Read Quiet Days in Clichy Page 9


  But Corinne was hungry too. We sat down, Carl still red as a beet. He shifted his watery gaze from one to the other, as if uncertain which one to lick first. He was definitely in a mood to lick them from head to foot. After he had taken a few mouthfuls, he got up and slobbered over Corinne. Then, as if he had a dose of catnip, he sidled around to Christine and went to work on her. The effect was pleasing but left them slightly dazed. They must have wondered just how the evening would terminate.

  As yet I hadn’t touched Christine. I was curious to observe her behavior—how she talked, how she laughed, how she ate and drank. Carl kept filling the glasses, as if it were lemonade we were drinking. Christine seemed shy, I thought, but the wine was soon to take effect. It was not long before I felt a hand on my leg, squeezing it. I grasped it and put it between my legs. She drew it away, as if frightened.

  Carl now began plying her with questions about Copenhagen, about her children, about her married life. (He had forgotten that her husband was dead.) Suddenly, apropos of nothing, he looked at her with a malicious grin, and said: “Ecoute, petite, what I’d like to know is this—does he give you a good fuck now and then?”

  Christine went scarlet. Looking him in the eye, she answered stonily: “Il est mort, mon mari.”

  Anyone else would have been mortified. Not Carl. He rose to his feet with a natural, good-humored expression and, going over to her, he kissed her chastely on the brow. “Je t’aime,” he said, and trotted back to his seat. A moment later he was babbling about spinach and how good it tasted raw.

  There is something about Northern people I don’t understand. I’ve never met one, male or female, whom I could really warm up to. I don’t mean, in voicing this, that Christine’s presence acted as a pall. On the contrary, the evening rolled along like a well-oiled machine. Dinner over, Carl moved his acrobat over to the divan. I lay down on the rug with Christine, in the next room. It was a bit of a struggle at first, but once I had gotten her legs open and the juice flowing, she went at it with gusto. After a few spasms she began to weep. She was weeping over her dead husband, so she confessed. I couldn’t make it out. I felt like saying, “Why bring that up now?” I endeavored to find out what it was, precisely, that she was thinking of with respect to her departed husband. To my amazement, she said: “What would he think of me if he could see me lying here on the floor with you?” That struck me as so ridiculous that I felt like spanking her. An unholy desire possessed me to make her do something which would warrant a true display of shame and remorse.

  Just then I heard Carl get up to go to the bathroom. I called to him to join us in a drink. “Wait a minute,” he said, “that bitch is bleeding like a stuck pig.” When he came out of the bathroom I told him, in English, to try his luck with Christine. Whereupon I excused myself and went to the bathroom. When I returned, Christine was still lying on the floor, smoking a cigarette. Carl was lying beside her, gently trying to pry her legs open. She lay there cool as a cucumber, her legs crossed, a blank expression on her face. I poured some more drinks and went into the other room to chat with Corinne. She too was lying back with a cigarette between her lips, ready, I suppose, for another bout if anyone happened along. I sat beside her and talked a blue streak in order to give Carl time to get his end in.

  Just when I thought that everything was going well Christine suddenly popped into the room. In the darkness she stumbled against the divan. I caught hold of her and pulled her over beside Corinne. In a moment Carl also came in and flung himself on the divan. Everybody was silent. We shifted about, trying to make ourselves comfortable. In pawing around, my hand touched a bare breast. It was round and firm, the nipple taut and tempting. I closed my mouth over it. It was Christine’s perfume that I recognized. Moving my head up to seek her mouth, I felt a hand sliding into my fly. As I slid my tongue into her mouth I shifted slightly to permit Corinne to extricate my cock. In a moment I felt her warm breath on it. While she nibbled away I clutched Christine passionately, biting her lips, her tongue, her throat. She seemed to be in an unusual state of passion, making the queerest grunts and spasmodic movements of the body. With her arms around my neck she held me in a vise; her tongue had thickened, as though swollen with blood. I struggled to get my prick free of Corinne’s molten furnace of a mouth, but in vain. Gently I tried to wiggle it free, but she kept after it like a fish, securing it with her teeth.

  Meanwhile Christine was twitching more violently, as though in the throes of an orgasm. I managed to extricate my arm, which had been pinned under her back, and slid my hand down her torso. Just below the waist I felt something hard; it was covered with hair. I dug my fingers into it. “Hey, it’s me,” said Carl, pulling his head away. With that Christine started pulling me away from Corinne, but Corinne refused to let go. Carl now threw himself on Christine who was beside herself. I was lying so that I was now able to tickle her ass while Carl dug away at her. I thought she would go mad, from the way she was wriggling about and moaning and gibbering.

  Suddenly it was over. At once Christine bounded out of the bed and made for the bathroom. For a moment or two the three of us were silent. Then, as if we had been hit in the same crazy place, we burst into peals of laughter. Carl laughed loudest of all—one of his crazy laughs which threatened never to come to an end.

  We were still laughing when the bathroom door was suddenly flung open. There stood Christine in a blaze of light, her face flaming red, demanding angrily to know where her wraps were.

  “You’re disgusting,” she yelled. “Let me out of here!”

  Carl made an attempt to soothe her ruffled feelings but I cut it short by saying, “Let her go if she wants to.” I didn’t even get up to look for her things. I heard Carl say something to her in a muffled voice, and then I heard Christine’s angry voice saying, “Leave me alone—you’re a filthy pig!” With that the door slammed and she was gone.

  “That’s your Scandinavian beauty for you,” I said.

  “Yah, yah,” muttered Carl, pacing back and forth with head down. “It’s bad, it’s bad,” he mumbled.

  “What’s bad?” I said. “Don’t be a fool! We gave her the time of her life.”

  He began to titter in crazy fashion. “What if she had the clap?” he said, and made a dash for the bathroom, where he noisily gargled his throat. “Listen, Joey,” he shouted, spitting out a mouthful, “what do you suppose made her so angry? Because we laughed so hard?”

  “They’re all like that,” said Corinne. “La pudeur.”

  “I’m hungry,” said Carl. “Let’s sit down and have another meal. Maybe she’ll change her mind and come back.” He mumbled something to himself, then added, as if doing a sum—“It doesn’t make sense.”

  —Henry Miller

  New York City,

  May, 1940.

  Rewritten in Big Sur, May, 1956.

 


 

  Henry Miller, Quiet Days in Clichy

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