“Yes, of course,” Mitsuko said, raising her head, as though to answer her old classmate, who was staring at her.
“It wasn’t J, it was me!” the actor repeated in triumph to the sculptor, who was still in his arms. “All the way I didn’t make a sound, and I got her that excited!”
“You are a bastard, a real scoundrel!” the sculptor said, the blood rising to her face. Her wide-mouthed laughter showed the red tunnel of her throat.
“I want to use the last three minutes for the title soundtrack,” Mitsuko said.
“Ah,” the young poet said, feeling strangely as though he’d lost his strength completely. He pushed himself against the straight back of the chair and closed his eyes.
“You know that long slope that goes down to the bay,” Mitsuko said, starting to talk with the cameraman. To her and the cameraman, the tape was probably no longer particularly exciting. Possibly the two of them had even been present to witness the recording.
“On the other side or this side?”
“On this side. When J was a child, he saw a truck hit an old man on that hill. The wheels ran over the man’s stomach and killed him, and the dog that was with the man lapped up the blood from his master’s belly. It acted like it was crazy with joy.”
“Crazy with sorrow?” the cameraman asked, with a discrimination that would be expected of a middle-aged man.
“No, crazy with joy.”
“What kind of dog was it?”
“A Doberman pup.”
“I see!”
“That story may only be one of J’s childhood fantasies, since after all there’s a Czech children’s story about a dog drinking blood, and I think J might have read it.”
“How does it go?”
“When Christ died, a dog lapped up his blood, so the dog was also able to go to heaven.”
“The dog could no longer go to heaven?” the cameraman asked.
“The dog could also go to heaven.”
“Then we can’t use it for this movie.”
“That’s true,” Mitsuko said.
“Aren’t you hungry? Let’s have the chicken we brought. Then I’m going to get a little sleep.”
J’s wife brought the oil-paper package of baked chicken and a bottle of sauce from the baggage that also had the 16-millimeter camera packed in it. J’s sister had made the sauce that afternoon using plenty of lemon and garlic.
“You boys having some chicken too?”
“I’ll have some,” the young actor’s voice said from the sofa beside the far wall.
“Me too,” J’s sister announced with a shout, and then suddenly gave a shriek of laughter.
“I’m eating too,” the young poet said. He opened his eyes and was dazzled by the faint light of the fire. Everybody downstairs felt hungry.
When the five had gathered in front of the fireplace and started to eat the baked chicken, Boy turned to the others, including J’s sister, and raised his voice as though it should be heard, continuing the conversation he’d been having on the sofa. In dead earnest he expressed his disbelief: “Nineteen and impotent! It’s impossible.”
“It is possible. In fact, I’ve seen it. My English friend was like that,” J’s sister laughed, once again letting them look right down her throat. It was a red frightening dark hole.
“Was he a pervert?”
“No.”
“Well, it must have been terrible for the woman. I feel sorry for her.”
“The woman you’re talking about was me,” the sculptor said merrily. “Boy, are you still hard? You can give that woman some company!”
Everybody laughed at the young actor. He was constantly the object of this kind of sadistic coddling. And he let himself in for it.
“A French girlfriend of mine gave me some advice. The three of us discussed it. She even checked my boyfriend’s parts for me, to make sure he wasn’t like young Louis XVI.”
“Shit! I’m no good in history, so let’s not talk about Louis XVI.”
“Anyway, there was nothing wrong with him. My girlfriend explained it this way: if my lover was impotent, it wasn’t the responsibility of the young Englishman alone. She related it to the mathematical fact that, in sex between two people, the range of mutual stimulation is limited. So shouldn’t sex with three or more people be much more exciting? That’s what she said.”
They all laughed. J’s sister stopped laughing first and said, “So my French girlfriend got into bed and the three of us slept together. In the end our nineteen-year-old performed like a champion. And we all lived happily ever after!”
“But you didn’t really enjoy it, did you?”
“Why not?” the twenty-seven-year old sculptor said. Her freezing contempt silenced the young actor.
