Life

by Gwyneth Jones

  Maybe read for a while.

  About an hour later—Spence wasn’t wearing a watch—he looked up and saw someone coming towards him. The figure was still far off. He was in such a solitary mood that he almost rolled up his mat and took himself out of sight, then saw that it was Anna. She was wearing a lavender-colored dress that grazed her knees and left her brown arms bare. He waved. She waved back. Soon she was climbing up to his sun terrace, and then she sat down beside him among the summer flowers.

  “Hi. I thought it was you.”

  “Just catching a few rays.”

  She smiled, her eyes wary. He sensed the shyness he’d divined in her, that other people mistook for self-possession. “I won’t stay.”

  “Oh no, please do. I’d like your company.”

  “Aren’t you afraid you’ll burn? It’s pretty hot.”

  Spence’s skin was naturally matt, sallow, and pallid as a fish’s belly until the moment the sun came out. “I never burn.”

  “Nor do I, though people always think I will. I expect we’ll get skin cancer.”

  “Yeah. Melanoma, I bet. Dead in days.” He shrugged. “Too bad.”

  “I don’t know why people make such a fuss about death-dealing disease,” said Anna. “One in four people will die of cancer: how awful. As if the other three were going to be fine, as if death was an avoidable disease.”

  “No one here gets out alive.” He looked at her quizzically. “You been sleeping badly too?”

  “It’s just end-of-termitis.”

  “You’re worried about the sit-down exams?”

  “Not at all. I like them.”

  “Yeah, so do I. People will let you alone.”

  “Peaceful.”

  Anna slipped off her sandals and stretched her toes in the grass. Months ago (Ash Wednesday?) she had spotted the American Exchange at Mass in the campus chapel. He’d scooted, fast, probably feeling extremely caught-out. She’d never seen him there again. Anna didn’t go to Mass often. She did not want to join the university’s Christian Community, which would expect her to share some very dodgy opinions and would not understand that she didn’t believe anything. She just wanted to be there, sometimes: murmuring her responses. The rest was silence. Oh, and a moral code. But the moral code was obvious; it didn’t belong to any religion.

  He could have been her brother. Shall I do it, she wondered. Do I dare?

  “Spence, can I ask you a personal question?”

  “You can ask.” He narrowed his eyes, preparing his defenses. “I might answer.”

  “Are you a virgin?”

  If anyone had tried to tell Spence that one day he would be proud to make this confession to his beloved, he would have dismissed the idea as fascist crap. He did not feel proud now, but something told him that a lot depended on his reply. What the hell was going on?

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “Just lucky, I guess. Would you mind telling me why you ask?”

  “It’s—” She swallowed, visibly. “I’ve got a proposition to make to you. You see, I’m a virgin too. And I don’t want to be. And I thought, well, I’m heterosexual, and I like sex.”

  “How d’you know?”

  “You mean, that I’m heterosexual? Well, I suppose because of what turns me on.”

  “That you like sex.”

  She looked puzzled. “I’ve done some petting and I masturbate. Don’t you? The whole way can’t be that different.”

  He pulled a grass blade, inspected it carefully. His heart had begun to shake. “Let’s get back to the proposition.”

  “The thing is, I’d like to have sex, full unprotected sex, without having to worry about it. And, to be honest, I’d like not to be on my own among all these couples that are sprouting up. I’m on the pill. My mother thought it made sense, when I came to university, and I agreed with her. But there’s AIDS to think of, and other diseases, and antibiotics maybe not working… It seems to me, the ideal way to have totally relaxed sex, without condoms, is if you and one other person are faithful to each other. We seem to get on all right, and you’re going back to the US soon. It wouldn’t be long term.”

  Don’t interrupt, he thought. Not for your life. But apparently she’d finished. She was looking at him expectantly, hopefully, fearfully—

  “Am I dreaming?”

  “No.” Anna’s face fell, like a hurt child’s. “You’re talking to a Vulcan.”

