Strange thing: wanting to reassure Henry, I took a siesta with him, knowing he would take me, and I responded fully. And it was after this I went down to the Mexican room and could still vibrate under John’s earthy caresses.
Mars of the earth again.
John can do something none of my other loves could do—he can make me feel joyous, sensual, free of pain.
I enjoy my power. I can say John’s name in such a way that he says it feels like a knife. I can make him tremble with desire, quaking with it, keep him awake and tortured. He has given me what woman should value highly—a young man’s first passion, so total, so romantic and fervent. I feel beautiful, desirable, potent in his hands. The light in his face at times is dazzling. After a walk in the dark when merely brushing each other, we could create ecstasy. Even in the dark his face is resplendent.
John, it is marvelous to arouse desire. Do not be too hurt. So much in the world we should caress and love only with the blood and the flesh because it is beautiful, brilliant, alive—as we love fire. No small role—giving me pure joy—giving me life in this body, a miraculous current without pain. For the first time the Sun. I was never given the Sun.
Poor little Flo—she taps John’s knees lightly with a small, helpless hand. I dig my nails into them and he trembles like a racehorse.
MAMARONECK, AUGUST 12, 1940
I believe I have defended myself against loving John, against suffering. I believe that just as in the beginning when I still loved Henry and couldn’t yield to Gonzalo absolutely, so have I defended myself against yielding to John. Whenever I arrive at Hampton Manor, I am prepared not to feel. And so it was the last time. Because there was Flo, because John is poor and not free, because of his youth, there were obstacles. Anyway, I arrived cold. And for a few hours all was well, but soon the warmth returned. John may have been talking. I saw his eyes on me. I looked at his mouth.
The next day the torment began. I found him depressed. Flo attacked him each time they went to their room. Her instinct is not blind: she told him: “I am not the woman for you. Anaïs is the woman for you.” And then, more obscurely, she fights to diminish him, crush him. She tells him he must not be crude (when he is merely impulsive), that he talks too much, or she attacks his work. Poor John.
All the time we were watching for a moment together, and all through the first day it was impossible. The next day Caresse arrived early in the morning. She sent us on errands, which included two huge valises so that no one else could get into the car. John and I went—and we went to the woods. The moment was too short for me to respond fully in spite of my excitement, but I still feel the starved kisses, the violence. That evening, a walk in the dark with sparks burning through us.
Caresse announced her publishing partner was failing her. Somehow or other we all simultaneously began to talk about doing it ourselves. Caresse was very concrete and determined. We sat at lunch, planning to run a press in Hampton Manor to publish the books she had intended to do: Nadja by Breton, translated by Jolas, a novel of Kay Boyle’s, memoirs by Marianne Gold, Cendrars, Radiquet, etc.
We walked over to the barn, but found it was too open for a press, and we would not be able to get it heated later. Then we walked to the house built for the servants, a lovely little white house all of natural wood inside, with many rooms. We decided to install the press there. As this was shaping into a solution to John’s life (penniless, nowhere to go, a good craftsman, he could live on running the press), it became all intermingled with our love. John saw it as our work. I could see him working, incited by love, and the excitement took the form of an intense personal joy which we wanted desperately to share together, to share together like a bottle of wine.
While everybody was looking through the rooms, talking, I caught John alone, walking behind me. I turned fully on him and whispered: “I love you!” which completely set him on fire.
That evening we were so full of emotions, we could not talk. John is so different from Gonzalo—so creative and not twisted. Things take form in his hands. He loves to build, to work, invent, discover. The night before—while Henry argued against us—we had talked about the necessity of recreating the universe from the beginning with our own hands. John has that. He likes to dominate matter. This likeness, this capability we both have attracts us to each other. That night the accord between our temperaments was so visible that Flo left the table and went to her room.
Next morning. It is the day of my departure. We find ourselves alone in the library, sitting far away from each other because we are in turmoil and John says he wants to pounce on me. Every time we look at each other we feel we are sent reeling. The whole world is reeling around us. It is unbearable. John comes over to me, takes my face in both his hands and quickly covers it with kisses.
He is despondent. He feels defeated, imprisoned by Flo, frustrated. I am depressed too, from so much supervision and repression.
A little later when I am all packed, I find Henry has fallen asleep. I leave the room. I go to Caresse and ask her if she will call John for me (Flo is ill in bed) so that I may see him a little while. She suggests I go to the little white house and wait there. She’ll come with John later. And this she does so deftly that Flo thinks John has been called to help Caresse carry things to the little house where the press is to be.
She leaves us there. My heart is beating. We kiss. John is ecstatic. “Everything you do I love, everything. You are perfect, marvelous! I like your audacity. I like all your impulses. Now I am happy.”
In the train I travel with Henry, who has to go to New York. I don’t know if it is Henry who has changed or my image of him, but he seems faded, grey somehow. In the train I am anxious because I fear I am going to fall in love with John, but there are reservations in my desire for him which do not exist in my other loves.
The night before I left for Virginia, lying with Gonzalo, after his possession of me, he moved his head in such a way that his long black hair brushed my breasts, and this I felt so deeply, as if every strand of hair were tangled with a strand of my own hair and tied around a cell of my blood. John’s gestures do not have this sort of effect on me. The intoxication is there each time, the need to embrace, kiss, to lie with him, but only while he is there, and it never grows roots into my being. Even this time, though I remember the intoxication, I do not feel those blood roots stirring in me, the kind that makes a woman know the man is inside her womb as a child would be, stirring at the center of her being.
AUGUST 22, 1940
Saturday I discovered I was pregnant—three months! Days of anguish over the money and the complications I feared would arise. Jacobson put me in the hands of a good German Jew who works for rich women. He said it would have to be done in two operations, one to insert a bag which dilates the womb (this is done without ether) and then a final one that is done with ether.
I set the date for Wednesday, the 21st. I arrived at nine-thirty and was strapped like an insane person, wrists tied, arms, waist, legs—a strange sensation of utter helplessness. Then the doctor came in. As he began to work, he found the womb dilating so easily that he continued the operation in spite of the terrific pain. And so in six minutes of torture, I had done what is usually done with ether! But it was over. I couldn’t believe it. Hugh was so full of anguish, and Gonzalo.
The only wonderful moment in all this was when I was lying on a little cot in the doctor’s office and another woman came in. The nurse pulled the curtain so that I could not see her. She was made to undress and lie down, to relax. The nurse left us.
Soon I heard a whisper to me: “How was it?” I reassured her—told her how I had been able to bear it without ether, so it would be nothing with ether.
She said: “How long were you pregnant?”
“Three months.”
“I only two—but I’m scared. My husband is away. He doesn’t know. He must never know.”
I