Higher Ed (16 page)

“Okay,” Ed says, simply. “Okay,” again.

Holy the solitudes of hospitals and malls! Holy the casinos filled with the millions! Holy the mysterious whispers of doubt beneath the sheets! She needs to chill. She can’t tell him her plan just yet.

He kisses her like it’s the last thing he will do in his life. Maybe she has not known kissing before. This is how they kiss in English. This is why everyone is here. He tastes of fried onions and sauerkraut from perogies she cooked for him, but there is also vodka, and one small thought comes that maybe he has drunk too much. But this kissing like the end of the world is too good to stop. His body moves if she moves. One leg for one leg, one hand for one hand, on top of her and then still if she is still. She cannot find where she ends and he begins.

And so she cries.

He pauses, caresses her cheek. “Are you all right?”

She has no words.

He slides to her side and holds her tight. She turns and he gathers her into a spoon and this feels like something that God has done.

“I’m sorry,” he says, but she does not want to ask what he is sorry for in case it is something that will end this. So she makes believe and pushes everything out of the room that God did not mean to happen.

“You sing,” she says, not asking but telling because he has before named Bach and Beethoven, then Bartok and Berlioz, and
all the music he could think of when she played the game at dinner. Name all the music you love, she said, and only after Bartok did they notice the Bs. She slides from his arm—“Wait for me”—gets up and on her toes, crosses the cold floor, and is happy for once that the room is small. She brings the guitar.

“I sing one; you sing one.” And she sits; her fingers clutch for C, then D, G—as she has learned from the book. Pick and strum. It is this song that Beata taught her on the dulcimer, but in London a guitar was £40 in Brick Lane. And she can give this kind of music to him because her mother was a girl in Warsaw and learned Czerwone Gitary’s “Biały krzyż” to sing to her baby. “The translation is ‘White Cross,’” she says and closes her eyes to sing to him. When she is finished she opens them and his face is like grace.

She passes him the guitar and smells their bodies in her sheets. “Do you sing?”

His fingers curl over the guitar neck and make her wet again.

He picks the strings like he knows how. And she knows this song because her mother was a girl in Warsaw when Czerwone Gitary was merely a copy of this band, and so when he sings “Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings …” she does not understand how he can know her like this, or how this other B music will not make her die, right here in her own bed.

There are two more songs, more elaborate, more foreign, before he stops and looks at his wrist, but the watch was taken off in Ned time, so he picks it up from the floor and makes a face that has pain.

“I should go,” he says, and the pain is now in her chest.

“Why?”

He draws her to him, pulling her down and spooning again as God decreed.

“I promised. I promised I would be there for her,” he says. She does not ask then why are you here for me; she slides out from the spoon and sits up, pretends that everything is okay.

“Of course, of course,” and she tells herself that she is doing this for a baby, and so it is fine. “Go quickly.”

Her bedsit has been made beautiful. Robin touches the silk cushions on Katrin’s only comfortable chair. She has dessert for their return from the Spanish restaurant, their regular now, several nights in a row.

The first night he was here she cooked a Polish dinner for him, and he touched her lips with his finger before he kissed her, and when he kissed her it was a disappearing.

Katrin has not mentioned Emma or the baby, doesn’t talk or ask about them, and when he told her the bare facts before their first night together, she didn’t flinch, didn’t recoil, but said, simply and with force, “It’s good to be a father.” This is an extraordinary response. He wants to assure her that he doesn’t take it lightly, that her equanimity inspires the sort of awe in him that he has previously only experienced in the presence of nature. He worries, however, that it might mean that she is not investing and that the small parts of himself that he leaves behind every time he visits her will be unsafe.

How will he manage all of this? Emma is bigger. Her face is more beautiful than it has ever looked, her cheeks flushed, but her moods more fierce. She stayed at his flat for almost a week before
she reacted to his frequent evenings out, and now she has moved to a girlfriend’s house, saying there is more room there, but in fact there is less room. He has told her about Katrin, but has underplayed it, sparing everyone’s feelings, grappling with Deleuze’s principle of courage, which consists in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. He hugs Katrin’s green silk pillow to his chest. His guilt is adamantine.

