Evangelista's Fan (12 page)

She finds a cab. Its interior is muddy, as if it were a water-taxi.

(Otto: ‘
There is always, on a wet night in the city, some means of getting home, but every one of these nights, in our hearts, is a rehearsal for the night when there is no means and when there is no home to go to and we are the outcasts again.
')

The driver tells Marianne that he can't take a direct route to the Europa Hotel because one of the bridges is closed. A bomb has exploded at the central Post Office and the police have thrown a cordon round it. He will have to make a ‘complicated' diversion.

‘OK,' says Marianne.

He's a young man, quite eager to talk. He's worried about a letter he posted at five o'clock to his sister in Argentina. He says: ‘It takes me all year to write to her. I don't know how to turn my life into words, that's my problem. And now my letter's gone up in smoke.'

On a different evening, in her own city, Marianne might have taken out a piece of paper from her briefcase and said to the driver: ‘Let's write it again. You dictate and I'll put it down.'
Dear Maria, Don't faint. This is a letter from that marvellous correspondent, your brother. I am fine and hope you are and how are the Executive Boxing lessons going?
But tonight, she hasn't got the strength to be helpful in this way and decides, anyway, that the offer might be a patronising one.

They drive past the shuttered façade of a vast meat market, now closed while the city planners discuss new uses for it. ‘I drove a film maker here,' says the driver. ‘He was going to turn the meat market into an imaginary Finland. He told me he was famous, but if he was so famous why was he in my old cab?'

As they turn into a narrow, cobbled road in the oldest part of the city, the driver half turns to Marianne and smiles. ‘I told you,' he says, ‘a complicated route.' And Marianne sees that they're passing a row of shop fronts, lit and furnished like old-fashioned parlours and occupied by prostitutes who smile and pout and touch their breasts as the taxi goes slowly by. One of them, naked except for a red suspender belt and gold stockings, has fitted out her shop as an opulent bathroom and is sitting, legs apart, on a gold-plated lavatory. Marianne stares. The women in their little parlours amuse her, attract her, even. The girl on the throne shocks her. Yet she can't not look at her. She turns, cranes her neck, as the cab moves on.

‘That one!' says the taxi driver. ‘No shame, eh? They should make a law . . .'

‘There's no law any more,' Marianne hears herself saying, and then, in the muddy dark of the cab, she sees, as if down a long tunnel, herself in a hotel bathroom. The suck of the extractor fan is hungry:
give me your foul air and I'll turn it into an icy breeze
. Marianne is taking off all her clothes and folding them into a neat pile. They're the clothes she's still wearing, the silk blouse, the skirt, the dark tights, the shoes now spoiled by the rain. And she's excited; sexually aroused and excited and nervous in her mind. She's going to sleep with a stranger. She, Marianne, who lives for her work with old people and for her son, Nico; she, who no longer dreams about past lovers or even about the touch of a man's hand on her hair, is going to go to bed with the tall American she met in the hotel bar. He has a large body. His hair is blond, but his pubic hair is dark. He works for a chemical company. She moves from the bathroom, holding her hands across her breasts, and sees him standing on the opposite side of the double bed. She wants him. She wants to lie down and be held close to his chest, to breath the half-forgotten smell of a man in her arms. She knows this is a moment of weakness, but she doesn't mind. But then. After he's undressed and she's undressed and they're standing face to face, she shivering a bit in the air-conditioned room, nothing proceeds as she wants it to proceed. The first terrible thing is the kiss . . .

‘How are you going to pay?'

‘What?' says Marianne.

‘Is this a cash job?'

‘What?'

‘Cash or account, please? You got an account with the cab company?'

The taxi has stopped and the young driver is asking about the fare. They're at the Europa Hotel. Marianne recognises the entrance, but doesn't understand how they could have arrived here so quickly. Only seconds ago, they were passing by the prostitutes in their lighted windows.

‘Cash,' says Marianne.

