“Patrick, this is Alex,” she said.
Alex waved. The boy moved closer to his mother and stared.
“Mum, I have to whisper something,” he said, his eyes still on Alex.
She bent down and put her ear next to his little red mouth. He pressed his whole head deep into her neck as though he could hide there, and whispered. He received a kiss, and then scampered back upstairs into the realm of the nanny and bedtime.
She was wearing perfume. Alex held the door open and followed Katrina through it into the night, sniffing slightly at the fragrance that diffused and expanded in her wake, as though expecting it to be familiar.
“THAT WAS AN interesting kiss,” she said much later, on her couch. The evening had been bearable, she thought. Just. He seemed to think he was charming, which was tiresome. He wasn’t charming, she thought, just energetic. He talked at her and insisted on buying the dinner, as though some Thai place in Westbourne Grove was an extravagance. “I hadn’t found you very attractive until that kiss,” she added.
He pulled away from her on the couch and smiled the serene and slightly giddy smile of someone who has just attained a small amount of power.
“It was an arrogant kiss,” she continued. “Are you confident too? Or just arrogant?”
His smile went away and he stood up from the couch, which was enormous, and took a few steps into the middle of the room. It was an intimidating room, lush as an opium den; thick curtains hung from the ceiling to the floor, and a round mirrored ball, a witch’s eye, she explained to him, hung from the ceiling, providing a fish-eye view of everything in the room no matter where you stood. The house, like the woman, exuded good taste, refinement, wealth, and weird secrets.
“Come back,” she said, and he came back to the couch and sat as far away as possible.
“Maybe it’s going to be impossible to actually have, you know, to do it with you,” he said. “It just occurred to me that I might not be able to do it.”
“Why not,” she asked. She was very cool and calm and clinical as she said this, and he decided right then that he wasn’t attracted to her, which was a shame, because he had hoped, while in London, to sleep with a woman with a British accent, or to meet someone who would evoke normal human sentiments and feelings of cozy intimacy and with whom he might start figuring out what he was going to do next, and for a moment this woman had promised both.
“Because if we, if I have with you, you know, if we…”
“Fuck,” she said. “If I fuck you, is what you’re trying to say.”
“If I fuck you, let’s make it clear who is doing what here. If I fuck you—if you want to use such language…”
“You’re the one who says fuck in every other sentence,” she said.
“Yes, but I don’t use it to describe the actual act. At least not on a first date.”
“On a first date you just stutter and look down at the floor until the person you are talking to figures it out?”
“What I was going to say was I don’t think we can, you know, do it, because if I fuck you then I will be fucking someone’s mother.”
She gave him one of those devastating little smiles. “And I’ll be fucking someone’s baby,” she said.
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” he said.
He looked down at the floor, then at her. They sat in silence for a few moments, looking searingly into one another’s eyes, building each other back up with sincere looks of mutual appreciation and interest, and then he jumped on top of her. It was a predatory, almost athletic jump from the other end of the couch, and she shrieked and coiled up in the corner in a mock display of reticence and fear, and he reached his hand behind her neck and grabbed her hair, the short hairs at the back of her neck, and forced her mouth to his. Then he pulled it away. Then he brought it back. They kissed like this for a few minutes, his hand turning her head this way and that as though it were a diamond and he was inspecting every facet, kissing her lips, cheek, eyes, neck. She offered just enough resistance to make him feel it was a violation, which he liked. His thrill at this sensation was enhanced by the fact that he knew she was playing along. He wasn’t even sure what, exactly, the game was, but they were playing. He started to feel very happy, making gentle forays with his tongue into her mouth, grazing her lips with his and then forcing her mouth open.
After a while her hand reached down towards his crotch on what struck him as an information-gathering expedition. It made little pats and squeezes, and his erection went away because it felt scrutinized. He pulled away from her. She lit a cigarette.
“Can I go get some Rice Krispies?” he said after a little while. “I’m suddenly in the mood for Rice Krispies.”
