Disgrace (2 page)

          There is a new secretary in his department. He takes her to lunch at a restaurant a discreet distance from the campus and listens while, over shrimp salad, she complains about her sons' school. Drug-pedlars hang around the playing-fields, she says, and the police do nothing. For the past three years she and her husband have had their name on a list at the New Zealand consulate, to emigrate. 'You people had it easier. I mean, whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, at least you knew where you were.

          'You people?' he says. 'What people?'

          'I mean your generation. Now people just pick and choose which laws they want to obey. It's anarchy. How can you bring up children when there's anarchy all around?'

          Her name is Dawn. The second time he takes her out they stop at his house and have sex. It is a failure. Bucking and clawing, she works herself into a froth of excitement that in the end only repels him. He lends her a comb, drives her back to the campus.

          After that he avoids her, taking care to skirt the office where she works. In return she gives him a hurt look, then snubs him.

          He ought to give up, retire from the game. At what age, he wonders, did Origen castrate himself? Not the most graceful of solutions, but then ageing is not a graceful business. A clearing of the decks, at least, so that one can turn one's mind to the proper business of the old: preparing to die.

          Might one approach a doctor and ask for it? A simple enough operation, surely: they do it to animals every day, and animals survive well enough, if one ignores a certain residue of sadness. Severing, tying off: with local anaesthetic and a steady hand and a modicum of phlegm one might even do it oneself, out of a textbook. A man on a chair snipping away at himself an ugly sight, but no more ugly, from a certain point of view, than the same man exercising himself on the body of a woman.

          There is still Soraya. He ought to close that chapter. Instead, he pays a detective agency to track her down. Within days he has her real name, her address, her telephone number. He telephones at nine in the morning, when the husband and children will be out. 'Soraya?' he says. 'This is David. How are you? When can I see you again?'

          A long silence before she speaks. 'I don't know who you are,' she says. 'You are harassing me in my own house. I demand you will never phone me here again, never.'

          Demand. She means command. Her shrillness surprises him: there has been no intimation of it before. But then, what should a predator expect when he intrudes into the vixen's nest, into the home of her cubs?

          He puts down the telephone. A shadow of envy passes over him for the husband he has never seen.

TWO       

WITHOUT THE Thursday interludes the week is as featureless as a desert. There are days when he does not know what to do with himself.

          He spends more time in the university library, reading all he can find on the wider Byron circle, adding to notes that already fill two fat files. He enjoys the late-afternoon quiet of the reading room, enjoys the walk home afterwards: the brisk winter air, the damp, gleaming streets.

          He is returning home one Friday evening, taking the long route through the old college gardens, when he notices one of his students on the path ahead of him. Her name is Melanie Isaacs, from his Romantics course. Not the best student but not the worst either: clever enough, but unengaged.

          She is dawdling; he soon catches up with her. 'Hello,' he says.

          She smiles back, bobbing her head, her smile sly rather than shy. She is small and thin, with close-cropped black hair, wide, almost Chinese, cheekbones, large, dark eyes. Her outfits are always striking. Today she wears a maroon miniskirt with a mustard-coloured sweater and black tights; the gold baubles on her belt match the gold balls of her earrings.

          He is mildly smitten with her. It is no great matter: barely a term passes when he does not fall for one or other of his charges. Cape Town: a city prodigal of beauty, of beauties.

          Does she know he has an eye on her? Probably. Women are sensitive to it, to the weight of the desiring gaze.

          It has been raining; from the pathside runnels comes the soft rush of water.

          'My favourite season, my favourite time of day,' he remarks. 'Do you live around here?'

          'Across the line. I share a flat.'

          'Is Cape Town your home?'

          'No, I grew up in George.'

          'I live just nearby. Can I invite you in for a drink?'

          A pause, cautious. 'OK. But I have to be back by seven-thirty.'

          From the gardens they pass into the quiet residential pocket where he has lived for the past twelve years, first with Rosalind, then, after the divorce, alone.

          He unlocks the security gate, unlocks the door, ushers the girl in. He switches on lights, takes her bag. There are raindrops on her hair. He stares, frankly ravished. She lowers her eyes, offering the same evasive and perhaps even coquettish little smile as before.

          In the kitchen he opens a bottle of Meerlust and sets out biscuits and cheese. When he returns she is standing at the bookshelves, head on one side, reading titles. He puts on music: the Mozart clarinet quintet.

