The first time Nathan and I made love I lay there afterwards entirely still, staring silently up at the ceiling. In the end, when I had recovered myself, when I had scraped all the pieces, so to speak, back together, I said, ‘Where did you learn to do that?’ He said, ‘My grandfather. He was Romanian.’ It seemed such an absurd answer, so entirely inappropriate that I laughed and in the half-light of the flashing neon I could see he was mildly offended.
He said, ‘He told me I should learn to give a woman pleasure,’ this rather stiffly, his voice full of an old-fashioned dignity.
Nathan, my old European with those fine hard European bones to his face and that big bull head. God knows, but when I think about it, this Old Maid was made for an old European like Nathan.
The surprise when I look back is how brief the affair was, scarcely more than a couple of months when I calculate it. And yet it seems so much longer. It stretches on and on in my memory, as if that Time that ran and danced and disappeared down a black hole that first night went on playing games with us from that first moment when he pushed the coin along the bar top towards me.
I’ve never been a hand-holder. It’s just that it’s never appealed to me. I’m a strider ahead, a pointer at things. Come on, look at this. My hand in that of another grows heavy and awkward. So that if I tell you, I had, had mark you, to have his hand in mine, I speak of something extraordinary, something I’d never felt before or have done since. It stands out as the thing I best remember about the affair, as if at that first moment when the coin began to travel along the bar it established some sort of gravitational pull between us, so that from then on it was merely a matter of course, as intractable as a law of physics, that we should proceed to one of the bamboo sofas (the one in the corner where from then on we would always sit) there to talk in low voices and to find, several nights on, to our own surprise, our hands clasped, locked fast together in the crack between the cushions, between my bare thigh and those sombre grey trousers.
If they were surprised at the Oasis to see what was happening to us, at the unseen gravitational pull that was drawing us together, keeping us every night staring out from behind the barricade of our clasped hands, at first they made no comment about it. Only Angel could not resist showing her pleasure.
‘You … you and Nathan.’ And her eyes were shining.
After three days or so, though, Barnie’s brows began to draw together and Mama San’s lips grew tight. I wasn’t there, after all, to sit with my hand locked tightly into Nathan’s. So, after that, Nathan and I merely came in together, this after we’d eaten an early dinner. He’d share a drink with Barnie and then return to his hotel to work while I sat on talking to the Chinese businessmen, the Japanese tourists, the Filipino embassy staff and to the poorly paid, high-spending Thai clerks whose wages would disappear behind the bar in a night, all of these forming the main bulk of our customers. I’d join Nathan later at his hotel. Just occasionally, though, and this to my embarrassment, he’d sit on for a while in the corner watching me.
I’d feel his eyes on me.
‘What are doing when you sit there?’
‘Listening.’
‘Listening to what?’
‘To you.’ He said, ‘You’re very funny. You make me laugh, Riley.’
It was the worst thing he could have said. What I wanted to hear. Tiresome heroines from films of the time swam before my eyes as he said it.* I wanted to be one of them. I wanted to be zany (dear God, that terrible word) and kooky (there’s another one) – and all this for my oh so serious professor.
One morning, in the bathroom, preparing to go down to breakfast, I stuck my head under his arm, made faces in the mirror, disturbing the peaceful, pedantic scrape of his old-fashioned cut-throat razor. The clowning had a forced feel to it, the uncomfortable air of a routine. He tried to smile but there was an embarrassed look in his eyes before he dropped them to rinse the razor in the water. It said, ‘I know why you’re doing this but it’s not what I want from you, Riley.’
Later, in one of the sudden belligerent patches on my part that were a feature of the affair, I said, ‘What is it you want from me anyway?’
He said, ‘Nothing. I don’t want anything from you.’ He went on calmly twirling the angel hair noodles on his fork. Then he looked up suddenly and straight into my eye. He said, ‘It’s what I want for you, Riley.’
It’s a pernicious thing, popular culture. I see that now. Novels, films and plays, how dangerous are they for a mind looking for role models? All those stereotypes lurked in my head as I tip-tapped along in those high-heeled sandals beside him. It’s that incongruity, stock of screen and page, that gives me so much pleasure. In particular I enjoy the sensation of him being from a time so much different from my own, a time that seems so much darker and heavier and more serious, of Korea, McCarthyism …
‘It was a terrible time?’
‘Yes. Yes. It changed the country. Overnight. It has still to recover.’
‘I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis.’
He looked surprised. ‘You do?’
‘Yes. I made a list of all the things I’d miss.’
‘What were they?’
‘Stupid things. The sound of a tennis ball on a racquet. My favourite TV programme. My new Connie Francis record.’
‘They’re not stupid things, Riley. They’re the stuff of life.’ His look across the table was urgent and earnest.
‘Were you frightened?’
‘No, not exactly frightened. That’s the strange thing. Just really sad, thinking I’d never get to do things …’
‘Like what. Get married?’ His lips were drawn into the thin mocking line.
