What Could Be Saved

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  She looked up, saw that Dawson was staring not at the pitcher but at her.

  “And of course, every piece is unique,” she said, brisk. She placed the pitcher onto the shelf.

  “That only Japanese,” said the shopkeeper, who had come up behind them. “In Thailand, broken we throw away. Make more.” He showed Genevieve the card he’d written out; she read it and nodded approval. Dawson let Genevieve guide him down the aisles of the shop, away from a collection of animal figures, away from an ancient-appearing vase (cheap reproduction, she murmured), into a purchase of a Burmese gold-leafed plaster statuette of a monk.

  “Not the broken pitcher?” Dawson said as the shopkeeper began swaddling the monk in tissue paper.

  “You don’t deserve the broken pitcher,” she said.

  “I think I do,” he said. He told the shopkeeper, “I’ll take both.”

  * * *

  “I should get some fruit,” she said when they were outside the shop.

  “I thought your servants did that,” said Dawson.

  “They do,” she said. “But I’ll need packages.” She realized, when the words were out, that they betrayed her scheming beforehand, how she’d planned to acquire props as proof of her innocent afternoon. He didn’t remark on it, though, following her into the channel of pavement made narrow by vendors squatting with their baskets of goods.

  “Where did you learn so much about Oriental art?” he asked as Genevieve selected a hairy cluster of rambutan.

  “I studied it in college,” said Genevieve. That wasn’t quite accurate: she’d begun to study it in college. Most of what she’d learned had been from reading on her own, after having left college to get married. She pointed to a pyramid of pineapples, held up three fingers to the vendor.

  “Did you want to be a curator?” Dawson said.

  She blinked. Had she? Had she had any concrete plans for herself at any point in her life, before leaving school to marry Robert? That time seemed so distant, sepia-toned, blurred by a wavy glass of years. She thought of Frances Sawchuck, a high-school classmate—striving, serious, bespectacled Frances. She was the kind of woman who worked, who would make a cold, solitary path through the world. At fourteen, Genevieve had known she was not like Frances.

  “It’s starting to rain,” said Dawson, accepting the bags from the vendor.

  “If you let the rain stop you here, you’ll never go anywhere at all,” Genevieve said, putting her change into her purse and snapping it closed. “The club does a lovely shrimp cocktail.”

  “I don’t want to go to the club,” said Dawson. He spoke deliberately. “Do you?”

  She felt a frisson. Thus far, he hadn’t touched her, and apart from letting the antiques dealer assume that they were married, there had been no suggestion of impropriety on his part.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  He was not standing very close, but she was very aware of his chest under his shirt; she remembered how his biceps had flexed and unflexed as he tossed the little rooster pot. Her pulse beat in her throat. She understood that the line was behind them now, perhaps had always been.

  * * *

  In room 510, without words they began to undress. He removed his shirt, revealing a powerful torso; she unhooked the eye at her collar and turned her back to him so he could tug the zipper down, the split widening until her dress dropped around her feet. She reached behind herself, unclasped her brassiere, let it fall. Hesitated, then pushed down her underpants, and stepped out of them. She kept her hands at her sides when she turned. The thought came, unbidden: now Robert was not the only man to have seen her naked.

  They were almost the same height. She smelled the tobacco on his breath, the echo of gin. He slipped one palm down to the small of her back and pulled her toward him, took his time about kissing her, as though that was all that he’d planned, the single kiss. Stop it, she told herself, for she was comparing it to Robert’s kisses, those perfunctory preludes to sex or firm dry-lipped goodbyes. Surely there was something not quite—nice—about this kind of kissing, so open-mouthed. That thought chased briefly through her head and was gone.

  Now both of his palms were underneath her bottom, and he was lifting her, and they were going backward. She felt a cool surface under her as he released her weight, and opened her eyes enough to see that she was being settled down onto the desk. She closed her eyes again and steeled herself for the next part. She jumped at the touch of his hand, then couldn’t make sense of the next sensation, and her eyes flew open. What was he doing? She put her hands on his head, pushed it back and away.

  “Let me,” he said, his breath warm against her. She let him, but she remained jackknifed, cold, uncertain. Finally she relented, In for a penny, in for a pound, and lay back. Closed her eyes again and resolved to think about other things, to separate herself from what was happening: his fingers, his mouth, the soft tickling on her inner thighs from the curls on his head. If she retained no clear memory of the act, the experience would pass over her like water, would not write itself upon her in any detectable way. She thought about the shopping, wilting in paper bags on the floor. She’d bought a lot of pineapple; she’d have Harriet make a fruit salad. She thought about socks: the children needed new ones, she had better order them soon, packages sometimes took months coming from the States. Isn’t this how most women survive? she asked herself, shakily ironic. Making lists in their heads while their husbands go about it?

  But this wasn’t her husband. He was a veritable stranger, older than Robert, shorter, hairier, thicker around the middle. Far less tentative. Robert had never done what this man was doing right now. What she was allowing to be done. The heady new smells of this man were weaving into one another like the pattern on a fabric, enveloping her: the musk of tobacco, a different musk from under his arms, an unfamiliar hair tonic, a scented soap. Robert always smelled of Truefitt & Hill No. 10 Finest Shaving Cream, shipped from England at great cost.

