Twenty-two
HEN JO WOKE IN DAY’S ARMS, SHE FELT A MOMENT’S suffocation and then caught her breath, bringing her panic under control. Where was she? The windows were open and the AC was silent, and so the room was hot as an oven, her skin prickly and wet. A sensation of drowning just before her eyes opened, then the awareness of night as it slid into day. She unpicked herself from the alien male arms and went to the bathroom to wash her face. The mirror was covered with fingerprints.
She had never been unfaithful to David in all those years, and for that matter, the thought had never even crossed her mind. Even when they had slept apart for the last two years, it had not occurred to her to venture out into the sea of other men, for what would she do there but wave and drown? Look at yourself in the mirror: haggard, exhausted, sweating. Can one ever recover instantly from such a mistake? It was the potency of the secret one would from now on have to carry around with one that hurt the future and made it less livable. Even if she couldn’t even remember the lovemaking with Day (what an inappropriate phrase!), it would still exist inside her as a weight she would have to carry around, a semi-memory but still a form of knowledge. Had she enjoyed it? She didn’t know.
The sound of the faucets didn’t wake him. She crept back to the bed and gazed down at him with a dry amazement. Had she really made love with this snoring animal of pretty dimensions? What had made her do it? A string of moments of madness, a bottle of fermented grape juice, a clever man, and a subtle, aggravating rage against the husband who was not there, and who in many ways was never there. It was hardly a real argument for betrayal, but she hadn’t needed to be persuaded anyway.
Her first thought was escape. The door was wide open, and there were pieces of clothing everywhere, including her sandals and her hair clips, and from the soft open night came the enticing sounds of parties gone haywire and people walking about on tiptoe. These were all things she had wanted to drown herself in when they’d set out sulkily from London two days earlier, in those days of innocence: an all-night party with elegant touches, and nights filled with mysterious humanities. She went out and took a big gulp of that soupy air, then steadied herself against the doorjamb. The dawn was not even faintly there yet, and it was strange, because she was sure she had glimpsed it before falling asleep.
Between the sexually fetid darkness of the room and the open night, what a difference. The latter fresh, innocent, and plump like a girl who has just washed her hair, the former already stale and suffocating. Cicadas in the earth walls, water flowing down the runnels that fed into the pools. A promise of something. Whereas in the room there was just the remains of something already completed and forever done, and the man asleep in his cups. She stepped out and left it behind.
As she went down the path of embedded shells—they made little pictures she hadn’t noticed before, images of fish and tomatoes and gibbous moons—she found alien words flowing back into her mind, to the effect that even the most frozen, deadened heart has two or three drops of love at its bottom, enough to feed the birds. It was an American who had said it long ago, but she couldn’t remember who. She walked swiftly away from the room where Day slept and soon she was drifting back among the guests, and it was still surprising how few of them she knew or had met. Had a new crop arrived earlier that evening? They were even younger, louder, and they ignored her as she slipped between them with her middle-aged ease. On one of the wide artificial lawns some kind of raï-inspired hip-hop was playing, MC Rai, though she would not have known it, and the kids were rocking to it with pinwheel fireworks turning on three sides, smoothly replaced and relit by the staff when they burned out, the bars sprinkled around under the trees lit from underneath so that the immense glass pitchers looked brilliant, packed with floating ice cubes and pieces of fruit. There were bowls of sugared yogurt that were kept chilled and silver racks of hard-boiled eggs, and the staff held long spoons with which to mix drinks in the tall glasses and scissors to cut up the bunches of fresh mint. A brisk trade in mojitos, in caipirinhas and gin and tonics and “moroccojitos.” The boys dancing in borrowed slippers, high on majoun, and wet from head to foot.
