Exposure

by Talitha Stevenson

  'You can afford it, can't you?' Karen said casually, her gaze as steady as a jeweller's on his face.

  'Yes.'

  'Well, I think money's for doing exactly what you like,' she said.

  'Yes, I expect you're right.'

  'Well, what do you like, Alistair?' She was beginning to feel confident, sexy. Your shoes didn't matter, for Christ's sake, if you were young and pretty. This older man, this brilliant barrister, was all nervous in front of her because she was young and pretty. It was so funny she had to bite her lip. 'I bet I can guess some things,' she told him.

  His mind ran involuntarily through a rather unexpected list of pleasures: the taste of whisky, the smell of lilies, eight dusty chimes from the clock in the drawing room signalling the end of the day, the creak of his leather armchair and the weight of a book in his hand. Was that really all there was? He could not tell her this. He could not tell himself this. What about the red stockings? Suddenly he couldn't summon them up. 'Isn't it sad?' he said sarcastically. 'I seem to have forgotten.'

  'Maybe you're depressed. It's common in men your age.'

  He laughed sadly and finished his champagne. He wanted to ask her how she knew so much about men his age, but he feared she would say, 'My dad's about the same age as you,' and that this would make him feel even more disgusting for contemplating the idea of removing her clothes.

  His own thoughts stung him: removing her clothes? Why? Why would he do that? He had not seen another woman naked in over forty years. A spell would be broken ...

  It was getting darker now and the lights on the ground floor of the hotel fell in bright golden squares on the pavement. The traffic moved past slowly, the rain trickled down the windowpanes, the flames on the torches outside swayed in the wind. London seemed to be engaged in a languid dance.

  'Well, do you like me?' she said.

  'Oh, Karen, I'm old enough to be—'

  'So what?'

  'So what?'

  'Yes. So what?'

  'And I'm married.'

  'Well, I've got a boyfriend. As you know.' She giggled—keeping her disappointed vanity secret from him, confining it to the stiffened corners of her smile. 'Don't you like me?' she said, making her voice playful, wanting to press a sharp object, a lighted cigarette, into the palm of her hand. She longed to be older sometimes, past the stage of constant hopeful auditioning, when you must have learnt to know your place.

  He looked at her face. Just then he almost hated her. He hated the arrogance of youth. He hated the faith she had in her physical superiority. Where do they get the idea that the important things get done in your twenties? he thought. All the bright pictures in magazines, in films, telling them a beautiful lie. You had to wait and wait and wait for success, for acceptance. It had nearly killed him, the waiting. She had better realize that quickly. Briefly, he felt the desire to humiliate her and to teach her a lesson about disappointment.

  The wind picked up outside and the rain pattered on the glass. A double-decker bus paused close enough for him to see windows misted with human breath, faces blurred to abstraction behind them. It was only seven o'clock. Hardly a dangerous hour. Was it possible that, after all, everything he cared about mattered less than he thought, that he invested his actions with far too great a significance, that he was a self-important fool? And, after all, no one could actually see.

  'Oh, look, Alistair, I won't ask you again. If you don't want to ...'

  He shook his head hard to compensate for the fact that he was finding it almost impossible to speak. His mind was evenly split into three emotions: lust, cruelty, fear. 'Want to,' he told her. He spoke from the point at which all three emotions met and combusted. Want to. The charred little fragment of a sentence shrivelled and flew up out of his burning mind.

  Want to what? Betray my wife? Humiliate myself? But why would he humiliate himself? Unlike Henry's, his 'equipment' had not stopped working. And this had nothing to do with Rosalind. This present moment was as irrelevant to her existence as that untidy past of his, which she never condescended to mention. Half an hour or so of untidiness—a little out of synch—and he could simply consign it to the river of forgetfulness, which flowed just beneath their bedroom window. The details Rosalind had forgotten on his behalf ... He could forget this on her behalf.

  'Don't you want me?'

  It was agony. 'Yes,' he said. 'Look, stay here for a few minutes and then ask them for the room number at Reception. I still think it's best we don't go up together.' He was aware this did not make much sense.

  'OK.'

