Sex and Death

by Sarah Hall

  This she had done, one week before her barroom chat with Tom. It had been lovely. So lovely, in fact, that Cora had made arrangements to spend a weekend with young Clément, in Amsterdam, following a gallery opening in Hamburg in the spring. Of course, that couldn’t happen now. The telephone incident had put an end to things. It had stripped from Cora the delusion that the receptacle for canapés, awards and critical vacuities was another Cora, a Cora whose actions did not ramify in the life of a kind husband.

  The lights had gone on in the theatre. In the glare blinked a silly old woman whose marital felonies had been monstrous and insane. It went without saying, Cora had told the therapist, that she would cancel the reservation for the Amsterdam hotel room she and Clément had so looked forward to humidifying over the long Easter weekend. Cora expected the doctor to make some approving noises at this announcement, but he did not because he was asleep.

  Yet weeks went by and the Amsterdam booking kept not getting cancelled. The regretful note Cora needed to write to Clément kept not getting written. These things had to be done, yet when Cora pondered doing them, an ochre feeling came over her and her thoughts went elsewhere. She had not bothered to tell Clément that she was married. During their brief collision, he had impressed her as a wholesome, fragile boy. In sending her regrets, she would need to craft a lie that would leave his feelings unbruised, and also preserve his ignorance of Cora’s shabby marital scene. An illness? The death of a parent? The effort of liecraft affronted her. The chore went undone.

  Winter surrendered. On street corners the grey Tetons of icy soil shrank and roiled for the storm drains. The crocuses and daffodils shouldered forth. Pollen outputs rimed the windows. In her back garden, Cora saw a bull pigeon try to mount a rat. Cora felt her own sap rising. A store of shame was in her still, but it had lost its tanginess and bite. With the spring upon her and the city, she felt the logic of guilt to be the logic of death. Not to go see Clément over Easter was an insult to the big harmonic. She decided to keep her Dutch appointment, if decided is the word for a thing one knew one would do all along.

  The opening in Hamburg did not go well. Despite the gallerist’s assurances that the press had been duly pestered, only a single critic came by to chat with the artist. He was blunt in his opinions. ‘Okay, so we are obsessed with famous people. Well, yeah, pretty obvious. To me this point does not make interesting these photographs that, formally, are not intriguing.’

  Speaking from a hot place in her chest, Cora retorted that she could not agree more. They were dismal photographs, but the phenomenon of the exhibit’s success proved the shrewdness of its point. ‘This is a little bit intriguing,’ the critic allowed. ‘Maybe, you put on the wall the numbers of how much money you are making with these pictures of nothing. Maybe that is the real exhibit.’

  In the morning, she boarded the train to Amsterdam feeling antimagical and undeceived. Sliding rearward out of Hamburg, Cora counted her plagues. No department of her life did not have fungus on it. A divorce would happen soon. Her dog was ill, maybe terminally, with an outbreak of long blue cysts about which Cora had been too dispirited to call the vet. ‘Go into the big space,’ an art school professor had once exhorted Cora. For years, she had found these words useful. But when, precisely, had her ‘big space’ become a large damp room that smelled of rancid towels? And now four days with Clément. What a queasy bounty this would be. The prospect was appetising as a week-old crabcake left out in the rain. She would brass it out in good humour, but something had to change. From her wallet she took the index card, downy with age, on which she sometimes minutely journalled. Steadying her hand against the surgings of the car, she jotted this wisdom: ‘Never do anything ever again.’

  But the train ride gentled Cora: the bumping of the rail seams, the excellence of a purchased croissant, its airy tissues as organically wondrous as a living chunk of lung or brain. Retreating before the engine’s nose, purple thunderheads ceded the sky to a Delftware schema of ivory and deep blue. Sheep were on the hillsides, droll yellow afros cropping weed fields to baize. Passing through Teutonic villages, she wondered Americanly at the age of stone homes. She marvelled at the absence of those architectural toxins – synthetic stucco, faux mansard roofs – that had ravaged her homeland. Beauty, beauty, here it was. Receive it, Cora. Be its willing vessel. When the train slid into Amsterdam, she told herself how pleased she’d be to see her little friend.