At that moment, the jazz singer returned to the room. Keiko Sawa was wrapped in a summer blanket from her breasts to her underbelly. Now that she was covered by a blanket, the others turned their eyes away from her more than when she’d been completely naked. The blanket didn’t leave the slightest room for doubt about what she and J had just been doing. But she herself was indifferent to such psychological processes.
“How nasty,” she said. “Eating without us.” She sounded dissatisfied.
“There’s plenty left,” Mitsuko said.
“J wants you to come upstairs.”
“Why?” Mitsuko said coolly.
“We think somebody’s watching us, on the second floor! We both felt it. Especially me. I saw a pair of little eyes at the door. So J wasn’t any good. In the end, it just didn’t happen.”
“Me too!” the young actor shouted. “I saw two little eyes looking at us from the shadow of the door to the kitchen. Didn’t I just tell you so?”
“You liar. I didn’t see anything,” J’s sister said, laughing and showing her red throat once more.
“I also had the feeling somebody was watching us,” the cameraman said seriously. “Just a little while ago, when we were listening to Keiko’s tape.”
The young poet began to feel as though he too had been conscious all along of eyes behind his back. Then he recalled that the kitchen door had been open to the outside when he went to get the firewood. But then he hadn’t been particularly suspicious about it. In his mind it was J, waiting upstairs for his wife, who had begun to grow into an overwhelming menace.
“But after all, isn’t it true that when a person feels that somebody is watching him, you can always discover a ghost looking at that person? Isn’t human consciousness made that way? That’s what they call ‘the eyes of God’ or ‘the eyes of the Devil.’ When I’m hysterical, I can see eyes like that even in pitch darkness,” the sculptor said.
“So even I am hysterical?” the middle-aged cameraman said.
“When I studied philosophy at the Sorbonne . . .”
“That’s enough now, talking about philosophy! Just stop it,” the young actor said. The sculptor didn’t react to his sudden rough language, which gave the others a general understanding of the kind of caresses J’s sister and the actor had been exchanging on the sofa a moment before.
“Well, I’m going to have some chicken, so forget about hysterical eyes for a little while,” the jazz singer said. She picked up a big chicken wing and started to eat. Her naked breasts were smeared with garlic sauce.
“Go up to J,” the jazz singer urged. “Nothing is working with me, and I’m tired.” She bit into the chicken with her big white teeth.
Mitsuko shook her head vaguely, and then, with the sad, incoherent eyes of a drowning cat, looked at the young poet. The young poet returned her look. Drink had made him hot, dull, and sluggish, but a single core had formed within him, a core of passion that sparkled clear and distinct. If Mitsuko doesn’t go to J, I’m going to lure her away and hide her somewhere, he thought. Don’t let her go to him, he prayed. But where can we go? If only these four drunks would all just drop off to sleep . . .
Just then they heard J cry out upstairs. His irritating, urgent-sounding vo
ice called for Mitsuko again and again. The poet burst out in a fit of laughter. Mitsuko slowly stood up. She kept her eyes on the young poet. He stood up too, and they crossed the hall together, walking shoulder to shoulder. They closed the door behind them, and for an instant the two old classmates held each other in the narrow space between the bathroom, kitchen, and stairs. He pressed his hand between the small, naked buttocks under J’s wife’s skirt. His finger reached her hot, wet eye. Through the poet’s trousers, J’s wife clutched his madly erect cock.
Seized by desire, the young poet whispered, “Let’s hide somewhere, let’s go away.”
“But where?” a hoarse voice answered, as caught up by desire as him. “Where can we go?”
Feeling cornered, the poet tried to think. Where could they go indeed? Upstairs J was waiting, already out of patience; thirsty people would be coming into the kitchen to drink, one after the other; and every ten minutes there’d be somebody in the bathroom to relieve himself . . .
“The Jaguar?” the young poet said. As the idea came to him, he was seized by a feeling of hope. “Let’s hide in the Jaguar.”
“J’s sister has the key,” Mitsuko said, nipping his hope in the bud.
