Desire

by Mariella Frostrup

  “Only a caress,” he said, “just a caress.”

  I did not move. I had never felt anything like this hand softly, softly caressing the skin between my legs without touching my sex. He only touched the tips of my pubic hair. Then his hand slipped down to the little valley around the sex. I was growing lax and soft. He leaned over and put his mouth on mine, lightly touching my lips, until my own mouth responded, and only then did he touch the tip of my tongue with his. His hand was moving, exploring, but so softly, it was tantalizing. I was wet, and I knew if he moved just a little more he would feel this. The languor spread all through my body. Each time his tongue touched mine I felt as if there were another little tongue inside of me, flicking out, wanting to be touched too. His hand moved only around my sex, and then around my ass, and it was as if he magnetized the blood to follow the movements of his hands. His finger touched the clitoris so gently, then slipped between the lips of the vulva. He felt the wetness. He touched this with delight, kissing me, lying over me now, and I did not move. The warmth, the smells of plants around me, his mouth over mine affected me like a drug.

  “Only a caress,” he repeated gently, his finger moving around my clitoris until the little mound swelled and hardened. Then I felt as if a seed were bursting in me, a joy that made me palpitate under his fingers. I kissed him with gratitude. He was smiling. He said, “Do you want to caress me?”

  I nodded yes, but I did not know what he wanted of me. He unbuttoned his pants and I saw his penis. I took it in my hands. He said, “Press harder.” He saw then that I did not know how. He took my hand in his and guided me. The little white foam fell all over my hand. He covered himself. He kissed me with the same grateful kiss I had given him after my pleasure.

  He said, “Did you know that a Hindu makes love to his wife ten days before he takes her? For ten days they merely caress and kiss.”

  The thought of Ronald’s behavior angered him all over again – the way he had wronged me in everybody’s eyes. I said, “Don’t get angry. I am happy he did it, because it made me walk away from the village and come here.”

  “I loved you as soon as I heard you speak with that accent you have. I felt as if I were traveling again. Your face is so different, your walk, your ways. You remind me of the girl I intended to paint in Fez. I saw her only once, asleep like this. I always dreamed of awakening her as I awakened you.”

  “And I always dreamed of being awakened with a caress like this,” I said.

  “If you had been awake I might not have dared.”

  “You, the adventurer, who lived with a savage woman?”

  “I did not really live with the savage woman. That happened to a friend of mine. He was always talking about it, so I always tell it as if it had happened to me. I’m really timid with women. I can knock men down and fight and get drunk, but women intimidate me, even whores. They laugh at me. But this happened exactly as I had always planned it would happen.”

  “But the tenth day I will be in New York,” I said laughing.

  “The tenth day I will drive you back, if you have to go back. But meanwhile you are my prisoner.”

  For ten days we worked out in the open, lying in the sun. The sun would warm my body, as Reynolds waited for me to close my eyes. Sometimes I pretended I wanted him to do more to me. I thought that if I closed my eyes he would take me. I liked the way he would walk up to me, like a hunter, making no sound and lying at my side. Sometimes he lifted my dress first and looked at me for a long time. Then he would touch me lightly, as if he did not want to awaken me, until the moisture came. His fingers would quicken. We kept our mouths together, our tongues caressing. I learned to take his penis in my mouth. This excited him terribly. He would lose all his gentleness, push his penis into my mouth, and I was afraid of choking. Once I bit him, hurt him, but he did not mind. I swallowed the white foam. When he kissed me, our faces were covered with it. The marvelous smell of sex impregnated my fingers. I did not want to wash my hands.

  I felt that we shared a magnetic current, but at the same time nothing else bound us together. Reynolds had promised to drive me back to New York. He could not stay in the country much longer. I had to find work.

  During the drive back Reynolds stopped the car and we lay on a blanket in the woods, resting. We caressed. He said, “Are you happy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you continue to be happy, this way? As we are?”

  “Why, Reynolds, what is it?”

  “Listen, I love you. You know that, but I can’t take you. I did that to a girl once, and she got pregnant and had an abortion. She bled to death. Since then I haven’t been able to take a woman. I’m afraid. If that should happen to you, I would kill myself.”

  I had never thought of things like this. I was silent. We kissed for a long time. For the first time he kissed me between the legs instead of caressing me, kissed me until I felt the orgasm. We were happy. He said, “This little wound women have... it frightens me.”

  In New York it was hot and all the artists were still away. I found myself without work. I took up modeling in dress shops. I could easily get work, but when they asked me to go out in the evenings with the buyers I would refuse and lose the job. Finally I was taken into a big place near Thirty-fourth Street where they employed six models. This place was frightening and gray. There were long rows of clothes and a few benches for us to sit on. We waited in our slips, to be ready for quick changes. When our numbers were called, we helped one another dress.

  The three men who sold the dress designs often tried to fondle us, squeeze us. We took turns staying during the lunch hour. My greatest fear was that I would be left alone with the man who was most persistent.