She went past the spinning fireworks, which made the staff laugh and elbow one another, and into the stone courts that surrounded the main pool, around which the braziers were going strong in gusts of sparks that blew across the flagstones and died out. She felt them breeze past her, then sting her arms momentarily. Fifty people at least stood and swam in the pool, their arms raised above their heads. On the court’s far side, the long tent with its cushions and pipes was crowded with people lying on their side, indifferent to the time of night, or early morning, as it now was. She wondered what to do, locked inside that deafening music. Unthinking, she dropped fully clothed into the pool and sank under the surface, letting her hair drift upward and stretching out her arms as wide as she could.
As she floated there suspended among the forest of dark limbs, her hair static and fanned out in the water, she suddenly felt like a child again. She let out a big fat bubble and began to choke with an enormous happiness. She saw herself running along the bank of the River Ouse near Piddinghoe with her father, catching moths with a net, with a suet pudding in a cheesecloth that her mother had given her. Moths, or mussels—she couldn’t remember. Her dead father was now alive, turning back to catch her eye. They recognized each other and he said, “You have a little stream inside you, always alive, always running, my wee Muff.” The dead are always inside us, she thought. They are what make us alive, though one only sees them underwater.
Then she resurfaced, slightly dissolved and cleaned, and found herself among bobbing heads moving to the beat of Raivolution. She hauled herself out and went to lie in the tent. A boy came to offer her some ice cream from a tray, and then a joint. She didn’t hesitate. She accepted. Above the walls, meanwhile, the first glimmer of dawn had appeared, a blush against the jagged outline of the mountain. She smoked thoughtfully and waited for something to happen, and when it didn’t, she felt herself fragment again and she wondered if she was going mad or if that same mountain really was higher and sharper than it had been. The serrations rose into thin spirelights like those of a cathedral. She thought back to their first hours in the country on Friday, and it seemed incredible that she could look back on that former self as naive and inexperienced. In forty-eight hours she had been completely destroyed from top to bottom, but at the same time liberated and rebuilt. If David had remained at her side, nothing would have happened at all; if they had not killed that boy, nothing would have happened either. Nothing would have happened and she would have remained the same, lumbering forward in time toward her predestined discontents. It was, she thought, Driss who had liberated her finally. It wasn’t even ironic or paradoxical or anything like that. It was too tremendous for such concepts. Were it not for Driss, she thought bitterly, she would not have slept with Day. There was a grim logic to it, and she had gone along with it. Driss, Day, David, her Three D’s.
It was Richard who, picking his way through his own party and spotting her from afar, came to rejoin her to his grand weekend. He was looking relaxed and intensely appealing, as gay men sometimes do when they allow their considerable flair to engage the female eye without hesitation, and he knew how to put her at ease and cajole her into satisfying his curiosity, which in any case was never overbearing.
“Here you are at last,” he said, sitting himself down next to her and then adding, “It’ll be dawn in an hour and you’re going to enjoy it. It’s going to be one of those days.”
She doesn’t look depressed, he thought.
“I can’t wait,” she said.
“Nor can I. And our David will be back before lunch.”
“I wasn’t afraid he wouldn’t be.”
“I suppose,” he said, lowering his eyes, “you are probably sorry you ever came here. Maybe you’ll consider coming back at a later time, when all this has blown over.”
“I would consider. David. I don’t kno
w.”
“You could come alone.”
She nodded. “Yes.”
From now on, in fact, alone might be better. Aloneness had suddenly appeared as a wide-open possibility for the future.
“It might be better like that,” he went on. “If I may say—I know it’s impertinent—you didn’t seem very happy. I mean, in general. You didn’t seem like you.”
“It’s been rather a difficult time all round. Part of it is me. I haven’t been working. Things haven’t been going well at home—I can’t concentrate; I can’t get it rolling. You know how that is sometimes?”
He took her hand and said, “Oh, Jo, what cases we are!”
“You have those periods, too, then?”
He said it was sometimes better just to stay depressed the whole time. Dally had told him about a recent study of shrimp exposed to Prozac. The beasts, it was found, swam in more brightly lit waters than normal shrimp and there they were easy prey for larger fish.
“Am I one of those shrimp?” she laughed.
“We all are.”
“I feel like one now, I must admit.”
“But you disappeared—what happened to you?”
