Anais Nin Diary February 1940

[Stevyn]

I first met Beth at a party. She spoke softly. She was eloquent with her body. She lay on the couch as if it were time to go to bed rather than to talk or drink together. She placed her hand in mine as if we were old friends drawing comfort and companionship from this gesture, and the rest of the people were strangers. We agreed to meet again. She was the first flowerlike, plantlike woman I had met in New York, with a yielding, pliant, sensuous quality quite rare in a place filled with wiry, nervous, high-strung women.

She had plenty of leisure. She liked to shop, to linger over lunch, to talk. Our only difficulty was that I would be pulled away by my work.

In French museums I saw countless paintings of women about to step into their bath, pink-fleshed, fleshy, fresh-out-of-their-clothes, with the dew of coverage still clinging to them. Beth, all dressed, evoked these paintings, but being American she evoked far more the glow and roseate dewiness of after-the-bath. She was full-fleshed, transparently clean, with clear blue eyes as if a little water had gathered in a white porcelain cup. Her mouth was so full and ripe it reminded me of one of Man Ray's canvases, on which he had painted only a mouth, leaving the rest the chalk-sandy, off-white canvas desert. Beth appeared sensuous in every strand of her shining hair, in the pink lobe of her ears, a flesh made for nudity as naturally as a fruit. I could only imagine her in a bedroom about to undress, or already undressed. This image of her fruitlike skin not made for clothes may have been partly created by her recurrent talk: "At that time I was sleeping around with everyone, or with everybody." So I assumed she lived, breathed, existed in a constant atmosphere of erotic pleasures. It would have taken the most expert accounting to keep track of her sexual activity. She deceived me.

When she once told me she most enjoyed sleeping with men for money I concluded she was never satisfied, could not obtain enough men (I knew it was not money she needed).

She tried to persuade me to accompany her to an apartment where a certain lady took care of distributing girls according to taste and type. (I could not envisage any charm in this because I could only enjoy sexuality when I was in love.) When I questioned her about the quality or variations of the pleasures obtained she confessed she had never known an orgasm.

I knew no woman as easily persuaded to go to bed who had obtained so little from her play-acting. The extent of her frigidity appalled me, and I persuaded her it would only get worse, and finally become incurable if she so deadened her contact with men. I gently took her by the hand and led her to an analyst.

But this woman, who could undress at the request of any man, make love with anyone, go to orgies, act as a call girl in a professional house, this Beth told me she found it actually difficult to talk about sex!