He simply looked at her.
“I go up to the Banbury Road,” she explained. Explaining what?
“Yes,” he agreed, and began walking. She followed, she felt like a child trotting after her parent. He simply strode off. Damned male, sure of himself. She felt like shouting at him: What makes you think you can treat me like this! What made him think it was, obviously, that he could. She could dismiss him easily if she wanted to. All she had to do was get annoyed, or even just formal and controlled, ask for his credentials, inform him that she no longer desired his company. It wasn’t true, though: she wanted his company. But she did not like feeling she was being preempted.
They did not look at each other as they walked toward the Banbury Road. What I can do, her mind rambled on, is turn and make polite conversation. Do you live in Oxford? Ah, the big house on the corner, the one with all the little trikes outside? How nice. Why don’t you and your wife stop in for drinks with me sometime? Lovely day it turned out to be after all. Such a beastly morning, wasn’t it. But perhaps we’ll have more rain later, don’t you think? So kind of you to carry my bags. (They’re so awfully heavy.)
Yes, I could do that. End it fast.
She remained silent.
Where does he live, do you suppose? Carrying a good-sized suitcase. His
Yes
sounded more American than British, although
yes
was hardly much to go on. The suitcase would hold enough clothes for a few days, a week even. If he didn’t live in Oxford, maybe he was looking for a place to stay.
A jolt: she paused in her stride. N
OT WITH ME
! her mind cried, startled and appalled at a possibility she hadn’t considered. Nothing had happened, yet she already felt invaded, crowded, imposed upon. No, no. He must already have a hotel. He’d have to be a fool to come here unbooked at term time. It did not occur to her to ask him.
Yes, he was an American professor spending a year in England, moving between the British Museum and the Oxford libraries. Just like her. Perhaps they’d worked across from each other in the BM, eyes not meeting. Perhaps he’d seen her there, perhaps she looked familiar to him and that was why he was acting this way.
No. He was a romantic, raised on novels of chivalry. He was like so many professors, all he knew about life came from literature. He would see her to her door, deposit her bags on her step, kiss her hand, and depart
That had actually happened to her once, years ago, when she was lost in Manhattan, couldn’t find the building she was looking for. She stopped at a construction site and asked directions of a burly red-necked man in his sixties, who was standing on the sidewalk drinking soda from a bottle. He put his soda down on a pile of two-by-fours, whisked her suitcase out of her hand, and set off without a word. She had trotted behind
him
, too, followed by jeers, whistles, obscene remarks hurled at them by the men perched up on the scaffolding. She thought to be nervous, but wasn’t. She trusted her unlikely knight, all two hundred fifty pounds of him. He was impervious to the workmen’s cries, he walked proudly, silent. He stopped in front of her building, swept his arm out towards it, handed her her suitcases, then snatched up her other hand, kissed it, and bowed. Then disappeared.
She smiled, remembering.
So, now, she and this man walked in silence. The gardens were green on the Banbury Road; roses crumbled against the walls. Few people walked on the street—some teenagers, an old woman dragging her string bag of groceries and a huge black purse. She glanced at his body: no, he was too well-dressed to be a professor. She looked at his face. It was still composed, except for a tiny muscle twitching in his cheek.
And that startled her. He was afraid!
Afraid of me? Do I look like a mad rapist, a killer, a person who hits people over the head and takes their wallets? I’m the one who ought to be frightened. Of course, I am an experienced reader of faces, and he doesn’t look like a rapist or killer either. But you never could tell with men. Charles Carson, the distinguished and eminent professor, beat his wife Nancy for years until she left him. And he had flecks of white at the sideburns and a superior kindly manner. Lots of sweet and gentle men ended up killing their mothers.
But no, no, that wasn’t it. He wasn’t afraid she’d do him bodily harm. It must be hard to act as he was acting, it cost something. He’d invested his ego in carrying this off, and suppose it didn’t carry? Male ego was so fragile, because it made everything into a game and then has to win every game. Or shatter. That man who wrote a letter to
The New York Times
about his tiny children, and kept saying “She won,” or “He won.” Tiny children.
