He felt formless in this embrace, unable to recall himself. Nadine, in his arms, seemed to him formless and very warm, yearning toward him. He could not have said her name. He seemed to be watching himself, Jules, grow smaller and smaller like a dying light, extinguished in the confusion of her body. Everything else passed out of his range. He had no vocabulary. Nadine’s face and body and the anguished movement of her hands against his back were like words shouting at him. She was saying something, she said “Jules,”—and he hadn’t the strength to answer her. She drew him somewhere. He felt the blindness in her body, her stumbling against something, and his own legs were numb and blind. She sat down on the edge of a bed. Jules knelt before her and embraced her. He pressed his face against her. He felt her fingers in his damp hair and imagined her staring down at him, as if not comprehending his passion but giving herself up to it, recognizing its power. She drew him up. It was with an impersonal, abstract strength that he rose to her.
Jules made love to her, still without words and without any memory of his having done this before with other women; his body led him forward while his brain, in a swoon, cast about for some hold, some fixed point, so that he would be able to come back to himself. He needed a style; he was terrified to lose hold of himself. But everything gave way in him. He felt as if he were in a wave of violence that bore him along, Jules Wendall, a kind of victim, burying himself in Nadine with groans of surprised love, while Nadine submitted to him, embracing him, her softness delivered over to his impersonal strength. Yet he felt a horror at not knowing what he did. He would not remember it.
“Jules, I love you,” Nadine said.
He opened his eyes. They looked at each other.
“Jules, do you love me?”
“I love you.”
He was trembling, covered with sweat. He felt beatific with it, absolved of the heaviness he’d been carrying around for weeks. Now that density, that impurity, was gone; he felt that he had shed everything in Nadine’s arms. They lay together in silence and looked at each other, Jules pretending sleepiness out of a kind of courtesy. Nadine smiled. She had a sudden, surprising smile; she seemed happy. This dazzled Jules. He stared at her mouth, shaped into that gift of a smile. He could not believe in her beauty. She brought her arms around his neck and touched his mouth with her own, shyly. In a kind of terror Jules gathered her tight into his arms again, wanting to bury himself in her. They clung together tightly.
Jules lay on his back and looked around. A ceiling, a room. He had never seen this room before and now it opened itself to him in a swift series of patches of light—white ceiling, white walls, a window with filmy white curtains. Everything was bare. There was a sense of an echo here, an indefinite emptiness. Jules wiped the sweat out of his eyes like a swimmer wiping away drops of water, desperate to see, afraid of the element he was in. He felt as if he had surfaced from a great, dangerous depth.
“I didn’t think this would ever happen. Like this,” he said.
“You do love me?”
He did not want to drown in her closeness—her closeness was uncanny. Everything in him might have resisted but he had no hold on himself, no clear memory of himself. So he had made love to this woman? She was his mistress?
“How did this happen?” Jules said.
“Oh, don’t make jokes!”
“But it’s a wonderful joke. It’s wonderful. I’m going to die with it.” He felt the room’s sunshine penetrate the deepest part of his brain, dazzling him. Light flooded everything. “Where are we, honey? Did you rent this?”
“Yes, for a month.”
“You rented it for us?”
“Yes.”
“But I didn’t hear from you for so long, I thought it was finished. I thought you’d given up.”
“I didn’t.”
“Why didn’t you call, Nadine?”
“I thought of you all the time. I couldn’t think of anything else,” she said.
Now that they were lovers even the barrier of her cool, rapid, nervous speech was gone; she spoke softly. The gentle hot stroke of her breath was a marvelous intimacy to him. Jules was amazed at her sweetness. He kissed her body, he caressed her, he marveled at her smooth skin. His own hand made him ashamed, his hands, his body; he felt shame at touching her.
But Nadine drew him to her, saying, “I love you. I love you,” like a woman in a trance. “I didn’t want to see you again but I couldn’t go through with it. You could have called me. I kept waiting—”
“You weren’t waiting—I did try to call you.”
