Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

by Nadine Gordimer

  The coffee cups are on the floor, either side of their bed. She turned on her elbow to kiss him goodnight but he lifted a hand and got up to put on the pyjama jacket. She liked his bare chest near her, the muscles a little thicker—not fat—than they used to be; when you are very tired you feel chilly at night. Climbing back to bed he stretched to close the light above. His sigh of weariness was almost a groan, let him sleep, she did not expect him to turn to her. Let the mutual heart beat quietly. Before moving away for private space they mostly fell asleep in what she called the spoon-and-fork way: she on her side and his body folded along her back, or him on his other side and she curved along his. Of course he was the spoon when enveloping her back in protection from shoulders to thighs, her body was the slighter line of the fork, its light bent tines touching the base of his nape, her breasts nestled under his dorsal muscles. This depended haphazardly on who turned this or that side first, tonight he rolled onto his right, approaching deep sleep giving him a push that way. The gentle impetus reached her to follow, round against him. The softness of breasts in opposition to the male rib cage and spine are one of the wordless questions and answers between men and women. In offended vanity which long survives, she never forgot that once, in early days, he’d remarked as an objective observation, she didn’t have really good legs; her breasts were his admiring, lasting discovery. In bantering moods of passion she’d tell him he was a tit man and he would counter with mock regret he hadn’t ever had a woman with those ample poster ones on display. In tonight’s version of the spoon-and-fork embrace she always had her closed eyes touched against his hair and her nose and lips in the nape of his neck. She liked to breathe there, into him and breathe him in, taking possession he was not conscious of and was yet the essence of them both. These were not the sort of night moments you tell the other, anyway they half-belong to the coming state of sleep, the heightened awareness of things that’s called the unconscious. None of his business, secret even from herself that she enters him there as, female, she can’t the way he enters her. Or it’s just something else; the way you would bury your face in that incredibly innocent sensuous touch and smell of an infant’s hollow under the back of its skull. But that’s not a memory which persists from the distant infancy of a fifteen-year-old whose voice has broken. She moves her face, herself, into the nape as she does without at first meeting the skin, not to disturb, the touch of the lips to come after the gentlest touch of her breathing there.—

  She’s sniffing. She’s drawing back a little from the hollow smooth and unlined as if it were that of a man of twenty. Comes close again. Scenting. Her nose drawn tight, then nostrils flared to short intakes of whatever. Scenting. She knows their smell, the smell of his skin mingled with what she is, a blend of infusions from the mysterious chemistry of different activities in different parts of their bodies, giving off a flora of flesh juices, the intensity or delicacy of sweat, semen, cosmetics, saliva, salt tears: all become an odour distilled as theirs alone.

  Scenting on him the smell of another woman.

  She moved carefully out of bed. He was beyond stirring as her warmth left him. She went into the bathroom. Switched on the light above the mirror and forced herself to look at herself. To make sure. It was facing a kind of photography no-one had invented. It wasn’t the old confrontation with oneself. There was another woman who occupied the place of that image. Smell her.

  She, herself, was half-way down the passage darkness to the bed in the room that served as guest and storeroom when—despising that useless gesture, she went back. In their bed she lay spaced away from where she would allow herself to approach, scenting again what she already had. Rationality attacked : why didn’t he shower instead of dozing bare-chested and then climbing into bed. Yes, he’d got up and put on the pyjama jacket; in place of the shower’s precaution. He showered when he came home after squash games. Was it really from the squash courts he returned, always, Tuesday nights.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t allow herself to think further; she could not think. A blank. So that it might not begin to fill, she left their bed again as carefully, silently as the first time, and in the bathroom found his bottle of sleeping pills (she never took soporifics, a university lectureship and the take-off and landing of a risky airline enterprise did not share the same ‘stress’). She shook out what looked like a plastic globule of golden oil and swallowed it with gulps of tap water cupped in her hand. When she woke from its unfamiliar stun in the morning he was coming from the bathroom shiningly freshly shaved, called, Hullo darling; as he did ‘Hullo my girl’ in affectionate homecoming, to their dog.

