My Hundred Lovers (4 page)
Can it be true that the box had a lid, like a coffin? The girl thinks it does, a lid on two squeaky hinges, and when the lid is closed there is total darkness. There is nothing but the close breathing mouth of her brother, whose fingers are trying to find out the difference between a boy and a girl.
The first boy's fingers to touch that secret pulse are her brother's.
Have you ever noticed how many people marry someone who looks like their brother or sister, like a missing member of their family, no doubt unconsciously influenced by what is known as genetic sexual attraction?
Let that boy, my brother Paul, count as my seventh lover.
THE FIRST GIRL I LOVED
had the whitest skin, as pale as an invalid's, and once, while playing leapfrog, she forgot to keep leaping but instead sat breathing with her legs spread upon my back.
I felt the pant of her breath on my neck, the race of her heart.
I felt the throb of her clitoris against the arch of my spine.
Neither of us moved.
I could have stayed like that for the rest of my life.
Nina Payne.
Nina Payne.
The whites of your eyes were white-blue like a newborn infant's.
Your upper gums showed when you smiled, glistening, moist.
I was jealous of your fringe. It rested against the high white dome of your forehead where I wished my lips could be.
Nina Payne's bedroom was at the back of her house. It was an old person's house, with old-fashioned, faded carpets and pink china figurines and a photograph of her father in a slouch hat and an army uniform. An only child, Nina Payne had elderly parents, at least as old as Nana Elsie.
We sometimes made cubbyhouses together. Mrs Payne let us take the good chairs from the dining room and blankets from the linen press into Nina Payne's girlish bedroom.
We holed ourselves up in our house in the dark and lay with our bodies pressed together, toe to toe.
We practised kissing, using our tongues, curling them deliciously around and around. Our tongues were entwined at their roots and once Nina Payne broke away, lifted up her long, swan-like neck and let out a moan.
I had never heard a sound like it before.
Immediately I wanted to hear it again.
The girl knew she was the boss of Nina Payne. Nina Payne was docile, practically mute, and the girl with the strange inner lips was the one who directed the play. She arranged when they would meet, at what time and at which house. The girl made her friend pretend to be a nurse while she lay in the dark of the cubbyhouse and made Nina Payne run her fingers over her body inch by inch to check for disease.
She made Nina Payne take off her underpants and walk around the yard in her dress, while the girl lay on the ground and looked up. She made Nina Payne sit with her legs apart so that she could see for herself whether she had a distinguishing feature like hers.
Nina Payne's vagina was pale, only slightly rosier than the rest of her.
The girl would have stuck her finger in except that her friend stood up and ran away.
In lying down with Nina Payne, in sucking her tongue and her strange, supine lips, the girl may indeed have been seeking the maternal body.
There was so much space between her mother and herself.
PERHAPS YOU HAVE HEARD OF
the Swedish woman who took as her lover the Berlin Wall. Eija-Ritta Berliner-Mauer, known as Mrs Berlin Wall since she married her lover on 17 June 1979, describes herself as an object-sexualist. By this Mrs Berlin Wall means that she is emotionally and sexually attracted to objects, and believes them to have souls, feelings and desires. As an animist, she thinks all objects are living: âIf one can see objects as living things, it is also pretty close to be able to fall in love with them.'
Eija-Ritta Berliner-Mauer lives quietly in a village in Sweden, surrounded by objects she has fallen in love with. The central figure in her life remains her now-broken husband.
Many people speak of loving housesâa particular house in which they were happy, or one in which they spent their wondrous first years. Some people speak of loving gardens, the contours of which are as familiar as a beloved face.
I once loved the jasmine that covered the side of the house in Sydney where I grew up, which every spring burst into starry blossom.
Brick.
Wall.
House.
The lover as object.
It is a private matter between the object lover and ourselves to know if the object lover loves us back.
