Butterfly (25 page)

When I again lifted my eyes to Butterfly, her loveliness flooded my face like early morning sunshine. I saw her once more as in bygone days when I had basked in it so freely. It was as if her pardon had washed away all that separated me from her, all that encrusted and held me prisoner against the truest wishes of heart and mind. Our moment of deepest love suddenly came to me, with a vividness that transported me back in time. A current of sexuality, pure and potent, passed through our linked bodies, and my masculine core rose and surged toward her with an irresistible élan that the restraining garments could scarce contain.

Butterfly's eyes never left my face, but swept along by the reflux of desire, the woman in her had awakened. I felt its response in an all but palpable emanation that enfolded me in its electrifying flow. My arms circled around her hips to pull her to me, but her willing body instantly drew away. “Not here,” she gasped. She pryed loose my hold and, taking a step back, stood with my hands in hers. For a moment neither of us could speak.

She cast down her eyes and looked at my hands. “Your hand has healed?”

“My hand?”

“From fall.”

“Fall? What fall?”

“Your fall from horse!”

“Where do you get the idea that I've fallen from a horse?”

She became flustered. “You . . . you say yourself, in letter.”

I suddenly understood. Rash in my exaltation, I blurted out without reflecting, “I didn't write any letters! Oh, Butterfly ... that was part of my . . . vileness.”

“But I got letters. ...” She flushed slightly.

I already regretted what I had said, but it was too late to retract. “Sharpless wrote them,” I told her despondently. “He wrote in my name.”

“So . . .”A shadow had crossed her brow.

I wanted to weep. “I am sorry,” I said with an effort. “Can you forgive me?”

She could; she already did. Hadn't she said so? She smiled; her eyes had regained their clarity. I bent forward to kiss her hands. Clasping mine a little tighter, she drew me from my seat. The sexual call, for a moment suspended, once more sounded its
claim.

“We go?”

The hint of passion in her voice made me thrill. “Butterfly!” I whispered. Awkward in my desire, I stumbled alongside her toward the door.

81

Pinkerton remembered perfectly. It had been one of the first really cold days. They lay pleasantly crushed under layers and layers of covers. He had slipped into her almost without intending, their bodies had become so perfectly attuned. It was difficult to move under the heavy mass, but hardly any movement was needed.

“I feel you,” she had breathed. “So deep.”

Possessed by love, their very flesh and blood seemed animated from within by its high purpose. Something stirred at the innermost center of his being, surged with a momentum unguided by his will. As his desire strove toward its destiny, he could feel the vortex of her response powerfully drawing him on.

“Now, enter now!” he had heard her moan or so he imagined, for the voice was muffled and the words in a language not his own.

And his life, deliquescing, flowed to her as if siphoned off in a stream, on and on. He could neither control nor stop it; it was marvelous, and a little frightening. The sensation was unlike any he had known. He felt transfixed as by an exquisite silver needle that pierced through his loins to hers, pinning them together for all eternity.

He did not cry out as he often did. Nor did she. Hushed as before an epiphany, they lay together in a suspension of time. It was as if God had breathed through their bodies.

“Now we will have child,” she said. He nodded into her neck; he knew.

82

(The Nagasaki ms.)

No sooner had Butterfly gotten the door open—I had turned the key in the lock to forestall any undesired intrusion—than a voice rang out from behind us.

“Are you leaving so soon?”

The voice brought me up like a leash whose existence I had momentarily forgotten. Through the connecting door to the bedroom, Kate had emerged and was coming toward us. “Henry!” she chided. “You knew that I wanted to meet your charming guest. I should have thought you'd be more considerate.”

Discomfited, I introduced the two women. Kate was all smiles and amenities, while Butterfly contented herself with a bow and curt formal phrases. Underneath their polished behavior, however, I could sense on the part of one and the other a certain wary excitement, for each knew that she was facing a formidable opponent.

Kate was the first to attack. “Henry has told me so much about you, such interesting things, too, that I almost feel I know you.” She looked down at Butterfly—in her high-heeled shoes, she towered a good six inches over her—with overbearing admiration. “Except that you are twice as lovely in person.”

