Occasion for Loving

by Nadine Gordimer

  He admired and was amused by his mother, as, bare-footed and flushed-faced, she cha-cha-cha-ed round the table with Boaz, between the stew and the fruit salad, or, with narrow eyes and a challenging grimace, forgot her food and waited to make a point. He was afraid to show his pleasure; he knew it so quickly grew into the pawing attention that irritated everyone.

  All Jessie’s animation, that evening, was for Morgan. She was conscious of a picture of herself, as a woman is conscious of a picture of herself for the eyes of a lover.

  When the Stilwells had gone upstairs to bed Boaz and his wife hung about a little longer. Boaz had the true scholar’s tendency to turn furtively, as to a secret assignation, to his work, to “finger it over”, as Jessie had once described it, after any sort of break from it. Quite naturally, for him, the boisterous evening ended in a quiet hour of the night when he might as well play over a few of the new tapes he had made in the bush. He went upstairs to fetch the portable player. Jessie, coming from the bathroom, said “I’ve left the alka-seltzer out.” They both thought of something they had been laughing over earlier and burst out laughing. Tom called from the bedroom “Good night”, and Boaz said, “I’m going to have a little music first.”

  In the living-room, Ann lay on the divan watching him come in and said, automatically, “We ought to go up.” But she did not move, except to roll over on her stomach and rest on her elbows. Drumming and nasal humming began to come from the player, and she swayed and began to fit the words of a jazz-jargon song to it. “That’s it, that’s it,” he grinned as he went through a box of tapes. The tape in the player snapped and at once he was busy, exasperated and absorbed. When it was fixed, and the music began again, he said: “Come on?”

  She had begun to examine her finger-nails; again and again she pushed down the surrounding skin and looked at her hands. She was frowning in deep concentration, the concentration of keeping something out, rather than in, but one of the penultimate ripples of drunkenness reached her and suddenly she rested her outstretched chin on her hands and flung her head back, smiling brilliantly, sleepily, uncontrollably.

  “Isn’t this a good one?”

  “So tender! What is it?”

  “Makhweyana bow accompaniment. Zulu woman. It shouldn’t be on this tape, with that other snake-charmer thing, but I was short.”

  “Gorgeous!” she said again, as a particular phrase in the song was repeated.

  “Pasty-face,” he said. It was an overture of affection, to show he noticed her. In the generous outpouring of trivial intimacies when they first fell in love, she had told him how this had been a hated nick-name at her first school. He used it whenever he wanted to tell her he found her beautiful.

  She did not attempt to brush the acknowledgement aside; as always, the temptation to accept it overcame her; denial would have been guile: the acceptance was innocent.

  The mood between them was affectionate, and the mood of the evening behind them was one that suggested that men and women were neither good nor bad, happy nor unhappy, but taking pleasure here, suffering there, as they tried to live; rash, occasionally exalted, often funny. To be human was to bear with one another through all this. He was looking for another tape that he particularly wanted to play to her and telling her how he had come to make the recording, when she said, with obstinacy and even a little humour: “You know, this business of going about with Gideon Shibalo. I’ve been having a sort of”—she did not pause, but interrupted herself with a quick lurching sigh—“love affair.”

  The second sentence was something she forced herself to say, for herself. He knew the moment she said Shibalo’s name; she saw it at once in the slackening of muscular tension in the line of his neck from ear to shirt collar. His ears went scarlet, like a girl’s. She watched these things although she didn’t want to. Boaz had a waxen, oriental skin in which the blood never showed unless he cut himself.

  She spoke again before he could say anything. “Did you have any idea?” At the dinner table, she had told—very well—the story of the incident at the night-club. Now she tried to let herself off lightly by believing that she had really confessed then, in a way, in a general context of the culpability of experience.

  He was frowning, to ask for time; he stayed her. He said, above some tumult, “You’ve made love to Shibalo?”

  “I’ve told you.”

  There was a silence; the first real silence of their lives together. She was sober, but the ultimate ripple of the wine’s tide just touched her, once more. Without meaning to, she made the funny, doleful smile, lips pursed down at the corners, eyebrows wide, that she used to draw his attention to, and make mock excuse for, some trivial blunder when she was doing drawings for him.

  He smiled slightly, slowly, fascinatedly; it was as if she had done it on purpose, to play with him, to demonstrate a power over him, and from that moment she did begin to feel power.

  He came and stood above her. He faced her without weapons and in an honesty as different from her own as his conception of work was different from hers. “What’s it all about, though?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  He nodded. She spoke the truth, for her.

  “It’s just one of these things that happen. Before you realise it …” She was ready to embroider, to invent, now, but he stopped her by squatting on the floor beside the divan and putting his hand in a sort of muffling caress over her face. “Poor Pasty-face.”

