The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  Steven put down the phone and sat in his high-sback chair with the special lumbar support which cradled his aching back. He began staring out of the window, wondering where he had gone wrong with Maria. With hindsight, nothing he could think of would have improved on his decision to walk out of the shop. It was the right choice. He drifted back to the hours after he had left her, half-dressed, staring after him as he angrily walked away. When he left the Owl Café, he had walked around for several hours wondering what he could do to rescue the situation. Finally, tired and feeling dreadful, he decided to go home.

  He heard his phone ringing from halfway up the stairs. He ran up the remaining flight and fumbled desperately for the key, dropped it, swore and managed to get the door open. As he got to the phone, she hung up. ‘Fuck!’ he shouted, realising he had forgotten to set the answering- machine. He switched it on. Then it rang again. He went to pick it up but decided to listen instead. ‘Hello, I’m not in at the moment. Please leave a message at the sound of the tone.’

  ‘Steven? Steven, if you’re there please pick up the phone.’

  The dread began to lift. There was desperation here. She must have decided either that he was out or wouldn’t answer. ‘Whatever it is, Steven, I’m sorry. I . . . I’m so . . .’ This must be tricky for her, he thought. The wrong apology could make things worse. ‘I’m so clumsy. You musn’t be angry with me . . . I have to go out. I’ll ring back at eight thirty.’ There was a pause. ‘I don’t really understand a lot of things. People are a m—’ She stopped and put down the phone.

  He listened to her message over and over. All in all, he was reassured rather than otherwise, although not greatly. He worried about her going out: it seemed to distort the implications of the desperate tone of her voice. If she was as worried as she seemed, why had she left the flat when her absence meant that this anxiety could not be allayed by a call from him? If it was vital then it would be all right, but if it was not, he was finished. He sat and thought about it for some time. After about an hour he was violently sick, bringing up the tea he had drunk in the Owl Café.

  At eight twenty-five the phone rang. At the last moment he again decided not to pick it up. She did not ring again until nearly midnight and yet again, uncertain to the point of terror, he did not answer. Beyond identifying herself, she left no message, nor did she the next morning. He took the next day off work and waited. She did not ring. He grew more and more alarmed, afraid that he had overplayed his hand.

  He waited through the early evening until nearly nine. A ferocious anxiety gnawed at him, but he couldn’t bear to stay in any longer and decided to go for a walk. He pulled the door firmly behind him. It was sticking now in the damp winter, and as he turned for the stairs he saw her waiting in the shadows at the end of the corridor leading up to the next floor. For the first time in his life he was unable to speak. She moved forward into the light. Her eyes astonished him: wide, fearful, the pupils large and black. She called his name then stopped.

  ‘Thank God you’ve come,’ he said. His sincerity pulled her into his arms and with her eyes staring full into his she kissed him. She pushed up against him, forceful in a way that caught him off guard, and he stumbled against his door awkwardly, catching his back on the handle. He grunted with pain but either she didn’t hear him or didn’t care. Her hands grasped him around the small of the back and she pulled him tighter into her. She grabbed his hand and forcing it downwards pushed it between her legs. Then she pulled her thick woollen skirt up around her waist. He tried to find the top of her tights but fumbled. With her skirt bundled around her waist she dragged frantically at them, forcing the tights down her thighs. She shifted her legs apart and his hand moved between them. Her left hand cupped the front of his trousers. Then someone moved on to the landing above. She groaned. He reached into his pocket, took out the key, and with a hefty shove to the sticking door they were in the flat.

  He tried to steer her to the bedroom but failed. Something had taken hold of her. She pushed him to the floor, stepped out of her shoes and rolled down her tights and knickers. But she was too excited to take them off completely. One foot still sheathed in a train of nylon and cotton, she sat astride him and forced him into her. He winced. In only seconds she was twisting and arching as if shaken by a terrible pain. She fell forward on his neck and said wearily, ‘Oh, God.’ These were the first words she had spoken since he had found her waiting outside his door.

  She stayed there, immobile but for her laboured breathing. He could feel her breasts pushing against him rhythmically as she slowly recovered. She said nothing more. He heard heavy breathing again growing louder, and realised it was his own. Still she did not speak.

  ‘Look at me,’ he said finally.

  Staring at the wall, she replied softly, ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m embarrassed,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?’ he said smiling, although he felt sick again.

  She pulled herself up. ‘I suppose you’re right.’ She looked him straight in the eye. ‘If I’m going to be shameless, I’d better do it properly, don’t you think?’ She began to undo her blouse, reached behind to unclasp her bra, fumbled for the hook then laughed as she remembered it opened at the front. She unclipped it, pulling the bra away from her without either coyness or overt sexuality. He reached up, taking the weight of her breasts in his palms. How wonderfully soft the skin was, how warm, and how heavily, despite their size, they took to the shape of his hand.

