“Oh Jim.”
I drop my clothes bundle and rush to him; he shoves back the eiderdown for me to crawl in beside him. We fall on each other in a frenzy, hands grasping and mouths finding the best places to land: necks, lips, ears. Our breath comes in joyous pumps, our lungs and mouths doing spontaneous work. Jim rolls me onto my back and slowly lifts the hem of my nightgown from ankle to knee to thigh, all the while keeping his ice-blue eyes to mine. I grin and he smiles back, then he drops his head between my legs. I puddle and swoon when the tip of his tongue reaches the tip of my sex. He sucks, he nibbles, he licks. His groans are heated, animal, his breath and spit hot on me, his tongue now hard, now soft. I buck forward, I guide his mouth and sing out with lust. Jim slides up me and his mouth is on mine, hot and slick and salty, and he has his maneen in his hand, to guide him inside. It doesn’t take more than one jolt and he’s in and tearing through me. My nightgown is rucked around my neck, half strangling me, and I struggle out of it and Jim’s mouth is around my nipple, fast as a starving babe. His suckling swoons my back upward and he pounds farther into me and it’s as if his maneen might come out of my throat. We’re locked together, the dear double-heart of the poem he said to me, and we buck and thrust until we’re both riding the same mad wave, somewhere outside of us but also deep within us, and it’s the strangest, most beautiful place I’ve ever been. I roll him onto his back and straddle him.
“Fuck up, love,” I whisper. Then louder I say it. “Fuck up, my lover.”
Jim cries out and I feel his flood inside me and I pull back so I will feel its heat outside of me, too, and he clamps his mouth around my breast until I, too, am shuddering like an animal. He flips me onto the bed and slides his naked body down mine, so his face is below again to feel the gorgeous madness breaking through me on his mouth.
We are stilled. Our skin soaked, salted and a-tingle. Our breaths come slower. Jim lifts his head to me and laughs.
“You’re my little fuckbird now, Nora.”
“That I am, Jim.”
I laugh and hold out my hands to him. He slithers up beside me and we kiss and giggle and hold each other, we talk and touch and love through the night until we’re altogether spent. We sleep.
Work
Zürich
OCTOBER 12, 1904
WE CAN’T UNGLUE OUR EYES FROM EACH OTHER AT THE breakfast table. I nearly burn my tongue on the hot chocolate, I’m paying so little heed to everything except the man before me. The crisp and buttery pastries are a mild distraction and we eat a fair few between us, but all the while we stare at the newness we find in each other. Herr Döblin and his staff flicker at the edge of our attention, serving us, tidying tables when the other guests finish their food and leave. After breakfast we tumble on the bed with our clothes still on, kissing and pressing at every scrap of heated flesh we can lay bare without stripping entirely. But, eventually, Jim pulls away and jumps to the floor.
“I hate to leave you, Gooseen, but the world of work calls.”
“Don’t be long, Jim,” I say, flicking up my skirts to give him a flash of my drawers. He leaps on me again and slots a finger inside me making me gasp. He probes his tongue in all parts of my mouth then hops up again and leaves, all groans and grins as he backs out the door.
I know he has to go to meet the man at the Berlitz school, to learn the particulars of his teaching job, but I’m lonely for him already and have nothing truly to do. I sulk on the bed for a few minutes, then I haul myself up and out, to look at this strange city of Zürich.
I dawdle down Bahnhofstrasse and stop to stare at the lavish displays in the shop windows, everything span-new and neatly arranged, breathing riches through the glass. I lean in closer to ogle the things that look good enough to taste: kid gloves flimsy as altar bread; a plum devoré velvet gown that I crave as a child craves sweets; hats with grape clusters and plumages a foot high. Jim says they call this “licking the windows” in French and I can see why; my nose is so close to the glass that my breath makes a steam patch. I fashion a J in it with one finger and walk on.
I wander and think about Jim, glowing with the memory of our loving. My heart and my sex, both, tighten and slacken in welcome throbs. But it seems to me that, despite everything between us, all regard and all lust, Jim does not know the meaning of love, or what it really is. Oh, he loves me, of that I’m certain but, for all his fancy wordage, he refuses to name what we have as love, he hesitates to define it that way.
Last night, after the first time, he spoke French to me. “Tu es touchée, Nora,” he said. He had to tell me that it meant I was no longer untouched, no longer a virgin.
“It might be easier to say ‘I love you,’ less mysterious.”
He rolled away. “How you ladies love to talk of love.”
“There are different kinds of love, Jim,” I said. “Mother love, lovers’ love, sisterly love.”
That made him shrug and light a cigarette. I’ve never met such a man for stubbornness in his ideas and positions; if Jim gets hold of a notion, the devil himself couldn’t wrestle it from his grasp.
This morning I pressed him again. “Do you love me, Jim?”
“If love is wanting the beloved one to be happy then, I suppose, what we have is love,” he said.
“You see, Jim, you said ‘beloved.’ The word love is trapped within the longer word.”
A little shrug of the shoulders and I wanted to strangle him, in truth, for not just saying “I love you, Nora Barnacle.” If only to settle my heart.
“I want to answer you honorably and truly, Nora, and if you question me, and then don’t like what you hear, well, that’s your own lookout.”
He’s a singular man, to be sure, my Jim.
I MAKE MY WAY BACK TO THE GASTHAUS HOFFNUNG AND GO UP to our room, thinking I will rest awhile before Jim gets back and then I’ll be ready for him, naked in the bed, as a surprise. But when I open the door, he’s here ahead of me, smoking a cigarette by the window. He doesn’t turn.
“Jim?”
“There’s no job for me in Zürich, Nora. It was all a lie.”
I close the door behind me, my heart thumping now. “What do you mean, love?”
“I was conned out of my money by that English agent I wrote to; she had nothing to do with the Berlitz school. There was never a position for me here.”
“Damn the woman.” I knead my fingers. All I can see is our adventure in Europe over before it even began and me returned to Ireland in shame. I gather my nerve, for his sake and for my own, and go and slip my arms around him from behind. “We’ll be all right, Jim.”
He turns and places his Turkish cigarette between my lips and I drag hard on it. “We will be all right,” he says. “I won’t let you down, my little goose.” He kisses my forehead. “The man from the Berlitz is sending out a call to their other European schools; I badgered him until he agreed to do so. I’ll be accommodated someplace, he says, he’s sure of it.”
“Might we be sent back to Paris?” I cross my fingers behind my back.
“It’ll be Switzerland or Italy, more likely.”
“Well then, that’s it, Jim. I don’t mind as long as we’re together.” And I really don’t.