Bodily Harm (14 page)

Paul touches her back. “Any better?” he says. “I guess I was driving too fast for you.”

With her head down Rennie listens, she can hear birds, thin shrill voices like fingernails, raucous croaks, insects, her heart going
too fast. After a while, she doesn’t know how long, she lifts her head. Paul is looking at her, his face is right there, she can see two little faces, white and tiny, reflected back at her from his sunglasses. Without his eyes his face is expressionless, he’s a faceless stranger. She’s aware of his arm lying across the back of the seat.

“Could you take off your sunglasses, please?” she says.

“Why?” he says, but he does.

Rennie turns her head away from him. It’s late, the sun is slanting down through the long spokes of the palm trees, the coconuts lie rotting in their husks; here and there something, an animal, has made large burrows in the ground.

“What lives in the holes?” says Rennie.

“Landcrabs,” Paul says. “Big white buggers. They only come out at night, you hunt them with a flashlight and a big stick. You shine the light in their eyes, that stops them, and then you pin them down with the stick.”

“Can you eat them?” Rennie says. She’s still not connecting very well: the outlines are too clear, the sounds too sharp.

“Sure, if you want to,” Paul says. “That’s why you hunt them.”

He turns her around to face him, he’s smiling, he kisses her, more exploration than passion. After a minute Rennie puts her hand on the back of his neck; the hair is soft, she can feel the muscles under it, the ropes, the knots. His hand moves towards her breast, she takes hold of it, slides her fingers between his own. He looks at her and nods a little. “Right,” he says. “Let’s go back.” The rest of the way he drives slowly; it’s dark by the time they reach the town.

Rennie wants everything to be easy, why not? Once it would have been, there would have been nothing to it. She likes him, well enough but not too well, she knows nothing about him, she doesn’t need to know anything, he knows nothing about her, it’s perfect. She walks down the wooden corridor, past the chilly eyes of the
Englishwoman, he’s just behind her, this is something she wants to do, again, finally, she wants it so much her hands are shaking.

But at the door of her room she turns, without unlocking the door, she can’t do it. She can’t take that risk.

“I take it I’m coming in?” he says.

She says no, but there’s nothing more she can say.

He shrugs. “Up to you,” he says. She has no idea what he thinks. He kisses her on the cheek, a peck, and walks away down the green corridor.

Rennie goes into her room, locks the door, and sits down on the edge of the bed. After a while she opens her purse. From the zipper compartment at the back she takes out the Kleenex package Lora handed her and unwraps it. Inside, there’s what she knew there would be, five joints, tightly and expertly rolled. She’s grateful.

She picks one and lights it with a wooden Swedish match. She smokes a little of it, just enough to relax, puts it out and slides the remaining half and the other four joints between the folds of the green blanket in the middle drawer of the bureau. She lies down on the bed again, hearing the blood running through her body, which is still alive. She thinks of the cells, whispering, dividing in darkness, replacing each other one at a time; and of the other cells, the evil ones which may or may not be there, working away in her with furious energy, like yeast. They would show up hot orange under one kind of light, hot blue under another, like the negative print of the sun when you close your eyes. Beautiful colours.

They use it now in hospitals for terminal cases, it’s the one thing that can stop the nausea. She pictures all those Baptists and Presbyterians, no longer sitting in their upright pews but laid out
in rows in clean white crank-up beds, stoned to the gills. Of course they call it something else, some respectable Latin name. She wonders how much pain she could take before she would give herself up, give herself over again to the probers, the labellers and cutters.
Doctored
, they say of drinks that have been tampered with, of cats that have been castrated.

You just feel this way about me because I’m your doctor, Daniel said. I’m a fantasy for you. It’s normal.

I don’t mean to be rude, said Rennie, but if I was going to have a fantasy why would I pick you?

It would be nice to have someone on the bed with her. Almost anyone, as long as he would keep still. Sometimes she wanted just to be still.

You’re using me for a teddy bear, Jake said. Why don’t you go back to sucking your thumb?

You wouldn’t like the substitution, she said. Is there something wrong with quiet companionship?

No, he said, but not every night.

Sometimes I think you don’t like me very much, she said.

Like? he said. Is that all you want to be? Liked? Wouldn’t you rather be passionately and voraciously desired?

Yes, she said, but not every night.

That was before. After, he said, You’re cutting yourself off.

That’s a bad pun, she said.

Never give a sucker an even break, he said. What can I do if you won’t let me touch you? You don’t even want to talk about it.

What aspect of it would you like to discuss? she said. Instances of recurrence? My chances of survival? You want statistics?

Stop talking like a sick joke, he said.

It may be a sick joke but it’s what I’m stuck with, she said. That’s why I don’t want to discuss it. I
know
it’s a sick joke. So I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.

How you feel, he said. Try that.

How I feel? Great. I feel great. I feel like the body beautiful. How do you want me to feel?

Come on, he said. So it’s the end of the world?

Not yet, she said. Not for you.

You’re relentless, Jake said.

Why? she said. Because I don’t feel like it in the same way any more? Because I don’t believe you do either?

She used to think sex wasn’t an issue, it wasn’t crucial, it was a pleasant form of exercise, better than jogging, a pleasant form of communication, like gossip. People who got too intense about sex were a little
outré
. It was like wearing plastic spikes with rhinestones and meaning it, it was like taking mink coats seriously. What mattered was the relationship. A good relationship: that was what she and Jake were supposed to have. People commented on it, at parties, as if they were admiring a newly renovated house.

