Entertaining Angels

by Marita van der Vyver

  A young waitress was hovering near them, her blue-shadowed eyes fixed on the moving sugar bowl. It was a smart restaurant and an expensive sugar bowl and they both looked out of place here, Griet realised. Tienie was dressed in her holiday clothes – floral shorts and a striped T-shirt and trainers without laces – and Griet wore one of her familiar crumpled dresses, the uniform she chose for hiding in her office.

  ‘Petra also brought a few weirdos home before she became the world’s leading yuppy.’

  ‘Do I hear she’s coming out for a visit?’ asked Tienie.

  ‘Just after Christmas. For more than a month. Ma is on cloud nine.’

  ‘Without hubby?’ Tienie raised her heavy eyebrows expressively.

  ‘Hubby has to stay behind in the Big Apple to keep the home fires burning.’

  ‘And to keep his wife in designer clothes.’

  Tienie and Petra didn’t burn with enthusiasm for each other, Gretha always said, and they certainly weren’t warmed by the same fire. Of course not, said Tienie, the nearest Petra ever came to any fire was the flame on her elegant silver cigarette lighter. Tienie regarded Petra as a capitalistic femme fatale with an irrelevant, superficial job in the advertising industry. Petra regarded her sister Tienie as a socialist feminist who talked a lot of crap.

  ‘That’s one black sheep that turned snow white.’ Griet smiled with her chin in her hand. ‘These days Pa regards her as the most exemplary of all his children.’

  ‘Well, she’s the only one who’s making any money. Maybe that’s all that counts for him.’

  It was because they were such opposites, Gretha always said, that Tienie and her father could never get on. No, said Tienie, it was because she’d dared to be a third daughter rather than the son he’d wanted so badly. She’d always shone in the classroom and on the sports field, but he’d just shaken his head and said she was too competitive for a girl. She’d have a hard time finding a husband.

  ‘And the only one who’s decently married,’ said Griet. ‘Since my fiasco.’

  ‘How are you coping?’ Tienie leant closer in concern. Now she played the older sister. ‘I mean, I know how one feels when a relationship breaks up … but how do you cope when a baby dies?’

  ‘You don’t cope.’ Griet stared at the cup in her hands as though she could read the future in it. The porcelain was so thin it was almost transparent. The restaurant had better crockery than she’d ever had at home. ‘If I smash this cup against the wall, I could maybe stick it together again, but there’ll be bits that I can’t find. That’s probably what happens every time someone you love dies … your mother or your husband or your brother … If it’s your child, there are so many bits missing there’s not much left to stick together.’

  But on a certain level a failed relationship is worse, thought Griet. Death makes you feel powerless, but a divorce makes you feel guilty. You have no control over death, but you have to accept responsibility for a divorce.

  It was the guilt that was torturing her; the guilt and the responsibility. Sometimes she wondered whether her inability to bear a child was also her fault. Whether she was being punished because she preferred writing to cooking. Preferred sex to ironing.

  What if she had to choose? Between bringing up children and writing stories?

  Her throat closed and she couldn’t get a word out.

  ‘As far as the relationship goes …’ she said gruffly at last, ‘I’ll probably always wonder if I didn’t give up hope too easily; whether I couldn’t have done more to save it.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Not locking the keys in the car.’

  When she was discharged from hospital shortly after the birth and death of her baby, she and George had got to the car before she realised she’d left her flowers beside her bed. They were the only flowers she’d received – a bunch of creamy-white roses her husband had brought her, white-knuckled. She asked him to go back and fetch them. He sighed, put her case into the car and went back into the hospital building.

  She got into the car, feeling more alone than she’d ever felt in her life. It was so unbearable that she got out again to run after him. When they returned to the car, the keys were locked inside. George didn’t say anything, just bit his lip, picked up a brick and took out all his frustration on the window. It was the only time she ever saw him lose control.

  ‘I can’t decide whether I did too many things wrong,’ she tried to explain to her frowning sister, ‘or just didn’t do enough things right.’

  ‘What do you think you did wrong?’

