Do You Love Me or What?

by Sue Woolfe

  ‘Should I leave you to think about it?’ The gloss of importance had fallen off him.

  She reached out and held his hand.

  ‘Me,’ she managed. ‘Not me.’

  He paused.

  ‘I thought you had feelings for me …’

  She managed a whole sentence:

  ‘I love dancing with you.’

  ‘But not being with me?’

  ‘It’s the dance.’

  ‘Are you saying no?’

  ‘Yes. No.’

  There was no ambiguity in her voice. He knew her well, of that he was sure. The only thing she was sure of, was that he seemed blind. Perhaps he’d always been blind.

  He rose, defeated, as he’d seldom ever been, except when his mother had died.

  Then anger came, and rescued him.

  ‘It’s your damned independence. Look at you – it nearly cost you your sight. You couldn’t bear being dependent on a man.’

  She paused and inclined her head up and down what she hoped might be a nod and in indecent haste fell back to sleep.

  She never knew when Greg left.

  In the next fortnight, if Greg had quizzed her on who she’d prefer to him, Magdalena would’ve nominated the surgeon. Not only did the surgeon prove to have no interest in her, just in her retina, but, as she recovered her sight, she realised that that was the only interest they had in common, and that interest was fading. She seemed to have no attraction to or for anyone else.

  Magdalena recovered her sight, but she left the troupe because Greg had immediately married Janette and Janette insisted he partner her. Magdalena kept dancing and didn’t go back to her old ruinous ways. Instead she sat in dance halls and began to talk to other women between dances. She didn’t quite know why, except that Nadina had shown such kindness, and perhaps more people were kind than she’d thought. It was difficult at first, like learning to tango. She dropped in at Nadina’s shop when her boss was out and they tried on the most expensive shoes. They found out that they both had uneven feet, so they both needed shoe sizes 6 and 7; while Nadina needed a size 6 on her left foot and a size 7 on her right, Magdalena’s sizes were the other way round.

  ‘Why didn’t we notice this before?’ said Magdalena.

  ‘We’re made for our friendship,’ Nadine said. For her lunch break, they sat on a nearby park bench, eating sandwiches and sharing a soft drink.

  ‘We’re all missing you,’ Nadina said. ‘No one’s like you.’

  Magdalena threw a crust to a seagull.

  She said she didn’t know what Nadina meant.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Nadina.

  At work, Magdalena made herself tell Rashmi why she’d been absent.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ Rashmi said. ‘I thought we were friends.’

  Magdalena heard her distress.

  ‘I’m sorry. Can I make up for it now?’ she asked.

  After that, there was less work done, or maybe it still got done. No one complained.

  In a year, Janette had left Greg for another dancer, and the troupe insisted Magdalena return.

  ‘I made a mistake,’ Greg said, apologetically.

  She would’ve thought coming back to the troupe was the answer to all her hopes, but something more important had happened, something immense that changed everything. She wasn’t entirely sure when it happened, for you don’t always know when these things come, and certainly you don’t know why, but one dawn you wake up and you realise that you’re lighter, easier, you’re untied somehow, you walk out into the kitchen for a drink of water and you lean on the sink, cold against your sleepy nightie, and watch the plummet of silver water from the tap, and as I do that I suddenly realise that sometime recently the archangels have flown away, without even a tremble of air, and now I know they will never come back to me.

  The Last Taxi Away From Here

  I must admit it now, I tell myself, as I ride in the back seat of a taxi to my friend’s apartment: I came to this city for love.

  I had no right to the yearning. I’d known forever that my dull life was my own fault for gazing out the window in school rather than concentrating on what my teachers were saying. I was always being accused of daydreaming, which was true, though what the daydreams were about, I couldn’t have said, even then, except that I was impatient with ordinary things, as if I wasn’t ordinary. Oh, I knew my life was ordinary, my looks were ordinary, and clearly, judging by the way my teachers viewed me, my mind was as well – though I wasn’t really convinced, and that was the problem. I felt everyone was ignoring something mysterious and incandescent that slipped behind the shadows and under the surfaces. If they knew it was there, they pretended it wasn’t. To me, anyway. If they knew this secret, they hadn’t bothered to tell me.

