Benighted

by Kit Whitfield

  He looks abashed. “I felt very sick.”

  I cover my mouth, laughing. It isn’t that funny, really, but I’m laughing anyway.

  “Seriously, I felt awful. Lou came around to see me—that’s my friend, the one who’d told me to eat all those bananas in the first place—and I was just curled up on the sofa feeling terrible.”

  He gives me an almost shy glance. I say the thing that’s uppermost in my mind, which is, “So he laid off you about the bananas?” He raises his eyebrows, gives me a look of pleasure and surprise. I guess he was expecting me to say he’d been stupid, or something like that, but really, I’m on his side in this. A grown man shouldn’t have people ordering him what to eat. I sit back and wait for an answer.

  Paul shrugs. “Yeah. I think he decided I couldn’t be trusted to handle advice.”

  He looks at me for a moment, then gives me a questioning, one-sided smile.

  And just like that, we’re friends.

  The waiter brings our food and our wine in one go. We’re both having goulash in little white bowls, the sauce burnt at the rim, and a bottle of some red stuff. I don’t know anything about wine, but the waiter just unloads it on the table without comment, so I don’t have to pretend to know whether I like it or not. Not that the waiter would care: he pulls the cork out with a gesture like a teenage shrug, and looks at the clock three times while he’s giving us our dinner. Paul sniffs at the bottle, then pours me some.

  I drink half a glass, trying to steady myself. The inside of my mouth turns to crepe.

  Paul sips it, makes a face, and sets it down without comment. Taking a glance at my glass, he sees that it’s half empty and tops it up for me.

  “Trying to get me drunk?”

  He shakes his head. “I’ve already seen you drunk.” He swirls the wine around in his glass, tilting it to and fro and examining the dark liquid from different angles. In this dim room, wine looks almost black, the candle flame and overhead lights forming slippery reflections on the surface.

  I nurse my drink, tapping my fingers against the sides of the glass. Paul studies his for a moment more, then raises it to me in a salute.

  The glass weighs heavy in my hand as I try to lift it in response. “What—what are we drinking to?” My throat hurts with the effort of speaking.

  “How about your friend in the hospital?”

  My fingers tighten on the stem. “To—to Marty.”

  “Marty.”

  I take another mouthful of the wine, and as I try to set the glass back on the table, it falls sideways in my hand. Red fluid splashes over the side, spatters my hand and soaks into a red wet pool on the white tablecloth below. “Ohh…” I can think of nothing to say. I’m clumsy, stupid, making a numb-handed mess on the clean cloth.

  “Never mind,” says Paul, putting a napkin over the stain. It hasn’t bothered him; he just thinks the glass is still half-full.

  “I—” I’m still holding my drink. Before anything else can happen to it, I try to put it down.

  “Hold on.” There’s a light hand around my wrist, and Paul is cleaning the wine-stained base, wiping away dark, clinging droplets. “There you go.” He guides my hand down to the table and I release the glass, let my hand fall beside it. Turning my head aside, I find I’ve reached up to touch my left eye. I turn my head again, flinching away from my sticky, red-stained fingers.

  “Here.” Paul offers me another napkin, and I can’t do anything with it, I clutch it in a dull hold and just sit there. He takes it back, freeing it from my grasp, and wipes my hand clean. Cloth encircles each of my fingers, slides off them, thick-woven white cloth smooths over the back of my hand.

  There’s a gleam of pain as he touches one of my knuckles, and I see a bruise. It wasn’t there yesterday. I flinch, my hand bucks under his, and he picks it up, stroking the damaged area.

  “How did you get that?”

  I close my fist inside his. “I hit someone.”

  His clasp loosens around mine. He doesn’t let go. I don’t look at him, but I hear him draw breath, and when he speaks, his voice is very quiet. “Why?”

  I don’t move my arm, neither of us moves. “He bit Marty.”

  Quiet.

  “And he tried to kill me.”

  Paul says nothing. I desperately want to know, but I can’t, can’t look at his face.

  I close my eyes, bow my head. “That’s what happened.”

