by Sarah Dunant
And since that day I have not done a line of coke. You probably find it hard to believe from looking at me, but I am fatter than I was. My body is healthy again. I have a purpose to life. I work a couple of days at the store. I am employed. I even employ others under me. I hold a green card, which gives me an identity separate from Lenny. I am legal, justified. And on the days when I am not working I draw, take Spanish lessons, learn the flute, and wander the city. I fill my time. I am busy. As busy as Lenny.
And Lenny? Well, he has both changed and remained the same. He is still the amateur academic, but only for some of the time. For the rest he is away. On trips. Business. The shops. Or so he says. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. If I asked, he might tell me the truth, and then I would have to face facts. I don’t mean to be unfair. It’s not that he hasn’t tried. He has. He still does. Gives me what he can. Sometimes I think he has almost forgiven me my weakness. But deep down I don’t trust him. And, when I’m feeling really paranoid, I think he doesn’t trust me either.
It’s crazy, because in some ways we get on even better than before. In bed, for instance. The sex is great. My desire for him increases. As if I take from sex what I can’t get elsewhere. And take is the right word. I’m grabby and selfish. We both are. It’s good. I like it. It touches something in me, makes me powerful. But it never lasts past the orgasm. And he never says he loves me, because, of course, he doesn’t. And the lack of it sometimes drives me distraught with pain.
Hard to believe, isn’t it, Marla? Me, Elly Cameron, life and soul of the party, old before my time. I mean it. It’s as if he’s taken away my youth. When things were really bad, do you know what I used to do? Go and sit for hours in coffee shops watching other women, wondering how they did it. I was fascinated by the ones younger than me. I don’t think I’d ever noticed them before. Suddenly they were everywhere. I used to marvel at their skin, the softness of their flesh, the confidence of it. And I would so envy them their possibilities. I knew I was being absurd. That it’s as easy to be fucked over at twenty as it is at thirty. Only it didn’t feel like that. Not anymore. I had been young in the world for so long that I had grown to assume that was how it would always be. But, of course, it isn’t. I know that now. There’s less room for mistakes now. That’s what being with Lenny has taught me.
And if I’m being truthful, I think that I’m in too far ever to get free, that when they sucked out my womb, they took half of my will as well. He’s like a disease inside me, Marla. But one that I don’t want to recover from. Of course I say nothing. I keep to my side of the bargain, demand no more than he feels able to give. And meanwhile his other affair he conducts in greater and greater secrecy. And some nights, after we’ve screwed and he’s fallen asleep, or more likely gone out on the balcony to read a tome or two, some nights I wonder if it means that I am becoming just like him. Or if I have simply become accustomed to being a victim.
I should know the signs. Women who are victims always throw themselves in the path of the oncoming truck and then complain when it runs over them. Remember those people? We used to know a lot at one time. And we were so scathing about them. Well, sometimes I think I’m one of them now.
And the terrible thing is, Marla, you’ll see nothing of this. When you meet him he’ll be charming. He’ll smile and shine and talk and listen, and you’ll believe it’s all there for the taking. But it won’t really be him—any more than the person he has made me is really me. Or at least not the me you once knew.
Which is where this all began … and which is why I asked you to come. You’re my last hope, Marla. I can’t do it alone. I want to leave him, but I don’t know how. It feels as if it’s not allowed, like a rule which can’t be broken. I want you to help me break it. Please.
five
So ended Elly’s tale. Outside, even the city seemed stilled for a moment. She sat huddled in her chair, her body awkward and taut, as if a kind of rigor mortis had set in.
I went over and put my arms around her. She did not respond. I held her tight, willing her to relax. “Listen, look on the bright side. It’s fortunate I didn’t bother to unpack. This way we can be on the first flight home.”
But she missed or decided to ignore the irony in my voice and pulled away from me, brittle again. “It’s not that simple,” she said angrily. “Don’t you understand, I can’t leave. That’s just the point.”
