Suddenly a remembered window. On the ninth floor of a hotel, two little girls in wide red skirts were playing in the window. Very similar children in similar clothes, perhaps twins, Occidentals. They pounded at the glass, pushing it with their shoulders and shoving at each other. Their mother knitted, her back to the window. If the large pane were to have broken or come loose, they would have fallen from the ninth floor. It was only I who thought them in danger. Their mother was quite unconcerned. The glass was in fact so solid that there was no danger.
“It’s beautiful,” said the arm on the bed as I turned from the window. Perhaps she was speaking of the curtain, in the same flowered pattern as the bed cover.
“Oh? But it’s faded from the sun and almost ready to go.” I sat down on the bed and took the arm on my knee. “This is what is beautiful. More beautiful than anything.”
Taking the palm of the hand in my own right palm, and the shoulder in my left hand, I flexed the elbow, and then again.
“Behave yourself,” said the arm, as if smiling softly. “Having fun?”
“Not in the least.”
A smile did come over the arm, crossing it like light. It was exactly the fresh smile on the girl’s cheek.
I knew the smile. Elbows on the table, she would fold her hands loosely and rest her chin or cheek on them. The pose should have been inelegant in a young girl; but there was about it a lightly engaging quality that made expressions like “elbows on the table” seem inappropriate. The roundness of the shoulders, the fingers, the chin, the cheeks, the ears, the long, slender neck, the hair, all came together in a single harmonious movement. Using knife and fork deftly, first and little fingers bent, she would raise them ever so slightly from time to time. Food would pass the small lips and she would swallow—I had before me less a person at dinner than an inviting music of hands and face and throat. The light of her smile flowed across the skin of her arm.
The arm seemed to smile because, as I flexed it, very gentle waves passed over the firm, delicate muscles, to send waves of light and shadow over the smooth skin. Earlier, when I had touched the fingertips under the long nails, the light passing over the arm as the elbow bent had caught my eye. It was that, and not any impulse toward mischief, that had made me bend and unbend her arm. I stopped, and gazed at it as it lay stretched out on my knee. Fresh lights and shadows were still passing over it.
“You ask if I’m having fun. You realize that I have permission to change you for my own arm?”
“I do.”
“Somehow I’m afraid to.”
“Oh?”
“May I?”
“Please.”
I heard the permission granted, and wondered whether I could accept it. “Say it again. Say ‘please.’”
“Please, please.”
I remembered. It was like the voice of a woman who had decided to give herself to me, one not as beautiful as the girl who had lent me the arm. Perhaps there was something a little strange about her.
“Please,” she had said, gazing at me. I had put my fingers to her eyelids and closed them. Her voice was trembling. “‘Jesus wept. Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved her!’”
“Her” was a mistake for “him.” It was the story of the dead Lazarus. Perhaps, herself a woman, she had remembered it wrong, perhaps she had made the substitution intentionally.
The words, so inappropriate to the scene, had shaken me. I gazed at her, wondering if tears would start from the closed eyes.
She opened them and raised her shoulders. I pushed her down with my arm.
“You’re hurting me!” She put her hand to the back of her head.
There was a small spot of blood on the white pillow. Parting her hair, I put my lips to the drop of blood swelling on her head.
“It doesn’t matter.” She took out all her hairpins. “I bleed easily. At the slightest touch.”
A hairpin had pierced her skin. A shudder seemed about to pass through her shoulders, but she controlled herself.
Although I think I understand how a woman feels when she gives herself to a man, there is still something unexplained about the act. What is it to her? Why should she wish to do it, why should she take the initiative? I could never really accept the surrender, even knowing that the body of every woman was made for it. Even now, old as I am, it seems strange. And the ways in which various women go about it: unalike if you wish, or similar perhaps, or even identical. Is that not strange? Perhaps the strangeness I find in it all is the curiosity of a younger man, perhaps the despair of one advanced in years. Or perhaps some spiritual debility I suffer from.
