by Nina George
I focus entirely on the task of relaxing his battered body. The first minutes of daily awkwardness soon pass. My hand on his chest, his hand on mine, our eyes closed, united as we once were when we danced. I feel as if I’ve never lived as intensely as in this moment. My life expands every time I caress Henri’s body. I’m feeling, I’m loving, I’m fighting. All the beautiful aspects of existence are more beautiful than ever, and all the trivial things have never seemed more remote. I feel as if I’m in the right place here.
Henri
I only ever spend a few days in London to visit Ibrahim, Greg, and Monica. I can never stand it here for very long. I need to move on, because it’s only in airport transit lounges, hotels near railway stations, and guesthouses on the harbor’s edge that I can sleep. I can sleep in places that resound with the noise and hustle of departures and arrivals, but nowhere else.
If I don’t sleep, I’m seized by an unspeakable fear of dying. What soothes me in those moments is the memory of Marie-France and how we conceived Sam. Conception: two such inept people created new life—proof of how incredibly benevolent and lavish creation can sometimes be. Like a rose blooming in the desert, or love emerging from solitude, and death from life.
When I’m in London or whenever I have to stay in a large city for more than three days, I make it through the dark nights by walking and drinking. Occasionally I drive out to the airport to watch the human tide ebbing and flowing as many lives mingle, touch, and then go their separate ways. Afterward, I walk through the streets for hours, through streets unknown or familiar, dirty and dark, peering into lit windows, seeing how life goes on inside, whereas mine has been on pause ever since that day in my childhood, when I came home with the blue boat, leaving my father behind. Time has held its breath, and I’m caught in the middle, between no end and no beginning.
During one of those restless nights in London, my turmoil drives me into a concrete ruin in the East End, somewhere between Hackney and Columbia Road. Outside, the temperature is still in the nineties, but inside it is cool, a summer cave. In the corners and behind the pillars are shadows as deep as black water. The only light comes from lanterns, candles, and torches.
Old wooden chairs with curved legs and broken backs have been arranged against the unrendered walls, and between them are sofas and armchairs that might have been stolen from a hotel storeroom. Planks, old blackboards, and doors have been laid across overturned fruit boxes and wooden crates to form tables, which are strewn with bottles and glasses, ashtrays, and a few pairs of gloves that lie there on top of one another like empty, abandoned hands. Each table also has a red rose in a crystal vase. Individual women are leaning against the sofas or the pillars, all of them alone. Men—soloists too—roam in the semidarkness. Bats dart across the high, unfinished hall, as inquiring and evasive as the eyes of the men and women below.
Halfway along one of the long brick walls stand two bandoneon players, a third man with a bass, and a violinist with a guitar leaning against a closed suitcase at his side. The men’s white shirts glow in the light produced by the flames. Here, in this place where everyone appears to be alone, slowly, imperceptibly at first, time starts to breathe again.
The two bandoneon players glance at each other. One of them has gleaming black hair and his biceps ripple darkly under the thin fabric of his tight white shirt. The other man, who has a moustache, stares at his colleague with such intensity that it seems as if he might dive into his eyes. They are intensely, erotically, almost furiously virile. The bassist and the violinist have their eyes closed. They have surrendered, and their abandon fills the room with an erotic charge.
The first bandoneon player’s foot taps the rhythm, and the second falls in with the beat, soon joined by the bassist and the violinist, whose eyes are still closed. They are music incarnate. I’m addicted from the very first note.
A man in a suit steps out of the shadows into the flickering light. His eyes too are closed as his arms embrace an invisible woman. Thus he dances, but he is not alone.
Women detach themselves from the scattered sofas, pillars, and walls; men begin to stir. They resemble wild beasts circling each other in a cage or prowling under the open sky, and although I cannot figure out how it happens, the first couples come together, catch hold of each other for an instant, dance, and then release each other again. Their changeovers appear to symbolize my unrest in recent years as I hastened from one war to the next, from one person to the next, and then back to my solitude. Like the man still dancing on his own with his eyes closed, as if that is the only way he can visualize the woman in his embrace, I clasp at empty air and do not know who is in that space.
Eschewing grand gestures, the couples spin wordlessly across the concrete floor. They stride, they fuse, they continue on their twisting paths. Their eyes flash with menace and hope. One more step and you’re mine! Inhibition lurks just beneath a veneer of restraint.
The woman emerges from the depths of the darkness, as if she were surfacing from the waters of the night. I don’t know her, and yet I’ve seen her a thousand times before. I have no idea who she is, but I’ve been calling her name forever.
At first I cannot see how she does it. Does she grab the men as she passes? Does her hand say, Take me? Is her body emitting secret signals that you can only detect from up close?
Then I realize she does it with her gaze. It does not ask, it does not invite; it simply says, Come! and the men obey. Only when she melds herself to a man does she close her eyes.
