Transgressions

by Sarah Dunant

  She gave a shrug, her hand already under the chair, the white lace curled up in her fingers. “Sorry. I’m not part of the free gift,” she said coolly.

  “I said open your legs.” This time the voice was harsh. “Or I’ll open them for you.”

  She sighed slightly, as if his threats bored her, but she did as she was told, moving her knees just far enough apart to show the pubic bush under her skirt.

  He sat staring directly at her snatch. She let him stare. She almost seemed to like it. Slowly she shifted her buttocks forward on the chair, spreading her legs farther apart, so the view was better and more insolent. He laughed, tossing the bag down onto the table and walking lazily over to her. With one hand he lifted her chin up and held it cupped in his palm, a little too high for comfort. Then he slipped his other hand up into her. “Just checking that everything that’s mine is out of there,” he said slyly, his fingers working overtime.

  She sat absolutely still, apparently oblivious to his touch.

  “Satisfied?” she said after a while, and this time the voice dripped with scorn.

  He slammed a finger farther in and up, savagely deep, and this time she cried out. “Bastard,” she said between clenched teeth.

  “And what other kind of men do you know?” he said as he used his other hand to unzip his fly. “Let’s get on with it, eh?”

  “Yeah, well, you’d better get your finger out if you want to fit anything else in. Unless, of course, it’s even smaller than I think.”

  “Bitch,” he said, as he hit her hard across the face. “That’s not where I’m going to put it.” And he hit her again.

  Her eyes glazed over, the look of a woman on automatic pilot. “Shit,” she said under her breath as the skin around her right eye began to swell.

  “You got it, sweetheart.”

  Outside in the shabby bar/café across the road Jake looked up to check the top-floor window. Then he ordered another beer and dug out a magazine.

  She pressed the save button. The little numbers at the bottom of the screen danced upward.

  Now that there was no chance of losing the text, she scrolled back up the page, highlighting certain phrases with the cursor. “. . . she slid the fingers of her hand up into her crotch. . . .” Crotch? Or should it be snatch? Snatch was more insulting. But for that reason it fitted better later, when the man was doing the feeling. Snatch. Certainly more a male word, in English at least. She sighed.

  Not the same problem with panties. The choice of that word was more cultural than linguistic. Her instinct would have been to use knickers, but that was too British. Only English girls wore knickers. The word carried instant overtones of school uniforms and dirty old men. But these guys were meant to be dangerous rather than pathetic. And a book that had its eye so firmly on the American market had to give its women a more scintillating kind of underwear. Panties rather than plain old pants. Decisions. Language and sex. Always a challenge for the translator.

  She read the completed three pages back again. If her father had still been alive she could have asked his opinion. The thought made her smile. He’d always been so proud of her proficiency. Would the pride have helped overcome his sense of shock at the material? It was a tacky little vignette, though not without its erotic power. I wonder if it presses the same buttons for men as for women? she thought. For her the trick of it was the woman’s confidence and contempt, the sense—at the beginning of the encounter at least—that her body was its own kind of weapon. In her imagination she would be a younger version of Catherine Deneuve, with echoes of her impenetrable middle-class, Belle de Jour personality. The image of the uncrossing of the legs was grossly derivative, of course. For zeitgeist just read Hollywood. Whatever his literary pretensions, the writer had simply risen to the basic instincts of Sharon Stone working a room full of American policemen. Not so much a comment as a rip-off. But while that scene had at least given Stone some of the trump cards, this one, in contrast, refused to let the woman get away with anything.

  The same theme echoed through the book: sassy women finding themselves punished rather than rewarded for their daring. Still, it seemed to be the kind of thing people wanted to read, already selling well in half a dozen languages in Europe. And you could multiply any figure by a hundred when the English version coincided with the release of the movie.

  She scrolled up farther to the first description of the woman. Would anyone notice that the word still was missing? In the original text the woman was described as “in her late thirties, attractive still.” She had left out the qualifier. Hardly a subversive omission (though she knew from the publicity blurb that the writer had recently left his childhood sweetheart to shack up with a wafer-thin young foreign model), but it gave her a sense of pleasure. The quiet hand of the translator.

  She looked at her watch: 6:40 P.M. Outside it was already dark. She should call it a day if she was going to get showered and dressed and make it to Sal and Patrick’s in time for the party. It would be her first time out in what, two, no, maybe three weeks? Good old Sally, persistent as ever. Most of the rest of her address book had given up on her long ago.

  She went into close-down, checking, as she always did, how many words she had done that day. Twenty-five hundred. Not bad. At this rate she should finish the first draft by the end of January, and deliver maybe two to three weeks later. A winter spent in the company of pimps, prostitutes, and tough guys. Some girls get their kicks in different ways. At least she was being paid for it.

