by Edna O'Brien
“Come on, doll, you’re not swinging.” A tall man stood over Kate. She looked up and shook her head slowly from side to side, a thing she learned once, to relax her neck muscles.
“I’m drinking,” she said.
“You’re not swinging,” he said. He had a ruddy, affectionate face and golden eyelashes. She would have liked to talk to him. She would have liked to say, “I can’t dance. I drink instead of dancing, or I cry.” She would have liked to say, “Teach me to dance,” or, “How many of these people sleep together?” but he was exercising his shoulder and flicking his fingers to the beat of the very loud music.
“You won’t,” he said. “You’re not a primitive?”
“Later,” she said. He moved onto the floor and joined a girl who had begun to dance alone, in defiance. She was tall, and boyish-looking, and wore leather trousers.
Sitting, watching very carefully, Kate tried to do the dance mentally. She shook her arms, her legs, her hips, her shoulders, but she could not trust herself to stand up and do it.
“What do you think of it?” the papier-mâché man called over to her.
“Great, great,” she said. The password. He was dancing with a girl who wore a strawberry punnet on her head to make herself taller. He winked at Kate’s sandals. They were toeless and silver, with straps as thin as a mouse tail across her instep. She held his look idly for a second and then she looked around to locate another drink. She poured some from a stray glass into her own and drank it greedily. If nothing else, she’d get drunk! There were now two record players, and two opposing songs were belting out; the faces of the dancers were twisted with effort and mistrust, the sweat crying on their brows. It was hot, and unfunny, and shrill in that room. And, a little tipsy, Kate thought what the coolest thing she’d ever known had been: the exhalation of fresh brown clay, that inaudible breath when the sod is first turned over.
It was a habit of hers to escape a bad moment by remembering a better one. She thought of a day when she said to Eugene, as he walked naked across the bedroom floor, that a man’s testicles had the delicacy of newly forming grapes. It must have been summer, both because he was able to wander around naked without freezing, and because the sight of hanging grapes was fresh in her mind. Far away and lost, all those moments. Part of her had died in them.
“Come on, I’m having an erection, let’s go,” the papier-mache man said to the girl with the strawberry punnet, and they both shot through the door. Kate followed, stunned. She had to see if they were boasting.
They were not in the bedroom, at any rate. The large double bed was piled high with coats, and to one side of the bed, lying in its crib, was a baby looking up at the ceiling with the deepest, darkest eyes. Eyes that only babies have, that are like powdered ink when the first drops of water have been added and it is still an impenetrable blue. The baby hung a lip and thought to cry when Kate’s form mooned over it, but being resourceful, Kate remembered a game from Cash’s infancy. She ducked behind a bank of coats, reappeared, and went on ducking and reappearing until the baby’s giggles alerted other people. Its mother came and tapped a pillow just to show she was its mother, and Roger came and stood near Kate, and said, “You must be a very real person.”
“I am,” she said. “I help blind men across the road,” as she gave her finger, out of some buried instinct, to the child to gnaw.
“Ouch,” she said, taking it away quickly, and to him, “Trust not the innocent, this child bit me.” He opened his mouth and snapped quickly at nothing, as if an apple had been swinging from the ceiling on a thread. He admired Her cheekbones. He asked why she hadn’t danced and why she looked on with such scorn. He had been watching through the jamb of the door. She wanted to tell him the truth, to say that she felt clumsy, and tired, and considerably older than twenty-five, but she heard herself saying something quite different.
“They scream too much and they perform too much and they have no cadence,” she said. She was really drunk now, using words that were affected and trying to sound superior. He asked what she’d been thinking of.
“I was thinking of clay.”
She could not have said a more propitious thing: he saw her now as fundamental. Where had she come from?
“Ireland,” she said. “The west of Ireland.” But did not give any echo of the swamp fields, the dun treeless bogs, the dead deserted miles of country with a gray ruin on the horizon: the places from which she derived her sense of doom.
“There is a solitary stone castle,” she said, as if she owned it, “on a hill, and it is intact, even down to the beautiful stone window frames, and there is always a white horse there, rooted to a cleft of the hill, and I would like to live there.”
Lies. Lies. He fell for it, he said he must go, they must go there, make a pilgrimage, ride the white horses over the bogs down to the churning sea. She had filled in some details for him to be able to describe the place back to her.
“Sssh, ssh,” Kate said, and put her finger to his lips. The baby’s eyes were closing. She had forgotten that terrible anxiety which grips one in the instant that a baby is going to sleep, in case it won’t. She remembered Cash and felt disloyal to him. Then she put a scarf on the side of the crib to shut out the glare of the table light, and looked up, smirking. She’d forgotten the pleasure of watching a man become attracted to her.
“You’ve made the party worthwhile,” he said.
“And what about the others?” she said, meaning the soft, the bunny, the gooey, the dew-wet bitches.
“They are all lovely,” he said. Rat. She’d expected some corny little lie at least.
“I must go soon,” she said to her cheap wristwatch, as if it would save her. A woman who had just come to get her coat was having an argument with about twenty other coats, which she pitched onto the floor.