Her body is slender. Not curvaceous, not full. Hers is an androgynous figure, the physique of an Amazon whose beauty isn’t immediately apparent to most. When she moves her warrior’s limbs, I see myself. Her dancing expresses my unrest and my anxiety; she dances as if she doesn’t wish to carry on living—not like this—and yet she’s fighting to survive. Her dancing gives voice to my emotions and every shade of my life, the grays and the whites, the blazing fires that consume all color, and the endlessly forlorn melodies too.
She dances, and I watch her for hours and hours, dreaming thousands of different lives. Her movements are harbors, and I’m a castaway. What might be possible with this woman of whom I know less than any other?
I see this unknown woman dancing and in parallel I watch our daughter climbing onto her mother’s feet to learn the waltz, foot on foot and hand in hand.
I see this stranger as I take her to Ty Kerk, unlock the blue door, and take out everything I’ve kept stored away for so long. She’ll inhabit the rooms, and her bright eyes will banish all the shadows. That’s how it will be.
I see myself kissing this stranger’s delicate yet proud neck.
I see her in a white dress in the eight-hundred-year-old chapel by the sea, goose pimples on her arms because she senses that time has a different consistency here. There are places where time is thinner, where yesterday, today, and tomorrow converge and we can feel the presence of the dead and the echo of the future.
It is then that the stranger spots me, and her eyes say simply, Come!
I nod.
After so many hours she strides toward me, her piercing blue eyes as clear and deep as the sun-drenched waters of the Iroise Sea. Her eyes are awash with the ocean, and for the very first time I don’t hate the sea.
I want to go home.
Take me with you. She doesn’t say a word or touch me. She steps very close to me, and I can see her chest rising and falling. She’s so close that her mouth and nose are level with my collarbone. I can feel the air between us being warmed by the heat from her body. She looks up at me, and I breathe out as if it is my very first exhalation and as if time has finally snapped back into place.
* * *
—
That night we lie facing each other on a fresh white sheet on a low, wide bed in her flat in an old tulip warehouse in the East End. Immediately above the loft is a roof garden where my dancing Amazo
n lives among silvery grasses swaying in the night breeze, bougainvillea flowers reach for the stars, and a flower bed blooms like a Breton meadow in summer.
By the light of countless candles we gaze silently at each other and explore each other’s bodies with our eyes. Both of us long for affection, but we are unable to bridge the distance between us because with affection comes anxiety. A hankering for distance. A shared desire not to be “we.” And yet this irresolvable yearning binds us closer to each other than to anyone else.
At one point she closes her eyes, smiles, and lays her hand on the sheet between us. I put mine on hers. That night I sleep soundly in the knowledge that I’m in the safest place in the world.
Henri
I wake up as the plane from Vancouver touches down at Heathrow five minutes ahead of schedule. My hand feels numb, and yet I have pins and needles. It sounds as if the plane engine is wheezing as we taxi toward the gate. I’m thirsty, but there’s no flight attendant in sight.
London is shrouded in a morning fog that divides the world of the nightwalkers—I used to be one of these people who restlessly pace the dark streets—from the world of those who rise early to go to work. Two parallel worlds that ignore each other on the buses and in the tube and the steaming early-morning bakeries where they rub shoulders.
The nightwalkers dare not entertain the thought that another day of their lives is already over, and so they extend it into the dark hours so they never have to stop. Early risers, on the other hand, want to make the most of the day that lies ahead.
I know where to find the key to Eddie’s flat, which is the same one that unlocks the doors to the goods lift and her offices. It’s in the cavity behind a half brick in a wall in the yard, in the left cheek of a graffiti Bugs Bunny.
I’m always afraid that the key won’t be there waiting for me as a sign that I’m no longer welcome. I don’t know why I’m so scared, for Eddie would never do anything like that—or at least not in that fashion. She would meet my eye and tell me. She is the most reliable, most candid person I know.
I know lots of people, and she is different in many ways. There’s never a “maybe” with her. Yes means yes, no means no, and both are categorical and nonnegotiable. Maybe that’s what I’m afraid of: if Edwina Tomlin ever says no to me, there’ll be no way back into her life.
But there is one thing I have kept a secret since we met: Sam. I have kept my own son a secret from her.
Ibrahim knows her. We took him to the airport with Greg and Monica. He’s studying law in Washington, specializing in human rights.
* * *
—
It is shortly after seven when the taxi drops me off in Columbia Road. Is she still asleep? Eddie usually reads manuscripts until three or four in the morning.
I walk into the yard and carefully pull out the half brick. My fingers explore the cavity. Where’s the key? Panic grips me, but then I find it. I unlock the door, tiptoe through the office and up the spiral staircase, and sit down on the bedroom floor, leaning back against the wall that separates it from the rest of the loft space. Eddie looks as fresh as a young girl in her sleep. Her lips are pursed, as if she’s just finished chatting to someone.
I sit there watching her as she sleeps and I feel at peace. Her flat is the only place where I can settle down and resist the urge to flee.
Forgive me, I think. How am I now supposed to explain to you how it came to this? How Sam came about, and why I’m not allowed to see him? How can I tell this to your face without making you disappointed in me? I know that the longer I conceal this from her, the more appalled she’ll be.