Her anguish was not common to all women in the act of surrender. And it was with her only the one time. The silver thread was cut, the golden bowl destroyed.
“Please,” the arm had said, and so reminded me of the other girl; but were the two voices in fact similar? Had they not sounded alike because the words were the same? Had the arm acquired independence in this measure of the body from which it was separated? And were the words not the act of giving itself up, of being ready for anything, without restraint or responsibility or remorse? It seemed to me that if I were to accept the invitation and change the arm for my own I would be bringing untold pain to the girl.
I gazed at the arm on my knee. There was a shadow at the inside of the elbow. It seemed that I might be able to suck it in. I pressed it to my lips, to gather in the shadow.
“It tickles. Do behave yourself.” The arm was around my neck, avoiding my lips.
“Just when I was having a good drink.”
“And what were you drinking?”
I did not answer.
“What were you drinking?”
“The smell of light? Of skin.”
The fog seemed thicker; even the magnolia leaves seemed wet. What other warnings would issue from the radio? I started toward my table radio and stopped. To listen to it with the arm around my neck seemed altogether too much. But I suspected I would hear something like this: because of the wet branches and their own wet feet and wings, small birds have fallen to the ground and cannot fly. Automobiles passing through parks should take care not to run over them. And if a warm wind comes up, the fog will perhaps change color. Strange-colored fogs are noxious. Listeners should therefore lock their doors if the fog should turn pink or purple.
“Change color?” I muttered. “Turn pink or purple?”
I pulled at the curtain and looked out. The fog seemed to press down with an empty weight. Was it because of the wind that a thin darkness seemed to be moving about, different from the usual black of night? The thickness of the fog seemed infinite, and yet beyond it something fearsome writhed and coiled.
I remembered that earlier, as I was coming home with the borrowed arm, the head and tail beams of the car driven by the woman in vermilion had come up indistinctly in the fog. A great, blurred sphere of faint purple now seemed to come toward me. I hastily pulled away from the curtain.
“Let’s go to bed. Us too.”
It seemed as if no one else in the world would be up. To be up was terror.
Taking the arm from my neck and putting it on the table, I changed into a fresh night-kimono, a cotton print. The arm watched me change. I was shy at being watched. Never before had a woman watched me undress in my room.
The arm in my own, I got into bed. I lay facing it, and brought it lightly to my chest. It lay quiet.
Intermittently I could hear a faint sound as of rain, a very light sound, as if the fog had not turned to rain but were itself forming drops. The fingers clasped in my hand beneath the blanket grew warmer; and it gave me the quietest of sensations, the fact that they had not warmed to my own temperature.
“Are you asleep?”
“No,” replied the arm.
“You were so quiet, I thought you might be asleep.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Opening my kimono, I brought the arm to my chest. The difference in warmth sank in. In the somehow sultry, som
ehow chilly night, the smoothness of the skin was pleasant.
The lights were still on. I had forgotten to turn them out as I went to bed.
“The lights.” I got up, and the arm fell from my chest.
I hastened to pick it up. “Will you turn out the lights?” I started toward the door. “Do you sleep in the dark? Or with lights on?”
The arm did not answer. It would surely know. Why had it not answered? I did not know the girl’s nocturnal practices. I compared the two pictures, of her asleep in the dark and with the lights on. I decided that tonight, without her arm, she would have them on. Somehow I too wanted them on. I wanted to gaze at the arm. I wanted to stay awake and watch the arm after it had gone to sleep. But the fingers stretched to turn off the switch by the door.
I went back and lay down in the darkness, the arm by my chest. I lay there silently, waiting for it to go to sleep. Whether dissatisfied or afraid of the dark, the hand lay open at my side, and presently the five fingers were climbing my chest. The elbow bent of its own accord, and the arm embraced me.
There was a delicate pulse at the girl’s wrist. It lay over my heart, so that the two pulses sounded against each other. Hers was at first somewhat slower than mine, then they were together. And then I could feel only mine. I did not know which was faster, which slower.