  They went to his bedroom and they talked all night, stopping only twice. It was fascinating, if disconcerting, to listen to her as she gave him an account of her state of mind during the previous year. He had spent uncountable hours guessing at the effect of his remarks and actions. Now he was hearing directly what she had really been thinking. Events of which he had been barely conscious or had forgotten turned out to have been of great significance to her. Others that had pleased him with their subtlety and effectiveness had made no impact at all, although in one instance particularly she had seemed at the time to have been moved deeply. But she also talked of things he had done or said, or not done or said, which were detailed in his ledgers in their imagined, hoped-for impact, sometimes almost word for word. He could not remember a time of greater pleasure, or relief, as she poured out her heart to him.

  After a long time the spate slowed and between one sentence and the next she fell asleep. It would have been nice to sleep too; he could have done with a good night’s rest. But tonight he felt unsettled, as if he needed to keep listening or moving. His breathing was shallow and his pupils contracted. Vindication is a powerful drug, he thought. Be careful. He slipped her head gently from his shoulder and slid out from under her legs. He stood by the bed, his arms hanging loosely by his side, and looked at her for a long time. After about ten minutes she stirred, missed his presence, opened her eyes halfway and saw him standing by the bed watching her. She smiled almost without moving her lips then closed her eyes and settled into the white pillow. He looked at her face. It was relaxed, entirely itself.

  In the end he went to the kitchen to make himself tea. He drank it and made more, trying to think calmly of what to do. He went back to bed at six thirty and within ten minutes he was falling into his habitual semi-conscious doze. When he woke it was nearly twelve and Maria was sitting, dressed, on the edge of the bed with a cup of tea in her hand. He was oddly startled, and disguised his nervousness by yawning. She was smiling but he could think of nothing to say.

  ‘Would you like tea or coffee?’ she said.

  ‘Tea, please.’ He was acutely conscious that he was not meeting her gaze, and to hide his eyes he rubbed his hands over his face, as if trying to wake himself properly. Fortunately she left, and when she returned a couple of minutes later he was ready to face her.

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be any toast,’ he said.

  ‘What did your last slave die of?’

  He reached for her and pulle
d her down beside him. She squealed as she fell, her legs splaying inelegantly apart. Off-balance still, she struggled to close them but he pushed his hand and elbow between her knees, the skirt taut across her thighs. He shifted his weight, jamming her against the wall on one side. Placing his left hand just above her knee he slowly pushed it along her cool, white skin and between her legs. She had kept still at first but now she started to struggle. This caused her skirt to ride up towards her waist. He hooked one finger around the tight elastic of her knickers and gently pulled them to one side. It was not difficult for him to avoid being sentimental but even after all this time and all these women he was still astonished by its beauty. It surprised him because it was so unexpected. All other parts of the human body seemed predictable, to belong to one another, but somehow the connection between this combination of hair and softly folded skin and the body it served eluded him. He did not understand pornography, nor was he interested in it. Once in the 1960s he had looked through a collection of pin-up photos in black-and-white he had found lying on the pavement. The pubic area had been airbrushed to remove all traces of hair and labia so that they looked like naked mannequins in a shop window: smooth and impenetrable. Odd as this was, and though the implications were absurd, the pictures somehow seemed more logical, what you would have expected. Looking up at Maria, he noticed how touched she was by his gaze and how safe his appreciation made her feel.

  An hour later she returned from taking a shower. As she walked naked and unselfconscious around the room, it occurred to him how vital it had been, this disinterested sense of the beauty of women. They felt the sincerity of his appreciation and imagined always, every time, that this arrived hand in hand with a capacity for love or being genuine or a whole range of related virtues.

  Distractedly she searched the room. Unsuccessful, she stood, biting her lip thoughtfully.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  She turned her head away, laughing. ‘I can’t find my knickers.’

  He pulled back the sheets, picked them up and held them out to her.

  As she took them from him, she turned and sat on the bed to put them on. Then she stood up and looked at him. ‘I was beginning to think you might be keeping them for a souvenir.’

  ‘Me?’ he said with genuine surprise. ‘I’m not much of a one for keeping things.’

  ‘You’re not, are you? There are no bits and pieces here, no photos, no old letters on your mantelpiece. I don’t really know anything about you at all.’

  He looked at her thoughtfully, then said quietly, ‘You never seemed particularly interested.’

  She turned and started to dress too quickly, then stopped. Still with her back turned she said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘There’s no need to be. If I’d wanted to tell you my life story I would have. If I’d wanted you to think about my state of mind rather than your own then, frankly, I wouldn’t have taken the trouble to get to know you and then I wouldn’t have fallen in love with you.’

  Her eyes rounded. ‘I want to know about you now.’

  And so he began to tell her about himself, his childhood on an obscure RAF military base in Germany; how after he had drunk purple rat poison his mother had saved his life by forcing him to swallow salt water and repeatedly making him sick by sticking her finger down his throat; his elder brother’s death by drowning and his own inability to persuade a passer-by who could have saved him that it was not a childish prank; the day he inadvertently set fire to the school’s grand piano and how a year later, having got away scot-free, he confessed because he’d misunderstood what was intended to be a jovial remark from the headmaster; university, jobs, the accident, not his fault, in which he had run over and killed a small boy; the story that always turns out to be more morose than you had expected. He talked for several hours without stopping, Maria contributing only occasional laughs and touches. When he had finished she said, ‘Now I really am sorry.’