  Once when Stephen telephoned to ask if he could see me that evening, the man came up behind me and put his hand into my slip to feel my breasts. Not knowing what else to do, I kicked him while I held the phone and tried to go on talking to Stephen. He was not discouraged. Next, he tried to feel my ass. I kicked again.

  Stephen was saying, “What is it, what are you saying?”

  I ended the conversation and turned on the man. He was gone.

  The buyers admired our physical qualities as much as the dresses. The head salesman was very proud of me and would often say, with his hand on my hair, “She’s an artist’s model.”

  This made me long to return to posing. I did not want Reynolds or Stephen to find me here in an ugly office building, wearing dresses for ugly salesmen and buyers.

  *

  Finally I was called to model at the studio of a South American painter. He had the face of a woman, pale with big black eyes, long black hair, and his gestures were languid and effete. His studio was beautiful – luxuriant rugs, large paintings of nude women, silk hangings; and there was incense burning. He said he had a very intricate pose to do. He was painting a big horse running away with a naked woman. He asked if I had ever ridden on horseback. I said that I had, when I was younger.

  “That is marvelous,” he said, “exactly what I want. Now, I have made a contraption here which gives me the effect I need.”

  It was a dummy of a horse without a head, just the body and legs, with a saddle.

  He said, “Take your clothes off first, then I will show you. I have difficulty with this part of the pose. The woman is throwing her body back because the horse is running wild, like this.” He sat on the dummy horse to show me.

  By now I no longer felt timid about posing nude. I took my clothes off and sat on the horse, throwing my body backwards, my arms flying, my legs clasping the horse’s flanks so as not to fall. The painter approved. He moved away and looked at me. “It’s a hard pose and I do not expect you to keep it long. Just let me know when you get tired.”

  He studied me from every side. Then came up close to me and said, “When I made the drawing, this part of the body showed clearly, here, between the legs.” He touched me lightly as if it were merely part of his work. I curved in my belly a little to throw the hips forward and
then he said, “Now it is fine. Hold it.”

  He began to sketch. As I sat there I realized that there was one uncommon detail about the saddle. Most saddles, of course, are shaped to follow the contour of the ass and then rise at the pommel, where they are apt to rub against a woman’s sex. I had often experienced both the advantages and the disadvantages of being supported there. Once my garter came loose from the stocking and began to dance around inside my riding trousers. My companions were galloping and I did not want to fall behind, so I continued. The garter, leaping in all directions, finally fell between my sex and the saddle and hurt me. I held on, gritting my teeth. The pain was strangely mixed with a sensation I could not define. I was a girl then and did not know anything about sex. I thought that a woman’s sex was inside of her, and I did not know about the clitoris.

  When the ride was over, I was in pain. I mentioned what had happened to a girl I knew well, and we both went into the bathroom. She helped me out of my trousers, out of my little belt with the garters on it, and then said, “Are you hurt? That’s a very sensitive spot. Maybe you’ll never have any pleasure there if you got hurt.”

  I let her look at it. It was red and a little swollen, but not so very painful. What bothered me was her saying I might be deprived of a pleasure by this, a pleasure I did not know. She insisted on bathing it with a wet cotton, fondled me and finally kissed me, “to make it well”.

  I became acutely aware of this part of my body. Particularly when we rode a long while in the heat, I felt such a warmth and stirring between my legs that all I desired was to get off the horse and let my friend nurse me again. She was always asking me, “Does it hurt?”

  So once I answered, “Just a little.” We dismounted and went into the bathroom, and she bathed the chaffed spot with cotton and cool water.

  And again she fondled me, saying, “But it does not look sore anymore. Maybe you will be able to enjoy yourself again.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Do you think it has gone... dead... from the pain?”

  My friend very tenderly leaned over and touched me. “Does it hurt?”

  I lay back and said, “No, I do not feel anything.”

  “Don’t you feel this?” she asked with concern, pressing the lips between her fingers.

  “No,” I said, watching her.

  “Don’t you feel this?” She passed her fingers now around the tip of the clitoris, making tiny circles.

  “I don’t feel anything.”

  She became eager to see if I had lost my sensibility and increased her caresses, rubbing the clitoris with one hand while she vibrated the tip with the other. She stroked my pubic hair and tender skin around it. Finally I felt her, wildly, and I began to move. She was panting over me, watching me and saying, “Wonderful, wonderful, you can feel there...”

  I was remembering this as I sat on the dummy horse and noticed that the pommel was quite accentuated. So the painter could see what he wanted to paint, I slid forward, and as I did so my sex rubbed against the leather prominence. The painter was observing me.

  “Do you like my horse?” he said. “Do you know that I can make it move?”

  “Can you?”

  He came near me and set the dummy in motion, and indeed it was perfectly constructed to move like a horse.

  “I like it,” I said. “It reminds me of the times I rode horseback when I was a girl.” I noticed that he stopped painting now to watch me. The motion of the horse pushed my sex against the saddle even harder and gave me great pleasure. I thought that he would notice it, and so I said, “Stop it now.” But he smiled and did not stop it. “Don’t you like it?” he said.

  I did like it. Each movement brought the leather against my clitoris, and I thought I could not hold back an orgasm if it went on. I begged him to stop. My face was flushed.

