Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

They kissed in the darkness, while she steered him around the floor as if in a dance. She stopped, took his head between her hands. Outside, the pine trees loomed dark-blue. She was as tall as he, she curved her head round, kissed the back of his neck lingeringly, wrapped him in her hair, kissed him, gently bit him.

She pulled out a mattress, unrolled it and took off her clothes before purposefully laying him down on it and, as she did so, he realized how prepared he actually was, how ready , as if in painting him she had been priming him mentally to be made love to. And Dagny M. truly intended to make love to him. She pinned up her hair with two paintbrushes, Japanese-style, and sat astride him. She was wet, had saved up three months’ worth of moist lust, and now she let it ooze down over him, began to run her vulva over his body as if it were a sponge and she were washing him. Jonas felt as if she had gone from painting on a canvas to painting him, with a damp brush, a form of body-painting, decorating him, executing quirky little strokes this way and that like a ritual almost, as if she were intent on transforming him, recreating him or getting him to remember something, something of which he had only dreamed once upon a time. Dagny M. took her vulva on a long journey across his body, took her time, left tracks, lines, let her movements describe a pattern which she repeated again and again, drew her wet pubic hair across his thighs, his stomach, up to his nipples, made circling movements with her sex, moistened his skin, from head to toe. Jonas lay there and allowed himself to be slowly rocked, brushed, into another state of mind.

Then she guided him inside her, enfolded him, and even in the heat of the moment Jonas noted that she had a classic mare yoni, a vagina so delightful that as they made love in the dark he began to see colours, dramatic pictures which were, nonetheless, nothing but colours, large planes of colour flowing past one another or blending together, colours he had never seen before. It was as if he were on a journey through colours and shapes, going in all directions at once, and he wanted only for this journey to last, for her to go on and on making love to him, every bit as passionately, while the darkness glowed with colour.

He was jolted out of this state, or perception, by the orgasm which began to shake her, first gently then with greater and greater force, and yet so infinitely removed from all the clichéd notions of orgasm, while her face exhibited surprise, disbelief almost, as if she herself could not comprehend it, such forces, such pleasure coursing through her body or as if she had suspected that it was bound to come to this, at the end of a long journey which, for once, surpassed even the most optimistic expectations, but hardly dared, even so, to embrace this experience, this overwhelming ecstasy when first it made its full force felt.

And since he, too, had in a way returned to consciousness, he let himself slide the last bit of the way into unconditional surrender, and here, in Dagny M’s house, overlooking a purple landscape with the moon dripping gold onto the fjord, Jonas Wergeland did something he had never done before: he screamed out loud as he came, a scream that set waves of different colours rippling around his body, layer upon layer of them.

Although they only made love that one time, for both of them this proved to be a momentous event. Dagny M. was struck by a desire and a passion the likes of which she would never know again, a sense of euphoria which filled her the moment she lowered herself down onto him and did not leave her until long after she had climbed off him, a thrill and a warmth which were totally new to her and which relegated her orgasm to an almost incidental part of the pleasure. There may be those who imagine that I am exaggerating, but that is how it was and that is how it would be for all of those women who lowered themselves down onto Jonas Wergeland’s — I might as well say it now — quite exceptional penis. The very memory of this act of lovemaking was enough to make these women’s hearts beat faster and render them numb with desire, even as they were filled with a huge sense of loss, as if Jonas Wergeland had established a utopia which, they knew in their heart of hearts, they would never find again.

At the tail end of that long night, in the grey light of dawn, Jonas was allowed to see the picture, a picture which surprised him because it depicted only his face and because he was struck by the magnetism of the portrait as if becoming aware for the first time of his own charisma. His face looked like a map, limned in the colours of the atlas and marked with routes, lines, tracks: a face which presented the whole intricate network of stories which went to make up his life while at the same time capturing many of the other faces he owned, colours laid one on top of the other, hidden levels, levels of which he knew nothing, had only an inkling, and thanks to his gift, the ability to know a good work of art when he saw it, Jonas realized right away that this was a fine, no, a masterly picture.

‘Why did I have to pose in the nude?’ he asked.

‘Because the face is a part of the body,’ she replied.

Only a day or so later Jonas felt an irresistible urge to draw. He had done some drawing before but only every once in a while. But as soon as he picked up the pencil he could tell that something had changed; he was aware of a facility that had not been there before, the pencil even sat better between his fingers, as if he had been doing this all his life. And when he drew the first line on the paper he could see that even this line was quite different from anything else he could remember: sure, significant, not to say creative, it went its own way, and he experienced, not least, the pleasure of executing this line, the pencil point on the grain of the paper, the infinite potential of that line to become a part of anything whatsoever. So he drew, drew for a long time, and sketches grew beneath his fingers, amazing figures which showed him that he was on the trail of a considerable and untapped innate talent, and it would be no exaggeration to say that Jonas Wergeland — at long last — realized his dream of becoming an architect thanks to his encounter with Dagny M.

Dagny M.’s exhibition had been the talk of the arts scene in the high summer, a furore which gave rise to all manner of inquiry and analysis in the press, all of it dominated by philistine celebrities, and panel discussions on television in which those few who could actually wield a brush were drowned out by all of the other windbags. It had been a long time since Jonas had visited an exhibition, now that his grandmother had wound down her activities as a patron of the arts, but he did make a point, not surprisingly, of taking in Dagny M.’s controversial debut, although he chose to ignore the invitation to the opening. He spent a whole morning at the Art Society keenly surveying walls hung with what one might call travel pictures, or perhaps it would be better to say: pictures which had travelled — vague, hazy monuments and antique buildings, possibly in ruins, canvases covered in layer upon layer of colour, colours which seemed quite, quite new, shimmering and yet triggering associations with aircraft aluminium and railway-carriage panels and bearing such titles as Caravan of Dreams and Hadrian’s Trail.

‘There was one portrait there, not particularly flattering,’ said Veronika, while Jonas, utterly hypnotized, studied the way in which she stuck her tongue far out to meet the food as if wishing to satisfy herself as to the taste long before the contents of the fork entered her mouth — if, that is, it was not an indication of her forked tongue, her viperish streak or her duplicity. ‘A face caked with brushstrokes and paint splotches,’ she went on. ‘ Journey over J.W. it was called. That wouldn’t have had anything to do with you, would it, Jonas?’