At ten o’clock on the dot, Matei entered the room and found her dressed in the clean clothes he had left her. They walked out of the hospital in silence, accompanied by another nurse who, despite her apparent discretion, seemed eager to shake them off. Matei drove angrily on their way home, his mood significantly changed from the previous day. The vain sensation of victory over the woman who had stood beside him had been replaced by the stupefaction of having been cheated. He had grown accustomed to calling her his ‘wife’, someone he thought he knew everything about, whom he had never cast any doubt on and from whom he never anticipated any sort of surprise. Now that woman may have vanished, turning all of a sudden into his foe.
They didn’t exchange a single word. Emilia was even controlling her breath, fearing it could disturb the silence reigning over the tiny space between them. From time to time, when Matei’s hand came close to the gear lever, she got the impression he slightly, unnoticeably faltered toward her curved thigh and his hesitation made her wince on the inside. Eventually, she laid her hands over her knees, trying to cover everything up, to reveal only a few margins of herself. After an hour, they got home, cutting through Bucharest in a caravan of choked and heated vehicles lagging one behind another. Emilia entered the bedroom and Matei went to the kitchen, from which she soon heard pots clattering and glasses clinking. The noise lasted for a long time; so long that, wondering what he was doing there, Emilia dozed off.
When she woke up, it was already dark. No sound could be heard in the house. She had become very good at detecting a presence; she could even discern the movements in the apartments next door. She knew when the neighbours downstairs were fighting or returning home, when they were eating or sleeping. She would hear the main door in the entrance and, from the way it was closed, she could clearly tell whether it was Matei or somebody else. Then there were the steps on the hallway and the grating and rattling of the elevator door.
She got dressed stealthily and cautiously stepped out of the room. She paused, taking a deep breath, and then entered the living room. Matei was lying down on the sofa, his snoring like a growl. She watched him from the doorway. Sal’s visit at the hospital had made her clearly see what was about to happen. He had neither given her hope nor told her anything decisive. ‘Patience’ had been the only word he uttered, and she had seen in it nothing more than a trite way of saying goodbye.
She stormed out and wandered the streets amongst the blocks of flats, till she fell down on the pavement far away from home. Then she looked for a taxi, got in and gave an address to the driver. She thought they had been driving for ages when she heard the man’s voice telling her they had arrived. She changed her mind and asked him to take her back, and the man grumbled a little at her request, but she sunk in the back seat; her face vanished from the rearview mirror, and thus she was taken all the way back. Though it was late when she returned, she no longer felt sleepy. Getting upstairs, she found Matei in front of the door.
‘Have you been to see him?’
She refused to answer, but he dogged her all around the house. ‘Emilia! Answer me now!’
‘Why do you want us to go on tormenting each other? Isn’t everything that’s happened enough for you? Can’t you see how wretched I am myself?’
Matei took his head in his hands and doubled up, fluttering and teetering through the dim hallway like a beheaded hen; he wailed and sobbed noisily, he cursed the day they had met her lover’s family at the sunny garden – he would have rather known nothing and carried on his life serenely. He knew he was being ludicrous, he wailed on, but so was life, and so were the ludicrous lovers. He was hoping that his wretchedness would move her. And Emilia, impressed, rushed to him and embraced him, swaying with emotion. He leaned on her chest and nestled there; then he clasped her waist and drew her to the living room sofa on which, a few hours earlier, he had slept a heavy and fitful sleep. At that time, he couldn’t have imagined they would be sitting so close to each other and that he would be listening to that lying and deceitful woman again. Now, he suddenly thought it was but a dream and there was still hope for them. Their home, their family, their life as a couple – all these words that had momentarily lost their meaning in the meanwhile became real again.
He was inhaling her skin’s fragrance, groping her with his fingers prodding in the synthetic blouse that was giving off a pleasant, sweaty odour; her whole body yielding slowly yet unrestrainedly in his clasp told him that the crisis had finally been quenched. They went to the bedroom, worn out. He undressed her the way he thought her lover did, brought her down on the bed and, as all he found beneath him was a lifeless body, he jolted her to exhaustion, as if relentlessly trying to soften a crumbling dough by pouring in water. He took off his pants and underwear, and even though the intense odour of his sex dominated, it was more the scent of fear that pervaded. He penetrated her feebly and wriggled above her helplessly as Harry had in her dream. But the more he tried, the more he went astray in that hole between her legs that seemed to be gaping and sucking him in. He sat back after a while and moaned.
A week went by and neither of them spoke about it. Matei would come back in the evening and she would listen to him from the bedroom, opening the refrigerator, uncorking a bottle of wine and then crashing on the sofa. They would seldom see each other, and they spoke mainly on the phone, as Matei called her punctually every day to ask how she felt, whether she had taken her pills and if anything had happened. She would answer curtly, and they would end their conversation within a minute or so. Then she would return to her room and wait for time to go by.
