Savage Beauty (31 page)

Then she mumbled something about her own dream, and they drifted into another kiss. “She talked as if she were breaking a long silence,” he remembered, “as if now, in my arms, she was free to speak her mind without fear.”

Soon, to Dell’s delight, they were seeing each other every day. But even this early in their relationship, Dell was anxious. When Edna wanted to know why he was in analysis, he spoke about certain “faults of character.” His inconstancy and fickleness with women troubled him. Edna was unconvinced. She said she’d noticed that his girls remained friends after they had stopped being lovers. Dell laughed and said that at thirty he had had enough love affairs. Edna didn’t think romantic love could last long in any case—she wanted to be in bed with him now, but she also insisted that their relationship continue “platonically.”

He watched her undress in her little room while the fire died down, carefully folding her clothes and placing them on a chair, before she slipped into bed. As they lay in each other’s arms, they kissed and talked, and he thought to himself that if she really wanted their companionship in bed to continue without going further, “I would conform to her wish.”

And it appeared that this was just how she wished it to be. Lying in my arms, not beneath but always above me, she kissed me with kisses that were for the most part sweet and dreamy but were sometimes fierce and agonized.

At first he considered it some peculiarly New England form of “bundling.” He fully expected that his “patience and devotion would be rewarded in the natural course of events.” But it wasn’t.

Dell was living in a basement room on Charlton Street. It was large and comfortable and bright with the Japanese prints Arthur Ficke had given him. He had built his bed in such a way that it resembled a low divan, and when Vincent admired it, he offered to build her one when she moved. Dell remembered one night turning out all the lights save one, over which he draped a colored silk scarf. Undressing slowly, admiring each other, they lay in bed, again kissing tenderly and chastely. They talked, and they argued.

She attacked my Freudian views and I defended them. I argued somewhat reluctantly and awkwardly, for a Freudian defense could not be conducted in amusing phrases—and besides, I felt that she wasn’t listening to anything I said. I had a notion that she was using intellectual argument as a means of cooling off my erotic feelings, and her own, too. In this earnest debate we would now and then sit up in bed, she with her lamp-lit torso and small firm breasts confronting me with impudent audacity while she defended platonic love against Freud.

To her (so far as I could make out) the Freudian program required woman’s complete sexual surrender to man—which might be inevitable but which brought an inescapable penalty; for when a girl gave herself completely to her lover, he would soon stop being in love with her—and then she could pine for him forlornly or turn lightly to another lover.

Dell thought this was nonsense and told her so. She thought it was entirely true and that he ought not to be impatient with her. She would keep their love the way it was, in its beauty. They had then known each other less than a month.

Dell helped Vincent find new rooms at 139 Waverly Place, “a fairly large room on the second floor, at the back. It had a corner washbowl with hot and cold taps.” The following day he built her a wooden frame for her bed just like his. Then he put up shelves around the washbasin and brought her some colored dishes from Vantine’s and hung a Hiroshige print of Arthur’s.

Norma, one evening, made a witty remark, and Edna said to me, “Give my little sister a kiss for that.” Norma came and put herself in my arms, our lips met in a kiss—and together we floated off in a blissful trance.… and clung together in that dreamy kiss, which went on and on until we were at last wakened by the sound of Edna’s sobbing. Norma, filled with remorse, ran to her. Edna was apologetic about her outburst. And I went away.

After this passage (which was left only in an unpublished manuscript), Dell records that none of them ever mentioned the incident again.

Norma insisted it hadn’t happened. When I pressed her—why would Dell invent such a scene? It wasn’t really about him, it was about the relationship between the sisters, wasn’t it?—she said, “I don’t know. I don’t remember. You’d have to ask Floyd, wouldn’t you?” Since Floyd Dell has been dead for years, the only record left was Norma’s memory.

Years, not weeks or months, but truly years have passed, and we were talking about their other sister, Kathleen—about the enmity that can grow between sisters like a malignancy—when Norma did remember that kiss: “Well, yes, okay! I do remember Vincent’s asking Floyd to kiss me. Why
should she? But why should I not? So I suppose I gave him everything I got. I suppose we got caught up in some long lovely kiss. I don’t mean anything vulgar. And, then, yes, she was crying. You see, there was this change in Vincent. In Camden,
I
was the girl all the boys wanted to take out. Well, things had changed in New York, she’d published
Renascence
. That made quite an impression in New York. They’d heard of Vincent.”

