Read Cancel All Our Vows for Free Online

wanted, sliding them out of their envelopes, taking pleasure in the look of them, careful not to handle the microgrooves. She stacked them on the spindle and sat again on the floor in front of the big speaker. Resonances of atonal brass moved through the house, moved against her face and seemed to stir her fragile hair. She locked her slim legs in one of the basic positions of Yoga, a position she could maintain for hours. She folded her arms across her breasts, eyes shut against the surge of the music, feeling the familiar restlessness grow within her, the keen honing of a slender edge of tension, half physical, half unknown.
    In sudden restlessness she stripped off the light blouse, unhooked her brassiere and shrugged out of it. She stepped out of her skirt and kicked off her sandals and lay flat on the floor in front of the speaker. The hard heavy brass of the French horns was like a fluid moving across her body. The rug had a taut whiskery feel under her shoulders and hips, under the calves of her legs.
    The music stopped and another disc clacked down in place under the needle. This music had more wildness and she turned slowly over to lie with lips and breasts and pelvis flattened against the rug, arms and legs spread. With each quick breath she could smell the dust of the rug, feel the stir of her hair as her exhalations escaped along her cheeks.
    Restlessness grew and she jumped up to walk slowly back and forth across the rich flood of sound, her open palms brushing the hard satin of her thighs, so completely and physically aware of herself that each flex of muscle, each oiled turn of ball joint in socket, every erectile tremor was studied and weighed and observed in a coldness of excitement. She stood in front of the music, pressing the heels of her hands hard against the fronts of her thighs, then bringing them up hard and slow across the delicate intricacies of her body to cup at last the rigid breasts, and something within her was making a thin screaming sound.
    She arched her body and then reached forward suddenly and turned off the music. The silence was like a roaring. In ritual silence she walked slowly through the big house, finding every mirror, pausing to stare at herself in the mirrors, realizing suddenly that she had the hope of finding one mirror in which she could look and see, at last, another face, and it would be a pleasant madness.
    There was a thing that spiraled up hard within her, endlessly demanding bestialities. It wanted hurt and tearing and ripping. It wanted to race down a long hard torrent, endlessly, and it found itself in this quiet backwater, turning slowly, apart from life.
    This thing within me must be killed, or allowed to feed. It is something beyond a physical tension. Were it only that, the forlorn little ceremony of self-love would suffice. Or, in much the same manner, a rough shy meter-reader, or one of those sleek and knowing door-to-door salesmen, they would be enough if this were physical, only. But this thing within me discards those solutions as being cheap, and unclean and meaningless.
    And it also discards Ellis—poor dull Ellis with his apologetic love-making, his terrible efforts to keep from breathing too hard. Perhaps if, in the beginning, experimentation hadn’t been killed by his quaint and Victorian reserve …
    It isn’t a need for love, because I am beyond love. Two loves had I. And one they shot and one they drowned in the Coral Sea. Sad and beautiful name, with its pictures of pink reefs and the drowned, drifting hair. And there wasn’t enough of me left to ever love again. I died then,and in dying, selected a winner—coldly selected a steel-trap brain, a tool-steel ambition, and a fumbling inadequacy that does nothing for me.
    And I was dead and it didn’t matter. And now this thing is growing inside me. A thing that isn’t love, or the need for love. Love, perhaps, was a tree on which grew many kinds of strange fruit. The tree was burned and the fruit was