I watched her carefully, as one might watch a child whose tantrums might lead her to inflict some damage on herself. It was a long time since Elly Cameron had so lost her sense of humor.
“Come on, Elly. This is me, Marla, remember? We’re the ones who used to hit each other’s shins with hockey sticks to avoid having to play games in winter. Comrades in adversity. Nothing’s changed. It’s all right. I understood what you said.”
Now, at last, her body loosened, and she let out a noisy sigh, caught midway between tears and laughter. “Oh, Marla, what a mess, eh? How the hell did I get into this? Does it really make any sense?”
“Of course.” I was only half lying. It could never have been my story because I would have lacked the original courage to get that involved. Because Elly had always taken life in such huge gulps, it was inevitable that sooner or later she would ingest something that would disagree with her. But people seldom die of food poisoning, and Lenny, potent though he may have been, did not strike me as a lethal dose. At least not for the Elly I once knew.
“Listen, you know the legend as well as I do. All you have to do is slay the Minotaur, then start winding back the thread until you reach the entrance, which will also be the exit.”
This time she grinned. “Trust in the gods, eh? Oh, Marla, I’m so glad you’re here. Don’t you wish you’d taken a package to Majorca instead?”
“Perish the thought. Haven’t you heard? They’re blowing up English tourists out there. Anyway, you know me. Why lead my own life when I can live through someone else’s? Why do you think I’ve been so disturbed by your silence? I always knew there had to be a good story behind it.”
Talk of our separation brought us back to time present. She looked at her watch in a kind of disbelief. “Christ, Marla, we’ve been sitting here for hours. You must be shattered. It’s already morning in England.”
And did I miss it? Not a jot. I could have stayed up till lunchtime. But she was in more need of sleep than I. Now it was told, the energy had seeped away and she looked gray with a tiredness worse than jet lag. I stood up.
“One question. How long before he gets back?”
She made a face. “Your guess is as good as mine. He left last Thursday. Said he’d be away for ten days. But he’s always unpredictable. In my more paranoid moments, I think he does it deliberately, just to check up on me. Let’s just say he could walk in at any time.”
“Good,” I said with a firmness designed to impress.
“You sound like you really want to meet him.”
“After that buildup? I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I’m even looking forward to it.”
Boasting, of course, is a kind of hubris. In the still of the night such things are heard and visited upon you. Four in the morning. Almost two hours had passed since our good nights. My body was grumbling at me to sleep, but my mind was running the show. Elly’s story was everywhere. There was no place where I didn’t crash into it; a feeling, a fear. Twenty-four hours ago I had been obsessed by other things, expending energy sewing up the few loose ends of my life. None of it was there anymore. Elly had whitewashed it out.
I was fighting two quite separate emotions. The first was exhilaration at being plucked so suddenly out of my deliberate, controlled existence into the maelstrom of her life. That much was positive, full of warmth and color. The second emotion was fear, fear that I would not be strong enough to defeat him—or rather the him in her, because, of course, in every dragon myth half the problem is the princess. I knew her. I did not know him. Still, after all those words, he remained incomplete. Her emotions garbled him,
minced him into a strange hybrid of villain and hero, explained nothing. A man who wielded the weapon of self-containment. If that really was his secret, then he and I had something in common besides Elly. Would he recognize it? Had she?
In the eighteen years we had known each other, Elly and I had always operated differently. I turned somersaults in my head, walked across beds of nails, and spent too many years listening to my own heartbeat. I did not engage with the world. It was not my style. My act was perfected early, and it worked. People stayed clear of me. Even my parents had accepted the stranger in me. But not Elly. Elly had stayed. Right from the first moment outside the staff room, when I was the new girl, brainy and aloof, and she was the blithe spirit of the class, dropping a pile of textbooks in the path of the assistant headmistress and forcing me to laugh as she clowned about, trying to pick them up. I had expected to be lonely as an adolescent, had accepted it as my fate. Elly had marched straight through the Do Not Disturb signs and refused to go away when I tried to freeze her out. She had known that I needed someone. And she had decided that someone would be her.
