GIRL IN BLACK
41
desk. She bucked just enough to make it worthwhile, pushing up
against the hand at her white throat with which he held her down ;
and falling back again with a sigh that set the papers to whirling
about them both. Her knees, drawn up at first against her belly,
had relaxed; and she spoke, he realized, for the first time (but when
had he held her thus before?), still more sighed then spoke, urging
him on, "Yes. Now.
Now,
please. Yes."
For a moment, however, he stood astonished, almost paralyzed,
gazing down at her body, white where limbs and neck had shown,
white as frost or snow but warm with a heat that smote his face bent
toward a never consummated kiss; and black in belly and hams. and
upper thighs, black as the coat she wore; as
if
its color had seeped
indelibly into her flesh, or else these parts had burned to cindery
blackness in their own internal fire. White where visible, black where
concealed: he felt, bemused, that not he alone (but surely he as well
as all the rest) had longed but had not dared to dream her so; and
reaching out to touch her where the darkness of her blackness was
tenfold black, found himself saying, "Oh America, my new found
land."
The last word was a snore; and he hung between waking and
sleeping just long enough to know himself weary, weary, too weary
ever to ... to know that he had been, after all, all the rest: Frost and
Snow and Willowaw, Willowaw and Frost and.... To know that,
weary with their weariness, he slept.
