A Curable Romantic (66 page)

“I was so sad, Kaĉjo, so sad, but now I’m so happy. I’m so happy, I could … I don’t know …”

“What, fraŭlino?”

“Kiss someone! I don’t know …” She blushed.

Though I realized she was all but inviting me to kiss her, I wasn’t entirely sure. Perhaps she was merely reporting a fact concerning the quality of her happiness, describing it in a piquant way, never imagining that the metaphorical kiss she claimed to want should come from me, but rather, less improbably — for sake of example — from her mother
and, if so, placed not upon her mouth, but upon her forehead; or upon her cheek, if from a father or an uncle; and in an extreme case, upon her hand, if by a rogue like me who really wanted nothing more than to devour her whole, beginning with her mouth. Out of fear or perhaps to mask my own lustful affections, I looked at her idiotically, as though I were not her lover, but her best girlfriend, sympathizing with this desire of hers without understanding how she expected me to fulfill it.

She took hold of my hands and said, “Let’s take a walk,” and so we did, wandering away from the theater and through the tiered streets of Boulogne, leaning into each other, recounting the highlights of Dr. Zamenhof’s triumph. (“Lutek should never have compromised his visionary idea for their practical concerns,” she said. “The French understand nothing about what the world thinks of them.”) The pressure of her arm against mine was such an agreeable sensation that I resolved to volunteer myself immediately should fraŭlino Bernfeld again mention a desire to kiss someone. Unfortunately, the question never came up, and eventually we found ourselves in the sand, along the shoreline, the surge of the ocean more virile than I recalled it being during the afternoon. The rising moon bisected the sea with a shimmering band of phosphorescence, the moving crest of each wave sparkling with reflected starlight.

We strolled past the statue of Victory straining to offer a laurel wreath to San Martin enthroned upon his horse.

Fraŭlino Bernfeld was shivering, and I offered her my jacket. “Cold?” I asked.

“No, no, I’m fine,” she said. However, I insisted, and she allowed me to drape my coat about her shoulders. “That’s better, yes, thank you very much.”

She turned up the collar, and her white hands held the jacket front together from inside, the tips of two fingers crooking out.

“Fraŭlino Bernfeld.” I cleared my throat.

“Hmn?” she murmured questioningly, looking at the sea.

“I was wondering,” I said, “earlier when … you mentioned being sufficiently happy to … to …”

“Kiss someone?”

“I was wondering, yes: did you have anyone specifically in — ”

Before I could finish my sentence, her arms had snaked out from beneath my jacket and her hands were grasping the back of my neck. With a gentle tugging, she brought my head down to hers. My coat slid off her shoulders and fell into the sand. I had opened my mouth and was on the point of protesting in order to rescue the jacket — it was brand new, after all — when fraŭlino Bernfeld’s upper lip filled it. (My mouth, I mean.) Her bottom lip slid wetly across my chin, and as it did, I thought it best to ignore the jacket, for the time being at least, lest I miss what, in my state of idiocy, I imagined would be a celebratory and thus solitary kiss, and not the first in an endless banquet of kisses. fraŭlino Bernfeld’s lips were soft and pillowy, and my lips seemed to sink into hers with the slow dulcet movement of a cherry blossom falling into a pot of honey. Because I didn’t wish her to think I possessed any notions of taking advantage of her — though in a public place, we were, as far as I could tell, completely alone and blocked from view by the colorful fence surrounding the children’s playground we were sheltering in — I began to pull away. fraŭlino Bernfeld’s hands tightened about the back of my neck, and she brought me to her again. Her mouth widened, gnawing at my own. A soft, purring murmur juddered inside her throat, and in truth, I nearly swooned at the sound of it. Though we were hardly moving, our two heads seemed to be lunging at one another rhythmically, until my hat fell off. I don’t know where my hands were before this, but fraŭlino Bernfeld’s hands somehow found them and placed them upon her lower back. She pulled me towards her, until my chest was pressed into the soft upholstery of her upper torso. Still devouring my mouth, she dropped her chin, so that my chin was now nearly grazing the upward-thrust pillows of her bosom. Her head dropped back and some sort of instinctual knowledge took over in me. Without hesitation, I kissed her along the inside of her neck. Her hands, rising across my back, found my hair. Her fingers entangled themselves in my locks and, yanking on my hair, she forced my head down until the buttons of her blouse raked against my cheeks. My pincenez, for a while sitting askew, fell off the bridge of my nose and dangled between the columns of our bodies. With my mouth pressed against the fabric concealing her breasts, I allowed my hand to spider its way up her midsection, thinking she might at any moment, in a fit of modesty, brush
it aside, as, of course, it was her absolute right to do. A gentleman, I felt it only correct to give her fair and ample warning of my intentions. Counter to my growing disbelief, my hand however was allowed to proceed unimpeded, until at last it attained the desired summit.

