Consensus withheld: Dan not only loved the postmortem, he seemed to like all the same movies she did, even if she had instinctively edited out the worst. But then, Dan seemed so amenable, he couldn’t hold Bridget Jones against her. Never mind that he’d parked a mile away and the rain had started again; he understood that what she needed right now, this weekend, was the sunny and uncomplicated. She wasn’t about to muddy that gift with any speculation over whether he was in fact hoping to seduce her or just going through the motions. Who cared, anyway? She was just going to the movies.
“Fuck!” As she stepped down from the curb to get into his car, she’d landed her left foot up to the ankle in a puddle. It was soaked, and this time the boots were truly ruined. Trying to ignore her squidgy toes, now inside the little car—a black VW Beetle which, as Mrs. Mark Hubbard, she knew was not just some old banger but a “design classic”—she was still talking when he started over the bridge, wiping out an earlier suggestion of finding dinner on the South Bank.
“I’m taking you home,” he said.
Jean, finally quiet, hanging on to misty twenties China, was looking out the window at the glittering lava of the Thames below. She wasn’t sure whether she was disappointed or alarmed—did he mean dropping her off at her place or taking her back to his?
“Are you now,” she said neutrally, waiting to see what he meant, waiting to see how she felt. Don’t be an idiot, she told herself. Maya Stayanovich probably threw herself at him. Must happen all the time. In her own case, he was politely chaperoning the boss’s wife; it was his job. For an unhappy moment she wondered if Mark had asked him to look after her, because of Scully, and his being away.
“Yes, ma’am. I’ve got a gorgeous dinner all ready in the boot. A perfect picnic provided by the mother of my godchild and dear friend, Sarah Mustoe. God bless Sally.”
Mustang Sally. An old girlfriend, Jean supposed, not saying anything yet. At least he stayed friends with them. She thought for a second of the chubby redhead waving inanely at the pub.
“You do seem well looked after.”
“Ay, that I am. Now, we can go to your place, which is a bit nearer, or we can go to mine, which I marginally prefer only because I have the perfect bottle of wine to drink with the perfect picnic. A 1988 Puligny-Montrachet. And a microwave, which I’ll bet money doesn’t deface the Hubbard household decor.”
“Well, you’re right on the wine front—I don’t think I have any after my night in with Vic.” In honor of Meg Ryan’s performance, Jean didn’t mind sounding like a lush, but she wasn’t at all sure about his tone—was “decor” ever not a term of insult?—or for that matter about going to his place. When she spoke to Mark she hadn’t mentioned her date with Dan; she thought she’d still get out of it. The remote possibility that he’d arranged her date made that an awkward omission. But once again she was being paranoid. Why shouldn’t she go to a movie no one apart from Dan would dream of seeing—or, indeed, grab a bite afterward? Anyway, if Mark had arranged it, he’d have found a way to boast of his thoughtfulness.
Dan was a very skillful and reassuring driver, she noticed, enjoying her accelerated view of the slick London night. Suddenly it was entirely clear. She was hungry and she wanted her dinner. If Dan came over she might never get him out. Going to his place meant she could leave.
“It’s late,” she said. “Do you really think it’s a good idea? I mean, it’s been great, but maybe I’ll just go home.”
Dan shot past the turn for Camden Town. “Don’t worry. I’ll run you back,” he said, his eyes fixed on the road. “It’s a very good idea.”
Jean had no intention of helping him lay the table or warm the picnic and she wasn’t sure she could wait for it. Cold and famished, she looked in the industrial fridge where she found vitamins, film, juice, pickled onions, a jar of almond-stuffed green olives, a half-eaten can of sardines. She attacked the only possibility—the olives—and nearly finished them off before he reached over her shoulder against her laughing but genuine protests and stuck a couple fingers in the jar, nabbing the last one for himself.
A whole fish pie and two bottles of Montrachet later, Jean was wandering barefoot through Dan’s thoroughly modern third-floor flat. Loft, she supposed, for its open plan and exposed brickwork, but redeemed in her opinion by the row of doublearched windows admitting slanted Ms of moonlight.
He’d taken off her boots and with a big white towel patdried through her tights the puddle-soaked foot. Then she took her tights off because he was right, she’d “never get warm in those wet things,” and his manner remained capable—the matchside paramedic addressing a sports injury.