“You are very serious, Mr. Robin,” Katrin says as she approaches him on the chair. She kneels down and sits back on her heels, watching him. “You could play some guitar for me.”

He shakes his head, “I’m better on the piano.”

“But that I do not have!” She taps his knee. “You are a real musician,” she says. He shakes his head, knowing he would perform only for her. He loosens his grip on the green cushion.

“If you could be any animal in the world, what would you be?” She smiles, encouraging him. This is a game, and his heart lifts like a child’s.

“Goshawk,” he says, and sees her eyebrows go up.

“What is this?”

He drops the pillow, sits forward and draws her in closer, moved by her attempt to reach him. “A bird, like an eagle, but not quite …”

She resists him and stays firmly planted on her heels.

“And why, why this animal? I want three words to describe it.” She is still in the game. He thinks about this question, but he can’t concentrate; she is so beautiful and he can’t take his eyes off the small imperfection at the left side of her lip.

“It’s a predator, it’s free, it’s beautiful.” When his baby is born will Katrin agree to be part of his life; will she play games like this with his child?

She nods, taking mental notes, taking this all very seriously.

“If you couldn’t be a … what is it?”

“Goshawk … a northern goshawk, to be precise.”

She resists a smile. “If you couldn’t be this, what would you be?”

He doesn’t want to play, wants only to kiss her. She looks at him as though she already knows his every thought.

“Clownfish.”

“And this is a fish that lives where?”

“Warm waters: reefs, the Red Sea,” he says. He does not have to go home; he can stay with her tonight.

She nods, serious again, learning something more about him.

“And three reasons why you would be this fish?”

He is not going to be drawn into talking about their hermaphroditism, but she is the sea anemone to his clownfish. “Colourful, loyal, free,” he says.

She nods again, taking more mental notes. “And if you could not be this bird or this fish, what would you be?”

This is hard now; he can’t concentrate. He doesn’t see what she’s getting at. She already knows him.

“Green mamba,” he says.

“What is that?”

“Snake.”

“Oh dear,” she says, and looks alarmed. He laughs.

“Snakes are beautiful,” he says.

“I hate them,” she says, and what an idiot he is to want to be a snake. But it’s true. Snakes are a form of magic incarnate.

“But no, really, they are amazing, so smart. They are perfect form and content,” but she doesn’t look convinced. “And when are we going to have that dessert? I’m still hungry,” he says,
trying to divert her disappointment in him. She holds firm, puts her hands on his knees, and rubs them.

“Three words to describe snakes, then,” she says.

There is nothing to consider: “Beautiful, clever, free.”

She nods and adds this information to the list she is clearly making in her mind. “You are very strange,” she says. And if it weren’t for the look on her face he would be worried, but it’s clear that she likes whatever she means by strange. “You want others to see you as a predator, free, and beautiful; you see yourself as colourful, loyal and free; but you really are beautiful, clever, and free.”

His eyes fill. He grabs her shoulders and pulls her up to him. He touches the left side of her lip and then kisses her with all the life in him.

She starts to laugh, pulls away.

“What?”

She can’t control her laughter and he climbs inside it, wants never to leave it. She takes a big breath in order to speak. “You want to be seen as a predator …” but she loses it again, and he goes with it, until they settle down with her in his arms.

“Dessert,” she says, and starts to get up. He pulls her back, but finally lets her go.

“I didn’t make it,” Katrin says as she puts down on her small dining table a plate and two forks. “It’s from Epicure—simple, but pretty, no?”

“Why is the world suddenly possessed by cupcakes and over-decorated biscuits?” he says.

“You don’t like them?” she says, timidly.

