Athena

by John Banville

  Here she is, the moving mirror in which I surprised myself, poor goggle-eyed Actaeon, my traitorous hounds already sniffing suspiciously at my heels. Five foot two in her bare, her heartbreakingly bare, red little feet. Bust, thirty-four inches, waist … but no, no, this is no good. In the long-ago days when I took an interest in the physical sciences it was mensuration that gave me the most trouble – philosophically, that is – for how could anything in this fluctuant world be held still for long enough to have a measuring rod applied to it? (Have I said this before? I don’t care.) And even if it were possible to impose the necessary stillness, would the resulting measurements have any meaning outside the laboratory, the dissecting room? Old What’s-his-name was right, all is flux and fire wherein we whirl. Even the dead move, as they crumble and drift, dreaming eternity. When I think of A. I see something like one of those dancing, multi-limbed figures from an oriental religion, all legs and slender, S-shaped arms, her face alone always turned towards me, even as she spins and shimmers. She is the goddess of movement and transformations. And I, I am bowed down before her, abject and entranced, my forehead pressed to the cold stone of the temple floor.

  I have a handful of images of her, fixed in my memory like photographs. When I summon one of them up a spasm of mingled pain and pleasure goes off in me like a flashbulb. The tones range from platinum-white through glass-grey and nickel to silky blacks, with in places a pale sepia wash. Here, look at this one, look: I turn from the window and you are lying on your front amid the tangled sheets, wearing only a short, satin vest, facing away from me propped on your elbows and smoking a cigarette – ash everywhere, of course – your knees apart and feet in the air, and with stopped breath I stand and gaze at the russet and pink crushed orchid between your thighs and, above it, the tight-furled little bud with its puckered aureole the colour of pale tea. You feel my eyes on you and turn your head and squint at me over your shoulder and smile the smile of a debauched child, wriggling your toes in a derisively jaunty salute. Or here, look, here is another one, do you remember it? This time you are at the window. You are barefoot and your skirt I mean your dress is unbuttoned. You stand with eyes closed and head leaning back against the frame and one leg flexed with a heel hooked on the low sill, your arms folded tightly, crushing your breasts outwards like pale, offered fruit. I say your name but you do not hear me, or hear me and pay no heed, I don’t know which, and suddenly, as if summoned, a seagull, bigger than I would have thought possible, descends out of the sky on thrashing wings and hangs suspended for a second just beyond the glass in the bronze light of the October afternoon and seems to peer in at us, first with one agate eye and then the other, and sensing its annunciatory presence you turn to the window quickly just as the bird, screeching, with beak agape, goes on its way, downward into the shadowed chasm of the street.

  At first in the weeks after she had gone I used to torture myself with the thought that I had not observed her closely or carefully enough, that when I still had the opportunity I had not fixed her sufficiently firmly in the frame of memory, but now that I am calmer (am I calmer?) I cannot believe that anyone ever can have been subjected to such unwavering, demented attention as I devoted to you. Every day when you arrived in the room (I was always the first one there, always) I turned on you a gaze so awed, so wide with ever-renewed astonishment, beseeching in its intensity, that I thought you must take fright and flee from me, from such need, such fear, such anguished happiness. Not that you so much as flinched, of course; my poor haggard glare was never fierce enough to dazzle you. All the same I insist that I looked harder at you and deeper into your depths than anyone ever did before or will again. I saw you. That was the point of it all. I saw you. (Or I saw someone.)

