The Descent Ch. 02

When she reached Paris a week earlier Lena had been expecting to stay with an old friend from her college days. Together they had planned excursions to the list of galleries drawn up by her husband and promised each other when that was done they would enjoy the luxury of drinking chocolate together in the Luxembourg Gardens. But she had already boarded the train when their final letters crossed in the post and she arrived at the small flat on Rue de Colette to find no sign of her friend. A neighbour explained she had been called to the sanatorium in Arles where her mother was dying. Lena was at a loss. It wasn't just that her ticket was for a week hence -- no doubt she could have changed it at the station -- but she found herself unwilling to lose this first taste of freedom that her married life had offered her. After wandering for an hour in the unfamiliar streets she entered a small hotel on the Rue Chevert and took a room.

Her first deception was to write a short note to her husband confirming her safe arrival and installation at the Rue de Colette. That done, she set her suitcase on the folding stand in her room and stood looking at herself in the ancient foxed mirror. She opened her dress and stepped out of it. A dizzying sense of freedom had overtaken her. The woman who stared back at her from the mirror was a mystery. Young, upright and slender, she seemed entirely untouched by the world. This was not far from the truth. Her husband was a fastidious man, a lawyer. In the 12 months of their married life he had never seen her naked. When he took her it was always in the dark, always without removing his nightshirt. He was a good man, she told herself, generous and kind. She was lucky to have him. But it saddened her that he locked the bathroom door when he bathed and corrected her when she did not do the same. Older than she was, he had promised to be her teacher. He was as good as his word. Bit by bit she was learning to feel shame at her own body.

Without thinking she let her hand move to her breast. She watched the hand in the mirror obediently follow. She marvelled at the mystery of touch. It was as if her hand had brought her breast into existence at the moment of contact. Had created this mound of soft flesh with its budding tip, that was hardening now under her fingers.

She turned and looked about her. The hotel room was completely anonymous. The faded prints on the walls, the tired chiffon of the curtains, the colourless bedspread. It contained nothing of her. No longer surrounded by her own furniture, and belongings she was suddenly adrift. Free from the pressure of a past history the woman in the mirror might have been anyone at all. She could be a saint, a dancer, even a whore from the Tuileries and the room would not contradict her. The room would have no opinion at all. She had not felt this sense of freedom in her short adult life. No one knew she was here. No one knew who or what she was. As she stood gazing at her reflection, she was not sure that she knew either.

The breast seemed to grow fuller under her fingers. The nipple showed itself proudly through the soft chemise. Now she watched the hand as if it were no longer hers but the hand of a lover. Saw him slip the thin strap from her shoulder so that the breast emerged, full and round. Half dressed like this the image in the mirror seemed somehow more shocking than if she had been wearing nothing at all. A laugh escaped her lips. Standing alone with a breast exposed in this tiny room in a foreign capital she felt reckless and alive

Lena understood that in many things she was still an innocent. She had never seen a man's penis - even her husband's. She had felt it as he pushed into her, but even this left her no clear picture of what it might be like. Her acquaintance with her husband's member was always brief. So much so that for the early weeks of her married life the first nudgings of its rounded head were immediately followed by the sensation of warm liquid spilling over her thighs. She lost her virginity by slow degrees, surrendering a little more on each of his weekly visits to her bed until one night to her great surprise -- and indeed to his -- the cock finally found what it had been seeking and she felt herself enclose him for the first time.

Even this did not herald the step forward in their life together she had imagined. For some weeks after he did not visit her bed. It was as if in penetrating her he felt his job was done. Two months had passed before he appeared again at her bedroom door. He seemed genuinely surprised that his conquest of her had not produced the expected pregnancy.

Cupping her breast in one hand she let the other slide over the flat plane of her stomach to the space between her legs. Alone in her bed she had allowed herself to explore this place. Protected by the shuttering dark her fingers had found the soft nub where the lips parted. She learned that by pressing her thighs together and stroking this precious piece of her flesh she could bring herself to experience the little death she had read about. In the heavily carpeted room she had heard the little whimpering cry that emerged from her throat and at once choked it back guiltily lest anyone should hear -- even though her husband lay far away in his own bed on the other side of the house.

Outside the sun emerged and poured through the tall window from the street, softened by the lace curtains but still filling the tiny room and driving out the shadows. In another moment Lena had slipped the chemise over her head and stepped out of her underskirt. She faced her own nakedness in the mirror. The light fell on her pale skin so that even the tiny blemish on her shoulder stood out clearly. Nothing of her was hidden. The space around her seemed to echo with possibilities.

Now she took a breast in each hand, and offered them to her image in the glass. She let her fingers circle the nipples and felt darts of electricity spread through her. Saw the colour rise in her cheeks. She thought of her husband. How shocked he would be to see her now. She pictured the confusion on his face if he were to walk into the room and find her naked. How much worse then for him to discover that the body he had claimed as his was not just a receptacle for his seed but had desires of its own. It was she discovered a surprise to her.

Daylight changed things. Alone in her bed in the dark she could pretend that what she felt had been an aberration that had no place in the waking world, something hidden and forbidden for which she would be rightly punished if she was caught. She found she could keep these things separate, the sense of herself as a respectable woman and the shapeless longings that came to her while the house slept.

Without her noticing one had had slipped lower between her legs. Her skin felt hot to the touch. Searching her swollen flesh she felt the tip of one finger slip between her lips to find the moistness she had felt growing in her since she had closed the door of her private sanctuary.

Her first instinct was to look away. To slip between the sheets and close her eyes until the moment of pleasure claimed her. She had already reached the bed and pulled back the covers when she stopped. Why should she hide? What could happen to her? Surely this was something she had a right to see? Slowly she returned to the mirror.

She watched with a growing sense of excitement as her hand returned to the moist warmth of her parting lips. Let the other rise to her nipple. Watched as her fingers began to move.

In this narrow room the sensations flowing through her seemed magnified. Every nerve ending had been tuned to a new pitch so that soon she was trembling like a violin voicing some inner melody. She was not sure her legs would support her. The intensity of her feelings frightened her. It was as if her whole body had been lying in wait, unregarded, for just this moment. At the deliberate touch all rational thought and feeling were driven out; desire claimed her. It was almost more than she could bear.

She heard the breathing of the woman in the mirror grow tight and shallow. Watched as a slow bloom of moisture appeared on her skin. She saw her throat become reddened and blotched as the blood obeyed its own internal summons. And then as she drew closer a new miracle appeared in the glass. The face in the mirror was hers and not hers. It acquired weight and gravity. As she forced herself to watch the familiar features were claimed by a different Lena, a Lena whose primal ancestry was visible in the hunger and urgency of her desire. She watched her lids grow heavier, her mouth open. Saw her head flung back -

The sound of her release was not the bleat of young lamb she had smothered in her pillow at home. Facing the image of her own sexuality here in the sunlit room she cried out as if a wound had opened in her, a wound that even as she sank exhausted to the floor she knew she might not survive.