Kissing Through a Pane of Glass

by Peter Michael Rosenberg

  For the time being, I was happy. The memory of Liana’s outburst faded but did not disappear, and if I was self-conscious in any way, it was only with regard to my movements; that is, I avoided making any swift motions of my hands or arms. If, as was often the case, I wished to stroke Liana’s cheek, I would usually place my hand first upon her shoulder and slide my fingers gently upwards to meet her face. In time this became an habitual movement rather than a conscious one, its origins soon obscured.

  We returned often to the terrace overlooking the lake where we had first met; sometimes Liana would bring her notebook and make sketches of the surroundings, although she would never let me look at them. I questioned her about this and she said that, being a perfectionist, she didn’t like to exhibit incomplete work, and that sketches were by definition unfinished. Even though I longed to see her drawings, I didn’t push her on this; although I had yet to write anything of any value, I felt sure I’d feel much the same about my own work, unwilling to let anyone read it until it was complete, polished, ready for publication.

  On those occasions, whilst Liana sketched, I would simply sit and look at her. I would watch her intently, as if I could not be worthy of her until I was able to hold the whole of her in my mind, every square inch of skin, every hair, every pore. I examined her movements, the way she held her pencil, the manner in which she glanced at her watch or looked up for just a moment with the hint of a smile. I studied her breath, the way she shrugged, the flickering of her perfect eyelashes; I took stock of every action, memorised it, stored it away. If it would ever be necessary to reconstruct Liana from scratch, I held entire blueprints in my head.

  I did not write any of these impressions down; it was essential that it was all committed to memory. I wanted to have instant access to her, day or night, in my waking life and in my dreams, whether she was sitting beside me or a thousand miles away. I wanted to ensure that she would be with me always, that I could always relish that extraordinary beauty, that I need only close my eyes to visualise that exquisite loveliness.

  Liana didn’t seem to mind me staring at her; she never said anything about it, accepting my behaviour as normal. Consequently I did not feel selfconscious about it. I was as happy looking at Liana as I was making love to her. Sometimes I could hardly believe that such a wondrous beauty as she was sleeping with me, Michael Montrose.

  Making love lost not an ounce of fervour, not a wisp of passion; each time was as steamy, as exhilarating, as totally exhausting as the last. After each occasion I felt certain my heart would scream “enough!” and stop beating in protest at the punishment I was putting it through. Our lovemaking was the perfect amalgam of love and lust, of tough and gentle, a wondrous blend of the expected and unexpected. We seemed to guide each other through some extraordinary moves, and I found myself performing acts that I had not thought myself capable of, going beyond normal limits, reaching for greater ecstasies.

  On our last night in Udaipur, as we lay in bed together after a particularly frenetic session, Liana turned to me and began running her fingers through my straggly beard.

  ‘What do you look like without this, I wonder?’ she said in a half-mocking tone.

  I smiled. ‘Like an accountant’ I said. ‘Like a bank clerk.’

  Liana laughed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The original chinless wonder. You wouldn’t have given me a second look.’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  ‘It’s true. Before I grew this beard, the exquisite combination of nose and chin was guaranteed to have to have pretty girls running for the hills.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re very handsome; you have a lovely nose.’

  It was my turn to laugh. ‘It’s very sweet of you to say so.’

  Liana’s expression changed. She looked bemused; half quizzical, half offended. ‘You think I’m lying to you.’

  ‘No, no . . . it’s just, well, I know I’m not a good-looking bloke...’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ she said. ‘You’re completely crazy.’

  ‘What?’

  Liana shifted her position until she was looking down on me. She placed her hands on either side of my face, and held me firmly so that I would have had to struggle if I’d wanted to move. ‘You’re the most attractive man I’ve ever met, Michael. The most. You’re more than handsome. You’re beautiful.’

  I was quite taken aback by her vehemence. No one had ever referred to my looks as handsome. No one had ever called me beautiful. And the strangest thing was, these were not just lover’s words, designed to please. Liana was deadly earnest. She believed I was beautiful. I could have cried.

  ***

  The noose tightened. The water rose another inch. I was a hanged man, a drowning man, and I did not even know it.

  Chapter 15

  Liana slept most of the day today, while I tried to complete a piece about Chitwan National Park in Nepal. It’s the final article in a series on the Himalayan kingdom, and it’s causing me all sorts of difficulties. That’s the trouble with writing a series of articles on just one country; by the time you’ve written twelve thousand words, you’ve run out of suitably appealing adjectives and original descriptive scenarios. There is only so much you can say about mountains, blue skies, medieval Asian architecture and wizened old men with faces like decaying boot leather.

  Thankfully with Chitwan there’s the jungle to provide the setting and the animals to furnish the action. Still, my heart’s not really in it, and I wish I hadn’t promised the editor that I’d have it finished by the weekend. I’m sure he doesn’t intend using it for at least another three months, but I daren’t renege at this stage. My reputation is shaky enough as it is, and besides I need the money (even if I won t see it for an eternity).

