by Tessa McWatt
The first night he was here she cooked a Polish dinner for him, and he touched her lips with his finger before he kissed her, and when he kissed her it was a disappearing.
Katrin has not mentioned Emma or the baby, doesn’t talk or ask about them, and when he told her the bare facts before their first night together, she didn’t flinch, didn’t recoil, but said, simply and with force, “It’s good to be a father.” This is an extraordinary response. He wants to assure her that he doesn’t take it lightly, that her equanimity inspires the sort of awe in him that he has previously only experienced in the presence of nature. He worries, however, that it might mean that she is not investing and that the small parts of himself that he leaves behind every time he visits her will be unsafe.
How will he manage all of this? Emma is bigger. Her face is more beautiful than it has ever looked, her cheeks flushed, but her moods more fierce. She stayed at his flat for almost a week before she reacted to his frequent evenings out, and now she has moved to a girlfriend’s house, saying there is more room there, but in fact there is less room. He has told her about Katrin, but has underplayed it, sparing everyone’s feelings, grappling with Deleuze’s principle of courage, which consists in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. He hugs Katrin’s green silk pillow to his chest. His guilt is adamantine.
“You are very serious, Mr. Robin,” Katrin says as she approaches him on the chair. She kneels down and sits back on her heels, watching him. “You could play some guitar for me.”
He shakes his head, “I’m better on the piano.”
“But that I do not have!” She taps his knee. “You are a real musician,” she says. He shakes his head, knowing he would perform only for her. He loosens his grip on the green cushion.
“If you could be any animal in the world, what would you be?” She smiles, encouraging him. This is a game, and his heart lifts like a child’s.
“Goshawk,” he says, and sees her eyebrows go up.
“What is this?”
He drops the pillow, sits forward and draws her in closer, moved by her attempt to reach him. “A bird, like an eagle, but not quite …”
She resists him and stays firmly planted on her heels.
“And why, why this animal? I want three words to describe it.” She is still in the game. He thinks about this question, but he can’t concentrate; she is so beautiful and he can’t take his eyes off the small imperfection at the left side of her lip.
“It’s a predator, it’s free, it’s beautiful.” When his baby is born will Katrin agree to be part of his life; will she play games like this with his child?
She nods, taking mental notes, taking this all very seriously.
“If you couldn’t be a … what is it?”
“Goshawk … a northern goshawk, to be precise.”
She resists a smile. “If you couldn’t be this, what would you be?”
He doesn’t want to play, wants only to kiss her. She looks at him as though she already knows his every thought.
“Clownfish.”
“And this is a fish that lives where?”
“Warm waters: reefs, the Red Sea,” he says. He does not have to go home; he can stay with her tonight.
She nods, serious again, learning something more about him.
“And three reasons why you would be this fish?”
He is not going to be drawn into talking about their hermaphroditism, but she is the sea anemone to his clownfish. “Colourful, loyal, free,” he says.
She nods again, taking more mental notes. “And if you could not be this bird or this fish, what would you be?”
This is hard now; he can’t concentrate. He doesn’t see what she’s getting at. She already knows him.
“Green mamba,” he says.
“What is that?”
“Snake.”
“Oh dear,” she says, and looks alarmed. He laughs.
“Snakes are beautiful,” he says.
“I hate them,” she says, and what an idiot he is to want to be a snake. But it’s true. Snakes are a form of magic incarnate.
“But no, really, they are amazing, so smart. They are perfect form and content,” but she doesn’t look convinced. “And when are we going to have that dessert? I’m still hungry,” he says, trying to divert her disappointment in him. She holds firm, puts her hands on his knees, and rubs them.
“Three words to describe snakes, then,” she says.
There is nothing to consider: “Beautiful, clever, free.”
She nods and adds this information to the list she is clearly making in her mind. “You are very strange,” she says. And if it weren’t for the look on her face he would be worried, but it’s clear that she likes whatever she means by strange. “You want others to see you as a predator, free, and beautiful; you see yourself as colourful, loyal and free; but you really are beautiful, clever, and free.”
His eyes fill. He grabs her shoulders and pulls her up to him. He touches the left side of her lip and then kisses her with all the life in him.
She starts to laugh, pulls away.
“What?”
She can’t control her laughter and he climbs inside it, wants never to leave it. She takes a big breath in order to speak. “You want to be seen as a predator …” but she loses it again, and he goes with it, until they settle down with her in his arms.
“Dessert,” she says, and starts to get up. He pulls her back, but finally lets her go.
“I didn’t make it,” Katrin says as she puts down on her small dining table a plate and two forks. “It’s from Epicure—simple, but pretty, no?”
“Why is the world suddenly possessed by cupcakes and over-decorated biscuits?” he says.
“You don’t like them?” she says, timidly.