Fraŭlino Bernfeld shuddered.

Her mouth again found mine, her tongue licentiously searching mine out. Our knees gave way, and we were standing upon them. I could feel her hands working frantically, and when she once again forced my head onto her breast, I was surprised to find her bodice unbuttoned. As I (quite presumptuously, I felt) licked along the line where her bare chest met the cups of her brassiere, her hands, knotted into jittery fists, pummeled my sternum as she worked to unbutton the rest of her dress’s front. Unable to wait, she yanked the two halves apart. Three buttons flew off with little percussive sounds and were lost in the sand. Kissing me still, she reached blindly across the sand for my jacket, and when she had it in her hands, she broke off from me. I looked into her eyes, questioningly. Keeping my gaze, she stood and retreated a step or two. She looked back towards the high cliffs and the little town. No one could be seen. Except for ourselves, the beach was uninhabited. While I remained on my knees, fraŭlino Bernfeld pulled her dress off her shoulders. She let the top of her corset fall and climbed into my jacket, sliding her arms into its arms. In the moonlight, I could see a brace of sand falling from its shiny black satin. Covered now with the jacket, fraŭlino Bernfeld let the top of her dress fall to her waist. She returned to me with a sultry air that was, quite frankly, alarming. Kneeling beside me, she locked her mouth onto mine and pressed her weight against me until I had no choice but to fall backwards onto the sand, moving my legs, with difficulty, from beneath me. She laughed with her lips still hard on mine, and I could feel her teeth. When I laughed in response, our teeth ground together. Her nipples emerged from beneath the lapels of my evening coat, and the black satin sliding against their extended flesh was nearly more than I could withstand. She removed whatever it was that was fastening her hair and threw it — a metallic glint in the moonlight — into the mouth of her shoe.

She shook out her hair, the milk chocolaty tresses falling onto the shoulders of my evening coat. “Now where were we?” she said.

“I believe I was offering to kiss you,” I said, “if, in your happiness, you still feel the need.”

Again she knelt beside me, her skirt and long underskirt a bell of fabric surrounding her legs. With her arm on my shoulder, she distracted me with a kiss, while with her other hand she fiddled with the buttons of my braces and with those of my trousers. Stupid! I thought. You should have unbuttoned them yourself while she had moved away to retrieve your jacket! But I’d been afraid of seeming too forward, of appearing to push myself upon her. What if I were misreading her signals? She dug, like a child digging in sand, through the various fabrics of my crotch, until she found at last what had been long buried there. Almost painfully, my manhood stood, uncustomarily erect. I couldn’t help gasping out a high, helpless breathy gasp, and fraŭlino Bernfeld smiled shyly. Schooled at her father’s expense from an early age in the equestrian arts, she dispatched one leg across my supine body and straddled me before I’d completely anticipated her intentions. She settled herself upon me as though she were settling into a hot bath — slowly, degree by exquisite degree, her face contorting in a momentary grimace, until she sighed and seemed, at least provisionally, to relax. Lying on the sand, I held myself upright using my elbows as supports. Bending low, fraŭlino Bernfeld pressed her breasts against my chest, kissing me in the crook of my neck, her breath blossoming against my skin, concealing us, as it were, behind the curtain of my jacket above and of her skirts below. If we were, Heaven forbid it, espied from a distance, I’ve no doubt we would have resembled either a man in a formal jacket raping a young maiden or a sartorial hermaphrodite falling to its knees on the beach, sobbing at some unimaginable tragedy.