“Let’s run away from this house. I’ll save you from J. Let’s just go!”
“We’re just drunk,” Mitsuko said. “This isn’t love. It’s only desire that makes you want to go somewhere.” Mitsuko’s hand, which had been clutching his sex, now dangled limply between his pants legs.
J called again from the second floor. Mitsuko twisted herself free of the young poet’s arms, brushed past him, and went galloping up the stairs. Looking after her, he saw her pale, ugly profile and realized that his words had frightened her off. He was frightened too, frightened by the image of a bitter future with Mitsuko, after she’d lost the ambition to make movies. She’s right, he thought. We are just drunk. It isn’t love, it’s only desire that makes me want to run away with her. He opened the bathroom door and stumbled in. As he was spreading his legs and urinating, he looked down, and the tears that had remained pent up in his eyes until now dripped down, wetting his heavy penis. He thought that was funny and smiled. Then he was captured by a solitary desire that had no connection whatsoever with Mitsuko. As he persistently masturbated, he groped after the slightest clue to an orgasm in the lower depths of the extreme insensibility brought on by drunkenness. When he finally came, the semen dripped like blood, only to fall like thick snow into the beerish froth of tears and piss. He groaned without pleasure. Already he was thinking more about J than Mitsuko. He felt friendship for J. J would probably reduce the desire that he’d aroused in Mitsuko to a bitter ashen broth. He vaguely connected J, Mitsuko, and then himself with the image of the threesome in J’s sister’s recollection. He felt that fantasy to be altogether harmonious and satisfying. For the first time he felt comfortably at home in J’s world. He felt that he, like the jazz singer and the young actor, had surrendered to the mighty J, but he didn’t experience any feeling of humiliation. He tucked his rapidly wilting penis into his trousers and pulled the chain to flush the toilet. He sat down on the bathtub beside him, motionless. It was getting harder and harder not to fall asleep. He lay down in the empty tub. He started to sleep, but in the instant before the young poet drifted off, he felt that he was a happy dead man in his coffin. He should write about it in a poem, he thought. He also thought he’d write about the pair of limpid eyes that he could see now, seeming to watch him from the far side of the open door as he lay in the bathtub . . .
§ § §
In the darkness, Mitsuko felt that J was finally beginning to climb the slope toward ejaculation. She caressed his anus and raised her voice in boyish powerful groans to encourage him. The crystal clear, perfectly composed feeling she had now reminded her of times when, as a child, she would swim in the river and slip to the bottom, lying on her back and looking up at the surface of the water as it glittered in the sunlight. She didn’t feel the slightest pleasure. J’s spasms were accompanied by a slightly embarrassed cry. With the composure of a nurse, Mitsuko patiently accepted J’s sweaty body and the weight he now rested on her. From the length of his ejaculation, it was clear that Keiko hadn’t been lying. She also knew that J didn’t particularly like having intercourse with Keiko. In his sex with her, J only faked enthusiasm. Mitsuko could also guess why that was. It seemed to justify the fact that Mitsuko herself always feigned excitement when she was having intercourse with J. But then why did J so stubbornly insist on sex with her and Keiko? Mitsuko had seldom thought deeply about it, and she certainly had never gotten to the bottom of the problem. A vague presentiment of the frightening answer she would find had made her leave the question alone. She felt that the way J insisted on having a woman was probably, in its essence, a lie.
J had quietly collapsed at Mitsuko’s side and, in the darkness, had turned onto his back in the same position as Mitsuko. Their naked bodies lay arranged together in the dark. They listened to the sound of each other’s breathing. Both had their eyes wide open. When the sweat began to chill them, their naked legs worked together to pull the blanket over their bodies. All the while they remained silent. Downstairs they could hear the echoing laughter of Keiko, the actor, and J’s sister. They could not hear the voices of the cameraman and the young poet . . .
“Instead of a fake orgasm, don’t you ever want to try for the real thing?” J said suddenly.
“That’s not important to me. My real orgasm is film,” Mitsuko said. It felt like they’d had this husband-and-wife conversation a hundred times before.
