(1961) The Chapman Report (57 page)

“Why did he call you that?”

“Because I was frigid, I guess,” she said helplessly. “I guess I was. How could I know? At first, I thought it was his fault. But I wasn’t sure. And he was always sure. And so, finally, I decided that it was my fault. That was after he had died-no, even before, yes, even before, I was beginning to believe it was me. I never felt anything, Paul, and I couldn’t give anything. I don’t mean orgasm. Forget orgasm. I mean, passion, excitement, tenderness, desire-oh, love, just plain love. Eventually, he stopped coming home nights at a stretch. When he was home, I was stiff, I avoided him, I pretended I was tired or ill. Once a month maybe, he’d take me, or I’d let him, when he was drunk, and I was drugged with sleeping pills.”

“Did you try to do anything about it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Seek help?”

“Yes, one month I went to an analyst I’d heard the women discuss. I saw him a dozen times, I think. We just talked. He was always speaking of beautiful women who were inhibited by narcissism-women so much in love with themselves that they had no love left for anyone else-but that wasn’t me, because I never felt beautiful, not even when I was younger. Also, he quoted Stekel at me-unconscious punishment of a man who disappointed-well, maybe unconscious, but I tried consciously in the beginning to give something to Boynton. Then the analyst thought possibly it went back to the time when I was six. The neighbor girl and I always played with our dolls, and one day my mother caught us touching each other-you know-and I was punished. I guess I was always nervous about sexual behavior after that. I remembered, when I was twelve, I think, being ashamed of my breasts, walking hunched-anyway, there was no help from the analyst; he was too formal and unsympathetic, like Boynton in a way, and so I didn’t go back-just lived on and on in the ice palace.”

“And you still think you’re frigid?”

“The night I first met you-just before-a friend of Boynton’s who had been courting me came over and, well, I’d had the interview in my head and was upset about lying and wanted desperately to be normal, so I decided to give him what he wanted, hoping it might be different. I wanted him to take me. I led “him on. But at the last moment I just froze. It was involuntary. I couldn’t help it. I stopped him. He was furious.” She paused. “And you. When I thought you were trying to pet-you saw-I froze again. I

couldn’t control myself. I was afraid. I’m still afraid. You say marriage, and I say, how?”

Paul rubbed the briar of his pipe across the back of his hand. “Kathleen, have you ever had another man?”

“No.”

“How do you know it’s all you then? How can you be sure you’re-well, as you put it, frigid?”

“Because I’m afraid of the act, I don’t enjoy it, I’m not stimulated, it leaves me cold.”

“Have you wanted to sleep with me?”

“Yes,” she said immediately.

“That’s a rather warm emotion. That’s not cold.”

“Oh, yes, when we’re apart, and it doesn’t count. But if I knew it were to happen-“

“You can’t be certain how you’d finally feel. Actually, except in the case of a pelvic disorder, there’s no such thing as frigidity.”

“Please, Paul. I’ve read those ridiculous books.”

“Nevertheless, it’s true. Perhaps thirty-five to forty per cent of all women get little pleasure from intercourse-anesthesia of the vagina, the analysts call it, and it’s not uncommon-and the reasons vary from guilt to fear of pregnancy to some distant psychic trauma. But in every instance, it is not an inherent coldness the woman suffers, something that can’t be overcome, but rather an emotional block that can be worked loose to free the natural warmth down deep inside.”

“You think it’s an emotional block?”

“With you? Possibly. But possibly not. It may have much less to do with you than you think. It could have been your husband, you know. Too often, it is the man’s lack of technique, his poor judgment, his insensitivity, his neuroses, that make the woman unresponsive.” Paul lay down his pipe and looked at her anxious face. “You told me yourself,” he went on, “that you were shy and timid from the start. Had your husband understood this, then or later, and catered to it, you might have gradually begun to respond. But he couldn’t help you because he was ignorant, too. He mistook experience for knowledge, but experience, like common sense, can be a pack of stupid misinformation. And so, to bed. You found him sexually distasteful at once. Emotionally you closed up shop and threw away the key. But, believe me, because ardor and desire are asleep inside you does not mean that they don’t exist.