“You did? But I…I didn’t hear from you either, and I was afraid to call you…I wanted to die, it was so miserable. I thought about you constantly.”
“I thought about you constantly,” Jules said happily, remembering the misery of those weeks as if another man had suffered it, someone ludicrous. He rose and came to her again, and Nadine, gracious and startled, pressed her open mouth against his and waited. He entered her as easily as if all those years of distance and deprivation had not existed. He did not think of this woman as someone else’s wife and therefore practiced in love, but as the deepest, essential Nadine, always prepared for him and only him, Jules, the only man her body would really accept. In his passion he saw her blurred pale face, too close to be seen; they clung together, very warm; the boundaries of their bodies were uncertain. Jules pressed himself down again and again on her soft cries, comforting her. He felt as if his head had become hollow and her moans were echoing inside it. A great joy began in him; he wanted to gather her violently into his arms and penetrate her to the very kernel of her being, to her deepest silence, bringing her to a release of this joy. But she seemed to slip from him, too weak or too stunned, and he felt his love emptied violently into her again while she held him, her hands tight against his back, tight as if with alarm, her own body grown rigid at this crisis.
“Nadine?”
She drew the back of her hand across her forehead.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. Wonderful.”
Jules saw the pillows for the first time: white with dark green stitching on the edges. Everything was strange. He felt the slim curve of her body with his hands, fascinated with her skin. He could not remember any other woman, was not certain that he had ever done this before. Everything was washed out of his mind; there was nothing authentic in his experience; what was his personal history might have been stolen from movies and books, the imaginations of other people.
The room had one large window facing the park. The window had been redone and was newer than the rest of the room, which was old-fashioned. Up at the ceiling the molding looked ancient, like mummified cake; it was a shock to see a black telephone on the floor, very modern, stark and purposeful.
“Why do you have a telephone?” Jules asked.
“It isn’t connected.”
“It came with the apartment?”
“Yes.”
This pleased him immensely. He was light-headed. His legs seemed very strong suddenly, urgently strong. “Then no one will call us. The phone will never ring,” he said.
“Never.”
They lay for a while watching each other, smiling. Jules felt the strength flowing back into his body. It was a curious sensation. Nadine stroked him, and the skin beneath her fingers lifted itself in tiny bumps.
“Where is your husband?”
“Don’t worry about him.”
“Is he gone away again?”
“Yes.”
“But when is he coming back?”
“Don’t ask.”
They lay pressed together. Jules, in love, contemplated her body with some fear—he could not quite believe in all this beauty, this gift of beauty, this perfection. He was afraid that he had won her through some mistake, a misunderstanding. Covertly he stared down the length of her body to her bare feet. His throat constricted with emotion: he had never been
so moved. He said with a desperate lightness, “Can we both live here? In this apartment?”
“Yes,” said Nadine.
Late in the afternoon they rose shakily. Jules stared at the bare floor, a shining waxed floor. He saw everywhere around him the result of labor not his own, a kind of magic. Nadine herself was magical. He felt embarrassed, getting out of bed in so ordinary a way, crossing to the bathroom, while Nadine sat up, her elegant white backbone slightly bowed. She did not look at him. Naked, Jules wanted to hide himself from her, from her incidental glance. But she did not look around. Her hair had come down in dark shining tangles onto her shoulders. She looked as if she had just risen from the sea, deranged from hours of breathlessness.
The bathroom was radiant with light—white curtains, white tile, a white shower curtain. This room had been redone also, remodeled. Jules staggered to the sink and stared at himself. He looked wild. Nadine’s lipstick was smeared faintly across his face but still he recognized himself. Jules in love, sick with love….He’d seen that face before, a hint of it, but had never felt its desperation so strong in his bones.
