Sylva

It was in this frame of mind that I presented myself again in Galveston Lane the very next morning. As I turned the doorknob outside Dorothy’s small flat, I was not so sure that the door would open, that it would not be locked as she had threatened. Especially after my flight. What woman could forgive such an insult? But the knob turned, the door opened. I passed through the vestibule. Dorothy seemed to be asleep on her divan, stretched out beneath her panther skin.

She was not asleep. She watched me approach with lusterless eyes under drooping eyelids. I am not a man of depraved tastes and have no perverse liking for morbid looks. But what man could remain insensitive to the touching signs of a languid sensuality? Personally, I have always felt dimly but undeniably drawn to Botticelli faces. And Dorothy, with her loose hair, her cheek gently resting on the velvet, her half-open lips, her pale, translucent complexion, evoked the lovely, doleful Pietà of the Uffizi in Florence. It moved me deeply. I stepped closer, uncertain whether she would not suddenly emerge from her torpor and throw me out. But she didn’t. She let me come up to her, never stirring except for one hand which she turned over in a gesture of abandon, so that I might place mine in it.

I knelt down and murmured: “Can you forgive me?”

She closed her eyes, her lips moved in the ghost of a smile, she pressed my hand in hers. Nothing else. She half drew up her eyelids, again rested that heavy gaze on me. She seemed to be waiting. I put my arms around her and said, “If you’d like to… I do, now.”

She shook her head very slowly, muttered “No,” and I lay down at her side. I wanted to clasp her in my arms again but she gently pushed me away.

“Let’s do whatever you wish,” I said. “Tell me what you would like.”

She took my face in her hands, gazed at it for a while, then whispered, “What I like-really?”

“Really,” I said, and smiled.

She scanned my face for some time more without speaking, then said, “Stretch your arm out behind you.”

I did.

“On the shelf,” she said, “there’s a powder box.”

I groped for it, found it, handed it to her. Her fingers trembled to open it.

“Take some with me,” she said under her breath, in a tone in which prayer and command mingled with an almost incredulous shyness. Had I expected this? Perhaps. In any case I hardly hesitated.

The powder box shook in her hands. She must have read in my eyes that I was willing. Her own eyes sparkled. She held a quivering palm close to my nostrils. I inhaled several times. Her pupils became unbelievably large. Soon my head was spinning exquisitely. I dropped my cheek on the velvet opposite her face. A vast sweetness pervaded me.

I felt a feverish breath on my lips, while someone was saying very low, with an avid curiosity, “Yes?” But I was already so wonderfully weary, carefree and happy that I could only acquiesce with a slight puckering of my eyelids. And later we remained for an immeasurable time without moving, commingling our exhausted breath.

Chapter 28

IF there is something more entrancing than a solitary vice, it is the same vice shared with another. Especially during the initiation when, elated by their secret complicity, master and disciple alike are gripped by a sort of all-consuming passion. One then feels that the slightest falling off in the partner’s pleasure, the briefest pause in his intoxication, is an unbearable letdown. Alone, one may possibly use moderation, exercise restraint; but when there are two, all self-restraint founders. No sooner did Dorothy and I surface from our euphoria than she plunged us into it again, with a kind of ferocious impatience, and I let myself be carried away unresistingly, completely given up to the intoxicating novelty of sensation. And seeing me abandon myself helplessly to her perverse desire must have given Dorothy a particularly intense delight, for I remember hearing her groan as if with sensual pleasure.

We abandoned ourselves to it all with frenzy: to ecstasy and unconsciousness, to the most oblivious indolence and to sudden fits of erotic rapture that would seize us both together. However, I can only recall confused images of all those hallucinating days. And perhaps even they are imaginary. They have no link with one another. Even when it comes to the rare moments of solitude and clearheadedness which I wrested from Dorothy’s grasp in order to assure myself that I was still in control of my will, I am unable to situate them in time and hardly even in space.

I can see myself at my hotel once, in the process of having a bath. But when? Another time, on Battersea Bridge, offering my face to the sea-born breeze as if trying to sober up. Still another time in the street market behind Paddington, but I am with Dorothy, and we are floating like sleepwalkers; we must have left Galveston Lane with our minds still cloudy with drugs.