The Lying Days (35 page)

Back in the Cellar again, the warm exhausted air burned against our cool cheeks. The others were hungry and exaggeratedly delighted with the hot dogs. Isa held hers away from her dress as if its steamy heat were dripping and called to me: “You shouldn't let Paul drag you around the streets. He could have gone on his own.” But I only said, with the swagger in my voice of the child who has been tumbling out in the cold to the grownup who huddles at the fire: “But it's a beautiful night, really—I could have walked miles.”

Later I smelled her perfume and found she was beside me. I said: “Do you want another? There's a half left here—” I felt her looking at me appraisingly in the dark. “Yes,” she said to me, “you're the kind. You're a giver. You'll pile everything on the bonfire. But don't marry him.” She was a little drunk, but I felt also that she had caught from the atmosphere of the place, as I had, a
sympathy and a softening toward the pain and danger of being human. So I was not annoyed or offended at her presumption. I merely mumbled something foolish about a gypsy's warning. “Cassandra,” she said irritably, on a rising note, “Cassandra tipping it straight from the horse's mouth. …”

Herby had his head on the big blonde's shoulder; he had to sit up very straight to get it there, because he was much shorter than she. Jenny was begging John in a low, insistent, reasonable voice to come home. And Paul was offering some wine to a straggling group of burly young men who had hailed him and now drew him admiringly into their midst with the air of showing off in the flesh someone about whom they often spoke among themselves. They were heavily built, and the two blond ones had beards on their broad faces. They listened with smiles of anticipatory pleasure while he spoke: he was repeating some anecdote, apparently at their request; now he was mimicking someone; he shook his head and gave a quick twist to his shoulders, tossing the plaudits of their laughter away like the butt of a cigarette.

I watched him and suddenly Isa's idea of me excited me; the warning, if that was what it was, aroused in me in the desire to stake my whole life, gather up from myself everything I had stored against such a moment, and expend it all on Paul. Everything on the bonfire. I stood up. Our heads were still in the smoke, the music and the voices, but a stiffening cold was coming up from the cement floor of Marcel's Cellar, the cold of the earth that comes with the early hours of morning.

It was on a Sunday afternoon that we made love for the first time. I remember the deserted silence coming up from the streets where we had forgotten to pull the curtains; dawning on me slowly as I opened my eyes and saw, past the corner of the old eiderdown that covered us and the piece of feather that flattened every time I breathed, Paul's room. I could see his shirt on the floor; one shoe. My skirt and the light heap of my stockings thrown down
as only a man would handle them, irritated with their clinging substancelessness, snagging them on the wood of the chair. My sweater I had so often worn in our house in Atherton. Perhaps the last time I had had it on was there.

Paul's head was buried in the heat of my neck beneath my hair as if he did not need to breathe. His arm lay across me like a spar. He might have been lying dead if it had not been for the little line of wetness that I felt him draw now and then with his tongue on my skin. I looked on his exhaustion with wonder; how far it was from the frenzy in which I had seen him snatched up—ten minutes ago, was it? And the squash racket behind the door, the alabaster ash tray—it was the kind of thing his mother must have given him—the three tomatoes ripening on the window sill, the calendar, the telephone: the casual disorder of our dropped clothes, lying there, provided the only link that related that unspeakable intensity, to these witnesses out of ordinary life. I remembered how when I was a child I had wondered how people could make love and then walk calmly in the streets, fit into rooms naturally among people and objects, with no revealing mark. …

I said to him: “I almost thought you were in pain.” He did not seem to hear. He lifted his heavy arm and put his hand up to draw my head down into the warmth, groping as if it were dark. I found with delight that his ears and his temples were still burning. “You seemed just as if you were in great pain. The way you arched your neck—” Now he smiled at the wonderment in my voice. I could not explain to him the blast of tender anguish that had come upon me, quite maddening and unbearable, at the astonishing onslaught of his passionate release. I could not believe myself, my body, the mesh against which he struggled like a creature meeting death: I once had seen a bird die wildly, like that, its wings magnificently caught up in some net you could not see. How often again I was to say that to him! Are you in pain? To grip him and beg him with a kind of savage insistent tenderness, even tears. What is it? What is it?

