A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (10 page)

Roger was startled by her touch, but he didn’t pull his hand away. She squeezed it. She became aware that a lute was playing on a tape or CD in the back of the restaurant, accompanied by quick, galloping, hand-beating percussion. A man sang: nasally, his voice strained, perhaps in solicitation, punctuated by frequent glottal stops. The singer paused, the lute called for him to continue, and it was joined by a stringed instrument, very tightly, sinuously wound. The rapid drumming was followed by forceful hand-clapping and the ringing of finger cymbals.

“No, I mean
you,
yourself, Roger. Do you miss me?”

He was blushing, smiling shyly. The proper hand squeeze could change the world.

“I miss you,” she said. “Our friendship was, is, important to me. And, you know, I always thought we had something more than a friendship. I mean, I think we always saw each other as good friends, but there was always some boy-girl stuff involved, am I right?” She smiled with warmth, putting herself on the line. “There was some heat between us.” Roger’s smile didn’t confirm this. It had become pained. This turn in the conversation made him anxious. “It was obvious, we’re as transparent as two glasses of water. There were times when I thought…well, I don’t know what I thought. You remember we were taking the cab together, back from that cocktail party…?” He remembered it with a jolt: she saw it in his eyes. That evening Marshall had been out of town and Linda had a dinner appointment.
Roger and Joyce had paired themselves at the party, even though they saw each other all the time. They shared a taxi to Brooklyn. Joyce went on softly, “I guess we were drinking a bit. It was cold, the cab had no shocks, we kept on bouncing against each other in the backseat, giggling. I thought you were going to kiss me. I think I wanted you to. I wasn’t sure what I wanted. I think if I had only looked at you or said something or stopped giggling…” He pursed his lips, unable to contradict her. “It seemed like it wouldn’t have taken much. But that’s what’s wrong with me, I don’t take risks, and look where it’s left me…”

She trailed off. She wasn’t precisely clear in her own mind how her fear of taking risks had wrecked her marriage, but it seemed to make sense. For example, if she had taken the risk to confront Marshall earlier with their marital problems…No, that wouldn’t have worked. She still held Roger’s hand, cool and damp from his drink. She moved her hand slightly without squeezing. The motion was almost a caress.

“I’m sorry, I should go,” he said, but he didn’t remove his hand. He could have removed it at any time.

“I’m sorry,” she said, pulling hers away. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

“No, not at all. What happened happened, and what didn’t happen…” He looked confused by his own tautology. In the taxi he had actually put his arms around her for a moment, ostensibly to keep her warm.

“Oh shit,” she said.

“What?”

“I forgot the photo album!”

Roger shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Linda can get it some other time.”

“I feel terrible.”

“Mail it,” he said, a ridiculous suggestion. The postal service had just reopened and no one was mailing anything. “UPS it.”

“They’re pictures from elementary school!”

Nothing could have compromised Roger more than the obviousness of her tactics. He would return with her to the apartment because he wanted to. Many deceptions were practiced in this way, in bazaars and counting halls, at the marriage broker and house of assembly, against those who needed to be deceived so that they could acquire in good conscience something they wanted.

It was difficult, though, to hold the moment in the two blocks home, after he paid the bill and they faced the sting of the quickly cooling, sobering evening. Joyce took care not to brush too heavily against him. She had to exercise caution. She had to keep the matter on his mind without being so flirtatious that it would register consciously. They walked quickly, hardly speaking. The lute continued to sound in her ears; she heard mourning now in the voice of the singer. The fiddle was nearly made visible by its whine: a hunter’s bow scraping against a metal wire. She thought she might lose Roger again while she fumbled for the key to the building. He would remember all the times he had been here with Linda and Marshall. Now there was too long a wait for the elevator, a full minute, enough time for them to reconsider. As they ascended to her floor, she suppressed her misgivings and smiled, virtually batting her eyes. His smile was burdened with awkwardness and anxiety.

