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hypnotic subject of a performer in a mystic rite, produced sophisticated
version of infantile make-believe by going through the mimetic actions of
hearing a moan in the dark, seeing for the first time a brand new young
stepmother, tasting something she hated, such as buttermilk, smelling
crushed grass in a lush orchard, or touching mirages of objects with her
sly, slender, girl-child hands. Among my papers I still have a mimeographed
sheet suggesting:
Tactile drill. Imagine Yourself picking up and holding: a pingpong
ball, an apple, a sticky date, a new flannel-fluffed tennis ball, a hot
potato, an ice cube, a kitten, a puppy, a horseshoe, a feather, a
flashlight.
Knead with your fingers the following imaginary things: a piece of
brad, india rubber, a friend's aching temple, a sample of velvet, a rose
petal.
You are a blind girl. Palpate the face of: a Greek youth, Cyrano, Santa
Claus, a baby, a laughing faun, a sleeping stranger, your father.
But she had been so pretty in the weaving of those delicate spells, in
the dreamy performance of her enchantments and duties! On certain
adventurous evenings, in Beardsley, I also had her dance for me with the
promise of some treat or gift, and although these routine leg-parted leaps
of hers were more like those of a football cheerleader than like the
languorous and jerky motions of a Parisian petit rat, the rhythms of
her not quite nubile limbs had given me pleasure. But all that was nothing,
absolutely nothing, to the indescribable itch of rapture that her tennis
game produced in me--the teasing delirious feeling of teetering on the very
brink of unearthly order and splendor.
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Despite her advanced age, she was more of a nymphet than ever, with her
apricot-colored limbs, in her sub-teen tennis togs! Winged gentlemen! No
hereafter is acceptable if it does not produce her as she was then, in that
Colorado resort between Snow and Elphinstone, with everything right: the
white wide little-boy shorts, the slender waist, the apricot midriff, the
white breast-kerchief whose ribbons went up and encircled her neck to end
behind in a dangling knot leaving bare her gaspingly young and adorable
apricot shoulder blades with that pubescence and those lovely gentle bones,
and the smooth, downward-tapering back. Her cap had a white peak. Her racket
had cost me a small fortune. Idiot, triple idiot! I could have filmed her! I
would have had her now with me, before my eyes, in the projection room of my
pain and despair!
She would wait and relax for a bar or two of white-lined time before
going into the act of serving, and often bounced the ball once or twice, or
pawed the ground a little, always at ease, always rather vague about the
score, always cheerful as she so seldom was in the dark life she led at
home. Her tennis was the highest point to which I can imagine a young
creature bringing the art of make-believe, although I daresay, for her it
was the very geometry of basic reality.
The exquisite clarity of all her movements had its auditory counterpart
in the pure ringing sound of her every stroke. The ball when it entered her
aura of control became somehow whiter, its resilience somehow richer, and
the instrument of precision she used upon it seemed inordinately prehensile
and deliberate at the moment of clinging contact. Her form was, indeed, an
absolutely perfect imitation of absolutely top-notch tennis--without any
utilitarian results. As Edusa's sister, Electra Gold, a marvelous young
coach, said to me once while I sat on a pulsating hard bench watching
Dolores Haze toying with Linda Hall (and being beaten by her): "Dolly has a
magnet in the center of her racket guts, but why the heck is she so polite?"
Ah, Electra, what did it matter, with such grace! I remember at the very
first game I watched being drenched with an almost painful convulsion of
beauty assimilation. My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at
the ample and springy start of the service cycle when there would develop
and hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed foot,
pristine armpit, burnished arm and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up
with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of
the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of
falling upon it with a clean resounding crack of her golden whip.
It had, that serve of hers, beauty, directness, youth, a classical
purity of trajectory, and was, despite its spanking pace, fairly easy to
return, having as it did no twist or sting to its long elegant hop.
That I could have had all her strokes, all her enchantments,
immortalized in segments of celluloid, makes me moan today with frustration.
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They would have been so much more than the snapshots I burned! Her overhead
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