She was glad they weren’t talking.
She came into my study and disturbed me at my work and she knows she’s not supposed to, so I was going to spank her but she was so cute I couldn’t: so she won.
Man like that shouldn’t have children.
Still, there was something about this man that wasn’t like that, something that had … felt? suffered? Or was she inventing that? God knows she’d done it before, looking at Anthony’s sad face after they’d had a fight, such a sad face it made her heart mushy, and she’d go over and put her arms around him. “Honey, let’s not fight.” And he’d glare at her furiously and pull away. “Leave me alone, you bitch!”
They had reached her corner. “I turn here,” she said, and stopped and he stopped and turned to her and looked at her and her heart bounded: he’s going to leave me at the corner! She thought she could not bear it: to watch him leave, to trail down her street carrying her own bags, to return alone to the empty flat and stand there in the silent kitchen looking at the dirty dishes in the sink.
But he did not put her bag down. He did not speak. He just looked at her, and she realized after an instant that he was asking a question, and her blood began to flow again and she almost smiled looking back, answering it
They turned together down the street of low stucco houses with their little gardens, turned again up the walk of Number 17, and she found her keys and let them in.
I
T WAS AFTER THE
door was shut that the discomfort began. She mounted the stairs to her flat aware of him behind her and wishing that they could just go on like that, mounting stairs one behind the other, and not have to look at each other, not have to do anything else. Because how was she to behave? She could talk, of course, could launch into her name, rank, and serial number so that he would have to launch into his. Then she could offer to make a cup of tea. But that would destroy the tension, the unknownness that made this encounter so marvelous. She did not know what else to do. She had lived always using language as a shield, and did not know how to live without a shield.
She unlocked the upper door and went in. Her tightness, which was beginning to turn to panic, blurred her vision so that she could not really see her apartment, only a patch of bright light from the living room, the afternoon shadow in the kitchen. She walked into the kitchen, simply out of habit. He followed, set down the suitcases, and stood there. She turned and looked at him.
“I’m Dolores.”
“I’m Victor.”
“Would you like a cup of tea?” Her voice was tense.
He took her hand and held it with both of his. “Fine,” he said tightly, but he did not let her hand go.
She could feel her body—not quite
move
—but
incline
towards him; it yearned, it leaned. And his body did the same, it merely inclined, but suddenly their bodies were together. And then they were pitched into the middle of a battle, or a battle began inside of them. Chemicals pulsed through thighs and sides, electrical impulses swept through bodies, fingers were charged, lips felt like victims of starvation, and the two of them clung together as if only holding fast to each other would save them from this bombardment, but of course, holding fast to each other only made it worse. They clutched and caressed as their hearts pumped, as the sparks fell, as fiery charges burned them up. She looked up and saw his mouth, full, sensuous, and a little wrenched (did he not want to be here? to be doing this?) and she raised her own mouth that felt like a melon that was ripened and wanted to be eaten, was aching to be eaten, and they kissed and the war was escalated, but they were the war, and they pressed their bodies together until they felt like a single unit melted together by the heat they generated. They clung together without moving, desperately, as if only this clinging, this being together, could keep them from perishing.
W
HEN SHE TRIED TO
recall it afterwards, it was blurred in her mind, so fiercely had she felt their lovemaking, so little observed it. It had taken a long time. They could not get to fucking, so caught up were they by holding and embracing and kissing. Clothes were a problem, ripped off impatiently piece by piece as each was felt to be in the way. She remembered hearing a tear as one of them pulled something off in irritation. But at last they got down to bodies, simple smooth wonderful bodies, and they both uttered little sounds, as they rubbed their bodies together, and each stroked the other’s.