“But tonight, for the first time, you were headed for the real thing.”
“It was no such thing. It can’t happen.” She was genuinely shocked and practically paralyzed with fear. She believed that frigidity was the most essential element of her free existence.
“But you were excited.”
“I wasn’t. I tell you it’s not possible.”
“If that’s the way you want it, okay. I’m going to sleep,” J said. Then he was silent.
Mitsuko had lost her sense of certainty. That’s right—it must be like J said. I was excited, she thought. Mitsuko had had sex with her old classmate before, but when the poet held her outside the door, she’d suddenly discovered a new self that was in an orbit leading toward orgasm. Whenever J held her, no matter what she did to entice him, his fingers were incapable of even imitating the movement of the poet’s fingers in that one moment. What Mitsuko had felt dimly, when the poet’s fingers went instantly and without hesitation to her sex, was not a lie, but the action of a person who wants a woman. That was the opposite of J. For a moment she had felt that she might abandon filmmaking and run off into the darkness outside the mountain house with her old lover, the poet. Suddenly she had been struck by a deep fear. So she rejected the path of destruction which led to the orgasm inside her, rejected the young poet, and decided to return to film, which was her one and only passion. That was why, pale and trembling, she’d gone up the stairs. When she reached that dark room, which was still redolent of the jazz singer’s body and started to have intercourse with her husband, who was waiting in the unpleasantly warm bed, she had felt as though she’d completely conquered her moment of vacillation.
For Mitsuko, J was the ideal husband. He gave her everything she needed to make a film, and he always let her stay inside herself. She was trying to become a truly liberated female artist, and for that, she had to be free of all the constraints that constitute womanhood. She had to reject every temptation that might turn her firm insides into an unstable viscous gruel. Her orgasm as a woman would destroy her fundamental antifeminine rights as a filmmaker. Mitsuko had resolved not to fall into that trap. She thought she had also succeeded in her efforts to establish her freedom from the poison of female jealousy; but if one passing caress from the young poet could stir her as much as that, where was she supposed to go from here? Since her husband was sleeping beside her, Mitsuko stiffened her body so that he wou
ldn’t notice as she cried a few tears. Several times while they were having sex, J had screwed his head around and said that a pair of eyes were watching them from somewhere. She tried to urge him on, saying, “No, J, there’s nobody watching us, doesn’t this feel good, just relax now, let it happen, there’s nobody and nothing watching.” But she too felt like someone was watching them. Were those the eyes of the evil spirit who wanted to see the moment of her defeat—when, like a silly woman, she would feel the orgasm even a dog can feel, when she would give up her passion for the great work of creating an avant-garde film just for the dirty instinct of sex? Sobbing, Mitsuko went to sleep . . .
J was liberated. While his wife was sobbing, he lay on his back, naked, breathing only slightly. Like a traveler who encounters a bear, he pretended to be dead, partly out of fear and partly as a strategy. He even wished he had gills he could breathe through. Two years before, the cameraman, who’d been a friend since childhood, had introduced him to a young woman who aspired to be a film director. She was just out of school and had a temporary job in the production studio where the cameraman was making educational films. She was wearing jeans and had her dirty hair pulled back in a knot that she tied with a rubber band. There was something pathetic and young about her; she had a manic look in her eyes. Sexually the young woman was completely free, but because she was frigid, she didn’t attach any particular importance to intercourse. All her passion was bent toward her dream of making a film. A year later, J and the girl got married. From that time forward, he had pursued his grand, untiring, insidious project. J had wanted to create a private sexual microcosm, with himself at its center. But J dreaded scandal, a dread of what was virtually the life’s blood of the society in which his family moved. Unlike his sister, with her foolhardy courage, J possessed the cowardly heart of a rabbit. After the death of his first wife, he’d become incapable of dealing in any way with the real world. Instead, he became even more firmly attached to his private sexual microcosm, like an oyster clinging to a rock. That, he felt, was the one road to meaning in his life.