  She sat up, offended. “Don’t you believe me?”

  “Of course I believe you.”

  “I mean don’t you believe about him and me?”

  She felt that it was her eyes that made him walk about the room; they did not follow him so much as propel him.

  “Yes, but you don’t know what it’s all about. You don’t tell me it’s because he talks to you, or because you admire him, or because he’s great in bed, or because you wanted to try a black man—I mean, it’s like a child picking daisies …” He was patient but distressed, and she was alert to the feeling that the distress was a moral one that by-passed her. Like many people who do not mean to wound but want merely to draw attention to themselves, she found it might be necessary to make her mark draw blood.

  “Why should the reason matter?” she said, smiling at him. The unspoken “to you” stopped him as if she herself had risen from the divan and stood squarely in his way. How could she force him to say, in the debased verbal currency of the film close-up, do you still love me? Don’t you love me any more? The cat’s whine repelled him. He tried, in the moment, in his mind, to jumble the mumbo-jumbo so as to get sense and reality out of it: Is it me you still love or is it because you don’t love me—the worn units were idiotically unusable.

  They talked a little while longer, but as though musing gently on something that had come upon them without volition—the inexplicable behaviour of friends, or a venture that had gone wrong through outside circumstances. “I suppose I ought to have come with you more.” “Nonsense. You can’t run away from these things.”

  “Have you really never wanted to make love to anyone else since we’ve been living together?”

  “I don’t think so. Oh, perhaps once—”

  “Viveca, that time at Ellman’s?”

  “Yes, well, she hadn’t changed a bit, she was as crazy as she used to be—” But it was still only just after midnight; the night stretched long as soon as their voices gave way to the creaks that went over their heads as the house eased itself.

  They went upstairs with loosely linked hands. Castaways thrown together on the unfamiliar island, they moved about the room with a show of being at home, secretly watching each other. He never had asked her if she was still in love with him. Lying in bed she felt a lust like sudden generosity toward him, and longed to touch him.

  Yet in the morning, when the whole business hung in wait with the smell of last night’s drinking in the house, and he asked, “Are you going to see Shibalo this week?” she wrapped the hair-combings from he
r brush round her finger and said, “I suppose so.”

  Ten days later Boaz came home. There were sheafs of notes, drawings and photographs in the bedroom, and instruments and various African cooking utensils (these had nothing to do with his studies, but he picked them up anyway) littered the upstairs landing. He was in the house surrounded by these things all day and would have come downstairs perhaps only to the smell of dinner, in the evening, if someone had not broken in upon him from time to time. One of the children would stump slowly up the stairs, sent to say that lunch was ready, if he wanted some. Agatha would shout up the well, “Telephone for Baas Davis!”

  Jessie appeared with a bottle of beer wearing a glass over its neck. “Still in a muck. How long is it going to take you to struggle out of this? I’d almost forgotten your existence.” “Oh, I’ve only started unpacking. Wait till I start editing my tapes; all sorts of horrible noises—you’ll remember I’m around then, all right.” He pushed at the papers before him with a gesture of washing his hands of them. He wore an old pullover as if he didn’t know that it was an exceptionally hot day, for April, outside. The beer seemed like an offering for an invalid. He took it from her and, fishing with one foot for his sandals under a chair, said, “You know about it, of course.”

  “Yes.” Jessie stood blinking slowly, wary.

  “What’s he like?”

  “I like him,” she said.

  He smiled. “That’s all right, you don’t have to worry about it.”

  “I thought everything was fine with you two. Of course it may still be, you know. It may sound a vulgar way of putting it, to you, but these things blow over. You forget about them if you live together long enough.”

  “Three years.”

  She said encouragingly, “Not a bad basis. The trouble is that one always begins to think one owns a person. If you really could, you wouldn’t want them any more. I don’t think that’s bitchiness or neurotic; it comes from the destruction of polarity, and the tension of attraction that goes with it. Well, sex—love, whatever—apart, you have to let the other person live as he must. I don’t know why we always talk about power as if it were something generated by and operating only in politics. It’s a ghastly thing to resist taking hold of, anywhere. Oh I’m scared of it,” she shrugged in distaste, “and I’m always fondling it, like a dirty habit.”

  They laughed, and went down to lunch. Tom was home, too, and the talk was of other things, not as if Shibalo did not exist, but in acceptance of the fact that he did, indeed. It could not be expected that the whole household should be stirred by his existence; Tom, Jessie, Elisabeth, Madge, Clem—Boaz had the pull of other lives about him, and felt comforted, and lonely.