“Oh, no … I do,” he says. Idiot. He takes her by the shoulders and turns her to him. “I do.” There’s nothing he wants more than never to disagree with her. He kisses her and they stand in an embrace almost like dancing. Her hair smells of flowers. And it comes to him. She reminds him of Mona, that’s it—Mona was a girl he knew at school in Falmouth whom he slow-danced with but never got to kiss. A girl who told him he was an anorak and that the silly things that went on in his brain should be kept in his brain. And yet he wanted to kiss her more than any girl he’d ever known. Unlike Mona, Katrin does not seem to mind hearing the things that go on in his brain. Yesterday he spoke to her for nearly an hour about afterimage—the optical illusion that takes place in the eye—and how it is easily replicated in cinema. “In a medical condition called palinopsia,” he said, “you develop the capacity to perceive afterimage.” Katrin looked at him and for a moment he thought that she was finally seeing his flaws. But instead she said, “When a baby is first born, it sees the world upside down.”
She releases him and reaches for the plate of cupcakes. She holds one up towards him.
“Maybe for breakfast,” he says. At this she puts down the cake and touches her fringe. The smell of her hair, the taste of her.
“And Emma?” she says softly.
“She’s living with a friend.”
Katrin pulls out a chair and sits at the table. Oh God. He sits down across from her.
“And how will it be with you and your baby?”
“I don’t know yet.” But this is not what he means. Deleuze: Desire stretches that far: desiring one’s own annihilation or desiring the power to annihilate. “I have to get through this thing with my job.” It’s the job that will dictate everything, the thing that will tell him how he is to live. This is what he can count on: that he has this simple task to complete, this deliberate act of determining his future. Everything else will fall into place.
“A lot of questions for this uni to answer,” she says, knowingly.
“I don’t know what else to do,” he admits to her.
She looks at the cupcakes on the table. “Maybe in Ned time it is not as difficult as this.” She looks back at him, and
he’s relieved she’s smiling. “During the war, when a Polish scientist asked Einstein if he thought it was possible for human beings to change, Einstein said, ‘In historical time, no; in geological time, possibly; in mathematical time, absolutely.’ Perhaps anything is possible in Ned time.”
How is she possible? And how would life be possible without her?
FRANCINE
Lawrence is seated at the head of the boardroom table. Today his tie is orange. Orange alert: high-level threat. Francine shifts in her chocolate-coloured pencil skirt, too tight, too short, damn it. She fingers what is becoming a wide run in her pantyhose. She coughs, nervously. The four others at the table chat and tease, waiting for Lawrence, who is reading something on his Blackberry, to get on with the last item on this meeting’s agenda. Sarah, Paul, Simon and Mohammad do not appear to have done any special dressing for the occasion.
“It’s a good thing she went back; she was worried it would be the last time she’d see him,” Sarah says.
“And it was,” Paul adds. Ya, duh, you idiot. Francine notices that Paul has a stain on his collar. They are talking about Samita, who took sudden compassionate leave to go to India to see her brother. Samita is the key QA administrator, who liaises with field QA reps in each department. Francine has not until today noticed her absence.
“How old was he?” Mohammed asks.
“Young,” Simon says.
“In his forties,” Sarah says.
“Young,” Simon says, nodding.
“Doctors can’t tell you … they think they can tell you … but they can’t tell you,” Sarah says.
“Like the weather,” Paul says, and Francine snorts, then holds back her laughter, pretending that she’s coughing again (Who can turn the world on with her smile …).
“The VC group,” Lawrence resumes, “has announced that the second round of redundancies won’t be voluntary, like we’d thought at the beginning of the year. To be blunt with you, they’re expected to be brutal.” He looks at each one of them in the eye like some tribal judge, and Francine holds his gaze the longest, swallowing back what could have been another snort in less serious circumstances. She smirks but doesn’t mean it and then tries to smile, but Lawrence has looked back down at his documents, then his Blackberry, checking the time.
“Any questions?” He’s still looking at his phone.
That’s it? Francine looks at the faces of her colleagues: Paul has started to fiddle with his nose, the fingers dangerously close to entry. His fingers go transparent and she can see cartilage and the hands of a four-year-old boy picking his nose and eating the boogers. Sarah is smiling and Francine can see through her teeth, to the feathery canary secrets hidden behind them. The other two are blank-faced.
“It’s not going to be easy going forward, but we have to assume that we’re all in the firing line, so to speak,” Lawrence says, and he sounds like a complete jerk. She finds herself suddenly hot for him.
“Larry,” she says as she adjusts her thighs in her chair. She has no idea why she has collapsed into cute familiarity with him. “How much warning do we get?” She’s perspiring, more than a hot flash—this is like dripping sweat after running a long race.
“There’s a protocol in the HR guidelines, but I’m told there’ll be more time than usual. It’s now March; the end of our fiscal year is July. Expect some kind of announcement in the next month or so, to take into account due notice.”
Francine wipes some droplets before they slide from her eyebrows and she looks at Lawrence’s tie until its orange colour separates into component yellow and red and everything about him is only the sum of its component parts laid bare.
“Any other business?” he asks. The others mumble a no, and Francine bolts out of her chair, the creases behind her knees soaking wet.
