I do not want to see him again.
Hugh and I came to Mamaroneck for Hugh, so that he can enjoy his boating and fishing. I hate it. I want to run away from it.
Tonight I lie in bed hating my bourgeois life, feeling desperate and destructive while Americans celebrate the Fourth of July, throwing whistling bombs that remind me of those which terrorized us in Europe.
I should learn to accept twilight, deserts, impasses. I am liberated of my obsessive love, but not of the love itself.
JULY 13, 1940
After four days in Mamaroneck with Hugh, I spent a night with Gonzalo and took a plane to Richmond, Virginia, telling Gonzalo I was meeting Hugh in Washington. Gonzalo came to see me off after an intimate and emotional night.
At Richmond Henry was expecting me, with John Payne, Caresse’s young lover. We arrived at Hampton Manor, another enchanted house, like the Grand Meaulnes or Louveciennes, with its white columns, its deep frame of old trees, its large harmonious rooms, its extraordinary stillness, the enchanted sleep to the tune of whip o’ wills.
Caresse, whose life at the Mill (the Moulin du Soleil) was spangled with all the personalities of her time, felt that life might repeat itself with Henry and me at Hampton Manor. When she saw us there, writing, talking, she felt perhaps it was the Mill again, with Harry Crosby like a meteor, with Breton, Éluard, Frank Crane, Ernst, the painters, the aristocrats, the wealthy, the capricious. Now she had invited Henry, Salvador Dalí, and other artists. There are so many currents in Caresse’s receptive being that she brings forth more friendships, links and currents created by her life force. She sits stuttering, rubbing her eyes, rubbing smooth the wrinkles on her face, flicking her tongue, her small, sensual pink tongue.
We slept through long, hot afternoons. Henry wrote in the morning, adding many pages to Sexus.
We received telegrams from the Earl of Dudley that he might arrive Thursday or Friday with his wife, but I was not stirred. Yet when Thursday evening came and Caresse took us off to the movies I said, “Dudley will arrive tonight.” Henry said, “No, at three o’clock in the morning” Caresse said: “Tomorrow.” So we went to the movies, but I knew. As we were driving back to the house in the darkness, I said: “They are there. I know it.”
And they were.
As soon as I heard John’s voice, the sensual turmoil reawakened. His wife is small, dead, insignificant, lifeless. John stole a kiss from me in the dark stairway, and then we all went to bed, Henry and I in one room, John and his wife in another, Caresse alone because Payne is now in the army. I lay awake desiring John, whom I do not love, wishing he had the audacity to rise in the middle of the night, imagining how it would feel to meet in the dark, secretly, feeling each other’s bodies, as I read long ago in a novel which stirred me erotically at the age of nine. Darkness and nakedness.
In the morning the current of desire between us was so strong it was unendurable. I was leaving for ten days in the afternoon, and John’s wife followed him every minute with a fear of me. But Caresse took destiny in her own hands. She took John’s wife in her car to shop an hour away. Henry was trying to get in touch with his friend Emil Schnellock at Fredericksburg, so I suggested lightly that he too go to town and telephone him, and he did.
John had just finished taking a shower. I entered his room, and he began to kiss me hungrily in front of the window while we watched them driving away. The tension was so acute, a storm broke out during our caresses, a violent electrical storm. I stood by the window, John behind me. I pressed against him and felt his desire so hard and strong. He opened my blouse, took my breasts in his two hands and pushed them upward as if to drink from them. The storm over our heads, all the peace gone, fire and lightning bolts coursing through the body. We threw ourselves on the bed, and he took me with violence.
How grateful I was to Caresse for this moment, Caresse with her knowledge of passion. How joyous I was to have discovered this joy divorced from the pangs of love, this purely sensual vibration which alters in no way my deep love for Gonzalo, a vibration which takes place only when John is there, a drunkenness which lasts only while he is there, and of which I am free as soon as I leave him, free of love. Yes, he is the shepherd, and all I want is to bite into him when he is there, his flesh so alive, the summer perspiration fresh as dew, the sensual underlip. He is alive. Electric joys.
Nothing else about him interests me; his atmosphere of Middle West America homeliness, the cult of the ugly, the drinking, his dreams and talk, which I cannot even remember. Absolutely ordinary, youthful, too simple. He is imitating Henry. So when I leave him, the spell is broken, and I am free.
Caresse and I were in the airplane, talking, confiding. Caresse thought Hugh was going to meet me in New York, but I told her Hugh did not know I was arriving, that Gonzalo was going to meet me. Poor Gonzalo was desperately anxious—we were an hour late due to fog. He was waiting for me on the curb, anxiously staring at all the taxis. We spent the night in our little room. The next day we went together to Mamaroneck, to look for a place for him and Helba near Hugh and me. But they are so slow they will move in by the time I am ready to leave.
Here, in Mamaroneck, I have no excitement or fever, so I fall into an abysm. The smallest frustration makes me despondent. If I am thwarted I can easily think of suicide.
This place: a bourgeois apartment house near the bay, everything genteel and well regulated. The husbands all go to the city in the morning. The beaches are dull, the people stodgy and uninterested in each other. It is all plain and homely and tidy and colorless.
Now I think coldly like a demon: John will help me get through the summer, I will get strong, and in the fall I will throw myself into the fullest, most hectic life possible. I must find another love; I must get free of Gonzalo. It is all painful and negative now. He weighs on me heavily. I am only made for passion; it is the temperature of love that I cannot endure. I am afraid, and I think it is death—everything but passion seems like death to me. Only in fever do I feel life.
JULY 28, 1940
On the train from Fredericksburg to New York
Back in Hampton Manor again, Flo followed John like a shadow every minute. We could not even talk to each other alone. We could not touch each other. Tuesday, Wednesday. He does not know ruse yet. At night when we walked—we swayed in the dark to touch each other’s hands. Powerful currents traversed us. At any moment we could have made a wild gesture. The excitement mounted and became pain, the body aching with desire. One afternoon we went to the Potomac River to swim, and when I walked towards John in my bathing suit I saw the desire on his face. We knew we had to act.
Thursday morning Flo was not well, and she let John drive the poor negro, who has a tumor on his finger, to the doctor. We sat in a café and stole kisses, the tension growing so keen that I wanted to scream. We took the negro to the doctor, and then we drove to a pine forest I had observed on the way. We entered into the heart of it, walking on pine needles. We kissed voraciously. He slipped his hands into my shirt. What strength in John’s hands, what firmness. I felt his desire hard. We lay on the pine needles, and we almost shouted with the wildness of it, the ecstasy. When we returned to the house, we were gentle and appeased. When Henry and Flo took a siesta, John and I went down to the cellar, to the Mexican room, where he wanted me to see his drawings. I was naked under my cotton dress. He bit my thighs. Again delirium.
The last day we had only one hour together. Unable to unleash our desire for each other, I was forced to notice John’s character, and I saw the points at which we touch, the sensuality, the electric tensions, the positive onrushing natures, a likeness of swift, proud, domineering and active temperament, the capacity to burn. But he has a timid, plaintive, shrunken wife, who wants him small, who is afraid of the violence in him, afraid of a mistress who can give him a tremendous sense of expansion, set him on fire, challenge all his forces. The first time John and I returned from the ride