  Cora had difficulty finding the hotel, which she knew to be a ten-minute walk from the Centraal Station along a major boulevard. For ten Euros, she bought from a street vendor a map far too large to unfold on the street. The wind rattled and tore at it. Cora balled it up and stuffed it into a garbage can. Then, in brazen English, she asked the map salesman the location of the hotel, which was right across the street.

  In the lobby, there was Clément. Cora’s memory had glamorised him insufficiently, if at all. Thick inches of eyelash. Fleckless flaxen skin. Cheeks nearly gory with the chill of the day. Advancing toward her was the walking likeness of a 1940s advertisement for Nazism or wheat bread. The embrace was superb. His cool, dry face fitted itself to the hollow of her neck. He lipped her carotid. Cora’s legs felt thin. Greetings were uttered. In a final fit of satisfaction, Clément resocketed his face under Cora’s jaw. She heard him squeaking, gently, as though trying to rid his throat of a ribbon of fine phlegm.

  ‘Do you need a drink of water?’ asked Cora, crinkling at him a plastic bottle she’d been keeping in her purse.

  ‘I don’t need anything.’ Clément thumbed Cora’s untweezed brow and did a thing with his mouth that was close to a pout. ‘It’s weird. I had fear that you were not going to come, but now here you are, so pfff,’ he said, expelling, French-style, a morsel of air.

  Their room was small but unsqualid. A desk and a bed of the futon genus. Clément disappeared into the bathroom. Cora raised the blinds. Half a lifetime of peering into other people’s windows found fulfilment at last. In the apartment across the alleyway, people were in the act. The man was spherical and, even from this considerable distance, visibly striated with stiff white fur. His partner, astride, had the long bleached hair and synthetic bosom of a paid professional. She bounced upon the client and winced ceilingward in a burlesque of joy. ‘Rent-seeking behaviour’ was the phrase that came to Cora’s mind.

  A toilet flushed. Clément entered. Wet fingers braceleted Cora’s wrist. ‘Look, there are some people fucking here,’ said Cora. Clément glanced at the humpers but briefly, as though they were the noonday sun.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, though there was no maybe about it.

  Cora put a hand to the back of Clément’s skull and the other to his pants. She kissed him fiercely. His lips were marvellously supple. She hoisted the hem of his shirt and marched him backward toward the bed. ‘Maybe don’t do that,’ he said, tugging his shirt back down over his sternum. ‘Maybe I am not ready right now.’

  Not unforeseeable. The microphones and gentilities aimed at Cora that weekend in Nice plus the abundance of free wine had duped Clément into thinking her a desirable commodity. But at this sober hour, in a non-luxury hotel room, by the cadaverous light of 4 pm, he saw Cora as she was: a non-athletic woman of forty-four with a deeply laddered trachea and skunk lines in her hair. She revolted him. Fair enough. Why not have it out, with no apologies, embarrassment or umbrage-taking? Nice had been nice, but this was an error. Call it off. Catch the next flight home.

  But, of course, there would be apologies, shammed denials, and, unavoidably, umbrage too. Candour was enervating, impossibly so. Instead, Cora sighed, and in the politest auntly timbre said, ‘Of course. Shall we take a walk? Check out the tulip market? Have stroopwaffels? Whatever you’d like.’

  But even as she was saying this, Clément was unbuttoning her trousers. In a trice, her jeans and underpants were beside her on the bed, not heaped but folded, occultly, without Cora having seen him do it. And suddenly Clément’s jaw was lodged at the junction of her thighs. T
here, for nearly forty minutes, he was an avid gentleman.

  His gifts were notable. What he did to Cora was a masterwork of mouthcraft. Old Europe was somehow in this, she reflected near the half-hour mark. An artisanal standard whose line ran back through the wines of Margaux, the flying buttress and those intricate house-sized heaps of firewood built by Finnish monks. More the flying buttress. Altitude, soaring convexity were key sensational motifs.