She stared at him incredulously.
“Sure,” she said after a moment. “You go and get it.”
He stood up and she watched him walk across the room, picking his way around the scattered debris—the small sneakers flung here and there, the puppets and dolls lying like casualties on the floor—and watched him descend the staircase. He had an elegant neck and loose limbs and big hands. But the obviousness of some of his gestures—and also the lascivious greedy look that sometimes flashed across his face—mitigated his elegance and contradicted it. But then, she thought, he was an American, which she associated with Broad Gestures.
She found his request for Rice Krispies both charming and perverse. It was charming because it suggested a certain honesty and desire to be comfortable, and she wanted him to be that, having lived in what she thought was a dishonest and uncomfortable situation for some time. But it was perverse, she thought, because she had a little boy in the house, and here she was faced with the prospect of another baby who demanded Rice Krispies in the middle of the night, an extra-tall one with a capricious cock and questionable manners.
PATRICK WAS FAST asleep just then—mouth slightly ajar, breathing steadily, and vividly dreaming. He was dreaming of his father. His father on the beach, lifting him up. His father tosses him in the air. The sound of waves and screams of pleasure. And then he is in the water alone. The waves are high and it is hard to breathe. He calls out but is choked by a mouthful of water. It is a dream, he tells himself, but the taste of the salt water is real and convincing, briny and sharp. He tries to call out again, and again his voice becomes muffled by water, his breath is deprived, his legs kick against nothing but cold water, which is colder down below, where the monsters lurk, and then he awakes with a gasp in the dark.
There was light outside the room. There was always light in the vastness of the house, and it always beckoned him. The texture of the carpet was extremely palpable beneath his feet. It was only a few steps down the hall to his mother’s room, but when he pressed the door open—it glided open with a outrageous creak, as in a haunted house—he saw an empty bed. Instinctively, he went downstairs. He paused next to a painting, a self-portrait by his mother, and waved at her. He headed down another flight. Then he heard something in the living room and instead of continuing all the way to the kitchen on the ground floor, he stuck his head in and saw his mother lying on the couch underneath a strange man, whose posture was that of a beast about to devour its prey.
There was something about the way they were so close that reminded him of his dream. A choking feeling. He could see the top of her head moving. The man seemed to be moving his mother’s head with his hand. He turned to scamper up the stairs.
AFTER ALEX HAD gone to the kitchen, Katrina lay on the couch and thought of Sam; she tried to get past the frustrated, gloomy, perplexed face that had silently berated her for the last year, berated her for her distance, the ever-thickening glacier that had sprung up between then. Beneath the anger was a faint, pathetic perplexity as to why this had happened. It was a question she was in no real position to answer. Something in her had withered, and he had failed to see it until it was much too late. When Sam awoke to the fact that something in his wife, some important part of her, which was also an important part of them, had irrevo
cably died, he sprang to action. But it was too late. By then she had engaged in her one indiscretion, her one indulgence, a brief high that was followed by a terrible black depression. The confession just made everything worse. When Sam grasped that his marriage might well be over, he evolved into the wrathful figure who had very unsilently berated her through the holidays, who had screamed and shouted and called her a whore while Patrick stood at the top of stairs crying. Somewhere beneath all that was a more open, loving face, stern and paternal but also soft, the one she had spotted across a room when she was twenty and thought, instantly, “Well, I could marry that.” It was difficult to reach that far back. She didn’t think she could ever get back to that old version of Sam. And anyway, he certainly couldn’t. You can’t go back to your old selves, she thought. You have to keep inventing new ones. Or at least you have to try.