  The painter was carefully watching me, watching every expression of a pleasure I could not control, and now it increased so that I abandoned myself to the motion of the horse, let myself rub against the leather, until I felt the orgasm and I came, riding this way in front of him.

  Only then did I know that he expected it, that he had done all this to see me enjoy it. He knew when to stop the machinery. “You can rest now,” he said.

  *

  Soon after, I went to pose for a woman illustrator, Lena, I had met at a party. She liked company. Actors and actresses came to see her, writers. She painted for magazine covers. The door was always open. People brought drinks. The talk was acid, cruel. It seemed to me that all her friends were caricaturists. Everyone’s weaknesses were immediately exposed. Or they exposed their own. One beautiful young man, dressed with great elegance, made no secret of his profession. He sat around at the big hotels, waited for old women who were alone and took them out to dance. Very often they invited him back to their rooms.

  Lena made a wry face, “How can you do it?” she asked him, “Such old women, how can you possibly get an erection? If I saw a woman like that lying on my bed, I would run away.”

  The young man smiled. “There are so many ways of doing it. One is to close my eyes and to imagine it is not an old woman but a woman I like, and then when my eyes are closed I begin to think how pleasant it will be to be able to pay my rent the next day or to buy a new suit or silk shirts. And as I do this, I keep stroking the woman’s sex without looking, and, you know, if your eyes are closed, they feel about the same, more or less. Sometimes, though, when I have difficulty I take drugs. Of course, I know that at this rate my career will last about five years and that at the end of that time I will not be of any use even to a young woman. But by then I will be glad never to see a woman again.

  “I certainly envy my Argentine friend, my roommate. He is a handsome, aristocratic man, absolutely effete. Women would love him. When I leave the apartment, do you know what he does? He gets up out of bed, pulls out a small electric iron and an ironing board, takes his pants and begins to press them. As he presses them he imagines how he will come out of the building so impeccably dressed, how he will walk down Fifth Avenue, how somewhere he will spy a beautiful woman, follow the scent of her perfume for many blocks, follow her into crowded elevators, almost touching her. The woman will be wearing a veil and a fur around her neck. Her dress will outline her figure.

  “After following her thus through the shops, he will finally speak to her. She will see his handsome face smiling at her and the chivalrous way he has of carrying himself. They will go off together and sit having tea somewhere, then go to the hotel where she is staying. She will invite him to come up with her. They will get into the room and then pull down the shades and lie in the darkness making love.

  “As he presses his pants carefully, meticulously, my friend imagines how he will make love to this woman – and it excites him. He knows how he will grip her. He likes to push his penis in from behind and raise the woman’s legs, and then get her to turn just a little so that he can see it moving in and out. He likes the woman to squeeze the base of his penis at the same time; her fingers press harder than the mouth of her sex, and that excites him. She will also touch his balls as he moves, and he will touch her clitoris, because that gives her a double pleasure. He will make her gasp and shake from head to foot and beg for more.

  “By the time he has envisioned all this standing there, half naked, pressing his pants, my friend has a hard on. It is all he wants. He puts away the pants, the iron and the ironing board, and he gets into bed again, lying back and smoking, thinking over this scene until each detail of it is perfect and a drop of semen appears at the head of his penis, which he strokes while he lies smoking and dreaming of pursuing other women.

  “I envy him because he can get so much excitement from thinking all this. He questions me. He wants to know how my women are made, how they behave...”

  Lena laughed. She said, It’s hot. I will take my corset off.” And she went into the alcove. When she came back her body looked free and lax. She sat down, crossed her bare legs, her blouse half-open. O
ne of her friends sat where he could see her.

  Another one, a handsome man, stood near me as I was posing and whispered compliments. He said, “I love you because you remind me of Europe – Paris especially. I don’t know what there is about Paris, but there is sensuality in the air there. It is contagious. It is such a human city. I don’t know whether it is because couples are always kissing in the streets, at tables in the cafés, in the movies, in the parks. They embrace each other so freely. They stop for long complete kisses in the middle of the sidewalk, at the subway entrances. Perhaps it is that, or the softness of the air. I don’t know. In the dark, in each doorway at night there is a man and a woman almost melted into one another. The whores watch for you every moment... they touch you.

  “One day I was standing on a platform bus, looking up idly at the houses. I saw a window open and a man and woman lying on a bed. The woman was sitting over the man.

  “At five o’clock in the afternoon it becomes unbearable. There is love and desire in the air. Everybody is in the streets. The cafés are full. In the movies there are little boxes that are completely dark and curtained off so that you can make love on the floor while the movie is going on and not be seen. It is all so open, so easy. No police to interfere. A woman friend of mine who was followed and annoyed by a man complained to the policeman at the corner. He laughed and said, ‘You’ll be sorrier the day no man wants to annoy you, won’t you? After all, you should be thankful instead of getting angry.’ And he would not help her.”

  Then my admirer said in a lower voice, “Will you come and have dinner with me and go to the theatre?”

  He became my first real lover. I forgot Reynolds and Stephen. They now seem like children to me.