Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932) Read Online Free PDF Page A

could not bring herself to stare. I told her how I was afraid to look at her body. We talked brokenly. She looked at my feet, in sandals, and thought them lovely.
    I said, "Do you like these sandals?" She answered that she had always loved sandals and worn them until she had become too poor to have them. I said, "Come up to my room and try the other pair I have."
    She tried them on, sitting on my bed. They were too small for her. I saw she wore cotton stockings, and it hurt me to see June in cotton stockings. I showed her my black cape, which she thought beautiful. I made her try it on, and then I saw the beauty of her body, its fullness and heaviness, and it overwhelmed me.
    I could not understand why she was so ill-at-ease, so timid, so frightened. I told her I would make her a cape like mine. Once I touched her arm. She moved it away. Had I frightened her? Could there be someone more sensitive and more afraid than I? I couldn't believe it. I was not afraid at that moment. I wanted desperately to touch her.
    When she sat on the couch downstairs, the opening of her dress showed the beginning of her breasts, and I wanted to kiss her there. I was acutely upset and trembling. I was becoming aware of her sensitiveness and fear of her own feelings. She talked, but now I knew she talked to evade a deeper inner talk—the things we could not say.
    We met the next day at American Express. She came in her tailored suit because I had said I liked it.
    She had said she wanted nothing from me but the perfume I wore and my wine-colored handkerchief. But I insisted that she had promised to let me buy her sandals.
    First I made her go to the ladies' room. I opened my bag and pulled out a pair of sheer stockings. "Put them on," I pleaded. She obeyed. Meanwhile I opened a bottle of perfume. "Put some on." The attendant was there, staring, waiting for her tip. I did not care about her. June had a hole in her sleeve.
    I was terribly happy. June was exultant. We talked simultaneously. "I wanted to call you last night. I wanted to send you a telegram," June said. She had wanted to tell me she was very unhappy on the train, regretting her awkwardness, her nervousness, her pointless talk. There had been so much, so much she wanted to say.
    Our fears of displeasing each other, of disappointing each other were the same. She had gone to the cafe in the evening as if drugged, full of thoughts of me. People's voices reached her from afar. She was elated. She could not sleep. What had I done to her? She had always been poised, she could always talk well, people never overwhelmed her.
    When I realized what she was revealing to me, I almost went mad with joy. She loved me, then? June! She sat beside me in the restaurant, small, timid, unworldly, panic-stricken. She would say something and then beg forgiveness for its stupidity. I could not bear it. I told her, "We have both lost ourselves, but sometimes we reveal the most when we are least like ourselves. I am not trying to think any more. I can't think when I am with you. You are like me, wishing for a perfect moment, but nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a worldly way. Neither one of us can say just the right thing. We are overwhelmed. Let us be overwhelmed. It is so lovely, so lovely. I love you, June."
    And not knowing what else to say I spread on the bench between us the wine-colored handkerchief she wanted, my coral earrings, my turquoise ring, which Hugo had given me and which it hurt me to give, but it was blood I wanted to lay before June's beauty and before June's incredible humility.
    We went to the sandal shop. In the shop the ugly woman who waited on us hated us and our visible happiness. I held June's hand firmly. I commandeered the shop. I was the man. I was firm, hard, willful with the shopkeepers. When they mentioned the broadness of June's feet, I scolded them. June could not understand their French, but she could see they were nasty. I said to her, "When people are nasty to you