Charades

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Charades Page 20

by Janette Turner Hospital


  Koenig doesn’t hear, or chooses not to.

  “Which is curious,” she says, “given your continuing reputation as a womaniser. In the dorms, that is. And dating from pre-Me, I’m assuming. I realise I don’t exactly leave you much time to —”

  He reaches up and turns the shower head dial to full blast massage and subjects himself to the battering, though no force is likely to drown out that Toronto day, the trial testimony, the photograph of women and children, including the little girl, Rachel (he puts it into clear unassimilable thought: “my ex-wife, Rachel”) all of them, in the photograph, abstract as geometry: nothing but lines and angles, their ribs clear as graphed paper. He shuts his eyes and lets the water pound on his lids but the photograph is always there, an arrangement of parallel lines: barbed wire and bones. The photograph grows and grows the way things in nightmares do, it expands infinitely, projected onto the courtroom screen, and from the witness stand his ex-wife’s voice says, “There. That’s me,” as flatly as though she were pointing to a souvenir snapshot taken in front of the Schonbrunn Palace. Everyone looks, the entire packed gallery is watching, there are thousands of people staring at one small naked girl whose hands clasp themselves pathetically in front of her pubic triangle; it is so undefended that all the clothes of the rest of her life won’t cover it. And then Rachel looks up into the gallery where he hides behind a pillar and dark glasses and several other bodies. She looks right through him. He is frantic to get out of the courtroom, to stuff his senses with anything, anything: the first second of the universe, the first equation in time, the first woman he sees …

  “Do you know,” Charade says, cocking her head to one side, “this is the longest stretch of time I’ve seen you naked? I’ve never known anyone dress so quickly afterwards.”

  He is soaping himself the way he does everything else: meticu­lously, and in graphable patterns. It fascinates her: the way he moves the soap from ankle to thigh in a series of parallel lines. Then, round the genitals and working up to the neck, he follows the behaviour patterns of particles within waves: the endless little circles wheeling on, the cogs and rollers and flywheels of perpetual motion going nowhere. Lather is growing luxuriant along his limbs, spreading, foaming, a white fungus, and he turns with a kind of precise delicacy so that the shower water bounces only off the unlathered parts.

  “You look like a birdman,” she says. “Or a faun or something.”

  Her comments fall into the well of his absorption, or it could be soapy anger that he sets between them. He is obstinate as a mathematical formula, she thinks; a closed system. A glint comes into her eye. She stretches and slithers; one bare tanned leg, serpentine, follows her pointed toe down the front of the vanity, across the floor, and over the lip of the bathtub, the rest of her undulating after it.

  In Koenig’s hand, the mathematically minded cake of soap pauses, continues, muddles a pattern of perfect arcs across his chest, pauses. Acrobatic Charade, steadying herself with one hand against the tiled headwall of the tub, fingerpaints (or rather, toepaints) a wavering line through the foam from sternum to navel to crotch, which she is circling in slow toe-wiggling exploration when the soap slips like a fish from his hand and he grabs her ankle.

  “Brat,” he says. His tone is not angry, and not playful either. It is almost as though he were speaking of himself; or naming, with considered exactitude, some act of blasphemy. For a second he holds her ankle away from himself, forestalling her, forestalling whatever inevitability he reads in the soapsuds. Then they slither together like wet seals.

  Perhaps it is the exhilarating pummelling of the shower; or perhaps it is the way his wet hands move over her — as though she were a woman without a name — that makes Charade toss words into the spray, words that are possibly playful, possibly not. “You know,” she says, “in a few more years, you’ll be an authentic Dirty Old Man. It’s so easy to turn you on, it’s

  a joke.”

  This gets under the edge of his abstraction. When he flinches, she can feel the scrape along the length of his pride, practically see the pinpricks of blood. Whatever it is that follows — a spasm of shock or of anger — can be measured by the strength with which he hoists her up onto the side of the bathtub. “Is that … the name … of the game?” he demands, jerkily, rhythmically, coming at her like a jackhammer. “Humiliate the dirty old man?”