Then she pays the driver and gets out of the cab and is swept by the rain into the hotel foyer. She stands still in the bright circle of it. She can hear a pianist playing and realises that this is where it began, with the music in the bar, with some old sentimental tunes that reminded her of her life with Paul and even of her life with Otto and Lucie in that first apartment of all. It was the music that kept her there, ordering drinks, and which, after what seemed like a long time, made her angry to be so alone. And so she looked around and saw the yellow-haired American.

He'd been watching her. He told her that when they began to talk: ‘I'd been watching you, but you're smart, you knew that, didn't you? I like mature women because you all know where it's at.' He had eyes that seemed gentle. ‘What do you do?' he asked. ‘I know you do something.'

‘I'm a doctor,' she said. ‘A geriatrician.'

He gave her this long, bleak look. ‘My mother's old,' he said. ‘Old is hell. Death is better. But I admire you. Let me raise a glass to all that you do.'

Marianne has no idea what time it is. It feels late. She finds her room key and walks to the elevator. She takes the elevator to the third floor and goes into Room 341. A switch near the door turns on an overhead light and a desk lamp. She puts down her briefcase on the desk. She looks around her. There's nothing of hers in the room: no suitcase, no books, no clock, no make-up bag, no perfume, no shoes or clothes, no photograph of Nico in its little perspex frame. The room appears unoccupied. It's the room of a guest who's already left.

Slowly, holding her arms round herself, Marianne moves towards the bathroom. She can remember now that when she got out of the bed, where she'd lain for so short a time, hurrying to her pile of clothes, the American followed her in there. ‘
What are you doing, doctor? What the fuck are you doing?
' She was trying to get dressed. The floor was slippery. He'd made her take a shower before he touched her. He'd showered, too. The marble floor of the bathroom was awash with water.

There are no possessions of hers in the bathroom. She knew there wouldn't be, yet she continues to search for them – behind the shower curtain, on the hook on the door, in the white pedal bin.

She was trying to get dressed and the American was yelling at her and then something happened.

In the pedal bin there is a piece of polythene packaging. Marianne looks at it. She takes it out and reads the label on it:
Yhoders Sterile Products Inc. N.Y. Gloves. One pair. Allsize
.

Marianne sits down on the cold floor of the bathroom. The fierce extractor fan seems to suck all the air upwards, out of reach of her breathing. She knows that she's probably, in the next quarter of an hour, going to be sick. She raises the lavatory lid. It feels suddenly dark in the bathroom. As in the taxi, Marianne sees herself small and far away, as though at the end of a tunnel.

It began with the kiss that was never a kiss. He said: ‘In the old days, I would have kissed you, sure. But they're long gone. I don't employ my mouth any more. I'm sorry. No mouths. OK?'

He took her hands, as if to emphasise his apology for this, but then started to examine them and immediately noticed her bitten nails, one of which had bled recently. He left her standing there, cold, not kissed, not held. She crossed to the bed and tried to get in it, while he searched in his suitcase for something. He tore open the polythene package which contained the surgical gloves. He came to the bed and held them out to her and told her to put them on. ‘Don't take offence,' he said. ‘You could be Dr Death. How do I know?'

She should have left then. She didn't leave.

And there was a moment, she thinks, when he held her, when they held each other and she was warm and he stroked her thigh. But then he took one of her hands encased in its glove and guided it to his sex and said: ‘OK. Make me want you.' He had no erection. ‘Talk to me,' he said. ‘Give me some cinema. I can't get it away in Europe any more. It's got dark here, or something. I keep trying, but no luck.'

He wanted her to talk about Pieter. She'd told him, down in the bar, drinking whisky, with the sweet music going on, that she had this old patient who kept offering himself to her and the American had laughed, had seemed to find it funny and tender and had let it go. But now he wanted her to arouse him with this, the story of Pieter: ‘What does he do? Tell me what he does. God, even the dying have their brains in their pricks! Does he make you touch him? Does he masturbate in front of you?'

