Chapter 1
As Eve Banner took off her robe and stepped up on the posing platform it was obvious that she was a natural blonde. She turned slightly, facing the long expanse of windows that admitted the northern light into the classroom. As she felt the heat of the sun on her body she knew that the triangle of buff-colored hair at the top of her thighs was being turned into a bright, glistening gold.
The professor, in a paint-spattered robe whose stains seemed deliberate and over-arty, spoke to the drawing class.
"We'll start with thirty-second action poses." He glanced with determined casualness at Eve, as though trying to prove to himself that he really did not see her perfect, womanly form. "Will you time yourself, Miss Banner, I've forgotten my watch."
Eve smiled knowingly as she let herself hold his eye for an overlong moment. She enjoyed the quickly downcast expression on his face; he looked like a little boy caught with dirty postcards.
"Certainly, sir," she replied demurely.
She took a step across the carpet-covered model's stand and leaned on the stool, bending over so that her blossoming hips stuck out in the professor's direction. Conscious of his presence behind her, she wriggled slightly, finding the pose that she wanted, then raised one foot and put it on the rung of the stool. She spread her knee to the side, so that the class would have something to draw besides the foreshortened view of her creamy buttocks. Eve knew they were an enchanting sight, but she had been an artist's model long enough to know something about drawing. A protruding limb added a third dimension to her body and gave the students an angle to work with.
It gave Eve an angle, too....
Her head ducked down, away from the class, she smiled broadly. Her eyes closed for a moment as she savored the unrestricted feeling that rose up in her groin as she separated her legs. Her downy female parts opened as she assumed the straddling position. There! The throbbing began, slowly at first, merely a titillating sensation of mild pleasure. She began to count out the time of the pose-one ... two ... three ... four....
She liked the thirty-second poses best. Not only were they the easiest to hold, but she could look forward to the next one and wonder what it would be. Images flashed through her mind, images that were as exciting as the knowledge that she was exposing her most intimate parts to a roomful of men and women. Her mind was filled with pictures of herself, her creamy flesh and rippling muscles; she saw herself as she would be at the end of the class period, when a line of sweat formed down her spine and between her breasts. How exciting her glistening skin was....She had seen the students glancing covertly at her at such times.
There was something animalistic about a beautiful woman covered with sweat, and Eve knew it. She knew a lot of things about her own body.... It was the thing above all else that fascinated her the most.
What would she do next? Eighteen....nineteen.
... twenty....Should she raise one leg high in the air? Do a split? Stoop down and hold her breasts out to the class? Stretch out across the stool on her back?
There were so many things she could do, and they all gave her pleasure. Modeling was a continual sexual act for her, not painful drudgery as it was for the other models. All you needed to do was dispense with modesty, she thought, smiling. Modesty was something totally foreign to her now. Eve was contemptuous of the other women who posed for the university's art department. How dull they were! They never inspired the classes-or themselves-as she did because they were so modest.
She was the only woman who assumed poses that required the legs to be separated. She often watched them, coming to work early so that she could peer into the other classrooms. They stood with their legs clamped together as though they were about to be gang-raped. A favorite and boring pose for them was the September Morn stance-doubled over with hands crossed across the stomach to hide their femaleness. The students had to draw it over and over again because the models wouldn't dare do much else that was different or daring.
Eve breathed sharply as she felt the moisture collect in her cloven womanhood. It was starting now ... this promised to be an especially good day at work!
She always felt sorry for all the people who hated their jobs and had to drag themselves to work every day, and then spend hours watching the clock. It was a joy to go to work as far as Eve was concerned; work was a ritual honoring her body, and that was all the religion she needed, too. She watched a clock in a way, but it was a stopwatch; an instrument to signal her to change from one vision of delight to a different one.
Twenty-eight, twenty-nine "Time." Her voice rang out with authority. That was another thing she liked about posing; she was the boss here. The professor gave out the grades, and instructed the students, but without her there would be nothing to grade because there would be nothing to draw except a stupid pot of flowers!
Eve immediately assumed another pose, shifting and swaying for a moment in order to find the exact position she wanted. The students rattled their drawing pads and dusted charcoal-laden fingers on their smocks. The room smelled of turpentine from the painting class that had used it the hour before. It was a sexy aroma to Eve; by now, it reminded her of nakedness-her own nakedness.
