The picnic place of Arabella’s childhood proved to be as remote as it was lovely, lending it, as she had already recalled, a “secret” quality, Shangri-la style.
After turning off the main road and following a secondary one until it stopped at an impenetrable wall of trees, they left the car and walked into the forest, along a soft pine-needle path, above which the boughs of the very tall trees intertwined, forming a canopy which blocked out the sun; so the passage was like a tunnel that appeared to lead nowhere, but from which they emerged into a picture-book setting—the grassy banks of a sparkling mountain lake, surrounded by pines, and, rising above on every side, the silver-blue Alps.
“This is the place,” said Arabella, moving toward the shade of a huge evergreen.
Boris surveyed the whole scene, then nodded. “This is the place all right.”
While she took out the things they had brought, and arranged them on the grass, he opened the wine.
“We pour one glass,” said Arabella, “then we put the bottle to chill in the lake, yes?”
“Good idea,” said Boris, pouring a glassful and putting the cork back in.
“Like Jake and Bill, yes?” said Arabella. “Very romantic.”
“Jake and Bill?”
“Yes, in Hemingway—comment s’appelle? Le Jour Se Live?”
“Ah yes,” said Boris, remembering, “when they went fishing . . .” Then he laughed, “Why do you say ‘romantic’—you think they were fags?”
“Oh no, no, no, I mean romantic—in the classical sense? Fags! Mon dieu!” She shrugged as she unwrapped the Camembert. “I don’t know, were they supposed to be fags? . . . but he couldn’t do it, could he? Jake? His thing was gone—wasn’t that the story?”
“Hmm.” Boris thoughtfully stared at the chicken leg in his hand, then began to eat it.
“Of course,” said Arabella, frowning down as she studiously applied pâté to a small, thick, torn chunk of bread, “they could have done it—Bill could have made love to Jake, and Jake could have kissed Bill . . . how do you say, ‘sucked him’? Yes?”
Boris smiled. “Yes.”
“Or ‘sucked him off? How do you say? Which do you say?”
“Either one.”
She nodded gravely, scholar of linguistics, serious actor ever in search of le mot juste, slowly chewing, then taking a sip of wine.
“Listen,” said Boris, “who, in all the world, would you rather make love to?”
She looked up at him, stopped chewing for only a second, then answered without hesitation:
“Angela Sterling.”
“Sorry, she’s already spoken for. Who, next to her?”
“‘Spoken for’? What does that mean, ‘already spoken for’? And what are you talking about anyway?”
“Well you know the part, in the movie, your part—I told you it was a lesbian sequence . . .”
“Yes?”
“Well, I thought it might be good to get someone to play it with you who you had always . . . had eyes for, so to speak . . . someone you’d always wanted to make it with, you know, make love to. Compris?”
Arabella was delighted. “What a marvelous idea!”
“That way, you could sort of have more feeling for the scene, right?”
“Mais exactement!”
“Okay, who . . . besides Angela Sterling?”
Arabella brushed her hands and settled to the obviously savory task of thinking this through. “Eh Hen, let me see now . . .” and after perhaps three seconds, “ah, how about . . . Princess Anne?”
“Who?”
“Princess Anne . . .of England!”
“You mean Princess Margaret?”
“No, no, no, Princess Anne! La petite! Mon Dieu!” She turned away with a show of annoyance.
“Wait a minute,” said Boris, standing up, “let me get some more wine.” He came back with the bottle. “Now, I’m sorry—two things I should have made clear: one, she has to be an actress; and, two, she must be at least eighteen.”
“She is eighteen,” said Arabella from the depths of her pique.
“Yes, well the thing about someone like her is that she’s not an actress.”
“All the better—I will teach her . . . everything.”
Boris sighed. “She’d never do it. It’s a nice thought, but she’d never do it.”
“Not be in a film of Boris Adrian? She would be mad!”
“The only people who will be in this film,” explained Boris, “are people who need money, and actors . . . actors like you . . . artists who want to be involved—for one reason or another. She is neither.”