With her feet finally dry and her eyes closed—she was supposed to guess the ingredients—she ate warm, vanilla-scented plums poached in honey and wine, spoon-fed to her by Dan across a long black lacquered table, and what she had to say then, rising to take the plates to the sink, was “I must go.” This she said a second time, quietly to the wall, bent away from him to look at a framed, almost invisible pencil drawing of a nude hung opposite the arched windows. When she straightened and turned to say so again Dan was standing very near. He didn’t step toward her, just lifted his hands to find her waist. His tongue when he kissed her entered with the forcible promise that he was going to fuck her and soon, and Jean more than anything was relieved that it was settled.
But then again, maybe it wasn’t, she thought. Seemed a long time they’d been standing there kissing, her hands holding his shoulders like the sides of a big ladder she was considering climbing. She’d forgotten about kisses like this. The more she got the more she wanted, as if there was something she needed at the back of his mouth and he was not letting her pass. Why couldn’t she just do it—why did she also have to picture it (their lips like four fingers making taffy, two mouths after the same piece of gum) and add to that a running caption. The last time I kissed like this, Jean thought unhelpfully, Dan was eight. And what about the dressing under her right breast? Why had she told Dan about the biopsy? Subconsciously, to prepare him?
They stopped and looked at each other with no message exchanged, no corny smolder, and for this Jean was grateful. She closed her eyes like pulling down the blinds and Dan picked her up, her legs instantly lifting to wrap around him, and carried her not to his bed but to the long lacquered table.
He placed her carefully like a large terra-cotta urn and skill-fully set about his work, as concentrated as a specialist restorer focused on her intricate finish, as if she wasn’t even there. A tug here and the top of her dress fell to her waist. He tilted her head back to get under her chin, and his thumbs on her jaw and her throat and her chest moved swiftly, smoothing the skin as if it was quick-drying clay. He pushed the straps of her bra easily off her shoulders and then, for Jean, the first awkward moment. Perhaps it was the still-undiscovered Band-Aid that made her tense or an instinctive flinch for the biopsy spot itself—and none of this helped by the reminder, as he reached a couple exploratory fingers inside the bra, of his greedy grab for the last olive.
But reassuringly, he held her head again and kissed her about her ears. She didn’t know about having her ears kissed—how it pulled like a drawstring threaded right through you, teasing, tightening, bringing you in. With each nuzzling kiss the line extended over other parts of her body, gathering into a new constellation of improbable shapeliness—Archer, Boar, Mermaid—another point from among her scatter of solitary stars. His wide hands now completely covered her breasts and with that wolfish smile, he yanked her bra down, forgetting the fiddly hooks—such attractive, hungry, butterfingered frustration.
Dan held her hair back with both hands, he kissed and nibbled her throat and licked her torso, first like a cat—working his way cleanly over a small area, tasting her skin—and then like a dog, with broad-stroked abandon, bunching her breasts together to meet his flattened tongue. She forgot the bandage, if it was even there anymore, her hunger sidelining local soreness, his own vivid appetite returning her breasts to their atavistic no
nmedical, nonmaternal purpose. If she had first thought of herself as a pot or a clay nude, she wasn’t as passive as that; more like an artist’s model, a hard-won stillness as her body shivered through tiny arcs of pleasure and gratitude.
What, she wondered, was her best feature in the past? Her long neck, or her slender ankles? The slim waist maybe, or her breasts, smallish but pretty and unthreatening. However improbable, for some it would always be these freckles that deepened in color with heat or emotion, a Milky Way of discrete blushes. Now, she couldn’t help thinking, her best feature was gratitude. Irresistible to certain men. There were tit men, leg men, ass men, and gratitude men… Dan was certainly working hard to earn hers. It took her ages to stop noticing, assessing, and relax, but it seemed he could wait. She didn’t know how long it had been—but at last her critical machinery was unplugged. And then, just as she was finally above the foothills, in step for the slow climb then long slide, he picked her up again, leaving her dress behind, a dark island on the glossy table.