  She squeezed her eyes more tightly closed as a rush of sensations passed through her.

  “That’s right,” Max said, and she realized that she had made a sound, a small moan. It echoed in her head and she stiffened self-consciously, but only for a moment before surrendering again.

  Some time later he moved away and she heard the ring of a buckle, his belt falling to the floor, and then the warmth of him returned, his chest hair against her skin. She clung to him as he carried her, laid her down onto a soft yielding surface. He was kissing her again, but now the languor was gone from it; he clutched her upper arms with steel hands and breathed against her throat. And then finally the entrance, violent but not painful, and a still, ecstatic interval before he began to move. She was moving too, an involuntary, automatic series of flexes, her neck arching under his mouth, pressed against the vibrations of the noises she couldn’t help making.

  For some uncharted time everything hung like that, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing in her mind, while behind her eyes was a shower of flower petals, hurtling toward her like colored snow.

  Slowly she became aware again of the world: the separate panting of their breathing, the low noise of a radio on the bedside table, the tug of his hand on her scalp, where his fingers were still looped into her hair. The length of him was on top of her, a dead weight growing heavier until apparently he realized it, and shifted so that they were lying side by side. His chest was damp, the hair plastered dark against the muscle, and there was a small pool of sweat in her navel.

  He stretched his arm over her, reaching to the night table for the cigarette packet. She put up her hand with two fingers extended and he settled a lit cigarette between them, then lit another for himself and propped himself on one elbow, smoking, smiling.

  “That went well,” he said.

  “I don’t know why I did this,” she said. She felt an immense sadness, as if she were at the bottom of an avalanche of despair, watching the great shelf of it moving to bury her.

  “Yes, you do,” he said.
He pressed his lips against her shoulder, his disheveled hair tickling her jaw, and then he pulled his head back, put his cigarette to his mouth. “Or, you know why you did it once.” The lines fanned out from the corners of his eyes as the smoke drifted up from his smile. “You may not know yet why you’ll go on doing it.”

  She sat up, fumbled for the counterpane rucked at their feet, found its stiff embroidered hem and dragged it up to her chest. He put his hand on the naked flat of her lower back, his thumb tracing a circle.

  “I can have Robert sent upcountry this weekend,” he said, the name in his mouth like a slap.

  She pulled away from his hand, got out of the bed with the counterpane wound around her, dragging it like a train as she gathered her clothing from the floor. She dressed in the bathroom, balancing her burning cigarette on the edge of the sink, stopping twice to drag deeply on it before dropping it into the toilet. The mirror revealed the wreck of her hairstyle; she combed it with her fingers, catching them on hairsprayed tangles, and ran a wet washcloth under her eyes to gather up the speckled bleed of mascara. How stupid she had been, theorizing coolly beforehand about adultery, deciding that it lay in the consent and not in the act. She had been wrong. It had been nothing beforehand, nothing. It was real now. The soreness between her legs, the oozing onto the cotton panel of her underpants, the places on her body that still felt his fingers. Unwanted flashes in her memory of his head burrowing, burrowing while she made little helpless cries. It was not theoretical at all.

  When she emerged from the bathroom, he was standing in the bedroom doorway holding a fresh drink, wearing boxer undershorts and a thin white cotton robe with the three-headed elephant logo of the hotel over the breast.

  She turned her back to him, lifted her hair above the gapped back of her dress. He put down his drink and tugged up the zip. He fitted the hook into the eye at the top and his hand paused there, covering the tender neck bones. She stepped away from his hand, her neck going cold with a sensation like pain, toward her shoes, which were lying on their sides on the floor.

  “I’ll get you a taxi.” He went toward the desk—the desk; thinking of what had happened there, her breath caught—where there was a telephone.

  “No need,” she said, her back still to him. “I told my driver I’d meet him in front of the club at four o’clock.” Her voice sounded unfamiliar in her head. She put a palm against the window as she eased a shoe over her heel with the other hand, looking down through the glass at the street below, the people and traffic like hectic toys.

  “Come back tomorrow,” he said.

  “I have plans,” she said, although she had meant to say something different.

  “The next day, then. Any day. In the hot hours. I’ll be here.”

  She took up her handbag, went to the door.

  “Jenny,” he said in a soft voice. She turned. The gap in his robe showed a narrow strip of chest, wild white and brown hair curling through. “You’re forgetting something.”

  Almost against her will, she stepped toward him. They stood about a foot apart, looking into each other’s eyes. The room smelled of sex and tobacco smoke. Still holding her gaze, he extended his arm.

  She looked down, saw that his wrist was feathered around with green spears, the crown of a pineapple poking out from the wrinkled mouth of one of the paper bags in his hand.