“He has been telling me about you too,” Butterfly said meaningfully, though her face remained impassive. Her self-possession and delicate beauty, exquisitely wrapped in the splendid kimono, made Kate seem florid and vampiric for all her peerless natural beauty and studied simplicity of toilette.

“Oh? And you're still willing to take him back!” Kate, speaking with mock astonishment, turned to me. “Henry, she is an angel.”

“Kate . . .” I began, half entreating and half threatening, for at that moment I felt a sudden antipathy for her and would willingly have wrung her neck to stop the pernicious needling. Butterfly, however, was a step ahead with her rejoinder.

“There is much more to tell, I am sure, and I am interested to hear, because curious,” she said imperturbably. “But it is not important.”

Kate's eyes narrowed. “I wonder if Henry would agree.” Turning again to me, she smiled with cherubic malice. “The mark, for instance—how did you explain that to her? Or haven't you yet?”

The allusion was like a jerk of the leash to remind the dog of its condition. I colored.

“But that is none of my business now. It is clear that your decision is taken. A wise decision, too.” She cast a significant glance in Butterfly's direction. “I congratulate you.”

“Kate, you mistake my intentions,” I said with a serious mien.

“Oh, no, I mistake nothing.” Her laugh had an edge of bitterness. “And I approve the step you're taking, be assured. Especially now that I've seen her. I wish you both a long happiness.

“I am not leaving,” I declared unsmilingly. “I'll explain everything later.”

“There is nothing to explain. I'll be sailing shortly, the arrangements have already been made, so you needn't trouble about it or bother to send me off; in fact, I'd rather you didn't. I can manage perfectly well with Goro's help.”

“I'm not leaving you, Kate” I repeated.

“Then I'll be leaving you,” she said in a tone of playful melancholy. Our eyes met, and I found in hers—I had not looked into them since she made me her slave—a look that surprised me. I recognized it from the earliest days of our courtship; euphoric and dazzled as I was then, it had spoken to
me of life's profound mysteries and the miracle of love. Now, though I did not overlook an unexpected amorousness, what I saw in those deep, dark eyes was above all sorrow. It was a sorrow without bounds, an oceanic sadness in whose murky depths seemed to lie buried every human woe. For the first time perhaps, I saw beyond her impervious beauty, beyond its public call for adulation to a mute appeal for something nameless and darkly private. It was this unspoken appeal, not to the slave but to the lover, that clinched my fate. For all the passion that I had ever felt for her rose anew like a geyser in my breast.

“Kate, I will never leave you!”

The expression in her eyes suddenly altered; I could almost see the shutters slamming, and yet they did not completely close. A ray or two still penetrated from their depths, a mere glimmer which yet kept my heart on the line like a hook the fish cannot disgorge. An old tenderness, revived and already overflowing, made me ache.

But the accents in which she spoke were those, terrifyingly and reassuringly familiar, of the despotic mistress; and her face had resumed the implacable beauty that unfailingly forced my heart to its knees.

“No, go! I don't want to see you anymore!”

She turned abruptly and strode toward the bedroom. Caught between hot and cold, overwhelmed by the unforeseen turn of events, my judgment faltered. Aching with revived tenderness and unable to imagine separating from her whom I adored, I did what I had done once before with such fateful consequences: I rushed after Kate and threw myself at her feet.

With a violent fling of the arm, she freed herself from my grip and took a step back—prevented by furniture from overtaking her, I had grasped one of her hands and tugged it so that she was forced to turn around. Her face was ablaze as I had never seen it: with cold triumph, with explosive wrath.

“Henry,” she said in a voice like death. “Get up.”

Astonished by her anger, I could only look up stupidly at her.

“Get up!” she hissed, this time louder and with a note of despair. “Damn you, get up!”

“Please, Kate . . . Mistress ...”

She stared at me as if bewildered. Her breast heaved; a cry, terrible, unearthly, came as if torn from her entrails.

“All right then, be a slave!”

She fell upon me, her hands flailing out with hysterical violence as if wanting to knock me from the face of the earth, dealing blow upon blow until her arms could no longer for exhaustion, and still her desperate fury was not spent. Panting, her features contorted, she stood cursing me under her breath.