“Find me my bloody coat and take me home,” she said to Roger. Did she know him? Maybe not. That was how people paired off now. Many met for the first time, lying down on a bed that was bound to be unfamiliar to one or the other of them. Kate shuddered, longing to be safe, in a taxi driving toward her own house.
“But I have a girl,” Roger said, introducing Kate.
“Have two,” the woman said bluntly. “You’re a man, aren’t you?” He repeated that Kate was his and turned to her to confirm it. Will-less now, a little drunk, trapped, she let his hand caress her stomach in a slow, circular motion.
On the way out he excused himself for a minute. To say goodbye, or make a date for later with the drunk woman, or pinch a bottle? What matter.
They drove in the opposite direction from where she lived. She wanted him to say something, to ask him where they were going and what he intended to do. Sometimes he took his hands off the wheel and flicked his fingers and wriggled his shoulders as if he were dancing to impress the wheel. He had put the radio on.
“Careful,” she said. She always thought of Cash in moments of danger.
“I’m never careful, I pursue death,” he said.
She kept one hand on the dashboard just in case.
They drove to a road named after a plant, where his flat was.
“I’ll remember this road,” she said. The mildness and the warmth of the evening still touched her with remaindered joy and she put out her hands to catch something.
She wished that they could walk. Walk and walk and delay it, or maybe avoid it. It was a luxury now to walk at night, because she had no man to escort her. No placid male friends.
“You are rare,” he said, “and beautiful, and I want you.”
She hadn’t quite faced the sleeping question. She both expected it and didn’t. She was not certain what to do. Did other people make love in the same way, or were there bed secrets that she didn’t know about? To have only been with one man was quite a drawback. They climbed tall steps to the door, then climbed a staircase and another and another. His room was an attic with a door cut out of floorboards. He wound a pulley and the floor lifted up, and she climbed a few more
steps and entered a room that was large and cluttered, with two enormous windows at either end, facing each other. He had clicked on the light and picked some clothes off an armchair to make a seat for her. The door came down slowly, filling the gap in the floor, and finally closing with a slight thud. It was not unlike being in prison. Evermore, when she thought of the word “party,” she would think of the willful internment that came after.
“You’re cold, all of a sudden,” he said. She sat on the bed very close to him and they drank vodka from tooth mugs. A white cat with a hump on its back sat surveying them.
“I want you,” he said, and bit at her the way he had bitten at an imaginary apple before remarking on her cheekbones.
“Wronged eyes,” he said, “big, too.”
“Sometimes big, sometimes small, depends on how tired,” she said, and stood up. To keep indifferent, to keep cool, to keep her heart frozen. In the mess she was in now, anyone could take advantage of her. She’d trade anything for scraps of love.
In the bathroom there were three different colors of eye shadow in small, circular boxes. Three different sets of eyes had looked in the split mirror and drunk from those Cornish tooth mugs and sat very close to him on the bed. Also a copper ring, on a twig. Things left behind by people who were certain that they were coming back. The door between the bathroom and the bedroom was missing. How was she going to use the lavatory when the need came? From the bed he waved in to her. “Hello,” he said. Then when she came out he went in there and the telephone rang. She picked it up but no one answered.
“Leave it,” he said. He stood at the lavatory for a few minutes, and she could see his dark form and his hand, palm downward, on the wall.
“I can’t do it,” he said. So he was as shy of her as she was of him. Relieved, she crossed over and held his hand, and they both waited and prayed for that pee, the way people wait in the drought for rain. She said she liked the smell of fresh pee; it was when it got stale that it got sordid. She said did he notice when he ate beetroot how red it became.
“Never ate beetroot, only rhubarb,” he said. He said rhubarb backward for her. They said it together a few times, and then he did the pee, and just when they were about to sit and celebrate, the telephone rang again.
“It must be Donald,” he said.
“Who is Donald?” she said, disbelieving before she even heard.
“Donald is a dear sick man whom I must go and see,” he said.
“When?”
“Now. Tonight. I promised him.”
“I’ll come,” she said.
“No, you won’t. You’ll wait here.” He held her shoulders, said she mustn’t behave like a child, that she must get into bed and sleep, and then wake up fresh when he got back. He lit a cigar, aimed the red glow at one of her eyes, and put on the suede jacket which he’d taken off when they got in. He licked his finger and placed it prayer-wise on her pulse. A little baptism.
“Wait there,” he said. She was certain he was going to another woman. He wound the pulley up again and went down the stairs, raising his forehead on the last step to signal up to her, and then the door closed again and became part of the floor, and this time it was really prison. The humped cat looked at her, the night appeared beyond the two windows that were at opposite ends of the room. An airplane went by, its green lights passing over on a level with her eyes. She ought to get down the stairs before it fell on her head and knocked her out. She ought to and she could. The cat never stirred. She dreaded having to stay only a little less than she dreaded having to go. And so she stayed. The beggar. There were books all around she could read, or she could rummage and find little inklings of his life, but she just sat there staring across the room toward the window where she’d seen an airplane go by. “I’ve come to a nice end,” she said aloud, and thought, Where are convent scruples now? He hadn’t forced her, she’d come of her own accord to get a little—what? Satisfaction probably. No use ennobling it. Simple case of physical famine. In the end she took off her shoes, her stockings, her roll-on, and put them behind the leather sofa, where they would not catch his eye, and after about an hour she took off her blue dress and got in between the sheets, which were spattered with dried white paint.
