Caroline stopped any further reference to food, forever, between them. “I’ll join you,” she said.
As it turned out, he-not she-said, “I’ve never done this before.” They lay side by side, entirely nude, not the modest way to couple in the United States, if the Tribune’s Ladies’ Page was to be trusted, or interpreted correctly, for all was euphemism when it came to matters so intimate.
“Surely, you and Kitty have at least tried to do what we’ve managed to do.” Caroline’s virginal fear of the male body had, at first, been confirmed by so much overpowering muscle, hair, size. The scale was much too heroic for a mere woman. She felt not like a doll, which might have had its enchanting helpless side, but like a midget, which was definitely unattractive. The yards of male sinew beside her seemed the god-like norm and her own white slender body so like-like a rib torn out of him. Perhaps the biblical story did contain a kind of truth. Happily, he was as fascinated by her as she was by him, and he kept caressing her, as if not certain that she was indeed real. She, on the other hand, was more chary of touching him; fearful of explosions that might be set off if she were to explore too closely the brown-rose surfaces of that huge, mysteriously animated body.
“No. I meant that I haven’t been with anyone since we…” The voice trailed off.
“Well, I have been with no one at all.” She broke the news, as his hand strayed toward her groin. The hand froze where it was; she thought of the petrified citizenry of Pompeii, each last act caught and preserved in lava. Druscilla, virgin, with Marius, gladiator: in her end was her beginning.
“I’m the first?” He stared at her with unattractive amazement.
“Surely, it’s no martyrdom for you. One has to begin sometime, with someone…”
“But if I’m the first,” he repeated, eyes most unattractively fixed upon the source of all life, which Henry Adams never ceased, euphemistically, to celebrate.
“Why is there no blood?” Marguerite had explained all this to her; and she explained to him, with growing irritability, her years as a youthful equestrienne with its eventual reward not of trophies won but of hymen ruptured.
“I’ve never heard of that,” he said.
Although Caroline had not expected romance, neither had she expected so clinical a discussion after what had been, nearly, ecstasy. Firmly, she placed one hand over the faun-like mouth; with the other, she began experiments of her own, of an hydraulic nature; plainly, ecstasy was going to take a good deal of patience, not to mention hard manual work.
The second time was better than the first, and Caroline saw definite possibilities in the famous act. She was critical, however, of the Great Artificer who had designed both men and women with too little attention to detail, and too much left to chance. Nothing was quite angled right. Junctions, though possible, involved acrobatics of an undignified nature. Only childbirth, which she had witnessed, was less dignified, and, of course, exquisitely painful. Fortunately, there was no pain in all their maneuverings upon the bed; while pleasure, when it arrived, was sharp and unexpected and quite obliterated the sense of self, an unanticipated gift of Eros. Obviously, the Great Artificer intended that each be a conduit for the other, as well as for the race itself, which He had so haphazardly designed to go on and on, doing what they were doing in order to achieve pleasure, the small reward that the Artificer had thrown in, as they, doggedly, fulfilled what was the only perceivable purpose of the exercise: more, ever more, of the same until earth chilled or caught fire, and no one was left to couple.
Later, Jim, as she now called him, lolled contentedly in the tub, while Caroline followed Marguerite’s instructions with an elaborate douching in a Lowestoft china basin, involving a cold tisane guaranteed to discourage any little stranger from assembling itself in her no longer virginal loins.
Aware that Jim was watching her perhaps too expert handling of herself, she said, “Marguerite has given me full instructions. She’s also a midwife, though I pray we won’t ever need her for that.”
“Frenchwomen know an awful lot, don’t they?”
“Some know more awful things than others. But when it comes to the basic things, yes, they know a lot, and they tell one another, mother to daughter, for generations.”
“Americans never talk about-those things.”
“That is why newspapers are so necessary. We give people something to talk about. Politics, too,” she added, remembering her manners. Now, as she put on a silk peignoir, she wondered if she was going to be in love. She rather doubted it. After all, she lacked the first requisite: she was without jealousy, she had noted, watching him get into the tub. Kitty got to see this homely but also exciting spectacle every day while she could only attend the miracle play on Sundays; yet she did not envy Kitty. To have a man always with you, even one as well-proportioned and charming as Jim, was not a dream that she had ever wanted to come true. She had been a bachelor too long. Of course, she had ceased to be a virgin only an hour earlier, and who knew what fires hitherto banked-why did sex require so many similes, metaphors?-might flare up out of control, and devour her with lust, for that particular body, and no other? Je suis la fille de Minos, et de Pasiphaë, she murmured, and thought it curious that the great celebrators of woman’s lust had been men like Racine and Corneille. Nothing much was left of burning Sappho’s celebrations, while the other ladies who had written on the subject were careful not to give away the game, if indeed there was a game to be given away. Perhaps the whole thing was an invention of idle poets-of men with nothing better to do, unlike women, who had to bear and raise children and keep house, and rapidly lose their charms, leaving idle men free to invent love. But then Caroline thought of the various women that she had known who had been in love, and as she recalled their sufferings, she decided that they could not all have been acting. There had been pain or at least chagrin d’amour, which was probably worse. She wondered if she would ever suffer so much for any man, or woman-she must be honest with herself, as a pupil of Mlle. Souvestre. She doubted it; she was too used to being just herself, watchful, engrossed by others, amused by vanity, and was not jealousy simply vanity writ large? Yet when she saw Jim, fully clothed, the beautiful body that she was beginning to learn how to work for her own pleasure now covered up, she did feel a mild pang that she could not start all over again, and unveil the godhead, as she had come to think of that absurd-looking but entirely necessary organ. She would have to wait-impatiently?-until next Sunday.
The faun-lips were surprisingly soft, while the surrounding skin was scratchy, a nice contrast. He smelled of cedar, and the horse that he had been riding. “You and Kitty must come here to dinner,” said Caroline, leading him to her bedroom door.
Jim looked amazed. “Both of us?”
“Well, it is usual to invite married couples together, or so my Society Lady instructs us.”
“You’d like Kitty here?”
“Very much. We have,” Caroline smiled, “so much in common.”
“I guess you do at that.” He could be as cool as she, and that would make their relationship all the easier, she decided; and smiled, when she heard the front door slam. As it did, Marguerite, arthritis forgotten, hurtled into the room like a witch on the devil’s breath; and embraced Caroline, weeping loudly, shouting her congratulations, mixed with cautionary do’s and don’t’s and did she remember? and how was it, it, it?
“I have come through, Marguerite.” Caroline spoke to her in French; and felt a bit like Joan of Arc at the crowning of the Dauphin. “I am a saint-I mean a woman, at last.”