  My home life seemed mired in the practical. My father owned a milk bar, where I had to serve behind the counter and worry about getting the change right. However, when he died, my brother inherited it and made it into a restaurant, where I became the kitchen hand. Then he was suddenly killed in a car accident and I inherited it, along with his half-grown children. Ironically, for all my daydreams, I had no choice but to become a practical person.

  I loved the children, and despite me the restaurant prospered; I should’ve been reconciled to my lot.

  But I wasn’t. I secretly wanted more. I came to think of it as the wanting that you feel when a piece of music ends and something seems left out. The notes end in mid-air, lopped off. And because they’re not finished, you have a hole inside you. A hole in your soul.

  I never knew how to ask people what they did about this hole. At the restaurant, we talked about how to make a custard fragrant – I’m very knowing on this matter – or the best method for mussel soup – I’m an expert on this too – and at home, children, even when they’re grown up, need cossetting and comforting, and there’s no time for thought.

  Next door to my restaurant was a public library that had a foreboding schoolday air, but one morning, especially needy, I passed through the doors – and stopped in my tracks. Thousands of books glared at me. A librarian smiled up at me from her desk. She was one of my regulars, unwisely partial to deep fried seafood and cheesecake. ‘What are you looking for?’ she asked. A name from school popped into my head: Shakespeare. Hot with foreboding, I followed the clipping of her heavily laden shoes to a whole cabinet of shelves. I wished she’d leave me there, so I could sneak out the EXIT. But she smelled my desperation. ‘Here’s his cure for unrequited love,’ she said, as if she thought I needed that. She reached for a book, flipped it open, and read aloud in a high voice:

  ‘ “Why, what would you?” ’ That’s one lovelorn character needing advice about winning a heart,’ she explained. ‘And the other replies’ – and now she was reciting but in her normal voice though suddenly more passionate:

  Make me a willow cabin at your gate

  And call upon my soul within the house …

  Halloo your name to the reverberate hills

  And make the babbling gossip of the air

  Cry out ‘Olivia!’ Oh, you should not rest

  But you should pity me.

  A man jumped to his feet, a blush crept from her neck up her face, and they gazed at each other. I fled.

  I tried church, but the faces of the congregation and the priests were round with silent satisfaction. At three o’clock in the morning in my lonely bed, my lopped-off feeling grew like a potato plant under thick black soil, until one Christmas in the cathedral, during the reading from the Old Testament, a poet who’d lived thousands of years ago spoke to me as if we were kindred souls. ‘How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good tidings,’ he’d written. It wasn’t exactly a whisper, read as it was by the priest’s voice, as fat and thick and gold-trimmed as his rich garments, but the line leaped through the air in a shiny bubble like the ones the children used to blow, bubbles slicked with rainbows. Good tidings, I thought. About the secret. It seemed a line f
rom a fellow yearner.

  For the first time ever, I said to my confidante, my old, rheumy dog – a puppy when the children first arrived – somewhere else in the world there must be yearners like me – and surely they’d know what to do with this emptiness. And just at this time, a customer mentioned his apartment in Florence.

  ‘Florence is a place of the spirit,’ he said.

  I’d often confided in my dog, also a yearner, though easily satisfied by a strip of bacon. I showed her pictures of Florence I’d found on the internet.

  ‘Look,’ I said to her. ‘All of them, the statues and paintings, the decorations and the curlicues – what are they saying? Look at the naked cupids reaching out to something, look at the holy men turning their pale, shining faces to something, look at the Madonnas with closed lips barely suppressing their joy about something, not to mention those ragged shepherds and no doubt smelly stable-hands – they’re all openly yearning, they’re not ashamed of the holes in their hearts; indeed it seems an assumption amongst the artists who created them that there’s a hole in everyone’s hearts. Surely the people there know what to do about holes in hearts.’