“One day it occurred to me to wonder what was the Freudian explanation of her persistence in ‘platonic’ behavior in bed,” Dell wrote, “and the answer came to my mind instantly.” The next time they were in bed together, Dell told her he’d guessed her secret: “You pretend that you have had many love affairs—but the truth, my dear, is that you are still a virgin. You have merely had homosexual affairs with girls at college.”

Dell says she was astonished and defensive about her behavior. “No man has ever found me out before!” she said. He “lectured her, instructively, affectionately, scornfully. I felt that it was my duty to rescue her from her psychological captivity.” But he refused any longer to take part in what he later called their platonic “performances.”

Shortly after that confrontation, he came swinging into her place with a bag of groceries for dinner, only to find her “sitting adoringly” at the feet of a college friend. “Edna told me that she had forgotten to tell me that she had a dinner date with Imogene [as he called her]. I went to the kitchen corner and unpacked the groceries, and went out. Something ailed me, and at first I didn’t know what it was. I was stricken, confused, shattered.” (In an earlier draft of this memoir Dell added another sentence: “It was in fact a violent attack of jealousy.”) He felt he could never see Edna again.

Norma came to him at last and asked what had happened. He could not tell her. But he went back to Waverly Place to say good-bye to Edna. At first he couldn’t speak. Edna asked him to tell her what was troubling him. “I managed with great difficulty to say a few words about her lies.”

She listened to him gravely and told him she had not lied to him, she had simply forgotten. She was not in love with the girl, she never had been, and she would not lie to him. He believed her.

After their reconciliation, Floyd awoke one morning with the feeling of spring, though there was still snow on the ground. He felt that he had a rare girl waiting for him, and he dressed quickly and ran to her.

I rang her bell (with my special ring), and, after a brief interval, the door clicked to admit me. I ran up the stairs and opened the door. She was alone and in bed. I locked the door and went and sat on her bed. She put her arms about me, and we kissed.… and then [she] closed her eyes and seemed to sleep. I took off my clothes and got into bed with her. Was she really sleeping, or only pretending, as my love-making began? Anyway, there was nothing platonic about it. She was yielding herself to me, sweetly and completely.

Her sleepy dreaminess went on until she seemed to awaken “with an air of being surprised at what she found herself doing”; but she did not stop him, and she was no longer simply yielding. Afterward, stroking his pale silky hair as he curled next to her, she said—almost to herself, it seemed to him—“I shall have many lovers.”

CHAPTER 13

D
ell felt that their happiness together was “paradisal.” He noticed that she continued to see her college friend, but it no longer bothered him. When he told her this, she smiled and said it was because now they were lovers. “
This was said in her occasional hard-boiled or down-to-earth manner,” he wrote. But when she added, “Now that you are having a normal sex-life you are not so sensitive and easily upset,” that did bother him: she hadn’t said “we,” and she hadn’t said “love.”

But she was no longer shy or hesitant, and at his apartment they were free from interruption by Norma, who after all shared Vincent’s room on Waverly Place. Dell remembered placing a long gilt-framed mirror

on chairs alongside our divan and [we] lay there naked in each other’s arms, so that we could see what we looked like when we made love; we had read that the spectacle was ludicrous and ugly—but we saw that that was a lie, for the spectacle was beautiful and charming.

Dell wanted to know everything about her and pressed her relentlessly. When he said he wanted to marry her, she deflected him. She told him, playfully at first, that she was not the girl to cook his meals and iron his shirts. When his importuning became unbearable, she cautioned him, “Never ask a girl poet to marry you, Floyd.” Finally, she said point-blank, “I am not so hopelessly besotted with you as that!” Which didn’t mean she was no longer interested in him sexually.

One night after Norma had gone to bed, she heard Vincent in the hall. “
I remember her coming in and passing my bed. I was sleepy and almost asleep when she came and sat down on the edge. Without any conversation that I can remember, she told me that I had this little piece of flesh between my legs and that I should rub it back and forth. And when I thought I couldn’t stand it anymore, then I should keep on rubbing it. I’m sure it was Floyd Dell who taught her that. And it was like Vincent to share the news with me.” Norma’s roguish gaze caught mine. “And now I’m sharing it with you. I’m sure you won’t believe it, but I had no idea what a clitoris was.”

Leaning forward in my chair, I asked her the only thing I could think of. “What did you do?”

“Oh, naughty Normie. I tried it!”