Butterfly (9 page)

The news of their impending departure increased tenfold my desire, and my disappointment was proportionally worse when Marika again kept me waiting that night. The thought that my passion might never be satisfied drove me wild. Should I postpone my trip to gain a few days? It might look odd, and it would be inconvenient; but anything was preferable to being cheated out of the one thing that could release me from my agony.

To my relief, the weather was lovely the following morning, and Kate and Lisa went riding after breakfast as I had hoped. The moment they left, I rushed to Marika's room. I entered without knocking and found her sorting laundry. If she was surprised, she did not show it.
"Tiens, Monsieur Henri,”
she half greeted as one might the milkman. Her tone of voice irritated me, and I reproached her bitterly for not warning me of her imminent departure and for not making better use of the little time we had.

“You did not know?” she asked as innocently as you please.

“No, I did not!” I almost shouted for vexation. “Besides, I'm
going to New York tomorrow and won't be back until the end of next week. By then you'll be God knows where!”

Marika took my face between her hands and showered me with kisses and consolations. She was sorry she did not come to me last night. The reason was that her monthly indisposition had started, and it was bad luck to let a man enter when one was polluted. If she had known I was leaving, she would have come anyway, just to be with me. In any case, I had no cause to get so excited; I could come visit her at their new house, she would write to me and let me know when. She even intimated that she would enjoy more liberty then, since her room would not be next to Kate's as it was in our house; there I could stay all night and all day should I so desire.

While she calmed me, she drew me to the bed where our bodies could more freely mingle. Gradually our words took on a different coloring, our hands became bolder, our lips more avid. When at last I removed her corset and looked upon the perfection of her breasts and inhaled the strong musky scent of her nudity and rubbed my face against the unctuous smoothness of her skin, the gnarled frustration melted in me and ten days of pent-up desire broke forth in an avalanche that robbed me of my breath. Pressing myself to that naked flesh toward which all the atoms of my body had so long and so vainly been striving, I felt faint from ravishment.

But I was not allowed into the sanctuary. Time and again she would pull away from my insistent yearning, or else push it aside with the very hand whose caresses spurred it on. Driven beyond endurance, I entreated, I begged. “Next time,” she murmured. “Can you not wait?” But why should she mind her condition when I did not, I protested. She shook the head that was buried in my neck. No, she couldn't. I moaned in despair. She raised her head and looked piercingly into my eyes. “Shall I, with my mouth?” It was not what I wanted, but my desire had become so
painful that I nodded in resignation. At that moment a shadow of disillusionment tinged with shame passed over me, and my body subsided into a taut passivity.

The vigor of her lips made me gasp; over and over, they brought me to the edge only to hold me back, each time closer still, each time stretching my senses to yet a higher pitch. Her hands, strong and relentless, tore into me; two deft fingers set afire my bowels and made them writhe. My body became an instrument that her virtuosity drove into spasms of wild, unfamiliar pleasure. I lost all control, all sense of where my physical existence ended and began; I heard myself heaving and crying out in strange animal cries; and then it was as if my insides were gushing out in a sea of tears and sweat and effusions.

I jackknifed to reach Marika, but she slipped from my embrace and darted into the adjoining bathroom. I heard her spit out the contents of her mouth in one great glob; I heard her rinsing, spewing, washing. A heavy stupor weighed down my limbs, an indistinct sense of lassitude and futility. For the first time Butterfly had not been there to receive me; the living presence that I had once carried within me was gone. I had soared to a sensual intensity I had not known to be possible, and there had been nothing to catch me when I dropped. I felt alone and lost in an impenetrable emptiness. Although it was late and I knew that I must hasten away, I remained indifferent and inert.

Marika, who had handed me a towel, eyed me with impatience and proceeded to dress. “They say a man is sad when you spit out his
foutre
,"
she remarked with a touch of irony. “He is
rejeté,
he think. Is this true,
Monsieur Henri?
Do you feel
rejeté
?” I forced a smile and a denial, but her taunt had punctured something in me and now the sadness spilled out, spreading and suffusing. For a long time afterward, gall flowed in my veins.