Arabella shrugged, morosely.
“And then there’s the Queen,” Boris added as a clincher, “think how she’d feel.”
“Ah, yes,” Arabella was impressed, “the Queen. It’s true, it could upset her.”
“Break her heart,” murmured Boris, smiling at the thought. “No, you’ll just have to come up with someone else.”
“A compromise . . .”
“I’m afraid so.”
“All right, I will think.”
They continued eating, in silence now—Boris pursuing a fantasy about a lesbian and a princess, while Arabella explored her own world of dark writhing images for a suitable cohort.
Neither spoke for a while, until Arabella, having finished the last of the cheese, lay back on the grass, and sighed.
“You know,” she said after a moment, “it is here, in this place, I make love for the first time.”
“You mean with a girl?”
“Certainly, with a girl! What did you think I meant—a donkey?”
Boris lay back beside her, one hand behind his head, the other resting his glass of wine on his chest. “Who was it—that cousin you visited every summer?”
“Yes . . . Denise,” she said the name as though tasting it.
“Hmm. Right here, huh?”
“Right here exactly.”
He waited for a long moment, looking up at the sky.
“What happened?” he finally asked.
“What happened?” she repeated, shaking her head as though no longer certain, or as though it might be too intricate to recreate—or, yet again, as if at that very moment she was actually reliving it. Then she sighed. “I was fifteen,” she said. “Denise a year younger. She was my cousin, and we were together every summer for as long as I remember. I can’t tell you, I can’t express how close we were. She was an enchanted thing—strange, delicate, pure . . . a child of nature, or like something out of a ballet. And so . . . exquisitely beautiful. I adored her, because she was completely . . . unselfish, completely unaware of the material world. I was the opposite, like my friends in Paris—ambitious, always driving ourselves to the brink, obsessed with the idea of perfection and success. But I was her idol—I was already working in the theater, and studying . . . to her I represented all the mystery and excitement of Paris.” She paused for a moment, smiling softly. “You know, young girls—beginning about twelve years old—have an extraordinary interest in the development of their bodies. Every day they examine their breasts to see if they’ve grown anymore. And if they have a close friend, about the same age, they show each other and compare. Well, that’s how we were, Denise and I, except that I was almost a year older, and mine came first. Also I was naturally more . . . precocious in that way. In any case, by the time I was fourteen, my breasts were nice,” she involuntarily cupped her hand over one of them and looked down at it, “very nice, in fact, while Denise’s were still just beginning. Then I came back the next year—now she was fourteen—and her breasts had changed completely, they were marvelous. That was the first thing she did was show me, even though she was a little shy about it, because they were perfect—exactly the way mine had been the year before. So. That day we had our lunch here, just like this, and then we went in swimming, as we always did, not wearing anything. And that’s when it happened, when we came out of the water, and we were looking at her breasts again—and now
fascinated, of course, at the way the nipples stuck out because of the cold water. We both touched them, and mine, laughing a lot and I said I’d like to see how it felt to kiss one, while it was all hard and sticking out like that. And Denise laughed and said all right, and that she would too. And we did, and it felt wonderful—I mean, her nipple in my mouth felt wonderful . . . so hard and cold from the water, yet underneath it warm and alive, and so sensitive—I could feel it getting harder and bigger as I kissed it. I think that’s how it began—the response, feeling her respond like that. And then I had this overwhelming desire to kiss her on the mouth—which we had actually done before, but never seriously—with the tongue and everything—but just sort of practicing, for how it was supposed to be with boys. But this was different—I wanted to kiss her very deeply now, and I wanted to feel those hard nipples pressed against my breasts. So I began kissing her, while we were still standing, exactly here, and caressing her—her sides and hips, and legs . . . and finally, her thing. And then I said to her I didn’t know why, but I would like to kiss it. And she said all right, and I dropped on my knees and began kissing it, her clitoris—and then we lay down, here, and kissed each other’s.” She reached out and gripped Boris’s hand. “It was so wonderful . . . so fantastic. We were delirious. Oh, we had both played with ourselves before, and maybe had something like an orgasm, a little one, but this was incredible—the way she would moan and twist, and then sob when she came. It gave me such a feeling of power, being able to affect her like that. Finally it was just me kissing her, making her come over, and over, and over . . .”