  He grinned at her, telling himself to try to relax. It was only seven o'clock. When had he started to dread Rosalind? The girl's cheeks were red with excitement and alcohol, her face almost painfully excited. It was funfair excitement.

  'See you up there, then,' she said.

  He paid the bill, then he left her in the armchair with the empty glasses and the smudge of mascara under her eye and he walked away towards Reception, as if they had done this a hundred times before. Again, he was reminded of how easily his hand had slipped Uncle Geoff's money into his own pocket—like a practised thief. A practised adulterer, he said to himself.

  He felt unsteady in the bright lights of the lobby. He walked as confidently as he could towards the icy teenagers at Reception. 'I'd like a room,' he told one. The phrase sounded wrong.

  'Certainly. Single, twin or double?'

  'Double.'

  'Will you be wanting breakfast in your room?'

  'No. That won't be necessary.'

  'We'll need a credit card, sir.'

  He handed over his identity and was given a card-key in return. No, he had no bags. No, there was no need for the porter to help him up. No, he would not be requiring a wake-up call.

  'It's on the third floor, then, sir. Turn left as you come out of the lift. Enjoy your stay.'

  And that was that. He paused uncertainly and the girl smiled harder at him, as if she suspected he had run out of battery and required this mega-boost. He recoiled from her, starded.

  Enjoy his stay. Yes, he would. All he needed to do was stop thinking about the wrong. Think about the enjoy, think about the arms, wrists, thighs. Her boozy breath on his face. She was not really his 'type', though. He liked shining dark hair and long, elegant limbs. She was altogether too functional, what with the breasts that would one day spurt milk, the hips that would heave around sons. And the shrill, exhibitionist laugh, the eyes that would damn well squeeze out their money's worth of joy. There was chipped pink varnish on her fingernails. Her shoes were cheap.

  Why not go home? he asked himself, pressing for the lift.

  He had told her things that ought to have brought the sky down, collapsed the film set—and yet here was the Muzak still playing serenely by the oversized cactus. It was impossible that nothing meant anything anyway. He caught sight of himself on a mirrored pillar and thought: Drunk and nameless in the doorway of Tesco.

  In the lift there was a flat-screen TV with a nature film on it. Flamingos raced over a rainbow of salt flats. The standard, treacly American black female voice sang through the speakers, 'Oh, yeah, cos what you did to me baby ... stole my heart, stole my soul, made my dreams come true . . .' and spotlights flashed in sequence on the ceiling. Again, he wondered, what did it all mean? What notions of sophistication or luxury did all this convey to his children's generation? He was simply too old to receive the message, to unpick it from the atmosphere of intense irony.

  The card-key beeped and he went in. The room was vast and bright. A glowing fridge set back into the wall three feet high was full of champagne, Dutch lager, diet Coke, Swiss chocolate, sushi, and packets of what turned out to be facial mud. The bed was low and wide enough for three people, half covered in a white fur throw. There was a bathroom with a sunken bath and a chandelier hanging low over it. The windows were elaborately draped in white sackcloth with ice blue wooden shutters behind. He sat on the bed and waited for the knock at the door, feeling as if he n
eeded Karen to act as an interpreter.

  When it came, she ran in past him bursting into laughter, just as Sophie and Luke used to do on holiday in the race for the best bed. One, much like the other, had always acquired a mystical status and he had drawn up rotas for them to highlight the importance of sharing, of fairness in this life. He sat down again.

  'Oh, my God, it's incredible. I wish I had a camera,' Karen said. She aimed the remote at the TV and a picture of a girl dancing on a beach appeared. 'MTV!' she said. 'How cool is this?' Her eyes did not really see him as she searched his face. 'And this fridge!'

  She ran into the bathroom, then out again and over to the window, and then she looked back at him, her hands over her mouth. Something in his smile must have made her remember herself, because she picked up the remote and turned the volume low, sending diminishing triangles flashing across a close-up of the singer's midriff. She took off her shoes carefully and sat down in front of the bed, by his feet. He watched her as she put her hand inside his trouser leg, just above his sock. Her fingers were cold.