Butterfly had slipped away, I did not know when.

83

Kneeling at her feet, Pinkerton saw in a sudden flash the face that he had not been allowed to look upon for many months—the face not as it was now, ravaged no doubt like the wasting body, but as it had been one summer day fifteen years before. In his youthful ardor, he had been convinced that its beauty was immune to time, and for him it in fact had not changed.

The skin was so fine and clear and pellucid that he had felt as if he were dipping his face into fresh snow. It was the first time he approached her lips, and the kiss was as soft as moonlight upon an evening tuberose and as chaste. Their lips touched for perhaps a second, not much more, but it was a second plucked from time by the hand of God. As aeons hung upon their lips, the world around them, awakening from its age-old torpor, sprang alive in
pristine beauty; it was as if they had with that magical act created anew all past and future, and perfused it with harmony and light. Were they not like two halves of an arch vaulting high above the earth and reaching irresistibly toward one another? And was their kiss not the keystone that brought them to their common pinnacle? Indeed, to the enraptured youth, it had seemed the final keystone in all Creation, where past and future, spirit and flesh, life and death, joined together in aspiring glory.

Their lips drew back as from some sacred mystery and did not touch again. In the peaceful, vibrant transparency wrought by their alchemical union, they looked at one another in wonder. Colors had become uncommonly vivid and luminous; the air brisker, more crystalline. His whole being tingled with a consciousness of awakened manhood, with a newborn sense of purpose. The universe was one with himself, and it was burgeoning into a plenitude of teeming young buds.

Tears had begun to drip from Pinkerton's eyes; they flowed uncontrollably, though he contained his sobs. Sensing his sorrow, she did not scold but reached out her hands and put his head against her knees. Then he could not keep down the pain and wept with racking sobs. When at last his convulsions quieted, she solaced him with the only kindness that remained to them; raising the hem of her gown, she eased herself forward toward the edge of the armchair and drew his head deep between her thighs, there letting his tears mingle with the secretions in which his dreams had drowned.

84

(From the interview with Mrs. Milly Davenport)

Itwas awfully hard for Dada after that. You know, when someone you love dies—'specially someone who's too young for it—everything else dies too. It's like the spark of life has gone out. The whole world starts feeling like cold gray matter, an empty desert forsaken by God. But if God's not there, where did He go? It always comes back to that, doesn't it? Where your God is, that's the question, not whether God exists—everybody knows God exists, even the atheists, deep down. But they don't know where to find Him, because God has a way of disappearing behind clouds, like the sun, but the light is still there, only you've got to know that the light comes from the sun. Dada kept on asking: Where was God when Butterfly died? Was He dead too, like that German philosopher claims? And if that's the case, what is the point of living at all? “Those were days when I couldn't see a spot of light anywhere,” he told me. “Not in heaven, not on earth. I searched my soul, I turned it inside out, and all I found was darkness, and more darkness. I was appalled to look, and I was appalled that I hadn't ever looked before.”

“And you didn't find your spot of light?” I asked.

“Yes, Milly, I did,” he replied in his deep, quiet voice. “It was there all the time, only I didn't see it, not till later.”

It was pretty late by the time Dada got home that night after seeing Pinkerton, because he walked around for a bit to get a grip on himself, but Grandma Charlotte was waiting up for him. Now, feeling low the way he did, about the last thing he felt like was having to contend with Grandma Charlotte and her hostility toward Butterfly. Of course Grandma Charlotte saw straightaway something was wrong and asked about it. Dada fobbed her off by
claiming the Japanese dinner he'd had wasn't much agreeing with him, but he couldn't keep himself from blushing on account of her eyes being fixed on him so sharp and hard. She didn't say anything either, just kept on looking while he stood there uncomfortably wishing she'd leave him be. Then she shrugged like she was about to give up and go away, but at the last instant she changed her mind and spoke in a soft husky voice that he hadn't heard for a long, long time.

“Come on, George, tell me,” she said in a jaunty, playful manner—you know the ways girls talk when they're trying to wheedle something out of a body. Dada told me she used to talk like that sometimes back in the days when they were first married, but that was a good many years before.