  We had no night; it was always daylight when we met. Oh, the stillness of those pewter-coloured afternoons, with the muffled hum of the city below us and the sibilance of rain on the window and our breath white as thought in the motionless and somehow waiting air under that cranium-coloured ceiling. She did put up curtains, brown, hairy things that hung in lumpy folds like hides, but we never drew them. I wanted to look at her in the harshest light, to see the pores and blemishes and the little dark hairs that stood erect under my caresses; especially I treasured those times when, exhausted, or half asleep, she would lie sprawled across the couch, flaccid and agape, beached in forgetfulness of herself and of me; then I would sit by her side with my legs drawn up and arms clasped about my knees and study her inch by inch, from her gnawed fingernails to her splayed, unsettlingly long toes, devouring her slowly, minutely, in an enraptured cannibalism of the senses. How palely delicate she was. She glimmered. Her skin had a grainy, thick texture that at times, when she was out of sorts, or menstrual, I found excitingly unpleasant to the touch. Yes, it was always there, behind all the transports and the adoration, that faint, acrid, atavistic hint of disgust, waiting, like pain allayed, waiting, and reminding. This I am convinced is what sex is, the anaesthetic that makes bearable the flesh of another. And we erect cathedrals upon it.

  I believe that she did not much like the thing itself, the act, as it is interestingly called, or not as we performed it, anyway; no, I believe it was the accompanying ceremonial that interested her, the eager play, the games of consequences, the drugged post-coital exchanges. Perhaps it is only in the bitterness of hindsight that I look back now and see a certain briskness always at the end. She would push me aside and sit up and reach for her cigarettes, as though she were folding up some item of everyday use, a deckchair, say, or an ironing board, and putting it away so that the real business could start. I remember once after the final paroxysm when I lay on her breast gasping like a jellyfish she squirmed out nimbly from under me and picked up a half-eaten apple from where she had set it down on the floor beside the couch and set to work on it again as carelessly as an interrupted Eve. I would not have been greatly surprised, or greatly displeased, for that matter, if I had looked up one day from my endless, vain attempt to burrow myself bodily inside her (I think of an actor trying to struggle into a marvellously wrought but too-small costume) and found her idly smoking a cigarette, or flipping through one of those glossy magazines in the pages of which she lived yet another of her flickering, phantom lives. I must not give the impression that she was indifferent or that she played her part with anything less than enthusiasm; it is just that she was, I believe, more interested in the stage directions than the text. But speeches, she was certainly interested in speeches. Talk was the thing; she loved to talk. Endless discussions. She would detach herself from my panting, pentapus embrace and sit up and wrap herself in the sheet, securing it under her curiously plump armpits with a deftness surely learned from the cinema, and demand that I tell her a story. ‘Tell me things,’ she would say, the tip of her sharp little nose turning pale with anticipation, ‘tell me about your life.’ I was evasive. It did not matter. She had enough fantasies for two.

  She lied to me, of course, I know that, yet the things she told me (as distinct from the things that she did not) I think of not as lies but inventions, rather, improvisations, true fictions. The tales she spun had been breathed on and polished so often that the detailing had become blurred. There was the story of her family, and of her mother in particular. This mysterious woman – whom A. could not mention without narrowing her eyes and pursing up her lips as if to spit – though she was still malignly and, I suspected, exuberantly alive somewhere, was dead to her daughter. ‘I don’t want to talk about her!’ she would declare, turning aside her head and holding up a hand with its fuming cigarette canted at a trembling angle, and then proceed in a tight-throated drone to enumerate yet again the lengthy list of maternal enormities. The first time I heard of Mother she had been born in America, in Savannah, or Louisiana, or some other homonymous bayou of the Deep South, into a family of ancient lineage; in subsequent accounts, however, the birthplace shifted to Mississippi, then Missouri, and once even, if my ears did not deceive me, to Missoula, which, my atlas tells me, is a
town in the Rocky Mountains in the northerly state of Montana, to where I, Melmoth the Bereft, shall journey on that circumferential pilgrimage I intend one of these days to undertake in search of my lost love. But Missoula! – where on earth did she get that from? Her father, she said, was Swiss. He had been – I heard it coming before she said it – a diplomat in the foreign service, and she had been brought up all over the place; and indeed, in her sleep she often spoke in what seemed to me foreign languages. (By the way, why is it, I wonder, that I always take up with restless sleepers?) About Daddy ominous hints were dropped; I pictured a dark, sleek-haired gentilhomme, sinisterly handsome – see his skier’s tan, his chocolate-dark eyes, his multi-jewelled watch – idly fondling a pale little girl perched in his lap.