‘No. Not even then. Crazy things. Like playing at Wimbledon. Meeting Elvis Presley. What about you?’
‘What?’
‘Did you think it might really happen?’
‘Yes. I still do.’
‘Were you frightened?’
‘More angry than frightened.’
‘At who?’
‘All of them. Khrushchev, Kennedy. Posturing. Playing games. Bringing us to the brink like that. I kept thinking of my son …’
And there it was. Nathan, like an iceberg, jagged, poking up above the surface but with this whole other part lying beneath the surface.
‘Your son?’
‘Yes. How he might not have the chance to grow up.’
‘You didn’t tell me before.’
‘What?’
‘That you had a son. That you were married.’
‘I’m divorced, Riley.’
‘But how … ? When … ?’
‘It was a long time ago. A brief marriage. She was… a student … We met when I was first teaching.’
Later I said, ‘I’m trying to imagine it.’
‘What?’
‘You. As a father.’
‘I haven’t been.’ He said it very gruffly and he didn’t look at me.
‘How old is he?’
‘Sixteen.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Where should he be? With my wife. In New York.’
‘Do you see him?’
‘No.’ He said it very brusquely, staring at the menu. ‘Not … often.’
‘Do you like him?’
He looked up sharply. ‘Like him?’
‘Do you get on with him?’
The stare had something else in it now. Surprise. At the question. He appeared to be pondering it and when he answered it was reluctantly.
‘No. I suppose … not.’
Sudden he wasn’t like Nathan any more, not like the severe, impenetrable Nathan. Suddenly he was leaning forward across the table, speaking earnestly. At first I was going to say ‘like any father’, but of course he wasn’t like a father at all. How could he be?
‘I ask him what he wants to do when he leaves college, what he wants to do in life, and he tells me he wants to be rock star.’ He said it searchingly, staring into my eyes.
I smiled, s
haking my head, feeling, for once, wonderfully old compared to him. ‘At sixteen he’s entitled to want to be a rock star. That’s what being sixteen is all about.’
He continued to stare at me, his eyes fixed on mine as if he was searching for something. He said, ‘That’s good. That’s very good, Riley.’
More as a joke than anything I said, ‘So you don’t like rock and roll?’
He touched his lips with his napkin as if intent on giving a precise and fair reply. ‘It’s not my music, that’s all.’
‘What is your music?’
‘The music I grew up with, jazz, classical.’
‘I’d like to know more about jazz. I wish you’d introduce me to it.’
He gave a small shrug.
‘What? You think it would be too intelligent for me?’ My sarcasm betrayed the offence that had been taken.
He gave a sad sigh. His voice was patient. ‘You know I don’t think that. Or should do. I keep trying to tell you how smart I think you are. It’s you who won’t believe it.’
‘Then what?’
‘It’s too complicated.’
‘Oh … right …’
‘No, look …’ He laid his knife and fork down, clasped his hands across his plate, his elbows on the table as he leant towards me. ‘In a relationship where there’s an age difference … sometimes it happens that the younger person begins to try to take over the older person’s taste. Absorb it. Make it their own. I don’t like that, that’s all. I don’t like to see it happen. Stick to your own taste, Riley.’
‘Do you like my taste?’
‘It’s nothing to do with me.’ His voice had risen. ‘It’s your taste. Your age. Your era. That’s what’s important. Mine is different. I come from a different …’ He hesitated and I knew he was loath to use the words. ‘I come from a different time, that’s all.’
And so he did. From such a different time. Nathan, old and classic, in black and white; Riley a brash, colourful blockbuster of a movie.
We only went to the cinema once together. I insisted we go and see Summer of ’42. I’d seen it the year before with Sophie. At the time it seemed like the acme of sophistication. I was sure he would love it. But when we came out he strode wrathfully along the pavement away from me.
‘You didn’t like it.’ I was almost in tears.
‘It’s rubbish. Sentimental. Utterly untruthful.’
Later that night, at dinner, he said, ‘I’m sorry, Riley. It’s too late. I’m too serious for you. I’ve lost the habit.’
‘The habit of what?’
But he just made a terse gesture, went on staring determinedly at the menu. Eventually: ‘Of … lightness … Of conversation.’
I laughed, thinking it absurd. ‘What are you?’ I said. ‘Robinson Crusoe. The Man in the Iron Mask,’ which, of course, is exactly what he was, when I think about it. Because he was right. He had lost the habit of easy conversation, if indeed he ever had it. So tight-lipped was he that sometimes when we were talking I’d feel as though he was having to force the words out. As a result I’d find myself gabbling, filling up the silence.
‘I talk too much.’
‘No.’ He said, ‘I like it, Riley.’
I tried to make a joke of it. ‘It’s my mother’s fault. She has this thing. Silence should never fall on the dinner table.’ I went on, gabbling, ‘I’m like her. I just go on, talking, talking. All the time. About nothing.’ I began to cry and his hand reached over sharply, grasping mine.
