`Roll over,' I said. (Get her best weapon aimed elsewhere.) She rolled slowly over, reached up two white arms and pulled my neck down until our mouths met. She began to groan authoritatively. She pressed first her mouth hard against mine and then, somehow getting me to lift my legs up on the couch beside hers, pressed her abdomen hard into mine. She tongued, writhed, groaned and clutched with intelligent abandon. I just lay, wondering not too acutely what to do.
Apparently I had missed another cue, because she broke our kiss and pushed me slightly away. For an instant I thought she might be abandoning her role, but her half-closed eyes and twisted mouth told me otherwise. She had parted her legs and was reaching for potential posterity.
`Linda,' I said quietly. (No nonsense about movies this time.) `Linda,' I said again. One of her hands was playing Virgil to my Dente and trying to lead him into the underworld, but I held Dente back. `Linda,' I said a third time.
`Put it in,' she said.
`Linda, wait a minute.'
`What's the matter; put it in.'
She opened her eyes and stared up, not seeming to recognize me.
`Linda, I've got my period.'
Now why I said that Freud certainly knows, but searching for absurdity I had said it, and, realizing its psychoanalytic meaning, I felt quite shamed.
Linda either hadn't read Freud or didn't care; she was, I saw regretfully, on the verge of passing from Bardot to bitch without any intermediate third Linda.
She blinked once, started to say something which came out as a snort, twitched her upper lip three, four times, half closed her eyes again, groaned and said, `Oh come, please come into me, now. Now.'
Although her hands weren't pulling, my stallion responded to those words with enthusiasm and had galloped to within one and one eighth inches of the valley of the stars when the mad scientist pulled the reins.
`Linda, there's something I'd like you to do, first,' I said (What? What? For God's sake, what?) This was, in fact, the perfect statement: she couldn't tell whether it was something sexual I wanted her to do, in which case she could revel in her Bardot role, or something impractical having to do with my being a psychiatrist. Curiosity, stronger than Bardot or bitch, looked out of fully open eyes.
`What?' she asked.
`Lie here just as you are without moving, and close your eyes.'
She looked at me - our bodies were separated by only three or four inches and one of her hands was still pulling me
toward the great melting pot - and again she was neither Bardot nor bitch. When she sighed, let go of me and closed
her eyes, I eased myself to a seat on the edge of the couch again.
Try to relax,' I said.
Her eyes shot open and her head jerked up like a doll's.
`What the, bell do I want to relax for?'
Please, for me, do this … one thing. Lie there in your full beauty and let your arms, legs, face, everything relax. Please.'
`What for? You're not relaxed.' And she laughed coldly at my denied, deprived, but still unbending middle leg. `Please, Linda, I want you. I want to make love to you, but first I want to caress you and kiss you and I want you to receive my love without - with complete relaxation. I know it's impossible, so I'll suggest a way you might do it. I want you to think of - a little girl picking flowers in a field.. Can you do that?'
Bitch glared up at me.
Why?'
`If you do it, you may - if you follow my instructions you may be in for a surprise. If I come into you now, neither of
us will learn anything,' I brought my face dramatically down to within a few inches of hers. `A little girl picking
flowers in a totally lush, green, beautiful but deserted field. Do you see that?'
She-glared a moment longer, then lowered her head to the couch and closed her legs together. Two or three minutes
passed. Very distantly I could hear Miss Reingold's typewriter tit-tatting away.
`I see a little kid picking /tiger lilies near a swamp.'
`Is the little girl a pretty girl?'
[Pause] `Yeah, she's pretty.'
`Parents - what are this little girl's parents like?'
`There are little field daisies too, and lilac bushes.'
[Pause] 'The parents are bastards. They beat the kid . . . the little gig. They buy long necklaces and they whip her with
them. They tie her up with linked bracelets. They give her poison candy, which makes her sick, and then they force her to drink her own vomit. They never let the girl be alone. Whenever she goes to the fields, where she is now, they beat her when she comes home.'
(I didn't say a word, but the impulse to say `and they beat her when she comes home' had the strength of Hercules.)
There was a long pause.
They beat her with books. They hit her on the head again and again with books. They stick pins and pencils in her. And tacks. When they're done with her they throw her in the cellar.'
Linda was not relaxed; she wasn't crying; she seemed her bitchy self essentially, complaining against the parents but not able to feel sorry for the little girl. She felt only bitterness.
`Look very closely at the little girl in the fields, Linda. Look very closely at her.
[Pause] The little girl-?'
[Pause] `The little girl . . . is crying.'
`Why is the little . . . does she have . . . does the girl have any flowers?'
'Yes, she has It's a rose, a white rose. I don't know where. . .'
[Pause] `What is she . . . how, does she feel toward the white rose?'
The white rose is the only . . thing in the world which alms can talk to, the only thing that . . . loves her . . . She holds the flower in front of her eyes by the stem and she talks to it and . .. no . . . she doesn't even hold it. It floats to her . . . like magic, but she never, not once ever, touches it, and she never kisses it. She looks at it and it sees her and in those moments . . . in those moments … the little girl … is happy, The white rose, with the white rose … she is happy.'
After another minute Linda's eyes blinked open. She looked over, at me, at my wilted penis, at the walls, the ceiling. A buzzer sounded for what I now realized may have been the third or fourth time and I started.