Delta of Venus

Lilith

Lilith was sexually cold, and her husband half knew it, in spite of her pretenses. This led to the following incident.

She never took sugar because she did not want to grow plumper than she was, and she used a sugar substitute, tiny white pills which she carried in her handbag all the time. One day she ran out of them and asked her husband to buy some on his way home. So he brought her a little vial like the one she had ordered, and she put two of the pills into her coffee after dinner.

They were sitting there together and he was looking at her with an expression of mellow tolerance, which he often had in face of her nervous explosions, her crises or egotism, of self blame, of panic. To all her dramatic behavior he responded with an unwavering good humor and patience. She was always storming alone, being angry alone, going through vast emotional upheavals in which he did not take part.

Possibly this was a symbol of the tension which did not take place between them sexually. He refused all her primitive, violent challenges and hostilities, he refused to enter this emotional arena with her and respond to her need of jealousies, of fears, of battles.

Perhaps if he had taken up her challenges and played the games that she liked to play, perhaps then she might have felt his presence with more of a physical impact. But Lilith’s husband did not know the preludes to sensual desire, did not know any of the stimulants that certain jungle natures require, and so, instead of answering her as soon as he saw her hair grow electric, her face more vivid, her eyes like lightning, her body restless and jerky like a racehorse’s, he retired behind this wall of objective understanding, this gentle teasing and acceptance of her, just as one watches an animal in the zoo and smiles at his antics, but is not drawn into his mood. It was this which left Lilith in a state of isolation – indeed, like a wild animal in an absolute desert.

When she stormed and when her temperature rose, her husband was nowhere to be seen. He was like some bland sky looking down at her and waiting for her storm to spend itself. If he, like an equally primitive animal, had appeared at the other end of this desert, facing her with the same electric tension of hair, skin, and eyes, if he had appeared with the same jungle body, treading heavily and wanting some pretext to leap out, embrace in fury, feel the warmth and strength of his opponent, then they might have rolled down together and the biting might have become of another sort, and the bout might have turned into an embrace, and the hair-pulling might have brought their mouths together, their teeth together, their tongues together. And out of the fury their genitals might have rubbed against each other, drawing sparks, and the two bodies would have had to enter each other to end this formidable tension.

And so tonight he sat back with this expression in his eyes, and she sat under the lamp furiously painting some object as if after she had painted it, she would devour it whole. Then he said, ‘You know, that was not sugar that I brought you and that you took for dinner. It was Spanish fly, a powder that makes one passionate.’

Lilith was astounded. ‘And you gave me that to take?’

‘Yes, I wanted to see how it would affect you, I thought it might be very pleasant for both of us.’

‘Oh, Billy,’ she said, ‘what a trick to play on me. And I promised Mabel that we’d go to the movies together. I can’t disappoint her. She’s been shut in at home for a week. Suppose it begins to affect me at the movies.’

‘Well, if you promised, you must go. But I’ll be waiting up for you.’

So, in a state of fever and high tension, Lilith went to fetch Mabel. She did not dare confess what her husband had done to her. She remembered all the stories that she had heard about Spanish fly. In the eighteenth century in France, men had made great use of it. She remembered the story of a certain aristocrat who, at the age of forty, when he was already a little weary from his assiduous lovemaking to all the attractive women of his time, fell so violently in love with a dancer who was only twenty years old that he spent three full days and nights with her in sexual intercourse – with the help of Spanish fly. Lilith tried to imagine what such an experience might be, how it would take her at some unexpected moment and she would have to run home and confess her desire to her husband.

As she sat in the darkened cinema, she could not watch the screen. Her head was in chaos. She sat taut on the edge of her seat, trying to sense the effects of the drug. She pulled herself up with a start when she noticed first of all that she had sat with her legs far apart, her skirt up on her knees.

She thought this was an expression of her already growing sexual fever. She tried to remember whether she had ever sat in this position before at the movies. She saw the parted legs as the most obscene position ever imagined, and realized that the person sitting in the row in front of her, which was set so much lower, would be able to see up her skirt and regale himself with the spectacle of her fresh new panties and new garters that she had bought only that day. Everything seemed to conspire for this night of orgy. Intuitively she must have foreseen it all when she went to buy herself panties with a fine lace ruffle on them, and garters of a deep coral color, which were very becoming to her smooth dancer’s legs.

She brought her legs together in anger. She thought that if this wild sexual mood took hold of her just then, she would not know what to do. Would she get up suddenly and say she had a headache and leave? Or could she turn toward Mabel – Mabel had always adored her. Would she dare turn to Mabel and caress her? She had heard of women caressing each other in the movies. A friend of hers had sat this way in the darkness of the movies, and very slowly her companion’s hand had unhooked the side opening of her skirt, slipped a hand to her sex and fondled her for a long time until she had come. How often this friend had repeated the delight of sitting still, controlling the upper half of her body, sitting straight and still, while a hand was caressing in the dark, secretly, slowly, mysteriously. Is this what would happen to Lilith now? She had never caressed a woman. She had sometimes thought to herself how marvelous it must be to caress a woman, the roundness of the ass, the softness of the belly, that particularly soft skin between the legs, and she had tried caressing herself in her bed in the dark, just to imagine how it must feel to touch a woman. She had often caressed her own breasts, imagining that they were those of another woman.