“I got waylaid by a pirate.”
“I see.”
His look was knowing, but noncommittal.
“Such things have been known to happen.”
“Not to me.”
She had blurted it out, and regretted it. Too late. He gave her a small chocolate from the tripod table in front of them and watched her dutifully peel away the foil.
“It can happen to anyone. Circumstances conspired.”
“They certainly did, Dicky.”
“I am kind of glad in a way. I don’t mean about the boy. I mean about you. It knocked David off his perch. That was a good thing, wasn’t it?”
She sank her teeth into the truffle and felt it melt over her tongue. Sometimes a humble champagne truffle can open all the bolted doors inside you and you can lick it off your fingers gratefully.
“In the grand scheme of things,” she said, “it doesn’t matter if he was one way or another. I wasn’t thinking about him. For once I was thinking about myself. I dare say I won’t be the same again—in a hundred tiny, vicious ways. That’s fate if ever I saw it. But just now I jumped in the pool, and I have to say, Dicky, I never felt more alive than when I was under that water. I don’t even know why. I felt I had walked through the Looking Glass.”
“Then maybe you did.”
“Yes, in a funny way, I think I did.”
“What’s on the other side?”
Nightmares, she thought.
“I don’t know yet,” she murmured. “All kinds of odd things. A different future anyway.”
“You didn’t know what the previous future was.”
That was both true and untrue.
“I could guess,” she ventured. “I just didn’t like it much. I was glad it evaporated, anyway.”
“There you are, then.”
He had a brilliant smile for her, and his hand pressed upon her with a slow, deep sympathy and an assurance that he would never judge her. It made her eyes fill with tears that they nevertheless contained. The anguish brimmed up but stayed within her eyes, held in suspension by her iron will. No time for crying, this. She had lost nothing but her own self-deceit.
“The only future worth entertaining,” Richard said, emphasizing that odd last word, “is the one we can’t imagine at all. The one we’ll never have except partially.”
“I would be grateful for anything that wasn’t like the past. I’d get on a plane anywhere. I would.”
“Are you going to divorce him?”
“I can’t do it quite yet. But I have to, don’t I?”
“That I can’t say, sweet. Divorces aren’t my area of expertise. It’s usually best to wait awhile.”
“Yes, but I found out this weekend that I could and I must.”
“I see.”
“You see, the bottom fell out somewhere along the line these last two days. I can’t remember the exact moment, but it fell out and I saw it fall out. And I thought, okay, now I know it for a solid fact.”
“Was it David’s breakdown?”
“He didn’t have a breakdown. It was his true self that was allowed to come out. I thought he was actually relieved to be his true self for a change. He had an excuse to be his true self and he seized it. He was secretly thrilled.”
“So it’s even worse.”
“Yes, it’s even worse. The man I loved revealed as a cheap stranger.”
“Well,” Richard tried, thinking that he might as well represent David honorably for a change, “put yourself in his shoes. It cannot have been easy.”
“It’s not his fault,” she snapped. “Like I said, I’m talking about me. I’m the one who’s had the breakdown.”
“It’s been years coming,” he thought.
“You need to calm down, I think. It sounds like you’ve been up all night and are tired out. Maybe you should sleep now, before David gets back.”
“It’s the last thing I want to do. I can’t sleep now. I’ve never felt more awake. I’m so awake I’m dangerous.”
“All right. Let’s dance, then.”
“Wait a moment. Before I do anything—I know it sounds silly—I need you to take my pulse.”
“What?”
“Please, just take it. I was sure it was irregular a little while back. I want you to just take it right now and tell me.”
He protested at how ridiculous this was, but he did it anyway, and strangely enough, it was indeed a little erratic. He said it was perfectly normal.