  “Maybe.”

  He comes. She comes. The room is full of vapour. He turns off the shower, steps out, pauses. Charade sees his face.

  I don’t care, I don’t care, she tells herself. Nothing reaches him. (“Believe me, Charade,” a girl in the MIT dorms has told her sourly. “There’s a steady line through his office. The man is an animal.”)

  She does not believe the girl. She does not want to believe the girl, who may have an axe to grind. When would Koenig have time? But still, she thinks; but still, he could snap his fingers and forget I exist.

  Nevertheless she has to turn away. It is true, there is something disturbingly vulnerable about him naked.

  With a little flurry of movement, he turns the faucets on again, full blast, steps back into the tub and stands directly in the line of greatest force. He could be trying to scrape off a layer of skin. When he sees Charade’s eyes, he pulls the shower curtain across. Relentless, not even knowing why she does it, she jerks it back again and shuts off the drumming voice of the water.

  “All right,” he says quietly, resigned, exhausted. “All right,” he says, his back against the wall. “What is all this about?” He might be a prisoner in the dock. “Some kind of feminist revenge? A message from Katherine in Toronto?”

  “Don’t be silly. She doesn’t even know I’m here. To her, you’re incidental, an illusion, a freakish manifestation of the — Hmm,” she says, touching the mole in the hollow of his neck. “I wouldn’t call it star-shaped exactly. And I wrote to Mum, you know, to ask her if Nicholas had a star-shaped mole, or any mole for that matter, in the crook of his neck. And she wrote back: Bloody rubbish. Not a mark, not a blemish. One of Kay’s stories again. So who, I wonder, has the star-shaped mole?”

  “Why do I suddenly have the distinct feeling that all the stories were leading up to some kind of attack?” He is towelling himself dry now, first gingerly (the way an invalid pats at his bruises), then with increasing and furious energy.

  “How come,” Charade demands, “that some people who’ve given themselves the Gold Star Tragic Experience Award think they have a right to live rottenly ever after? Why do they think they’ve got some kind of licence to treat the rest of the world as shit?”

  He holds the towel perfectly still in front of himself, a shield, and stares at her. At last he says, “My daughter sent you.” He announces it as fact. Puzzle solved. (He can see his daughter’s eyes as he stands and pushes past people’s knees, makes it to the aisle, walks from the courtroom with as much tact as he can manage, willing himself not to run.) “Prick him and see if he still bleeds.”

  “Rubbish. You told Aunt Kay your name was Koenig, and you taught at MIT. If you hand out calling cards, what do you expect? I wanted to see if you really existed. I thought she might have made you up.”

  “Ah. We’re back to Aunt Kay.”

  “Whose name you didn’t even remember.”

  “I had a lot on my mind,” he says irritably. “I barely knew what I was doing that day. It wouldn’t have mattered who she was.”

  “Exactly.” She whisks his damp towel out of his hands and holds it between finger and thumb, at arm’s length: contaminated material. “It wouldn’t have mattered who she was. And does that happen to you often?” She drops the towel into the open toilet bowl.

  “What did you do that for?” For whole seconds he contemplates the problem, a formal arrangement of porcelain hemisphere (white) and acute-angled towel (plush brown) — an equation whose solution eludes him — and then wearily fishes out the towel and stuffs
it into the laundry hamper. But something about the dripping trail of water it leaves across the bathroom floor energises him. He is certainly angry now. First there is the slam of the toilet seat, which makes Charade jump, then the savage way he opens and shuts the medicine cabinet, dresses, yanks at his belt buckle. She is excited, she is made

  perversely hopeful, she is aroused by this show of agitation.

  “Oh yes,” he says, “of course it does. Of course that sort of thing happens all the time.” (Thickly now, laying it on in heavy strokes.) “A virgin a night, before you hung around so persistently.” (So many available virgins? Careful. This sort of thing betrays his age.) “One undergraduate girl per night,” he says savagely. “I had them served up.”

  “So I hear.”