  Did I believe her? Did it matter? Lolling there on our makeshift narrow bed in a daze of happiness I would listen to her for hours as she spun out her stories, and smoked her cigarettes, and picked at the callused skin along the side of her feet, now and then glancing at me sidelong, cat-eyed, gauging her effect, wondering how far she could go. In the early days, before I knew better, I would sometimes diffidently draw her attention to this or that discrepancy in whatever tale she was spinning and immediately she would retreat into a sullen silence outside which I would be left to stand, puzzled and repentant, with my nose pressed to the cold glass. I believed you, I believed you – how could you doubt it? Oh, my sweet cheat, I believed every bit of it.

  Certain of her more outlandish claims retain for me even still a distinct tinge of authenticity at their core, even if the details were shaky. ‘My trouble is,’ she said one day, frowning as if into dark inner distances, ‘there is only half of me here.’ At first she would not explain, but sat with her arms clasped about herself, rocking back and forth and mutely shaking her head. At last, though, I got it out of her: she was the survivor of a pair of twins. Her double had come out dead, a tiny white corpse whose blood fierce little embryonic A. had leached from her to ensure her own survival. A.’s mother let it be known that in her opinion the wrong twin had died. When as a child A. misbehaved, the Monster of Missoula, that Pasiphäe of the Plains, would chide her with the memory of little P. (a name had been chosen, a second christening gown had been bought). A. had grown up in a state of permanent, vague bereavement. She was a survivor, with the survivor’s unshakeable sense of guilt and incompleteness. When she had finished her story she turned on me a strange, solemn stare. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘maybe you too had a twin that died, and they didn’t tell you.’ We held hands and sat side by side in silence for a long time, clinging to each other like children who have frightened themselves with stories of hobgoblins.

  There were other ghosts. I recall … dear Christ, sometimes I falter. I recall one stormy late afternoon, it must have been at the beginning of November, when the first real autumn gales were blowing. The buffeted house shuddered in its depths and there was a thrilling sense of things outside – top hats, toupées, wrecked umbrellas – flying and falling in the scoured, steel-grey air. It was such weather as makes me think always of the far past, as if my childhood had been one long, tempestuous twilight. We were in the draughty bathroom on the second-floor return, the only one in the house that had water and a lavatory that flushed. The pipes banged and the linoleum was buckled and often the flame in the coffin-shaped geyser above the bath would extinguish itself spontaneously with a frighteningly understated whump. The wind that day leaked sighing through the window-frame and the keyhole and under the door, and the air was gritty with steam that swirled in the waxy effulgence from the bare lightbulb that must have been there since electricity first came to Rue Street. I was washing A.’s hair; we liked to play house like this (and, afterwards, mammies and daddies). She was in her slip, leaning over the big old chipped handbasin and clinging white-knuckled to the rim of it as if for dear life. I can see her there, the pink tips of her ears, the dark comma of wetted hair at the nape of her neck, the pale taut skin of her shoulders stretched on their intricately assembled ailettes of moulded bone, the slippery, silken slope of her back bisected along the dotted line of vertebrae. She liked to have her hair washed. It gave her the jitters, she said. She would squirm and shiver, and stamp from foot to foot, mewling in protest and cringing pleasure. As I crouched over her, with a crick in my back and my jaw clenched, I suddenly saw my son. It must have been the shape of her head in my hands that conjured him. I used to wash his hair, too, bending over him awkwardly like this on brumous evenings long ago when he was a child and I was still his father. My hands must have remembered the contours of his skull, brittle and delicate as a bird’s egg, with those hollows at the temple as if a finger and thumb had pressed him there, and the bumpy little dome at the back where his hair was always tangled from the pillow. I shut my eyes and a wave of something, some awful burning bile, rose up in me and I tottered and had to sit down on the side of the bath.