She fell silent, toying with a blade of grass.
Boris, resting on one elbow, studied her celebrated profile. She was considered to have the most beautiful mouth in France, where it had been immortalized in a famous toothpaste advertisement when she was sixteen, and was still used—just the full, wet, red lips, and the strong, white perfect teeth. He felt himself getting an erection. “Tell me some more,” he said softly, “I mean, did you do it all that summer?”
“Yes, in bed at night—but we had to be careful because she couldn’t keep quiet. And then a terrible thing happened. My uncle—it was her stepfather, a gross horrible man—found out. I suppose he heard something, in our room at night, I don’t know, but then he saw us—he followed us here one day and watched. Then, that evening, he got me alone and told me he had seen. He said he would tell my parents . . . unless I let him be alone with me. I told him that I had never been with a man, that I was still virgin—but I know he didn’t believe me . . . he just kept saying he wouldn’t hurt me. I asked him how he could do it without hurting me if I was a virgin, and what if it made me pregnant—and then he said he wouldn’t make love to me, he would just embrace me, hold me close. Well, I was so frightened and confused . . . I mean, I thought it would destroy my parents to find out. So the next day was Saturday, which was the day we, that is, the women—Denise, and I, and my aunt—always went to the village, to do the marketing. He told me to say I was sick and couldn’t go—and to stay in bed.”
It seemed for a moment that she didn’t want to continue, but Boris now had his own reasons for pursuing it.
“Yeah?”
“Well . . . I stayed, the way he said, telling them I felt sick, so they left for the market without me . . . and I lay there, listening, waiting—it was horrible—then I heard, in another room, his shoes drop against the floor—heavy shoes that farmers wear—and I knew he was coming, I closed my eyes, it was unbearable, and he came in, very quietly, like he might be on tiptoe.
“‘Pretend you are asleep,’ he said in a whisper, as though he thought someone would hear us, but, of course, he knew there was no one for miles—and he got into bed, with his clothes on, except for his shoes . . . he unbuttoned the top of my pajamas—I just lay still while he did that, but then he began to pull off the other part, and I tried not to let him, but he kept saying, ‘I won’t hurt you, I just want to hold you’—I still had no idea what he was going to do—then he was on top of me, pulling my legs apart and pressing himself in between them . . . and his thing, his penis, was out, hard, pressing against me, already hurting, and I tried to pull away and said, ‘You promised you wouldn’t,’ and he said, ‘I just want it to touch you,’ and he was trying to force it inside, but it wouldn’t because I was dry and everything, and he put saliva on the end of it and forced it in, very hard—oh it was unbearable, it was such pain—and I was crying and he kept saying, ‘Is this how your lover does it?’ and ‘Is mine as big as your lover’s?’ and terrible things, I would gladly have died to stop it. I didn’t even have the presence of mind to ask him not to come inside me—not that he would have listened . . . so anyway he finished, and he looked at the bed, for blood, but of course there was no blood—a ballet student loses her hymen on the first plié, and I had been dancing for six years. Well, he was relieved that there was no blood, but I was still crying, almost hysterical, and now that it was over, he began to be afraid I would tell—so when I said I wanted to go home, he took me straight to the station. Later he told my aunt and Denise that I was sick and had insisted on going home. Afterward I saw Denise a few times, in Paris, and we made love, but I never went back to stay with her again.”
She looked over at Boris and smiled faintly. “So, Mister B., there you have my story—‘The Loves of Arabella’—or at least the first chapter.”
Boris was somewhat astonished to find himself thinking along the very lines for which he had earlier chided Sid.
“Well,” he asked, “did you ever, uh, you know, try it again? With a man?”
