My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (32 page)

She was walking past the last table when an intoxicated man, wanting to show off his worldliness, addressed her in French: “
Combien, mademoiselle?
”

The girl understood. She thrust out her breasts and fully experienced every movement of her hips, then disappeared behind the curtain.

IX

It was a peculiar game. This peculiarity was evidenced, for example, by the fact that the young man, even though he himself was playing the unknown driver remarkably well, did not for a moment stop seeing his girl in the hitchhiker. And it was precisely this that was tormenting; he saw his girl seducing a strange man, and he had the bitter privilege of being present, of seeing at close quarters how she looked and of hearing what she said when she was cheating on him (when she had cheated on him, when she would cheat on him); he had the paradoxical honor of being himself the pretext for her unfaithfulness.

This was all the worse because he worshiped rather than loved her; it had always seemed that the girl had
reality
only within the bounds of fidelity and purity, and that beyond these bounds it simply didn’t exist; beyond these bounds she would cease to be herself, as water ceases to be water beyond the boiling point. When he now saw her crossing this horrifying boundary with nonchalant elegance, he was filled with anger.

The girl came back from the rest room and complained: “A guy over there asked me:
‘Combien, mademoiselle?’
”

“Don’t be surprised!” said the young man. “You look like a whore.”

“Do you know that it doesn’t bother me in the least?”

“Then you should go with the gentleman!”

“But I have you.”

“You can join him later. Go and work out something with him.”

“I don’t find him attractive.”

“But in principle you have nothing against it, having several men in one night.”

“Why not? If they’re good-looking.”

“Do you prefer them one after the other or at the same time?”

“Either way,” said the girl.

The conversation was proceeding to still greater enormities; it shocked the girl slightly, but she couldn’t protest. Even in a game there lurks a lack of freedom; even a game is a trap for the players. If this had not been a game and they had really been two strangers, the hitchhiker could long ago have taken offense and left; but there’s no escape from a game. A team cannot flee before the end of the match, chess pieces cannot desert the chessboard, the boundaries of the playing field are impassable. The girl knew that she had to accept whatever form the game might take, just because it was a game. She knew that the more extreme the game became, the more it would be a game and the more obediently she would have to play it. And it was futile to evoke good sense and warn her dazed soul that she must keep her distance from the game and not take it seriously. Just because it was only a game her soul was not afraid, did not oppose the game, and sank deeper into it as if drugged.

The young man called the waiter and paid. Then he got up and said to the girl: “We’re going.”

“Where to?” The girl feigned surprise.

“Don’t ask, just come on,” said the young man.

“Is that any way to talk to me?”

“It’s the way I talk to whores.”

X

They went up the badly lit staircase. On the landing below the second floor a group of intoxicated men was standing near the rest room. The young man caught hold of the girl from behind so that he was holding her breast with his hand. The men by the rest room saw this and began to call out. The girl wanted to break away, but the young man yelled at her: “Keep still!” The men greeted this with general ribaldry and addressed several dirty remarks to the girl. The young man and the girl reached the second floor. He opened the door of their room and switched on the light.

It was a narrow room with two beds, a small table, a chair, and a washbasin. The young man locked the door and turned to the girl. She was standing facing him in a defiant pose with insolent sensuality in her eyes. He looked at her and tried to discover behind her lascivious expression the familiar features that he loved tenderly. It was as if he were looking at two images through the same lens, at two images superimposed one on the other with one showing through the other. These two images showing through each other were telling him that
everything
was in the girl, that her soul was terrifyingly amorphous, that it held faithfulness and unfaithfulness, treachery and innocence, flirtatiousness and chastity. This disorderly jumble seemed disgusting to him, like the variety to be found in a pile of garbage. Both images continued to show through each other, and the young man understood that the girl differed only on the surface from other women, but deep down was the same as they: full of all possible thoughts, feelings, and vices, which justified all his secret misgivings and fits of jealousy. The impression that certain outlines delineated her as an individual was only a delusion to which the other person, the one who was looking, was subject—namely himself. It seemed to him that the girl he loved was a creation of his desire, his thoughts, and his faith and that the
real
girl now standing in front of him was hopelessly
other,
hopelessly
alien
, hopelessly
polymorphous
. He hated her.

“What are you waiting for? Strip!” he said.

The girl flirtatiously bent her head and said: “Is it necessary?”

The tone in which she said this seemed to him very familiar; it seemed to him that once long ago some other woman had said this to him, only he no longer knew which one. He longed to humiliate her. Not the hitchhiker, but his own girl. The game merged with life. The game of humiliating the hitchhiker became only a pretext for humiliating his girl. The young man had forgotten that he was playing a game. He simply hated the woman standing in front of him. He stared at her and drew a fiftycrown bill from his wallet. He offered it to the girl. “Is that enough?”

The girl took the fifty crowns and said: “You don’t think I’m worth much.”

The young man said: “You aren’t worth more.”

The girl nestled up against the young man. “You can’t get around me like that. You have to be nicer. You have to make an effort!”

She put her arms around him and moved her mouth toward his. He put his fingers on her mouth and gently pushed her away. He said: “I only kiss women I love.”

