She explained that Senga was her lover and occasional employer. I did not ask for details. My parents taught me it is wrong to ask for details of people’s private lives. Had Senga been a man I would have called the affair off because I’m afraid of men. However, I met Donalda in a restaurant and was about to pour wine into her glass when she said sadly, “Better not. After a glass or two I’ll go to bed with almost anyone.”
I said, “Hooray!” and filled her glass to the brim, and after the meal she came home with me.
Of course I hoped we would make love, but in sexual play no man is more dependent than me on the will of the woman, so I was pleasantly surprised to find we could and did make love. Then I fell asleep and dreamed I was Baron Frankenstein. The monster, looking just like Boris Karloff, lay on the bed-like operating table they show in the films. My hand was on the switch which would pour in the life-giving current, but I had not pulled it yet, for I realized the monster’s life would be a sad one and I would be to blame for it. But I did pull the switch, the monster opened its eyes and stared at me, I woke up and so did Donalda. When I told her my dream she burst out laughing. “That was me,” she said happily, “that was me! You’ll never get away from me now.” I found this amusing. I felt safe because she had Senga and I too had another lover, though Donalda said firmly, “I don’t want to know about her. Don’t tell me anything about her. And never, please, never tell me when you visit her or she visits you.”
I promised not to, feeling glad to know such a sensible woman.
How lucky I was then! Donalda usually visited me at lunchtime. I kept the curtains shut and, as the weather was cold, had my mattress on the carpet near the gas fire. I loaded that mattress with pillows, coloured cushions, a tray of fruit, cold meat, savoury cheese, pickles and wine. The lights came from five or six candles on the floor around us. I propped mirrors behind these so they seemed twice as many. The other woman sometimes came in the evening. She and I never fucked together (she had a satisfying husband) but we kissed, roly-polied around, ate, drank and talked a lot. A few days later Donalda made two discoveries, one that pleased, one that angered her. I forget which came first. The pleasant one was that Senga was having an affair with someone called Harry.
“As soon as I heard about it I ran round to the shop,”Donalda told me gleefully, “and I said, ‘Sit down Senga. I have something to tell you.’ And do you know her face went as white as a sheet!”
Donalda then told Senga that she (Donalda) knew Senga was having it off with Harry, but she (Donalda) did not mind, as she (Donalda) was having it off with me, and from now on each couple should stick with their recentest lover and be nothing but good friends to the old one. Senga gloomily agreed this was probably the best arrangement, but said Donalda was a fool to get entangled with a man.
“But she wasnae cross with me or anything daft like that,” said Donalda cheerfully, “So me and her are still doing business together.”
The discovery that angered her was: when and how often the other woman visited me. She learned this from an observant neighbour of mine and behaved as if I had done what I promised not to do and told her myself. Her anger did not frighten me because I knew I had not been wicked, but the grief which accompanied her anger was terrible. The thought of me cuddling that other woman was a pain as real to her as raging toothache. I must not give pain like that to people and certainly not to a woman who is fond of me because I seduced her. I promised she would never again discover that I had loved someone else. I made that promise without guilt or remorse. I made it gently but firmly, like a doctor binding up a hild’s broken leg and explaining why the leg would heal and not get broken again. This treatment worked. At the time I did not know my promise was a declaration of marriage.
Yes, I am a married man. Donalda and me live so near together, she is so observant and inquisitive that I can never make love to someone else without her discovering, so I don’t do it. This is no great deprivation but it makes me an unsatisfying lover. Lampedusa said once, “Marriage is a year of flames and thirty years of ashes.” He was Sicilian. I doubt if Donalda and I flamed together for more than a fortnight. We sleep together four or five nights a week nowadays but lovemaking happens once a month, if I’m lucky. Nobody is to blame. In bed two nights ago she said, “When I first knew you I felt I couldnae have enough of you. Why are we different nowadays? Is it because we’re older?”
I said, “Partly. And I think you are the last woman I will ever love, that after you comes nobody but death. The thought does not chill me but it makes excitement difficult.”
