Affection (23 page)

He took his one key and he left me on my knees scrubbing the oven.

“Need anything from the shop?”

I looked up and wiped my forehead. He was leaving. Somehow I knew he was leaving and it would be just me and the oil-encrusted oven and the removalists in a few days and nowhere in particular to go.

“A cleaning lady,” I told him and he laughed.

“You look great in rubber gloves you know.”

And then he left.

He's gone, I thought. I struggled out of the rubber gloves and I walked to the door of his room and the few possessions that he owned were gone. I sat on his bed in the sour smell of his sheets and I rode a surge of anger, and then loneliness and then loss. When it was over I dragged myself to my feet and settled down with my head in the oven. The irony was not lost on me. I laughed, coughed from the lungful of chemical reek, and settled back to the task at hand.

Paul is there.

It is late and I am sleepless and he is there on my computer screen, a little box with his word flashing there as if he has spoken. Cleared his throat, and said,

Hi.

And I imagine it is said with a kind of bounce. Just one word but there is a kind of energy about it that makes me think he might be grinning. I had decided not to speak with him.

I have decided not to speak with you.

Why?

Because we fought.

Did we?

There is no voice to the line of text that appears on the screen
but I imagine his innocent upward inflection. He seems so keen and quick and gormless. I remind him that he likes the only three girls who dislike me.

Oh, I like everyone, he says, and I think it's probably true.

Did you see the spa bath? I ask him. If I had stayed the night I might have had a spa bath.

Yeah, he says, me, too.

A silence can't be awkward on the Internet. A silence is an indication that one person or another is busy looking up a website, or answering an email or ducking off to the kitchen for another glass of wine.

Still, I imagined the minutes that followed this, empty of conversation, as a kind of embarrassed silence. Certainly I filled them with the idea that the two of us might have stripped down to our underwear and eased ourselves into the spa. Twin glasses perched on the sudsy lip of the bath, talking about the difference between the short form and the novel, the way a story circles around a single thought, the multiple thoughts and voices of a longer work.

I am playing the scene out in my head when Paul types, I am on the phone, and I realize that he would never want to share a spa bath with me, clothed or otherwise. He is fifteen years younger than I am. He sees me as an elder, perhaps. Someone interesting to talk to with nothing even remotely sexual about it.

It is time perhaps to admit that I have developed a little crush on
him, despite the way he annoys me in real life. I know too well that if I keep this thing a secret it will grow in size and intensity until it becomes unbearable. I must stop falling in love with my friends.

Paul is on the phone. This is why there is a gaping hole in our conversation, but suddenly the silence is deafening.

Okay, then I should go.

Really?

Yes. Maybe we'll meet in real life again some time.

Next week.

Really?

Thursday evening?

Okay.

Okay.

And then I close my computer and he is gone.

Two of the beautiful women at work had a room coming free. Jessica was the cold, quiet one and there was something about her I distrusted. Her silence seemed like a provocation, a passive flirtation. She giggled too easily at jokes that weren't funny and she always seemed to have a group of young men hovering around her, waiting to alight.

Mary seemed far more sophisticated than I was. She worked as a part-time model when she wasn't pulling coffees, and when I saw her in a glossy magazine I thought she was more startling than the other girls. She was lovely and quietly spoken and hopeless in her choice of lovers, always falling for someone who would treat her badly. The Nina Simone songs that my friend Laura played seemed to speak of Jessica's life, which was so beautiful and tragic. She was committed to a cultish self-help group called the Living Game and I couldn't help but
imagine that this was a little like her bad relationships: a charismatic leader like her charismatic boyfriends who would one day leave her broken and weeping.

The day I moved into their Spring Hill house they were playing the Cocteau Twins on vinyl. They had a CD player and a tape deck and a record player so old it would play 78s. I was tired and sweating from lugging boxes alongside the delivery men, and they had iced fruit punch. They turned the music up too loud and we danced. Jessica moved too close to me and pressed herself up against me and it was not like the joyful prancing that I shared with Laura. It was something about the smell of her and her slow, languid movements, and her cool stare. She caught my eye and then, having my full attention, looked slyly away. I really didn't trust her, and I danced away from her and excused myself to shower. But I was still caught in her sly gaze.

I removed the shower hose and pressed it against myself until I came with the sweet dewberry scent of her bath products in my nostrils.

I hadn't shared a house with women since I lived at Dragonhall. These girls were not the practical kind of women I was used to. They shopped for clothes and staged impromptu fashion parades, sometimes in expensive underwear and little else.

I watched, entranced. They were beautiful and I lived in a constant state of excitement. I sniffed their face creams and their powders and their makeup, I had never worn makeup and they sat
me down in a comfortable chair and made me lean back while they painted my eyes. When I looked in the mirror I was unrecognizable.