‘It’s not you, Riley. I told you, I’ve lost the habit. I’ve been too long in the laboratory, that’s the trouble.’
I tried to smile. I said, ‘You don’t work in a laboratory, Nathan.’
Looking back I can see now how little I really got to know about Nathan in the time we were together, and how much this had do with that tight-lipped quality. So often when I would ask him something simple, for instance, ‘What’s it like … where you live?’ the everyday stuff lovers ask when they’re getting to know each other, his brow would furrow as if I’d presented him with some difficult philosophical question. He’d always answer the same way: ‘What would you like to know?’ and I was never sure whether he really was keen to help, whether he just lacked the knowledge of how to respond, or if he was trying to ward off the question. Either way the answer would be the same in the end – formal, bloodless, as lacking in any life or colour as his dry dusty prose.
‘I live in the suburbs … it’s quite pleasant … a one-storey house … a small garden …’
Once he said, ‘I’m too old for you, Riley,’ but he didn’t say it any regretful way, not like people do when they’re fishing for a denial or some sort of encouraging rejoinder. Instead he said it flatly as if it was a fact.
‘For God’s sake, Nathan. You’re only forty.’
The answer came back quickly and sharply, ‘An old forty,’ and it was true.
We were in a taxi at the time, going back to his hotel from the Oasis. I said, ‘I’m wet for you, Nathan,’ but even as I said it I knew there was something false about it. I knew that I’d wanted to say it because it seemed sophisticated, part of what I wanted to be now, rather adventurous and extravagant and daring.
I said, ‘Here, feel,’ determined to take the thing further, putting my hand over his before he could pull it away and placing it between my thighs. He didn’t look at me nor I him, but his hand rested there in some odd, sad, even companionable way. And that was how we sat, all the way back to his hotel, rigidly but curiously at ease, each one of us staring out of the window.
I was spending every night with him by now. We’d make love on one of the single beds in his room, most usually the one against the wall. Sometime afterwards, I’d crawl into the other bed, fall into a deep sweet sleep holding his hand over the divide. Sometime during the night our hands would fall apart, but I’d never feel it, and in the morning I’d wake to the sound of him through the bathroom door showering and shaving. After that we would breakfast together. He was a favourite in the hotel, this because he stayed there every year when he was researching, also because he spoke Thai and because of this we were always served by the head waitress, an exquisite creature who glided rather than walked. She’d place the flat of her hands over her belly with a small nod, watch us take our first spoonful of papaya.
I cannot buy papaya still without thinking of those Bangkok breakfasts. Each day we would start with it, not at all like the small shrivelled things I bring back these days from the supermarkets. Instead they glowed, rosy orange boats, each morning spoonful perfect on the tongue.
Papaya was so cheap in Bangkok back then, you could buy armfuls for a dollar.
‘It’s a rotten thing,’ I said to Nathan one morning, ‘to have something so beautiful in such plentiful supply that it loses all its value.’ I paused with the spoonful of flesh almost on my tongue. ‘There’s a moral there somewhere.’
‘I think you mean a metaphor,’ he said quietly.
Looking back, those meals we ate together, breakfast and dinner most days, seem utterly central to the relationship, as important a part of it as the lovemaking. We ate in street stalls and restaurants, all the places where the tourists never went, these known from his days teaching at the university. On my nights off he would take me somewhere special.
‘I can’t let you do this,’ I said one night.
‘What?’
‘Pay for me. Every night.’ He made a sharp irritated gesture across the table. ‘I like to do it. Don’t make an issue of it, Riley.’
It should have been a special night when he took me to the Oriental. He’d booked a table on the terrace. I’d even borrowed a black evening dress from Zoe.
The city was lying in wait for a thunderstorm that night, with the air especially hot and heavy. Women in wide straw hats punted long thin boats full of fruit and vegetables and tourist gee-gaws along the river beside us. Not long after we arrived a pianist appeared and sat down at the white grand piano in the corner.
/> Nathan said, ‘God, I love the sound of a piano in a bar.’ And then, ‘New York is full of piano bars.’
‘You love New York?’
‘Of course. I grew up there.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘We lived with grandfather. In Brooklyn. A fourth-floor walk-up.’ And that, as usual, was the end of it.
‘Would you like to go back?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s not the place that I want to be now.’
‘New York?’
‘America.’
That was when he took my hand across the table, began running one of his fingers up and down my own, staring at them.
‘But I’d love to take you there.’
‘New York?’
‘Yes. Show you everything.’
I hear the words now just as he said them, slowly, carefully, with many layers, with a question in them, but with an air of regret too, as though they’d already been answered. As his finger went on travelling up and down mine, he seemed on the edge of saying something more but no words came so that we sat on there for a long moment like actors who have forgotten their lines. It seemed like a relief to us both when the waiter arrived, when we pulled our fingers away and leant back and the plates were put in front of us.
Not Married, Not Bothered Page 16