  Paul says something I would not have expected. His tone is level. “What did you hit him with?”

  My head comes up with a start. “Nothing. With my hands.”

  “Your hands?” He’s heard the plural.

  I look at him. He’s so beautiful.

  There must be things to say. I’ve said them so many times. What do you think I’d hit him with, a lead pipe? Though I’ve even heard of that being done. If you don’t like my kind, why are you having dinner with me? If you had at your mercy a man who’d been harming you all your life, who’d have killed you, killed your people if he’d had the chance, who sat there and told you to your face that he hated you, and you could do anything to him—you could do anything to him—can you look me in the eyes and say that you wouldn’t have hurt him?

  I say nothing. There’s such an ache in my head. My face contracts, my eyes crush shut and my mouth pulls tight at the corners, and I take my hand out of Paul’s to cover it. I won’t cry. I won’t cry.

  “Lola?” It’s a question. I turn my head away from him.

  “Lola—”

  I raise a hand, stave him off. “Give me a minute.” My voice comes out hoarse and weak, but I just keep it from shaking.

  He’s touching my hair, trying to get to my face. I don’t turn my head back toward him, but I let him touch my hair, for just a minute I let him.

  I press my hands over my eyes, steady my mouth, put my face back together. If I speak soft enough, it won’t crack. “Please, don’t be nice to me. I’ll only start being pathetic.”

  He laughs, just a quiet, sad laugh. “Do you not like being pathetic?”

  I shield the side of my face and say nothing.

  “Bet I’ve seen worse than you.”

  “Worse—” I have to distract myself, I have to get myself off the subject. “Worse sights than I’ve seen, or worse people than me?”

  “Oh.” He takes his hand away, brushing my shoulder briefly, and then we’re not touching anymore. “Well, I meant worse people. Sights, I don’t know.”

  “No offense—” I put my hands out in front of me, stare at them, “but if you haven’t, then you’re a very bad social worker or I’m a very bad person.”

  “No,” he declares. “I’m quite a good social worker.”

  I take a deep breath. “Yes. You probably are.”

  “My God, was that a compliment?”

  Flashing a hasty look at him, I see the face of a man who’s delighted with a novelty. “Yeah,” I say, “make a note of the date and time, because you won’t be getting another one for quite a while.”

  While he’s laughing at that, I take another look at my hands. They’re trembling.

  Paul sits back, rests his head against the wall. I think he’s about to say something when he sees me staring at my hands.

  “Um—” he says, meaning something, I’m not sure what.

  I clench my fists, unclench them, and they haven’t steadied.

  “As in catcher’s twitch?” says Paul.

  I look at him, look away. “It—” It can be catching. Sympathy pains. I won’t have it, I can’t have it. “No,” I say, sounding fiercer than I mean to. “Just a bad day. Look, I’m just going to the bathroom, I’ll be back in a minute.”

  He rises as I get up, standing when a lady leaves the room.

  The bathroom has scruffy tiles and little circles of light fall on the floor from the bulbs overhead. I stand at the edge of one of them and watch myself in the mirror. My eye is steady. My face isn’t twitching. I fill up the tiny basin with hot water and bury my
hands in it. They curl, the basin is that small, and heat encloses my skin. When I was still little, my first school, there was a teacher, a greasy-haired man with a pink, shabby face, who’d hit us on the back of the hands with a ruler. Not supposed to happen, thoroughly illegal in lyco schools, but the safeguards Becca had didn’t apply to me. “Stay in the real world,” he’d say, bringing the stiff wood down. “This is life I’m trying to teach you. You think staring out the window is going to prepare you for the world?” He taught us history, some of the worst facts. He was a twitcher. Probably he wouldn’t have been teaching if he hadn’t got the twitch. I think he knew that the freakishness of it, the little rightward jerk of his head, frightened our seven-year-old minds as much as the ruler. On days when his head pulled hard on his neck, jumping inches out of line, we knew we were in for a bad time. We’d keep our hands under the desk and hope he wouldn’t pull them out by the wrists. “Think you’re too young to deal with reality?” Always on the key words. Say “reality” or “cope” to any of us, and we’d flinch. This is where I learned this trick. We’d take a vote before each class, and someone would excuse themselves five minutes before the lesson ended, go to the bathroom, and fill the basins with hot water. Whoever had come under the fire of his disillusionment would have a bowl full of healing warmth to run to as soon as the class ended.

