Little Birds Read Online Free Page B

dark-haired, with burning brown eyes like some animal that looked at once hungry and tender. He was fascinated by Edna's voice, enchanted by the softness of it. He was completely spellbound by her.
    He had just won a scholarship with an acting company. He and Edna shared a love of the stage. He renewed her faith in herself, in her attractiveness. He was not even quite aware that it was love. He treated her somewhat like an older sister, until one day backstage, when everyone had gone home and Edna had been rehearsing him, listening to him, giving her impressions, they acted out a kiss that did not stop. He took her, on the sofa of the stage setting, awkwardly, hurriedly, but with such an intensity that she felt him as she had never felt her husband. His words of praise, worship, cries of wonder, incited her, and she bloomed in his hands. They fell on the floor. The dust got into their throats, but they were still kissing, caressing, and Robert had a second erection.
    Edna and Robert were together all the time. Her alibi for Harry was that she was studying acting. It was a period of drunkenness, of blindness, of living only with the hands and mouth and body. Edna let Harry go off alone on his cruise. She was free now for six months. She and Robert lived together in New York, secretly. He had such magnetism in his hands that his touch, even his hand on her arm, sent warmth all through her. She lived open and sensitized to his presence. And his feeling about her voice was the same. He would telephone her at all hours to hear it. It was like a song luring him out of himself and out of his life. All other women were canceled by her voice.
    He entered her love with a sense of absolute possession, security. To hide and sleep in her, take her, enjoy her, they were all the same. There were no tensions, no moments of ambivalence, hatred. The lovemaking never became wild and cruel, an animal bout in which one strives to rape the other, force one's way into the other and hurt with violence or desire. No, this was a melting together, a vanishing together into a soft, dark womb of warmth.
    Harry returned. And at the same time Dorothy came back from the West, where she had been working, sculpturing. She was herself now like a piece of highly polished wood, her features firm and chiseled, her voice earthy, her legs sturdy, her very nature hard and strong, like the work she did.
    She saw what had happened to Edna but did not know about her estrangement from Harry. She thought Robert had caused it, and hated him. She assumed he was a lover of the moment, just separating Harry and Edna for his own pleasure. She did not believe it was love. She fought Robert. She was cutting, biting. She herself was an impregnable virgin, though not puritanical or squeamish. She was open like a man, used lusty words, told bawdy stories, laughed about sex. But still she was impregnable to all.
    She felt Robert's antagonism exultantly. She loved the fire and angry demons in him, biting, snarling at her. What she hated above all was that most men in her presence wilted, grew small and feeble. Only the timid ones approached her, as if to seek her strength. She wanted to shatter them, seeing the way they crawled toward her treelike body. The idea of letting them push their penis between her legs was like allowing some insect to crawl over her. Whereas she gloried in the struggle to push Robert out of Edna's life, to humiliate him, demolish him. The three of them would sit together, Edna hiding her feelings about Harry, Robert not offering to take her away, not thinking, living only in the romantic present—dreamer. Dorothy accused him of this. Edna defended him; all the time she sat there thinking of the fiery way Robert took her the first time, the narrow little couch on which they lay, the dusty rug on which they rolled; thinking of his hands, the they penetrated her.
    Edna said to her sister, "You cannot understand. You have never been in love like this."
    Then