Sometimes we dressed for dinner. We put on our op-shop gowns and stockings and high heels. We spent hours on our hair and nails and cooked a three-course fantasy. I had never eaten desserts as part of a daily routine; the girls loved dessert. They loved chocolate. They bought bright bunches of flowers and filled the house with scent. There was always some woman crooning on the record player. There was always dancing.

On the nights when they went to their Living Game seminars they tried to talk me into accompanying them.

“You are such an enlightened soul,” they pleaded. “I'm sure you will love it.”

Of course I wouldn't. “I have no soul,” I said. “I don't believe in a soul.”

They returned from the seminars with stories of great feats of daring, fears they had overcome. They had snapped an arrow by running into it. They had walked over hot coals. They wrote affirmations and stuck them up on the toilet door: I am strong; I am beautiful; I am the goddess; I am a divine representation of the universe.

I copied my favorite lines from books I had been reading. Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter—Oscar Wilde. Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that
comes after it—George Orwell. I stuck them up amongst their platitudes and it was clear that I would not be attending the Living Game.

“You should come to the sex seminar,” they told me. “You would love it.”

Jessica described a three-day retreat spent almost completely naked where you divulged your worst sexual fears and then worked to overcome them—where you opened yourself up to all the universe had to offer. It sounded more like a compulsory group orgy where no one was allowed to refuse physical contact with any other participant.

When Jessica was gone I thought about her. I crept into her room and lay down on her pillow and inhaled the scent of her hair. I moved down the mattress picking out the individual odors, I curled about the place where it smelled of her sex and rubbed myself till I came. I washed myself with her soap and her shampoo. I filled in my lips with her pearly color but it was too pale for my skin tone. We were mismatched, it seemed: still I missed her. I cooked a welcome-home meal for both of them, peering through the curtains looking for the flash of her blond hair.

She had a boyfriend of sorts. He was a part of the Living Game and although he adored her, he was practicing nonmonogamy for the good of his soul. When he visited I saw him follow her compulsively with the sticky trail of his gaze. He is in love, I thought, without realizing that I had developed the same habit of turning my head toward her.

One night she came to find me. I was curled up with the fireplace blazing. My room was at the bottom of the terrace house. The bricks were left exposed which gave the space a dark and homey feel. There was a beam of wood running across the middle of each wall and I had filled this with images I had drawn. I had my sketch pad in my lap and my music playing and she was there in the doorway. I was imagining her into the fallen angel on my sketch pad and then she was there.

She came into my room and pulled back the bedclothes to crawl inside. She smelled of sex. Her boyfriend had been visiting and it was there behind the floral scent of perfume and hair products. She nestled into my shoulder and I held myself stiff and tight beside her. There was yellow ochre on my fingers, thick slivers of black oil pastel under my nails. My room was untidy, with piles of books toppling in every corner, pages thick with paint drying on the sisal carpet. She held her arm up against mine and measured the difference between them.

It was easy. She was cream and silk, I was oil and hessian. She was everything that I was not, compliant, soft, scented, warm. She was the type of girl that men would want as their girlfriend, and I was not the girlfriend kind.

“You okay?” I asked her and she nestled in closer.

She seemed small and vulnerable. I wondered if this was what men wanted in a woman, this sense of defenselessness. It would make you feel useful, a protective force for someone who truly needs you. I slipped my arm around her. I knew that this was her aim, the spell that
she was casting on me. I was not blind to it. I knew that it was just a trick she had learned from being so beautiful.

I began to feel sorry for her, born with such a body and such a face. She would never need to develop her humor or her intelligence. She would be required to sit around looking decorative. Poor Jessica. Poor sweet Jessica and all her lost potential.

“What is it like to sleep with two men at once?”

This was the most complete sentence I had ever heard her utter. She was full of giggles and vague, trailing replies. I had made her use a whole sentence. I felt special, and even as I felt it I knew I was being manipulated into feeling special.

“It's fun. That was probably the most fun I have ever had. You know, I think maybe it was a mistake to abandon it so quickly. I don't miss Richard, but I miss what we did together. Maybe I'll never have that kind of fun again.”

“I think you should.” A pause. “Should with me.”

Should with me.

It was not exactly a complete sentence but it was enough to make me want to roll onto her right then, heart pounding, and slip my fingers into her cunt. It was all I could do to keep the little distance there was. I was drunk with the idea of sex with her.

“Me and Laura,” she said and I felt the pause in my chest, the insecurities creeping back.

“Three girls?”

“Three girls and a boy.”

“Which boy?”

“Someone. Someone we all approve of.”

There were warning bells of course, but when she rolled to the edge of my bed and slipped off it, there was still that smell of her sex, which was half almond paste, half golden syrup and completely intoxicating.