It’s dark, everyone gone home but her. She has finally been productive. After the meeting she patted herself down with paper towel in the ladies’, took off her pantyhose, retreated to her office in bare legs and boots, and stopped asking herself what her mother had said about love. Instead she thought about one of her father’s favourite lines that he had tried on her as a teenager, when she didn’t want a part-time job: “Take Cinderella, for example; she had a good work ethic, and she had a thing for fancy shoes …” She hunkered down and cleared the backlog of reports and specifications that had piled up since the beginning of February and the last breaths of Dario Martinelli.
Now she is starving; her bare legs are splotchy with cold. As she closes her office door she catches sight of Lawrence ahead of her in the corridor.
“Larry!” she calls out. He turns and smiles. His orange tie is loosened, drawn down, rousing. She swallows and thinks of her splotchy legs.
“Working late—that’s not like you, Larry!”
“You don’t know me then,” he says and she’s aware of all the things she doesn’t know, one for sure being how to talk to a man who once told her that his wife never appreciated him in bed; another being how to hide her legs; and the last being why she feels that Lawrence is necessary right now.
“You have plans for dinner?” she asks.
“No, not really. Starving. Shall we?”
And suddenly she is in Philly again, in the hospital room, and her mother’s mouth is dry and her lips are like snakeskin. She’s not at all sure, but she thinks the thing that her mother might have said, the thing that love comes with, might have included shame.
She follows Lawrence towards the parking lot.
His hand is on her waist and she sucks in her gut, not moving a muscle as she gauges what her skin must feel like. The hand moves down, towards her ass, and she grabs it suddenly and does that thing she learned long ago, in another place: she kisses his hand and puts his finger in her mouth slowly, deeply.
Oh shit.
The evening started out obviously enough: the Crown Tavern on the docks, haddock and chips, from which she’d peeled away the batter and ate only the fish, a few chips, but it was the four glasses of wine and her drinking them all like water and then not feeling safe to get in her car—not knowing if Rajit pleaded not guilty of danger, not guilty of negligence, maybe pleading plain old dumb—that has brought her to this moment. This ever-so-stupid Francine who has Lawrence’s finger in her mouth like a popsicle.
“Oh God,” Lawrence says, and, shit, now she has to live up to the promise of this gesture.
“It’s just head-count, nothing more, nothing less. You can’t take it personally,” Lawrence said at the Crown, well into their second bottle. “It’s better to be seen to be cooperating,” and he held her eyes, staring into them, but looking more like he was trying to see his own reflection.
And now with his finger in her mouth, she is desperate to be seen to be cooperating.
Dario’s nose flashes into her mind. It had been driven flat to his cheeks from the impact on the road and then Ryan leaned his face over bone and blood and pried open his broken teeth and blew himself into a stranger.
“Oh God,” Lawrence says again.
After glass of wine number two, he’d asked her if she would go back to the States if she lost her job. Shit no, she’d said. She didn’t know what she’d do; she had options, she said, with her breath getting caught on the “p” and her mind getting stuck on an image of Scott and Melissa’s spare room: the single bed with the cream-coloured satin comforter and tubular satin throw-cushions like giant butterscotch mints. The crucifix over the bed, the night table with its doily and glass of water. And now she sees that room again, the light from the window that slashes the single bed early in the morning and exposes the fingerprints and lipstick stains on the rim of the water glass.
She takes Lawrence’s finger out of her mouth and licks it, rolling her tongue around it, sliding it back into her mouth.
“God,” he says again.
When everything is off but her bra and underwear, his shirt unbuttoned, only his underwear and socks remaining, she looks at his belly. Then lower, to the te
nt-like pouch of his briefs.
Shit. She tries to back out by shuffling herself away on the bed towards the pillows, hoping he won’t notice, but she sees her own thighs jiggle, and when she rests them on the duvet, the orangepeel complexion is spotlit in the track lighting overhead.
“The lights?” she says softly as she raises her knees and hugs them.
Lawrence complies then quickly takes off his shirt and whips off his socks, leaving only his briefs that look like they will rip with the force of what’s inside them. Larry is packing.
When he arrives at the bed it’s with a ferocious grunt as though he’s already come, but she lowers her knees and allows him on top of her, and shit, yeah, there it is.
His kiss is wet; she flinches. But a kiss—it’s been a long time coming, so she examines it with every inch of her tongue, tastes its haddocky tang and remembers not to probe too forcefully, to let him do some pushing forth, to allow him access to the depths of her throat, to make him think of other depths. And this seems fair enough. He has been kind to her; he has offered to protect her as best he can from the ravages of the upcoming culling; he has offered to read her job description for her; he has, bless the fat little functionary, said that she’ll be the first he will give a heads-up to if he hears anything significant. And as he takes his somewhat oddly shaped—more impressive in its width than length—cock out and aims it at her, she remembers all this and starts to help him by taking down her underpants, sorry that she hasn’t shaved or waxed or trimmed, but right now Larry could care less.
While he’s in her she can’t stop worrying if he has something that she might catch and why on earth she hasn’t insisted on a condom. Then it’s there: an image she hadn’t realized had imprinted. The image she had not even known she’d experienced until just this second: Dario’s face as his body flew across her windscreen—his visor open, the only discernible feature his white teeth bared in a silent howl.