Everything was extreme, shot with gold. He came to her at first with ferocity, with shudders that ripped through his whole body, and he stayed with her, inside her, and they played and wound around as if they were the one flesh the marriage service declares. A creature with twenty fingers, two tongues, two hearts, one body rolling over and around, interchanging its parts. Cries, sighs, moans escaped like animals from the cages of their ribs. They fit their bodies together clutching, clinging as if were they to let go, the world would return to the void. When, eventually, they fell asleep, they were still together, his contented penis still inside her contented complexities, both cool and quiet.
When they woke, the sun had faded from the bedroom window and the slate roofs across the back garden shone silver in the thin grey light. Their bodies were shadowed in the dim light; they looked long and smooth and cool and vulnerable. Always, caressing human flesh, stroking the beautiful lines of sides and thighs, she thought about that vulnerability. It was peculiarly human: animals had things—fur, or feathers, scales, or carapaces—to disguise their nakedness. Humans had only clothes, which were removable, and when they were removed, you were forced to remember what nakedness meant, how a tiny bullet, a cloth the size of a grain of cereal, a sliver of flying glass could destroy all of it in an instant A single swipe of a blade under a chin, and all the warmth and motion and color would drain away, the shapely flesh converted in an instant to stiffness, and all its expressiveness into rigidity, into stone that wasn’t stone, petrifaction that rotted and stank.
He stirred, pulled up his torso, and leaned over the side of the bed towards his clothes.
Her heart bounded. Was he one of those? He couldn’t be that bad, to get up now and dress! He couldn’t be!
He came back up with a packet of cigarettes and a gold lighter. He offered her one and she broke her rule and took it They sprawled comfortably against propped-up pillows, smoking.
He looked at her, glinting. “You know we don’t even know each other’s last names.”
She smiled back. “That’s kind of fun, isn’t it. I mean, dramatic and mysterious and romantic and all that.”
“It’s fun until you have to look somebody up in the phone book.”
“I’m not
in
the phone book.”
“That’s even more serious.”
She looked intensely into his face: wonderful face, sculpted with expression. She put her hand on his cheek, gently, and held it She did want to know, yes she did, what had made that face, what had lined it in that precise way, what had created such expression. He was looking love at her, and she lifted her head and kissed him lightly.
Even more serious.
Did he mean that? He acted serious, he was looking at her with the same intensity now as before. All the silence between them on the train, all the intensity, hadn’t it been designed to make this feel cataclysmic, a tremendous romantic ecstasy? And it had worked, their sex was extraordinary. But surely that was all, wasn’t it? It had served its purpose, was finished now.
Then why did the thought of him getting up and out of bed, dressing, leaving, the flat vacant of him, vacant, make her heart ache?
“Okay, then,” she said. “Tell me your last name. And everything else too.”
His name was Victor Morrissey. He was a vice-president in charge of development for IMO, a company that made a whole range of things, but mainly electronic equipment for airplanes and experimental trains and buses and cars. He was in England to open a branch office, small to begin with, forty or fifty people. The present plan was that it would expand tremendously in the future. They were being given great help by the government, in its belief that IMO would help bolster the British economy.
“We’re based in London, but I come to Oxford every few weeks because we work with the automobile companies here, in Cowley.”
Aha: Wife in London, mistress in Oxford. I see what he’s aiming for. R and R no matter where he is.
“Your turn.”
My turn.
“My name is Dolores Durer. I’m a professor of English at Emmings College in Boston. I specialize in the Renaissance.”
Actually I specialize in grief. I was apprenticed to it early by my mother, who was apprenticed to it by hers. You might call it the family business.
“I got an NEH—a federal grant—to come to England and do research on a book I’m writing. I work mainly in Oxford, that’s why I’ve taken a flat here. But sometimes I go to London, to the British Museum, and work there. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past couple of days. That’s why I was on the train….”
“Are you married?” He asked this with a special attentiveness.
“No. I was once. I have two children. And you?” She tried to seem indifferent.
“Yes.” The look, the tone: she had known them before. Reluctant, apologetic, sad: intended to convey: poor me. I don’t want to burden you, but it’s a terrible marriage, but I can’t leave because of the kids because she depends because it’s my third and I want to give this one a chance because because because…. But I am not happy, not happy at all.