My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, From Chekhov to Munro

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Perhaps that only indicates the extent of my selfishness. I didn’t mind being feminized except for the feeling that Orra would not ever understand what I was doing but would ascribe it to the power of my or our sexuality. I minded being this self-conscious and so conscious of her; I was separated from my own sexuality, from any real sexuality; a poor sexual experience, even one based on love, would diminish the ease of my virility with her at least for a while; and she wouldn’t understand. Maybe she would become much subtler and shrewder sexually

  and know how to handle me, but that wasn’t likely. And if I apologized or complained or explained in that problematic future why I was sexually a little slow or reluctant with her, she would then blame my having tried to give her orgasm, she would insist I must not be bored again, so I would in that problematic future, if I wanted her to come, have to lie and say I was having more excitement than I felt, and that, too, might diminish my pleasure. I would be deprived even of the chance for honesty: I would be further feminized in that regard. I thought all this while I went down on her. I didn’t put it in words but thought in great misty blocks of something known or sensed. I felt an inner weariness I kept working in spite of. This ignoring myself gave me an odd, starved feeling, a mixture of agony and helplessness. I didn’t want to feel like that. I suddenly wondered why in the theory of relativity the speed of light is given as a constant: was that more Jewish absolutism? Surely in a universe as changeable and as odd as this one, the speed of light, considering the variety of experiences, must vary; there must be a place where one could see a beam of light struggle to move. I felt silly and selfish; it couldn’t be avoided that I felt like that—I mean, it couldn’t be avoided by me.

  Whatever she did when I licked her, if she moved at all, if a muscle

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  twitched in her thigh, a muscle twitched in mine, my body imitated hers as if to measure what she felt or perhaps for no reason but only because the sympathy was so intense. The same things happened to each of us but in amazingly different contexts, as if we stood at opposite ends of the room and reached out to touch each other and to receive identical messages which then diverged as they entered two such widely separated sensibilities and two such divergent and incomplete ecstasies. The movie we watched was of her discovering how her sexual responses worked: we were seated far apart. My tongue pushed at her erasure, her wronged and heretofore hardly existent sexual powers. I stirred her with varieties of kisses far from her face. A strange river moved slowly, bearing us along, reeds hid the banks, willows braided and unbraided themselves, moaned and whispered, raveled and faintly clicked. Orra groaned, sighed, shuddered, shuddered harshly or liquidly; sometimes she jumped when I changed the pressure or posture of my hands on her or when I rested for a second and then resumed. Her body jumped and contracted interestingly but not at any length or in any pattern that I could understand. My mind grew tired. There is a limit to invention, to mine anyway: I saw myself (stupidly) as a Roman trireme, my tongue as the prow, bronze, pushing at her; she was the Mediterranean. Tiers of slaves—my God, the helplessness of them—pulled oars, long stalks that metaphorically and rhythmically bloomed with flowing clusters of short-lived lilies at the water’s surface. The pompous and out-of-proportion boat, all of me hunched over Orra’s small sea—not actually hunched: what I was was lying flat; the foot of the bed was at my waist or near there, my legs were out, my feet were propped distantly on the floor, all of me was concentrated on the soft, shivery, furry delicacies of Orra’s twat—the pompous boat advanced lickingly, leaving a trickling, gurgling wake of half-response, the ebbing of my will and activity into that fluster subsiding into the dark water of this girl’s passivity, taut storminess, and self-ignorance.

  The whitish bubbling, the splash of her discontinuous physical

  response: those waves, ah, that wake rose, curled outward, bubbled, and fell. Rose, curled outward, bubbled, and fell. The white fell of a naiad.