Perhaps this identity of pulse and heartbeat was for a brief period when I might try to exchange the arm for my own. Or had it gone to sleep? I had once heard a woman say that women were less happy in the throes of ecstasy than sleeping peacefully beside their men; but never before had a woman slept beside me as peacefully as this arm.
I was conscious of my beating heart because of the pulsation above it. Between one beat and the next, something sped far away and sped back again. As I listened to the beating, the distance seemed to increase. And however far the something went, however infinitely far, it met nothing at its destination. The next beat summoned it back. I should have been afraid, and was not. Yet I groped for the switch beside my pillow.
Before turning it on, I quietly rolled back the blanket. The arm slept on, unaware of what was happening. A gentle band of faintest white encircled my naked chest, seeming to rise from the flesh itself, like the glow before the dawning of a tiny, warm sun.
I turned on the light. I put my hands to the fingers and shoulder and pulled the arm straight. I turned it quietly in my hands, gazing at the play of light and shadow, from the roundness at the shoulder over the narrowing and swelling of the forearm, the narrowing again at the gentle roundness of the elbow, the faint depression inside the elbow, the narrowing roundness to the wrist, the palm and back of the band, and on to the fingers.
“I’ll have it.” I was not conscious of muttering the words. In a trance, I removed my right arm and substituted the girl’s.
There was a slight gasp—whether from the arm or from me I could not tell—and a spasm at my shoulder. So I knew of the change.
The girl’s arm—mine now—was trembling and reaching for the air. Bending it, I brought it close to my mouth.
“Does it hurt? Do you hurt?”
“No. Not at all. Not at all.” The words were fitful.
A shudder went through me like lightning. I had the fingers in my mouth.
Somehow I spoke my happiness, but the girl’s fingers were at my tongue, and whatever it was I spoke did not form into words.
“Please. It’s all right,” the arm replied. The trembling stopped. “I was told you could. And yet—”
I noticed something. I could feel the girl’s fingers in my mouth, but the fingers of her right hand, now those of my own right hand, could not feel my lips or teeth. In panic I shook my right arm and could not feel the shaking. There was a break, a stop, between arm and shoulder.
“The blood doesn’t go,” I blurted out. “Does it or doesn’t it?”
For the first time I was swept by fear. I rose up in bed. My own arm had fallen beside me. Separated from me, it was an unsightly object. But more important—would not the pulse have stopped? The girl’s arm was warm and pulsing; my own looked as if it were growing stiff and cold. With the girl’s, I grasped my own right arm. I grasped it, but there was no sensation.
“Is there a pulse?” I asked the arm. “Is it cold?”
“A little. Just a little colder than I am. I’ve gotten very warm.” There was something especially womanly in the cadence. Now that the arm was fastened to my shoulder and made my own, it seemed womanly as it had not before.
“The pulse hasn’t stopped?”
“You should be more trusting.”
“Of what?”
“You changed your arm for mine, didn’t you?”
“Is the blood flowing?”
“‘Woman, whom seekest thou?’ You know the passage?”
“‘Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?’”
“Very often when I’m dreaming and wake up in the night I whisper it to myself.”
This time of course the “I” would be the owner of the winsome arm at my shoulder. The words from the Bible were as if spoken by an eternal voice, in an eternal place.
“Will she have trouble sleeping?” I too spoke of the girl herself. “Will she be having a nightmare? It’s a fog for herds of nightmares to wander in. But the dampness will make even demons cough.”
“To keep you from hearing them.” The girl’s arm, my own still in its hand, covered my right ear.
It was now my own right arm, but the motion seemed to have come not of my volition but of its own, from its heart. Yet the separation was by no means so complete.
“The pulse. The sound of the pulse.”
I heard the pulse of my own right arm. The girl’s arm had come to my ear with my own arm in its hand, and my own wrist was at my ear. My arm was warm—as the girl’s arm had said, just perceptibly cooler than her fingers and my ear.
