Chapter 2

A slow dance. Another slow. Now it's Harry who' holds me in his arms. He has remained thin. His face is long and bony with lines that look like scars. His mouth is thin and sinuous, his eyes very light in a sunburned face.

He makes me think of a wolf. He breaths me in. His lips caress my hair and my forehaid. "You're still as beautiful as ever Helen. Still as desirable."

I shrug my shoulders. "Say that to Jean or to

Barbara. Your wife is on vacation and her husband is away."

"It's you I want. For eight years now, I've desired you. Why didn't you want to any more after the 'first time. Did I disappoint you?"

I nod yes. Since 'he's conceited, he doesn't believe me and he draws me tighter in his arms. He really does desire me; I feel it. It roles against my stomach, warming it slowly. On purpose I undulate even more because I know that he isn't going to get anything.

Larry dances by right next to us. His lips are glued to Jean's shoulder, his hand is high on her waist and it brushes against her breast. I smile without cheer. One day I had surprised them while they were making love in my room, on my bed. I had burst out laughing. I had just come from being with Harry. I was filled with feelings of guilt and had decided to unburden myself. Well he certainly had simplified matters.

I can still remember that laugh that had frozen them to the sheets.

It's a day in May 1950. I enter our house which is located on the outskirts of the city and in the middle of an English garden. It's a beautiful day; the birds in the trees fill their throats with the hot wind; the clouds are white against the sea of sky. They're like elongated beasts, crouching wild animals. Dream images which I never tired of creating, as when I was a child. The black tiled entry is cool and dark. I go up the stairs which gliten and are covered by a thick red carpet fastned by reddish copper bars. Once on the landing I hear what sounds like a sob. At first I'm frightened. I think of my seven year old son. He's at boarding school. What's happened? They've sent him home. He's crying. But the sob is followed by a groan, then a hoars exclamation, a kind of howl through which I recognise Jean's voice. Without thinking, I go in. I immediately recognise her blue jacket and sweater of the same color thrown over the chair. Her skirt is on the floor. Her scarf hangs over a green vase like a white serpent. One of her shoes points at a crazy angle against my dressing table. She whispers, "Oh, it's so good... I'm going to come...".

I hear her clearly. That same voice, the same words of sixteen grip my heart deliciously. Then her eyes widened as they saw me. I read fear in diem. Then stupifaction when I laughed.

My husband is stretched out on his back. Naked. His skin is too white in contrast with the bed cover. They could have taken it off. They're going to stain it; if they haven't done so already. Jean is on top of him. Her knees are sunk into the cover. Her large buttocks, whiter than the rest of her body and very firm are jambed against 'Larry's thighs. Her arms are thrown back with her hands placed on my husband's knees. Like the proud and exilerated circus rider in full gallop she is crouched over Larry. Her head rolls on her shoulder and her chignon which has become undone hangs down in black shinning waves on her beautiful back which is like a leaf with her spine the central stem and vein, Larry's hands are convulsively kneading her ample breasts, a little too heavy, but who in their fulness express all the joy of womanhood and all happiness of a body which is capable of fulfilment

I'm sorry now that I laughed ; for my noisy interruption. I would have liked to watch longer, and sec Jean come all over the place. But she gets up now. She stands before me nonplused and beautiful. She stutters, " Excuse me. I shouldn't have... it's silly..."

I put my hands on her shoulders. I pull her towards me. I kiss her on the corners of her mouth and then gently full on her lips. I caress her thighs, "I'm not mad at you, honey".

She smiles relieved, "Your nice. You know I didn't mean to deceive you." She shrugs her shoulders and with the voice of the school girl who is about to be punished despite her innocence, "That's how it is... I don't know what came over me..."

Larry slips on his underwear. He looks at us with bewilderment. I hear him say, "I'm sorry Helen. Please forgive me. I'll explain."

"Oh, there is nothing to forgive. Leave us alone."

Happy to have gotten off so easely he gathers up his cloths and runs off. I go to the door and lock it. I come back to Jean, She is in the act of putting on her panty, a cute little triangle of silken lace. First one leg, then the other follows. Her buttocks vibrate around the dark and narrow valley of shadow. I say to her, "Don't get dressed again. Come back and lie down."

She doesn't have to be asked twice. This time she draws back the slip-cover. I undress quickly, as I had just a little while ago when I was with Harry...

I had met him on the street He had just accompanied his wife to the train. She was going to visit her parents who lived at Bidart, near Saint-Jean-de-Luz, for three weeks.

"I'm sure glad to have run into you. How about a drink?"

"Great thought I'm dying of thirst."

