(no subject)
Looking back across that first week of our acquaintance I was struck by how much about how she spoke, dressed, behaved seemed designed, if not precisely to rebuff, then to make clear that if a certain degree of access had been granted much more was withheld and was likely to continue to be. Even when she at last undressed for me in her room her garters, which she never did remove and which I can for some reason picture her selecting from a catalog, seemed to suggest something more was being held back, even as they held back nothing. Letting her hair down seemed to belie that warning, though - seemed like the true crossing of a threshold, unlike the parenthesized denuding preceding it. While we weren't the sort to announce or verbally negotiate, and were as conservative as any couple that had abandoned shyness just since, the most arousing thing about her was a look of agreement in her eyes. It's a look you know, the one where the pupils have gone so large that you become aware of what they reflect, like a turned off television. The brightest light in the room or out the window dominates, becomes the moon or evening star of that small night. Even when still such eyes seem always to be leaning, coming toward you. Accurately or not, they seemed to convey that she would agree with whatever I proposed. Not because she had anticipated what that might be, but because she either no longer cared if she had or was excited that she hadn't. Half-asleep and watching her dress afterward there seemed something almost bureaucratic - even oddly reminiscent of Kafka's Castle - in the progressive layering of garments, the shining and knotting of the hair, the freezing of the expression via makeup into one of both superiority and slight surprise. "Almost certainly not" overwrote her native "Yes, of course." And I was now glad it did. Not because it kept other men at bay, as I expected no trouble yet from that quarter (perhaps naively), but because it somehow offered privacy. It felt something like the infinite-seeming quiet hallways, the loudly impersonal elevators, the giant's-living-room lobby and "Yes, and?" skepticism of the prompt, prompting desk clerks of our hotel. Something like all of those layers of evening one threads through to pass into night.