They’re there, alive, waiting to be freed. But no man, no matter how cherished, can do it without your help. Such prodigies do not exist. I think if you understand how much I love you, how much I love you and want you and need you-there’s no question in my mind that you’ll find the capacity to love me back.”

“But if I don’t-can’t?”

“You will, Kathleen.” He smiled. “End of interview.” He held out his arms. “Come here.”

She went into his arms.

“Now,” he said, “will you marry me?”

Her head was in the safe corner of his shoulder. She turned it upward. “I’ll let you answer for me-after you’ve slept with me.”

“You want me to make love to you first?”

“I want us to make love together.”

“Why, Kathleen? So I can audition you-have a preview?”

She closed her eyes, and he kissed her hard, almost angrily, and then, his heart wildly pounding, with persistent tenderness. Her breasts strained against his chest, and her body arched high in his arms, and her free hand caressed his face.

Briefly, he held her off, and found speech difficult. While he could, he wanted to have her understand. “Kathleen, I love you. But I’ve learned something, too-sex is only one part of love.”

“I want that part now.”

“Why?”

“Because I want you now. I want your sex-and your love-and you.”

“All right,” he said softly “Now, darling, right now.”

Naked and together on her bed, they were joined.

It was still not love, she decided, and never would be. She had not enjoyed a moment of it, and because of this, she knew that he could feel no differently. She had meant to pretend, to at least do that, but this was too important for a lie, and now her heart was heavier than the weight of him above her.

Femme de glace, she had warned him. And now he knew for himself.

Long minutes before-how many? five? ten?-he had crowned the countless kisses and caresses by entering her. She had wanted him and welcomed him with her mind, but her open thighs had been as rigid and lifeless as planks of wood. Yet, somehow, the desired and dreaded penetration had been effected, mechanically and with hurt, and ever since, she had lain stiffened by fear, knowing that each thrust and withdrawal pushed them further apart.

The guarded awareness of her hateful brain, the unyielding flatness of her shameful nudity, kept captive all response and repelled all rapture.

I told you, I told you, she wanted to scream in mortification. I’m infirm below the neck, infirm and petrified, I’m no good. Why didn’t you believe me? Why must it end this way?

Her eyes were closed to shut out all embarrassment, but from behind the lids, she imagined the stranger whom she loved and yet could not love because he was a man. She was conscious of each movement of his lean, muscular frame, of his lips and hands and loins, of the piercing of her flesh. Why, oh, why did she belong to that branch of living things that mated in this ridiculous, complex way? How did flora procreate, and fish, and birds? Weren’t there some living things that were fertilized by pollen and others that reproduced by splitting themselves into halves? Somewhere she had read-heard-of more sensible means-the tapeworm that possessed both male and female organs and mated with itself; and the oyster, yes, silly oyster, changing from female to male and back again. But this-this exacting complexity-forcing one dignified being to accept a foreign body inside its own? The foolishness of it!

She opened her eyes and stared up at the face she loved, and saw its love for her, and was sorry for what she was and was not. “I’m sorry, Paul,” she whispered. She wanted to say more, but his lips stopped her, and the lingering kiss and touch of his marvelous fingers on her breasts sent a wave of warmth slowly through her. And for miraculous seconds, because he was so precious, her white body became pliant and malleable. For the first time this night, although she hardly realized it, that part of him so deep inside her seemed less intrusive and more pleasurable.

Embracing him, she closed her eyes again and turned her face sideways on the pillow. She ceased to deliberate, allowing her flesh to relish this new contentment. Almost without knowing it, as an act quite apart from her intent, she had relaxed her thighs. A physical transformation, quite uncontrollable, seemed to possess her -the brown nipples of her breasts had swollen to points, and her womb had started to throb, and in her entire body a fierce genii took shape, a form unknown, a lust unknown, now known. Mindless she was, briefly-and then, suddenly angry at her helplessness

and the indecency of it, she opened her eyes and forced her mind to check and repress this unseemly reaction.

She tried objectively to see herself, to see this act of sexual intercourse. Always, before, she had thought Constance Ghatterley’s melting beneath the ardor of the mustached gamekeeper an absurdity of fiction. How could any one man release a woman from bondage to her inhibited past? And by means such as this?