“I’ll keep away the devils.” Mischievously, gently, the long, delicate nail of her little finger stirred in my ear. I shook my head. My left hand—mine from the start—took my right wrist—actually the girl’s. As I threw my head back, I caught sight of the girl’s little finger.
Four fingers of her hand were grasping the arm I had taken from my right shoulder. The little finger alone—shall we say that it alone was allowed to play free?—was bent toward the back of the hand. The tip of the nail touched my right arm lightly. The finger was bent in a position possible only to a girl’s supple hand, out of the question for a stiff-jointed man like me. From its base it rose at right angles. At the first joint it bent in another right angle, and at the next in yet another. It thus traced a square, the fourth side formed by the ring finger.
It formed a rectangular window at the level of my eye. Or rather a peep-hole, or an eyeglass, much too small for a window; but somehow I thought of a window. The sort of window a violet might look out through. The window of the little finger, the finger-rimmed eyeglass, so white that it gave off a faint glow—I brought it nearer my eye. I closed the other eye.
“A peep show?” asked the arm. “And what do you see?”
“My dusky old room. Its five lights.” Before I had finished the sentence I was almost shouting. “No, no! I see it!”
“And what do you see?”
“It’s gone.”
“And what did you see?”
“A color. A blur of purple. And inside it little circles, little beads of red and gold, whirling around and around.”
“You’re tired.” The girl’s arm put down my right arm, and her fingers gently stroked my eyelids.
“Were the beads of gold and red spinning around in a huge cogwheel? Did I see something in the cogwheel, something that came and went?”
I did not know whether I had actually seen something there or only seemed to—a fleeting illusion, not to stay in the memory. I could not remember what it might have been.
“Was it an illusion you wanted to show me?”
“No. I came to erase it.”
“Of days gone by. Of longing and sadness.”
On my eyelids the movement of her fingers stopped.
I asked an unexpected question. “When you let down your hair does it cover your shoulders?”
“It does. I wash it in hot water, but afterward—a special quirk of mine, maybe—I pour cold water over it. I like the feel of cold hair against my shoulders and arms, and against my breasts too.”
It would of course be the girl again. Her breasts had never been touched by a man, and no doubt she would have had difficulty describing the feel of the cold, wet hair against them. Had the arm, separated from the body, been separated too from the shyness and the reserve?
Quietly I took in my left hand the gentle roundness at the shoulder, now my own. It seemed to me that I had in my hand the roundness, not yet large, of her breasts. The roundness of the shoulder became the soft roundness of breasts.
Her hand lay gently on my eyelids. The fingers and the hand clung softly and sank through, and the underside of the eyelids seemed to warm at the touch. The warmth sank into my eyes.
“The blood is going now,” I said quietly. “It is going.”
It was not a cry of surprise as when I had noticed that my arm was changed for hers. There was no shuddering and no spasm, in the girl’s arm or my shoulder. When had my blood begun to flow through the arm, her blood through me? When had the break at the shoulder disappeared? The clean blood of the girl was now, this very moment, flowing through me; but would there not be unpleasantness when the arm was returned to the girl, this dirty male blood flowing through it? What if it would not attach itself to her shoulder?
“No such betrayal,” I muttered.
“It will be all right,” whispered the arm.
There was no dramatic awareness that between the arm and my shoulder the blood came and went. My left hand, enfolding my right shoulder, and the shoulder itself, now mine, had a natural understanding of the fact. They had come to know it. The knowledge pulled them down into slumber.
I slept.
I floated on a great wave. It was the encompassing fog turned a faint purple, and there were pale green ripples at the spot where I floated on the great wave, and there alone. The dank solitude of my room was gone. My left hand seemed to rest lightly on the girl’s right arm. It seemed that her fingers held magnolia stamens. I could not see them, but I could smell them. We had thrown them away—and when and how had she gathered them up again? The white petals, but a day old, had not yet fallen; why then the stamens? The automobile of the woman in vermilion slid by, drawing a great circle with me at the center. It seemed to watch over our sleep, the arm’s and mine.
House of the Sleeping Beauties Page 10