“We’re both drinkers,” she said morosely. “That’s the problem. Of course, I wouldn’t dare put myself on the same level of boozerdom as David, but we’re both in it together. It was the drink that made him drive so badly, and I’m only telling you because I know you’d never tell the police, and you’d say—and you will say—that it makes no difference now, and I agree, it doesn’t. But I’m telling you anyway. I have to get that off my chest. It was one hundred percent our fault. The kid did nothing wrong except step in the road and try to make us slow down, and David—David is so terrified of them—and he was so boozed up …”
“As you say, it no longer matters much. I knew all that anyway. It was quite obvious.”
“We’re rather an obvious couple, aren’t we?”
“Aren’t all couples obvious in the end? Look at me and Dally. No one would ever accuse us of not being obvious. In a way, I think one should strive to be obvious. It’s the sign that you’ve finally made it as a couple.”
“I don’t agree. But I see what you mean.”
She looked crestfallen for a moment.
“All I ever wanted,” she resumed, “was for us to be unobvious even to ourselves. What an insane ambition!”
“It’s everyone’s ambition.”
“And then we grow old and wear our trousers rolled?”
“Yes, more or less.” He chuckled. “Who cares about ambitions anyway? What do they ever come to? At fifty, I’ve noticed, everyone is in about the same state of protracted despair.”
“It’s not despair,” she wanted to say angrily.
“The funny thing about tonight,” she went on, “is that for the first time in years, I felt young again. I don’t know what it is. I committed adultery with a ridiculous man, as women always do. I woke up feeling like a god. I went for a swim and underwater I had a revelation. Well, revelation is a strong word. I had a flash.”
“How do you mean, young?”
She shrugged, because she felt that it didn’t really need to be explained. The word itself was so potent, so tyrannical, that it never needed to be explained or emphasized.
“I felt I was alive again,” she said bluntly. “Like coming out of the Ice Age. I felt the past coming back and giving me life.”
So there’s no going back, he wanted to say then, but if he did say it, he was afraid the thought would
be so conscious in her mind that she would impulsively act on it.
“In that case, run with it,” he said kindly. “It won’t last forever. If you have that feeling for one night, then live that night to the full and hope for the best.”
“Yes. I just don’t feel guilty anymore. I don’t need to be forgiven by anyone.”
“I’ve been saying that all along, haven’t I?”
“You have, but it’s such a huge thing to believe, isn’t it? That one doesn’t need to be forgiven by anyone.”
He was not sure what she meant, so he let it go. But soon their minds had wandered in different directions anyway, and she took his hand as a final gesture of solidarity and kissed it. There, there, he thought. He wondered what the rest of her tortured day was going to be like, the husband returned from his farce in the desert, the departure on the same road that had brought them such misfortune. It was not going to be a day she would relish. And yet it was beginning magically, with desert birds and the cruel line of the mountains as fresh as something being torn in front of their eyes and the stars fading out unnoticed. Things might yet resolve in ways unexpected.
“I’m going to dance for a bit,” she said. “While it’s still dark. I don’t want it to be dawn yet.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Can’t we clear our heads with something? Some lemonade?”
“Nothing simpler. I’ll see to it.”
They walked slowly up to the walls for some fresh air, and Hamid brought up the lemonade, the glasses, the ice. She drank it all voraciously and the two men watched her, bemused. On the slopes below them, small goats stood in the dark, their ears pricked, and the egrets stirred. The anticipation of first light and the endurance necessary for it. She sucked on the ice cubes and wet her hands with them and ran one through her hair, letting the ends drip. The nerves all along her limbs vibrated quietly, set into life by the cooler air blowing up from the plain, and the cold water slid between her breasts. She wondered if there was a condemnation in Hamid’s eye, but none seemed to be there. She thanked him for the lemonade and avoided that same eye, climbing back down with Richard and leaving the haughty servant watching them from above. They went to the dance floor in the main courtyard, and she fell into his arms and they danced for a while until she became too hot, and then she took off her shirt and went topless like the others until the moon went down into the side of the mountain and the sky began to lighten. She didn’t care whether it did or not. She was no longer waiting for David to return, and by the same token she was no longer not waiting. She lost herself in her own movement, and it was a long time before the music was cut and breakfast was served under starched cotton shades, with no sense that anything had ended.
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