As she moved her legs. Eve felt the puddle of womanly honey between her legs. It inspired her, and she pushed the tall stool away and sank down on the carpeted platform. She stretched one leg out straight behind her and sank slowly down until the heel of her other foot sank into her soft, moist private parts. Her hands found a restful position on her sharply acclivated hips as she settled into the carefully balanced dip.
She faced the class now. There was a trick to watching people who were busy drawing, their brows puckered with concentration. She could not stare directly at any one of them; if she did, they would tense and adopt an objective, artistic air, as though they did not see her, only a form to be copied. Eve could not bear that.
Instead, she lifted her chin slightly and let her eyelids droop, gazing at the chosen student through what appeared to be an opaque disregard mingled with model's fatigue. If they thought she was stiff and aching, she became, in their minds, what they wanted her to be-a collection of bone and muscle. Then Eve saw what she wanted to see: the struggle of the artist trying not to look at a beautiful woman with no clothes on.
How intellectual and sophisticated they thought they were! The art major crowd always put on the dog; so did the music majors, for that matter. But it was hard for the arts; they had a lot of naked bodies to contend with, and for all their determined avant garde cosmopolitanism, they were still college kids and most of them had hot pants most of the time.
Eve watched Rolfe Jagger, the instructor, as he made the rounds of the class, pausing here and there to whisper something to a student having difficulty. Occasionally, he took a piece of charcoal and improved the drawing on the student's easel. He was very good-looking, Eve thought, and of course he knew it. He always wore a white chemist's coat instead of a standard art smock, probably to show his contempt for cold science. Eve was ready to bet anything that he took the coat home and carefully stroked it with his paint brushes until it sported every color on his palette. After five years as a model, she knew that paint just didn't get spilled and smeared with such linear perfection.
Rolfe paused now behind a freshman who was nervously blinking through goggle-like horn rims at Eve while he sketched madly, trying to beat the second count.
The instructor spoke, looking at Eve and smiling slightly.
"Prentiss, your proportions are off again. You've drawn her too voluptuously. She's not that big. Look at her, she's a thoroughbred, not a percheron."
He raised his hand and signaled to Eve to continue the post past the thirty-second limit. The student blushed and shuffled his feet in typical freshman agony. Everyone turned to look at him.
Rolfe Jagger began to explain the drawing's faults in a voice that was lecture-loud. The student grew more and more miserable.
"Look at the subject, Prentiss. Study her carefully. She's what the romantics would call a porcelain beauty. Pink and gold, an aristocrat, not a peasant woman. She's fragile; look at those tiny bones, the long neck, the narrow ribcage. You've made her into a wet nurse, Prentiss."
The class tittered and Rolfe looked pleased with himself. He looked quickly up at Eve before he went on.
"Even if she were that size, she would make you forget it. There is no sensuality there, only sensuousness."
The student blinked. "What's the difference? I thought they both meant the same thing."
Rolfe cleared his throat importantly. "Milton described great poetry as 'simple, sensuous and passionate.' Literary critics have credited him with the first use of sensuous to differentiate it from the notion of undue indulgence in the ... er, grosser pleasures that is conveyed by sensual. You've drawn the subject as you saw her, Prentiss, not as she really is. Do you understand?"
The silence that came over the class was more telling than a guilty snicker, Eve thought. The student had just been told that he was horny, and the rest of them knew that they were, too.
Rolfe looked up at the platform and gave her his Artist-Above-It-AU nod. "Let's have another pose, please, Miss Banner, if you will."
She almost laughed in his face. He was the horniest male in the class, whether he knew it or not. Eve knew it....
How he was fighting her! It wouldn't be long now. She would have him soon. She knew he was in the stage of trying to think of her as mere equipment for the study of art; he was determined to think of her as an inanimate object, something he used, like a brush or a palette knife. She would soon show him-she would use him!
Eve sat down on the platform, turning her body toward the chastised student. She raised one knee until it pressed against her breast, flattening the perfect globe against her chest. She spread the other leg and drew the foot far back, until it supported her hips. There....that would certainly give him a good view of her. As she glanced covertly down at her body she saw the pink lips of her genitals exposed.
As she counted out the time, Eve forgot about the student. Suddenly, the game did not seem important. She had played it so often ... picking out one particular boy, usually a very young one, and deliberately tormenting him. But now, it was as though a dark cloud had settled over the bright glee she usually knew at such times.
The numbers that she spoke to herself seemed like years slipping away. One....two....three....four....It reminded her of the corny way Hollywood used to show the passage of time in a movie. Pages of a calendar appeared on the screen of her mind and began to flutter, turning backwards until "That's the devil's pool of temptation!"
