But this was Nina G. as she was then, and Jonas knew nothing about her when she grabbed hold of his legs, hauled him partway out from under the piano and tugged his trousers down to his knees, pulling off her own tights and knickers as she did so, but retaining the frothy layers of underskirt and dress. Then, with not a word said, she sat astride him and guided him inside her, laid her hands on top of the piano at the curve in its side and slowly began to rock back and forth.
As you can see, this accords with what I said in my little discourse on Jonas Wergeland’s select group of women; it was they who took the initiative. Why? I have already mentioned that it was his face which they found seductive, but I suppose I ought to elaborate on this by saying that women have far more subtle reasons for finding a man attractive than is the case the other way round, so let me simply state, very generally, that when Nina G. settled herself on top of Jonas Wergeland, a boy who was a stranger to her, she was moved not so much by desire as by the knowledge, called it female intuition, that this was a unique opportunity, the sort of chance that comes along just once in a lifetime.
Jonas lay on a red carpet at the heart of the Grand Hotel, gazing up at the underside of a grand piano and listening to the rustle of dress fabric. Like lovemaking in an opera, extravagant, unreal, or so unreal that it became real. If he tilted his head back he could see a couple of the mirrors; how fine they looked in the darkness, how they seemed to live, to breathe. At one point she stopped her rocking, ducked down under the piano to him, found his ear, concentrated on it, letting her tongue caress it, running it round the auricle; she whispered something into it, laughed softly, groaned softly with pleasure at the coupling of their lower halves and to Jonas the whole world seemed to converge into just one sense, his hearing; with her tongue and the kisses to that organ she seemed to be opening his ear to new sounds as if she had removed a plug, enabling him to hear everything differently, not only the swishing of her dress and her breathing but also the sounds coming to his ears from beyond the walls, from the city, cars outside, a far-away voice, even the barely audible tinkling of her earrings. Jonas derived enormous pleasure from this; she seemed to him to make love in much the same way as she played the piano, a combination of something familiar and something new. She was sitting so high up on him and clenching her vaginal muscles so tightly around him that he felt as if she were pulling him, heaving him, towards a boundary and a little beyond, while at the same time drenching his ear in kisses, playing a carillon of sorts on those tiny bones in the labyrinth deep inside, whispering now and again or uttering sounds that were not words, but more like music emanating from her body and evoking a weird resonance inside him as if she were conducting his body, calling forth latent harmonies, making it thrum until it glowed.
The one thing which the women who made love to Jonas had in common was that they all instinctively sat astride him. This had nothing to do with a feminine urge to dominate, nor with the absurd concept of the ‘new man’. Without going into the highly individual reasons for adopting this position, let me simply say that this was the position that Jonas himself preferred far above any other. For him, the pleasure seemed twice as great when these women sat on top of him. Jonas gave a lot of thought to why this should be, and he came to the conclusion that more than any other this position opened the door to the cognitive potential inherent in lovemaking; when he lay on his back like that, in some strange way his thoughts were set free. Not for nothing did the Arabs call this position ‘the Archimedean screw’; this tallied with Jonas’s own feeling that the Earth could be moved during lovemaking, from one single, fixed point.
As now, on a red carpet at the heart of the Grand Hotel. The instant his penis came into contact with her vagina and slipped inside, he was struck by a sense of a chemical change in his body; he was filled with energy, raised onto a higher plane, as if by a hydraulic system created by the friction between his penis and her vagina. From Aunt Laura’s sketches he knew that the phallus formed a straight line running out from the curved form of the scrotum, like a tangent from a circle, and this was also how he regarded something of the potential inherent in his penis; by dint of this he could break out of the set cycles of thought and shoot off at a tangent that would lead to something quite different. Exactly as here, because as they built towards a climax, slowly, because he was doing his utmost to spin it out, holding back, he noticed that his thoughts were starting to travel along different lines than usual until they eventually flowed out into an idea, a vision almost, as to what he should do for Owl, the debating society. He had been asked to talk about the opera, but now it was quite clear in his mind: he would rather play. He knew just what he would do; he would play arias from the opera but using different harmonies, jazz chords, old refrains with new tonal variations. While Nina G. sat astride him, making gentle, rhythmic love to him, giving him greater and greater pleasure, since she was now gripping the edge of the piano case and was thus able to raise and lower herself gently and vary the depth of penetration, he strove to hold onto this dream, spin it out, postpone the climax, so that he could also hear how good it would sound. And that concert at the Owl meeting a couple of weeks later did indeed prove to be a sensation, an event that was still being talked about at the school years later: how Jonas Wergeland, wearing a Persian-lamb hat of the sort worn by Theolonius Monk, jazzed up some well-known arias — opening with the stirring, seductive habanera from Carmen, ‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle’, in a tempo and an arrangement that rendered it almost unrecognizable; following this up with Senta’s ballad from The Flying Dutchman, the wistful piece from Act II, ‘Doch, dass der arme Mann noch Erlösung fände auf Erden’, and adding most tellingly in the transition to ‘Ach, könntest du, bleicher Seeman, es finden’ some harmonies that sent chills up the audience’s spines. Last but not least he had played Don Giovanni’s and Zerlina’s duet, ‘Là ci darme la mano’, with a number of chords and springs from one key to another that made people gasp, partly because nobody could see how such a wealth of sound could be produced from one solitary piano. There were those who knew what they were talking about — and bear in mind that Jonas never made any effort to take this further — who believed Jonas Wergeland to be Norway’s greatest jazz talent since Jan Garbarek. It was not that Nina G. passed on this gift, by osmosis as it were or, to be more specific, by way of her moist vagina; nonetheless, it was thanks to her that he could suddenly see, or hear this potential within himself. Through Nina G. he discovered a different and unknown gear in music.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Jonas Wergeland was still lying on his back, his upper half under a grand piano in the Mirror Restaurant of the Grand Hotel, aware that Nina G. had started to tense into a tremulous, increasingly vehement rhythm, and was uttering sounds which made it quite clear to him that she was approaching a peak, or heading into something; and so eager was she, or so carried away, that just before she came, with a soft, muffled whimper like a glissando from the high to the low notes, she banged her head against the piano case, producing a sound, faint, but nonetheless audible, that swelled up among the dark mirrors and filled the room with a sort of fog of sound that Jonas was to hear again long afterwards — he would have sworn to it — built into one of her most famous pieces. And even though he did not want the pleasure to end, he too had to succumb to his orgasm, which he always dreaded slightly, or disliked because it interrupted a marvellous train of thought, snuffing it out. Jonas Wergeland could well understand why orgasm was known as ‘the little death’.