  “Oh for God’s sake.” It is not possible, he is thinking, to translate middle age to youth, or horror to those who have not felt it, or a war to those born after it. “Anyway” — he resigns himself to speaking in a second language, one they can both understand, one stripped of complicated nuance — “anyway, as for the Katherine in Toronto … She practically threw herself at me.”

  “She thought you were Nicholas. She explained that.”

  “Did she? It so happens that I don’t remember. It was the day of the trial …”

  A procession is winding its way through his head: Zundel and his coterie of hardhats. He stares at the fleshy faces, smug, confidently right, smiling beneath the yellow domes of their helmets. They might be colonists from Uranus, one of the dark cold lifeless planets. He envies them and hates them for their bovine certainties. For them indeed — you can read it in their faces — for them there was no holocaust; it didn’t touch them and therefore it didn’t happen. He hates the way they stay calm in court, confident that the riders in subway cars, the readers of tabloid newspapers, the people in the street, the vast and eternal subterranean currents of prejudice, are with them; while the survivors in the witness stand grow shrill in spite of themselves.

  Charade says: “According to Rachel Koenig’s testimony — I looked it up in the trial records — she didn’t come from Le Raincy at all. Her family were Austrian Jews.”

  He looks at her blankly.

  “So why,” she asks, “did you tell Aunt Kay it was Le Raincy?”

  “What? How could I have told her that? That’s your aunt’s invention. A lot of it is her invention. That wasn’t the way it happened.”

  “Why would she make up a detail like that? What would be the point?”

  “I’ve never even heard of Le Raincy.”

  Charade sighs, “Well, I guess this is the end of the trail.”

  “Meaning what? Why are you getting dressed?”

  She raises an eyebrow, tugs at the tail of the shirt he is engaged in buttoning. “Listen to who’s talking,” she says. “I’m leaving.”

  “What do you mean, leaving? It’s early. It’s only eleven o’clock, we haven’t had our brandies, you haven’t told tonight’s —”

  “I’m leaving.”

  He knows perfectly well what she means. From the start he has been convinced she would disappear again as mysteriously and suddenly as she appeared. This is a given. He has never believed he has any power to influence the course of events. What image billows up out of the word leaving? Answer: the hollow image of his future, a long long tunnel, the infinity corridor, curving back to the first second of unrecorded time, furnished or over furnished, by way of compensation for other starkness with comfortable mathematics. But these are the rules of the game: one always plays as though it were possible to win. And so he says, both hopefully and hopelessly: “But I’ve bought a jazz record, the one you mentioned, the Wynton Marsalis — and all day at the back of my mind I’ve been waiting to find out … especially now that I find I’ve met her. I mean, how did Katherine end up in Canada? And when? And why?”

  “Typical,” Charade says, “of the quantitative mind. Seize on the boring and irrelevant facts and don’t let them go. Of course there are hows and whys for Katherine, but that’s another story. Another story altogether, another cycle, another book. It has nothing to do with my story. Anyway,” she says again, with an extra edge of petulance in her voice: “I’m leaving.”

  (Because why should he skip right over “leaving”? Why should he react so mildly? It’s an affront the way it barely causes a ripple in his evening. Why should it be so easy? — a mere inconvenience for him, before someone else, whose name he will not remember, takes her place.)

  Nothing I say, he tells himself forlornly, is going to make any difference. Someone else has written the rules. But he asks, as though he does not already know the answer: “Do you mean leaving leaving, or just leaving early?”

  “I mean leaving leaving. This is it. I’m off.” She has of course no serious intention of leaving if she can help it, she most certainly does not want to leave. But whatever this is, this overwhelming inertia that keeps her from moving on, or from moving back home, whatever it is (and she most certainly does not believe in love, an outmoded, a bourgeois, a pre-feminist and colonising and ludicrous Romantic idea), whatever it is, why does it have her throwing tantrums and behaving like a fretful child? Passion is an illness, she thinks. Love (hypothesising for the moment that it exists) is cruel, is hell, is like shedding a layer of skin. Love stinks.