Jean would think back on the things that surprised her through the night. She was surprised by her ease, how it flowed—once, that is, he’d silenced her helpless running commentary, those footnotes to every twitch of her cerebral cortex. And she was surprised (no, stunned ) by Mr. Manning’s answer to that question she’d been too embarrassed to ask Mr. Scully: yes, readers of Mrs, the spot does exist—although the pleasure of it, as with his kiss, was sheathed in insatiability. And how did you figure those Egyptian cotton sheets—the twelve hundred thread count once again confounding her idea of their chunkysoled rugby-playing owner. But what she kept returning to (sentimental, childish) was how he tucked her in, taking care to cover her evenly and completely, just as earlier he’d folded his handkerchief, and it smelled the same, the big edition, like fresh laundry and damp leather, like Dan.
When Jean awoke she was alone. For just a moment, one glorious moment, she thought she was in St. Jacques. She was disoriented by unfamiliar traffic noises and by the strange light, the morning sun filtering in through thin orange curtains like a tangerine dream. And then she sat up. She hadn’t really taken in the upholstered wall behind the bed—was that hessian? A bit seventies, but no doubt that was its point: another design classic. She looked at the time, 8:18. Beside the clock radio, the blue glass ashtray with two butts in it, upright like the legs of a diving duck. One of them was hers. Along with all the rest, that cigarette, which she could still taste, seemed so perfect at the time, was perfect at the time, her last bright idea of the evening. And the huge whiskey, a nightcap—or kneecapper, as they called them at home.
Jean stood, gathering the sheet around her, and listened. Not a sound: no one in the bathroom or the kitchen alcove. She was relieved Dan wasn’t there—but where’d he gone? Was that a TV? Something was glowing on the long table, facing her. Jean, winding the loose sheet around her, leaned forward. What was that? She stepped off the low bed platform (reminded as she moved of each part of her body entrained during the night) and crossed the polished concrete floor to the table. It was a computer monitor, as thin in its class as Mr. Scully’s gold watch, the black-and-white screen beaming a message in red letters across the bottom: back soon with panetone, coffee in kitchen.
The image was a photograph, a picture of a sleeping figure, turned away. The artistically arranged sheet reached just below the high hip. Fanned fingertips peeked over the rib cage; a dune rose to the shoulder from the crevice of the waist, head and hair swirled and blurry, like the satellite image of a storm. There were no shadows behind the figure—dozing on a cloud. It looked like an old photograph, but it wasn’t. It was Jean.
She covered her mouth, letting drop part of the sheet. Fully awake now, she wanted urgently to be gone. She gathered her things—dress, tights, bra, and underpants (belated shame as she found them, buried deep in her bedsheet toga). No coffee: burdened Jean shuffled into the bathroom and got dressed. She squeezed her eyes shut, not ready for contact with the surprisingly fancy mirror, a movable triptych over the sink, and splashed her face. Listening for Dan through the gentle trickle from the tap, she had an idea.
Quick—she’d find the camera and delete the pictures; then maybe she could figure out how to remove the picture from his computer. Jean returned to the glowing screen, stagily placed in empty space, like an advertisement. But she saw instantly she’d never figure it out—this was a new kind of machine, with no buttons or any kind of keyboard. She couldn’t even see how to turn it on, or rather off. Like the bathroom mirror with its wings—like him, Saturday winger, speeding up from out of nowhere through your blind spot—there were Jeans ad infinitum in that computer. Even if she managed to delete this one another would appear in its place, and another and another, reproducing instead of dying, like chopping up an earthworm, all you could do was make more.
She looked over at the bed—the set: that wall fabric, the ideal backdrop for photographs, eating light like velvet. Apart from the fact of it, and the illiterate caption, the picture on the screen wasn’t by any means gross—in fact, it was lovely. There was no point in saying, Oh, what a time for vanity, does your shame know no depths? There it already was, lovely and dangerous—and, like the would-be model Giovana, just waiting to be discovered.