  EVA and Michael Tate lived the pattern of the working week, seven days and the next seven days differentiated only by the disruptions of Michael’s alternations of tentative hopes and anxiety about negotiations with the national airline that might bring not a solution for Flight Hadeda’s survival but a bankruptcy as its resolution. ‘That’s no exaggeration.’ He rejected her suggestion that as negotiations were lagging on, this was surely a good sign that the government was at last having doubts. After all their rapping of the private sector over the knuckles for not taking enough responsibility in new ways to develop the infrastructure . . . Beginning to listen to the private airlines. ‘Government could have just gone ahead and granted licences to the national after that window-dressing democratic first meeting with all of you. Why didn’t it? I think it’s tip-toeing round a compromise.’

  He had pulled his upper and lower lips in over his teeth as if to stop what he didn’t want to say.

  There were also words she didn’t want to say.

  She did something out of her anger and disbelief, that disgusted her. But she did it. She called the squash club on a Tuesday night and asked to speak to Michael Tate. The receptionist told her to hold: for her, an admonition not to breathe. The voice came back, Sorry, Mr Tate is not here tonight. ‘Sorry’ the regret a form of colloquial courtesy personnel are taught.

  Eva read in bed and the dog’s indulgence, there with her, was extended. Music accompanied them and she did not look at her watch until the dog jumped off and made for the stairs. Michael was back. And early. Down, Dina, down! They were in the bedroom doorway, the dog with paws leapt to his shoulders. Dina’s come to accept what she scents as part of the aura, now, of the couple and the house, she does not have to recall the atavism of hunting instincts.

  Eva does not remark on the hour. And he doesn’t remark that he finds her already gone to bed. Perhaps he isn’t aware of her. She’s never experienced coming home to one man from another, although she once had a woman friend who said she managed it with some sort of novel pleasure.

  ‘Win or lose?’ Eva asked. The old formula response would be in the same light exchange; a mock excuse if he’d been out of form, mock boast if he’d played well—they knew Tuesdays were for keeping fit rather than sport; avoiding the onset of that male pregnancy, a middle-age belly.

  ‘I think I’m getting bored with the club. All my contemporaries working out. Most of us past it.’

  She tried to keep to the safe formula. ‘So you lost for once!’

  He did not answer.

  He’d gone to the bathroom; there was the rainfall susurrus—he was taking a shower this time. When he came back she saw him naked; yes, nothing unusual about that, the chest she liked, the stomach with the little fold—no, it’s muscle, no, no, not fat—the penis in its sheath of foreskin. But she saw the naked body as she had seen herself in the bathroom mirror that first night when she and the dog scented him.

  He spoke, turned from her, getting into pyjamas. ‘It looks worse every day. There’s a leak that’s come to us. Adams knows one of their officials. They’ve had approved a schedule of the routes they intend to take up. Analysing cost structures if bookings are to be taken only online, cut out the travel agents’ levy on passengers.’

  ‘But you can do the same.’

  ‘We can? Travel agents feed us passengers as part of overseas visitors’ round-
trip tours. We can’t afford to ditch them.’ He came to the bed.

  ‘Aren’t you taking Dina?’

  Recalled to where he was from wherever he had been, he put his hand on the dog’s head and the two went to the stairs. When he reappeared he got into bed and did not lean for the goodnight kiss. The alternate to his reason for avoidance could be the despairing abstraction: distrait. As Michael turned out their light he spoke aloud but not to her. ‘Hadeda’s down. Scrap.’

  For the first time in sixteen years there was no possibility of one comforting the other in embrace. She said in the dark ‘You can’t give up.’ She didn’t know whether this was a statement about Flight Hadeda or a bitter conclusion about where he had been, this and other nights.

  They did continue what the new millennium vocabulary terms ‘having sex’ not making love, from time to time, less often than before. This would be when they had had a night out with friends, drinking a lot of wine, or had stood around at her duty academic celebrations when everyone drank successive vodkas, gins or whiskys to disprove the decorum of academia.

