Dancing Girls (10 page)

“I’ve missed you,” he says. Why should he have missed me, I’ve only been gone five days. The last time wasn’t good, I was nervous, the wallpaper was bothering me and the bright peel-off stick-on butterflies on the cupboard, not his, prior to him. He kisses me: he does have a hangover, his mouth tastes of used wine, tobacco resin and urban decay. He doesn’t want to make love, I can tell, I stroke his head understandingly; he nuzzles. I think again of the Moonlight Pavilion, the Slow Loris creeping cautiously through its artificial world, water dishes and withering branches, its eyes large with apprehension, its baby clutched to its fur.

“Want to have lunch?” he says. This is his way of telling me he’s in no shape.

“I brought it. Or most of it anyway. I’ll go round the corner and get the rest. It’s healthier than those greasy hamburgers and chips.”

“Great,” he says, but he makes no move to get up.

“Have you been taking your vitamin pills?” They were my idea, I was afraid he’d get scurvy, eating the way he does. I always take them myself. I feel him nod ritualistically.

I can’t see whether he’s telling the truth. I turn over so I’m looking down at him. “Who were you drinking with? Did you go out after you moved the furniture?”

“The furniture was already moved when I got there. She couldn’t call to tell me.” That’s true, he has no phone; our conversations take place in booths. “She wanted to go out and drink instead. I spilled chop suey all over myself,” he says with self-pity.

I am supposed to commiserate. “Was it digested or undigested?” I ask.

“I hadn’t touched a bite of it.”

I’m surprised at her for being so obvious, but then she’s always seemed unsubtle, blunt and straightforward, captain of a women’s
basketball team, no, highschool gym teacher with whistle in mouth. An old friend. No nonsense. Mine had bloomers and skinny legs and made jokes about what she called The Cramps in a way that suggested we weren’t supposed to have them. Trampolines, the body contorted, made to perform, the mind barking orders.

“She’s been trying to seduce you for months,” I say, smiling; the thought amuses me, she looks like a marmot. At this he tries to shrug, but I have him pinned, one arm across the neck. “Did she succeed?”

“By the time we got out of the bar the subway was closed.”

I hadn’t been serious, but this is suddenly a confession. I want to ignore it but I go on. “You mean she spent the night here?”

“As opposed to trying to get all the way back to her place,” he says, “yes.” It would be a reason like that. Logical as hell.

What do you think you are, the YWCA, I want to say, but instead I ask the obvious. “I suppose you slept with her.” My voice is steady, I’m steady too, I won’t let it tip me.

“It was her idea. I was drunk.” He thinks both these things are good excuses.

“Why did you tell me?” If he hadn’t told me and I’d found out I’d say, Why didn’t you tell me; I know this while I’m asking it.

“You could have figured it out for yourself, the alarm’s set for eight.”

“What does that mean?” I say; I don’t connect. I’m cold, I get up off the bed and move backwards towards the doorway.

I am sitting in a brand-new hamburger palace; across the table from me is a man eating a cheeseburger. Feeding places are the only chances I have to watch him: the rest of the time I’m looking at the blurs through taxi windows or tracing the unfamiliar wallpaper designs. The colour of his face matches the formica tabletops: off-white. At other tables are other men, also eating cheeseburgers and being watched by other women. We all have our coats on. The air
shimmers with rock music and the smell of exhausted french fries. Though it is winter the room reminds me of a beach, even to the crumpled paper napkins and pop bottles discarded here and there and the slightly gritty texture of the cheeseburgers.

He pushes away his cole slaw.

“You should eat it,” I say.

“No no; can’t eat vegies,” he says. The suppressed dietician in me notes that he is probably suffering from a vitamin A deficiency. I should have been a health inspector, or maybe an organic farmer.

“I’ll trade you then,” I say. “I’ll eat your cole slaw if you’ll finish my cheeseburger.”

He thinks there’s a catch somewhere but decides to risk it. The switch is made and we both examine our halves of the deal. Beyond the plate-glass window slush drifts from the night sky, inside though we are lighted, safe and warm, filtering music through our gills as though it’s oxygen.