          Wine, music: a ritual that men and women play out with each other. Nothing wrong with rituals, they were invented to ease the awkward passages. But the girl he has brought home is not just thirty years his junior: she is a student, his student, under his tutelage. No matter what passes between them now, they will have to meet again as teacher and pupil. Is he prepared for that?

          'Are you enjoying the course?' he asks.

          'I liked Blake. I liked the Wonderhorn stuff.

          'Wunderhorn.'

          'I'm not so crazy about Wordsworth.'

          'You shouldn't be saying that to me. Wordsworth has been one of my masters.'

          It is true. For as long as he can remember, the harmonies of The Prelude have echoed within him.

          'Maybe by the end of the course I'll appreciate him more. Maybe he'll grow on me.'

          'Maybe. But in my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.'

          Like falling in love. Do the young still fall in love, or is that mechanism obsolete by now, unnecessary, quaint, like steam locomotion? He is out of touch, out of date. Falling in love could have fallen out of fashion and come back again half a dozen times, for all he knows.

          'Do you write poetry yourself?' he asks.

          'I did when I was at school. I wasn't very good. I haven't got the time now.'

          'And passions? Do you have any literary passions?'

          She frowns at the strange word. 'We did Adrienne Rich and Toni Morrison in my second year. And Alice Walker. I got pretty involved. But I wouldn't call it a passion exactly.'

          So: not a creature of passion. In the most roundabout of ways, is she warning him off?

          'I am going to throw together some supper,' he says. Will you join me? It will be very simple.'

          She looks dubious.

          'Come on!' he says. 'Say yes!'

          'OK. But I have to make a phone call first.'

          The call takes longer than he expected. From the kitchen he hears murmurings, silences.

          'What are your career plans?' he asks afterwards.

          'Stagecraft and design. I'm doing a diploma in theatre.'

          'And what is your reason for taking a course in Romantic poetry?'

          She ponders, wrinkling her nose. 'It's mainly for the atmosphere that I chose it,' she says. 'I didn't want to take Shakespeare again. I took Shakespeare last year.'

          What he throws together for supper is indeed simple: anchovies on tagliatelle with a mushroom sauce. He lets her chop the mushrooms. Otherwise she sits on a stool, watching while he cooks. They eat in the dining-room, opening a second bottle of wine. She eats without inhibition. A healthy appetite, for someone so slight.

          'Do you always cook for yourself?' she asks.

          'I live alone. If I don't cook, no one will.'

          'I hate cooking. I guess I should learn.'

          'Why? If you really hate it, marry a man who cooks.'

          Together they contemplate the picture: the young wife with the daring clothes and gaudy jewellery striding through the front door, impatiently sniffing the air; the husband, colourless Mr Right, apronned, stirring a pot in the steaming kitchen. Reversals: the stuff of bourgeois comedy.

          'That's all,' he says at the end, when the bowl is empty. 'No dessert, unless you want an apple or some yoghurt. Sorry - I didn't know I would be having a guest.'

          'It was nice,' she says, draining her glass, rising. 'Thanks.'

          'Don't go yet.' He takes her by the hand and leads her to the sofa. 'I have something to show you. Do you like dance? Not dancing: dance.' He slips a cassette into the video machine. 'It's a film by a man named Norman McLaren. It's quite old. I found it in the library. See what you think.'

          Sitting side by side they watch. Two dancers on a bare stage move through their steps. Recorded by a stroboscopic camera, their images, ghosts of their movements, fan out behind them like wingbeats. It is a film he first saw a quarter of a century ago but is still captivated by: the instant of the present and the past of that instant, evanescent, caught in the same space.

          He wills the girl to be captivated too. But he senses she is not.

          When the film is over she gets up and wanders around the room. She raises the lid of the piano, strikes middle C. 'Do you play?' she says.

          'A bit.'

          'Classics or jazz?'

          'No jazz, I'm afraid.'

          'Will you play something for me?'

          'Not now. I'm out of practice. Another time, when we know each other better.'

          She peers into his study. 'Can I look?' she says.

          'Switch on the light.'

          He puts on more music: Scarlatti sonatas, cat-music.

          'You've got a lot of Byron books,' she says when she comes out. 'Is he your favourite?'

          'I'm working on Byron. On his time in Italy.'

          'Didn't he die young?'

          'Thirty-six. They all died young. Or dried up. Or went mad and were locked away. But Italy wasn't where Byron died. He died in Greece. He went to Italy to escape a scandal, and settled there. Settled down. Had the last big love-affair of his life. Italy was a popular destination for the English in those days. They believed the Italians were still in touch with their natures. Less hemmed in by convention, more passionate.'

