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Chapter
4
Michelle is generous
with her body. Even a reserved woman has no choice, if she's
hugging you, except to crush her breasts against you. But
you can tell that this isn't the way she'd have it, that she's
disconcerted by this peculiar instance of enforced publicity
in a body that seems otherwise designed for maximum privacy.
You can feel such a woman's indignation somewhere in back
of her perhaps genuine cheer at seeing you. Yes, she's saying
to herself, I'm glad to see him, but why must showing him
the fact include making him intimate with my breasts? A perfectly
reasonable question, after all, if only nature were used to
giving reasonable answers.
Michelle is not
like this. She seems to want the man she's greeting to know
the loveliness of her breasts. That they are lovely indeed
is a thing she's learned, not something she understands from
within. For most women this is so. Michelle leans into the
man. She's not trying to be seductive, she's not throwing
herself at him or even flaunting her sexuality. It's more
as though she's concluded, purely on the basis of the circumstantial
evidence, that these firm and prominent objects can't possibly
be hers to withhold. They're just too...prominent and firm.
Michelle leans benevolently into a man, in a way that doesn't
in the least compromise her sweetness or modesty, as if to
say, "If this isn't what I'm supposed to do with these likeable
breasts of mine, then I can't imagine what is."
And it was glorious
to accept her generosity, which she compounded, as a matter
of fact, with the charms of her soft scent and the touch of
her cool, invigorating cheek. In fact, there was nothing about
Michelle that was not pleasing: every sensation she kindled
was complete and consuming. The silk of her shirt, the above-mentioned
outline of her bra, the redness of her lips, her long, almost
golden hair - in a very short time, a man could get quite
lost in the sensual landscape of Michelle.
But not so short
a time, I guess, as her sisters would allow.
"Unhand that girl,"
Julia said. "She's ours.... Besides, Dani's train is due."
Michelle squeezed my arm as she released me and reached for
her valise.
"No, no, no,"
I said. "Those hands are too gorgeous to carry the luggage
we men were put on earth to, ah, to...lug." But it was true.
The long-boned Bergman women were distinguished for (among
other beauties) their elegant fingers, with their fine taper
and shapely tips. Michelle had in this respect ever so slight
an edge on her sisters. Her fingers were a jot longer, perhaps
a touch more tapered, a quaver more sensitive. With women
of this caliber, such small advances on the perfection of
one feature or another are a pleasure to note and make the
adoring male (who doubts, remember, that he could tell one
nipple or one pubic swatch from another) feel like a sudden
connoisseur.
So down another
airport corridor we ran, the women a few paces ahead of me,
exchanging their news in giddy soprano voices while I lumbered
along with Michelle's bulging suitcase for side-kick and the
vision of six sisterly hips and buttocks to delight, and in
a way to puzzle, me. Yes, that's my theory as to why we men
can't stop staring at women. We simply and literally can't
believe our eyes. How can such noble bends and arcs really
be part of flesh-and-blood human beings; how can there be
so much art so close to the bone?
I was still pondering
this as we piled into the car. The girls decided to squeeze
into the back-seat, leaving me alone at the wheel in my chauffeur's
revery once more. How charming the Sisters Bergman looked
in the rear-view mirror, each woman's limbs practically yoked
to her companion's. I have to admit that I imagined their
thighs similarly wedged close and tried to picture the abbreviated
view one might have of their pelvises if one could see them
naked under these circumstances. Girls don't have to worry,
of course, about putting the squeeze on their pectineus muscles.
By beautiful design, there's nothing there to get crushed.
They can sit demurely even at close quarters (while we men
tend, even when we're sole occupant of our chair, to keep
our knees wide apart in solicitude for our balls, which seem
to belong nowhere). So I imagined (I won't say shamelessly)
the width of Bergman hips and the shallow triangles that then
had to have been formed by the juncture of Bergman thighs.
I imagined the creamy skin, slightly moist and fragrant, its
fresh, light color startlingly interrupted only by the ridge
of dark pubic hair, the wide end of the sacred triangle, which
remained unsecluded. Hidden entirely from view - but present,
yes, fully, sweetly present - would be the cleft, the heavenly
cleft, the captivating paradox of the "nothing" that's more
real than anything.
I'd say that I
free-associated in this way as I drove, but what was "free"
about it? I was spellbound by the fantasy of feminine mysteries
and the delicate garments that veiled them. I was compelled
to wonder about panties, for example. In the last century,
it was thought indecent for women to wear any sort of drawers,
and mostly prostitutes did wear them. I suppose the idea of
fabric lovingly adhering to the vulva scandalized people.
Amelia Bloomer's invention was a political event, a kind of
feminism of the loins. The modern panty, a scrap or two of
cotton or silk extended from a waist-band, is hardly more
than an insubstantial auxiliary to nature's own tiny mantle
of hair. Thinking of it, I realized that the distinction between
concealment and exposure cannot feel the same to a woman as
it does to a man. We men are always to some degree exposed
- if nothing else, our willy-nilly erections tell all - and
women never are really. A woman, I imagined, must sense herself
always as more or less hidden and, where it counts most, naturally
covered. My whole idea of exposure, I thought, is that of
a person with an erectile cock and vulnerable balls. I had
never considered how different it would have to be for a person
equipped with one of those serene, impassive mounds instead.
In a way, if a woman has an idea of her own exposure, it's
just a borrowing from us men: it's a fiction she throws on,
as she might one of our shirts, carelessly, capriciously,
charmingly burlesquing a part she doesn't fit.