He finishes my cheeseburger and lights a cigarette. I’m annoyed with him for some reason, though I can’t recall which. I thumb my card-file of nasty remarks, choose one: You make love like a cowboy raping a sheep. I’ve been waiting for the right time to say that, but maybe peace is more important.

Not for him; hunger satisfied, he turns back to an earlier argument. “You’re trying to see how much shit I’ll take, aren’t you?” he says. “Stop treating me like a nine-year-old.”

“There’s one good way to keep me from treating you like one,” I say. What I mean is that he should stop acting like one, but he doesn’t bite. In fact he may not even have heard: the music is louder.

“Let’s split,” he says, and we get up. I check the cashier as we go out: cashiers fill me with dismay, I want them to be happy but they never are. This one is waterlogged and baggy, saturated with too much sound and too many french fries. She is apathetic rather than surly. Fight back, I tell her silently.

We hit the air and walk, not touching. I can’t remember what he did but he won’t get away with it. He’s wearing a long khaki army surplus coat with brass buttons; it’s handsome, but right now it only reminds me of my fear of doormen, bus drivers and postal officials, those who use their uniforms as excuses. I steer my course so he will have to go through all the puddles. If I can’t win, I tell him, neither can you. I was saner then, I had defences.

“I never get up at eight. She had to go to work.” He’s conscious now that I’m not going to laugh with him over this one as I have over the others. “If you’d been here it wouldn’t have happened,” he says, trying to put it off on me.

I see it so clearly, in such an ordinary light, I know what he did, how he moved, what he said even, one warm body attracts another, it’s how people behave and I want to be sick. More, I want to take my carefully selected brown paper parcels and shove them down his never-cleaned toilet, which I even – crown of idiocy – had thoughts of cleaning for him, poor thing, no one ever showed him how to do it. Where they belong. So this is what it would be like, me picking up his dirty socks and cigarette butts in my experienced way, woman’s greatest joy, safely eight months pregnant so you can’t get out of it now, grunting away at the natural childbirth exercises while he’s off screwing whatever was propped against him when he hit the mystic number of drinks. A spiritual relationship with you, he said, and merely physical ones with the others. Shove that. What does he think I saw in him in the first place, his remarkable soul?

“I’m going out to do some shopping,” I say. I’m too visible here, desert mice with their burrows running down the side of the glass, what an intrusion I thought at the time. “Do you want me to come back?”

This is the call to repentance, he nods without speaking, he really is unhappy but I don’t have time to think about that, I have to get
out where there are a lot more around me, camouflage. I’m careful not to slam the door, I cross to the market street and dig in among the crowd of shoppers.

It’s a room, with bed, dressing table surmounted by mirror, night table plus lamp and telephone, linoleum-patterned drapes covering the windows which in their turn cover the night and a drop of ten stories to molten lights and metal parts, hall opening on bathroom which includes a sink and two taps, hot and cold, closed door. Outside the door is another hall and a line of similar closed doors. It is all correct, all in place though slightly dented around the edges. I’ve been trying to sleep in the bed, with no success. I’m going back and forth across the floor, raising from the carpet an airport smell of upholstery cleaner. Earlier there was a tray with steak rinds and shreds of old salad on it, but I set it out in the hall a long time ago.

From time to time I open the windows and the room is inundated with traffic noise as though it is part of a city-sized motor; then I close the windows and the room heats again, internal combustion engine. Sometimes I go into the bathroom and turn the taps on and off, taking drinks of water and sleeping pills, it gives me the illusion of action. I also look at my watch. It’s early spring, there are no leaves and no snow; the days have too much sun, it shows the dust on everything, it hurts your eyes. Three hours ago he phoned to say he would be home in half an hour. He speaks of this room where we have never been before and will never be again as home, I suppose because I’m in it. I’m in it and I can’t get out, he has the key, where would I go, it’s a foreign city. I work out plans: I’ll pack now, leave, he’ll come back after being – where is he? He could have been in an accident, he’s in the hospital, he’s dying, no, he would never do it so neatly. The room will be empty. The room is empty now, I’m a place not a person. I’ll go into the bathroom, lock the door, lie down
in the tub with my arms crossed in the lily position, eyes weighted with invisible pennies. I’ll wash down the rest of the sleeping pills and be found draped over something, the bureau, the telephone, in a coma. Their breathing is always described in murder mysteries as ‘stertorous,’ I’ve never known what that meant. He’ll come in just as I’m about to fly out the window into the solid hurricane below, my nightgown spread out around me like a huge nylon kite. Hold on to the string, it’s tied to my head.