          She makes another circuit of the room. 'Is this your wife?' she asks, stopping before the framed photograph on the coffee-table. 'My mother. Taken when she was young.'

          'Are you married?'

          'I was. Twice. But now I'm not.' He does not say: Now I make do with what comes my way. He does not say: Now I make do with whores. 'Can I offer you a liqueur?'

          She does not want a liqueur, but does accept a shot of whisky in her coffee. As she sips, he leans over and touches her cheek. 'You're very lovely,' he says. 'I'm going to invite you to do something reckless.' He touches her again. 'Stay. Spend the night with me.'

          Across the rim of the cup she regards him steadily. 'Why?'

          'Because you ought to.'

          'Why ought I to?'

          'Why? Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.'

          His hand still rests against her cheek. She does not withdraw, but does not yield either.

          'And what if I already share it?' In her voice there is a hint of breathlessness. Exciting, always, to be courted: exciting, pleasurable.

          'Then you should share it more widely.'

          Smooth words, as old as seduction itself. Yet at this moment he believes in them. She does not own herself. Beauty does not own itself.

          'From fairest creatures we desire increase,' he says, 'that thereby beauty's rose might never die.'

          Not a good move. Her smile loses its playful, mobile quality. The pentameter, whose cadence once served so well to oil the serpent's words, now only estranges. He has become a teacher again, man of the book, guardian of the culture-hoard. She puts down her cup. 'I must leave, I'm expected.'

          The clouds have cleared, the stars are shining. 'A lovely night,' he says, unlocking the garden gate. She does not look up. 'Shall I walk you home?'

          'No.'

          'Very well. Good night.' He reaches out, enfolds her. For a moment he can feel her little breasts against him. Then she slips his embrace and is gone.

THREE

THAT IS WHERE he ought to end it. But he does not. On Sunday morning he drives to the empty campus and lets himself into the department office. From the filing cabinet he extracts Melanie Isaacs's enrolment card and copies down her personal details: home address, Cape Town address, telephone number.

          He dials the number. A woman's voice answers.

          'Melanie?'

          'I'll call her. Who is speaking?'

          'Tell her, David Lurie.'

          Melanie - melody: a meretricious rhyme. Not a good name for her. Shift the accent. Meláni: the dark one.

          'Hello?'

          In the one word he hears all her uncertainty. Too young. She will not know how to deal with him; he ought to let her go. But he is in the grip of something. Beauty's rose: the poem drives straight as an arrow. She does not own herself; perhaps he does not own himself either.

          'I thought you might like to go out to lunch,' he says. 'I'll pick you up at, shall we say, twelve.'

          There is still time for her to tell a lie, wriggle out. But she is too confused, and the moment passes.

          When he arrives, she is waiting on the sidewalk outside her apartment block. She is wearing black tights and a black sweater. Her hips are as slim as a twelve-year-old's.

          He takes her to Hout Bay, to the harbourside. During the drive he tries to put her at ease. He asks about her other courses. She is acting in a play, she says. It is one of her diploma requirements. Rehearsals are taking up a lot of her time.

          At the restaurant she has no appetite, stares out glumly over the sea.

          'Is something the matter? Do you want to tell me?'

          She shakes her head.

          'Are you worried about the two of us?'

          'Maybe,' she says.

          'No need. I'll take care. I won't let it go too far.'

          Too far. What is far, what is too far, in a matter like this? Is her too far the same as his too far?

          It has begun to rain: sheets of water waver across the empty bay. 'Shall we leave?' he says.

          He takes her back to his house. On the living-room floor, to the sound of rain pattering against the windows, he makes love to her. Her body is clear, simple, in its way perfect; though she is passive throughout, he finds the act pleasurable, so pleasurable that from its climax he tumbles into blank oblivion.

          When he comes back the rain has stopped. The girl is lying beneath him, her eyes closed, her hands slack above her head, a slight frown on her face. His own hands are under her coarse-knit sweater, on her breasts. Her tights and panties lie in a tangle on the floor; his trousers are around his ankles. After the storm, he thinks: straight out of George Grosz.

          Averting her face, she frees herself, gathers her things, leaves the room. In a few minutes she is back, dressed. 'I must go,' she whispers. He makes no effort to detain her.

          He wakes the next morning in a state of profound wellbeing, which does not go away. Melanie is not in class. From his office he telephones a florist. Roses? Perhaps not roses. He orders carnations. 'Red or white?' asks the woman. Red? White? 'Send twelve pink,' he says.