  And it is intolerable that he should so take her presence for granted that he has never even asked her what she does with her days, what she lives on, where she disappears to at dawn; is so unpossessive that she might as well not have a name. And so she says with brittle gaiety: “I’m about to shoot through, as we say back in Oz.”

  “But why?” He gets between her and the bathroom door, shuts it, and leans against it. “Why? I thought this was such a comfortable arrangement.”

  “For whom?” She is zipping up her jeans. “You think in equations, you dream graphs, you’re always off in the far reaches of time and space. Between one night and the next, you don’t even know I exist. If I didn’t gatecrash your classes now and then, I’d never even have seen you in daylight.” (Oh, she has not intended to be so explicit. Oh she has not intended to … She is out, now, at the tip of a very long branch. She is losing track of what she means, what she wants. Her Achilles heel is showing. Only fancy footwork can save her now.)

  “But why haven’t you …?” he says.“You’ve never indicated … I had no idea you …”

  This is true. He thinks of their encounters as … (but does he still? does he still think this way?) at any rate, he has in the past thought of their encounters as a kind of supernova occurrence, doomed to fade, an episode in the life of a dying star, but still, for the brief duration, flashy and brilliant. He thinks (or has been in the habit of thinking) of their encounters as a problem equal in subtlety to the problem of the energy density of the universe.

  If the energy density exceeds a certain critical value, the universe could be said to be closed. Space would curl back on itself to form a finite volume with no boundary. If the energy density is less than the critical value, space curves — but not back on itself, and the volume is infinite, the universe “open”. If the energy density is just equal to the critical density (that is, if Ω = 1), the universe is flat. And he does not yet know — no astrophysicist or cosmologist yet knows — if the universe is open or closed or flat; he does not know (as yet) what value Ω had at the moment of the Big Bang, the moment when the universe was formed; but he does know that the current value of Ω is somewhere between 0.1 and 2.

  As applied to Charade, this theory cannot explain how their encounters fit into any sensible larger pattern. But within the little bubble of space and time where they have found themselves, surely the Ω value, as it were, is approximately known. Surely they both agree on the pleasure of these nights? He reaches up to take her face in his hands but she pushes them away “After all this time,” he says (reasonable, rational), “you can’t
just …” He makes a gesture of bewilderment. “I can’t seem to remember what nights were like before you … It’s become a habit, it’s been months and months.”

  “Exactly a year,” she says. “A year ago tonight, as a matter of fact. Not that I expected you to keep track of anniversaries.”

  “A year !”

  “Three hundred and sixty-five nights, and a night.”

  He is stunned. But now her behaviour makes sense. Within the scheme of their nights there are rules — the finer points of playing the game — that he has been breaking. “You’re right to be angry,” he concedes.

  “I’m not angry.” (Typical, she thinks explosively. Absolutely bloody typical. Apology without guilt or remorse; get off the hook without cost.) “And it has nothing to do with that. Absolutely not. That’s a pure coincidence. The thing is, if you recall, I had something particular in mind when I tracked you down.” She plugs in the hair dryer and turns it on; she needs a stage and a reason for raising her voice. “I was looking for my father,” she says above its electrical buzz.

  Theatrical gestures have been planned, he can see that, but bathroom humidity puts a crimp in her sweeping style. She switches off the dryer and reaches for a drawer, but the one she has intended to pull out with a violent tug is stuck. Shit, he hears; and other vehement words are muttered while she glances at him sideways, as though expecting, waiting for, provoking, a reprimand. (She is very young after all, he thinks.) When the drawer gives way, it does so with abandon and she lurches backwards. He watches with amazement the rain of little plastic bottles and jars, creams, lotions, combs, a brush. His drawer, his bathroom. But then, when has he opened that drawer? She scoops everything up off the tiles and crams them all back, a mess; and then fits the drawer on its tracks and slams it shut. She opens it again and takes out her hairbrush. “Of course,” she says (and even she can hear her six-year-old’s voice, a voice gone beyond any power of stopping itself, the voice of a child who is throwing a tantrum but who teeters, dizzy, on its brink, having misplaced for an awful second the trigger of her rage), “of course, what would

 

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