When he came back out she was putting on a yellow robe. Her movements were slow, lethargic, trancelike. She seemed really to have emerged from another element, an airless element or a world in which air was thick and creamy. Her skin looked creamy. It looked as if there was a gentle coating to it, something languorous, soft. She went to the closet where, inside, lay an open suitcase filled with clothing. On the closet’s several hooks were other pieces of clothing. Jules swallowed drily, seeing her clothes hanging there. They looked so intimate. For the first time he considered her belonging to him, the two of them belonging to each other, living out their lives together. The thought rocked in his veins.
“Nadine?”
He felt such a sharp love for her that his body seemed to turn into a crystal of love, a work of art, his bones stunned and hard. Nadine, turning shyly to him, not looking at his body, seemed to him also a work of art—fragile in her silk robe, with her sky rosy, startled, shy. He felt panic in his need to possess her. He himself was possessed by her, by his love; it was a frantic burden, a pressure like electricity, needing release. Jules could not think at all. He embraced her as she stood by the closet door, hesitating between him and the closet, about to break out into some casual, embarrassed remark of everyday life. He took her in his arms and felt how he was translated beyond himself, transfigured. He drew her back to the bed, feeling how his own wildness enticed her, silencing her. She put her arms around him and gave herself up to him.
When Jules woke he saw that Nadine was gone. She came to the doorway at once, as if sensing this, a shadow of yellow moving into his vision.
“Are you awake, Jules? Come out here,” she said.
He got up. He got into his trousers, dreamily, and came to her.
“Look at the sun setting. Look at the park,” she said. She leaned heavily against him. They were in a long, broad room, evidently a living-room. There were only two chairs—one an old-fashioned chair with a green silk seat, perhaps an antique or a reproduction, the other an ordinary straight-backed chair. On the floor were some magazines, a newspaper. The sun shone through the leaves outside the window and blossomed into a thousand glimmering dots.
“We’re in a painting. People in a painting,” Jules said hungrily, thinking of a nameless painting he’d seen once in the art museum, years ago, on one of his wandering, curious days around that part of the city. It had seemed, then, to hold a secret for him—the way out of Detroit. Now, standing with Nadine in this empty apartment, he found himself back in those days. He felt that his life now surpassed anything he could have imagined, even with his energy. He had gone beyond himself. He was being in a painting, embracing a woman in a painting. Their love, so sweaty and violent at its height, had exploded into a thousand clean glimmering dots and golden leaves.
“I feel that I’m possessed by something. By you,” he said.
“Are you joking again?”
“I never joke.”
“Yes, you always joke and you’re always serious. Both at once. I remember that. But I was too young to really love you then. I had to grow up.”
“I loved you then.”
“I know. That’s what I remembered about you. There was never a day in all those years that I didn’t think of you.”
“Will you always think of me?”
“All my life. I know I will, no matter what happens to us.”
“What’s going to happen to us?”
She laughed and pressed her face against his. She was cool now, gracious. She had combed her hair and put on lipstick, fixing herself up for him. The gentleness of this woman, unexpected, seemed to Jules to dislocate him from the world he’d known, throwing him into some queer dimension in which his style of living, his words, his very self had no power.
“Come out in the kitchen. I’ll make you something to eat,” she said.
The kitchen was small and old-fashioned; its sink was a little tarnished. At the heart of a building, in its plumbing, certain secrets crop out—this sink’s faucet had a slow silent drip. Jules brought the two chairs in, and Nadine sat on the elegant one, he on the ordinary one, prim as a guest. She sliced cheese for them with a dime-store paring knife. Jules’s hunger was overwhelming. He had never felt so healthy. “I have rye bread, too,” Nadine said happily. She was rosy with joy, childlike, almost giddy. She watched him eat, covertly, and he felt embarrassment—everything was so heightened, to the point nearly of being painful. He laughed. He sat a few feet from this woman, in a daze of love, very hungry, eating cheese.