When he got back she was dozing.
“I’m still here,” she said, sitting up, hiding her face with her hands, apologizing.
“Sssh, ssh, back to sleep,” he said, and undressed, and slipped in quietly beside her. Nothing happened for a few minutes. She put her hand in his and squeezed it overtightly. How dreadful if he rejected her now. How indecent. He seemed cold, temperate. Perhaps he’d gone and … She closed her eyes, ashamed, unable to finish the thought.
“Would you prefer to sleep first?” she said. That stung him. He moved up and lay on her, with dead weight. The pet words, the long, loving handstrokes, the incredible secret declarations that were for her the forerunners of lovemaking, all these were missing. Pure routine. The way he might turn on a fire extinguisher in a public building if someone called “Fire, fire.”
“You don’t really want me to make love to you,” he said. His way of saying that he didn’t. She watched his interest in her fade as she had watched others fade before now. The “instant love” potion proving useless once again.
She ran the soles of her feet up and down the calves of his legs, increasing the speed as she went along, coaxing herself into a fake frenzy. She remembered all the times she had longed to be with a man, and she told herself that she’d better make the most of this, it might have to see her through yet another winter.
“You want orgasm,” he said cruelly. She’d heard that homosexuals, who, out of deceit or vanity, forced themselves to sleep with women, inflicted these sorts of humiliations. She simply shook her head and smiled. Vulgarity, indifference, lovelessness—these things did not surprise her anymore. She had wanted orgasm, but all she wished now was that they could extract themselves without losing face.
“Don’t analyze us,” she said, kissing his shoulder and coyly admiring its costly tan. Sweet Jesus, she thought, I despise him. If there was a way of making him suffer now, I would do it. If he said his wife had vanished with his babies I would swallow my last grain of pity and laugh. It was the first heartless admission she’d ever made to herself, the first time she realized that her interest in people was generated solely by her needs, and bitterly she thought of the little girl—herself—who had once cried when a workman stuck a pitchfork through his foot. It was as if her finding the pleasures in the world had made her ravenous.
“All the women I’ve loved still love me,” he said.
“Many?” she said, to humor him.
“Many,” he boasted, dwelling on the word as if they were passing through his mind in a procession; lovely vestal women.
“Any particular age group?”
“Young,” he said.
And he had been the one to say to her at that crowded party, “What is absent from your life I must give to you,” and she had been the one to swoon.
She stroked his back, asked where he got the tan, moved her face from left to right, smiled, frowned, made little jokes, all to let him think that she did this sort of thing often and was not a fool in a strange bed. She thought of a penciled sign she saw in a pub lavatory which said I married Charles six days ago and I haven’t been fucked yet, and how its cruelty had shocked her, just as her own cruelty was shocking her now. With desperation she began hugging him, pressing her nails into his back, begging for kisses. She who had come home with him in heat was dry now and quite systematic! Out of decency she would have to arouse him, and feign delirium when the time came. What a cheat. Especially when one had set out to get something for oneself.
Afterward he said he should have waited longer, but she hushed that, and uttered something predictably noble about first-time hazards.
“I’m going to sleep,” she said, “and I’ll want tea when I wake up.” She could be quite flippant, after all.
“Are
you talking about tomorrow?” he said.
“I don’t believe in it,” she said. But earlier that night when he first flattered her, she had had some wild notion that he might fall in love, heal her, provide new thoughts, new happiness, banish the old ugly images of fresh-spattered blood, and forceps, and blunder; do away with Eugene, the guardian ghost, who shadowed her no matter what streets she crossed or what iniquitous sheets she slipped between. She honestly believed that this man, or some man, was going to do all this for her. Ah! He was going to sleep now, turning over to face the window that faced the sky where the airplane had gone by, hours and years ago. She curled up, accommodating her body to fit into the hollow of his. She thought how nice if women could become the ribs they once were, before God created Eve. How gentle, how calm, how unheated, how dignified, to be simply a rib! She pounded the pillow to get rid of some knotted flock and whispered, “Good night.” Then she drew the sheet up over her face and closed her eyes.
But it did not work. She could not sleep because of the strangeness, and as the night wore on she dreaded the morning. She dreaded sitting up and having to say “Hello” and watch his thoughts curve away from her the way a river changes course when it encounters a boulder. He had already said he had to go out early. He had already hinted. She moved to the foot of the bed and got out, without even touching the hump where his feet were. She dressed carefully, studied the door mechanism, and then lifted it up, creeping away without a sound. She left no note. Another narrow escape.
Out in the street the stars, if there had been any, had vanished, and the light was deepening from dun-gray to a tenuous satin blue; blue light touching the slates of the high houses, approaching windows, behind which people slept and had made love or had dreamed of having made love or had turned over to avoid the face and breath of some hated bed companion. People were strange and unfathomable. As well as being desperate. He would be relieved to find her gone.