Afterward he had reproached first himself and then me. He had taken advantage of my innocence; he had indulged his own passion at my expense; he should have restrained himself. I should have said something to stop him; one word, he said, one word from me, one raised finger would have stopped him in his tracks. And I told him that I hadn’t stopped him, I hadn’t wanted to stop him. I wanted the opposite. I wanted this culmination as much as he had. The promise of love wasn’t enough anymore. Before we parted, before we left each other and returned to misery and the relentless threat of death, I wanted to belong to him. I wanted the fact of love, the proof of it. I wanted to serve him, I wanted to give him joy.
“But you’re wrong,” he said, eyelids dropping, voice slurring, “it’s I who belong to you, it’s I who am your servant now,” and I thought he was going to sleep, because the feat was accomplished and there was nothing else to do but rest until morning. In my ignorance, I never dreamed there might be a second act. I settled myself against him and tried to quiet my teeming mind, the strange restlessness of my thoughts. But a short while later he began to stir—hands sliding, lips murmuring—and showed me what he meant. What it meant to have your nerves overcome altogether and your body turned into a perfect physical instrument, plucked into music not by your own inefficient fingers but by those of a lover. A lover’s mouth. A lover’s flesh, invading yours, heavy and urgent, stretching you into infinity until you simply snapped from the tension. You couldn’t help it.
That’s what I meant, he said, a little smugly, and his head dropped and he fell asleep, sliding into a natural position alongside me, his joints fitting into the cavities of my joints, his heart settling into the rhythm of my heart, hair and sweat and skin mingled together.
Now here he sat, propped against the horizontal brass rail at the head of the narrow bed, solid and carnal amid the haze of his cigarette, smelling of tobacco and a scent I now recognize as that of human musk, speaking my name once more like a holy word, while his face—what I could see of it, in the half-darkness of a curtained room just after dawn—contained nothing but sorrow.
Inevitably, we made love once more. Inevitably because there’s something so sensual about waking in the dawn with your lover, something primeval and hopeful. All your modesty is laid waste. The nakedness of his chest, and the nakedness of yours. I was like another Virginia, a new and lustful Virginia born from the old, rigid, fearful one. I had forgotten who she was. I pulled the cigarette from his fingers and kissed him violently until he surrendered and rolled me to my back on the narrow mattress and stretched my arms high above my head, holding my wrists in a tender grip against the brass rail, while his mouth nipped at my neck and breasts.
It hurt terribly at first, but I didn’t let him know. I didn’t want him to stop. I angled my hips and endured the way he worked himself inside me, until my raw flesh softened and filled with heat; until I drove as ardently against him as he drove against me. In the end, I struck home before he did, crying out with great force, and at the sound of my shout, the arch of my neck, he opened his eyes and went still. Gazed down at me. Said something vulgar in an awestruck tone. Followed me, frenzied, a few minutes later. Roaring as if in anguish. Collapsing on my breast as if he had lost every bone.
An absolute silence overcame the room. Only the valves of our hearts continued to move, in slow, giant, synchronized thuds that unnerved me. I thought he had fallen unconscious. I said his name softly. He roused himself and rolled away and gasped, hand on chest, “That’s it. Done for. You’re going to kill me, aren’t you? You’re going to wring me dry.”
I was so innocent. I lifted my head and said anxiously, “You’re all right? You haven’t hurt yourself, have you?”
“Irreparably, I think. But God knows, there are worse ways to go.”
By the time we could move again, the room was much brighter. The furnishings took on color. Simon lifted himself upward and reached for his wristwatch, which he had wound the night before and left ticking on the bedside table, next to the ashtray. His cigarette had burnt out. He sat on the edge of the bed and lit another. I came up behind him and wrapped my arms around his chest.
“What now?” I said.
He covered my fingers with his left hand and smoked silently for a minute or two, staring at the nearby wallpaper. His thumb stroked my knuckles, counting out the seconds in precise little beats. From outside the window came the shout of a man, the honk of an angry horn. The shoulder beneath my chin moved in a massive sigh.
“Right now, my dear, I expect we’d better bathe.”
He didn’t enlarge on this humble suggestion as we bathed and dressed, taking turns in the well-scrubbed salle de bain down the hallway, nor as we breakfasted in the small parlor downstairs. My modesty returned with my clothes. I could hardly look at him across the table, instead stealing glances over the rim of my coffee cup. (The hotel resolutely did not provide tea.) Simon busied himself with his breakfast and remarked on the weather. His cheeks were pink and fresh from his morning shave—he had contrived, somehow, to borrow a razor from the hotel—and he looked remarkably unlined, for a man of thirty-six years who had spent most of the night in vigorous sexual congress. Who had taken a virgin to his bed and drained himself three times by dawn. His hair bristled upward, still damp from his bath, the gray strands glinting like tinsel among the tawny brown, and I looked away, because I couldn’t examine the texture of his hair without remembering how it felt on my skin.
As he ate, his cheerfulness grew. Madame returned and asked if he wanted more coffee, and he smiled broadly and told her, in French, that he would take another cup with pleasure, that he could not get enough of this fine, strong brew. Her cheeks turned pink. She went obediently to the kitchen.
“Right, then,” he said, coffee finished, rising at last, tugging at my chair, “we had better catch that damned train, hadn’t we?”
We found an empty compartment on the 9:03 express to Paris and sat next to the window, across from each other. I couldn’t think of a word to say. My head was too full; my chest ached. Between my legs, I was now throbbing with soreness and above all a strange oversensitive awareness, as if I could identify by name each individual nerve beneath my skin. Simon absorbed my silence for several minutes, while the train gathered speed and the buildings flew by, lapsing into green, and then he turned from the window, leaned forward, and took my hands.
“Why, you’re cold!”
“Only my fingers.”
“You’re all right, aren’t you?”
He looked anxious. I smiled forcefully and said, “Very much all right.”
“Good. I am a dreadful cad, you know. I shouldn’t have let that happen.”
“I don’t regret a minute.”
“Now you don’t. But this afternoon, when I’m gone, all whisked off to my wretched surgical hut—”
“I’ll be grateful, tremendously grateful, for every moment we spent.” The words were flowing better now, greased along by Simon’s expression of easy remorse.
“So will I.” He lifted my hands to his lips and kissed them both. “In fact, I believe I desire nothing else in my life than to create a few more such moments, if you can spare them.”
“Yes.”
“And I’ll keep on writing, of course, and I do hope you’ll read my letters this time.”