I have not seen
Berlinmuren
, the film about Eija-Ritta Berliner-Mauer by the Norwegian artist Lars Laumann. I do not speak Swedish or Norwegian and my German is basic so the only words in the German reviews of the film I could make out were: âsex with the Berlin Wall'. When I close my eyes I see a thin, greying woman with her arms outspread, capturing nothing. Perhaps she engages in the gentle art of frotting any surviving bricks she owns, or maybe she mounts them.
In my mind's eye, the house in which Mrs Berlin Wall dwells looks like a cottage in a fairytale, deep in a dark Swedish forest. It has smoke coming from a chimney and I see her at the window, sitting at a long blond-wood table, the surface of which is adorned with bricks and barbed wire. Throughout the house are framed photographs of her retired husband in his vigorous prime.
In the bedroom, on the sheets and on the pillow, is a scattering of clay, dark, ruddy, smeared like blood. It is here, in the night, that Eija-Ritta communes most deeply with the object of her affections. In granting life to an inanimate object I imagine she is the very epitome of an intellectual; that is, giving breath to an ideaâin this case to some sublime idea of division, of partition, of
wallness
. It seems to me that Mrs Berlin Wall's devotion is an act more of mental life than of bodily life, but then again I am not there when her open mouth turns to the smear of dark clay beside her on the pillow and her love is suddenly made flesh.
It is true that I, too, have taken objects as my lovers: a car, a garden, a house. Longing for a house once entered my bloodstream like lust and for seven summers I rushed to this house, my heart wild in my chest, and I could hardly wait for my feet to touch its cool white tiles.
TEN, ELEVEN, TWELVE
CheeseâChocolateâCroissants
UNLIKE MRS BERLIN WALL, HOWEVER,
I could never marry an object that did not pulse with blood, or did not require light or rain in order to live. I might have an affair with a house, but I could never marry one. I could never marry anything without a mouth.
My mouth is the opening into myself, the principal portal of the body: the teeth, the gums, the fleshy slope of the throat, the glistening entrance into the dark depths below. The myriad tastebuds of the tongue which, when I was young, I imagined resembled the buds on the frangipani tree outside our house.
I pictured a tongueful of flowers, smaller than the eye could see, hundreds of tender buds opening as one to savour the body's bountiful catch.
From my earliest days I have had affairs with the food that gives my body life. Food may be mouthless but it is nonetheless animate, created by the dance of water, heat and light.
I have had endless affairs with fat French cheeses, creamy and sticky, made from raw cow's milk, brought to full, ripe life through the confluence of time and air. The rich distinctive smell of a mature brie de Melun has spilt into my nose and mouth, causing my mouth to flood with water and desire.
I have been a lover of milky chocolate dissolving on my tongue, of the dreamy bloom of thick, sensuous fragrance that spreads up from the tongue to the roof of the mouth, to light up all the pleasure receptors of the brain.
And then there is the croissant. Such a brief, perishing object! So full of life, yet as evanescent as the most fragile butterfly, dead by day's end, its flowering over within hours.
Le feuilletage
, layer upon layer of pastry animated by yeast, alive with butter, rolled and folded as carefully as an old-fashioned handwritten letter.
In the northern hemisphere croissants have a season, like asparagus or cherries, and the croissant's season is brief, from the end of October to the beginning of November. After this, the wheat harvests of summer are blended with older harvests, and the pastry made from blended wheat becomes inferior.
The particular warm, satisfying fragrance of a proper croissant
au beurre
in season, preferably eaten at a café in Paris on a pale autumn day, fresh out of the oven, warm and alive.
The whiff of the egg wash in the moment before the croissant enters the mouth and is felt upon the tongue. The crisp golden flakes surrounding its moist heart, flakes as sharp as toast, which crackle as you bite into it. Pierre Hermé, the renowned Parisian
pâtissier
, says that the sign of a good croissant is that you should be able to hear its suffering as you eat it.
The tongue is the last to forget desire: my mother's tongue loved chocolate, avocado and cream right up until the end, when at last her tongue of flowers forgot the sound of suffering.