  'Karen,' he said.

  'What?'

  What were the right words? He scoured the sterile corners of the room. 'I don't ... I don't know what's happening here.'

  She giggled. 'Well, I do. Don't worry—it doesn't hurt.'

  His laugh was ugly with fear: it was a mean, shrunken sound. 'I'm just ... concerned,' he said—and the understatement was enough to collapse his heart like a punctured balloon.

  'Are you saying you don't fancy me, then, Alistair?'

  He stared—he had never been spoken to like this by a woman. She was literally offering herself to him. It was appalling, amazing. 'Why the hell do you want me?' he said.

  'I just like older men. I've always liked an older man. When I was sixteen I went out with a guy in his fifties. He bought me a car.'

  'Did he?'

  She pushed her hand round the back of his calf and he felt his breath catch. His eyes closed. He had forgotten how hot the body could get. Hot, sticky. 'Karen,' he said.

  'It was a crap car and my brother ended up selling it for parts. Nice for my brother, though—having something to smash up like that. Not my stereo, for once. Or my hairdryer.'

  'Karen,' he said again, speaking from some desperate part of himself, his voice almost whiny, 'I really don't think you should let yourself be used like this.'

  'Used?' She removed her hand. She felt a rising sense of panic. She noticed her shoes on the carpet, spaced out as if they were running away. She remembered the stains on her feet and said quickly, 'Can we have some more champagne?'

  He let out a burst of relief: 'Yes. Yes, why not? Good idea,' he said, getting up. He walked over to the fridge and took out a bottle, opening it as slowly as he could with his back to her. 'This should be delicious,' he said. 'This is quite a bottle for a mini-bar, I must say. What a place,' he said, speaking mechanically, sociably. He remembered he had dreamt of hell once—a huge valley between two cliffs, one of which he had wandered on to inad-vertently. There was no wind, no sound. He stared down into a blanket of pure white mist. At the deepest point, barely visible, were faint-coloured lights. They moved slowly, incredibly beautiful, and he knew: This is hell. He thought of the sequential flicker of lights in the lift on the way up.

  It was a great relief to be engaged in the simple action of opening a bottle. He picked up two glasses, thinking he would tell her amusing stories about cases because he did this well. People laughed. This was something he did. But when he turned back, he saw she had taken off her clothes.

  Why this was happening, what he was doing in a scene from another man's life, ceased to matter beside the fact of her naked body. She was a litde too skinny about the ribs with her clothes off, the breasts were far too heavy for her frame, but her skin was smooth and new in the electric light. She laughed at his surprised face and the noise went through his body like gunfire. He walked towards her.

  'Exactly,' she told him softly. 'You just need to relax.'

  He put down the empty glasses and lay beside her on the bed, his entire self silenced by her youth and her nakedness. The muted TV ran on in the background, wild with unintelligible images, flickering their shadows up the wall as he kissed her. Her sly fingers undid his tie and shirt. She rubbed her cheek on his chest and kissed her way down his stomach, running her tongue in a line above his boxer shorts.

  What could possibly be in this for her? He was old. His stomach was not hard like his son's, his arms were thin, there was grey in the hair on his chest. This must be some enactment suggested to her by a deprived and abused childhood. Perhaps her father had ...

  He heard himself say her name in a gasp.

  'What?' she said, raising her face and smiling, 'What, Alistair?'

  Suddenly his life seemed to have been one of almost constant justification, argument, verbal evasion, but he knew that now he had absolutely nothing to say. And so he let her continue whatever unhealthy game she was playing so happily with his body. He smelt her different hair, her different skin with an animal curiosity, and when he turned her over and pushed himself inside her, barely conscious of the little face on the pillow, he felt an exquisite sadness for the things he had never done in his life—almost as if this was the moment of his death. Why had he not loved Rosalind better? What was it that she had done wrong? He simply couldn't forgive it. The bedside lamp dazzled his eyes and he wanted to switch it off, but the girl clasped her legs round him, urging him on with her hips, and the idea rapidly lost its shape.

  At last he closed his eyes in bright sunlight, remembering sunlight, remembering closing his eyes.