  Liana’s exhausted. She didn t sleep well. Late last night she suffered another panic attack, and I was up until four this morning trying to calm her down. She gets so scared at the thought of me leaving, and her anxiety is heartbreaking. I have to remind myself constantly that, within a week of my departure, she will have forgotten all about me. The staff at The Sanctuary will attend to all her needs. She’ll have a comfortable room with her own television, she’ll have three decent meals a day, and she’ll never be short of company as there are at least a dozen other loonies wandering around the place.

  Don’t give me that look. I know I shouldn’t say such things, but you have no right to criticise me. You don’t know what it’s like. This is my way of dealing with it, my way of coping with the sad truth: my wife is a loony, a crazy, a madwoman, a paranoid schizophrenic, a manic depressive; she has lost her marbles, she is no longer playing with a full deck, she is fucked in the head. As opposed to her loving husband who is merely fucked, period.

  I no longer wake up in the mornings thinking it’s all been a bad dream. My life is a hollow, pathetic thing. If, as sometimes occurs, I suffer the agonies of a nightmare, when I wake it is not to relief, but to greater anguish. For my reality is worse than the most frightening of dreams.

  I look not for pity or understanding; just, perhaps, acceptance. I hold no one responsible, I harbour no resentment, least of all towards Liana. I have brought all this on myself.

  Richard would never have understood. Nobody has to do anything, he would say. You’re a free man, a free spirit, restricted only by society’s conditioning and imposed moralities. If you want to kill somebody, you can do it. You make the decision, you pay the price, but you’re free to do whatever you want. Richard loved Crime and Punishment but thought Raskolnikov was a jerk for making such a song and dance about his own guilt. Guilt was another of Richard’s pet hates. Like love it was another figment. It all came down to insecurity; be certain of your actions and you need never feel guilty. Richard couldn’t stand ambivalence, procrastination, indecision or bleeding-heart liberalism. He’d have made a great fascist. “Personal choice, Michael; that’s all there is.”

  Perhaps he was right. Perhaps our views were not so f
ar removed from each other. If you come to a fork in the road where the left-hand path leads to freedom and the right to incarceration, and, having chosen (for whatever reason) the latter path, you are then forced by someone to take the former, just how free does that make you? Personal choice, Richard? There are some concepts that Richard will never understand, like the idea that there exist things beyond mere self-interest. Richard’s path may well lead to freedom, but it would be a lonely, isolated sort of place. When he arrives, he may well be shocked to discover that he is the only person for miles around.

  When I stood at the fork in the road, Richard, I was free to make my choice. The path to the left - your route - was open, spacious and silent. To the right the way was dark, narrow, claustrophobic, and away in the distance a sad, troubled beautiful voice called my name...

  Chapter 16

  We sat on the lawn of the Pushkar Hotel looking out over the holy lake with its fringe of blue-white buildings nestling beside the ghats. Pushkar had an improbable Mediterranean feel to it, a wonderfully peaceful ambience, so unlike any other place in India I had visited.

  We had arrived at Ajmer in the early morning, taken the bus over Snake Mountain, and by ten o’clock were settled in a delightful double room with - luxury of luxuries - our own hot shower. Even though we were tired and grubby from the overnight journey, such was our joint obsession with each other, that no sooner had we undressed to take a shower than we found ourselves tumbling on to the bed, embroiled in a sexual frenzy.

  ***

  Liana’s willingness and desire to make love - wherever and whenever - was a source of constant delight to me. She was every man’s fantasy, and she was mine. The only thing I found perplexing was how this stunningly sexy woman had managed to avoid the clutches of the millions of rampant males who would, like myself, have given anything to be with her.

  Aligned with this thought (and still suffering from the sort of self-deprecation that had become a trademark with me) was the question that, if she had been saving herself, saving that precious gift, why had she given it to me of all people? I mean, I was a nice enough guy, certainly, but Liana was special; she was unique. I surely was not a worthy recipient of her affections, her love, the intimacy with her body.

  I kept these thoughts, bothersome though they were, pretty much to myself. I knew what Liana would say: that it was she who did not deserve such riches. I was handsome, beautiful, sexy; I was warm, loving, caring. I was a great lover. She was so lucky, she would say whenever the mood took her, so lucky to have met me.

  I was bewitched, of course. It was not long before I began to believe all her words. How I kept my ego in check I’ll never know. But such is the nature of enchantment. If not for this then perhaps my suspicions would have been aroused. Perhaps I would have been more concerned about the dreadful incident on our first night together. Perhaps I would have wondered about her inventiveness in the bedroom, her seemingly natural abilities, the ease with which she adapted to new positions and variations. Perhaps I would have questioned how she knew what would turn me on, and queried her skilful use of hand, tongue, lips.

  But I did not. I did not give a damn.

  And that in retrospect was my greatest error.