From the living-room came splotches of golden light, touching one side of Nadine’s face. She looked young, her skin slightly raw. He had worn it raw with his own skin. Around her lips, worked into her soft skin, was a pink hue—her lipstick. Jules ate the pieces of cheese and bread she handed him, staring at her. It was a miracle, this transformation. He stared at her face, a woman’s private face, in its way impersonal and lovely as any work of art, absolved of personal anguish. A finely wrought face, and yet not heavy with intelligence—reflecting light, sunshine from the window or the light of Jules’s fierce attention. He looked at the opening in her gown. He could not see the top of her breasts but he understood that she was naked beneath the gown, an intimacy that stunned him, so strange and undeserved a gift.
“Will you love me? Will you let me love you?” he asked suddenly.
“I have no choice about it,” she said.
Her skin was translucent, a victim’s skin. But she smiled. Her teeth were even, white, ordinary. Her smile slowly revealed these teeth. Jules’s own teeth were not so white and not so good-looking, but at least none of them had been knocked out. He smiled slowly at her, taking her hand. There was something brittle and jewel-like, pearl-like, in her impersonal perfection. What he had done to her, all that lust, lay quiet inside her and gleamed through her pores, waiting.
“This doesn’t seem real,” she said finally.
“Not to me either.”
“You’ve made me so happy, Jules.”
“Yes.”
She brought his hand to her face and pressed it against her cheek. He saw the pale blue veins on the back of her hand. “I can feel what you’ve left in me, inside me,” she said dreamily. There was something lethargic, almost labored in her voice; she sounded drugged. Jules was a little startled by her words and then charmed, then excited. He wondered if, like himself, she felt annihilated by the sudden expansion of love—too much suffocating light, too much violence. He took hold of her by the shoulders and kissed the opening of her gown.
“You won’t leave me, Jules?”
“Where could I go?”
She was slow and hypnotic, like a child fascinated by something unexplained. Her hair was loose about her face. Jules felt a desperate lust for her but was ashamed of it. Her body, so obedient to his own, seemed to him t
oo fragile a vessel for his desire; he didn’t want to destroy her. He kissed her mouth, her face. He felt as if he were kissing bruised skin. She closed her eyes and brought her hands up to the back of his head, caressing him. Her touch drove him wild. He remembered her touching him like that while he had made love to her, so gentle a touch urging him on, inviting him.
“Could we…? How do you feel?” he said hoarsely.
She stood. He embraced her eagerly. “I want to make you happy. I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.
Walking with her into the other room, he had a kind of hallucination—a flash of a blown-up photograph of himself. He sometimes thought ironically of himself as being photographed, in the act of running, in a foolish situation, grinning idiotically, eating. Now the flash came to him, came and went. He did not really see it; he imagined it. He imagined himself leading this beautiful woman to a bed, his arm around her in an intimate, husbandly way, his face fixed in an expression of confidence and tenderness. He had become a husband. But the Jules of this photograph had been imagined in other roles, other positions less flattering. Endlessly Jules had pursued Jules, in endless stories and dreams: now he had come to this polished, waxed kingdom, and the immediacy of Nadine’s body was so miraculous that he wondered at his own daring. He opened her robe. He bent to kiss her body. She stepped back from him as if startled, but not really startled; he followed her, he let the robe fall to the floor. The closet door was partly open. He pushed it shut. He had always been afraid, as a child, of an opened door inviting trouble.
Jules knelt above her and came to her gently. She arched her back. He gathered her in his arms and clung to her, as if fearful of someone tearing him away. The white walls of the room seemed to draw back from them. Had there been a mirror somewhere near it would have shown Jules’s straining form in a mist of white, straining to achieve some permanence. He knelt as if he were falling endlessly, and only her body kept him from plunging down. A photograph of Jules falling. The darkness of her body, its warm secrecy, but also the cool external whiteness of her body, its clean, washed skin—this astonished him. He was being urged out of himself. Fearful of ending too soon and leaving her, he drew his head back wildly, very young. Nadine’s hands, on his back, were the hands of certain possession, urging him ahead. He said, “My darling…” and hoped that his words would put him at some distance. There was a terrible pressure in him that he feared, being unable to control it with her. He was not a machine but an urgent mass of flesh, shameful in a way, an unnamed mass of hunger.