Alice in Bed by Judith Hooper Read Free Book Online

written some shocking verses, which Aunt Grace, of all people, gave me, evidently failing to grasp a few of the metaphors. Have some more absinthe, Alice! You only live once.” She refilled both our glasses, adding more water and sugar. I drank again, my eyes glued on Sara’s in the mirror. As long as I kept my gaze there, my shyness and solitariness could melt away like snow in the sun.
    Holding my gaze, Sara said softly, “Alice, would you like me to show you the seven places where a woman should wear perfume?”
    There was evidently a great deal about being a woman I didn’t know. My mother and Aunt Kate seldom bothered with scent anddidn’t seem to know about the seven places. My eyes were fixed on the mirror as Sara’s fingers unbuttoned the first three buttons of my white cambric nightdress, gently dabbing the perfume on the first of the seven places. I almost forgot to breathe. After all seven places were anointed, Sara bent down, took my face in her hands and kissed me tenderly on the mouth. It took me by surprise, that lips should be so soft and pillowy, that a kiss could last so long, have so many different parts to it, and awaken such pleasure.
    Freeing my hair from its restraints, she wound some of it loosely around her hand and buried her face in it. In the candlelight she looked as if she were made of spun gold. The next thing I knew I was being led by the hand over to her bed. Had I fallen into a dream or a dimension so real it made everything else seem fake?
    Then I recalled that I’d been drinking absinthe.
    Sara was lying on her back and, with a yearning expression, tugged at my hand to pull me down on top of her. Wrapping her arms around me, she murmured, “Mmmmm” next to my ear and licked my earlobe with a flick of her tongue. My mind stopped, immobilized like a stunned bird, while my body yielded to the sensations coursing through me. Sara was meanwhile applying herself to kissing my neck and the hollow of my collarbone until my toes curled with pleasure, and then her lips crept lower. When she reached her arms around me and clasped the small of my back, the heat of her touch dissolved something hard and unyielding inside me. My insides were thawing and liquefying like ice in the sun.
    Then her hands were working their way down my spine, pressing and releasing, finding all the chords of my body and playing them. Later I would ask myself how Sara had acquired this expertise, and with whom, but for now my limbs were heavy and every part of me was surrendered—something that had happened before only in the best sort of dreams. My hand found the fullness of Sara’s breast, and then I was feeling and hearing my own breath, and Sara’s, quick and ragged as if we were climbing a steep mountain. Later I would not be able to recall how our nightdresses came off on their own, as if they were our chrysalises.
    It went on for a long time, caressing and being caressed in ways I didn’t know were possible. Cambridge, with its pontificating professors and their doting wives, Sara’s nice old-maid aunts, my parents with their fixed routines, the Nortons and their perfect manners and formal dining room full of Tintorettos—all that fell away and vanished.
    The next morning my life felt brand-new, sharp and bright as crystal, as if I’d never lived before. I hardly knew what to make of the mysteries unveiled to me during the night. It was puzzling that Sara was behaving as usual at breakfast, buttering her toast and methodically smearing jam on it as if our extraordinary night had not happened. It did not help to be hemmed in by Theodora, holding forth pedantically on a biography she was reading, and the Misses Ashburner, kind and pink-skinned, asking after my brothers.
    When we were briefly alone at table, Sara, stirring sugar into her coffee, said, “I believe there was a man who drank absinthe and murdered his whole family. It was in