          'I haven't got twelve pink. Shall I send a mix?'

          'Send a mix,' he says.

          Rain falls all of Tuesday, from heavy clouds blown in over the city from the west. Crossing the lobby of the Communications Building at the end of the day, he spies her at the doorway amid a knot of students waiting for a break in the downpour. He comes up behind her, puts a hand on her shoulder. 'Wait for me here,' he says. 'I'll give you a ride home.'

          He returns with an umbrella. Crossing the square to the parking lot he draws her closer to shelter her. A sudden gust blows the umbrella inside out; awkwardly they run together to the car.

          She is wearing a slick yellow raincoat; in the car she lowers the hood. Her face is flushed; he is aware of the rise and fall of her chest. She licks away a drop of rain from her upper lip. A child! he thinks: No more than a child! What am I doing? Yet his heart lurches with desire.

          They drive through dense late-afternoon traffic. 'I missed you yesterday,' he says. 'Are you all right?'

          She does not reply, staring at the wiper blades.

          At a red light he takes her cold hand in his. 'Melanie!' he says, trying to keep his tone light. But he has forgotten how to woo. The voice he hears belongs to a cajoling parent, not a lover.

          He draws up before her apartment block. 'Thanks,' she says, opening the car door.

          'Aren't you going to invite me in?'

          'I think my flatmate is home.'

          'What about this evening?'

          'I've got a rehearsal this evening.'

          'Then when do I see you again?'

          She does not answer. 'Thanks,' she repeats, and slides out.

On Wednesday she is in class, in her usual seat. They are still on Wordsworth, on Book 6 of The Prelude, the poet in the Alps. 'From a bare ridge,' he reads aloud,

                                                                      we also first beheld

          Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved

          To have a soulless image on the eye

          That had usurped upon a living thought

          That never more could be.

          'So. The majestic white mountain, Mont Blanc, turns out to be a disappointment. Why? Let us start with the unusual verb form _usurp upon_. Did anyone look it up in a dictionary?'

          Silence.

          'If you had, you would have found that _usurp upon_ means to intrude or encroach upon. _Usurp_, to take over entirely, is the perfective of _usurp upon_; usurping completes the act of usurping upon.

          'The clouds cleared, says Wordsworth, the peak was unveiled, and we grieved to see it. A strange response, for a traveller to the Alps. Why grieve? Because, he says, a soulless image, a mere image on the retina, has encroached upon what has hitherto been a living thought. What was that living thought?'

          Silence again. The very air into which he speaks hangs listless as a sheet. A man looking at a mountain: why does it have to be so complicated, they want to complain? What answer can he give them? What did he say to Melanie that first evening? That without a flash of revelation there is nothing. Where is the flash of revelation in this room?

          He casts a quick glance at her. Her head is bowed, she is absorbed in the text, or seems to be.

          'The same word usurp recurs a few lines later. Usurpation is one of the deeper themes of the Alps sequence. The great archetypes of the mind, pure ideas, find themselves usurped by mere sense-images.

          'Yet we cannot live our daily lives in a realm of pure ideas, cocooned from sense-experience. The question is not, How can we keep the imagination pure, protected from the onslaughts of reality? The question has to be, Can we find a way for the two to coexist? look at line 599. Wordsworth is writing about the limits of sense-perception. It is a theme we have touched on before. As the sense-organs reach the limit of their powers, their light begins to go out. Yet at the moment of expiry that light leaps up one last time like a candle-flame, giving us a glimpse of the invisible. The passage is difficult; perhaps it even contradicts the Mont Blanc moment. Nevertheless, Wordsworth seems to be feeling his way toward a balance: not the pure idea, wreathed in clouds, nor the visual image burned on the retina, overwhelming and disappointing us with its matter-of-fact clarity, but the sense-image, kept as fleeting as possible, as a means toward stirring or activating the idea that lies buried more deeply in the soil of memory.'

          He pauses. Blank incomprehension. He has gone too far too fast. How to bring them to him? How to bring her?

          'Like being in love,' he says. 'If you were blind you would hardly have fallen in love in the first place. But now, do you truly wish to see the beloved in the cold clarity of the visual apparatus? It may be in your better interest to throw a veil over the gaze, so as to keep her alive in her archetypal, goddesslike form.'

          It is hardly in Wordsworth, but at least it wakes them up.

          Archetypes? they are saying to themselves. Goddesses? What is he talking about? What does this old man know about love?

          A memory floods back: the moment on the floor when he forced the sweater up and exposed her neat, perfect little breasts. For the first time she looks up; her eyes meet his and in a flash see all. Confused, she drops her glance.