  A. must have felt that charge of grief pass through me, it must have crackled out of my fingertips into her scalp. She turned without a word, her hair in dripping rats’-tails, and took my head in her hands and pressed it to her breast. There was a scrawny, freckled place between her sternum and her collarbone that I found pitifully endearing, and there I nestled my ear and listened to the oceanic susurrus of her inner organs at work. I felt breathless and hiccuppy, as if I were at the end and not the beginning of a bout of tears. For I wept. Oh, yes, I am still a weeper, though I do not cry so often or so lavishly as of old. Was a time when hardly a day passed, or a night, that I did not shed my scalding quota. There is a barrier, a frontier of the emotions, where one must surrender – what is it: self-possession? dignity? grown-upness? – in exchange for the giddy and outlandish pleasure of abandoning oneself wholly to grief. It is not a crossing I often make. I weep, yes – but there are tears and tears. On the other side of that final boundary the ground drops clear away and one topples slowly, helplessly, into oneself, with nothing to break the fall and nothing to grasp except armfuls of empty air. She led me back upstairs (my God, if we had met Morden then, or his man!) and we sat on the couch and she held my hands in hers while I sobbed my heart out. Plump hot tears fell on our knuckles, each one printed with a tiny, curved image of the window in which the raucous grey day was rapidly dying. I recall the noise of the wind, a huge, hollow trumpeting high up in the air, and leaves and bits of twigs blowing against the panes, though that cannot be right, for there are no trees in the vicinity; perhaps they were fragments torn from the buddleia bush down in the waste site beside the house? We had a double-barred electric fire, an antique affair she had salvaged from somewhere, which burned now at our feet with what seemed to me a baleful, gloating redness that reminded me of the coke fires of my childhood. Often nowadays I toy with the notion of breaking into the house – I’m sure everything there is much as it was – and rescuing something for a keepsake, that fire, or a smeared wineglass, or a tuft of lint, even, from between the floorboards, perhaps with one of her hairs tangled in it; what I really want, of course, is the chaise-longue, but even in my worst throes I have to laugh at the image of myself, sweating and swearing like a cattle drover, bumping that recalcitrant big brute down endless flights of stairs. All the same, what would I not give to be able to throw myself down on my face upon it now and breathe deep its fusty, exhausted, heartbreaking smell.

  My memory is up to its tricks again, conflating separate occasions, for now as I sit there weeping with A. beside me it is I who am undressed, under the cheap bathrobe that she had bought for me, while she is got up for outdoors in one of her expensive black suits and a pair of those needle-sharp high-heeled shoes the sound of which on bare wooden floors still tick-tocks in my dreams, always, always receding. I have the impression of a certain impatience, of exasperation, even, on her part; the tears of others, no matter how heartfelt, can be hard to tolerate. I was embarrassed myself, and even as I sobbed I had that hot, panicky feeling you get when the passenger beside you on a crowded bus begins to rave and cur
se. It was a long time since I had heard myself cry like this, so simply, so unaffectedly, with such heartfelt enthusiasm.

  ‘I lost him,’ I said, the words coming out in jerks and weepy plops. ‘He just slipped out of my hands and was gone.’

  A. sat with her gaze fixed on the floor beside my bare feet and said nothing. Disconcerted I suppose by her silence I peered at her anxiously through the mica-glitter of tears; she had the glumly patient air of someone dutifully waiting for a familiar and not very interesting story to end. I suppose I needed to impress her then, to do in words the equivalent of taking her by the shoulders and giving her a good shake. Besides, I had to live up to those extravagant tears. So I sat swaddled in my robe, swollen and blotched, with my hands bunched in my lap, like a big, bruised baby, and told her of my poor boy who was born damaged and died, and of my wife, that by now archaic, Minoan figure, with whom long ago I wandered the world until one day we found we had used up world and selves, and I left her, or she left me, and I went into free fall.