Her mother had grabbed the tiny, cheap compact she had bought at the dime store and smashed it on the floor, crushing the broken glass under her foot until there was nothing left of it but a piece of twisted plastic and a pile of gritty, ground-up dust that had once been a mirror.
The woman's eyes were over-bright and frightening as she shook her finger in her daughter's face.
"You know what your father and I told you, Evelyn! There'll be no mirrors in this house! They're the work of Satan. Vanity is a sin that leads to even worse offenses against Christ!"
"Mother, I-"
"Get down on your knees! Pray for strength against your temptations, Evelyn. Pray, pray, pray!"
The mother forced the girl to the floor and began a honking invocation of forgiveness. "Deliver us from the sins of the flesh, oh Lord.
Lead us down the paths of righteousness to our home in Eternity with Thee."
She began to rock back and forth on her knees, her body swaying in time to the rhythm of her chanting speech. Eve struggled against the tight grip, shivering with disgust as she felt the iron-like, girdled hip collide with her. Corsets, her mother called those elasticized vises she wore. She ordered them from a catalog that was full of pictures of women just like her-'stylish stout' the ads called it. The corsets laced up the front like huge pink shoes. They were prisons that bound flesh into obedient, motionless bundles. Now, as her mother swayed violently against her, Eve thought about the stiff, heavy feel of death. She remembered the dead cat, how hard his body had felt to the touch. Her mother's body felt that way now.
"Women are running around naked nowadays," the mother said contemptuously. "Bouncing and swaying like hussies walking the streets swinging their pocketbooks."
Pocketbook swinger....How often her mother used that expression. Any woman who did not live a totally pure religious life was called a pocketbook swinger. When Eve was old enough to need one her mother cautioned her about carrying it on the crook of her arm.
"Hold it down at your side, Evelyn."
Eve soon found out why this was so important to her mother. When a woman carries her pocketbook on her forearm she walks differently; the small act of balance leads to a swaying of the hips. She tried it once, in her room when her parents were out of the house. Instantly, she had felt the difference in her walk. It became easier, more fluid and much more feminine. Hands held at the sides was a military posture, a structuring of the body that looked stiff and unyielding.
Like her mother laced into her corset....
Eve held the bag over her arm and placed her hand on her hip. Her heart beat faster as she saw her shadow on the wall of the mirror-less room. She moved slowly forward, walking sinuously. The shadow swayed to and fro. She reached out to it and saw the long line of her arm on the sun-drenched wall.
It was not long before Eve found out that 'pocketbook swinger' was a synonym for prostitute. After that, she practiced the new way of walking in her room, taking a tremulous pleasure from the sight of her undulating shadow.
One day, before she could toss the purse aside and grab up a schoolbook, her mother entered without knocking. They stared at each other for a moment, and Eve watched the small eyes grow even smaller with hate and fear. The woman's mouth twitched as she began to speak.
"What are you doing?" she said slowly, in a hoarse whisper. "Do you know what you look like? What are you doing!"
She shook Eve and slapped her repeatedly until the girl's head bobbed back and forth like a buoy.
"Posing! Posing like a tart under a lamplight!" she screamed. Then she looked up at the bright sunlight streaming into the room, and whirled about to see their two shadows on the opposite wall. With a harsh cry of frustration, she ran to the shade and pulled it down until the room was shrouded in darkness.
Eve cried out sharply. It was suddenly so dark, like a tomb. It was as though she had gone blind in an instant. Horror welled in her and she began to scream.
"Stop that!" the mother cried, and slapped her again.
"It's dark! Pull up the shade, please! I won't look at the shadows again!" Eve pleaded.
The mother looked suddenly pleased. Her voice calmed to a singsong of satisfaction. "See? You're afraid of darkness. All sinners are because the darkness is the spirit of the devil waiting for your soul. Fear doesn't live in those who keep the spirit of Christ within themselves."
Throughout her teens, Eve was never allowed to use any makeup at all. She could not sneak it at school because the principal was a member of her parents' church and she knew he would tell them if she appeared "painted." The parents' religion forbade any decoration on the body. No jewelry, no bright colors, no fringes or lace or bordering of any kind.
"You don't have to wear anything to hide yourself under if the soul underneath is pure," her mother said. "The soul should stand ready to be covered before Jesus when He calls. The more decoration you wear, the more sin you're trying to cover up. You look at these women with all their necklaces and rings and bracelets. There's a sin for every jewel they wear, you mark my words."