Now I understood the presence of the book I’d seen her stashing so furtively inside her traveling case, Dr. Albrecht’s notorious
Mysteries of Females or, The Secrets of Nature.
She had wisely prepared for the moment, researching it, while I, as ignorant as I had been after my father’s frank talk, found myself still in the dark. I couldn’t even say for certain
what exactly I was feeling underneath her skirts. Cobbling a mosaic out of various sculptures and monuments I’d seen in museums, stops on a recent sightseeing tour, and the collection of pornographic postcards Otto once left inside his evening coat, I tried to conjure a picture of what might be going on between the straining obelisk of my lap and the Arc du Triomphe of fraŭlino Bernfeld’s, but of the images of the female nude I kept inside my head, none were specific enough to satisfy my current needs. Everything seemed soft, wet, and enfolding, but was that simply her sweat-bedewed thigh or actually, in fact, the soft and encompassing caresses of her vulva, the thought of penetrating which was enough to prematurely release the wellsprings of my masculinity.

I was alarmed to hear a garbled, strangled growl flying from my throat. My feet and head seemed to be pulling apart, trying to dash down the beach simultaneously in opposite directions. I may even have fainted before instantaneously coming to.

“Oh?” fraŭlino Bernfeld said, raising herself up and looking perplexed as though, having come for the first time to the end of this sticky business, she couldn’t quite understand what had earned the enterprise its exalted reputation. Her look of confusion was immediately covered by one of benediction as she came near me and kissed my eyelids, my forehead, my nose, and finally my mouth. Groggily, I accepted and returned these kisses, feeling somewhat humiliated. One of her breasts grazed my mouth, and I tried to suckle at it sleepily, but it moved past too quickly as she stood. She turned her back and dressed. I lay in the sand and let my head fall into it. I gazed up at the stars, a galaxy of brilliant points in a black shroud. I staggered up, intuiting that it was not gentlemanly to exult in my own deliquescence while fraŭlino Bernfeld apparently could not in hers. (I’d learned enough from reading Freud to know this little.) I buttoned my pants and my braces. fraŭlino Bernfeld was once again fully clothed with my jacket over her shoulders. I walked the beach the few paces towards her and stood behind her, kissing her neck and cupping her breast in my hands. She closed her eyes and leaned against me, before removing my hands, firmly and decisively.

Lowering her head, she covered her eyes and began to weep.

“Ne, ne, mia karulino, ne, ne,” I said soothingly.

I turned her around, so that she was facing me, and she collapsed against my chest. I enfolded her into my arms. I felt horrible. She had given me her maidenhood, but clearly I was the only one who had profited from the exchange, and now she was ruined. Had I forced her into this? Perhaps by withholding a marriage proposal for so long, I had driven her into degrading herself, simply to secure my attention. I never felt lower or meaner in all my days, and I recoiled against the heartless cad I’d become. A creation of my own era — who isn’t? — there was but one thing I could do.

“Fraŭlino Bernfeld,” I said. “Loë. Ŝa, ŝa, ŝa, mia kara, mia dolĉa knabino …”

My words, however, only seemed to make her cry harder.

I held her by her shoulders, so that she faced me squarely. I took a breath, and at last I said the words I’d been meaning to say for so very long: “Karulino, edziniĝu al mi.”

“Kio?”

“Estu mia edzino. Mi petas!”

“Ho, Kaĉjo!” She lifted both hands to my face and covered me with her soft, sweet kisses. “Jes,” she said.

“Vere?”

“Jes, mi diris, jes, mi volas, jes!”

CHAPTER 10

The rest of the congress passed in a blur. There were concerts, speeches, balls, banquets, day-trips, and performances of various plays. Dr. Zamenhof’s own translation of Molière’s
Le Mariage Forcé
seemed to particularly delight fraŭlino Bernfeld, although I found the depiction of Sganarelle, the reluctant bridegroom, a bit mean-spirited.

Early on the Sunday immediately following Dr. Zamenhof’s speech, the Majstro roused me from my bed and asked me to go with him to the local church. He wished to attend a mass there. “In a spirit of openness and brotherhood,” he told me. I had little enthusiasm for the gesture, noble though it seemed. Sore and chafed from my deflowering of fraŭlino Bernfeld, I worried that something about me, forever and irrevocably changed, would publish to the onlooking world that I was now a mad sex fiend. Staying in bed, lolling lazily in the sheets, my reserves spent and renewing, I had only to close my eyes, and I could see her again in my jacket, bearing down on me, her breasts like the mountains of a long-sought homeland coming nearer and nearer as the pilgrim returns.

But who could refuse Dr. Zamenhof anything?

“I didn’t bring a talis,” he fretted, as I found my clothes in the morning’s near darkness, my legs, my arms, my hips aching sumptuously. “It’s been years since I’ve had the need to don one.”