IT WASN’T DIFFICULT for Alex, downstairs in the kitchen, to imagine Sam’s face. He had gone to the fridge for milk, bowl of Rice Krispies in hand, and had been brought up short by a series of color snapshots haphazardly stuck onto the refrigerator door. Scenes from the beach. One featured Katrina from behind, looking out at the rolling blue surf in a black one-piece bathing suit (exceptionally nice ass, he noted). In another a man—somewhat handsome, a bit rough, with blunt features and dark coloring—stared at the camera with a faint smile at the corners of his mouth, holding an earlier version of Patrick in his arms. The husband, thought Alex, the father. The abundance of Katrina’s life intimidated and fascinated him. He had never slept with a mother before. He stared at the photograph and wondered if this was a brief fling, something to pass through, or if he would stay awhile in this woman’s life, visit her house, get to know Patrick on the stairs.
SHE HEARD ABNER approach, his tag jingling delicately as he hopped onto the couch where Alex had been. He lay on his back and spread his legs, revealing his lean, taut whippet stomach, and looked at her with a preposterously excited expression, tongue hanging out, waiting for her foot to begin its massage in that special place. These demanding males, she thought. She moved her silk-socked foot over him. Abner’s hedonism was inspiring. Perhaps she should treat herself to a big American, the way one might treat oneself to a big milkshake at the end of a long day or, in her case, the end of a long marriage.
Alex returned to the living room with his cereal and ate. “The milk in England is incredible,” he said. “These are the best Rice Krispies I’ve ever had.” She smiled and lit a cigarette. He watched her smoke and she watched him eat. He was hunched over, savoring. Pulses of revulsion and attraction moved through her. Her husband was a fastidious man. The idea of cereal at night, let alone in the living room, would have revolted him.
“Why are you still hungry?” she said.
“I was nervous over dinner,” he said.
“And now you’ve relaxed. I suppose that’s good. Just don’t get too relaxed.”
“I don’t think that’s likely,” he said.
Her husband had been tense, coiled, and expectant, but at the same time possessed of a certain ease. This man was easy in the way her husband had been tense, and tense in the way her husband had been easy. She wondered if every experience she was going to have for the rest of her life, every amorous encounter and every sexual one, too, would be subject to comparison with her husband. She knew she should try to resist this impulse. In comparing her lover to her husband, both, she suspected, would always fare poorly.
When he was done he moved over on the couch and tried to kiss her.
“Don’t,” she said. “You have to leave now.”
“Just a little,” he said.
He tried to kiss her some more but she moved her mouth away. Her face now had a tragic aspect to it—as though the two of them were subject to forces beyond their control, forces they had no choice but to accept, huge structural Romeo-and-Juliet, Capulet-and-Montague forces—and the implication that there was more going on than just a man and a woman on a couch, that there was a whole complex narrative into which he had tumbled, fascinated him and turned him on.
She wouldn’t let him kiss her. Then she let him. He thought of the picture on the refrigerator, her husband, the man who for years had roamed these rooms. He thought of her boy, of all the other people in her life, if he would meet them, get to know them, if he wanted to. Particularly the boy. He thought of the son while he kissed the mother.
SHE FOUND PATRICK sleeping on the staircase. She shook him gently and said, “Poopsie, are you all right? Are you having bad dreams? What’s the matter? What happened?” She stroked him, and when he didn’t answer, she hugged him. She was his again, and he was enveloped by her and he let her stroke him and coo at him and escort him gently back upstairs to bed, towards that space, tiny as a universe, occupied by just the two of them.
ALEX SAT IN Lazzaro’s and soaked up its conciliatory atmosphere of decline.
He was racing through The Savage God. It wasn’t as though he were suicidal. He had a somewhat dyslexic response to substances, and this was true of printed matter as well—inspirational material made him despair, and writing that embodied or anatomized despair tended to cheer him up.
Alvarez quoted Cesar Pavese: “Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in the world.”
Sitting in Lazzaro’s he was in the grip of that pure kind of despair that contains within it, that gives birth to, a vertiginous happiness, a boundless sense of life’s possibilities.
Feeling in love with the world all of a sudden, Alex stood abruptly to pay. Mr. Lazzaro looked up beneath heavy-lidded eyes that for the first time seemed to acknowledge the customer standing before him and said, “Not to worry. The world isn’t going to end today.”