  Spence reached out and brushed back her hair. He traced the rim of her left ear with his fingertip. “I don’t think so. This looks human.” His hand returned to his lap. He chewed his grass blade. “How would each of us know that the other was sticking to the deal?”

  “Well, you would trust me. And I would trust you. Like I said, it wouldn’t be for long.”

  She waited. Spence felt himself poised over an abyss, swept out of time and space to face a mighty challenge that he dared not refuse. In that moment he knew that if he accepted Anna’s contract, the light of romance went out in his life forever. There would be no candlelight over an intimate table for two, no bunches of red roses, no preening in front of the bathroom mirror, no heart-in-the-mouth phone calls, no spending too much money on dates designed to impress. No tender gifts, no sweet avowals, no measuring her finger for the best ring he could afford… He had not known that he valued those hoary trivialities until this brink, when he felt that his birthright was being ripped from him. If he said yes he would get sex practically for free with this girl with whom he was deeply in lust, if no more. It didn’t sound an awfully tough decision. He knew different, he knew very very different. But what could he do?

  Leap, then, into the arms of God.

  “Okay. I accept. It is a done deal.”

  Her reserved, anxious look broke into a lovely smile.

  The bride and groom sat looking at each other. There was no one around to tell Spence that he was allowed to lift the veil. Instead, he produced his spliff. “You want to smoke this?”

  “D’you have a light?”

  The non-tobacco smokers were parasites on the cancer-stick community. It turned out that he did not have a light, not a single draggled scrap of matchbook. Nor did Anna. Spence realized he’d made a dangerous error. The spliff had acquired significance. If it could not be smoked, the chances were high that Anna would make her excuses and leave. Spence would be too proud and scared to try and stop her. Next time they met each would wait for the other to mention this conversation. Neither of them would speak; Anna’s brave offer would be buried. Spence felt strangely resigned. It was fate. He could see the same rueful acceptance growing in Anna’s face. He looked around, praying for deliverance, and saw that another wandering scholar had appeared, striding along the path on top of the ridge, heading towards campus. It was Oliver Tim, a floppy white cricket hat pulled down over his eyes and a bundle of books and papers under his arm.

  “Hey, Wol! Oliver!” Spence brandished the joint. “You got a light?”

  Early that summer evening, Spence and Anna came into the bar in the Student’s Union, blinking in the cool gloom, and tracked down Wol where he was sitting with Rosey McCarthy. Anna produced a posy of wild flowers, bound in a knotted grass-stem, and laid it on their table. “Thanks for everything. You’re a pal.” The two left immediately, giggling over some private joke. Oliver put the posy away and refused to explain its meaning (he wasn’t sure what it meant). He had a soft spot for Anna Senoz, a grave and gentle old-fashioned girl. He hoped the American Exchange was not leading her astray.

  iii

  Anna was a very fit young lady. She played tennis, she practiced yoga. She could lie on her back on the floor, cross her legs, and rise to her feet in one neat movement, without using her hands. They all had admired the slightly nerdy prowess, the girls without rancor and the guys without salacious interest. It was for Spence to discover the implications of muscle tone; for Spence (who had been raised a devout puritan, though he didn’t know it) to learn what
it meant to be the true belief of a healthy, athletic young woman whose box-fresh sexual mores were trained only by desire. His life long, if he recalled certain incidents of that time, those weeks when Anna invariably wore a skirt, because underwear could be easily dealt with but, as she said, “a girl wearing trousers can’t fuck,” his tongue grew thick in his mouth, his throat closed, blood rushed to his crotch. That first experience, under the hot sky, was extraordinary enough. Spence was not circumcised. The practice had been de rigueur in Manankee County, but his mother had rebelled and saved him. He’d always had a little trouble with his foreskin. It seemed to catch somehow; it didn’t want to slide all the way back. When they first—she kneeling astride his lap, her blue crepe skirts sweeping his thighs—commenced to consummate their vows, it really hurt. Something gave way, the pain was gone, but either the pain or the awe of the situation saved him from the humiliation of instant spurto. Far from it: he felt as if they could go on forever, locked in rhythm. Afterwards he was able to point out that he had actually shed blood, the same as she’d done, if not more. When she finally left him, which was late that night, and he could stop being so damned sensible, he had knelt on the floor of his room in Regis Passage, touching his fingertips and his lips to the small dark mingled stain on that roll of thinsulate, as if it were a sacred relic.

