Behold

by Barker, Clive

  As she came out of her ecstasy she saw Ben sitting on the floor, shut up into a space about the size of one of his fine leather suitcases, while blood, bile and lymphatic fluid pulsed weakly from his hushed body.

  My God, she thought, this can’t be my husband. He’s never been as tidy as that.

  This time she didn’t wait for help. This time she knew what she’d done (guessed, even, how she’d done it) and she accepted her crime for the too-rough justice it was. She packed her bags and left the home.

  I’m alive, she thought. For the first time in my whole, wretched life, I’m alive.

  VASSI’S TESTIMONY (PART ONE)

  To you who dream of sweet, strong women I leave this story. It is a promise, as surely as it is a confession, as surely as it’s the last words of a lost man who wanted nothing but to love and be loved. I sit here trembling, waiting for the night, waiting for that whining pimp Koos to come to my door again, and take everything I own from me in exchange for the key to her room.

  I am not a courageous man, and I never have been: so I’m afraid of what may happen to me tonight. But I cannot go through life dreaming all the time, existing through the darkness on only a glimpse of heaven. Sooner or later, one has to gird one’s loins (that’s appropriate) and get up and find it. Even if it means giving away the world in exchange.

  I probably make no sense. You’re thinking, you who chanced on this testimony, you’re thinking, who was he, this imbecile?

  My name was Oliver Vassi. I am now thirty-eight years old. I was a lawyer, until a year or more ago, when I began the search that ends tonight with that pimp and that key and that holy of holies.

  But the story begins more than a year ago. It is many years since Jacqueline Ess first came to me.

  She arrived out of the blue at my offices, claiming to be the widow of a friend of mine from law school, one Benjamin Ess, and when I thought back, I remembered the face. A mutual friend who’d been at the wedding had shown me a photograph of Ben and his blushing bride. And here she was, every bit as elusive a beauty as her photograph promised.

  I remember being acutely embarrassed at that first interview. She’d arrived at a busy time, and I was up to my neck in work. But I was so enthralled by her, I let all the day’s interviews fall by the wayside, and when my secretary came in she gave me one of her steely glances as if to throw a bucket of cold water over me. I suppose I was enamored from the start, and she sensed the electric atmosphere in my office. Me, I pretended I was merely being polite to the widow of an old friend. I didn’t like to think about passion: it wasn’t a part of my nature, or so I thought. How little we know—I mean really know—about our capabilities.

  Jacqueline told me lies at that first meeting. About how Ben had died of cancer, of how often he had spoken of me, and how fondly. I suppose she could have told me the truth then and there, and I would have lapped it up—I believe I was utterly devoted from the beginning. But it’s difficult to remember quite how and when interest in another human being flares into something more committed, more passionate. It may be that I am inventing the impact she had on me at that first meeting, simply reinventing history to justify my later excesses. I’m not sure. Anyway, wherever and whenever it happened, however quickly or slowly, I succumbed to her, and the affair began. I’m not a particularly inquisitive man where my friends, or my bed-partners, are concerned. As a lawyer one spends one’s time going through the dirt of other people’s lives, and frankly, eight hours a day of that is quite enough for me. When I’m out of the office my pleasure is in letting people be. I don’t pry. I don’t dig, I just take them on face value.

  Jacqueline was no exception to this rule. She was a woman I was glad to have in my life whatever the truth of her past. She possessed a marvelous sang-froid, she was witty, bawdy, oblique. I had never met a more enchanting woman. It was none of my business how she’d lived with Ben, what the marriage had been like, etc., etc. That was her history. I was happy to live in the present, and let the past die its own death. I think I even flattered myself that whatever pain she had experienced, I could help her forget it.

  Certainly her stories had holes in them. As a lawyer, I was trained to be eagle-eyed where fabrications were concerned, and however much I tried to put my perceptions aside I sensed that she wasn’t quite coming clean with me. But everyone has secrets: I knew that. Let her have hers, I thought.

  Only once did I challenge her on a detail of her pretended life story. In talking about Ben’s death, she let slip that he had got what he deserved. I asked her what she meant. She smiled, that Gioconda smile of hers, and told me that she felt there was a balance to be redressed between men and women. I let the observation pass. After all, I was obsessed by that time, past all hope of salvation; whatever argument she was putting, I was happy to concede it.

  She was so beautiful, you see. Not in any two-dimensional sense: she wasn’t young, she wasn’t innocent, she didn’t have that pristine symmetry so favored by ad-men and photographers. Her face was plainly that of a woman in her early forties: it had been used to laugh and cry, and usage leaves its marks. But she had a power to transform herself, in the subtlest way, making that face as various as the sky. Early on, I thought it was a make-up trick. But as we slept together more and more, and I watched her in the mornings, sleep in her eyes, and in the evenings, heavy with fatigue, I soon realized she wore nothing on her skull but flesh and blood. What transformed her was internal: it was a trick of the will.

  And, you know, that made me love her all the more.

  Then one night I woke with her sleeping beside me. We slept often on the floor, which she preferred to the bed. Beds, she said, reminded her of marriage. Anyway, that night she was lying under a quilt on the carpet of my room, and I, simply out of adoration, was watching her face in sleep.