Not to worry? Alex was halfway down the block when he realized that Mr. Lazzaro must have thought that his one regular customer was about to kill himself. His laughter echoed throughout the strangely vacant expanse of Fitzroy Square.
ALEX CALLED HIS mother.
“Mom!” said Alex. “I love London. I’m running around having a great time. I don’t really know what I’m doing. But it’s fun.”
“It’s a transition period,” she said.
For days afterwards he was quietly infuriated. Transition to what? What time wasn’t a transition period?
KATRINA WALKED ACROSS the dark room, her shoes clapping angrily against the floor. Each step took her farther away from him, and yet with each step the sound became louder, as though she were getting more and more upset. Then she reached a lamp and turned it on, and the bare bulb flooded the room with a harsh theatrical light which cast long shadows across the unknown territory of their second date.
“Don’t look,” she said. “You promised.” She hadn’t planned on taking him here, but she hadn’t wanted to say goodbye outside the restaurant, and she couldn’t bear taking him back to her house.
“What am I supposed to do, keep my eyes closed?” he said. He looked. She’d told him she was a painter and that she would take him to her studio, but she wouldn’t show him her paintings, and he couldn’t ask to see them.
The room was large and mostly empty, but its emptiness had character. The wood floor was spattered with paint. The walls were ocher, but patches were chipped away revealing the white plaster beneath. There were interesting moldings that looked as graceful as musical signatures, which were also damaged and interrupted in places. A wounded chandelier, its crystals dulled, its complex web of lights tangled, hung low over a round wooden table on which sat a solitary bowl. The bowl should have been filled with plums or peaches or grapes, a still life in waiting, but it was empty.
The sounds of long-ago parties wafted through the room’s stillness, and from the bed over in the corner—plain, low to the ground, covered in a gray blanket, a monkish looking thing at once austere and illicit—there emanated moans of adulterous pleasure. It was a room whose general sense of fabulousness was enormously enhanced by the feeling that whatever excitement had once taken
place here had been horribly and brutally interrupted, and had remained in this interrupted condition ever since.
“What happened to the walls?” he said.
“Didn’t we have a deal?” she said.
“What was the deal?”
“That you would shut up.”
Her hostility, he felt, was promising. If someone takes you home and is rude to you, he felt, that means they’re already hating you for what they are about to let you do.
She put on opera. He debated whether to complain. It was too tragic, too mournful, the place was enough of a stage set to begin with, and this made it seem as though just beyond the huge window that overlooked the garden, out there in the dark, there were rows of patrons sitting quietly waiting for the action to begin. He imagined being on the outside looking in; it wasn’t hard. In her presence he felt like an intruder. He wondered how the scene would look without sound.
He collapsed on the ratty couch and regarded the various paintings that sat stacked against the walls, face forward, some old and dusty, others so new their staples gleamed.
“Is there any chance…”
“No,” she said.
He laughed.
She sat on the far end of the couch.
“Has anyone ever told you that you are very attractive when you are annoyed?” he said.
He moved across the couch and kissed her gently on the mouth. To his surprise, no insult was forthcoming. A gusher of confidence erupted within. He kissed her again, less gently. He was slightly rough with her breasts, he squeezed her ass lasciviously, he ran his hands up over her pants legs, all the way up, and though she struggled, which he liked, she also relented, which he liked even more.
After a while, they moved to the bed, and when he passed the stereo he hit stop, and the tape clicked off, leaving the room painfully silent, which he regretted, because the small thudding sounds of their shoeless feet on the floor seemed embarrassing. But then the embarrassment went away. Clothes were peeled off. Her kisses were nervous, needy, voracious, ambivalent. The opera was still playing in his head at thunderous volume, and at the same time every ruffle of the sheets, every gasp, every sticky separation of their lips and caress of her cheek, brushing her black hair out of her eyes, all these sounds were as clear to him as if an ultrasensitive recording device were positioned next to them and he were wearing headphones. He felt closer than close.
The Sleep-Over Artist Page 19