Then she was sure she lost him when she opened the door to the apartment. The sour odors of family life spilled from it, replacing the scents that had accompanied them from the restaurant, the cloves, the cardamom, the ginger, the saffron, the pepper, the turmeric, the fenugreek, the anise. She had straightened the apartment this morning, picking up toys and sweeping and dusting the living room. She had put Snuffles’ food and water dishes away. She had removed her bed linen from the couch and stuffed it into a closet—but now she saw that she
had neglected to remove the clock radio from its incongruous, telltale position on the side table. Some water damage around a window, dating from a storm last spring, had gone unfixed, conspicuously awaiting a settlement on the property. Marshall’s bedroom door was closed, as always. She saw the apartment through Roger’s eyes: it
looked
like a broken home.

“Okay,” he said, stopped at the threshold.

“Come on in, I’ll get the album.”

He remained in the doorway.

“It’s okay,” she said, taking his hand. “They’re not coming back till Monday, I swear. Take off your coat. How about a drink? Those mojitos were almost all Seven-Up and sugar. The Muslims can’t make a decent cocktail. How about a Scotch?”

She poured it right away. She needed a Scotch now as badly as she needed oxygen. Her hands trembled. She had never before done anything on any field of battle this daring or this treacherous. She had never cheated on Marshall, to whom she was still technically, legally married. Roger stood at the entrance to her kitchen, sweltering in his coat, which he had only partially unzipped.

“Cheers,” she said. She handed him his glass.

His eyes darted glances around the apartment, taking in the debris from their marriage: a CD rack with half its discs missing, a nonworking samovar Marshall had expelled from the master closet when he took control of the bedroom. Perhaps he was also looking for signs that Marshall was hiding behind the couch or alongside the TV. She had done a quick, panicked survey herself. Turning to her, Roger replied,
“Khodai de mal sha.”

“What’s that?”

“A Pashtun saying. You know, from Afghanistan. ‘May God be your companion.’”

“How’d you learn it?”

He said, “I don’t know. Picked it up from the news, I guess.”
His smile was mysterious, as if he knew exactly where he had picked it up.

“Khodai de mal sha,”
she echoed. She loved saying it, the strange, steaming syllables gliding over her lips. For the moment her mouth was Pashtun, capable of Pashtun lies, Pashtun courage, Pashtun romance, and Pashtun desire.
“Khodai de mal sha,”
she repeated.

They fell on their drinks, each taking half a glass at once. She tracked the descent of the alcohol into her gut, waited a moment, and then felt the consequent familiar little explosion and the warmth rising to her ears. She gazed at him, hoping he was experiencing the same effects.

She wasn’t going to wait for something to go wrong. She reached up to kiss him. His lips were warm, as soft as she thought they would be, yet they responded to her kiss with solemn insistence. He had wanted her to kiss him all this time.

Joyce removed his coat. His blue oxford shirt was soaked and his perspiration was not simply from the heat. He touched her breast gently, but without the least hesitation.
Roger touched my breast!
she told herself, amazed, and another voice responded:
The friend of my enemy is my enemy.
She kissed him harder. It was all happening very fast: he didn’t want to lose the moment either. She slipped out of her shoes and then, trying to move closer, she nearly fell over them. He caught her. Their drinks swirled around in their tumblers but didn’t spill. They each took another swallow.

He was trying to drift toward the couch, but she resisted. It wasn’t the couch where they needed to be. She wrestled him over to the door to Marshall’s bedroom. She dropped her left hand, allowing it to caress his side as she reached to turn the doorknob.

He stopped, frozen, as if suddenly aware of being within the sights of a rifle. He knew this was Marshall’s room. Joyce
herself sensed the trespass, but she pushed the door open wide, without turning to look in. Roger peered into the gloom over her shoulder, scared. He had probably never done anything like this either—and Marshall, until a moment ago, had been his best friend. She slid her hand along the front of his pants to determine that, no, the moment hadn’t been lost. She pulled him into the bedroom.

When their glasses were empty their clothes came off. As she had known, he was extravagantly hairy: across his chest, his belly, his buttocks, his legs…The naked, sweaty bulk of him verged on the grotesque. She wasn’t repelled: she had done this because she desired to enter into the grotesque. Joyce felt his hands and lips on her body, but she experienced the lovemaking, if that’s what it was, as something happening to someone else. The Joyce who observed was still a successfully married mother of two small children. Yet she observed with grim approval. He was hunched over her, his lips on her right breast, coaxing blood into her nipple. If only Linda could see this, if only Marshall could…But that wasn’t necessary, the violation was sufficient in itself, treachery was its own reward, independent of anyone’s knowledge; and in any case, Joyce would know, and this knowledge was a poison, transferable by dart or whisper, a tincture added to the rosewater.