  If one has given oneself utterly, watching the beloved sleep can be a vile experience. Perhaps some of you have known that paralysis, staring down at features closed to your inquiry, locked away from you where you can never, ever go, into the other’s mind. As I say, for us who have given ourselves, that is a horror. One knows, in those moments, that one does not exist, except in relation to that face, that personality. Therefore, when that face is closed down, that personality is lost in its own unknowable world, one feels completely without purpose. A planet without a sun, revolving in darkness.

  That’s how I felt that night, looking down at her extraordinary features, and as I chewed on my soullessness, her face began to alter. She was clearly dreaming; but what dreams must she have been having. Her very fabric was on the move, her muscle, her hair, the down on her cheek moving to the dictates of some internal tide. Her lips bloomed from her bone, boiling up into a slavering tower of skin; her hair swirled around her head as though she were lying in water; the substance of her cheeks formed furrows and ridges like the ritual scars on a warrior; inflamed and throbbing patterns of tissue, swelling up and changing again even as a pattern formed. This fluxion was a terror to me, and I must have made some noise. She didn’t wake, but came a little closer to the surface of sleep, leaving the deeper waters where these powers were sourced. The patterns sank away in an instant, and her face was again that of a gently sleeping woman.

  That was, you can understand, a pivotal experience, even though I spent the next few days trying to convince myself that I hadn’t seen it.

  The effort was useless. I knew there was something wrong with her; and at that time I was certain she knew nothing about it. I was convinced that something in her system was awry, and that I was best to investigate her history before I told her what I had seen.

  On reflection, of course, that seems laughably naïve. To think she wouldn’t have known that she contained such a power. But it was easier for me to picture her as prey to such skill, than mistress of it. That’s a man speaking of a woman; not just me, Oliver Vassi, of her, Jacqueline Ess. We cannot believe, we men, that power will ever reside happily in the body of a woman, unless that power is a ma
le child. Not true power. The power must be in male hands, God-given. That’s what our fathers tell us, idiots that they are.

  Anyway, I investigated Jacqueline, as surreptitiously as I could. I had a contact in York where the couple had lived, and it wasn’t difficult to get some inquiries moving. It took a week for my contact to get back to me, because he’d had to cut through a good deal of shit from the police to get a hint of the truth, but the news came, and it was bad. Ben was dead, that much was true. But there was no way he had died of cancer. My contact had only got the vaguest clues as to the condition of Ben’s corpse, but he gathered it had been spectacularly mutilated. And the prime suspect? My beloved Jacqueline Ess. The same innocent woman who was occupying my flat, sleeping by my side every night.

  So I put it to her that she was hiding something from me. I don’t know what I was expecting in return. What I got was a demonstration of her power. She gave it freely, without malice, but I would have been a fool not to have read a warning into it. She told me first how she had discovered her unique control over the sum and substance of human beings. In her despair, she said, when she was on the verge of killing herself, she had found, in the very deep-water trenches of her nature, faculties she had never known existed. Powers which came up out of those regions as she recovered, like fish to the light.

  Then she showed me the smallest measure of these powers, plucking hairs from my head, one by one. Only a dozen; just to demonstrate her formidable skills. I felt them going. She just said: one from behind your ear, and I’d feel my skin creep and then jump as fingers of her volition snatched a hair out. Then another, and another. It was an incredible display; she had this power down to a fine art, locating and withdrawing single hairs from my scalp with the precision of tweezers. Frankly, I was sitting there rigid with fear, knowing that she was just toying with me. Sooner or later, I was certain the time would be right for her to silence me permanently.

  But she had doubts about herself. She told me how the skill, though she had honed it, scared her. She needed, she said, someone to teach her how to use it best. And I was not that somebody. I was just a man who loved her, who had loved her before this revelation, and would love her still, in spite of it.

  In fact, after that display I quickly came to accommodate a new vision of Jacqueline. Instead of fearing her, I became more devoted to this woman who tolerated my possession of her body.

  My work became an irritation, a distraction that came between me and thinking of my beloved. What reputation I had began to deteriorate; I lost briefs, I lost credibility. In the space of two or three months my professional life dwindled away to almost nothing. Friends despaired of me, colleagues avoided me.

  It wasn’t that she was feeding on me. I want to be clear about that. She was no lamia, no succubus. What happened to me, my fall from grace with ordinary life if you like, was of my own making. She didn’t bewitch me; that’s a romantic lie to excuse rape. She was a sea: and I had to swim in her. Does that make any sense? I’d lived my life on the shore, in the solid world of law, and I was tired of it. She was liquid; a boundless sea in a single body, a deluge in a small room, and I will gladly drown in her, if she grants me the chance. But that was my decision. Understand that. This has always been my decision. I have decided to go to the room tonight, and be with her one final time. That is of my own free will.

  And what man would not? She was (is) sublime.

  For a month after that demonstration of power I lived in a permanent ecstasy of her. When I was with her she showed me ways to love beyond the limits of any other creature on God’s earth. I say beyond the limits: with her there were no limits. And when I was away from her the reverie continued: because she seemed to have changed my world.