In retaliation I commented on her remarkable expertise and asked where she had learnt her skills. “I do it, how do you say,
pump?—
pomper le dard
—when I was ten year old,” she replied unruffled. “I should know how, no? But I pump you too much, I think. You will maybe not have enough when I want it.” She had finished dressing and looked at me with a malicious smile. “Here is something to help you recover,” she said as she picked up a pair of small drawers from the soiled laundry and held them out to me; as I hesitantly reached for them, she stuck them at my nose. A whiff made me color with unavowable pleasure and shame. Casting down my eyes, I let her keep the garment pressed to my face; through the sheer fabric I kissed her hand.
"Petit cochon,”
she purred, her voice a Circean caress.

As I prepared to tuck the unpresentable object into my pocket, she suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, it is one of hers!” Embarrassed by the awkward error, I wavered; her eyes, drinking in my predicament, danced with I know not what deviltry. “No matter,” she quipped. “
Monsieur
will find that the
effet
is the same . . . or maybe even better.” With that, she laughed pertly and pushed me toward the door.

26

Even the bathwater, run very hot in the Japanese manner, stung more than usual; it made Pinkerton draw back in surprised irritation, as if bitten by a normally affectionate pet. He had fled to the bath vaguely hoping to find something of Butterfly; but today the water seemed to be charged with a mute resentment. Her name pronounced in invocation brought no answer into his heart. For the second time that morning, he felt rejected by Butterfly.

With his eyes closed, Pinkerton recalled the miniscule bathroom in Nagasaki, half of which was taken up by the sunken
waist-deep
furo
with its ledge for sitting in the water. When they took their bath in the late afternoon, mellow sunlight would filter in through the little bamboo grove and surround them with spots of gold. The mottled pattern changed from day to day as the seasons turned in a loose, modest rhythm; immersed together, he and Butterfly seemed to float along with that ineluctable cosmic progression. The temperature of the water discouraged touching, though once in a while they would snuggle together or nestle in a still, tenoned embrace; most often they were joined only by the water, but in an intimacy unique and seldom surpassed. In the heat, the boundaries of their bodies seemed to dissolve, and a vital current of energy would flow around them and through them, untrammeled by bodily confines. More than once, Pinkerton felt himself merged with the water, and his identity melted and diffused through everything that surrounded him: Butterfly, the water, the begonias and bamboo, the sunlight and sky—all were as one whole, inviolate, intact, immutable. In such moments he was not conscious of anything in particular, but afterward when he thought back on them, he would be overtaken by a religious fervor that he had known as a child and not since, for after his adolescent revolt against the Church he had eschewed anything that smacked of piety. There were no words to describe his feelings, so he did not attempt to tell them; he would have liked to, though more out of exuberance than any real need, for he obscurely felt that Butterfly, always present on such occasions, must share his experience in some way he would have been hard put to specify.

The quality of sunlight, the hues of bamboo, the smell of steamy water and wet wood, the peace, the communion—all this Pinkerton now summoned up with great vividness, yet it all seemed far away; it had taken on the distant quality of childhood memories, of things that despite indelible traces are irretrievably of the past.

27

(The Nagasaki ms.)

During luncheon, I could hardly look at Kate, though my eyes were more than ever drawn to her. Face to face with her whom I had after a fashion violated, I had a difficult time maintaining my composure, the more so as my soul was entranced by a strange and turbid voluptuousness.

Immediately upon regaining my room, I had locked the undergarment in a cabinet. I handled it gingerly, like a stolen article that the illicit possessor trembles to unveil. The sight of it filled me with consternation, almost with awe, for the memory of its odor and of its texture against my mouth made me thrill with an emotion very different from what I had felt when I had imagined it Marika's, and this prurience filled me with shame and dismay. I had, even if unwittingly, stolen something whose very essence lay in its being given, for intimacy melts in the face of force or stealth like boiled snow.

What would that noble lovely woman, whom I had once courted so ardently and yet so chastely, whose lips I had kissed as reverently as a chalice and whose hand I could never touch without agitation, what would she think if she could have seen her irreproachable if faithless lover but two hours ago? In all the months when I had enjoyed a clear claim to her love, my mind had never erred so near its portals as my nose that morning. But that one whiff had been enough to arouse the animal desires that I had long kept down; unleashed, they now rushed in a pack for that forbidden spot, so that a flood of images assailed me even as I contemplated the beautiful, pure features of her face—lurid, lewd images of other features hidden under her skirt. My
obsession was such that, had I been able, I should no doubt have transformed myself into a dog and crawled on all fours to bury my nose in her lap.