She perched at the edge of Marshall’s bed. Her distance from these events closed as Roger put his hands on her shoulders, lowered her to the bed, and climbed onto her body, kissing the hollow of her neck. Then she saw him slide in. His
penis
! Linda’s husband’s
penis
! Inside her! She was stunned by how easily this had been accomplished. The seduction had been no work at all. It was as if…Now the lovemaking
was
happening to her, his hands and mouth on her breasts, his pelvis grinding hers against the bed, a great store of energy being summoned from within her. His hair, his bulk, his sweat, and his masculine
odor gave him a fearsome, primitive aspect. She was suddenly overcome by a flood of sexual feeling: every nerve ending in her body seemed to be in contact with Roger’s penis.
She
was Roger’s penis.
The penis of the friend of my enemy
…Joyce had thought she was hardly attracted to Roger—there had
never
been any boy-girl stuff between them—but she suddenly wanted him. She moved with him, laid out across a textured beige bedspread Marshall had purchased on his own, and recalled now the easy delight she had once taken from the sex act.

When it was over, the waves of feeling continued to rock her and Roger rolled over, falling heavily onto the bedspread. He was soaked again with perspiration. “Well,” he said, and she found herself beginning to turn into the dim, slow, luscious arc toward a nap. Then she remembered to arch her back, spilling semen. The new bedspread was eminently stainable. She wondered if she was pregnant. That would be a disaster and it would also be almost perfect.

She hadn’t been in this bedroom since she had moved to the couch. From where she lay, flat on her back, her breasts bare and still heaving, the room didn’t look as if it had been dusted or cleaned in all that time, though Marshall had outfitted it with a new television and a CD player–clock radio, much better than her setup. There was a picture of the kids on the dresser, taken when Vic was no more than a year, the happiness of the moment locked within the picture frame like a gemstone. She saw a new phone behind the books on Marshall’s night table, relationship books and histories of the Middle East:
Winning Divorce Strategies; The Ottomans Break Up; New York State Family Law for Dummies; Partition and Exile; How to Keep the House, the Money, the Kids, and the Homeland; The Great Game; Screw Your Ex!
Marshall’s streamlined, LED-equipped telephone seemed gratuitously high-tech, with some kind of weird attachment hooked into it. What was
that
for?

“We wanted it,” she said, returning to Roger. “We both wanted it.” Her voice was choked, a bit husky. She liked the sound. At that moment she found herself fantastically sexy.

“That cunt,” he said, gasping. “She had it coming!”

Joyce wished she had a cigarette. It had been accomplished: this stain on Linda’s marriage as sure as the one on Marshall’s bedspread. She pushed her pelvis forward again, releasing another trickle. But wait a minute, what did he mean when he said, “She had it coming”? Who did, Linda? Why? How? So caught up in her divorce, she had hardly wondered about the state of Roger and Linda’s marriage. What exactly were the circumstances that made him capable of doing this? She didn’t know. She didn’t know a goddamn thing. She hadn’t spoken to Linda in a year and had no knowledge of what went on in her life—who was her new best friend? what had she done to Roger? how could Roger call her a “cunt”? yuck—and now Joyce felt the loss of friendship echo through her all over again.

“Could you give that to me?”

“What?”

He slid his fat fingers down her leg to her ankle bracelet. He pulled on it gently. She had forgotten she was even wearing it.

“What for?”

“Oh, you know, just to have. As a keepsake.”

As a trophy. Linda would find it in the back of a dresser. She would know it was Joyce’s; she would learn that Roger had found a new way to hurt and dishonor her. Joyce reached for the bracelet, flicked the clasp, and passed it to him. As she lay there, staring at the ceiling, she knew she had not seduced Roger at all. He had his own reasons for making love to her, something to do with Linda. She had seen him as a pawn in her struggle against Marshall, but each person had his own tragic secret history, his own rationalizations, his own formulas
of conflict, his own imperfectly understood needs. Every human relationship was a conspiracy. Roger, too, was working in the shadows, for his own survival, against his own enemies and friends of enemies…Her body cooled, turning taut, and she wondered where Marshall kept his cigarettes.