The House of the Sleeping Beauties Read Free Page A

it."
    Her hands trembling violently, the woman stood up and threw the coat to the floor.
    "I hate it. Coming here just after you've had a baby in your arms."
    Her voice was harsh, but the look in her eyes was worse. She was a geisha with whom he had for some time been familiar. She had known all along that he had a wife and children, but the smell of the nursing child brought violent revulsion and jealousy. Eguchi and the geisha were not again on good terms.
    The smell the geisha so disliked had been from his youngest child. Eguchi had had a lover before was married. Her parents became suspicions, and his occasional meetings with her were turbulent. Once when he withdrew his face he saw that her breast was lightly stained with blood. He was startled, but, as if nothing had happened, he brought his face back and gently licked it away. The girl, in a trance, did not know what had happened. The delirium had passed. Even when he told her she did not seem to be in pain.
    So far away beyond the years, why had the two memories come back to him? It did not seem likely that because he had had in him the two memories he had smelled milk in the girl beside him. They were far beyond the years, but he did not think, somehow, that one distinguished near memories from distant memories as they were new or old.
    He might have a fresher and more immediate memories from his boyhood sixty years ago than from the yesterday. Was this tendency not clearer the older one aged? Could not a person's young days make him what he was, lead him through life? It was a triviality, but the girl, whose breast had been wet with blood had taught him that a man's lips could draw blood from almost any part of the woman's body. And although afterwards Eguchi had avoided going to that extreme, the memory, the gift from a woman bringing strength to a man's whole life, was still with him, a full sixty-seven years old.
    A still more trivial thing.
    "Before I go to sleep I close my eyes and count the men I wouldn't mind been kissed by. I count them up to my fingers. It's very pleasant. But it makes me sad when I can't think of even ten."
    These remarks had been made to the young Eguchi by the wife of a business executive, a middle-aged woman, a woman of society, and, report had it, an intelligent woman. She was waltzing with him at that time. Taking this sudden confession to mean that he was among those she would not mind being kisses by, Eguchi held her hands less tightly.
    "I only count them…" she said nonchalantly "You are young, and I suppose you don't find it sad to get to sleep. And if you do you always have your wife. But give it a try once I find it very good medicine."
    Her voice was if anything dry, and Eguchi did not answer. She had said that she only counted them. But one could suspect that she called up their faces and bodies in her mind. To conjure up ten would take a considerable amount of time and imagining. At the thought, the perfume as of a love potion from this woman somewhat past her prime came more strongly to Eguchi. She was free to draw in her mind as she wished the figure of Eguchi among the men she would not mind being kissed by. The mater was no concern of his, and he could neither resist nor complain. And yet it was sullying, the fact that without his knowing it he was being enjoyed in the mind of a middle-aged woman. But he had not forgotten her words. He was not without a suspicion afterwards that the woman have been playing with him, or that she had invented the story to make fun of him. But later still, only the words remained. The woman was long dead. Old Eguchi no longer had these doubts. And, clever woman, she had died after having imagined herself kissing how many hundreds of men?
    As old approached, Eguchi would, on nights when he had difficulty sleeping, sometimes remember the woman's words, and count up numbers of women in his fingers. But he did not stop at anything so simple as picturing those he would not mind kissing. He would