Her eyes swept the room. Hardly any clutter, few objects and fewer books on the cantilevered shelf that floated the length of the room—the camera should be easy to find. At last she spotted it on the floor by the bed, next to an asymmetrical plastic bottle of lubricant, the Astroglide. Not a design classic, not now, not ever, Jean thought, unable to believe she was here. A foot above the floor there was a bank of electrical outlets. Jean, downcast, remembered she’d had a good long close-up view of this spot last night; she knew just how the cement met the wall, how the chrome plates over the outlets had uneven gaps between them, how the shiny metal distorted her face like a carnival mirror…
At the time, upended and eyeballing those plug holes, she’d experienced an acute moment of recognition because she was arranged exactly as she’d once seen Giovana, and this familiarity had just made it seem doable, utterly natural and exciting, nothing like a dubious submission her disembodied brain would have to reject. Last night she’d learned such play wasn’t peculiar to the desperate man-toy Giovana as she’d piously, naïvely thought; it was the thing people did called sex—almost unrelated to the solemn, face-to-face sacrament of her youthful courtship. So she’d also learned that the unexamined feminism of her generation had in fact enforced bans on a number of things that were pleasurable and therefore basically good, and wasn’t that—in addition to the momentary fun of it—a thrill?
But—oh, God—the license didn’t hold. Jean was ready for shame now; she could feel the floodgates opening. First, however, the memory card. She slid open the camera and unclicked the sliver of plastic. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if she could do the same with her own memory, just click it out of its slot, gone. Now where was her bag? Hurry, by the front door. Her mac was there too, right where she’d left it, a sorry heap on the floor. With a glance around for any further traces of herself, she opened the door, softly shutting it behind her.
“You’re not leaving.” His initial smile (did he think she’d run down to greet him?) turning to childish dismay, the two masks eliding, comedy and tragedy. She met Dan right on his doorstep. He had his key out, and all the other keys on the ring jingled with the promise of doors still unopened. Jean thought for a split second: girls’ doors. Under his arm he had a shopping bag—she saw a milk bottle (another design classic—yes, she got that) and something boxed, the panettone.
“Actually, I am. Sorry, but I really must get going.”
“Not even coffee and a bun? Come on.”
“Not even coffee and a bun.”
“All right. Let me get these inside—I’ll run you home.”
Jean was about to protest—but it was clear from the Sundaymorning stillness that it was Dan or hoofing it, and she remembered what Vic said about the wal
k to Clerkenwell. Imagine how long it would take her to get home from—where was she?—Hoxton. Mark had told her he’d be home for lunch. When was lunch?
“Okay,” she said softly, trying to smile. She was utterly parched—her throat, her skin, her stinging eyes. Where was the rain now?
Dan took the stairs four at a time. Standing in the street, she gulped the cool air and, arms crossed, looked down at her boots, ruined and then ruined again, as she deserved. The left foot was many shades darker than the right, the tarry color of unhealthy feces, with ugly scalloped white stains seeping up from the sole. Maybe, she thought, she could save them by stepping into another puddle, this time with the right foot. Or would it have to be the same puddle—with its particular south-of-the-river salt-streaked grime? Quididdity, she thought, a wave of grief hitting her now. She could hear Dan on the stairs—good. But his descent was much slower, outrageously slow, she thought, preparing to bolt, and when he appeared she saw why: he was carrying a giant white mug of hot coffee.
“I hate that I don’t even know if you take sugar,” he said, handing her the cup.
“I’m sure it’s fine, that’s great,” Jean said, not telling him, taking the vase-size cylinder in both hands.
Settled in the car, she took a few sips, and realized she should share. Was that what he meant by not bringing a cup for himself? She passed it, sloshing a little into the gearbox, but he refused, occupied as he was with violent downshifting (Jean sensed an ego impeding legitimate use of the brakes). He was strikingly fresh faced, but the driving was definitely tired.
London looked evacuated. Seemed unnecessary, this back route Dan had chosen, snaking through narrow streets. Habit, she supposed, and a desire to show the knowledge. As if she hadn’t seen enough of that, Dan’s knowledge. Jean looked resolutely out the window. The knowledge: she thought as they bumped along a cobbled mews she hadn’t known existed, dribbling coffee onto her conveniently brown dress, Dan could certainly pass an exam covering the A to Z of her body, the roundabouts and closes, the bridges and embankments, the lay-bys and flyovers, the canals and culs-de-sac, no quarter unmapped. Come to think of it, there was a kind of practiced feel to his itinerary, as if he was moving, in considered sequence, through an entire repertoire. A great performance, Jean would give him that. A great service.
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