  I’m standing here in this poky little room, remembering Mr. Davis, and it isn’t what I want to be doing. It’s silent in here. I dabble the water to make some noise and it’s as quiet as a sound heard from a great distance.

  The trouble is, while no one can see me in this small, white bathroom, while it’s as good a hideout as any, it’s lonely in here. I want to be back at the table talking to Paul.

  He’s sitting in his chair, quite placid. I walk soft, watching him from a distance, and he’s just sitting there and looking at the table. He isn’t even fidgeting. The candle seems to be holding his interest.

  As I approach, Paul starts absently passing his fingers through the flame.

  “What are you doing?” I hurry up to the table, trying to stop him from mutilating himself.

  “Mm?” Paul turns his attention from the candle to me, and the next second burns himself because he hasn’t managed to get out of the flame before forgetting about it.

  Paul’s hurt.

  “Ohh…” I sit down, scoop some ice out of my water glass and press it to his scorched finger. “Dear God, that was silly. What on earth are you singeing yourself for?”

  “I’m okay,” he says, “really.”

  “Really. Actually sticking your hand into a flame and waiting for it to catch fire.” He winces as I turn the cube over, scraping the ridged edge against the burn. “Oh, don’t do that, I’m sorry. You poor bloody simpleton. No, hold still…”

  Ice melts in my grasp, and water drips down, rivulets running over my palm, into my sleeve, drenching me. He sits there, letting me press ice against him, droplets soaking into the fabric of his jeans as they fall from our knotted hands through the air.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” he says. Too soft to be casual.

  “This is me being nice,” I tell him. “Don’t pass up the opportunity.”

  NINE

  When I woke in the dark, it was midnight, and he was awake and looking at me. He lay still, the stillness of a man who needs little sleep and has no need to toss and turn if he finds himself wakeful, and his eyes gleamed in the dim room. Rested but not fully alert, I stretched my arm across the few inches between us, to find him.

  “How is it that you’ve only got cereal?” Paul says, coming back to bed with two bowls balanced on my cutting board in place of a tray. The tiny room is taken up entirely by my disheveled double bed, and he has to start crawling to get into it.

  “I accept no criticism from a man in a hula skirt,” I mumble, making a half-hearted gesture at the two sweaters he’s wearing around his waist. He’s wider awake than I am. “I think there’s a tomato in the fridge.”

  He disappears, and comes back with it.

  Later he asks me to come out with him. I don’t want to leave the warm room, but I am hungry. The first thing that comes into my mind is, “You’ve already had dinner with me.”

  This, I do not say.

  Once outside the restaurant, we kissed without the waiter’s eye on us. We found an alley, light from a streetlamp slanting through it and casting cold shadows in the corners, and we pressed together for warmth as the brick wall pushed into my back. His coat baffled my touch, and all I wanted to do was pull aside these layers of fabric that were keeping him from me. He had the same taste I did, the burnt stew and cheap red wine, but softened and fluid in his mouth, and I dipped in, trying to take some of it with me. His hand traced the back of my neck, and I balanced his head in my palms.

  Disengaging, it was hard to talk through the shape he’d left on my mouth, and my lips bumped up against each other as I said, “Come home with me.”

  If he was surprised, he didn’t show it for more than a moment. He touched my face.

  Inside my apartment, I took him into my blue, dark bedroom and unloosed the blinds. I had put no lights on, and all I could make of him was a warm silhouette. I was pulling him down onto the bed when he laid his hands on my shoulders and moved me a little distance away from him.

  I leaned toward him, reaching through the space between us, and he said, “Wait a moment, Lola.”

  “What?” I didn’t want to stop. I couldn’t even think of reasons why he might.

  “Why not sleep a little first?”