“Oh, no … I do,” he says. Idiot. He takes her by the shoulders and turns her to him. “I do.” There’s nothing he wants more than never to disagree with her. He kisses her and they stand in an
embrace almost like dancing. Her hair smells of flowers. And it comes to him. She reminds him of Mona, that’s it—Mona was a girl he knew at school in Falmouth whom he slow-danced with but never got to kiss. A girl who told him he was an anorak and that the silly things that went on in his brain should be kept in his brain. And yet he wanted to kiss her more than any girl he’d ever known. Unlike Mona, Katrin does not seem to mind hearing the things that go on in his brain. Yesterday he spoke to her for nearly an hour about afterimage—the optical illusion that takes place in the eye—and how it is easily replicated in cinema. “In a medical condition called palinopsia,” he said, “you develop the capacity to perceive afterimage.” Katrin looked at him and for a moment he thought that she was finally seeing his flaws. But instead she said, “When a baby is first born, it sees the world upside down.”

She releases him and reaches for the plate of cupcakes. She holds one up towards him.

“Maybe for breakfast,” he says. At this she puts down the cake and touches her fringe. The smell of her hair, the taste of her.

“And Emma?” she says softly.

“She’s living with a friend.”

Katrin pulls out a chair and sits at the table. Oh God. He sits down across from her.

“And how will it be with you and your baby?”

“I don’t know yet.” But this is not what he means. Deleuze: Desire stretches that far: desiring one’s own annihilation or desiring the power to annihilate. “I have to get through this thing with my job.” It’s the job that will dictate everything, the thing that will tell him how he is to live. This is what he can count on: that he has this simple task to complete, this deliberate act of determining his future. Everything else will fall into place.

“A lot of questions for this uni to answer,” she says, knowingly.

“I don’t know what else to do,” he admits to her.

She looks at the cupcakes on the table. “Maybe in Ned time it is not as difficult as this.” She looks back at him, and he’s relieved she’s smiling. “During the war, when a Polish scientist asked Einstein if he thought it was possible for human beings to change, Einstein said, ‘In historical time, no; in geological time, possibly; in mathematical time, absolutely.’ Perhaps anything is possible in Ned time.”

How is she possible? And how would life be possible without her?

Lawrence is seated at the head of the boardroom table. Today his tie is orange. Orange alert: high-level threat. Francine shifts in her chocolate-coloured pencil skirt, too tight, too short, damn it. She fingers what is becoming a wide run in her pantyhose. She coughs, nervously. The four others at the table chat and tease, waiting for Lawrence, who is reading something on his Blackberry, to get on with the last item on this meeting’s agenda. Sarah, Paul, Simon and Mohammad do not appear to have done any special dressing for the occasion.

“It’s a good thing she went back; she was worried it would be the last time she’d see him,” Sarah says.

“And it was,” Paul adds. Ya, duh, you idiot. Francine notices that Paul has a stain on his collar. They are talking about Samita, who took sudden compassionate leave to go to India to see her brother. Samita is the key QA administrator, who liaises with field QA reps in each department. Francine has not until today noticed her absence.

“How old was he?” Mohammed asks.

“Young,” Simon says.

“In his forties,” Sarah says.

“Young,” Simon says, nodding.

“Doctors can’t tell you … they think they can tell you … but they can’t tell you,” Sarah says.

“Like the weather,” Paul says, and Francine snorts, then holds back her laughter, pretending that she’s coughing again (
Who can turn the world on with her smile
 …).

“The VC group,” Lawrence resumes, “has announced that the second round of redundancies won’t be voluntary, like we’d thought at the beginning of the year. To be blunt with you, they’re expected to be brutal.” He looks at each one of them in the eye like some tribal judge, and Francine holds his gaze the longest, swallowing back what could have been another snort in less serious circumstances. She smirks but doesn’t mean it and then tries to smile, but Lawrence has looked back down at his documents, then his Blackberry, checking the time.

“Any questions?” He’s still looking at his phone.

That’s it? Francine looks at the faces of her colleagues: Paul has started to fiddle with his nose, the fingers dangerously close to entry. His fingers go transparent and she can see cartilage and the hands of a four-year-old boy picking his nose and eating the boogers. Sarah is smiling and Francine can see through her teeth, to the feathery canary secrets hidden behind them. The other two are blank-faced.