  He laughed. ‘After three and a half hours I’m not surprised.’

  She smiled back. ‘Thank you for telling me.’

  ‘Would you like to see a photograph of my brother?’

  She nodded and he went over to his desk drawer, searched for a moment, then returned with a single black-and-white box-camera photo. It was of a coltish-looking blond boy of about thirteen, whose smile was breaking out of the unreal grimace of the carefully posed family photograph and into the grin of someone who wasn’t taking the photographer seriously.

  ‘My mother took it about a week before he died. I was an orderly little boy, terribly tidy about my clothes and toys – just like now. He used to burst in on me, wreck everything in his search for whatever he needed, then vanish. He doesn’t look much like me, does he?’

  ‘No.’

  They talked more about his brother’s death and the effect it had had on his family. He admired the delicacy with which she listened and responded: a comment here, a question there, a readiness to laugh when he shifted from bitterness or loss to an amused and telling evocation of the dead, in one of those bewildering switches so typical of those talking about their grief. She made no claims to know exactly how he felt, avoided intrusive sympathy, yet she was clearly moved. He was impressed.

  Finally she left.

  Some people have a thirst for understanding, some have a hunger for it. Some are even desperate, but not in the way that Steven Grlscz is desperate. The peasant farmer staring at his horse’s arse twelve hours a day is not in tune with nature and the natural world. It must be done to stay alive. The natural world is always threatening to break his heart and anyone who can choose to do these things is never going to understand. Thinking is what Steven has to do and what he does is like breaking the ground with a blunt plough, tending a sick horse, having too many mouths to feed and insufficient rain. Except that it’s not just hard: it’s complex, tricky and fathomless.

  His head ached and he felt drained rather than tired. He decided he must ring Maria and put her off returning so that he could get some more sleep. That he dozed so lightly meant that he needed a great deal of this half-sleep to maintain his strength. She answered quickly, pleased to hear his voice and obviously thinking his call was a demonstration of romantic impatience for her return. She was caught off guard by his request. Her silence and the hurt tone of her response alarmed him. He tried to withdraw and asked her to come as soon as she could but he knew it sounded lame and she was unconvinced. ‘Please come now.’

  ‘Look, it’s all right.’

  He could almost see the tautness of her lips. ‘I want you to come.’

  She laughed but in a way that sent a chill across his heart.

  ‘Don’t be silly. I understand. Just get some rest, it’s fine.’

  He knew there was no point in continuing. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said, aiming for a tone somewhere between tiredness and gentle anticipation.

  ‘Yes . . . fine.’ The hurt tone had increased in its intensity.

  ‘Bye, then.’

  ‘Bye.’ Her farewell was almost inaudible – iciness warmed by disappointment.

  He went to bed and dozed, waking at midday with the winter sun shining powerfully on his bed. Although he preferred the heat of summer, he liked the sharp, severe lines produced by the sunny days in December and January. Despite the cold, anything was preferable to the predominant greyness of an English winter. He felt better after his sleep and the sunlight in the room cheered him up. He rang a local flower shop and ordered a dozen roses to be sent to Maria at work. The choice of flowers was not an unthinking reflex but the result of experience: he knew to his cost that it was foolish to put aside rituals of this kind on the grounds that they had become devalued by habit.

  He left several messages on her answering-machine knowing that there was no chance of her being in. He called her as soon as she arrived home from work and quickly sensed her desire to forgive him, and, after the urging of his first apology, her nervous hope that he would observe all the forms of contrition.
She was like a mother anxiously watching her son’s first piano recital where all that was required was for him to finish without pausing or striking too many false notes. It would not be so easy a second time or, if it were, a third. The power of a breach made up to bring two people closer had proved itself to him before, but so had its capacity to erode. And you could never tell for certain which was which.

  He returned to his ledgers with renewed heart. To his relief their account began to approach a point where they matched. They were becoming equals. When they were balanced it would be the right time. At night when he was not with Maria he would work at the ledger with the care of an interpreter on the final draft of a complex technical manual full of obscure terminologies for which there was no exact translation.

  ‘Are your eyes closed?’ he said to her. She was sitting on his sofa halfway across the room from him smiling and with her eyes shut. She was dressed in a business suit because she had arrived straight from a book launch at work. Her skirt, fetchingly, was just a little too short and, perched on the edge of her seat, she uncrossed her legs to give herself a greater sense of security while she waited uncertainly but pleasurably for what he was going to do. The result of this was that her legs splayed slightly too wide. Other than when they were making love there was a modesty about her and she was as careful about bending and sitting elegantly in company as a 1950s debutante. He could make out the dark V between her legs lightened by the white cotton of her knickers; it made her seem especially vulnerable.