Time: The Present — Selected Stories of Tess Slesinger by Tess Slesinger

Author:Tess Slesinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Boiler House Press
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Young Wife

This Quarter, Spring 1931

A sudden lurch of the train startled Esther into a sharp realization that she was going home to Mark: the steady jogging all night long had rhythmically droned the same truth into her ears, but it took this one extra lurch for the sound to carry significantly to her brain. Consciousness brought a moment of terror. For tomorrow this body that lay gently shaking with the motion of the train would be with Mark again, and what would it feel? this body that had spent last night with a stranger. In this queer coffin-world it looked oddly depersonalized, oddly like the body of some other woman. For an uneasy moment it seemed to Esther that it was no longer her body because it was no longer Mark’s body; it seemed wrong that some one else should have loved it, it seemed spoiled.

But in the same moment Esther’s body became tenderly reminiscent of its new experience. It had been good to feel hands of new desire upon her body again. Good to feel hands which were strange grow familiar, and yet, exploring out curves and recesses, remain strange, stranger’s hands. As her lover was a new lover, her body became a new body. She was conscious of it, she breathed through it, she felt with it, as she had not for a year, not since her first shy ecstatic contacts with Mark, her husband. There was no happiness in this strange embrace: there was hunger in it, sharp, delicious suspense, a reminder of that lost virgin ecstasy, a hint of that old sense of luxurious defilement. . . . There came over her body with the memory an expanding surge of voluptuousness, of freedom, of abandonment, a yearning to open itself wider than it had dared, in its timidity, to do last night to David. Esther wished he were with her now, lying cramped in this small berth, she could almost feel his hand as it had stolen for the first time, so painfully, under her dress. . . . And she felt suddenly defiant toward Mark: Mark who with his superior knowledge had initiated her into the ways of men and women, Mark who had been so long for her the only man. Now she was his equal. Now, after a year of half-resentful submission, she had proved by one act that she was not dependent upon Mark for fulfillment, she had made herself once more separate and whole. And when she thought of those past days filled with futile resenting, it was with the incredulous amusement that one feels on treading in daylight the path that was so impassable the night before.

For when Esther, a night’s journey from Mark, raised her face in a strange moonlight unlike that which fell upon her home, and saw above her the strange face of David lit by its own light of desire, she made no move to check the answering radiance of her own body. And when she

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