He lives at the end of a quiet avenue, the only one in this industrial city. When we found ourselves before his door I never even thought to object After all he didn't say that she was going to take me to a bar. He lives in a private bouse which he inherited from his parents. The whole length of the marble staircase which is bathed in a soft light filtering through the colored panes of the windows is hung with English prints: birds, the hunt, Victorian personnages with binoculers hanging around their necks. The salon is vast with incurved walls, a little like a rotonda. One could imagine that one was in an old chateau. The furniture is of a dark and polished oak. Above the huge chimney hang two crossed sabers with their steely smiles beneath the golden and shinning handles. The drapes are heavy, old and beautiful. Flowers are gently dying in a large pot They take all of the light.

I like this atmosphere of the old and ancient The lives of several successive generations that have lived and died here spreads over the place a noble perfume.

Harry has me sit down on a deep couch whose armrests are carved with countlesse curl votes in the best style of German baroque. He pulls a long bell cord which ends in a green and slightly faded tassel. A butler enters. He's bald and ruddy. Wearing a striped vest he resembles a big fat beetle.

"Scotch and soda."

He disappeares and returns with a silver tray embossed with Harry's coat-of-arms who is a marquis. I like that too. It creats a certain old-fashioned charm and elegance which he carries off well. He isn't very intelligent but he never says a stupid thing. At least he has learned how to 'keep quiet. It is a good tradition which is unfortunately ignored by the middleclass.

He sits down next to me. We sip our drinks slowly; I know already that something is going to happen. He envelopes me like a stationary whirlpool of hot air. In the silence which has fallen between us I can hear his breathing. Not as a noise. It's more secretive, more savage. It is as if the air around us was pulsating. The room shrinks. The walls are closing in. It is a strange hallucination which seems to rise out of my stomach, choking me gently, deliciously.

During the whole time of our one year of marriage I have not experienced the sensation of pleasure that Jean has so often described as a tidal wave, a tumbling, burning sun, a blade of fire that pierces right through you, a wave that carries you away. She always uses images, Jean. But her eyes reflect those which are still more exalted and powerful. She cant find words for them. She says so herself.

I think that perhaps with Harry I shall experience all that. How I should like to. And how afraid of it I am, for my whole life would be changed. Could I then support living with a man who I like in proportion to the degree that I feel contempt for him, a degree which till now has not been excessive?

But to live without having known what it is to come, without the confusion of complete passion?

Harry takes my glass from my hands. He places it on a little coffee table. He slips down to his knees, his head pressed against my thighs. He turns his tanned face up to me. A handsome male face, a little contemptuous. He must love women only in so far as they can afford him pleasure. Will he be able to give it to me? He smiles as he takes my hands, "Marquise, thou beauty, thine eyes make me wilt with love..."

I smile too in order to hide my shyness. The beating of my heart deafens me. It is as if great waves of heavy blood were beating against my temples, filling my ears. My whole being is nothing but one heavy and regular beat; burning. It is almost painful. Harry pushes me gently. I allow myself to 'be pushed down on the cushion; my arms falling limp. I close my eyes. I am thankful to him for not saying anything and not trying to kiss me. It is as if he understood what I expected of him. No hypocrisy. All I want is that which a husband had been unable to give.

His lips travel about my thighs. They reach the edge of my stocking. Run over my flesh. His hands run up me like a stream. They reach the silky crotch of my panty. He grabs the elastic edge with his fingers and pulls gently. I raise myself a little in order to help him. My panty slides slowly down; passes the round borders of my knees. It goes down over my calves. In a thrice they are down on the tip of my foot and hooked on my heels; I toss off my shoes. My panty is off.

With one swift motion Harry's head spreads apart my 'knees and reaches the living center of my body. I let out a sigh, surprised, delighted by this advance without an introduction. His lips are good and skilful. His tongue explores me, searches out the sensative spots, moves about slowly, pulls away and comes back. A feeling of pleasure spreads through me. In order to accentuate it I arch myself and grinde up and down in the motion of love. That excites the boy. He literally devoures me with sighs, groans, animal grunts, first hurried and then wild. I become more languide, and sigh. I melt under his lips like a bonbon. It's a little like the sensation of drunkeness, very light, but with a desire to get even drunker.

He leaves. He romps on top of me. I push him off. I get up. For a moment I read fear in his eyes. His mouth falls open as if he was about to beg. It makes him look like a child. But he is quickly reassured. I let fall my coat. I take off my sweater with one morion, up over my head. I'm not wearing a bras. I don't need one. My breasts are small, but very round and firm. I can feel that he likes them. He comes toward me. I tell him, "Wait!". And I cannot recognise my voice.

I take off my skirt One foot then the other... mere... it's lying on the floor like a dead butter fly with its wings folded hack. I'm nude. He holds me against him standing for a while. He caresses my round stomach.

"Your belly, your beautiful woman's belly", he murmurs. He bends mown. He kisses it lightly.