There were no mirrors anywhere in the house except for a small glass on a stand that Eve's father had to use when he shaved. He always locked it away when he was finished with it. She knew he regretted having to keep it, but he excused his lapse from grace on the grounds of safety. "It's not for vanity but necessity," he intoned morosely. "A man needs a mirror but a woman doesn't. If I even catch you with it I'll not spare the rod, Evelyn."
Her mother did not need a mirror, that was true enough. Her face was clean and her thin hair pulled back into a net. Both of these grooming tasks required only a sense of touch.
There were no movies, no television, no radio, or any other kind of entertainment. Her father read a daily paper, intoning aloud the major pieces of news that he censored as he went along. After he was through with the paper, he tossed it in the trash. Comic strips were a form of levity and in some cases, blasphemy. Since the Bible enjoined, "Thou shalt have no other God before Me" Eve's father took offense at Snoopy's Head Beagle and Lucy's five-cent psychiatric services. Dagwood, too, bit the dust, since God made Man to have dominion over everything, including woman. Comic strips were therefore the Devil's work.
The only outings the family had besides church and church suppers were walks in the woods. Nature was God's work.
It was in one of God's endeavors that Eve saw her own reflection. They stopped beside a pool and she looked down at her image in the water. She had seen herself in mirrors at school, in the homes of her few friends, and in plate glass windows. But this was somehow perfection.
She knelt down, pretending prayer, but really gazing at herself. She was eighteen, and beautiful. Her hair was the color of corn silk; her eyes were almost the exact gray-green of the water that reflected them. And her body....
The curve of her hip as she knelt on her folded thighs fascinated her. It was round and soft-looking, so different from her mother's rigid shanks. She would never let that change. She would keep them soft and free like this. Eve began to smile. She was beautiful ... beautiful! Nothing bad could happen to her if she possessed such loveliness. As bad as things were now, at home, they wouldn't last. When she finished school, she planned to go away and never see them again. She would support herself, no matter what she had to do.
A surge of power covered her. She could do it! A beautiful woman never need worry. She would use her beauty ... that's it. Her heart beat faster. Yes ... her beauty. Somehow, she would use that to let the light shine into her drab life. She would reflect life and love and beauty, just as this pool was reflecting her.
She leaned further forward. Her hand slipped and a rock on the bank came loose and tumbled into the water. She was startled, and drew back. The rock sent broad ripples through her reflection until it was distorted and ugly. Eve looked down at the mud spreading through the water.
Ugly ... dirty ... hard.
Eve worked grimly through high school, waiting for the day when she could escape. Her only pleasure, when things got too bad, was the contemplation of her get-away. She knew where her father hid money in the house. He did not believe in using banks. That, too, was part of the religion that he had so successfully twisted.
He belonged to a political group called "American Crusade." In the pamphlets the group handed out were innumerable references to "international Jewish bankers" and "godless international communist conspiracy."
As a result of this educational material, the father adopted a cash-and-carry arrangement. "I'll not let those communist Christ-killers play with my money," he said.
Eve was going to steal the money and leave home the day after graduation.
The plan made her think a great deal about the subject of money. One day a joke went around the school when, in the senior year, everyone was talking about what he would do for a living alter school was out. One of the boys sneered at a girl student's ambition to be a lawyer. "Why do you have to go to all that trouble? A girl doesn't have to worry-you're all straddling a gold mine."
That night in bed, Eve thought about the remark. Her hand crept down under the covers and found her sex. She reached into the band of her pajamas and caressed the tufted mass of curls. She shivered as a warm feeling stole through her back and legs. It was gold ... bright gleaming gold. She switched on the light and looked down at herself. The glistening mound rose up in a gentle curve below her flat belly. She was proud of that pretty, yellowish mass. No other girl had one like it. She had looked at the others in gym class, in the showers. Even the other blondes were darker down there; none had this lustrous mass to match their hair as she did.
She had heard about harlots all her life; there were more in the Bible than there were in night court. They weren't called harlots anymore ... they were call girls. Could she be one? She frowned, staring up at the ceiling. It felt very strange, planning to be one. From all she had heard, nobody ever actually decided to go into such a business. You just went from bad to worse and sort of descended to it.
A recalcitrant distaste welled up in her. She could not do that. She could not descend into anything. She remembered the day at the pool in the forest ... how the rock had fallen into the water and ravaged her image. The mud in the water oozing over her face and body.
