A SPIDER HAS BEEN BUSY SPINNING A WEB IN THE WINDOW CASEMENT since shortly after dawn. On top of its beauty, the web is a death trap, and as I lie there watching it, a small white moth flies straight into it. Its struggles are unbearable to watch, so I free it, tearing several sticky strands and making a mess of that part of the web, so painstakingly constructed this very morning. The moth flies off to the sanctuary of a cream-colored curtain, to dream of eating holes in my woolens. Did I do the right thing? After all, I have cheated the spider of a well-earned meal. It is not easy being a god.
Afterwards, I close my eyes and drift off.
“Do you remember where we left off? We were as usual on our knees in the tomblike chill of the chapel, with its stained glass depicting past Christian atrocities. I had just breathed on your neck, Vivienne. Do you feel a warm breeze smelling of tropical flowers and the sea?”
Hiding your smile behind your hands, you whisper out of the side of your mouth. “Isn’t that odd, chère Aurore, since we are in a drafty stone chapel in Paris in wintertime!”
“Attends, chérie! We must train our minds in difficult austerities”—the sisters have helpfully provided instructive pamphlets on this subject—“until we can transport ourselves at will to a distant tropical land. India, perhaps?”
“Yes!” Your eyes shine. The luminosity of your eyes is one of the seven wonders of my world. “Are we going there to baptize pagan babies?”
A fit of giggles seizes us. We have to hear about these accursed pagan babies ad nauseam here. The sisters consider it vital to baptize them so that they will not spend eternity in limbo, but if you ask me, limbo doesn’t sound so bad.
We wait for nighttime. Then I see your feet flying over the cold flagstones, and you slip, shivering, into my bed and pull the covers up over our heads. I feel your breath like a hot spring flowing into a cool pool. Soon we are far away. You press your ear to my chest as if to listen to my heart. I feel the goose-bumps on your arms and start to kiss them away.
“Be careful, Aurore! Sister will hear.”
“You forget that tonight we have Sister Dominique, who is stone deaf.”
“It would be helpful if she were blind as well,” you say, and we muffle our laughter with the pillow.
Our kisses become more fervent. “Have you seen any pagan babies around?” I ask, breathless from kissing.
“Mais bien sûr,” you say, with some pretty French gestures. “But, you know, here in India everyone goes up on the roof to sleep in the hot season. The cry of the lovesick peacocks in the courtyard drives one mad with desire.”
I am tracing the line of your cheek and jaw with my index and middle fingers, and you stretch and purr like a cat. Then you seize the front of my gown hungrily, and, trembling, unbutton the innumerable tiny cloth-covered buttons. I like the way you savor each bit of flesh uncovered. You whisper breathily in my ear, “We are supposed to tell the Hindoos about Jesus but I think they are bored to death with the subject.”
I giggle helplessly. “There is so much more to life than Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” Lying on my back I draw you down to me. I tug the straps of your nightgown down off your shoulders and your breasts tumble out, round as mangoes. You kiss me firmly on the mouth. Your mouth tastes fruity from the candies you hoard and eat under the covers. “So, then,” you say, with a look of lovely volupté, “we let the beautiful Indian ladies with their long blue-black hair tell us about their gods. Much more interesting than ours, n’est-ce pas?”
“Yes, and so many of them, too.” I can scarcely speak for the waves of pleasure crashing through me. “They’ve got one for everything—a goddess of childbirth, a god of the monsoon, even a goddess of smallpox. Ah, comme tu es diabolique!”
A loud snore erupts from sleeping Sister Dominque, causing us both to jump a foot. I am struck with helpless hilarity at the thought that she can’t hear herself snore. When I mention this to you, you laugh so hard the tears stream down your cheeks. Now the air feels like the steam rising from a laundry tub. Well, of course—we’re in India! We sneak out of bed, and, holding hands, patter out of the room in our bare feet and ascend a rude wooden ladder, trembling in our night-dresses. From the roof, the moon is huge and full and looks so close to earth that it seems to brush against the branches of the neem tree. Or do I mean the banyan tree?
ALICE JAMES
11 HAMILTON TERRACE, LEAMINGTON
JUNE 10, 1889
TO WILLIAM JAMES
A life-interest in a shawl, with reversion to the male heir, is so extraordinary & ludicrous a bequest that I can hardly think it could have been very seriously meant. My desire would, naturally, be to renounce my passing claim to that also, as I can hardly conceive of myself, under any conditions, as so abject as to grasp at a life-interest in a shawl!
P.S. If the shawl were left to me outright, I should leave it to you, William, on condition that you wrap it about you while you perform that unaeasthetic duty, which will one day fall to you, of passing my skin and bones through the Custom House.
HENRY JAMES
11 HAMILTON TERRACE, LEAMINGTON
MAY 24, 1889
TO WILLIAM JAMES
Alice told me she didn’t remember definitely how she had written to you, but that her letter proceeded really from a sense that she had been snubbed in her innermost, and later, on receipt of your letter, that she had been still more snubbed. Your mistake was, I take it, that you wrote to her too much as a well woman.
She cried to me about the cruelty or at least infelicity of AK’s taking from her, in her miserably limited little helpless life, the luxury of devising for herself the disposal of the objects in question. She has had a bad time of it ever since Aunt Kate began seriously to fail. She only gets on so long as nothing happens.