That was what it had been at first: no mess, no
in love
. By the time she met Jake she’d decided she didn’t much like being in love. Being in love was like running barefoot along a street covered with broken bottles. It was foolhardy, and if you got through it without damage it was only by sheer luck. It was like taking off your clothes at lunchtime in a bank. It let people think they knew something about you that you didn’t know about them, it gave them power over you. It made you visible, soft, penetrable; it made you ludicrous.

There was no question about love with Jake, at first. Not that he wasn’t attractive, not that he wasn’t possible. He wasn’t deformed or a fool and he was good at what he did, he was even good enough to
have started his own small company by the time he was thirty. This was how she’d met him: she’d been doing a piece for
Visor
on men who had started their own small companies by the time they were thirty. “The Young and The Solvent,” it was called. They’d used Jake for the full-page picture facing the title, and when she thought about him that was the first image she always saw: Jake, “saturnine” she’d called him in the piece, with his dark skin and white teeth and narrow muzzle, grinning like a fox, perched with jaunty irony at his drawing board, wearing a navy blue three-piece suit to prove you didn’t have to be afraid of suits. That was about the year the tide was turning, on suits.

A prick, the photographer said to Rennie. He was an old pro, that’s what he called himself, the mournful kind, balding and a little seedy. He wore vests with no jacket and his shirt sleeves rolled up. They used him a lot for indoor shots, but only the black and white ones that were supposed to be the subject’s real life. For the colour they used a fashion photographer.

How can you tell? asked Rennie.

I can just tell, the photographer said. Women can’t tell.

Oh, come on, said Rennie.

Or maybe they can tell, said the photographer. The thing about women is they prefer guys who treat them like shit. A nice guy like me never gets a chance. There’s only two kinds of guys,
a prick
and
not a prick
. Not counting fags.

You’re jealous, Rennie said. You wish you had teeth like that. He’s good at what he does.

Watch out, said the photographer. He’s still a prick.

What Jake did was design. He was a designer of labels, not just labels but the total package: the label, the container, the visuals for the advertising. He was a packager. He decided how things would look and what contexts they would be placed in, which meant what people would feel about them. He knew the importance of style, so
he didn’t sneer at Rennie for doing pieces on the return of the open-toed spike-heel sandal.

Better than that, he liked her body and said so, which Rennie found refreshing. Most of the men she knew used the word
person
, a little too much, a little too nervously.
A fine person
. It was a burden, being a fine person. She knew she was not as fine a person as they wanted her to be. It was a relief to have a man say, admit, confess, that he thought she had a terrific ass.

What about my mind? she said. Aren’t you going to tell me I have an interesting mind?

Screw your mind, Jake said. Both of them laughed. No, he said, I couldn’t screw your mind even if I wanted to. You’re a tough lady, you’ve got your legs crossed pretty tight. You can’t rape a woman’s mind without her consent, you know that.

You can try, Rennie said.

Not me, Jake said. I’m not a mind man. I’m more interested in your body, if you want the truth.

When they’d moved in together, they’d agreed to keep their options open. That was another phrase she’d had to translate for Daniel; by that time she’d had trouble explaining what it meant.

It took her more time than it should have to realize that she was one of the things Jake was packaging. He began with the apartment, which he painted several shades of off-white and filled with forties furniture, chrome for the kitchen and a deep-pink bulgy chair and sofa for the livingroom, “like thighs,” he said, with a real trilight he’d picked up at the Sally Ann. Wicker and indoor plants had been done, he said, and he got rid of the benjamina tree, Rennie suspected, by pouring his leftover coffee into it when she wasn’t looking.

Then he started on her. You have great cheekbones, he said. You should exploit them.

Oppressed cheekbones? said Rennie, who was slightly embarrassed by compliments; they’d been rare in Griswold.

Sometimes I feel like a blank sheet of paper, she said. For you to doodle on.

Screw that, said Jake. It’s all there underneath. I just want you to bring it out. You should enjoy it, you should make the most of it.

Aren’t you afraid packs of ravening, lustful other men will storm in and snatch me away from you? said Rennie. If I make the most of it.

Not a chance, said Jake. Other men are wimps. He believed this, which was one of the things Rennie liked about him. She didn’t have to stroke his ego, he did that for himself.

He decided she should wear nothing but white linen jump-suits, with shoulder pads. The Rosie the Riveter look, he said.

They make my ass look big, she said.

That’s the point, he said. Small asses have been done.

Rennie drew the line at
nothing but –
Let’s not be absolutist, she said – but she got one, to please him, though she refused to wear it out on the street. In the livingroom he hung blowups of Cartier-Bresson photographs, three Mexican prostitutes looking out of wooden cubicles, their eyebrows plucked thin and drawn into exaggerated bows, their mouths clown-mouths, an old man sitting in a field of deserted chairs.

That was the daytime. When he had that arranged, he started on the night. In the bedroom he hung a Heather Cooper poster, a brown-skinned woman wound up in a piece of material that held her arms to her sides but left her breasts and thighs and buttocks exposed. She had no expression on her face, she was just standing there, if anything a little bored. The picture was called
Enigma
. The other picture in the bedroom was a stylized print of a woman lying on a 1940’s puffy sofa, like the one in their own livingroom. She was feet-first, and her head, up at the other end of the sofa, was
tiny, featureless, and rounded like a doorknob. In the foreground there was a bull.

These pictures made Rennie slightly nervous, especially when she was lying on their bed with no clothes on. But that was probably just her background.

Put your arms over your head, Jake said, it lifts the breasts. Move your legs apart, just a little. Raise your left knee. You look fantastic.