  Under the hard rain of the shower she thought some more about the book. She was 130 pages in already. Jake had already screwed up his career in New York by taking his sorrow and fury with Mirka out onto the streets and had been shunted off to Prague on the pretext of watching the bad guys, while they in turn were watching him. She’d made good progress. But, then, she’d been at it solidly, not stopping for weekends, and working most evenings till about eight or nine o’clock. It was a tried-and-true method for her, a way of submerging herself in a writer’s style, infiltrating herself into their world until gradually it became hers, her choice of words mirroring theirs. There was a quiet pleasure to be had in this, like working in unison with an invisible partner, someone unseen at your shoulder, whispering in your ear. It could have its drawbacks though. Like with this one, when getting into the words meant getting into the sensibilities, and the undertow of threat and sexual sadism.

  To begin with, it hadn’t troubled her much. She had managed to keep the meaning of the images at a critical distance: dissecting syntax, looking for ways to reproduce linguistic rhythms. But in the last few days the violence seemed to have burrowed its way farther under her skin. She would lie in her bed at night, rerunning certain scenes from the book, substituting herself for the women in the text. As with today’s scene: imagining herself sitting in that sparse cold room, crossing, then uncrossing, her legs, enjoying the insolence and the power, down to the moment of the pain.

  In the mornings she made light of such stuff, seeing her identification simply as a reflection of a job well done. But the images of dodgy eroticism had uncovered something else, a series of memories that she would prefer to have left buried, about a time in her relationship with Tom when a visit to Amsterdam had sparked off a joint interest in porn. They had brought a clutch of the more graphic magazines home with them, giggling together as they sauntered through the green channel with half a dozen obscene publications stuffed under Tom’s shirt.

  But he had not been as cool as he appeared. He had been sweating so much on the way through customs that the imprint of one of the cover pictures had leaked onto his skin. That night as they lay in bed, she traced the outline of the man’s erect penis and the woman’s arched buttocks, the two of them caught between hysteria and desire.

  As the months passed she realized, to her surprise, that she was getting more into them than he was, relishing the way in which the sex was so anonymous, and how the women’s passivity took on a power of its own. For a while they u
sed them a lot, relying on them as a kind of—what was the marketing phrase?—“sex aid.”

  Then she started to find herself coming back to them when she was alone in the house working. She discovered that she liked the fantasy even more when she didn’t have to incorporate a real lover into it. So what? she had thought at the time. It wasn’t as if the sex in them was particularly violent or damaging, more that it was so, well, so divorced from real life. The more she used them the easier she found it to have orgasms with them, to orchestrate and control the pace and flow of her pleasure. Until, in the end, she got a little scared of how good and how alone they were making her feel.

  By a kind of mutual consent she and Tom had stopped using the magazines so much and after a while she had packed them away in a box under the bed; like the classic suburban couple, she had thought at the time, imagining their children coming upon them one afternoon when they were out, trying to square these pictures of explicit, exploitative sex with the image of their cozy, long-married parents. But neither the marriage nor the children were to be, and when she looked for the box during that brief reawakening of sexual interest a couple of months after Tom had moved out, she found to her annoyance that he had taken the magazines with him. Their absence angered her—specifically, of course, because she knew that she could never ask for them back.

  She stood in the shower, feeling the water run down her body, wondering just how much she would really like to have them again. Enough to go into a shop in Soho and flick through the magazine shelves, then present her selection at the desk, a big grin on her face? No, maybe not. She was laughing at the very thought of her embarrassment when she heard the doorbell ring two stories below. Damn. Chances were that by the time she got out and made herself decent enough to open it whoever it was would already have gone. She decided to let them ring. The bell went again, longer this time—whoever it was was holding their finger against the button. Eventually it stopped.

  She finished the shower and got out, pulling a new towel from the linen closet and wrapping its fresh warmth around her. She dried her hair and headed toward the bedroom. From the vantage point on the stairs she could see right down into the hall to a large buff-colored envelope lying on the mat.

  She went down to retrieve it. When she picked it up it turned out to be bulky as well as big. She tore open the top and a key fell into her palm. She didn’t need to open the front door to know which lock it fitted. At last Tom had come through. But the gifts didn’t end there. She dug farther in and pulled out a CD wrapped with a scrawled note held in place with a rubber band.

  “Only just found it after I got back from Canada,” it said. “Sorry. No hard feelings. Will this make up for the delay?”

  She slipped the paper off the plastic case. The CD with its image of an American city skyline at night was still in its record-shop wrapping. Above the picture was the name, Van Morrison, and below it the title, A Night in San Francisco.

  She stared at it for a moment, not quite taking it in. So it had been him after all. And this was what? His way of making a joke out of it? “No hard feelings.” It was incredible.

  Or maybe not. Maybe the “no hard feelings” wasn’t a reference to the CD at all, but only to the key and how long she’d had to wait. Could that be it? Could the music be just a present? Except Tom didn’t know one end of Van Morrison’s work from another. To pick this one from the ten or fifteen CDs available couldn’t possibly be coincidence. It had to be a statement. But if he had taken it from her, then why bother to buy it again new? Presumably in order to keep the message ambiguous. So when would she get the other one back? Or did he already know that she didn’t need it anymore. After all, if it was him, then his last visit would have revealed the fact that she’d already replaced the first CD. It was unbelievable. But it was, she realized, not unlike Tom to do something like this, to admit everything and nothing at the same time with a gesture that was both cruel and generous.