  ‘You sound just like my shrink. One always does something wrong. Let he who is without sin throw the first stone.’

  ‘And you sound just like Grandpa Big Petrus, always quoting from the Bible. Except that he knew the proper words.’

  ‘You cope from day to day.’ Griet poured herself a third cup of tea. It was quite cold by this time. The waitress was still watching them with anxious eyes. She seemed to be scared they’d make off with the china. ‘But not always from night to night.’

  ‘I know. When I lie awake in the dark, I think: This is what hell must be like. Very dark and very alone.’

  ‘I’m not brave enough to lie in the dark.’ Griet took a sip of tea and grimaced – it tasted worse than she’d expected. ‘I’m worse than Grandma Lina was. I turn on every light in the flat before I go to bed. Last week was a bit better, with Adam in the living room. Just to hear someone else breathing …’

  ‘Tell me more about him.’ Tienie leant forward again.

  Griet wondered what the two women at the table next to them were talking about. They were much more smartly dressed than the two Swart sisters, in suits with high-heeled shoes, but their heads were just as close together.

  ‘I don’t know very much. He knocked on my door – in the middle of the night. He’s tall with brawny shoulders and a golden body. I was probably mad to let him in, but I felt sorry for him.’

  ‘“Be kind to strangers, for some who have done this have entertained angels without realising it.”’

  ‘Where did you get that from?’ Griet asked, delighted.

  ‘Guess! It begins with a B.’

  ‘Impossible!’

  ‘“Don’t forget about those in jail. Suffer with them as though you were there yourself.”’

  ‘One of Jans’s friends has a bumper sticker that says that.’

  ‘It’s well known in the Struggle. Hebrews 13, verse 3. But verse 2 is much more beautiful: “Don’t forget to be kind to strangers …”’

  ‘Entertaining angels without realising it …’ Griet repeated slowly. ‘Well, so far I haven’t seen an awful lot of this angel. I’m in the office and he’s on the loose. But he says he wants to make a meal for me this weekend. To thank me for letting him stay. I’m only too pleased that someone wants to use the oven for something other than suicide.’

  ‘Do you mean …’

  ‘No, I don’t mean anything.’

  Tienie shook her head incredulously.

  ‘You mean he can cook?’

  ‘Seems like it,’ Griet smiled and dropped her chin into her hand again. ‘He apparently worked in a restaurant sometime or another.’

  ‘You’ve finally met a man who can look after himself!’

  ‘Now I must just find one who can look after me as well.’

  ‘You can look after yourself.’

  ‘I know, I know, I know, I’m not talking about physical care,’ she protested to her indignant sister. ‘But it would be nice to find someone who doesn’t run away when the “for worse” in the “for better or for worse” happens, you know, Tienie.’

  ‘I never know what he wants!’ said the woman at the next table, suddenly animated. ‘I just never know what he wants!’

  Griet started to laugh, nearly choking on the dregs of cold tea in her cup.

  ‘You have to keep on guessing, my dear,’ comforted her elegant friend, painting her lips a bloody red while she peered into a little hand-mir
ror.

  ‘Now you sound like Ma again,’ giggled Tienie. ‘Look for a partner who’ll eat seven bags of salt with you. Wasn’t that what she always said?’

  ‘That’s what she still says.’ Griet gestured to the waitress with the starched lashes to bring their bill. ‘Strength has nothing to do with muscles. Just look at your father.’

  ‘That’s why I’m gay.’ Tienie looked at the young waitress and then at the two old friends at the next table and shook her head as though there were something she couldn’t understand. ‘Because Ma taught me that strength doesn’t lie in muscles. I just don’t know if Ma is ever going to accept that she had anything to do with it.’

  ‘Cover yourself, my darling sister,’ said Griet, her voice faltering unexpectedly, ‘so the rain doesn’t fall too hard on you, so the wind does not blow too cold on you … Do you remember?’

  ‘So the king may see how beautiful you are …’ Tienie said absently.

  15

  Cinderella Loses Her Glass Slipper

  (Et Cetera, Et Cetera)

  Maybe he hadn’t read Camus, but she couldn’t really say he was stupid. You don’t learn everything out of books either, she’d realised again last night.