“And you don’t love me?”

“No.”

“Who do you love?”

“What’s that got to do with you? Strip!”

XI

She had never undressed like this before. The shyness, the feeling of inner panic, the dizziness, all that she had always felt when undressing in front of the young man (and she couldn’t hide in the darkness), all this was gone. She was standing in front of him self-confident, insolent, bathed in light, and astonished at her sudden discovery of the gestures, heretofore unknown to her, of a slow, provocative striptease. She took in his glances, slipping off each piece of clothing with a caressing movement and enjoying each individual stage of this exposure.

But then suddenly she was standing in front of him completely naked, and at this moment it flashed through her head that now the whole game would end, that since she had stripped off her clothes, she had also stripped away her dissimulation, and that being naked meant that she was now herself and the young man ought to come up to her now and make a gesture with which he would wipe out everything and after which would follow only their most intimate lovemaking. So she stood naked in front of the young man and at that moment stopped playing the game. She felt embarrassed, and on her face appeared the smile that really belonged to her: a shy and confused smile.

But the young man didn’t come to her and didn’t end the game. He didn’t notice the familiar smile; he saw before him only the beautiful, alien body of his own girl, whom he hated. Hatred cleansed his sensuality of any sentimental coating. She wanted to come to him, but he said: “Stay where you are, I want to have a good look at you.” Now he longed only to treat her as a whore. But the young man had never had a whore, and the ideas he had about them came from literature and hearsay. So he turned to these ideas and the first thing he recalled was the image of a woman in black underwear (and black stockings) dancing on the shiny top of a piano. In the little hotel room there was no piano, there was only a small table, covered with a linen cloth, leaning against the wall. He ordered the girl to climb up on it. The girl made a pleading gesture, but the young man said: “You’ve been paid.”

When she saw the look of unshakable obsession in the young man’s eyes, she tried to go on with the game, even though she no longer could and no longer knew how. With tears in her eyes she climbed onto the table. The top was scarcely a yard square and one leg was a little bit shorter than the others, so that standing on it the girl felt unsteady.

But the young man was pleased with the naked figure now towering above him, and the girl’s ashamed uncertainty merely inflamed his imperiousness. He wanted to see her body in all positions and from all sides, as he imagined other men had seen it and would see it. He was vulgar and lascivious. He used words she had never heard from him before. She wanted to refuse, she wanted to be released from the game. She called him by his first name, but he immediately yelled at her that she had no right to address him so intimately. And so eventually in confusion and on the verge of tears, she obeyed, she bent forward and crouched according to the young man’s wishes, gave a military salute, and then wiggled her hips as she did the twist for him; during a slightly more violent movement, when the cloth slipped beneath her feet and she nearly fell, the young man caught her and dragged her to the bed.

He had intercourse with her. She was glad that at least now finally the unfortunate game would end and they would again be the two people they had been before and would love each other. She wanted to press her mouth against his. But the young man pushed her head away and repeated that he only kissed women he loved. She burst into loud sobs. But she wasn’t even allowed to cry, because the young man’s furious passion gradually won over her body, which then silenced the complaint of her soul. On the bed there were soon two bodies in perfect harmony, two sensual bodies alien to each other. This was exactly what the girl had most dreaded all her life and had scrupulously avoided until now: lovemaking without emotion or love. She knew that she had crossed the forbidden boundary, but she proceeded across it without objections and as a full participant; only somewhere, far off in a corner of her consciousness, did she feel horror at the thought that she had never known such pleasure, never so much pleasure as at this moment—beyond that boundary.

XII

Then it was all over. The young man got up off the girl and, reaching out for the long cord hanging over the bed, switched off the light. He didn’t want to see the girl’s face. He knew that the game was over, but he didn’t feel like returning to their customary relationship; he feared this return. He lay beside the girl in the dark in such a way that their bodies would not touch.

After a moment he heard her sobbing quietly; the girl’s hand diffidently, childishly touched his; it touched, withdrew, then touched again, and then a pleading, sobbing voice broke the silence, calling him by his name and saying “I’m me, I’m me. . . .”

The young man was silent, he didn’t move, and he was aware of the sad emptiness of the girl’s assertion, in which the unknown was defined by the same unknown.

And the girl soon passed from sobbing to loud crying and went on endlessly repeating this pitiful tautology: “I’m me, I’m me, I’m me. . . .”

The young man began to call compassion to his aid (he had to call it from afar, because it was nowhere near at hand), so as to be able to calm the girl. There were still thirteen days of vacation before them.

LOVERS OF THEIR TIME

WILLIAM TREVOR

LOOKING BACK ON it, it seemed to have to do with that particular decade in London. Could it have happened, he wondered, at any other time except the 1960s? That feeling was intensified, perhaps, because the whole thing had begun on New Year’s Day, 1963, long before that day became a bank holiday in England. ‘That’ll be two and nine,’ she’d said, smiling at him across her counter, handing him toothpaste and emery boards in a bag. ‘Colgate’s, remember,’ his wife had called out as he was leaving the flat. ‘The last stuff we had tasted awful.’