We had things in common, had even shared a certain attitude to the world. Maybe it came from the fact that each of us was an only child and used to our own company. My mother had always been terrified of procreation, afraid she wouldn’t know how to cope. She was right. She didn’t. She was too much of a child herself. Since she needed a father more than I, and since there was not room enough for two children in the family, I became the adult. It suited me fine. The only person who took any interest in me was my grandmother, but she lived in Paris, so her parenting was reserved for holidays. As for Elly, well, she always said she had been conceived in an absence of mind, which was not quite the same thing as an absence of contraception. Her father had wanted a son and had lost interest immediately. Elly had spent much of her childhood trying to win him back. A course of action which had, no doubt, alienated her mother. Certainly, by the time we met, the Cameron household was a battlefield, and Elly had started to enjoy the war. Finding me provided another outlet for her emotional energies, this time a positive one.
Her sense of fun brought another dimension to those early teenage years, and I owed her for times which would otherwise have been dismal. Aggressive timidity is hardly a social asset, particularly during the first mating seasons. Whereas school dances and dates tempted others into alternative forms of learning, I went underground. Boys did not interest me. Or that was my story. So, I cut my long blond hair and became a scholar. But Elly never stopped pestering me. And her methods were robust. Once, when the blackness was particularly dense, she marched into my room and announced that according to a book she had just read I was either gay or intellectually overdeveloped. Did I fancy any of the fourth-formers? If not, I would just have to sit it out and wait for my body to catch up with my mind. We found it very funny at the time, although looking back, I see she wasn’t so far from the truth. Certainly things got worse before they got better. And even if she couldn’t always help, she knew how to handle me. There are some things you can’t repay. Now, thanks to her and the occasional man persistent enough to brave the scorn, I have come through. True, I still enjoy work more than sex. But then how much pleasure does Kim Basinger get from reading Anglo-Saxon poetry? I am not so much strange as unfashionable. Yes, I have found a way through. And now I would help Elly to do the same.
I must have slept, because the next thing I remember was opening my eyes on a room more defined by light. I was covered in sweat and in need of a drink. I unglued my eyes and pulled myself out of bed, my cotton nightdress sticking to my skin. Outside in the corridor I was halfway to the kitchen when something made me stop.
Across the hall, through a half-open door, I glimpsed the living room, where a grainy dawn was creeping its way across the wood floor. At the other end of the room, one of the balcony doors was open. I remembered with an absolute clarity that the last thing Elly and I had done was to lock them, because it had occasioned a crack about New York paranoia reaching eight stories high. My stomach turned over. Don’t be foolish, Marla. There must be an explanation. Probably Elly, unable to sleep. I stepped forward with silent footfalls. On a chair I spotted a jacket, pale cotton, and a briefcase. Next to the briefcase a book, with half its cover showing. I registered a bold, black-and-white ink drawing of a hand holding a quill pen: firm powerful strokes like a Dürer woodcut. Stupid the details one’s brain records when it is concentrating hard on something else. Except that something rang a bell. I couldn’t connect what. One thing was clear. This was no burglar. In which case there was only one explanation. Lenny was home.
My curiosity was enormous. To see him without being seen, watch him in his lair. I edged across the room, bare feet on rug. The floorboards did not give me away. When the balcony was in sight, I stopped. The man sitting out there was in oblique profile to me. He was tall, slender, and very fair, with long legs splayed out in front of him. He was wearing smart leather boots and designer trousers. The storm of hair was almost white. His face, had he turned fully, would have been clean and chiseled and beautiful. Mr. Magnificence himself. There was no doubt about it. The man on the balcony was the man on the plane.