“What a horrible thing to say! That I remind you of death!” cried Donalda, who is terrified of death. I hate deaths made by governments, business corporations and self-employed criminals, but when in good health the inevitability of death soothes or braces me. Donalda is different, so I tried to put the matter more tactfully. I said, “When we made love in the old days I was livelier because then I felt you were just one in a whole crowd of possible lovers.”
“Do you mean that when we made love you were imagining other women too?”
It was worse than that. When we made love I imagined other women instead of Donalda, and other men instead of me. I could not ejaculate without imagining my prick belonging to someone more powerful and cruel than I am: a tyrant with a harem of captured brides, a cowboy sheriff with a jail full of deliciously sluttish prostitutes. My book is full of these fancies. I once read it aloud to Donalda, she laughed wildly at bits the Sunday Post called facetious chauvinistic pornography, and now she is upset by a reference to notions which make me randy! But we all know facts with part of our brain while using another part to think, talk and act as if facts don’t exist. Donalda prefers to forget my sexual fancies and has never told me hers, yet she must think of more than me when we make love. I am an interesting fellow but too fat, wheezy and self-obsessed to fully occupy a woman’s mind at these times. If she is not thinking of tomorrow’s shopping list she must be glamorizing the occasion with something fanciful. I once knew someone who enjoyed hearing my fancies while we made love, but Donalda and me are shy at these times and say nothing aloud but our names. I sighed and turned my back to her feeling lonely and gloomy, though I had no reason to be. I am lucky to sleep beside her so often. Fucking is less important than the publicity for it suggests, but in the old days when Donalda and I did not fuck she at least slept in my arms. Nowadays we sleep back-to-back, and when I press as much of my back against her as possible she moves further away. Sometimes I wake in the morning and find I’m alone. My snoring has driven her into the spare bedroom. Yet she loves me and I like nobody better than her. We will almost certainly stay together until death interferes.
But the night before last, without warning, Donalda turned and embraced me and brought me alive and awake all over. She only does this nowadays when I least expect it, never after a quarrel but always when love seems impossible. At first I cooperate in a half-hearted way, then it feels perfectly possible and we swim together with me on top, because she prefers that. My body enjoys the exercise, my mind is nothing but a sad pleased blankness. But when Donalda murmurs that she wants me to ejaculate I can only do it by imagining wicked things. On this night I imagined a beautiful discontented customer walking into a shop like the one where Donalda works, a shop I have never visited. For some reason I cannot imagine wicked glamorous men nowadays or any sort of penis, but only women who seduce each other in sly cruel ways which have no base in my experience – the lesbians I know are rational folk who never seem to humiliate each other. The lesbians I imagine, however, did many things to this lovely discontented woman which made her completely content and helped Donalda and me to a satisfying conclusion. The next morning, which was yesterday, Donalda said, “I don’t need you tonight. Tonight you can do what you like.”
We got up, washed, had breakfast. She phoned for a taxi, swiftly painted her face, kissed my cheek making a distinct mouth-print on it (“To warn off others,” she said) and left for t
he shop. When we first met she went to work by bus, so the shop must be doing well. The great thing is, I was left feeling happy and guiltless in my own place of work, which is home, thank goodness.
I never pitied my father when he left home for the factory each morning but I knew he drilled bolt holes through engine casings from necessity, not choice, and I had no wish to follow his example. Yesterday Donalda left me in charge of this quiet factory where I am the designer, craftsman, struggling apprentice, unskilled labourer, canteen staff and supplier of raw materials. All of us are equally important and are paid exactly the same. Our machinery is old-fashioned but my friends O and P and Q, who work with word processors, do not think my product inferior to theirs. I siphoned good black ink into the slender rubber well of my steel pen and laid reference books on a convenient table. I clipped sheets of lined paper to a board, sat down in the very comfortable chair I never use when I have visitors, and wrote the Darien Scheme section of my CALEDONIAN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF SCANDALOUS INSTANCES. The ENCYCLOPAEDIA is factual, and normally I cannot write the truth as fast as I write short funny things like this. Yesterday I mastered my material so quickly that whole sentences were conceived before the sentences leading to them. The scurrying this caused was all that disturbed the flow of work, apart from two visits to the kitchen to make and eat instant pizza. (Cover a slice of buttered bread with chopped onion and tomato, cover the whole thing with cheese and toast it.) I worked so well that the sun set and it was ten o’clock before I remembered I had been allowed to do exactly what I wanted that evening. It was too late to play chess, not too late for the pub. I phoned Donalda to tell her I would not visit her that night (she dislikes me when I’ve been drinking) but there was no reply. She must have been working late. The shop has no telephone so I had done all I could, and I went out with a guiltless conscience. As I entered a pub which cashes my cheques a woman leaving it stopped and said, “Hullo Dad, I’m reading your book again.”