If she hadn't started to tell him, then there might have been something to save, despite his refusal to kiss her, despite the awful gloves, because she
wanted
it so badly after all her years alone. But, half drunk as she was, she did start to talk about Pieter and the American listened and became aroused in her hand and kept saying, ‘OK, go on. OK, go on.' And then, suddenly ashamed – disgusted by her betrayal of Pieter, disgusted by her witless departure from a self she'd spent so long trying to become – she stopped talking and took her hand away. She picked up what she thought was her room key from the bedside table and got out of bed and went to the bathroom to put on her clothes and leave. She heard him start to yell at her. She was trying to take off the hateful gloves when he arrived in the bathroom. ‘Hey! What are you doing, doctor? What the fuck are you doing? I was getting hard! Look! I've been in this stinking Europe for ten stinking days and this is the first time I feel like a man and not like a corpse and you're walking out on me!'

Marianne said nothing. She gave up on the gloves. All she wanted was to be far away from here. She knelt down by her pile of clothes and tried to put on her bra. He kept shouting. ‘
Words, of course
,' said Otto, ‘
can feel like stones, as if a building has begun to fall down all around you.
'

And then a sudden darkness came on.

Marianne flushes the lavatory and closes the lid. She washes her face and hands and wipes them with a clean towel. As a child, she vomited often. Lucie was almost always with her, to comfort her, to hold her forehead and hold back her long hair.

She feels better. Almost weightless. Now she must go down to the desk and tell the receptionist she's mislaid her room key.

She returns the glove packaging to the bin and the soiled gloves with it. What else did he leave behind which the room maid saw and cleared away? Her own blood on the floor? What did her head strike when he kicked out at her? The rim of the bath or the underside of the washbasin? How long did she lie in his bathroom? She has no recollection of returning to her own room, but she knows it was there that she woke up, there that she got dressed, as if sleepwalking into her clothes, and set out for the final day of the conference. And all day she sat listening to the speakers but didn't hear them. She went to the platform to take part in the plenary session, but said nothing. All day, she'd been dreaming of going home to her beautiful apartment above the cherry trees.

She is given a key. Her room is two floors above his. The view of the city is grand and when Marianne looks down she can see the Post Office, still burning. All around it, blue lights flash.

She remembers there used to be fires in the city when she was a child. In those days, the fire engines rang bells. Lucie used to say: ‘
There's the fire bell, Otto
,' as the trucks passed.

There had been a chimney fire in their street the night the police came to the adjoining apartment and found the body of Joseph Stephano under the floorboards in the unoccupied room. Marianne was in her room, standing at the window watching the firemen and the crowd in the street. Then she saw the police arrive and come into the building. She thought the fire had leapt over the street and would come down into their flat. She began to cry.

Otto came and comforted her. He said a fire couldn't leap that far, it wasn't a kangaroo. He put her back into bed and told her to go to sleep, but she didn't go to sleep. She heard people go into the unoccupied room. They were men, talking in low voices. And then she heard it again, that same creaking noise, like a door that opens onto a ghost story. She went running to Otto and Lucie, drinking coffee in the kitchen that always smelled of baking, and refused to leave them.

She sat on Lucie's knee, with her face buried in Lucie's thick hair. Otto went to listen to the ‘noise' in her room and when he returned he looked all around the kitchen, as though searching for something. Marianne believes now that he was searching for words.

Then they heard Joanna Stephano screaming.

‘
Otto
,' says Lucie, holding Marianne tightly to her, ‘
shouldn't we do something?
'

‘
No
,' says Otto. The screaming goes on and on.

‘
We must do something!
' says Lucie. ‘
Go, Otto!
'

Otto opened the apartment door, which gave directly into the big kitchen where they sat. Marianne turned round and looked.

She doesn't know now – has never known – whether she saw it, or only imagined it afterwards and then kept on seeing it in her mind: the body of Joseph Stephano being carried down the stairs. She knows only that when she understood what had happened she felt the horror of it every night for years. She'd lie in the dark, biting her nails, imagining it. It had happened just a few feet from her bed. The body of Joseph Stephano had lain right there, squashed into the space between the joists, the boards nailed over him like the lid of a coffin.