  The life of the house seemed to go on as usual for the next few weeks. The situation became, astonishingly, as impossible situations often do, part of the everyday comings and goings of eight people. The coarse, elastic fibres of being, that sustained so much, matted in the new tension.

  Ann left the house, alone, three or four nights a week, and was often out all day. When she was at home she helped Boaz assiduously with his work, and would come swiftly downstairs every now and then, full of enthusiasm: “Look at this! Boaz copied it himself, made it himself from reeds. Look, he had to find the right grasses to bind it together, and everything!” Sometimes, when they were all in one room, she would seem to put herself apart from them—Boaz, Tom, Jessie—abandoning her usual way of lounging or squatting where she alighted, and holding her profile clear. Whenever she came upon Jessie in any part of the house she would take the initiative of a big, blazing smile—though, as Jessie remarked to Tom, “… I’m not going to ask her anything, for heaven’s sake.”

  The Stilwells supposed the affair was tailing off, in the civilised way. There were two ways such adventures died, once they weren’t going to bring about a divorce: one, the primitive catharsis, with tears, threats of suicide, and a highly emotional reconciliation; two, the civilised way, with three-cornered talks, plenty of drinks, and an exaggerated courtesy. The Stilwells had heard Shibalo’s voice upstairs one afternoon; he was being shown Boaz’s collection of new instruments. Soon all three of them, Boaz, Ann and Shibalo, came down, and Shibalo stayed to dinner. He was charming, rather like a visiting celebrity determined to be natural.

  Eleven

  Every day when Ann went to meet Gideon she held in her mind a frame of awareness that might fall into place and mark it as the last time. There did not need to be an event or a decision, merely the word or the look, the turn of mood that would give the affair its meaning and the grounds for its destruction contained within the meaning. She neither dreaded this nor was curious about it, but it lent intensity to the inanimate witnesses of her movements—the grain of tables that she scratched with a fingernail as she talked to Shibalo, the colour and heat-tacky texture of the plastic covering on which she sat alone in the car waiting for him at mid-day. People’s faces she scarcely saw, for she was aware only, in the house, of what they might be thinking of her: a scribble of fears and impulses scratched them out, like the faces in the children’s picture-books that she saw lying about upstairs.

  She could not stop seeing Gideon simply because Boaz was home; it had never occurred to her that she might not stop whenever she felt like it, but after she had told Boaz that night, she knew that this was not so simple: if she gave up seeing Gideon because Boaz had come home, it followed that she had begun a love affair with him only because Boaz was away.

  The day after she had talked to Boaz, Gideon saw her standing on the balcony of the flat watching him as he came up the road. She stood there with her arms open, hands resting on the balcony rail, and he could feel her attention on him long before he could make out her face clearly. She smiled suddenly as her face came within distance of recognition, and turned and went into the flat, leaving a single trail of cigarette smoke moving gently, like a water-weed, in the air where she had stood. He hurried instinctively. In the flat she had arranged flowers that she had brought; she must have been there some time, but she wore a coat, as if she did not intend to stay. The coat came to his eye and suddenly created the status of a past tense between himself and this woman; how many times had he seen it, flung on the back seat of the car, hanging from her shoulders with the sleeves empty! He had slept with it rolled up under his head, under the blue gums. He said to her once, “Your coat’ll get dirty,” and she said, “That old thing—nothing harms it.” It had been to Norway and Turkey and Italy, this coat, that was shabby-smart and designed to make a girl like her look lost and in need of no home.

  “Where’re you off to?”

  “Nowhere.” She stood in the middle of the room.

  He came over to her kidding, tenderly, lingeringly, “I ought to paint you in that coat. Trench warfare.” He touched the belt, fiddled with the buttons and slid his hand down into hers. They began to kiss; when she felt him about to release her she held him and when he felt her about to draw away he enticed her closer. “You’ll find another model,” she said. “What about a picnicker—wha’d’you-call-it, an open-air companion.” “That too, I suppose.”

  The game of renunciation began. In it they felt the parenthetic closeness of two people who have shared an experience outside the separate involvement of each in his own background. The Stilwell house, that held every vibration of her voice and laugh, and had seen her every gesture, did not know her as she had her being among the objects and with the person in the flat. Like two men who have been stationed together in some foreign region, or a pair of children who return to family meals from an imaginary country, there was an existence in which they knew life and each other as nobody closer to them did. It became a refuge, too; doubts and decisions did not operate there, any more than public notices specifying enchanted circles which a black foot might not enter. As soon as she sat smoking in one of the chairs belonging to the two young advertising men she had seen only twice, and following, now with her eyes, now with the sense of an intensely-known presence, G
ideon as he moved about the room, Boaz’s “What is it all about?” was dislodged and fell harmless.