Now he opened his eyes dazedly with the slow smile of someone who hears something about himself he cannot know, and while I traced the soft brush of his mustache (it was younger and lighter than his hair, bleached, like the short hair at his temples, brighter
than brown) he said with almost an element of curiosity in his voice: “This is nothing. You understand? It will be better for you next time. I promise you, it will be wonderful for you. I want to make it wonderful for you.”

I said: “You thought I'd made love before.”

“Well, yes, of course.”

I was silent. He kissed me.

“I was so ashamed. I wanted to invent lovers I'd had. But that would have been all right only so long as you didn't make love to me. … Was I all right?” I suddenly felt that perhaps I had not pleased, that in my inexperience I was not a good lover.

He kept on kissing me. What I had said seemed to fill him with an anxiety of delight. “Oh, I adore you, adore you.” He stopped and looked at me with exasperation. “My little demi-vièrge.”

His words sent an afterglow of passive sensuality through me, his bright, tousled, roused face above me, the blood pulsing against the angle at which he held his neck, seemed to bring me to a marvelously full consciousness of being alive. Those empty moments of falling terror when the wings of life suddenly cease and drop and all the props of one's effort cave in meaninglessness—not because they may fail, but because the end itself seems nothing—seemed secured against at last in this. This was the answer of reality to a phantom: perhaps the mystery of the end to which life is directed is simply the miracle of the means. With my arms about this other young human whom I had just taken symbolically and strangely into my body, I felt myself secure against the void of infinity.

So I, who had inherited no God, made my mystery and my reassurance out of human love; as if the worship of love in some aspect is something without which the human condition is intolerable and terrifying, and humans will fashion it for their protection out of whatever is in their lives as birds will use string and bits of wool to make a nest in the city where there are no reeds.

When it was nearly five and the city afternoon began to darken with winter outside, we sat at the bright-barred heater drinking coffee that Paul had made. I was dressed again, a little self-conscious in the identical order of my clothes with the way I had been before. I felt suddenly like a visitor, looking round at the cheap, yellowish
walled room that had the public look of rooms where people never live for long, like the eyes of restaurant cashiers who continually watch comings and goings. Paul's few things, so eloquent of him as a separate entity, filled me with curiosity. My eyes wandered over the desk with its files and piles of paper, the bottles of green and red ink and the open typewriter, the snapshot of two shy native babies, the good old tapestry chair with the sagging arm where someone made a habit of sitting with his legs slung over, even the rumpled divan where we had lately lain, with its faded blue eiderdown quilt that belonged to an unknown childhood. Here he lived and moved among things when I was not with him and before I had known him: that old quilt must have followed him to boarding school in his mother's winter parcel and covered him on cold nights in the antiseptic, serge-redolent atmosphere of a boy's dormitory, his little boy's rough hands clenched under the cold sheet years away from the softness of my breasts.

He put off the old coat he had used as a dressing gown and got into his clothes, and I watched this strong tender body, so different from my own, take on, like a public manner, the anonymity of men's clothing. Those thighs with their dark warm hair, that other hair that drew a crucifix on his breast and belly, the bare-looking triangle of bony white at the base of his spine; all this which was withdrawn and secret from his outward appearance to the world made me conscious with a kind of solemnity of what else must be hidden; behind his voice and his impulses, the life he chose and the men and women with whom he chose to live it: even me, and what he believed he had found in me—all the unknown forces of memory, conviction and desire from which his personality glanced off, like a light. And I think I started then that strangest of journeys which is never completed, the desire to understand another in his deepest being. And I knew already, even then, that love is only the little boat that beaches you over the jagged rocks; for the interior something more will be needed.

When we got back to the Marcuses' flat I was somehow a little irritated to find that they were waiting supper for us. We had not said, when we went out, at what time we should be back, and there was the echo of something irksome in the way Jenny came to the
door of the kitchen as we came through the front door: “Well, now I can heat the spaghetti—at last! What happened to you?” It seemed to me that although she was young, she too had forgotten already the liberation from time, the privileged suspension from all the practical mechanics of life into which it is really a device for plunging men and women deeper than ever, with which love begins. Momentarily there had already dropped across her young, passionate eye the film of the matron, who in suckling children has forgotten the other urgency. We went into the living room and Joel was there, with Laurie Humphrey and John.