  I didn’t exactly speak those words to my dog, but I sent my thought to her, the way the poet had sent his thought to me. She licked her old, droopy jowls. The next day, she died.

  I told my customer I needed a break and asked if I could rent his apartment in Florence. He imagined I wanted a rest. But, though I’d been busy, I’d rested, in a way, all my life.

  So, after I buried my dog, I left for Florence.

  I wandered through galleries and cathedrals, amongst a noisy mob of fellow yearners oddly clad in spotted sun frocks or loose yellow shirts patterned with palm trees, as if they weren’t pilgrims at all. But they, too, responded to Florence’s yearning all around us, it was yearning along with us: all the statues, the altar pieces, the very walls, they all unashamedly, even flagrantly yearned along with us; there were meandering narrow streets with buildings almost toppling into them, such was their yearning. Why, even at night the river Arno coiled with a pleading light through the darkened city; it didn’t hurl itself in a drench of sand and sunshine like our toiling oceans. Once, in a hushed cathedral, a man in the congregation began to sing of his desire, and it was just like mine. I wanted to go up to him and hold his hand and sing with him but of course I didn’t, I can’t sing and I didn’t know the words, there never seem to be the right words, and his pleading gusted like a wind through the empty spaces inside us as we stood with upturned faces waiting for the vaulted arches to crack open and give us – what – what would yearning give us? For the first time in my life I was with soul mates, and from then on in Florence I trod more stoutly.

  I can never go home, I thought. I must stay here with soul mates. But time was running out, my friend needed his apartment back; my restaurant and the children needed me back.

  Then, one muddy afternoon on a bus back to the city from Scandicci, I found a ridiculously simple solution. A Florentine man, surely with yearning rampant in his blood, in his very DNA, a man with palely lidded orange eyes – I’d seen those pale eyelids without eyelashes a hundred times in medieval paintings – directed his gaze at me. It came to me, his gaze, in a fierce beam of orange light. That’s how it felt, twin torches burning orange light through the grey, slippery day. When I met his gaze, he stepped out of the frame of the Renaissance painting, pursed his lips into a kiss, lowered his eyelids as if he were swooning, then rolled his eyes back into his head, and entered what seemed to be a state of bliss.

  I looked behind me to see what god or goddess had occasioned this. There was only the dismal afternoon falling away against the fogged window glass. I counted to seven, a sacred number according to one of my guide books, and turned back. His gaze was still on me. He went through the act again, then unpursed his lips and smiled. So I had no choice but to admit the impossible.

  He was suggesting bliss to me. Sexual bliss.

  Of course, you’d think it obvious, the notion that yearning could be fulfilled by sex, but it hadn’t occurred to me. If a man in my country had done what he had, it would mean nothing but his wish for sex, he’d be just a disappointing predator. Not that I’d had many of those, I’m not a pretty woman that men notice, I am what used to be called large-boned, with a long, thin face, close-set eyes and a prominent nose. Against my better judgement, my heart gave a little lurch of joy at being noticed – but more, noticed by a Florentine, surely a fellow yearner.

  I dared another look. He was shaven-headed, ear-ringed, leather-jacketed – cream and black leather, far too fancy for a man in my country. Even his jacket set him apart, suggested he was a man from the land of the yearners. There were no lines on his face, no sags under his eyes.

  A matron rustled her plastic shopping bag and in the sound I came to my senses. All the warnings my mother had given me, that I’ve given my brother’s children: never trust strangers, always run from them, especially strange strangers.

  I wriggled off between the soft matronly bodies to the far end of the bus where I held on to a pole near the driver, my skin wrinkling around the base of my fingers like a tide ebbing out past gnarled rocks. As the concrete apartment blocks slid by, I struggled to accept that there were, after all, compensations in my life: the children remembering to ring me up every so often; the customers staying back after hours serenading each other and sometimes me; the camaraderie with my chef, who’s a friend from schooldays; our little experiments with recipes. And then, unbidden, there popped into my mind the new regular who’d prop a book against his wine glass and catch my eye whenever I emerged from the kitchen to see if the diners were pleased – as if he was waiting for me. His face, with its muscles and crinkles, broke into many surfaces when he smiled, so for me it was like crushed velvet. I’d never stopped to chat with him because I was intimidated by his constant books. He’d find out I meant to read but didn’t. He always left his dog tied up outside and many times I’d wondered if I should put a bowl of water out for it, but what if all the diners took it into their heads to bring their dogs? The restaurant would be ringed around with dogs. My brother would turn in his grave.