  Spence had arrived in the UK a virgin because at home the girls he liked had seen him as a friend. The well-trained child of a feminist single mother, he’d easily sensed that they didn’t want him to get sexual. Whereas if he detected that a girl was trying to pressure him into making a move, he felt uncooperative. There was also his mother. She meant well, but no one would ever call Spence’s Mom tactful. She’d have been all over his fledgling love life. His plight was not unusual. He’d have been willing to bet a significant proportion of his male contemporaries were in the same boat, whatever lies they told. A year in Europe had seemed like his big chance, yet nothing had changed. Sex was freely available: but he was still the friend-not-boyfriend type and still repelled by any girl who tried to elicit sexual behavior from him. He had begun to suspect that there was something out of kilter about his maleness. He did not think he might be gay. He did not feel attracted to guys; he felt attracted to Anna. But he didn’t seem to have the right impulses in his repertoire: or not enough of them.

  Spence’s mother had told him that his ancestors were pure Scots and Irish (apart from the obligatory Romantic Native American somewhere back there). As he grew up and looked in the mirror, and observed that cute little gap between his front teeth, the way his hair grew, the set of his eyes and cheekbones, he used to say to himself no, really? He was not concerned if she had him descended from Finn MacCool, when Chaka Zulu might have been as appropriate: he just wondered. The unease about his sexuality was like that, but with the potential to be much more serious. An intuition, stronger than evidence, that something had been left out of the account.

  Whatever happened, he was eternally grateful to Anna for setting his mind at rest.

  On the last night of term there was a big party in the Martin Luther King Hall. Anna had packed her stuff. Tomorrow she was going to start work in a restaurant and move to Bournemouth seafront, where she and Daz were sharing a room. He pulled her close and demanded, in her ear, “Want to get away from this and snog?”

  “Yes.”

  They wandered. The Union building, ungainly, dating from the sixties, had a carnival atmosphere, bodies in scanty bright clothes draped around concrete pillars, wild-eyed gangs screeching with laughter from recesses of naked brickwork. “Did you know the guy who designed this was Basil Spence, same as did Sussex University?”

  “Yeah. I saw that in the prospectus. Two listed Georgian houses, one listed Basil Spence blockhouse… I nearly changed my name back to Patrick for the duration.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t like the idea of sharing a name. I don’t like to be—”

  “Like anyone else.”

  “Ah, ha ha ha.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. You wouldn’t have been called Spence.”

  “You’d never have known any different. Spencer was my mother’s family name. She called me Patrick after a guy in a poem, which she used to recite to me when I was young in a horrendous supposedly Scottish accent. She’s a great Britophile, my Mom. Something about…: I saw the new moon yestreen, with the old moon in her arm. There’s a storm at sea, and it ends with a shipwreck. And there lies guid Sir Patrick Spens, with the scots lairds at his feet. I didn’t like Patrick, don’t know why not, so I called myself Spencer, which became Spence—”

  The beat came thrumming up through their feet. Anna leaned out over a rail, where people were dancing and drinking below. Spence embraced her from behind, burying his face and mouth in her warm nape, pulling her close. He was lost in kissing, pressing his aching genitals against her bottom, running his palms over her breasts, wonderfully tormented, expecting any moment she’d say stop, this is a public place, when he realized that her hands were busy too, down inside the waistband of her skirt. “Anna,” he whispered, scandalized, “are you by any chance playing with yourself?”

  “Yes I am. Anything wrong with that?”