The mechanisms of the room continue their clicking and gurgling, indifferent. I’ve turned all the knobs on the heating unit but nothing happens, maybe I’m not really here. He ought to be here, he has no right not to be here, this machine is his creation. I get back into the bed for the fifth or sixth time and try to concentrate on the shapes moving across my closed eyelids. Sun, dust, bright colours, headlights, a Persian carpet. There are pictures now, ducks oddly enough, a woman sitting in a chair, a lawn with a country house, Grecian portico and all, clocks made of flowers, a line of dancing cartoon mice, who put them there? Whoever you are, get me out and I promise I’ll never never again. Next time it will be just from the neck down, I’ll leave his motivations alone.

It was so simple at first, you should have kept it that way, it’s the only thing you can handle. Cool it, said the doctor, trying to communicate but coming through like Fred MacMurray in a Walt Disney family picture, take pills. Maybe he’s just asserting his freedom, you’re too possessive. He’s escaping, you’ve driven him to it, into the phone booth and out comes Superstud. A self-propelling prick with a tiny brain attached to it like a termite’s, couple of drinks and he’d stick it into anything. Like night-hunting snakes it has infra-red sensors on the front end, in the dark it strikes at anything warm. When the lights went on he was fucking the hot air register.

That’s unfair. What really annoys you is that she got it last night and there wasn’t any left for you. Why couldn’t he have chosen some other time? He knew I’d be there this morning. He didn’t choose it, it just happened. Why can’t you see him as a confused human being with problems? Do I ever do anything else? Already I couldn’t tell you whether he’s my lover or my out-patient. You think you’re so magic, you can cure anything. Can’t you admit you’ve failed?

Maybe I’m not a confused human being with problems, maybe I’m something altogether different, an artichoke.… None of that.

Actually she’s his type, they must have made it fine together, they’re both athletic, maybe she keeps time with the whistle,
peep!
they’re off.…

In a way I admire her, she gets through the days.

When I come back he’s dressed and miserable. I move about the room in a parody of domesticity, savaging the bread into sandwiches with his one inadequate knife, sloshing water over the fruit. I open the Pepsi I’ve brought him.

“Do you have more than one glass?”

He shakes his head. “There’s only the one.”

I bring the soft-headed rose out of the bedroom, throw it into the clothes hamper he uses for trash, rinse out the glass and pour half of the warm Pepsi into it for myself. That’s the nearest I can bring myself to physical anger. He starts to eat; I can’t. I’m shivering; I get his coat down from the hook and wrap myself up in it.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he says.

“Like what?” I say

I’m not allowed to be angry, he thinks it’s unfair. In fact I’m not angry, I’m flipping through my images, trying to find one that will save me from speaking the unforgivable, the words that can’t be recalled. Tortoises in cement cubicles, the otters in their green-scummed pool, they were eating, bones and the head of something,
no, what about the foxes; they were barking, you couldn’t hear them but you could see the insides of their mouths. The echidnas, waddling through the sawdust like fat fur-coated madwomen, that’s no comfort. Back to the plants, the water-lily house, and in Greenhouse 12,
Victoria amazonica
with her huge plate-shaped leaves six feet across and her spiky blossom, floating in her pond, her harbour, doing nothing at all.

“Look,” he says, “I can’t stand these silences.”

“Then say something.”

“Whatever I say you’ll think I’m sinister.”

“I don’t think you’re sinister,” I say, “I just think you’re thoughtless and stupid. Anyone clever would wait until after he’d got the woman moved in with him before starting on that.” Part of him, I know, doesn’t want me to move in at all, the stove stays broken. Hang on to your defences, I think; you’ll be sunk without them.

“I thought it was better to tell the truth right off.”

I look at him; he’s hurting all right, but I need my mouthful of flesh, I need back some of that blood. He’s so unhappy though and it isn’t his fault, it’s just the way he is, accept me, accept my nervous tics, and he thinks that’s all it is, a kind of involuntary muscle spasm.