  Suddenly there was a firm male body pressing against me. I had forgotten male firmness. It came back to me from my youth, when I’d sometimes danced with men in the town hall that has now become a disco. I’d had few partners, only boys who knew my father and were obliged to do a round with me. Apart from a few unsatisfactory sexual encounters, soon over, I hadn’t known men.

  A large, olive-skinned hand gripped the pole I was holding, and slid down onto my fingers and covered them, and then the hand slid down to become a bracelet on my wrist. Or a handcuff. I swayed to the rhythm of the bus, not moving my arm, not looking up. The world narrowed. There was only the old man’s catarrh of the motor and the warmth encircling my wrist. There were no tumbling cupids or upturned faces lit by a beam from a crack in the heavens, but nevertheless the circle of sexual warmth stilled my thoughts.

  After a long while – funny how time’s arrows suddenly cartwheel, and could that mean I was already experiencing the timelessness of ecstasy? – something, perhaps politeness, demanded I follow with my eyes the man’s arm, the bunched up shoulders of his cream and black leather jacket, the cheeky diamond in his ear, and, when I dared, his orange eyes. I didn’t free my hand.

  I’m the one who can give you what you seek, said his orange eyes.

  If the soft-bodied matrons pursed their lips in scorn, if they made faces to each other of contempt, I didn’t see, as the Madonnas nearing a state of bliss in paintings don’t see. Their eyes accept the exalted moment. So I saw nothing, nobody, only him, for his eyes were repeating: I am what you came for.

  It couldn’t last. He took his hand away, and suddenly my wrist was damp and cold. He turned, the cream and black jacket crackling. My hope got off the bus.

  I had no choice. I plunged between the women and the plastic bags and the children, and with the superhuman
strength of the stricken, I forced open the closing doors, so I could get off too.

  He strode down a street. I walked behind. A café beckoned relief, all bright lights and gleaming glasses, just like my restaurant back home. Home washed over me, the warm bathwater of ordinariness. I remembered the curious sense of harmony when we get the menu right, so we’d begin to think what we do has an importance beyond feeding people; I remembered the orderly lines of tables just before we opened for the evening, with the plates the paleness of peace; I remembered the face of the new regular whose dog waits outside for him. He’s not my sort of man, being small and spindly, but there’s something accepting about his gaze. Perhaps he senses something about me, something that speaks to him – perhaps he’d understand what I can’t put into words. And if that’s true, he may not mind that I don’t read books.

  I turned like the dumbly respectable person I am, and went inside the café, leaving behind this wild Florentine and my foolish moment. I sat at a table. After all, I told myself – and I still sent my thoughts to the ghost of my dog, though I was trying to give up that habit – it’s just envy making you desire what you haven’t had, what you weren’t meant to have.

  I hailed a waiter.

  But it was the Florence man who loomed. He stood gazing down at me, while I could only gaze down at the table top. He sat opposite.

  ‘Come to my home,’ he said in perfect English, overly perfect.

  Then the waiter appeared. ‘Madam?’ he asked.

  There’s never anyone handy to advise you what to do.

  ‘A short black,’ I said.

  We sat in silence for several minutes until my coffee arrived.

  I broke the silence.

  ‘I didn’t come to Florence just for sex,’ I managed to say.

  He shrugged.

  ‘I’m after,’ I said, stumbled, and then suddenly I found the words, ‘someone who knows what this city is saying. So I can hear it too.’

  He sat up so straight, proud and tall, his shoulders could have lifted the entirety of the chandelier-hung ceiling.