  Griet lay on her stomach, looking at the sleeping form beside her. He was naked, shameless as a child, the sheet flung aside. She’d never manage to look as relaxed with nothing on. Especially not with the blue veins on her legs or the pads of flesh on her hips clearly visible to a stranger’s eyes in the bright morning light.

  Not that there was any detail of the honey-brown body beside her that should be kept hidden under the sheets. It was probably as close to a perfect body as any she’d ever get into her bed. Not even a hint of fat or flab. Not one single pimple on the buttocks. Even his penis looked as though it had been dipped in honey, shiny after a night of sex, the same healthy colour as his shoulders.

  She normally felt disconcerted waking beside a naked man whose family she didn’t know. She was probably old-fashioned, but she preferred having her body discovered little by little, from forehead to foot, from top to bottom. Certainly not the other way round. It was just that everything had happened so quickly last night that she’d lost control of the sequence. Adam had slipped her sandals off and started massaging her feet … Next thing she knew, here she was lying as naked as Eve before the serpent led her astray. And it didn’t even occur to her to cover herself with the sheet.

  Adam had cooked dinner on the gas stove and they’d sat on the floor eating it: a meal that had far exceeded her naughtiest dreams. Fresh artichokes to start with, then a seafood paella, and then the crème de la crème of desserts: cunnilingus, on the dusty living room floor, under the merciless light of a bare bulb, with the South African national anthem on TV as background music.

  ‘We won’t be able to say tomorrow that we were seduced by the romantic atmosphere,’ Griet warned, shutting her eyes against the blinding light. ‘We won’t have any excuse.’

  ‘Hey, man, we don’t need an excuse,’ mumbled Adam, his mouth against the curve of her instep. ‘Romance is for people who feel guilty about sex.’

  Griet was speechless. The boy wasn’t as innocent as he looked, she thought as his tongue slid over her ankle and his hands stroked her legs, right up to the thighs and then back to the ankles. She felt like an insect pinned down by an angel, squirming on the floor as her skirt worked its way up, higher and higher. How on earth had she landed in such a divine position? She’d been eating, her desires reasonably under control, when she realised he was staring at her foot. He’d slipped off her sandal without a word and taken her foot in both hands. Her fork had clattered to her plate.

  ‘I don’t know about you,’ she said, swallowing hard, ‘but I have reasons to feel guilty about sex.’

  ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery,’ someone who looked like Grandpa Big Petrus exclaimed from the top of a mountain, and the earth beneath her trembled. Or maybe it was only a thrill of pleasure.

  Adam raised his head – his mouth set on a steady course for her thigh – and flashed her his Angel Gabriel smile.

  ‘You’re the kind of person who has to feel guilty before you can enjoy anything.’

  Once again his insight – and what his mouth and his hands were doing to her thighs – took her breath away. The lower body as dessert, she’d thought while she could still think. Just the other day a friend had told her about a new sex handbook for women by an American with long blonde hair and long red nails, photo on the back cover slightly out of focus, age unspecified. She advised her readers to sample their own sexual juices.

  You wouldn’t put a plate of food in front of your husband if you weren’t prepared to taste it yourself, would you? Not only did you taste different from other women, the book claimed, but your taste also varied on different days of the month. As a good sex partner you should know when your good days are – vaginal-gastronomically speaking – and when you shouldn’t open the restaurant Mount Venus.

  Griet wondered whether she shouldn’t have taken the American writer’s advice, but Adam thrust his head between her thighs with the eagerness of an animal about to slake its thirst. The sharp light against the ceiling and the numbness in her wide-splayed legs reminded her momentarily of the maternity ward, but that was her last coherent thought of the night. After that, everything happened without giving her a chance to think. Without a clear boundary between agony and ecstasy. Like in a maternity ward.

  After thousands of years of philosophy and logic, thought Griet in her bed beside a man she barely knew, Western civilisation was still virtually powerless against man’s animal urges. Intellect still had very little influence on birth, sex and death, the three greatest experiences in anyone’s life. Thank goodness, thought Griet, raising herself on an elbow to admire Adam’s hair, which was fanned out long and loose on the pillow beside her.