  In the vast spreading darkness and silence of the sea. There was nothing

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  but that wake. The darkness of my senses when the rhythm absorbed me (so that I vanished from my awareness, so that I was blotted up and was a stain, a squid hidden, stroking Orra) made it twilight or night for me; and my listening for her pleasure, for our track on that markless ocean, gave me the sense that where we were was in a lit-up, great, ill-defined oval of night air and sea and opalescent fog, rainbowed where the lights from the portholes of an immense ship were altered prismatically by droplets of mist—as in some 1930s movie, as in some dream. Often I was out of breath; I saw spots, colors, ocean depths. And her protests, her doubts! My God, her doubts! Her No, don’t, Wiley s and her I don’t want to do this es and her Wiley, don’t s and Wiley, I can’t come—don’t do this—I don’t like this es. Mostly I ignored her. Sometimes I silenced her by leaning my cheek on her belly and watching my hand stroke her belly and saying to her in a sex-thickened voice, “Orra, I like this—this is for me.”

  Then I went down on her again with unexpectedly vivid, real plea-

  sure, as if merely thinking about my own pleasure excited and refreshed me, and there was yet more pleasure, when she—reassured or strengthened by my putative selfishness, by the conviction that this was all for me, that nothing was expected of her—cried out. Then a second later she grunted. Her whole body rippled. Jesus, I loved it when she reacted to me. It was like causing an entire continent to convulse, Asia, South America. I felt huge and tireless.

  In her excitement, she threw herself into the air, but my hands happened to be on her belly; and I fastened her down, I held that part of her comparatively still, with her twat fastened to my mouth, and I licked her while she was in midheave; and she yelled; I kept my mouth there as if I were drinking from her; I stayed like that until her upper body fell back on the bed and bounced, she made the whole bed bounce; then my head bounced away from her; but I still held her down with my hands; and I fastened myself, my mouth, on her twat again; and she yelled in a deep voice, “Wiley, what are you doing!”

  Her voice was deep, as if her impulses at that moment were masculine, not out of neurosis but in generosity, in an attempt to improve on the sickliness she accused women of; she wanted to meet me halfway,

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  to share; to share my masculinity: she thought men were beautiful. She cried out, “I don’t want you to do things to me! I want you to have a good fuck! ”

  Her voice was deep and despairing, maybe with the despair that goes with surges of sexuality, but then maybe she thought I would make her pay for this. I said, “Orra, I like this stuff, this stuff is what gets me excited.” She resisted, just barely, for some infinitesimal fragment of a second, and then her body began to vibrate; it twittered as if in it were the strings of a musical instrument set jangling; she said foolishly—but sweetly—“Wiley, I’m embarrassed, Wiley, this embarrasses me. . . .

  Please stop. . . . No . . . No . . . No . . . Oh . . . Oh . . . Oh . . . I’m very sexual, I’m too sexual to have orgasms, Wiley, stop, please. . . . Oh . . .

  Oh . . . Oh . . .” And then a deeper shudder ran through her; she gasped; then there was a silence; then she gasped again; she cried out in an extraordinary voice, “I FEEL SOMETHING!” The hair stood up on

  the back of my neck; I couldn’t stop; I hurried on; I heard a dim moaning come from her. What had she felt before? I licked hurriedly. How unpleasant for her, how unreal and twitchy had the feelings been that I’d given her? In what way was this different? I wondered if there was in her a sudden swarming along her nerves, a warm conviction of the reality of sexual pleasure. She heaved like a whale—no: not so much as that. But it was as if half an ocean rolled off her young flanks; some element of darkness vanished from the room; some slight color of physical happiness tinctured her body and its thin coating of sweat; I felt it all through me; she rolled on the su
rface of a pale blue, a pink and blue sea; she was dark and gleaming, and immense and wet. And warm.

  She cried, “Wiley, I feel a lot! ”

  God, she was happy.

  I said, “Why not?” I wanted to lower the drama quotient; I thought the excess of drama was a mistake, would overburden her. But also I wanted her to defer to me, I wanted authority over her body now, I wanted to make her come.

  But she didn’t get any more excited than that: she was rigid, almost boardlike after a few seconds. I licked at her thing as best I could but the sea was dry; the board collapsed. I faked it that I was very excited;

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  actually I was so caught up in being sure of myself, I didn’t know what I really felt. I thought, as if I were much younger than I was, Boy, if this doesn’t work, is my name mud. Then to build up the risk, out of sheer hellish braggadocio, instead of just acting out that I was confident—and in sex, everything unsaid that is portrayed in gestures instead is twice as powerful—when she said, because the feeling was less for her now, the feeling she liked having gone away, “Wiley, I can’t—this is silly—” I said, “Shut up, Orra, I know what I’m doing. . . .” But I didn’t know.