His hands grab my buttocks and squeeze. I'm afraid of nothing. I know diem to be perfect. He afirms it Then he pushes me gently over onto the couch. I stretch out on my stomach with my head between my arms. A rustling. I know that he is hurridly undressing himself, throwing his cloths and underwear about him in a fever.

He is up against me. He kisses my loins, bites into diem. I stretch myself with my legs spread apart and offering my ass. Then I want to turn over but he keeps me as I am. He runs his tongue down the length of my spine. He kisses the nape of my neck, nibbles at it. I like that He slips his tongue behind my ears, and again nibbles at my lobes. It's pleasurable. Then his burning, hard, huge dick brushes against my thighs, and then slides a little way between my buttocks into the dark crack, then my cunt whose lips open and salivate.

He senses the fact that I'm getting a hang out of it. He whispers, "You feel how stiff I am... you make me get hard". His voice is hard. It breaks after each word as it pushes through his teeth, clenched with passion and desire. He Tolls over on his side and pulls me against him. He takes my hand and directs it toward his thighs. I caress his tool. It is very big and hot It vibrates like the arrow drawn on a bow. His balls are round and well filled. I wish that he would say something more. But he just grunts. He groans out my name. For the first time I really desire to be taken, penetrated. I smell the male. I desire his brutality, his mastery and his precaution.

Jean's stories are still with me. I turn around. I offer my burning cunt to his mouth and at the same time I take his cock between my lips. I've never done that before. I hold it with one hand as if I was afraid that it would choke me. As a matter of fact it fills the whole of my mouth. Harry tries to shove it in even further. I don't want him to. I look at it. I dissect it. It's true, I'm almost a virgin. This is something new for me. I slide back the tender and very soft skin over the large bud stuffed with blood and love. I feel it palpitate. It keeps swelling. You'd think that it was going to explode. I take almost all of this beautiful member into my mouth and moisten it with my saliva.

Far, very far from me, it seems, Harry's tongue searches through my brown, curly bush which underlines my stomach; searches my cunt. Words come to my lips, a girl's words which I do not dare repeat.

Of a sudden he turns around. He pulls me to the edge of the couch. Only my loins support me. My feet touch the ground and so do his. It's as if he were standing over me. With a lunge he buries himself in me. I let out a scream of joy. There, I have felt the first shock of pleasure. I grab him around the back, "Stick it in... put it all in...". I murmur other things. I am no longer that nice girl that lowers her eyes when she walks down the street. I'm a female desiring to come. Only a female searching a sensation of pleasure which she hasn't experienced up to now.

Harry's hands are on my ass. They squeeze it and scratch it. One of his fingers slides into the middle and slowly digs into my little hole. He massages the inside. That makes me tighten my cunt around his member. I grinde up against him with fury and regularity. The pleasure is heightening. It is like a wave, like a bath in imaginary water from which one will never step cut. But I cant go any farther. I call for an orgasm with all my soul' but it doesn't come. Suddenly Harry lets out a bellow. His burning come splatters over my belly, spreads like warm oil. He moves away. I remain stunned, disappointed. I get up very quickly.

"The bathroom?"

"At the rear, over there."

I grab my cloths on the way. When I come back he his dressed in a dressing gown. He is smoking a cigarette and sipping a glass of scotch. He gets up and makes a motion to put his arms around me.

"I'm in a hurry. I have to go home."

He seems to be relieved to have me go this way without any emotional effusions. He savors in peace his drink and his lassitude.

V

I tell all of this now to Jean. I notice little pin-points of light burning under long) brown eyelashes. She is still beautiful. She is no longer that acid school girl whose precociousness astonished and charmed me. She is a woman with sumptuous flesh. Her shoulders are smooth and well outlined. Her heavy breasts are solidly attached to her brown armpits from where comes a delicate and exciting odor of sweat. They are large and grand. Their slight sag which is barely noticeable give them an extra charm. Their aureoles are clearly designed and brown, the nipples rise up from their middle, round, long, soft to my lips which suck on them, to my mouth which devoures them tenderly, lets them go and then takes them up once again. How well they become erect. I feel the sap that makes them swell. I let my hands run over her stomach enclosed and cushioned by her voluptuous hips. Her thighs are short and round, the beautiful thighs of a girl from the south. Isn't she from Manosque? A sun ray, which a little while ago warmed my back, now shines on the bush, the glistening brown bush of her cunt. I slide towards it. I too desire, like my husband a little while ago, to give her pleasure, to see her hump, undulate, to hear her whimper words of love and voluptuousness for me.

My fingers reach her most intimate flesh and gently enter into it. Jean has a beautiful vagina, deep and with thick lips which are well turned. A kind of tenderness rises from my hand up to my heart. I feel her clitoris that comes out to meet my caresses. It's like a malicious tongue; first hurried and then trembling.