  Then she left me.

  I knew why: she’d gone to find someone to teach her how to use strength. But understanding her reasons made it no easier.

  I broke down: lost my job, lost my identity, lost the few friends I had left in the world. I scarcely noticed. They were minor losses, beside the loss of Jacqueline . . .

  ***

  “Jacqueline.”

  My God, she thought, can this really be the most influential man in the country? He looked so unprepossessing, so very unspectacular. His chin wasn’t even strong.

  But Titus Pettifer was power.

  He ran more monopolies than he could count; his word in the financial world could break companies like sticks, destroying the ambitions of hundreds, the careers of thousands. Fortunes were made overnight in his shadow, entire corporations fell when he blew on them, casualties of his whim. This man knew power if any man knew it. He had to be learned from.

  “You wouldn’t mind if I called you J., would you?”

  “No.”

  “Have you been waiting long?”

  “Long enough.”

  “I don’t normally leave beautiful women waiting.”

  “Yes you do.”

  She knew him already: two minutes in his presence was enough to find his measure. He would come quickest to her if she was quietly insolent.

  “Do you always call women you’ve never met before by their initials?”

  “It’s convenient for filing; do you mind?”

  “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “What I get in return for giving you the privilege.”

  “It’s a privilege, is it, to know your name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well . . . I’m flattered. Unless of course you grant that privilege widely?”

  She shook her head. No, he could see she wasn’t profligate with her affections.

  “Why have you waited so long to see me?” he said. “Why have I had reports of your wearing my secretaries down with your constant demands to meet with me? Do you want money? Because if you do you’ll go away empty-handed. I became rich by being mean, and the richer I get, the meaner I become.”

  The remark was truth; he spoke it plainly.

  “I don’t want money,” she said, equally plainly.

  “That’s refreshing.”

  “There’s richer than you.”

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise. She could bite, this beauty. “True,” he said. There were at least half a dozen richer men in the hemisphere.

  “I’m not an adoring little nobody. I haven’t come here to screw a name. I’ve come here because we can be together. We have a great deal to offer each other.”

  “Such as?” he said.

  “I have my body.”

  He smiled. It was the straightest offer he’d heard in years. “And what do I offer you in return for such largesse?”

  “I want to learn—”

  “Learn?”

  “—how to use power.”

  She was stranger and stranger, this one.

  “What do you mean?” he replied, playing for time. He hadn’t got the measure of her; she vexed him, confounded him.

  “Shall I recite it for you again, in bourgeois?” she said, playing insolence with such a smile he almost felt attractive again.

  “No need. You want to learn to use power. I suppose I could teach you—”

  “I know you can.”

  “You realize I’m a married man. Virginia and I have been together eighteen years.”

  “You have three sons, four houses, a maid-servant called Mirabelle. You loathe New York, and you love Bangkok; your shirt collar is 16½, your favorite color green.”

  “Turquoise.”

  “You’re getting subtler in your old age.”

  “I’m not old.”

  “Eighteen years a married man. It ages you prematurely.”

  “Not me.”

  “Prove it.”

  “How?”

  “Take me.”

  “What?”

  “Take me.”

  “Here?”

  “Draw the blinds, lock the door, turn off the computer terminus, and take me. I dare you.”

  “Dare?”

  How long was it since
anyone had dared him to do anything?

  “Dare?”

  He was excited. He hadn’t been so excited in a dozen years. He drew the blinds, locked the door, turned off the video display of his fortunes.

  My God, she thought, I’ve got him.

  ***

  It wasn’t an easy passion, not like that with Vassi. For one thing, Pettifer was a clumsy, uncultured lover. For another, he was too nervous of his wife to be a wholly successful adulterer. He thought he saw Virginia everywhere: in the lobbies of the hotels they took a room in for the afternoon, in cabs cruising the street outside their rendezvous, once even (he swore the likeness was exact) dressed as a waitress, and swabbing down a table in a restaurant. All fictional fears, but they dampened the spontaneity of the romance somewhat.

  Still, she was learning from him. He was as brilliant a potentate as he was inept a lover. She learned how to be powerful without exercising power, how to keep one’s self uncontaminated by the foulness all charisma stirs up in the uncharismatic; how to make the plain decisions plainly; how to be merciless. Not that she needed much education in that particular quarter. Perhaps it was more truthful to say he taught her never to regret her absence of instinctive compassion, but to judge with her intellect alone who deserved extinction and who might be numbered amongst the righteous.

  Not once did she show herself to him, though she used her skills in the most secret of ways to tease pleasure out of his stale nerves.

  In the fourth week of their affair they were lying side by side in a lilac room, while the mid-afternoon traffic growled in the street below. It had been a bad bout of sex; he was nervous, and no tricks would coax him out of himself.

  It was over quickly, almost without heat.

  He was going to tell her something. She knew it: it was waiting, this revelation, somewhere at the back of his throat. Turning to him she massaged his temples with her mind, and soothed him into speech.

  He was about to spoil the day. He was about to spoil his career.