She wakes up and life floods into her body, like summer and all the laughter and desire and fragrances it brings flowing into a house that has been empty throughout the winter. Her eyes are wide awake and say, Come to me!
I undress before those eyes and this body, as inviting as a beach in summer. I don’t know how Eddie does it, but her lingering eyes make me feel handsome. I exist because those eyes see me.
“Take your time,” she whispers. “I don’t want to miss a single detail.”
I unbutton my shirt, unbuckle my belt, and slip out of my trousers. I never wear socks. Just like my father, whom I remember differently when I’m with Eddie.
In fact, I can only ever think of him when I’m with Eddie, and it is only now that I’m in my forties that I notice all the things I’ve inherited from him. The shape of my fingers: just like his. My love of going barefoot—being able to feel the world with my feet instead of simply trampling all over it.
I lie down alongside Eddie. She smells of pancakes and sugar and salt and freedom, like a beautiful ripe fruit—an apricot—and a flower: jasmine, I think. She is the whole world.
I take her face between my hands, framing it with my fingers. She smiles, keeping her eyes open as I explore the warmth between her thighs until we nestle seamlessly inside each other. The boundary between us has dissolved.
My darling, I think. My darling, darling Eddie, how can I even breathe without you?
* * *
—
That first summer we often made love on the top of the world—my name for Eddie’s magic garden above the rooftops of London. One night when the stars appeared to breathe more freely in spite of the light pollution, she told me why she had planted the meadow. She was lying in the crook of my arm on the raised bed as the bats wheeled overhead and a blue moon—the second full moon of the month—rode high in the dark sky.
“When I was a little girl, I always longed for the grass behind our house to grow tall enough for a unicorn to be able to hide in it. At dawn it would emerge from the half darkness, lift its nose toward my room, sniff the air, and then wait for me to come to the window. For a brief instant we would look at each other and it would send me a thought like I know I’m safe with you before lying down in the grass and slowly lowering its head to rest at last. It would be safe from the world, safe from being caught and killed and tortured. Because humans always destroy what is miraculous, and the unique makes people uncomfortable.”
I stroked her head, whose form was so familiar, so perfectly matched to the curve of my arm. The texture of her skin was already part of me. My hands, fingers, lips, chest, and thighs all knew the feel of her.
“My father would cut the grass on our lawn with a scythe and later with a battery-powered lawn mower. One day when I was five I tried to stop him by standing in front of the mower.”
I was touched by this image of a small girl standing in the path of revolving blades to save a unicorn.
“And when he asked me why, I told him about the unicorn. My father never mowed that lawn again, and when my mother brought in a gardener to cut the grass with a scythe, he paid him to leave it be. My mother didn’t speak to us for weeks, but the lawn stayed just the way it was. Because of me and the unicorn.”
She paused before going on quietly. “The unicorn never came. That’s when I stopped believing in inexplicable miracles and contented myself with wonders that could be explained. When my father died, the unicorn died with him.”
I realize how much fathers are capable of loving when they’re loved, how much my father loved me, and how much I miss him.
Then my heart crashes to the floor with shame.
Sam. Does anybody love him? Does he have a father who loves him when I’m not there? The mere idea drives me mad—mad with guilt and shame. I cling to Eddie and don’t move. Can she read my mind?
I’ve never lied to her. We owe each other nothing but honesty, but still I say nothing.
“What was your father’s name?” I ask, and my voice doesn’t crack, although it ought to break, as should my silence and my heart.
“Edward,” she replies. “Actually, he was always Ed, and I was always Eddie. I was a smaller version of him, and sometimes I still feel that way: as if my larger ego—the more intelli
gent and more loving part of me—were dead.” She takes my hand and places it on her chest above her beating heart. Her kind, loving, great big heart. How can someone like her stand being with someone like me?
“I occasionally feel like ringing him to tell him something. It’s a painful reflex, like moving an unsplinted broken leg. On occasion I close my eyes and try to listen for his advice.”
She twists in my arms to face me. It only lasts for a few seconds, but she represents everything I’ve ever needed to embrace.
“How about you, stranger? Have you ever dreamed of your father?” she asks. Straight out. No scruples. Without shame or fear of causing pain. That’s Eddie through and through.
Never, I want to say. Please don’t ever ask me that question again.
I exhale and nod. The urge to flee is always with me, requiring only the smallest encouragement to kick into action. “Yes. In my dreams my father doesn’t usually know he’s dead,” I confess, “and I don’t tell him. I relish those moments with him and savor an opportunity to chat to him, share a room with him, or go for a drive together.”
Or sail out to sea, the last remaining freedom, but I can’t bring myself to bring up that scene. How often I have had that dream! Over and over again, and each time my father is unaware that the wave is about to hit us, and I’m never quick enough. I never see it early enough or grab hold of my father fast enough.
I’ve told Eddie that he drowned while he was out fishing, but I’ve never mentioned the fact that I was with him. Nor have I told her that I’m losing all sense of what is true and what isn’t. Did he let go of me, or I of him?