Closing her eyes now, she recalled Mabel’s body in a bathing suit, Mabel with her very round breasts almost bursting from the bathing suit, her thick, soft laughing mouth. How wonderful it would be! But still, between her own legs, there was no warmth of such nature to cause her to lose control and stretch her hand toward Mabel. The pills had not taken effect yet. She was cool, even constrained, between her legs; there was a tightness there, a tension. She could not relax. If she touched Mabel now, she would not have followed with a bolder gesture. Was Mabel wearing a skirt that fastened on the side, would Mabel like to be caressed? Lilith was growing restless. Every time she forgot herself, her legs stretched open again, in that pose that seemed to her so obscene, so inviting, like those gestures she had seen in the Balinese dancers, stretching out and away from the sex, leaving it unprotected.

The movie came to an end. Lilith drove her car silently along the dark roads. Her headlights fell on a car parked on the side of the road and suddenly illumined a couple not caressing in the usual sentimental way. The woman was sitting on the man’s knees with her back to him, he was raising himself tautly toward her, his whole body in a pose of a man reaching a sexual climax. He was in such a state that he could not stop when the lights fell on him. He stretched himself taut so as to feel the woman sitting over him, and she moved like a person half-faint from pleasure.

Lilith gasped at the sight, and Mabel said, ‘We certainly caught them at the best moment.’ And laughed. So Mabel knew this climax which Lilith had not known and wanted to know. Lilith wanted to ask her, ‘What is it like?’ But soon she would know. She would be impelled to let loose all those desires usually experienced only in fantasies, in long daydreams that filled her hours when she was alone in the house. She would sit painting and think: Now a man with whom I am very much in love enters. He enters the room and says, ‘Let me undress you.’ My husband never undressed me – he gets undressed by himself and then gets into bed and if he wants me he puts out the light. But this man will come and undress me slowly, piece by piece. This will give me so much time to feel him, his hands about me. He will loosen the belt first of all and touch my waist with his two hands and say, ‘What a beautiful waist you have, how it curves in, how slender it is.’ And then he will unbutton my blouse very slowly, and I will feel his hands unbuttoning each button and touching my breasts little by little, until they come out of the blouse, and then he will love them and suckle at the nipples like a child, hurting me a little with his teeth, and I will feel all this creeping over my whole body, untying each little tight nerve and dissolving me. He will get impatient with the skirt, tear at it a little. He will be in such a state of desire. He will not put out the light. He will keep looking at me with his desire, admiring me, worshiping me, warming my body with his hands, waiting until I am completely aroused, every little part of my skin.

Was the Spanish fly affecting her? No, she was languid, with her fantasy beginning again, over and over again – but that was all. Yet, the sight of the couple in the automobile, their state of ecstasy, was something she wanted to know.

When she reached home her husband was reading. He looked up and smiled at her mischievously. She did not want to confess that she was not affected. She was immensely disappointed in herself. What a cold woman she was, whom nothing could affect – not even this which had once made a nobleman in the eighteenth century make love for three nights and three days without stopping. What a monster she was. Even her husband must not know. He would laugh at her. In the end he would look for a more sensitive woman.

So she began to undress in front of him, walking back and forth half-naked, brushing her hair in front of the mirror. Usually she never did this. She did not want him to desire her. She did not enjoy it. It was something to be done quickly, for his sake. For her it was a sacrifice. His excitement and his enjoyment that she did not share were rather repulsive to her. She felt like a whore who was receiving money for this. She was a whore who had no feelings, and in exchange for his love and devotion she would fling this empty, unfeeling body at him. She felt ashamed to be so dead in her body.

But when she had finally slipped into bed, he said, ‘I don’t think the Spanish fly has affected you enough. I feel sleepy. You wake me up if …’

Lilith tried to sleep, but all of the time she was waiting to go wild with desire. After an hour she got up and went to the bathroom. She took the little tube along and took about ten pills, thinking, ‘This will do it now.’ And she waited. During the night her husband came into her bed. But she was so tight between her legs that no moisture would come, and she had to wet his penis with saliva.

The next morning she awakened weeping. Her husband questioned her. She told him the truth. Then he laughed. ‘But Lilith, it was a prank I played on you. That was not Spanish fly at all. I just played a prank on you.’

But from that moment Lilith was haunted by the idea that there might be ways of arousing herself artificially. She tried all the formulas she had heard about. She tried drinking big cups of chocolate with a great deal of vanilla in it. She tried eating onions. Alcohol did not affect her as it affected other people, because she was on her guard against it from the first. She could not forget herself.

She had heard about small balls that were used as an aphrodisiac in the East Indies. But how to obtain them? Where to ask for them? East Indian women inserted them inside the vagina. They were made of some very soft rubber with a soft, skinlike surface. When they were introduced into the sex they molded themselves to the form of it and then they moved as the woman moved, sensitively shaping themselves to every motion of the muscles, causing a titillation much more exciting than that of the penis or finger. Lilith would have liked to find one, and to keep it inside of herself day and night.