  Even after Cora’s third orgasm, Clément showed no signs of tapping out. She had to bodily haul him toward her face. Even then he struggled hard to keep his shirt on. She did finally manage to strip him of it, but only after a panting grapple that felt uncomfortably close to ravishment. It took more work to crack into his trousers. The state of his penis was distressing. She had held thicker, more ardent sardines. Her hand slid north again. Clément put his face to Cora’s neck and squeaked.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Cora asked.

  Clément had slipped back into his shirt with haste that seemed dire. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’

  He exhaled slowly. A great force of will, Cora guessed, was keeping more squeaking at bay. ‘I am sorry. I don’t like to show you my body.’

  ‘Why don’t you like to show it?’ asked Cora, unconsciously aping Clément’s rudimentary English, to her own irritation. ‘You have a beautiful body.’

  Another sigh. ‘No, it is not beautiful. It is terrible, and I hate it and I don’t never like anyone to see it.’

  ‘Oh, you poor, sweet thing, why would you say that?’ Cora said. ‘You have a wonderful body. I should know.’

  ‘You knowed it only in the dark,’ said Clément. ‘It’s normal I should hate it. I used to be horrible fat. One-hundred-seventy-four kilos.’

  Cora began to say that this was nothing, and then she did the math: three hundred and eighty-something pounds!

  Cooing and petting and smoothing his hair, she coaxed from Clément the story of his old body and its miraculous reduction. Large at birth, a medical curiosity at ten, he had spent his adolescence exiled within his own flesh. For years he was tormented and for years he was alone. Boys ignored him no less resolutely than did girls. When he turned twenty, he had his belly stapled. He lived on celery with mustard, and, to fend back food-longing, uppers and downers and shots of B12. He swam and he walked five hours a day. Toward his parents and the people of his little village, he felt penitent. It pained everyone, this public admission of the secret that he knew how his body looked. The pounds came off and off, one hundred and ten of them in less than a year. The great shedding left Clément with much Shar-Pei-ness, around his middle, legs and arms. A doctor’s scalpel cut off sixty pounds of this. Post-operative shunts drained twenty more pounds of blood. And then the world saw fit to make him welcome. He made friends. He got an internship in an economic sector reserved for pretty people. He began to go with women but, until now, only in the dark. The thing was, there were scars.

  Cora asked to see them. Clément – eyes closed, body rigid, as though this were a second surgery – obliged her. The scars were not remotely terrible. Cora told him so. ‘Today is the day that you let this go,’ said Cora.

  Clément kissed her, and then copulated with her gratefully. Afterwards, he seemed genuinely unencumbered, and for this Cora was glad. Still, she wished she had not heard the story, which was like a giant crystal chandelier Clément had put into her hands with instructions to never set it down.

  They bathed, dressed and walked out into the windy dusk in search of food.

  ‘Ooh, so much good things,’ Clément said to the menu at the restaurant they’d selected, a pretty art nouveau bistro. ‘I think I will have to be careful in this place.’

  ‘Please do not be careful. This is a special time. We are away from normal life, and you should eat the things you like.’ Why could she not stop talking this way? Clément’s spoken English was not the best, but his comprehension was presumably up to par. It served no purpose to locute like Fay Wray taking King Kong out for his birthday meal.

  And yet, her Tarzan-speak put Clément at ease to feed freely. He ordered steak with Roquefort sauce, shrimp cocktail, frites, burrata and several diet Cokes. For dessert, he had hot chocolate and a fluted cakelet whose centre bled raspberry magma. While he gobbled this, Cora asked him questions with which she supposed he wanted to be plied. ‘So Clément, how long do you think you will be working with Hélène?’

  ‘Not so long, I don’t think,’ he said.

  ‘Good. She is wonderful, but I imagine you’ll want to start really doing your own work.’

  ‘Which work?’