  “Your alibi,” he said, with the barest hint of a smile.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ROBERT LOCKED his office door and flipped the light switch on the wall in the corridor. It was a clue to the origins of this building, but one he had yet to decipher, how the ceiling light in each room was controlled from a switchplate in the hallway outside. He hesitated a moment, patting his pockets: Had he forgotten anything?

  It was pointless, and he knew it. No matter how thoroughly he checked now, it would not prevent the need to check again when he was halfway down the stairs. It was one of his lifelong nervous habits. In college those habits had regularly subtracted half an hour of his nightly quotient of sleep, forcing him to turn the bedside lamp on shortly after switching it off to ensure—again—that the alarm clock was set. A few minutes later, he’d have to turn the light back on to check that the alarm had been set to the correct time. Light off. Pause. Light on again: Had he pushed the little pin in the back in inadvertently, shutting the alarm off, during the last maneuver? After he’d married, he’d been able to relinquish the bedtime checking ritual, having put his trust in Genevieve to manage the alarms and locks and other minutiae of home. One of the great advantages of married life.

  But away from the house the old behaviors dogged him, and it was a rare evening that he didn’t have to go back at least once after leaving his office, to check whatever it was that needed checking. Sometimes only once but more usually twice and occasionally three times, before the compulsion retracted its claws and released him, and he would be able to get into the car and drive away.

  Today he got only fifteen feet down the hall before turning back. And then the second time to the stairwell, and the third time halfway down the first flight of stairs. The fourth time he made it to the parking space where the white Mercedes awaited him. He had the keys out and in his hand, but the anxiety scrabbled inside him like a trapped animal and he turned away from the car, went back across the garage, and pushed through the door again into the stairwell.

  The door fell closed behind him, cutting off the rushing sounds of traffic from the street, and he climbed the stairs with a feeling of dull resignation. He couldn’t even remember what he was checking this time. Not the lights, which he recalled turning off, and which he had already gone back twice to check. Ah, the window. The third time he’d gone back was to ensure that it was closed. Now he was going back to make certain that he’d locked it.

  The building was quiet. It was nearly seven. Everyone else had gone home to their dinners; they weren’t boomeranging back over and over, to check on things that didn’t need to be checked. He knew the things didn’t need to be checked; and yet, he also didn’t know, and he had to check them. He opened the door onto the second floor. The corridor was dark.

  Not completely dark: there was a slim bar of light beneath one of the doors down the hall, a large dim rectangle hovering above it. He was sure that when he’d left just a few minutes before, all of the offices had been dark—yes, he remembered having had some trouble with his footing, feeling around for the stairwell door, pushing it open, the stairwell light spilling onto his feet. Whose office had become occupied since he’d left? He thought at first it was Bardin’s, but as he got closer, he realized that the light was coming from his own office. He stood outside the door. No movement apparent through the thick pebbled glass, but from within, he heard a very quiet noise, like someone surreptitiously sliding a drawer closed.

  The briefcase in Robert’s hand was solid, with sharp corners. He could burst into the room, serve the intruder a wicked backhand with the case—and then what? How was Robert to subdue the intruder after the initial assault? No smack from this fine-grained leather valise—no matter how powerful the swing, no matter how sharp the corners or well-aimed the blow—was certain to render a man unconscious. What if the man was armed? The safest plan was to retreat and look for a public phone. Robert could say khmoy to the operator—everyone knew that word, there were plenty of burglars in Bangkok—and give the address. That would surely get the message across. And if the man got away in the meantime, well, then he got away.

  While Robert was considering the options and coming to this decision, almost of its own accord his hand floated up and found the light switch on the wall on the near side of the doorway. His fingers grasped the protruding plastic nub and pulled it down.

  The room went instantly dark; the small surreptitious noises from within stopped.

  The small flare of pleasure that Robert felt when the light extinguished, eliminating the uncomfortable asymmetry in the corridor, evaporated almost as it was born. What now? Robert had a fleet
ing advantage over the intruder—he knew the topography of his own office better, and so might circumnavigate obstacles more easily in the dark—but that advantage wouldn’t count for long. His burglar (Robert had begun to think of him in the possessive) was probably standing with his back to the window, eyes open wide. The longer Robert waited, the better the other man would be able to see. Robert had to act now.

  He put his left hand out, grabbed the knob, and turned it. It went an entire revolution: the door was unlocked. He jumped in front of the door, pushing it wide with his left shoulder, flicking the light switch back up with a swipe of his right hand as he did so. He didn’t recall later, but he might even have yelled “Aha!”

  Bardin stood blinking in the light.

  “Good Christ,” he said. “Give a man a fright.”

  “What are you doing here?” Robert almost yelled, his heart hammering in his chest. “You’re not supposed to be in here.”

  “Perhaps you should sit down,” said Bardin, his brow corrugated with concern. He motioned toward the chair in front of the desk—My desk, thought Robert. “You look quite faint.”

  “Why are you in my office?” Robert said again. Bardin was so calm, his air of ease so pure, that Robert double-checked that it was his own office. Yes, there was the potted plant, and there the photograph of Genevieve on the desk.