The following Saturday, Matei left in the morning and returned only late at night. He was tipsy, and the moment he came in, he gave off a sour smell. He called out to her in a hoarse voice, and she thought from his tone she’d better stay in the room. Yet she still went, advancing fearfully along the dim hallway, feeling that something evil lay ahead. Then she stopped and pricked up her ears. The silence in the house was so overwhelming that she gasped. She thought she wasn’t dressed properly and wanted to go back and change, but she gave it up after a few steps. Tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, she stepped forward, her shoulders drawn back and her chin raised as if she were a queen walking to her execution. When she entered the room, Sal was sitting on the sofa, with his legs crossed and his nose pointing down to the floor, while Matei was leaning back against the wall with folded arms, his fingers drumming lightly in the air.
‘Oh! There she is!’
He threw himself at her, grabbed her arms and dragged her into the middle of the room. Sal had already sprung to his feet.
‘Here, I’ve brought him over, as you wished. Now I’m leaving the two of you alone.’
‘You don’t need to,’ Sal muttered.
‘Don’t I? How come? Do you want to talk to your mistress in front of her husband? That would be odd. I’m kind of old-fashioned, you know; I think it’s my duty and yours to keep up appearances. So I’ll bow out now and return in an hour.’
While speaking, Matei was striding backward toward the door; he whirled away while uttering his last words, and before long, the entrance door slammed, shaking the entire house. They remained standing, face to face, looking at each other, each worried for their own reasons, as if waiting for something. Then they sat down in silence. Emilia was the first to sit and then he, next to her, keeping a certain distance that seemed appropriate in such circumstances.
‘Are you upset that I came?’
She shook her head vehemently. Nothing could upset her any longer. She did not feel, like others may have, embarrassed by her state, nor by what she had tried to do. She thought her urge had been reasonable; only the timing may have been badly chosen. Her mind was shifting about swiftly; she could hardly focus and it was difficult to grasp what was happening to her. She saw Sal at her feet, his head leaning on her skinny knee, wailing about.
‘Emi, we have both been so reckless! We need time to sort things out properly, don’t you see?’
He was watching her keenly. ‘Would you please tell me that you understand?’
Emi nodded meekly. He seemed to have shrugged a burden off himself and sat down next to her, released.
‘I was sure you’d understand. Don’t you think that all this time I’ve been striving to find a suitable way out of this mess? But, you know, there were my daughters and everything; but whenever I looked at them I would see you as a little girl. I couldn’t do it out of love for you. I know it sounds awful, but I would think of you, your father, your misery. You say it was not like that, but it was obvious. I remember – when we came back, when they found us – my mother dramatically told me, speaking in charades as usual, that we’d better be careful, as a fatherless child would not be a complete person, particularly if the father was in prison. When I asked her why, she shrugged. I thought he had killed somebody, stolen something or had done something dreadful. And I thought it was so unfair because you were so beautiful, your soul was so pure and everything was perfect. Your father couldn’t have been the one my mother hinted at. Only after many years did I realise what had really happened. And then I understood why your mother wouldn’t talk about him, how terrible it must have been for all of you to keep low for fear of those bastards…’
‘My father left home a year before they had him locked up. So it has nothing to do…’
‘Yes, it has…’
‘Listen, Sal,’ she cut in harshly. ‘Why have you come?’
He halted. He had grown excited and he wanted to expound his theory on the ex-convict who had been the victim of a giant conspiracy, but either her altered tone of voice or the fact that they were running out of time made him come to his senses.
‘What would you like more than anything right now?’
Emi hesitated a little. She looked at him and her voice softened. ‘I wish we weren’t here, or at least, were I to be here, I would like to be alone.’
‘Would you want us to run away together?’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know – just leave them and mind our own lives somewhere else.’
‘Where?’
‘How should I know? There are places.’
‘We couldn’t afford to live more than a week.’
‘That’s not the problem.’
‘Then what is?’
‘Tell me, do you want to?’
‘I don’t know…’ She made up her mind in a second, though. ‘I don’t think I’d like to.’
‘Why?’ Sal asked in a daze. ‘I thought that’s what you wanted!’
She hugged and squeezed him tight; she was squeezing him as if he were a child, pressing his head against her chest and kissing and stroking his hair.
‘I wish we hadn’t wound up here.’
‘Yeah. But that’s that now.’
‘That’s that,’ she echoed.
He pulled away grievingly. The room had darkened, but since they knew each other so well, they didn’t need to see each other to feel when one of them was miserable.
‘Well, this is stupid. What’s the point of all this? Just to make our lives miserable? You have to tell me what you really want so that I know what to do… and now you’re telling me you want nothing. How come?’
‘Because it should have been me! I was the one so horribly stripped of what was meant to be mine, and if it hadn’t happened that way, I would have been the mother of your daughters and would had taken care of the flowerpots on your windowsill and the other plants, and I wouldn’t have had to hide from anybody!’
‘That’s right. Though I can’t just kick her out now and tell her it was a mistake. I can’t tell Matilda she should simply leave. I couldn’t make you happy by driving her away; surely you see that, don’t you?’