I stood transfixed, my heart beating so loudly that I was surprised it didn’t disturb him. When I felt more in control, I turned and glided from the room. I needed no second glance at the book cover. I already knew that the artist was not Dürer but a fellow countryman who, centuries later, dabbled in the same art. The book was Günter Grass’s Meeting at Telgte, the novel he had been reading on the plane. What current obsession did this reflect? It took a sturdy mind indeed to find pleasures in the maze of the Thirty Years’ War.
I sacrificed the glass of water to the cause of security. Back inside my room, I lay awake for what seemed like a small eternity, hearing Elly’s voice in my head. “His other affair he conducts in greater and greater secrecy.” Chicago on shop business? Among his many sins, Lenny was also a liar. What should I tell Elly? Or him for that matter? Maybe I should wait until I met him face-to-face. I felt a certain confidence that I, in my role as St. George, should have been granted such an early advantage. It would be a pity if lack of sleep undermined it. I recited a few pages of Bede and felt better. New York was stirring as I fell asleep.
I woke buried in hot sand. The sheet was over my head, a torture presumably self-inflicted to protect me from the light, which was streaming in through half-closed blinds. The morning might have been the afternoon. There was no way of telling since my watch had stopped at 6:43 A.M. I made a run for the bathroom, where I showered and dressed. I had no intention of risking formal introductions in a bathrobe. I needn’t have worried. The flat felt empty. In the living room the balcony doors were closed; both Lenny and Günter Grass had gone. Along the corridor their bedroom door was ajar. I tiptoed in. The bed was unmade, and the room was decorated with a pleasingly familiar hurricane of Elly’s clothes. But with no sign of tailored jacket or Gucci boots. I was heading for the kitchen, nursing the suspicion that maybe I had dreamt it all, when the phone rang somewhere near the bed. It took me a while to find it, and when I did I couldn’t remember the number. Elly’s laughter danced over the wires.
“God, you’d make a lousy maid. Well, I needn’t ask how you slept.”
“Where are you?”
“At the store. Crisis management. The girl who works here woke to find a gas leak in her apartment. She’s watching the repairman while I’m waiting for a delivery. Didn’t you get my note? It was under the orange juice.”
“I haven’t made it as far as the kitchen. What time is it?”
“Put it this way, you’ve missed two meals already. It’s after three.” The sleep of the dead. Except for the interruption. “And guess what?”
“What?”
“Lenny’s home. Came in at dawn. What did I tell you? Perfect timing. As always.”
“Where is he now?” I said at exactly the same instant as my eyes registered the door across the
room leading to the en suite bathroom.
“Don’t panic. You’re safe. He was up and out early. Business, no doubt. I didn’t catch the details. I arranged for us all to meet for dinner this evening. That is unless you want to change your mind and go to California today?”
Not for the world. I wanted to see the expression on his face when we met. “It can wait.”
“That’s what I hoped you’d say. Great. Why don’t you get dressed and meet me downtown?…”
In the underworld no one moved more than was absolutely necessary. The air, baked in the folds of the tunnels, was stale and unprofitable, and the train when it arrived, roaring and screeching its way out of the darkness, was like the set of a Roger Corman movie, tacky and menacing.
I climbed in and sat down. New York. There is a different balance between madness and sanity in this city. Maybe that’s why so many gravitate here. More room for deviancy. But you have to have the stomach for it. I remember my first visit, when I had taken the subway late at night, riding a compartment that was totally empty. I had spent four stops staring at the thick black graffiti which saturated the ceiling, seats, and walls. I could almost see the madness seeping out of the spray paint, and crawling its way toward me. It was hard to know whose violence I was feeling, theirs or mine. In the end I got out of the train and took a taxi. Of course, I was younger then and my psyche a little less resilient. Graffiti is just graffiti now. Even in Manhattan.
Aboveground it was raging sunshine. Following instructions, I crossed into Washington Square. The place was swarming with people, sitting, striding, watching, playing. Two black kids body-popped to the roar of a ghetto blaster, while a small crowd gathered for the show. On the grass people were stretched out in the sun, and a middle-aged man was roller-skating along the paths.