It calls for my tongue. But I'm going to make it wait

"Turn over!"

Jean obeys. She profers her large back which is a little fat. She places her head between her arms and her stomach is raised over the bed. Her big ass reaches out for me. I spread her cheeks. I dissect the long shadowy valley. Just above her cunt is that little orfice with its tender and red edge like a round mourn carefully made-up. I stretch it out a little with my fingers. I slip in my tongue and twist it around again and again. I only stop in order to put in my fingers and to move them in and out

"Oh, you bitch!", Jean gasps as if she was going to the. And again, "Oh, you honey of a cunt..." And her little ass-hole opens wider. I wish I had a cock to shove in there and to rip from her beautiful throat screams of joy, curses and the raspings of pleasure in comiting this prohibited' act

Then I get back down on her cunt. Her lips palpitate gently like the heart of a bird.

They are all wet I taste the juke, so sweet, a little salty and whose muscy odor of spices rises in me like alcohol, like a magic liquide.

She turns around fighting against me who is trying to hold her in place. She lets out a long whimper. I know that she has just come. I felt it all of a sudden against my mouth. It was like a long rippling shiver that spread over her stomach like that caused by a stone thrown into a quiet pool of water. She gasps a little and then takes my lips in her own and kisses them wildly, thrusting her tongue deep into my mouth.

We remain pressed against one another for a long time, dosing. Happy.

During a whole year at school we slept just this way and luckily were never caught at it Only our lit. prof, suspected something. One day she called us to her office.

"Jean and Helen, you know I know a little about life. I've found you out, whether you think so or not. I don't have to see something to know that it exists. Do you understand what I mean?"

Her face had swollen and her eyes glistened strangely. I only thought of it later. She was called Julia Smacker. She was a daughter of the North, very tall, with long legs, a short torso and her breasts were very round over her astonnishingly slim waist

Jean put on the voice of an insulted little girl:

"Madame, I don't understand?"

"Really?" smiled Julia Smacker, "I understand perfectly."

She was the only pretty prof. That day she was wearing a blue sweater the same color as her eyes. She could have been thirty but no more. The former students of the school said that she had affairs and that one as never bored with her. But no one could tell a truely incriminating story to prove it. In this provincial town, elegant and discrete and full of English serenity inherited from the reign of the Plantangenats, all one said was, "Miss Smacker has a lot of visitors."

I knew that she didn't want to punish us. I felt that there was on the contrary a feeling of sympathy between her and us.

"Please explain yourself, Madame." said Jean very priggishly.

Julia Smacker shrugged her shoulders, "Don't consider me as your enemy my dear Jean. I want to invite the two of you to my house on thursday. How about four o'clock? We'll have tea and talk. O.K. ?"

Going out of the office I felt dazed and excited.

Jean said coldly, "I bet you that it's going to be a free-for-all! The bitch." Jean laughed, "You'll see. A real little family affair. But if she has some men come along, I'm getting out."

Jean knew and understood everything. When I was with her I felt completely safe. Nothing could happen if I was with a friend who was on the ball like she was. I began looking forward to that thursday with a good deal of impatience. I repeated silently to myself, "A free-for-all". I liked the way it sounded, the way it slipped out between my lips. I had no idea what it was all about, but it must be nice...

Thirty years. Memories collect and then disappear. Thirty years. Harry continues to rub up against me in step with the music. My husband's lips and those of Jean are welded together. While passing me she gives me a malicious wink. Her husband and the tall girl have stopped dancing. They're spread out on the couch petting. The tall girl spreads her thighs and I can see the black triangle of her panty against her white skin at the crotch.

No this isn't going to turn into a free-for-all. We wont go any farther. It's this way every week. Even several times a week. It's by an unwritten convention, perhaps to escape from the boredom of this large Eastern city, that we get together like this with the right to flirt. It's all very well, very "smart". Afterwards everyone goes back home. We have all slept with one another, at one time or another, but we never talk of it; we act as if nothing had ever happened.

That's one of the rules. It allows for agreable duplicities from time to time.

I'm tired of dancing. I undo Harry's arms and he is surprised. I go and sit down on the couch next to John and the tail! girl. On the way I've picked up a glass of scotch. I drink thirstilly. Harry comes and joins me with a bottle. He puts it down next to me, fills my glass with the amber liquide and we both drink.

Only Jean and her husband sway in the middle of the livingroom. I let Harry run his hand over my thighs over my skirt. If he only knew the poor dear how much more it would take now to awaken in my flesh the slightest shiver.

Am I at the point of decay? At the edge of the abyss from which there is no escape? The limits of virtue are those which we impose. That day in May 1945, I really thought that I was a girl completely lost. And yet on leaving Miss Smacker's house I was still as virgin as one can be...