She was in her early thirties, very tall and gaunt but not anorexic. Her neck-tendons were distinct but muscular, her head completely bald. Bald women usually appal me but this one seemed a handsome specimen of a new race: not white, not black, not Semitic, not Asiatic. Her neck and smiling head were the colour of a light brown biscuit. Her chin was strong and sharp, her nose wee and snub, her small delicate pointed ears were pierced through the gristle (not the lobes) by the hoops of huge silver ear-rings. She wore an ankle-length leather coat with very wide lapels and her hoarse little voice seemed to come from a great distance. I did not know her name or profession but had seen her in a pub near Glasgow Cross frequented by the Print Studio crowd and other arty people. She said, “You have an astonishingly dirty mind. You made me feel quite … mm mm.”
I assumed mm mm meant sexy so I said, “Good.”
We continued looking at each other. She did not stare at my face but closely watched it with this gloomy intense smile, her mouth turning down, not up at the corners. I was fascinated but did not know what else to say. Could she possibly desire me? If we became lovers what would Donalda do? She suddenly chuckled, touched my arm and went to the car park. I climbed some stairs to a crowded room where I joined O and P and the famous Q who saluted me smartly and said, “Good evening Major Name.”
We discussed books, human freedom, the uselessness of Scotland’s fifty Labour MPs, the culture capital of Europe in 1990 and its coincidence with the three-hundredth anniversary of the battle of Boyne Water. A happy heat was spreading through my veins while we spoke: adrenalin, of course. The woman who called me Dad had stimulated my heart.
She stimulated my heart and gave me the freedom of the universe last night. I felt able to swim over, under, inside every woman in the world, able to love and own the whole as completely as well-loved babies own it after a good meal. Outside babyhood hardly anyone feels healthy for long, but viewed in health and without prejudice the universe is an orchard of strange lovely bodies: fruit, stars and people freely grown for us by God (if we’re religious) or by the universe itself, if we ain’t. Most bodies cannot be visited or grasped without expense, danger or embarrassment – the moon, for example, and the woman who calls me Dad – but through mediums of light and air thousands of bodies harmlessly visit and touch every one of us. Donalda should not fear the nourishment I get from these light and airy contacts. All such nourishment makes me more fluid – more able to love her. I must tell her so. When I see her tonight (or on Monday night if she has to work the whole weekend) I will say, “Sit down Donalda, I have something to tell you.” No, that would alarm her. I will take her out for a very posh meal, maybe in that new restaurant boat which chuffs up and down the river. She will think I am compensating her for some pleasure I enjoyed without her, but she will not accuse me of it at once. She will ask what I did on Friday, Saturday, Sunday. When I left my house. Who I met. Where I ate and drank. What happened after that. I will give short accurate answers which will make her more suspicious than ever. She will try to annoy me into telling more by saying:
“So you had a real wild night.”
“Of course I know you did more than just talk.”
“Whose house did you fall asleep in?”
I will not be annoyed. I will say calmly, “It was an ordinary, enjoyable night.”
“I talked and drank, that was all.”
“I went home to my bed and nobody came with me.”