  “No.” I was out of words, couldn’t hold more than one thought at a time.

  “There isn’t any deadline, is there?” I was straining to see his face in the dusk. “It’s Friday.”

  “Friday?” I grasped his shirt, close to the skin beneath.

  He sighed, stroked my hair out of my eyes. His tone was almost apologetic. “It’s just that—to an onlooker, it might seem that you’ve had a bad day and you’re running on autopilot. I don’t feel like I have your full attention.”

  “You have my full attention.” My head was rocking on its neck, I was sleepwalking, but it was a sensual dream I was sleepwalking through.

  He sat on the bed beside me, put an arm around me and lay down. Outside, rain sighed against the streets. His fingers played around my ear, and though my heart was beating in my stomach, I let the stroking action lull me. I was sure I wouldn’t sleep, but my eyes closed nonetheless.

  It was dark when I woke. His face was close to mine, and a little light coming through the blinds showed that his eyes were open. I stretched, shifted, reached out and touched flesh. I didn’t know where his clothes had gone, but his arm was bare, his shoulder, and I ran my hand over him wordless, reacquainting myself with this stranger in my bed.

  There was barely light enough to see by. My hands became eyes and searched, my skin became hands and grasped. I lay back to be shaken awake. We turned and plunged like swimmers, drowning in air, and in my narrow room full to the corners with a mattress, the bed rocked like a raft, and the sea opened under me, miles deep. And I sank.

  I did not mistake any of this for love, but I’ve been alone a long time.

  Sleep with a man and you lose him. That’s what my mother would have said if I had asked, what her mother would have said, all those certain armies of older women. They had the world laid out in neat rows, they had topiary shears that trimmed human nature into clear and defined outlines that they understood and tried to teach us, me and girls like me, back when we were still girls. Of course, we scorned them for it. I lay in bed, thinking about older women, while Paul slept, his eyes finally closed and his head buried in the pillow, unable to see me.

  I think they meant that he wouldn’t respect me. I think even Becca thought that, in some ways. Sleep with a man and you lose him. When I grew up, I tried it. They were right.

  It isn’t that he won’t respect you. But in all the world, nothing isolates you more than sex. It locks y
ou in your own body. The more aroused a man is, the further he retreats from you, because all he needs of you can be felt on the skin, and at the moment of climax, you disappear. I didn’t lose men like I’d lose friendships, keys, or faith. They vanished from me as the moon vanishes when the rising sun throws out so much light that it blocks whatever is beyond it. Dazzled, they lost sight of me, and unseen, I lost them, over and over.

  I knew I was going to sleep with Paul. I knew I wanted to, anyway. Perhaps I should have waited until after we finished working together so that he could leave more easily.

  When he wakes, though, he pulls me to him again, and afterward he wants to talk, and the clock moves from eleven to twelve, from noon to afternoon, and he hasn’t gone away.

  “You don’t have any food in this place,” says Paul.

  I point at the cereal, and he takes a flake out of the bowl and sticks it on my forehead.

  “That’s not food,” he says. “That’s sustenance.” He leans across, his lips and tongue brush me as he cleans the cereal off my face.

  “You don’t have to eat it.” I get all the words in the right order, distracted but still coping.

  “Yes I do, I’m starving.”

  I take a spoonful out of his bowl. “Well then.”

  “Well, I could have cooked you breakfast if there’d been food.”

  His sexual etiquette includes staying the night, I suppose, and serving me in the morning. He’s been well brought up.

  “Did you know,” he says, playing with my hair, “that you finger the bedclothes when you sleep?”

  “What?” I cover my face, uncomfortable. “Do I do anything embarrassing?”

  “No, no, it’s quite sweet. Like this.” He lays his hands flat on the sheet, and starts running them to and fro, tapping out rhythms. “It’s dainty. I like it.”

  I look at his hands, and realize what he’s doing. “Ohh…”

  “Oh? Does it mean anything? I figured maybe you were typing or something.”

  “No.” I lay my head down on the mattress, and he pets it. “I’m playing the piano.”