  See Michael Montrose, a fool in love, with his starry eyes and stupid grin. Snigger at his ignorance, his inability to see the strings attached to each limb and the top of his head. Marvel at the skill of the marionette-master as Michael dances to a tune, not of his own making, but composed by agents beyond his understanding.

  Poor Pinocchio; his head is made of wood, and he’s playing with fire.

  ***

  The lawn that led down to the lake was the first stretch of green grass I had seen in a month. We took off our sandals and felt the fresh, cool springiness of the blades between our toes. We ordered a pot of tea, played a game of cards and smoked cigarettes.

  I had toyed with the idea of smoking whilst at university. I had bought the occasional packet of Rothmans, which would usually last a fortnight, during which time I would struggle to get the hang of breathing in the noxious fumes without coughing up bits of lung. I was not particularly successful, and after two weeks would give up and throw away the remaining fags, certain that smoking was not for me. I must have repeated this sequence of actions four or five times. I have no idea why I was so keen to smoke; it did seem a pretty pointless activity.

  It had come as something of a surprise when on our second evening together, Liana produced a packet of cigarettes over dinner and lit up.

  ‘I didn’t know you smoked?’ I said, no disapproval in my tone, just surprise.

  ‘Just occasionally,’ said Liana. ‘I like to watch the smoke curling up into the air. There’s something so transient about it, the uncertainty of the spirals. It makes me think about the passing of time.’

  This seemed the least likely excuse for smoking I had ever heard, but from Liana’s lips it had the ring of authenticity. I did not discover until much later that Liana was a confirmed twenty-a-day addict, and that at the time she met me she had been trying to give up. By the time we arrived in Pushkar, I too was smoking like a fool. It didn’t seem to matter; it was just a part of the whole, a fancy, a game. It was as irrelevant as tapping one’s fingers on a table top.

  The drinking, however, was another matter altogether.

  Chapter 17

  I come from a family of teetotallers. Neither my parents nor my older sisters drink; not so much as a glass of wine with a meal. This is not, as one might suspect, for any moral or ethical reasons. They do not disapprove of alcohol; they simply don’t like the taste. Consequently I was brought up in a booze-free home, and it was not until I was sixteen that I discovered the potent effect of fermented vegetable matter.

  At sixteen I became a hardened cider drinker. I have, it seems, a low threshold to intoxicating substances, and I discovered in these formative years that a pint of Strongbow was enough to reduce me to a gibbering idiot. Alcohol made me popular: I was the best value entertainment in town. If you wanted an amusing evening, all you had to do was take me to the pub, pour cider down my throat, and after half an hour I would sing, dance and tell ludicrous stories for the rest of the night. Friends would happily stand me the price of a pint. While this may sound a bit demeaning, at the time I revelled in it. If girls did not fancy me for my looks, they at least liked me for my sense of humour.

  I remained faithful to the sweet, sickly, gassy liquid until I attended Sussex where, as cider was considered “a girl’s drink”, I switched to real ale. In an effort to prove I was a real man, I would drink pint after pint of the disgusting stuff in the vain hope that I would, one day, get to like it. I succeeded only in making myself very sick.

  It was sweet, innocent little Jo who introduced me to the pleasures of Scotch and American Dry. It was love at first sight. At last, here was a drink that was sophisti- cated, pleasing in taste, easy to drink, and could get you really pissed if you so desired. Not that I liked getting drunk too often. But there were occasions when I took to the bottle with a sort of madness, determined to wipe myself out. I loved that light, carefree feeling that came at around about the fourth drink, when the tongue was loose but still in control, when everything seemed easy and amusing, and you were under the impression that everyone loved you.

  My mistake, like so many drinkers, was in believing that to sustain these feelings one merely had to continue drinking, and I don’t suppose, for all the throwing up I did or for all those dreadful hangovers, that I ever appreciated the fallacy of that particular theory.

  There comes a point, as anyone who has ever tried this knows, when reason no longer enters the picture. You are no longer in control, you no longer care. You are drunk and a potential danger to yourself and anyone who dares to come too close. The morning that I woke up to find myself in a crouched position in a strange bathroom, my knees locked, my head lodged in the toilet bowl, I realised I had a problem. Not a drink problem; drink was just the catalyst, the medium -
drink was just an excuse. No, my problem was much more serious, and was to do with excess.

  I seemed to need more of everything than everyone else. More experience, more love, more care, more laughter, more pain. I wanted excess. I wanted not just to do everything, but to overdo everything. I wanted bright colours, strong flavours, pungent smells, loud music. I wanted my heart to beat faster. I wanted more respect than everyone else, more pleasure, more beauty. I never questioned whether or not I deserved it; I just knew that I had to have it, that it was necessary for my survival, essential for my well-being.

  Perhaps that is why, when the most beautiful woman in the world walked into my life and introduced me to the sensation of euphoria, I did not ask too many questions about whether I was deserving or not. It was what I wanted, what I needed, and that was all that really mattered.

  Chapter 18

  From the depths of her backpack, Liana produced a full bottle of Courvoisier.

  ‘Where have you been hiding that?’