So there's a kind
of irony behind the scantiness of women's underclothes, and,
for that matter, behind the lightness and fragility of so
much of their street-dress. It's not that they're exposing
themselves, being promiscuous with their flesh. No, it's that,
no matter what they do, they're certainly not exposing themselves;
they're simply tormenting us with the illusion that they are.
But that's not it either. Women have the right to tease us,
and, in our hearts, we're happy when they do. We're grateful
to be played with and, beyond that, to be shown that she who's
playing knows that it's hers to make the rules. But we also
know that even she can't change nature. She's made to elude
us, to slip from our grasp and even from our sight. If her
power over us is rooted in nature (as the reader knows I think
it is), then it begins in this perpetual taunting that is
the sexual component of the human condition. I mean, it's
unalterable. It's just what happens when a pellet of mind
is dropped, depending, into a caldron of cocked or cunted
body. Men seethe and women keep cool. A woman's total nudity,
her uncoy, generous and clinical display of herself - even
that would divulge nothing that would give a man the least
power over her.
Every time I glanced
in the rear-view mirror, my heart jumped with happiness at
the vision of the women in back and the thought of their presence
in my home. I melted to imagine the perfumed air of our apartment,
subliminally dosed with womanly pheronomes. I thought that,
no matter which room I entered or which direction I turned,
I would be within inches of someone's angelic breast and sacred
vagina. And this fantasy of x-ray eyes brought my thoughts
around again to a revery of underwear. In the back-seat, the
girls were addressing the question of Michelle's guilt whenever
she flirted with men she had no wish to sleep with. She was
admitting that she got a kick out of "toying with guys," but
didn't she owe them something for the amusement they gave?
I listened and recollected the feel of her bra-strap under
my hand and thought that in that sensation alone she had given
me more than I, or any man, had a claim to. "Sweet girl,"
I wanted to cry out, "your presence in their midst is all
the gift they need and more than they deserve. Don't you see
this? Believe me, THEY do."
Of course, I myself
was greedily reliving the thrill of being at eye-level with
Lilly's pelvis, and of feeling Michelle's breasts firm and
resilient against my chest. "I mean, don't they have a right
to be pissed at me if I leave them at the bar?" Michelle was
saying. I observed Lilly nodding slowly in sympathy with her
sister's dilemma.
"You feel you
have to give them something, right?" Lilly said.
"Give them something?"
Julia said. "You've given them plenty. You've given them a
hard-on. 'Hey, fella, thank the lady!'" The women laughed
freely, though Michelle then said, "I guess."
I smiled too,
at Julia's little lesson to her sisters, and at another recollection
of my own...of the last time Julia and I went shopping together
and I found myself waiting with others of my sex as my beloved
mistress vanished through a small doorway, her hands filled
with what seemed three dozen crumpled brassieres.
In the lingerie
department men are at their worst. It doesn't matter who we
are in life, we become yokels here. There are five or six
of us waiting for our women to reappear from the changing-room.
We're all standing against the wall closest to the entry-arch.
It's as though there's a law prohibiting male trespass beyond
this point. We're cleaving to the wall like suspects in a
line-up. We're decked out with our women's parcels and shopping-bags.
A couple of the men have been entrusted with purses, which
they're holding in the deliberately awkward, true-grit way
men adopt for such tasks. We're all racing back to oafish
boyhood, as though that regained coarse innocence can mitigate
our shame at stumbling upon this feast of bras and panties,
this cornucopia of strings and thongs and tear-drops and triangles.
We shift from foot to foot, staring at the floor as we do.
The cups of weightless bras draw furtive glances from us.
Some white, some rose, some black of course; matte cotton
and glistening silk; frosted, or molten, or sheer. Now and
then a clerk will look our way and whisper something to a
fellow-clerk who will then look too, and both will laugh.
Is it just that we're incongruous, we men, as we keep our
clumsy watch? Is the surgeon to my right funnier in the girls'
eyes than the lawyer to my left? And what of myself, a strapping
man in middle age, proprietor of an office full of apprentices
and underlings, fascinated and all but undone by what are
only tiny shreds of tenuous fabric? Julia hasn't yet emerged
from the remembered fitting-room when we pull into the actual
railroad station. We're late, but so is Daniella's train,
and we arrive a few minutes before her. The iron horse is
crawling in just as we reach the platform. And there's Daniella,
yet another vision of beauty and ability - and one whose intense
attractiveness to me should assure the reader that what I
love above all things in women is their composure and autonomy,
and only then their assertive breasts and bikini panties.
For Daniella,
the eldest of the Bergman girls, is also the smallest, the
most compact, the most boyish-looking. She's a devout athlete,
trim as a vector, and she's not crazy about frills. Her hair
is dark and very short, cut just past boy-length. She's wearing
a little make-up, not much, a blue Oxford-cloth shirt and
slim white jeans. Daniella is a model of minimalism: her breasts
are small, but there's just enough bosom on her to signal
her womanhood; her hips are slight, and so are her buttocks,
but, all the same, she consents to curve a little, lest the
observer imagine that she's not delighted with her gender.
And her jeans show clearly that in one area, at least, she's
pronouncedly feminine. How little people understand of the
loveliness of the so-called androgynous look, in which the
male element is pubescent at best. It isn't a disguise, a
denial of the great, unbridgeable divide between male and
female. Far from it. It asserts the basicness of the feminine,
the priority of the girlish and the girlishness of the boy.
It's a reminder that, in this sexual realm anyhow, even a
little difference goes an incredibly long way. I gaze - shamelessly,
I'm sure, and with swelling penis - at the succinct hillock
in Daniella's milk-white jeans and I know, however close my
stare, that we are worlds apart.
end of part four
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