  And I didn’t like that tone for sexual interplay either, except as a joke, or as role playing, because pure authority involves pure submission, and people don’t survive pure submission except by being slavishly, possessively, vindictively in love; when they are in love like that, they can give you nothing but rebellion and submission, bitchiness and submission; it ’s a general rottenness: you get no part of them out of bed that has any value; and in bed, you get a grudging submission, because what the slave requires is your total attention, or she starts paying you back; I suppose the model is childhood, that slavery. Anyway, I don’t like it. But I played at it then, with Orra, as a gamble.

  Everything was a gamble. I didn’t know what I was doing; I figured it out as I went along; and how much time did I have for figuring things out just then? I felt strained as at poker or roulette, sweaty and a little stupid, placing bets—with my tongue—and waiting to see what the

  wheel did, risking my money when no one forced me to, hoping things would go my way, and I wouldn’t turn out to have been stupid when this was over.

  Also, there were sudden fugitive convulsions of lust now, in sympathy with her larger but scattered responses, a sort of immediate and automatic sexuality—I was at the disposal, inwardly, of the sexuality in her and could not help myself, could not hold it back and avoid the disappointments, and physical impatience, the impatience in my skin and prick, of the huge desire that unmistakably accompanies love, of a primitive longing for what seemed her happiness, for closeness to her as to something I had studied and was studying and had found more and more of value in—what was of value was the way she valued me, a deep and no doubt limited (but in the sexual moment it seemed illimitable)

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  permissiveness toward me, a risk she took, an allowance she made as if she ’d let me damage her and use her badly.

  Partly what kept me going was stubbornness because I’d made up my mind before we started that I wouldn’t give up; and partly what it was was the feeling she aroused in me, a feeling that was, to be honest, made up of tenderness and concern and a kind of mere affection, a brotherli-ness, as if she were my brother, not different from me at all.

  Actually this was brought on by an increasing failure, as the sex went on, of one kind of sophistication—of worldly sophistication—and by the increase in me of another kind, of a childish sophistication, a growth of innocence: Orra said, or exclaimed, in a half-harried, half-amazed voice, in a hugely admiring, gratuitous way, as she clutched at me in approval, “Wiley, I never had feelings like these before!”

  And to be the first to have caused them, you know? It’s like being a collector, finding something of great value, where it had been unsuspected and disguised, or like earning any honor; this partial success, this encouragement gave rise to this pride, this inward innocence.

  Of course that lessened the risk for this occasion; I could fail now and still say, It was worth it, and she would agree; but it lengthened the slightly longer-term risk; because I might feel trebly a fool someday.

  Also, it meant we might spend months making love in this fashion—I’d get impotent, maybe not in terms of erection, but I wouldn’t look forward to sex—still, that was beautiful to me in a way, too, and exciting.

  I really didn’t know what I was thinking: whatever I thought was part of the sex.

  I went on; I wanted to hit the jackpot now. Then Orra shouted, “It ’s there! It ’s THERE!” I halted, thinking she meant it was in some specific locale, in some specific motion I’d just made with my tired tongue and jaw; I lifted my head—but couldn’t speak: in a way, the sexuality pressed on me too hard for me to speak; anyway, I didn’t have to; she had lifted her head with a kind of overt twinship and she was looking at me down the length of her body; her face was askew and boyish—every feature was wrinkled; she looked angry and yet naive and swindleable; she said angrily, naively, “Wiley, it’s there! ”

  But even before she spoke that time, I knew she ’d meant it was in her;

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  the fox had been startled from its covert again; she had seen it, had felt it run in her again. She had been persuaded that it was in her for good.