          'Wordsworth is writing about the Alps,' he says. 'We don't have Alps in this country, but we have the Drakensberg, or on a smaller scale Table Mountain, which we climb in the wake of the poets, hoping for one of those revelatory, Wordsworthian moments we have all heard about.' Now he is just talking, covering up. 'But moments like that will not come unless the eye is half turned toward the great archetypes of the imagination we carry within us.'

          Enough! He is sick of the sound of his own voice, and sorry for her too, having to listen to these covert intimacies. He dismisses the class, then lingers, hoping for a word with her. But she slips away in the throng.

          A week ago she was just another pretty face in the class. Now she is a presence in his life, a breathing presence.

The auditorium of the student union is in darkness. Unnoticed, he takes a seat in the back row. Save for a balding man in a janitor's uniform a few rows in front of him, he is the only spectator.

          Sunset at the Globe Salon is the name of the play they are rehearsing: a comedy of the new South Africa set in a hairdressing salon in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. On stage a hairdresser, flamboyantly gay, attends to two clients, one black, one white. Patter passes among the three of them: jokes, insults. Catharsis seems to be the presiding principle: all the coarse old prejudices brought into the light of day and washed away in gales of laughter.

          A fourth figure comes onstage, a girl in high platform shoes with her hair done in a cascade of ringlets. 'Take a seat, dearie, I'll attend to you in a mo,' says the hairdresser. 'I've come for the job,' she replies - 'the one you advertised.' Her accent is glaringly Kaaps; it is Melanie. 'OK, pick up a broom and make yourself useful,' says the hairdresser.

          She picks up a broom, totters around the set pushing it before her. The broom gets tangled in an electric cord. There is supposed to be a flash, followed by a screaming and a scurrying around, but something goes wrong with the synchronization. The director comes striding onstage, and behind her a young man in black leather who begins to fiddle with the wall-socket. 'It's got to be snappier,' says the director. 'A more Marx Brothers atmosphere.' She turns to Melanie. 'OK?' Melanie nods.

          Ahead of him the janitor stands up and with a heavy sigh leaves the auditorium. He ought to be gone too. An unseemly business, sitting in the dark spying on a girl (unbidden the word letching comes to him). Yet the old men whose company he seems to be on the point of joining, the tramps and drifters with their stained raincoats and cracked false teeth and hairy earholes - all of them were once upon a time children of God, with straight limbs and clear eyes. Can they be blamed for clinging to the last to their place at the sweet banquet of the senses?

          Onstage the action resumes. Melanie pushes her broom. A bang, a flash, screams of alarm. 'It's not my fault,' squawks Melanie. 'My gats, why must everything always be my fault?' Quietly he gets up, follows the janitor into the darkness outside.

          At four o'clock the next afternoon he is at her flat. She opens the door wearing a crumpled T-shirt, cycling shorts, slippers in the shape of comic-book gophers which he finds silly, tasteless.

          He has given her no warning; she is too surprised to resist the intruder who thrusts himself upon her. When he takes her in his arms, her limbs crumple like a marionette's. Words heavy as clubs thud into the delicate whorl of her ear. 'No, not now!' she says, struggling. 'My cousin will be back!'

          But nothing will stop him. He carries her to the bedroom, brushes off the absurd slippers, kisses her feet, astonished by the feeling she evokes. Something to do with the apparition on the stage: the wig, the wiggling bottom, the crude talk. Strange love! Yet from the quiver of Aphrodite, goddess of the foaming waves, no doubt about that.

          She does not resist. All she does is avert herself--avert her lips, avert her eyes. She lets him lay her out on the bed and undress her: she even helps him, raising her arms and then her hips. Little shivers of cold run through her; as soon as she is bare, she slips under the quilted counterpane like a mole burrowing, and turns her back on him.

          Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away.

          'Pauline will be back any minute,' she says when it is over. 'Please. You must go.'

          He obeys, but then, when he reaches his car, is overtaken with such dejection, such dullness, that he sits slumped at the wheel unable to move.

          A mistake, a huge mistake. At this moment, he has no doubt, she, Melanie, is trying to cleanse herself of it, of him. He sees her running a bath, stepping into the water, eyes closed like a sleepwalker's. He would like to slide into a bath of his own.

          A woman with chunky legs and a no-nonsense business suit passes by and enters the apartment block. Is this cousin Pauline the flatmate, the one whose disapproval Melanie is so afraid of? He rouses himself, drives off.