“Yes. When I was still very young, before I had accepted myself. I tried it twice, as a matter of fact—and each time it should have been ideal . . . each time it was with someone I was very fond of . . . someone gentle and loving . . . someone I wanted to please. And each time it was terrible—I could feel nothing . . . except fear and resentment. I couldn’t even begin to relax, much less . . . to give anything.” She turned to Boris with her famous smile. “Well, Doctor?”
Boris shook his head. “Incredible,” he said softly.
“Incredible? You mean you don’t believe it?”
“No, no, I mean it’s . . . astonishing . . . it’s great. We’ve got to use it—for your sequence in the film.”
“You can’t be serious—what about the story you already had prepared?”
“Mickey Mouse compared to yours. No, we didn’t really have a story—just some ideas, images mostly, about two girls making love. This way we can use the uncle as well. It’ll be terrific—something for every taste.”
“But I couldn’t—not with the uncle, I mean, I simply couldn’t do it.”
Boris had a sudden wild notion of suggesting Sid as the uncle, but then thought better of it.
“But don’t you see, the abhorrence you would feel would be perfect—it would be exactly what we’d be trying for.”
She shook her head, not looking at him. “No, it is not possible. I would do anything for you, Boris—I’ll do it on camera with the girl, kiss her, make love to her, do anything you want . . . because I believe in it . . . I feel it . . . and because I know it is for art! But I just cannot do the other—please don’t ask me.”
“Hmm,” Boris considered it, then sighed. “Okay, we’ll use doubles on the inserts—when we cut to the closeups—erection, penetration, and so on, we’ll use somebody else’s. I’m sure you’ll be able to do the face stuff great.”
“Oh, I will,” she said, reaching out and touching him in gratitude, “I promise you I will, Boris.” She raised her great gray-green eyes to him, and smiled sadly. “I’m so sorry, Boris—you know how I always try to do anything you want. I love you, you know,” she added softly, lowering her eyes.
Watching Arabella closely as she went through these various changes, and still aware of his quite serious erection, Boris suddenly found himself seeing her through Sid’s eyes, recalling the intense imagery he had used—“fantastic to make a beau
tiful dyke come,” and so on, and he fleetingly considered the notion of trying to actually experience it vicariously from Sid’s attitude—but, more than that, being so genuinely fond of her, and feeling such an urgent demand between his legs, he found it almost impossible to believe that she wouldn’t enjoy it. He wondered what would happen if he asked her . . . begged her . . . pleaded . . . appealed to her friendship, loyalty . . . swore it was a matter of life and death . . . or perhaps if he said she could be on top—then she wouldn’t feel dominated. His erect member had arrived at the state sometimes described (by hacks) as “pulsating tumescence,” and he realized, too, with a certain disquiet, that due to the press of events of the last two weeks—the script preparation and the pre-production work generally—he had neglected to get laid during that entire period.
“Do you know why I’m so fond of you?” asked Arabella, looking at him again, “or anyway one of the reasons I’m so fond of you? It is because you have always accepted me for what I am. Yes?”
“Hmm,” Boris murmured, no longer too certain of this, and shifted uneasily.
“And I know you like women,” she went on, “and that sometimes you may think of me that way—as a woman. Well, I do have certain feminine qualities or let us more properly say, certain Yin qualities.” And whether through a wondrous intuitive awareness, or whether she actually perceived it, she reached out and gently rested her hand on his trousers and the taut wood-hard muscle beneath, raising her beautiful face to him with a smile that was radiant and benign. “Is that for Arabella?”
Boris, who was ordinarily rather blasé in these matters, felt an unaccountable tinge of chagrin when his member throbbed and reared at her touch as though from the slightest electric shock.
“I’m beginning to think that it is,” he admitted.
“Oh Boris, you’re wonderful,” she said with a marvelous laugh, and slowly pulled down the zipper, and took it out—holding it carefully, studying it. “Just look at it—all throbbing and eager, and no place to go.”
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