  So, it was possible for him to desire her then. Hard to understand. She’s always refused to believe the meek sexist acceptance that men’s desire is different from women’s. When they went through the repertoire of caresses real desire was not present in her body; for her, as it must be for him, desire must belong with another woman.

  She was looking for the right moment to come out with it. How to say what there was to be said. The ‘Are you having an affair’ of soap operas. ‘You are having an affair’; restating the obvious. ‘You’re making love to some woman, even the dog smells her on you.’ Away with euphemisms. When to speak? At night? Early in the morning, a breakfast subject? Before Patrick came home for the holidays? What happens when such things are said. Would they both go to work after the breakfast, take their son to the movies, act as if the words hadn’t been said, until he was out of the way back at school.

  The night before Easter she was taking from the freezer a lamb stew that was to be the last meal together before it was spoken. What she would find the right way to say. When he came home he closed the livingroom door behind him against the entry of the dog and strode over to turn mute the voice of the newscaster on the television.

  ‘I’m shutting up shop. Just a matter of selling the two jets, no-one’s going to be stupid enough to buy the licence. Fat hope of that. Adams and I have gone through the figures for the past eighteen months and even if the national thing weren’t about to wipe us off it’s there—we’re flying steadily into loss.’

  The brightly miming faces were exchanged on the screen while he said what he had to say.

  ‘But we knew you’d have to rely on our capital for a least two years before you’d get into profit, it’s not the same issue as the national one.’

  ‘The competition will make the other irrelevant, that’s all. Why wait for that. Sell the planes. Won’t make up the loss. The overdraft.’

  ‘It’ll be something.’

  There were images dwelling on the dead lying somewhere, Afghanistan, Darfur, Iraq.

  ‘For what. To do what.’

  He’s been a man of ideas, in maturity, with connections, friends in enterprises.

  ‘You’ll look around.’ That’s what he did before, set out to change his life from earthbound real estate to freedom of the sky.

  He lifted his spread hands, palm up and let them drop as if they would fall from his wrists while the screen was filled by the giant grin-grimace of a triumphant footballer. ‘How are we going to live in the meantime.’

  ‘I don’t bring in bread on the corporate scale, oh yes, but there’s a good chance I’ll be appointed head of the Department with the beginning of the new academic year.’

  ‘It’ll just about pay the fees at Patrick’s millionaire school.’ That school also, had been the father’s ambitious mouldbreaking choice for their son; if it was now a matter of reproach, the reproach was for himself, not a sharp reception of her provision of an interim rescue. Despair ravaged his face like the signs of a terminal illness.

  She did not say what she had decided was the right time and the right words to say.

  She saw he managed to eat a little of the lamb as some sort of acknowledgement of her offer.

  EVA recalled that time, the Tuesday when he came home from the woman and said about his fellows at the squash court where he hadn’t played with them—Sorry, Mr Tate is not here tonight—he was getting bored with the club, ‘All my contemporaries working out. Most of us past it.’

  Past it.

  Too late. In middle age the schoolboy adventure of Flight Hadeda, even that night in unadmitted faltering, and threatened by the national carrier he had no means to counter. Inside Eva, sometimes softening; the failure accepted, perhaps he had been too tired, stressed’s the cover-all word, to make love.

  What other way to reassure, restore himself. Not past it; proof of the engendered male power of life, arousal to potency: by another woman.

  Eva never confronted Michael with the smell of the woman scented on him. She did not know whether he saw the woman some other time, now that he had given up the Tuesday night squash club; when or whether he had given up the affair. She did not know, nor return by the means she and the dog possessed, for evidence.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following publications, in whose pages these stories first appeared:

  Daedalus: “Tape Measure.” Granta: “Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black.” The Guardian: “Gregor” and “A Frivolous Woman.” Harper’s Magazine: “History.” New Statesman: “Dreaming of the Dead” and “Mother Tongue.” The New Yorker: “Alternative Endings: The Second Sense,” “A Beneficiary,” and “Safety Procedures.” Playboy: “Alternative Endings: The Third Sense.” Salmagundi: “Allesverloren.” Virginia Quarterly Review: “Alternative Endings: The First Sense.”