would say "I love you, Tanya."
There was Marie. Oh Marie! Oh you Marie! You with your exquisite laughter and deep perfume! I loved her teeth and mouth and the scent of her flesh. We used to meet in a dark room whose walls were covered by cobwebbed books. There was a leather chair near the fireplace, and it must have been a very great house, a castle or a mansion in France, because across the room, big and solid, stood the desk of Emile Zola as I had seen it in a book. I would be sitting there reading the last pages of Nana, that passage about the death of Nana, and Marie would rise like a mist from those pages and stand before me naked, laughing and laughing with a beautiful mouth and an intoxicating scent until I had to put the book down, and she walked before me and laid her hands on the book too, and shook her head with a deep smile, so that I could feel her warmth coursing like electricity through my fingers.
"Who are you?"
"I am Nana."
"Really Nana?"
"Really."
"The girl who died here?"
"I am not dead. I belong to you."
And I would take her in my arms.
There was Ruby. She was an erratic woman, so unlike the others, and so much older too. I always came upon her as she ran across a dry hot plain beyond the Funeral Range in Death Valley, California. That was because I had been there once in the spring, and I never forgot the beauty of that vast plain, and there it was I met the erratic Ruby so often afterward, a woman of thirty-five, running naked across the sand, and I chasing after her and finally catching her beside a pool of blue water which always gave off a red vapor the moment I dragged her into the sand and sank my mouth against her throat, which was so warm and not so lovely, because Ruby was growing old and cords protruded slightly, but I was mad about her throat, and I loved the touch of her cords rising and falling as she panted where I had caught her and brought her to the earth.
And Jean! How I loved Jean's hair! It was as golden as straw, and always I saw her drying the long strands under a banana tree that grew on a knoll among the Palos Verdes Hills. I would be watching her as she combed out the deep strands. Asleep at her feet coiled a snake like the snake under the feet of the Virgin Mary. I always approached Jean on tiptoe, so as not to disturb the snake, who sighed gratefully when my feet sank into him, giving me such an exquisite pleasure everywhere, lighting up the surprised eyes of Jean, and then my hands slipped gently and cautiously into the eerie warmth of the golden hair, and Jean would laugh and tell me she knew it was going to happen this way, and like a falling veil she would droop into my arms.
But what of Nina? Why did I love that girl? And why was she crippled? And what was it within my heart that made me love her so madly simply because she was so hopelessly maimed? Yet it was all so, and my poor Nina was crippled. Not in the picture, oh she wasn't crippled there, only when I met her, one foot smaller than the other, one foot like that of a doll, the other a proper shape. We met in the Catholic church of my boyhood, St Thomas's in Wilmington, where I, dressed in the robes of a priest, stood with a scepter at the high altar. All around toe on their knees were the sinners, weeping after I had castigated them for their sins, and not one of them had the courage to look upon me because my eyes shone with such mad holiness, such a detestation of sin. Then from the back of the church came this girl, this cripple, smiling knowing she was going to break me from my holy throne and force me to sin with her before the others, so that they could mock me and laugh at me, the holy one, the hypocrite before all the world. Limping she came, disrobing at every painful step, her wet lips a smile of approaching triumph, and I with the voice of a falling king, shouting to her to go away, that she was a devil who bewitched me and made me helpless. But she came forward irresistibly, the crowd
There was Marie. Oh Marie! Oh you Marie! You with your exquisite laughter and deep perfume! I loved her teeth and mouth and the scent of her flesh. We used to meet in a dark room whose walls were covered by cobwebbed books. There was a leather chair near the fireplace, and it must have been a very great house, a castle or a mansion in France, because across the room, big and solid, stood the desk of Emile Zola as I had seen it in a book. I would be sitting there reading the last pages of Nana, that passage about the death of Nana, and Marie would rise like a mist from those pages and stand before me naked, laughing and laughing with a beautiful mouth and an intoxicating scent until I had to put the book down, and she walked before me and laid her hands on the book too, and shook her head with a deep smile, so that I could feel her warmth coursing like electricity through my fingers.
"Who are you?"
"I am Nana."
"Really Nana?"
"Really."
"The girl who died here?"
"I am not dead. I belong to you."
And I would take her in my arms.
There was Ruby. She was an erratic woman, so unlike the others, and so much older too. I always came upon her as she ran across a dry hot plain beyond the Funeral Range in Death Valley, California. That was because I had been there once in the spring, and I never forgot the beauty of that vast plain, and there it was I met the erratic Ruby so often afterward, a woman of thirty-five, running naked across the sand, and I chasing after her and finally catching her beside a pool of blue water which always gave off a red vapor the moment I dragged her into the sand and sank my mouth against her throat, which was so warm and not so lovely, because Ruby was growing old and cords protruded slightly, but I was mad about her throat, and I loved the touch of her cords rising and falling as she panted where I had caught her and brought her to the earth.
And Jean! How I loved Jean's hair! It was as golden as straw, and always I saw her drying the long strands under a banana tree that grew on a knoll among the Palos Verdes Hills. I would be watching her as she combed out the deep strands. Asleep at her feet coiled a snake like the snake under the feet of the Virgin Mary. I always approached Jean on tiptoe, so as not to disturb the snake, who sighed gratefully when my feet sank into him, giving me such an exquisite pleasure everywhere, lighting up the surprised eyes of Jean, and then my hands slipped gently and cautiously into the eerie warmth of the golden hair, and Jean would laugh and tell me she knew it was going to happen this way, and like a falling veil she would droop into my arms.
But what of Nina? Why did I love that girl? And why was she crippled? And what was it within my heart that made me love her so madly simply because she was so hopelessly maimed? Yet it was all so, and my poor Nina was crippled. Not in the picture, oh she wasn't crippled there, only when I met her, one foot smaller than the other, one foot like that of a doll, the other a proper shape. We met in the Catholic church of my boyhood, St Thomas's in Wilmington, where I, dressed in the robes of a priest, stood with a scepter at the high altar. All around toe on their knees were the sinners, weeping after I had castigated them for their sins, and not one of them had the courage to look upon me because my eyes shone with such mad holiness, such a detestation of sin. Then from the back of the church came this girl, this cripple, smiling knowing she was going to break me from my holy throne and force me to sin with her before the others, so that they could mock me and laugh at me, the holy one, the hypocrite before all the world. Limping she came, disrobing at every painful step, her wet lips a smile of approaching triumph, and I with the voice of a falling king, shouting to her to go away, that she was a devil who bewitched me and made me helpless. But she came forward irresistibly, the crowd
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