  Her sense of outrage moved into anger. How dare he? She pulled the front door open, hoping—hoping what? To catch him still hovering behind it? But there was no one there and when she went out onto the street it was empty. From behind her a set of firecrackers went off alarmingly close. She jumped around, half expecting to see him, flinging up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Sorry, Lizzie. Just a joke.” But instead two teenage boys jumped out from behind a car where they had been crouching.

  “Police,” shouted one of them, in a howl of laughter. “It’s a raid.”

  She slammed the door and went inside. From the hall phone she dialed his number. He wouldn’t, of course, be home yet. The Barbican from here? How long would it take? Ten minutes? Twenty in traffic. His answering machine had a different message, a little less jaunty, she thought. She waited till the beep, but when it came she couldn’t trust herself to speak, wasn’t sure she would find the right words to register her contempt as well as her fury. It would be braver and better to do it face-to-face. Or at least person-to-person.

  She thought about driving straight to his apartment, confronting him then and there, but by the time she got herself ready, the kitchen clock was showing 8:20 and she was already late. Having refused the last three invitations, it wouldn’t do to completely blow off this one. Sally might act casual about such things but she didn’t easily forgive people who forgot Patrick’s birthday.

  She slammed the CD down onto the counter. The cover of the old one was still on the rack above. She brought it down and sat them side by side. She was tempted to fling the new one straight into the trash, to not allow herself to be contaminated by it. But why punish Van Morrison for someone else’s transgression? In the end, she pulled off the cellophane and slipped it into the machine. She played the first three tracks before turning it off and heading out the door, grabbing a bottle of wine on her way.

  four

  If it wasn’t the best of evenings, then neither was it the worst. Years of practice had made Patrick’s birthday something of a ritual: first the fireworks (whatever the weather), then the food, and finally the dancing. Lately, Sally had got her hands on the guest list, skillfully working in business with pleasure. There were a few faces that she recognized (not Charles, she noticed, but, then, perhaps the aroma-therapist had been invited instead), otherwise the place was full of people who usually wore suits, slumming it in jeans and sweaters and shoes that had probably never seen a garden, let alone mud.

  She chatted to some of them as the rockets exploded over the Islington skyline, and surprised herself by how well she did. A few friends came by and told her how fabulous she was looking, and how much they wanted to have her to dinner, and she smiled and agreed it would be a good idea, promising to call them back before moving on to the next group of strangers. It struck her as curious that she got on better with people she didn’t know, as if this new Elizabeth, single, without Tom, needed an equally new world to define herself against. Curious, but not unpleasant.

  In fact, had she arrived less freaked out she might even have found one or two of these strangers attractive. She had gone to the social precaution of leaving the car at home, so that by halfway through the evening she was more than a little drunk. When the fireworks had given way to the food she found herself sitting on a bench at the back of the kitchen, laughing with a guy whose name she couldn’t remember, a youngish man with a square face and floppy hair in a suit that was fashionably too big for him. They were talking and eating, balancing kabobs and glasses on their laps. He was expressing some witty reservation about the cinematic talents of Tarantino, in a manner that suggested intelligence as well as just cultural perversity. She looked across at him, and the apartment block in Prague came mischievously back into her mind. What would you do if I bent down now and slipped off my panties, she thought. Would it bring us closer together? His fingertips were greasy with sausage fat. She imagined herself licking them. Afterward. The thought was absurd. Outrageous. She had another drink, and found herself choking a laugh into it.

&nbs
p; “. . . that kind of violence. What is it? You all right?”

  It got worse before it got better. In the end he had to thump her across the shoulder blades. The perfect introduction to intimacy. She managed to get herself back in control. “Nothing, nothing. Just an unexpected idea.”

  “If it’s that funny I’d love to hear it.”

  “Really, I doubt you would,” she said, this time with a straight face.

  “You sure about that?” He smiled the question, inviting in his curiosity, but she couldn’t rise to it. The moment had passed and she found herself already withdrawn and embarrassed at the same time.

  In the end he gave up. After a while he drifted away and she knew suddenly that it was time to go home. She made her way through the house to the front hall, where she called her local cab company who said it would be fifteen minutes at least. She was still deciding whether or not to wait for them when her hostess appeared.

  “Eliza! You’re not going home already, are you? The dancing’s just getting started.”

  Sally, glass in hand, equally the worse for wear. “Sal, hi. Yeah, I’ve got to go. I’ve . . . I’ve got an early morning.”

  “In which case you’re going to be tired. It’s after one o’clock, you know.”

  “Is it?”

  “Hmmm. You must have been having fun. He’s all right, isn’t he?”

  “Who?”

  “Who? The man you were supposed to meet three weeks ago, that’s who. Malcolm. Fuzzy hair, nice body, good eyes.” Malcolm. Of course. The name she couldn’t remember. “Are you going to see him again?”

  “No. Why, are you?”

  Sally laughed. “I do believe you’re drunk, too. Tremendous. At least I feel I’ve accomplished something tonight. So, tell me, how have you been? God, I’m sick of talking to your answering machine. I was ready to give up on you. I tell you, if you hadn’t said yes to this, Patrick was all for changing sides.”