And yet, now, clinging to her lover, the old doubt seemed less certain. Objectivity seemed to slide away. Because now, now, his love was so full inside her, parting and rending her flesh from its old inertia, heating her skin so recently cold, arousing her limbs with his consummating desire, lifting her passivity to the turmoil and rage of rapture and lust.

For a frantic moment, as in the old, old way, she tried to keep her identity, her aloof identity, to prevent losing it to the other individuality, prevent absorption into the other flesh. Desperately, she tried to curb the rising excitement and replace it with the habit of safe fondness and esteem. Ridicule this unnatural thing, she told herself, this unoyster thing, mock this ancient coupling, mock the awkwardness of the position, with limbs so ludicrous, mock the act itself, this unaesthetic muscular exhaling and inhaling, see the constricted breathless face above divested of all nobility and friendship-fight it, fight it, reach for the smooth used weapons of retreat and resistance, find them, grip them, fight it, fight it.

But grope as she would, there were no weapons, and she was helpless and alone with this wild engagement, and she was weak, weak, and all at once she did not care, and was almost happy. For now, more and more, conscious thought and control slipped away from her. Against her broken will, hating what was happening and loving it, she found her enemy body an ally with the one above.

Gradually, and at last, it was easier not to think than to think. It was easier to feel, and to allow her wandering mind finally to betray her and join her inflamed torso and surrender to the one above. Yet, in defeat there was a special victory, for the conqueror offered her more than she had ever known love to possess, not timid tenderness alone, not mere security, not simply art, but savage, joyous sensuality.

And suddenly the remote identity was gone and she wished only to be blended into the oneness of him. That instant, fused by passion, she let go of something held so many years-let go her separateness-and joined him without reservation. Crying out, she

gave herself totally, gasping words she had never spoken aloud, demanding that he take her, take her, remove her from this unendurable rack of pained pleasure.

Momentarily emerging from the animal agony of suspension, one human fear flashed through her head, and with it her heart seemed to stop. What if there would not be another time like this, and another and another? How could she live a day without this? Without her beloved? What if he had awakened her for this wondrous night only, and then left her a corpse, shattered for an eternity of years? Oh, couldn’t he see? She had come alive. She had crossed the barrier. She was his own. She had loved him before this night, but it had not been her entire life, but now she could not live without him.

She opened her eyes, meaning to ask him, but found that she had no voice except in her womb, and so with that, wildly, shamelessly, proudly, she told him her need. And he answered in her womb, and then with his lips whispering against her eyelids and parted mouth.

The past had dissolved, and there was left the present she could trust, and so she abandoned herself fully to carnal love. Thus impaled, champion over pride and fear, she clawed his shoulders, urging him closer, closer, closer, begging for release, caring for nothing but to be emptied of herself and all that had coursed into her loins and had risen dammed to the bursting point.

“Don’t stop,” she heard herself cry out, “don’t stop-don’t-“

Pitched to a frenzy by her chant, his love-giving became a ferocity matched by her own primitive love-taking.

Distantly, she heard him. “Kathleen-“

And herself. “Yes-oh, yes-“

Oh, Paul, she groaned.

And Paul-Paul-Paul—

Oh, Paul.

… thank God, Paul forever, forever.

When she awakened in the night, a vessel so wondrously drained, so peaceful with self and all the world, she was neither startled nor surprised to find her mate asleep beside her. She caressed his consumed naked body with her eyes, and gently she rubbed her neck on his arm heavy with slumber, and blissfully she luxuriated in the gift of an immortality of living years ahead.

Moonlight had invaded the room, and touched them both, and

heightened the sense of eternity. Quietly, Kathleen slipped off the bed and padded in nudity through the moonlight, like a goddess that had made her offering and received the ultimate blessing.

At the window, she parted the drapes slightly arid lifted her gaze to the serene blue sky, observing how the multitude of stars, in crystal clarity, blinked their approval and paraded in celebration. Silently, she thanked them for miraculous life, as once she had on a Christmas Eve in childhood.