INTERNATIONAL LOVE
401
same one, the left, the claws thin and spread like a spider's legs–
the strike so fast it can hardly be seen. But felt, yes. And I am rocking
faster. The rungs of the chair creak slightly. Besides that, there is
only one sound in the room - a whimpering. Not Poupee's of course.
Jacqueline's mouth is closed, she is slowly chewing her pastry, the
sound comes from there. With all the life left in me I want to rise, to
mother her, to marry her, to caress her, to love her. But I don't rise.
Her eyes are yellow like Poupee's but smaller, and she
is
moaning.
I hear
it
still.
Days later we sat through the next lesson in my kitchen,
neither of us saying or doing anything out of the ordinary. But when
she began as usual to recopy her composition, I took the hand that
held her pen in my own hand. She looked at me in a way that seemed
meant to end the lesson. We kissed. When her tongue came out
suddenly to taste mine, I thought she'd be my first French girl, and
I took her close . . . but no, she escaped right through the door of
my apartment and downstairs in through the door of her mother's
apartment.
A couple of days after that, when I came tiptoeing anxiously
up to my place, key in hand, I distinctly heard the cat wailing.
The laundry room from which the sound came was opposite my
door. I went in cautiously.
My pupil was in there. She seemed excited, skinny, tired - lean–
ing against one wall, her shiny dbows tight against her waist, her
fIowerbell breasts pressed between her arms. It was a bare room, just
the big laundry sink, a bucket and mop, four grey walls and a
closet door. I sensed that the two of us must be alone in the house,
and I began to have thoughts, concrete thoughts ... would she feel
less afraid of discovery here in the empty laundry room with me ...
or could she be persuaded to come to my bed across the hall?
Against the door of the closet the cat Bijou rubbed its back peculiarly.
"Go away," Jacqueline said. "Please." Something had changed.
Clearly I was unwanted. Yet in some way I couldn"t fathom, she
did somehow seem excited by my arrival . . . and yet exhausted. I
went to her and touched the slope of her shoulder. I never touched
her again after that. The moment I caressed her, the cat's wail
modulated to a new pitch. My movement must have done some–
thing - increased Bijou's urgency - the gyrations against the closet
