Little Birds Read Online Free Page A

on the street, Lina and I, holding each other by the waist, she pretended not to remember anything that had happened. I let her. The next day she left Paris.

Two Sisters
    There were two young sisters. One was stocky, dark-haired, vivid. The other was graceful, delicate. Dorothy had strength. Edna had a beautiful voice that haunted people, and she wanted to be an actress. They came from a well-to-do family who lived in Maryland. In the cellar of their house their father made a ceremony of burning D. H. Lawrence's books, which betrays how far behind this family was in the development of the sensual life. In spite of this, their father, with his eyes wet and brilliant, liked to take the girls on his knees, slip his hand under their little dresses and caress them.
    They had two brothers, Jake and David. Before the boys could get an erection they played at making love with their sisters. David and Dorothy were always paired off together, as were Edna and Jake. The delicate David liked his husky sister, and the rather virile Jake liked the plantlike fragility of Edna. The brothers laid their soft young penises between their sisters' legs, but that was all. This was done in great secrecy, lying on the rug of the dining room and accompanied by a feeling that they were committing the greatest of sexual crimes.
    Then suddenly these games stopped. The boys had discovered the world of sex through another boy. The sisters became self-conscious and were growing up. Puritanism was asserting itself in the family. Their father thundered and fought each intrusion from the outside world. He growled at the young men who came to call. He growled at dances, at parties of all kinds. With the fanaticism of an inquisitor, he burned the books he found his children reading. He gave up caressing his daughters. He did not know that they had made slits in their panties so when they dated they could be kissed between the legs, that they sat in cars with boys, sucking their penises, that the seat of the family car was stained with sperm. Even so, he fought off the young men who called too often. He did everything to prevent his daughters from marrying.
    Dorothy was studying sculpture. Edna still wanted to go on the stage. But then she fell in love with a man older than herself, the first man she had really known. The others were boys to her; they aroused a sort of maternal craving in her, a desire to protect. But Harry was forty, and he worked for a company that took rich people on cruises. As social captain of the cruise, it was his job to see that the guests were entertained, that they met one another, that their comforts were complete—and their intrigues, too. He helped the husbands to escape the vigilance of the wives, and the wives to escape their husbands. His stories of trips with these pampered rich stirred Edna.
    They got married. They took a trip around the world together. What Edna discovered in their travels was that the social captain supplied a great deal of the sexual intrigue in person.
    Edna returned from the trip estranged from her husband. Sexually he had not awakened her. She did not know why. Sometimes she thought it was because of her discovery of his having belonged to so many women. From the first night, it seemed that his possession was not of her, but of a woman like a hundred others. He had shown no emotion. When he undressed her he had said, "Oh, you have such thick hips. You seemed so slender, I never imagined you could have such thick hips."
    She felt humiliated, she felt that she was not desirable. This paralyzed her own confidence, her own outflow of love and desire for him. Partly in a mood of revenge, she began to look at him just as coldly as he had looked at her, and what she saw was a man of forty whose hair was growing thin, who was soon going to be very fat and looked ready to retire into a familiar and stolid life. He was no longer the man who had seen all the world.
    Then came Robert, thirty years old,