‘No…’
He felt his irritation well up and gave out something like a slight growl. ‘I came to see you and ask you once again to wait a bit. Let’s not go on with these charades any longer. Actually, it’s not my fault that I have a family and two daughters. And it’s not yours, either. I’m trying to make some changes in my own way, without hurting anyone too badly. I want us to end up together, because if it doesn’t work out, then…’ He stopped and covered his face with his palms. ‘First of all, I came to ask you not to do that again. What was going on in your mind? What were you thinking of? Why did you do it?’
He looked ridiculous, gesticulating in the middle of the room in his red, short-sleeved shirt, ironed and starched, his watch chinking at his wrist; he was shaved and freshly scrubbed, with very few features left from his childhood self. She was struggling to remember what exactly she had recognised, despite the changes and the age, when she realised his mouth was wandering upon her face and neck. She felt his breath and the whiff of his skin, smelling like freshly-baked cake; she heard him gasping and panting in her ear, turned on, and realised there was actually nothing left of that little boy other than their routine of loving each other, of being bonded by thousands of words, memories, common pleasures and promises, and that, even if their love itself would one day vanish, all the connections between them would survive it for as long as they lived.
She lay down, letting him climb upon her and strip her of her clothes. It was neither the place nor the passing time that made him hurry up, but rather his desire to make her forget, to draw her attention away. Emi knew all his thoughts. But she found comfort in knowing beforehand what was about to happen, after all those days of uncertainty. And Sal could faultlessly pick out the spots where he should titillate her skin with his lips so as to hear her gasps of pleasure echoing in the room. They were seemingly two half-naked people, entwined, his head buried between her legs and hers between his; they were switching positions with the artistry of a synchronised swimming team performing their routine.
Time went by and the two lovers lay stretched like giant cats next to one another, their adjoined heads propped against the arm of the sofa. They rested in a pleasant silence, still secluded in the slick, mineral cocoon that concealed all but their watery, blank and glittering eyes. He leaned his head on her shoulder and closed his eyes. Snapshots flashed through his mind: the crowd from the post office where they ran into and recognised each other, when he had realised that the round-faced and brisk-voiced girl with whom he had shared so many memories had turned into a woman. Next came Matilda, who was telling him, one year after their marriage, that she was pregnant and was asking him, in the same drawling, amenable voice she would use when consulting him over what he wanted to eat for lunch, whether he wished her to keep the baby or not. She also slipped in that, should he refuse, he had to resolve it quickly, as the pregnancy was quite advanced and soon no one would want to operate. Since Matilda had been so honest and straightforward about the situation, he instantly consented to it, without even asking her whether she wanted it or not. But now, thinking back, he felt he had somehow been tricked.
This hunch that had been nagging his mind for quite a long time made him sit up. Emilia rested stone-still, the hand that had been stroking him frozen in midair. From the way she sat, through the hair framing her features, her round face, her eyes, her mouth and her nose had shown, and even her angular cheekbones had been rounded off and softened, calling the little Emi to his mind. He realised that even if he had turned her entirely inside out, he would have found her there, whole and intact; he would have removed her from the placenta and blood, dirty and scared as if she had been a newborn baby; would have washed her off, cleaned the slime out of her hair and the red streaks from her cheeks, and life would have resumed where they had left it. He suspected that she was to blame; if it had not been for her extravagant coquetry, her insatiable pleasure at being admired and loved, of enchanting everyone in the gang, of entering doubtful and equivocal friendships which implied that all the fondling and petting, the hide-and-seek, the hopscotch, the games of tag, signified so much more.
Sometimes he had felt that Emi would lie through her teeth, hide out and try to deceive him, availing herself wit
h a grown-up woman’s arsenal, silencing his suspicion while sealing off her secrets. If it had not been for all that, their life would have unfolded normally. He could clearly remember that, from a certain point on, he had become suspicious even of friends who seemed to have seen more than him despite all the time he spent with her. Even her confession at the party, for that matter, had not been unplanned. It had confirmed various doubts, giving rise to yet others. He was not the only one to whom she had belonged. She had belonged to all of them, and the thought of it burned his insides.
He fidgeted around, and when Emilia wanted to pull him back, he tore himself away smoothly yet resolutely and remained crouched, musing. His penis had receded and hung feebly upon his scrotum. From this position, she could see a lucid drop barely hanging from a crease of the wrinkled skin. He grabbed his member between his fingers and shook it a little. The drop fell into the velvet on the sofa cover and was soaked up instantly.
He had come only to ask her to wait a bit, but her anguish, her wan and drawn face, her eyes in which he could see death so clearly, had turned him on and stirred up his urge to get revenge. He would have liked to push her into the abyss with one hand and pull her back with the other. Even the thought of dying together had crossed his mind, and he would have done it if he had been certain that the whole truth would out. After they had met again at the post office and exchanged their phone numbers, he had waited for a few days, hesitating to call her, since he didn’t want her to believe that, after such a long time, not only had he remembered her, but he was also still under her spell. But then she called him. She spoke in a studied, friendly tone, laughed a lot, and since he felt confident, he cracked a lot of jokes; in the end, he promised that one day soon he would invite her to the greenhouses, remembering her old passion for flowers and herbariums.
Sun Alley Page 22