Mercifully, Marika was not there to add to my confusion, for the maidservant she'd replaced had resumed her functions the day before. Even so, my balance was precarious and several times I felt myself skidding out of control. For the first time, I experienced a drunkenness that came from within and learnt how it felt to be “unhinged.” As we got up from table, I was relieved as well as genuinely surprised that my inner turmoil had gone unnoticed. But my heart nearly stopped when Lisa took me aside on the way out and asked whether anything had changed in the way I looked at things.

“I mean,” she elucidated, no doubt misinterpreting my pallor, “I could ask Kate to stay longer—if you want me to.”

“Why should she?” I asked a little sharply, terrified as I was by the thought that Lisa might somehow have perceived the emotions that had been so close to overwhelming. “She's not interested in me.”

“But that's not true!” Lisa protested. “I know, because I've been sounding her out. Of course, in her position she can't leave herself open to ridicule, but if you're willing to take a step toward her, a really sincere step, I know she won't refuse to listen.”

At that moment, the prospect of being reunited with Kate poured into my feverish mind like a cataract of all that was most desirable on earth, and I was dazed by the realization that it might indeed still be possible. But it was the flitting, eruptive images of the flesh that made the temptation so immediate and incisive, that made my head spin in contemplation of the insuperable emotional distance to her secret entrances; it was the thought of putting my head between her thighs that took away my reason and my breath.

Partly to steady myself, I took a sardonic tone. “You mean if I go and tell her that I'm ready to repudiate my wife if she'd marry me instead?”

Lisa gave me a long look. “It's your life, Hen,” she said quietly. “All I can tell you is that, as of now, you still stand a chance, and if you want me to speak to her for you, I shall. It's up to you to decide what you want.”

Temptation made me feel faint, and I must have looked distraught, for Lisa put a consoling hand on my cheek; she seemed about to say something but in the end only shook her head while the shadow of a smile crossed her face.

I went up to my room in a tizzy and flung myself on the bed, literally swept off my feet by the new erumpent desires I instinctively knew to be more dangerous than the lust for Marika. However it might have been in choosing between Butterfly and Kate, there was no question but that I had loved Kate, and perhaps with the greater passion. That passion, never dead, had lain inert like a powerful acid that needed to be brought in contact with the flesh to manifest its terrible potency.

But if I felt its power, I had not yet yielded to it. I thought of Butterfly, of the child she was carrying, of our life in Japan, so peaceful and content. Could a man ask for more? My passion for Kate was a
furor
,
divine or demonic I knew not which, a veritable malady that would surely consume me if I let it; whereas Butterfly's cool and gentle hand would just as surely succor and restore, if I could only reach it. To depart instantly, to return to Butterfly and not see Kate again—that was the most sensible, the only viable, solution. Happily, I was scheduled to leave for New York the next morning, so it was only a matter of getting through the evening without succumbing. That did not seem so impossibly Herculean a task. By the time I returned, both Kate and Marika would be gone. And a week after that, I myself would be on my way to Japan. Such were the reassuring thoughts with
which I reasoned myself into a calmer state; in the end I was smiling at my own exaggerations, though deep down I felt, darkly, like a man in a lion's den imagining how he would wake up safe in bed.

Without any particular intention, perhaps without thinking at all, I went to the locked cabinet and took out the baneful garment. Bringing it into the clear daylight, I proceeded to examine it with a cold eye. The satin was soft and smooth, and it was finely cut and sewn, almost immodestly, as if destined for a man's eye. A slight yellowing and a small stain marked where the material had lain most intimately; I looked at it unmoved, if anything with a certain distaste, and I might have followed a modest impulse to turn away were it not for remembering the emotion I had felt when Marika presented it to me as her own. Would I not at that very instant be throwing myself on it if I thought it still to be Marika's. But what if Marika had been mistaken in her identification? Or mendacious? Or—and here my breath caught—what if Kate had tendered it to me with her own hands; how would I feel about it then? The idea made my heart contract. If she had, if she would! Fully conscious of being ridiculous, I slowly raised the garment and breathed in once more, deeply, deliberately, the impregnations of the woman I loved and could not possess. A feeling, inexpressibly sweet and acrid like the odor that captivated my senses, rose in me until, uncontainably, it seeped forth from my eyes; I kept the garment pressed tightly to my face as tears, mingling with her emanations, penetrated through the fabric and moistened my fingers.