Dirty ... ugly ... hard.
She did not want anyone touching her beauty; she merely wanted them to look at it, as she enjoyed looking at it. But how? Who would pay to do that, and that alone?
She did not want anyone to touch her at all, in any way. If she could only remain, always, as she had been that day in the pool in the woods. A perfect vision. What was touch compared to that? Touch was the rock that spoiled everything.
She began to rub her fingers over her femaleness, dipping into the coral lips and caressing the sensitive folds. A gasp escaped from her lips; her eyes closed and a tight grimace of pleasure stretched her mouth. Her legs stiffened and her back arched as the tingling delight became more intense. What was she doing to herself? Her legs spread out on the mattress; the primitive excitement made her grip her toes as though over an imaginary branch. No such thing as evolution, huh?
As Eve continued to stimulate the bud of womanliness she was increasingly aware of her internal parts stretching with desire. With her other hand, she sought her sex cavern but then drew back, afraid. It began to hurt, she could not enter herself. She would just do this ... up top, where it felt so good and didn't hurt at all. Where there was nothing to shatter or break.
She rubbed harder, using the base of her palm, straining up against the pressure. Suddenly, an explosion of nerve endings spiraled out into her entrails, throbbing into the small of her back and down into her bowels.
The next morning in church, she listened to the preacher read from the Book of Genesis...." and they saw that they were naked, and they were afraid. They covered themselves with fig leaves."
Eve smiled to herself, her head bent low into the prayer book. She knew why they were afraid now. They had done what she had done last night, and the new delight had been so intense as to be awesome and terrible in a lovely way. Eve, the first woman, had felt the very same thing that she herself had felt.
She stirred, frowning. It was the first time in her life that she had ever identified with anyone or anything in the Bible. She was sick of the Bible, had been for a long time. But now, as she listened to the story of Adam and Eve, she felt a pleasant empathy.
Eve had felt that same tingling thrill. Had Adam as well? Was it the same for a man? She gave an internal shrug. What did she care what men felt? She rubbed her hand down her soft thigh; pressed the prayer book close to her body and felt the rounded curves of her breasts. Her body ... her beautiful body. Just like Eve's. Men seemed quite unimportant then. She could only think seriously about someone who looked like her.
She pictured the Garden of Eden, and saw Eve, long hair streaming down her naked back. There was a picture in the children's Bible stories. She reached forward and took it out of the rack at the back of the pew. Her mother glanced at her, approving.
She opened the book and stared at the colored drawing. Yes ... Eve looked just like her. Blonde and naked. She put the book back, smiling as she thought of the strategically placed trees and shrubs that hid the couple's genitals.
The preacher's voice sounded. "....the woman did give me, and I did eat of the fruit."
Eve, the temptress....the naked temptress.
After that, when her parents called her "Evelyn" she was hard put to answer immediately. Already, she thought of herself as Eve. That would be her name when she left home.
That year, one of the girls in her class got pregnant. She decided to stick it out until June, her fifth month. She showed early and grew very fat. Eve stared at her with a kind of pity. How awful to grow fat like that....to have her body become sloppy and undesirable. Yet because she had been desirable once, she was fat now.
What women did with men led to pregnancy, and pregnancy led to fat. Eve shuddered. She did not want that for herself. She did not want anyone except....
Except who?
There was no one except her own body in the darkness, nothing except her own adroit hand giving pleasure.
She had a vague feeling that she should feel guilty. She had heard so much about guilt and contrition and punishment, but it all seemed far removed from her and what she did to herself on those nights alone in her room.
Then, one day in the library, she found an answer in a beautiful story. The book she read was one on Greek mythology. She turned to the story of Narcissus, the handsome boy who stared at his image in the water until, in his delight, he leaned too far over and fell. In the place where he drowned there grew a beautiful flower that was ever afterwards called by his name.
She read it over and over until she knew it by heart. She saw. herself, leaning over and looking into the water. It was right and good and completely sinless. Herself, alone, and her beauty.
A month later, she took three hundred dollars from her father's strongbox and left. She went far away from the town and never saw her parents again.
"All right. We'll take a ten-minute break."
Eve looked up, startled. She had posed mechanically for almost half an hour. The class lingered a moment; the students began putting away their material. Some of them were glancing covertly at her as she stepped down and put on her robe.
Let them look, she thought to herself. That's all they can do.
Eve Banner, at the age of twenty-six, was a virgin.