  There were ways of making sex less bestial, she reminded herself. Ministers, priests and other clerics were often experts in this field. And clever men who were afraid of losing control.

  When she and George first had sex they’d whispered so as not to wake his children. And like so many things that are done early in a relationship without any thought for the consequences, the silence in their bed had almost immediately become a web in which they’d spun themselves fast. Even without children in the vicinity, George’s accompanying noises were limited to a few approving groans or dignified grunts. He believed that sex, like women, was better seen and not heard. If you held your tongue in the heat of battle, you wouldn’t let anything slip out that could be used against you later. You wouldn’t say something as rash as I love you.

  And as they normally only found time at weekends once the boys were in bed, there wasn’t much to see either. George would switch off the light and reach for her. It was a silent, dark affair.

  Sometimes the violence of an orgasm forced her mouth open, but time and time again the shriek froze in her throat. She felt like that poor screaming woman in Munch’s painting, trapped in silence for ever after.

  But last night, on the living room floor, she’d shrieked. Last night she’d taken vengeance for every woman who’d ever been gagged by a man. For Munch’s poor model and for all the women who were burnt or drowned because they were suspected of witchcraft, and for all her fairy tale heroines who weren’t able to save themselves, and for all the stepmothers who always got the lousy roles to play, and for seven years of decent, civilised, silent sex.

  And Adam snorted and cavorted along with her, MGM’s roaring lion, her fingers tangled in his mane of hair, her legs locked high over his jerking back, her teeth in his neck, a dragon spewing fire from his loins, a devil skewering her on his trident and leaping over the moon with her, an enchanter whose tongue licked away all resistance. Anything but an angel.

  Maybe it only happens once in a lifetime that precisely the right sexual partner comes knocking at your door at precisely the right moment. ‘Angel visits’, said the dictionary that she
kept at her bedside. ‘Delightful intercourse of short duration and rare occurrence.’

  Once upon a time there was an angel and a witch, but sometimes the angel was wicked and sometimes the witch was good, and in the end no one knew which was which, not even the witch and the angel themselves. But an angel would be silent during sex, thought Griet. So George must be an angel. The thought made her shake with laughter.

  Adam stirred and reached out indolently, without even opening his eyes. He touched her back gently, feeling his way downwards, blindly, and sighed happily when his hand found her buttock. He lay motionless for a few moments and she wondered disappointedly whether he’d dropped off to sleep again. Then he started to caress her thigh slowly. The memories of last night were enough to open up the floodgates of sensation again.

  ‘Angel n. Divine messenger; (fig.)lovingor obliging person.’ She’d been given over to the mercy of this hand, sliding down the inside of her leg. ‘Witchn. Woman supposed to have dealings with devil or evil spirits; (fig.) fascinating or bewitching woman.’ Which of the celestial teams would she choose to fly for? The angels with their wings were so terribly serious; like the English; like Louise’s husband who wouldn’t even pass wind in front of anyone else. But the witches on their broomsticks could be just as humourless; like the White Left in her fairy land. The angels with the seriousness of religion, the witches with the humourlessness of politics, and Griet Swart with an identity crisis.

  ‘How’s the guilt?’ asked Adam in a croaky, early morning voice. His eyes were still closed.

  ‘What guilt?’

  He opened his eyes and turned his head slowly to her.

  ‘Hey, are you OK?’

  ‘I can’t remember when I last felt this good.’

  ‘When did you last have sex?’

  ‘Long ago,’ sighed Griet, ‘Long, long ago.’

  Witches obviously had better reasons than angels to be Angry Young Women. It was hard to laugh when you were standing on a pyre. In the three centuries after Pope Innocent VIII had published his infamous Summis Desiderantes in 1484, almost nine million witches were systematically executed in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. And it wasn’t over yet, thought Griet, her throat contracting. In the terrible country where her own fairy tales were set, women were still burnt as witches, stoned, stabbed to death.