“Was she putting grated cheese on it?” Laurie asked. “Did you tell her to put cheese on it?” and I said in a queerly put-out, startled voice: “When did you come? I didn't know you were coming.” Joel seemed to know that the nervousness of this meaningless compulsion to say something was directed at him, and he lifted his familiar head (what a big, heavy head he had in comparison with Paul!) from the paper over which he and John were bent and said with a mock air of relief at finding someone who would be bound to know: “Now come on, Helen—who's going to win in Calvinia—?” And because I was still in the startled moment of taking in the changed relationships with which the room was innocently charged, and so merely registered the convention of a question requiring thought instead of realizing what he had said, my expression of weighing consideration was unintentionally comic. The three men roared with laughter; John with a childlike, expansive delight in someone making a fool of himself, Joel with the gentle human amusement of sharing an absent moment with someone, Paul with a proprietary pleasure in the idiosyncrasy of someone over whom one has the ascendancy of possession in love. The Sunday paper was holding a competition in connection with the national election which was to take place in the coming week: a list was printed with the names of constituencies, the candidates and parties returned at the last election, and the candidates and parties standing for this election. The winner of the competition would be the person who predicted most accurately which party would come to power, and with what majority. Calvinia was a Nationalist stronghold and the seat of Dr. Malan himself, so there could be no possible doubt about who would win Calvinia.

We ate spaghetti and argued amiably about the election; none of us except Laurie considered that the Nationalists had a chance of coming to power. “The most they can get is a few more seats.” “Forces of reaction be damned—you can't tell me people have forgotten the way the Nats cheered the Germans on during the war?” “The United Party is moribund.” Laurie drew the slippery strands into his big loose mouth, drooping his eyes sagely. “You can't rely solely on the popular appeal of Smuts. Like a poor film counting on some idolized Face to put it over.” “Well there you are, Laurie—you fill in your entry predicting victory for the Nats. Dr. Malan our Prime Minister. Win a hundred pounds.” Laurie's fat face creased into paunchy laughter. “Believe me I would, but somehow it seems a bit disloyal.”

Beneath the inconsequence of my part in the talk I was aware, as on another level, of the hollowed-out feeling within my body, a shaken newness hidden, yet like the trembling of one's hands when they have been put to some delicate strained balance of muscle in the performance of an unfamiliar skill. Somewhere I was withdrawn in the consciousness of this, and I watched and listened, even talked, from something of the still center of the cat, blinking out of itself into a room, or pregnant women, who hold themselves secret and contemplative. I found myself watching Joel and Paul closely; Joel's face when Paul was talking, Joel's manner when he spoke to Paul. And when the certainty came to me: Joel likes him—I knew why I had been watching them. I had wanted Joel to like Paul. To admire him, even. When Joel gave me the opportunity by offering me a cigarette, he must have been puzzled by the depth of the smile I felt come into my eyes for him; grateful, appealing, confessing—the smile with which a woman presents her child, or her lover.

And so the strangely commonplace Sunday evening passed; I even spoke to my mother on the telephone, a polite, quietly pleasant conversation of inquiries and answers, and the promise that I would be home for the week end after next, if not the next.

The odd, self-conscious unreality of facing other people after making love with Paul passed so soon that I did not remember it had ever been. In the busyness of our lives and the casual proximity of John and Jenny our time alone together was limited and we grew
increasingly reckless in our passion. Of course, we had whole long evenings together in Paul's flat, but there were many nights when his work took him to meetings and he would come to the Marcuses' to have coffee with me at eleven or twelve o'clock, and there were also nights when both he and I had work to do. If I took my books and went with him to his flat, we found that neither of us got anything done; we would lie on his bed in the dark, smoking and talking and drifting into a delicious slow love-making that left us exhausted and longing only to sleep where we lay. And then instead of sleeping, we would begin to make love all over again in order to stave off the horrible time when we would have to get up and go into the cold to take me home. The next day I would sit in a lecture theater with my head lightening to sleep with the low sound of the professor's voice, and at lunchtime we would hear each other's voices, faint and secret over the telephone, the clatter of a typewriter in the offices of the municipal Native Affairs Department at his end, and the enclosed echo of the public telephone booth at my end, somehow emphasizing the laughing, tender sympathy we had for each other's weariness.