  I started manipulating her delicately with my hand; and in my own excitement, and thinking she was ready, I sort of scrambled up and, covering her with myself, and playing with her with one hand, guided my other self, my lower consciousness, into her. My God, she was warm and restless inside; it was heated in there and smooth, insanely smooth, and oiled, and full of movements. But I knew at once I’d made a mistake: I should have gone on licking her; there were no regular contractions; she was anxious for the prick, she rose around it, closed around it, but in a rigid, dumb, faraway way; and her twitchings played on it, ran through it, through the walls of it and into me; and they were uncontrolled and not exciting, but empty: she didn’t know what to do, how to be fucked and come. I couldn’t pull out of her, I didn’t want to, I couldn’t pull out; but if there were no contractions for me to respond to, how in hell would I find the rhythm for her? I started slowly, with what seemed infinite suggestiveness to me, with great dirtiness, a really grown-up sort of fucking—just in case she was far along—and she let out a huge, shuddering, hour-long sigh and cried out my name and then, in a sobbing, exhausted voice, said, “I lost it. . . . Oh, Wiley, I lost it . . . Let ’s stop. . . .”

  My face was above hers; her face was wet with tears; why was she crying like that? She had changed her mind; now she wanted to come; she turned her head back and forth; she said, “I’m no good. . . . I’m no good.

  . . . Don’t worry about me. . . . You come. . . .”

  No matter what I mumbled, “Hush,” and “Don’t be silly,” and in

  a whisper, “Orra, I love you,” she kept on saying those things, until I slapped her lightly and said, ” Shut up, Orra.”

  Then she was silent again.

  The thing was, apparently, that she was arrhythmic: at least that ’s what I thought; and that meant there weren’t going to be regular contractions; any rhythm for me to follow; and any rhythm I set up as I fucked, she broke with her movements: so that it was that when she moved, she made her excitement go away. It would be best if she moved very smally: but I was afraid to tell her that, or even to try to hold her hips firmly, and guide them, to instruct her in that way for fear she ’d

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  get self-conscious and lose what momentum she ’d won. And also I was ashamed that I’d stopped going down on her. I experimented—doggedly, sweatily, to make up for what I’d done—with fucking in different ways, and I fantasized about us being in Mexico, someplace warm and lushly
colored where we made love easily and filthily and graphically.

  The fantasy kept me going. That is, it kept me hard. I kept acting out an atmosphere of sexual pleasure—I mean of my sexual pleasure—for her to rest on, so she could count on that. I discovered that a not very slow sort of one-one-one stroke, or fuck-fuck-fuck-Orra-now-now-now,

  really got to her; her feelings would grow heated; and she could shift up from that with me into a one-two, one-two, one-two, her excitement rising; but if she or I then tried to shift up farther to one-two-three, one-two-three, she ’d lose it all. That was too complicated for her: my own true love, my white American. But her feelings when they were present were very strong, they came in gusts, huge squalls of heat as if from a furnace with a carelessly banging door, and they excited and allured both of us. That excitement and the dit-dit-ditting got to her; she began to be generally, continuingly sexual. It ’s almost standard to compare sexual excitement to holiness; well, after a while, holiness seized her; she spoke in tongues, she testified. She was shaking all over; she was saved temporarily and sporadically: that is, she kept lapsing out of that excitement, too. But it would recur. Her hands would flutter; her face would be pale and then red, then very, very red; her eyes would stare at nothing; she ’d call my name. I’d plug on one-one-one, then one-two, one-two, then I’d go back to one-one-one: I could see as before—in the deep pleasure I felt even in the midst of the labor—why a woman was proud of what she felt, why a man might kill her in order to stimulate in her (although he might not know this was why he did it) these signs of pleasure. The familiar Orra had vanished; she said, “GodohGodoh-God”; it was sin and redemption and holiness and visions time. Her throbs were very direct, easily comprehensible, but without any pattern; they weren’t in any regular sequence; still, they were exciting to me, maybe all the more exciting because of the piteousness of her not being able to regulate them, of their being like blows delivered inside her by an enemy whom she couldn’t even half domesticate or make friendly to