  ‘Your photographs?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t prefer to do photography,’ said Clément. ‘I think maybe I don’t think it is so interesting, art from a machine. I have the job at the gallery only because Hélène is my mother’s, how do you call, cousine, and my mother, she is a painter and it would make herself happy if I would be an artist, so, of course she is very happy that I am here, together with you.’

  Behind Cora’s ribs, an inner nozzle squirted something sour and cold. ‘You told your mother about us?’

  ‘Yes, of course, that’s okay?’

  ‘Of course, of course.’

  ‘For us, it’s normal. We tell everything between ourselves.’

  ‘Oh, oh, how wonderful.’

  ‘Really, she is happy that I will be with someone older. With my father, they are different by almost twenty years. Like us. And they are very happy with each others!’

  Wait, hold up. What the fuck, exactly, are we talking about here? is what Cora wanted very much to say. Having confessed to Cora the secret of his old, unhappy body, did he suppose they were engaged? Was this a translation error? But with only blunt linguistic instruments at hand, Cora did not know how to clarify the matter without harming Clément’s chandelier. And so, ‘Oh, oh, how wonderful,’ is what Cora said again.

  ‘But my mother is a little bit angry at you that you did not ask me come to Hamburg. She thinks you are ashamed of me and you didn’t want me with you at a public thing. She wants me to say shame on you.’

  Cora received this absurdity with a kind of relief. She drew breath to attack the mother’s lunatic presumptions, and thereby armour herself against whatever presumptions Clément was or was not harbouring himself. But Clément spoke first.

  ‘Of course, I told her this was crazy. We are almost strangers, you and I. I love her, yes, but she is an old lady who lives in the country and her head really sometimes is full of weird ideas.’ Dispelling the spectre of his mother, Clément mannishly knocked back the last inch of his diet Coke as though it were a whisky shot. ‘Still I am happy we are here, Cora. I am happy we are friends.’

  Cora allowed his large hot hand to envelop hers. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said.

  The check arrived. Cora paid it. ‘Now what would you like to do?’ she intoned in painful monosyllables.

  ‘Maybe we should go back to the hotel and be cosy,’ Clément said. And this, because it did not involve talking, she was glad to do.

  A rattling sound woke Cora from her doze. This was Clément, nesting a bottle of Piper-Heidsieck in a bucket of ice. At the first parting of Cora’s eyelids, he popped the cork and handed her a spuming glass. ‘I am sorry but we must drink this very fast because I have a surprise for you but we must get there in thirty minutes.’

  ‘What is the surprise?’

  ‘I will not tell you. Drink, drink.’

  When they’d bolted the bottle, Clément conducted her to a wharf where a tourist barge was revving up. A man at the gangplank accepted Clément’s tickets, which, to Cora’s chagrin, bore the words ‘Amsterdam Lovers’ Cruise’.

  The seats were hard and minuscule. Cora’s chair was bolted to a juddering mechanical chase that stressed her bladder, now firm with champagne. Farther down things were stinging somewhat, the first signal flares, she suspected, of a urinary tract infection. These were blessings, in their way. By centring her cons
ciousness in her discomforts, she was able to hear a little less of Clément’s breath in her ear, and to smell a little less of his cologne, which was offgassing mightily in the close quarters of the boat.

  The barge pulled away from the dock. Clément took this as a cue to start his lover-work. He put his hand beneath the table and commenced to nudge Cora’s vulva through her jeans. With more force than she’d intended, she grabbed his wrist and uprooted his hand from her groin. He looked as though he had been slapped. ‘Why are you being cold with me?’ he whispered.

  ‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘I just really have to pee.’

  ‘So you don’t talk to me and just look out the window and don’t like me to touch you because you have to pee?’

  ‘No, I was just . . . thinking about nothing, I don’t know.’

  ‘I think you are lying,’ he said. ‘You think this is stupid and you hate it and you hate to be with me.’

  ‘Oh, Clément! That’s not true! You poor, sweet thing.’

  ‘Why do you call me that? I am not a thing. I am a man, so tell me, if you do not like to be with me, just tell me, please.’