  Chapter 10

  When Alistair's daughter came back from travelling in India during her gap-year, she brought her father and mother two simply horrifying little figurines. 'Meet Ganesha and Kali,' she said. 'He's god of all existing beings, she's transformation through death.' Sophie did the knowing smile she had acquired on her travels, her teeth very white against her brown face. Alistair sat with the tissue paper in his lap, his knees pressed together awkwardly, looking at the elephant head, the grotesque fat belly, and the other with its waving greedy arms. He tilted it towards Rosalind and smiled as best he could. This is not my culture, he thought, staring at them, repelled.

  When Sophie left he wanted to hide the ghastly things in the hall cupboard, but Rosalind insisted they keep them out so as not to hurt her feelings.

  'But they're hideous,' he said. 'What do they mean? We don't believe in them. They're hideous.'

  'Yes, darling, I know,' Rosalind had told him, putting them on the mantelpiece, by a crisp, card wedding invitation, which suddenly looked as if it had come from another planet. She had seemed unduly irritated by him.

  He thought these thoughts—about his daughter and his wife and the two Hindu gods—in rapid succession, while sitting on the edge of the hotel bed. He was putting on his pants and his socks and his crumpled shirt while Karen was doing something in the bathroom. At first he hurried to dress, in an irrational panic of modesty and shame: his body, his ageing body. Then he stopped this and sighed deeply and put his hand over his heart.

  He listened to the brazen trickle of Karen's urine and did up his tie, rather tightly. Then he heard the loo flush and out she came, grinning, wearing the hotel bathrobe—and his barrister's wig. The robe, adult-sized, was poignantly enormous. Her legs were posed seductively, one in front of the other. She had her hand on her hip and the robe fell open over her left breast and all the soft skin he had kissed and licked just a few moments before.

  Yes, that had been him—my mouth, my hands, he thought. His eyes moved up her neck to the giggling, winking face and the disfiguring horsehair wig. What sort of joke was this? It was such a sinister muddle of vocabulary. He felt lust and sheer horror and a desire to hide either her or himself immediately, to throw a cloth over the squawking canary in the cage.

  Alistair's had been a life spent on the run from the grotesque and he had never developed a sen
se of humour with which to confront it.

  Her smile fell. 'Oh, you're dressed,' she said.

  'I—yes.'

  'Oh.' She tossed the wig on to his bag and fluffed up her hair.

  'Listen, Karen,' he began, in the voice of order, as he straightened his shirt, 'it's all—it's all paid for, this room. You may as well stay the night if you'd like to.'

  'Are you going, then?'

  He bent down to tie his shoes—and also to be nearer the floor. 'Yes, I've got to go,' he said.

  She walked over to the bed and lay across it, spreading her hair out behind her. She was the picture of the tragic starlet. 'So are we going to do this again or was this a one-time-only thing?' There was a pause and then she met his eyes. 'Oh, don't worry. I knew it would be just this once really. Not your style, right?' She checked his face one last time. 'Nope, thought not,' she said.

  He walked across the room for his coat and he heard the TV volume go up again on another music video. Of course she had known it would be one time only, he told himself. She was wise beyond her years and would hardly have entertained fantasies about being kept as a mistress. Oh, who did he think he was, for God's sake? She would not even have wanted to be his mistress. She was merely being polite.

  He said, 'Karen, could I order you some supper up here? They could bring something to the room for you, if you like.'

  'Oh, my God, you mean like room service? Yes, please. How cool. Is it really OK?'

  'Of course ... it's the least ...' he said, struggling. There must, of course, be a kind of etiquette—but he had never had cause to learn it.

  She said, 'I should order it now, shouldn't I? Then you can pay on your way out.'

  Such earthy delights, such robust pragmatism, he thought. Was it all too much for his prissy little butterfly heart? 'Yes, I suppose that would be sensible,' he agreed.

  The very least he could do was try to remember—if only in the name of good taste, for God's sake—that there was no place for disappointed romanticism in a hotel room. He cleared his throat. 'I must just ...' He pointed at the bathroom and escaped behind the door.