  Holy Baloney. There were people watching, or at any moment might be. She didn’t care. She was reaching behind her, groping for his dick. Working as if he was defusing a bomb with seconds to spare he managed to unzip his pants one handed, positioned himself under her, eased her knickers aside from the cleft, and he was there: inside, he could hardly believe this, but he was going like a piston, Anna’s breath catching, and her whole body buckling. They fell to the floor, crawled behind a chunky sofa and went on fucking, while footsteps passed and voices chattered… Another of these nights, in one of the clubs they frequented in Bournemouth, they were dry-humping to the beat in the middle of the dance floor; it was common practice. She got her legs up around his waist, pushed the front of his jogging pants down under his balls, freed his rock hard penis and mounted it. Spence, no longer aghast, still fabulously excited by her boldness, was clutching her gloriously smooth butt, when he found that a strange hand had joined his own under her skirt. Two garish, sweat-dripping faces appeared on either side of Anna’s head. “Hey, d’you fancy a foursome?” yelled the girl. Spence was covered in confusion; Anna lifted her face and answered coolly, “sorry mates, this is a private party,” and at her words Spence instead of wilting came, explosively; it was incredible that they stayed upright. The experience cracked them both up. They had to go off and crouch in a corner, feeling more vulnerable when dissolved by laughter than in coitus.

  He would wake in Regis Passage to the screaming of the herring gulls, the guttural roocoo, roocoo of the back garden wood pigeons, and the braying of the collared doves, the pigeons’ slender cousins, whose tender beige plumage belied their aggressive street-style. Did some drugs, did some of his ridiculously tedious but easy programming work, and went to find Anna, who would be roasting herself on the crowded beach. She and Daz were working in a smart little restaurant, alternately cooking and waitressing, lunch and evenings. The pay was abysmal, but the tips were good and the food was free. He would eat whatever they’d brought him and drink the wine they’d usually managed to sneak out. Eventually the girls would go back to work and he would hang with Frank, Alice Flynn, Ramone, and the various somewhat scary characters who occupied the rest of the squat. He would be waiting for Anna when she finished at the restaurant. She would have already changed her clothes; her hair would smell of cooking oil. They would go out dancing in this club or that club, anywhere that didn’t cost too much, they weren’t proud. Dancing, they were all over each other’s bodies. Spence thought of a shocking craze known as the waltz: which must have been like this, before it hit the drawing rooms. Skirts up and pants down, bodies whirling, locked in couple, rocking to that beat. If anyone knew of a party, they went on there when the clubs finally faded, an
d then back to Regis Passage and fucked some more at dawn (public and near-public fornication was the tip of the iceberg, they never stopped, it seemed to him, either fucking or thinking about fucking) before she left to get ready for work… Weekends were different, if Rob, who had a job in London, came down. Spence did not care for the trite double date that materialized. He discovered that he didn’t like Rob Fowler. Sometimes Daz went up to London instead, and that was good, though it made no difference to Anna’s hours. They hardly slept, they forgot to eat, they expended staggering amounts of energy, day and night. How ’a God’s name did they survive this regime? They were young.

  In Frank’s kitchen, late at night, they sat and talked with Frank about the nature of reality. Spence was of the opinion that shit happens. Everyone’s having a different summer. There’s no meaning except what we construct, not ever, nohow.

  Anna said, “meaning can come at you from the future.”

  “D’you mind explaining that?”

  “Well, say, we seem to be running out of water on this planet. If that’s true, and it’s not the only limit we seem to be hitting, then the old story is confirmed. We’re the crown of creation all right, we’re the end of the line. That’s a meaning.”

  “But before then we escape, in our starships, flying mother nature’s silver seed—”

  “Not on present figures,” said Anna darkly. “Anyway, leaving aside the heat death of the universe, what do you mean by there’s no meaning except what we construct? Since you can’t talk, or think, at all without constructing a meaning, what’s the content in that statement?”