At last Donalda will accuse me of hiding something so I’ll tell her about my short talk with the bald woman. She will be furious. I will smile tolerantly and say, “You have nothing to fear. That talk led to a revelation which some folk would call religious. I realized …”
I realized something which words will hardly explain, so why try? Like most middle-aged people I have had many revelations which felt like turning points and maybe were. If I am a different man from yesterday my actions, not my words, will show it. I will continue to act as usual but with more courage and firmness, perhaps. If Donalda notices a difference she may even like it.
She sometimes says she regrets how bossy I let her be.
CLASS PARTY
DONALDA fastens her mouth on June’s mouth in a kiss which is almost a bite and June enjoys a melting delicious weakness like nothing she has known. Her astonishment at this feeling is so great that she does not move when Donalda releases her, stands, touches buttons on the radio phone and says, “Senga? Senga, she’s all ready for you, and she’s got no arrangments this weekend, nobody’s coming, or expects her … Yes bring up the teacher.”
Donalda, a little nervously (June thinks) straightens her skirt and tucks her blouse into the waistband without refastening anything. A buzz from entryphone. Donalda presses street-door switch, opens door to landing then stands beside it, listening to the coming of her friends. June has several seconds to think about screaming, a few seconds to do it. She doesn’t do it because she is almost certain that most of her neighbours are out on Friday nights, and if some are at home, and come when she screams, and the visitors run away, what will the neighbours find? June nearly naked in an embarrassing skirt with her arms bound behind her. All her life June has dreaded embarrassment more than pain, which she has hardly ever experienced and even now does not expect. She feels part of a surprising play or dream which cannot hurt much – if it does she will walk out of it or wake up. The obvious reason for not screaming – that as soon as she starts Donalda will jump on her and gag her – does not enter her head.
Senga walks into the room like a woman glad to be home after a long holiday. She carries two red nylon hold-all bags and dumps them on the floor. She wears a long waterproof coat and casts it off onto the sofa before waltzing round the room with outspread arms.
“Notice!” she announces to the world in general, “That I am wearing our school uniform, the same sexy skirt and blouse my pal Dona wears, and which so fascinated one of my customers that she ordered it before she knew she was joining the school. She seems to have messed it up a bit but that always happens at
playtime.”
She stands still and looks hard at June who now sits up on the hearthrug, alert and puzzled but not frightened.
“How was she, Dona?” asks Senga
“Very nice,” says Donalda, “Lovely at first. She lay down and opened up to me as easy as a wee pet lamb, just like what you said she would. But she soon got bored with me.”Senga puts her hands on her hips and tells June severely, “You are ignorant! I bet you’ve never made love for more than ten minutes at a time. You’re too good looking to be so ignorant. Plain Janes like Dona and me had to learn to enjoy ourselves late in life because nobody else was keen on us, but hundreds must have wanted to teach you. How did you miss them? I bet the only people who taught you to be a woman were a frigid mother and some stupid men. You are very lucky that we caught you before you got too old … She’s not too old for you, is she Miss Cane?”
Senga asks this of a woman who has entered the room behind her, also wearing a long coat which she has cast off onto the sofa. This is the lean bald lady of the second photograph, she wears the same big overalls with the bulging sidepockets, she now stands with her back to the door, legs astride. But despite her challenging stance and clothes she looks shy and downcast. She keeks at June sideways, her chin pressing hard into her naked shoulder as if trying to submerge in it. She mutters so softly the words are inaudible.
“I must explain about our school,” Senga tells June cheerily, “Our headmistress needs discipline because nothing good can be learned without it, but she is an ideas person, not an enforcer, usually. She leaves discipline to the head girl, who is me. Please turn round, Miss Cane.” Obediently the tall woman turns to the door and at once looks perfect. The shyly brooding evasive face is the only thing wrong with her. Senga, Donalda and even June stare entranced at her athletic figure, the broad-shouldered naked back tapering to a slim waist under a couple of crossed straps, the fine legs with outstanding calf muscles below the trousers rolled up to her knees. Senga shakes her head, becomes businesslike again and points to a slender pocket between the tall woman’s hip and knee. What seems a hook sticks from the top. Senga puts a finger under the hook and raises it far enough to show it is the handle of a flexible cane.
Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012 Page 46