Benighted (13 page)

There must be things to say. I’ve said them so many times. What do you think I’d hit him with, a lead pipe? Though I’ve even heard of that being done. If you don’t like my kind, why are you having dinner with me? If you had at your mercy a man who’d been harming you all your life, who’d have killed you, killed your people if he’d had the chance, who sat there and told you to your face that he hated you, and you could do anything to him—
you could do anything to him—
can you look me in the eyes and say that you wouldn’t have hurt him?

I say nothing. There’s such an ache in my head. My face contracts, my eyes crush shut and my mouth pulls tight at the corners, and I take my hand out of Paul’s to cover it. I won’t cry. I won’t cry.

“Lola?” It’s a question. I turn my head away from him.

“Lola—”

I raise a hand, stave him off. “Give me a minute.” My voice comes out hoarse and weak, but I just keep it from shaking.

He’s touching my hair, trying to get to my face. I don’t turn my head back toward him, but I let him touch my hair, for just a minute I let him.

I press my hands over my eyes, steady my mouth, put my face back together. If I speak soft enough, it won’t crack. “Please, don’t be nice to me. I’ll only start being pathetic.”

He laughs, just a quiet, sad laugh. “Do you not like being pathetic?”

I shield the side of my face and say nothing.

“Bet I’ve seen worse than you.”

“Worse—” I have to distract myself, I have to get myself off the subject. “Worse sights than I’ve seen, or worse people than me?”

“Oh.” He takes his hand away, brushing my shoulder briefly, and then we’re not touching anymore. “Well, I meant worse people. Sights, I don’t know.”

“No offense—” I put my hands out in front of me, stare at them, “but if you haven’t, then you’re a very bad social worker or I’m a very bad person.”

“No,” he declares. “I’m quite a good social worker.”

I take a deep breath. “Yes. You probably are.”

“My God, was that a compliment?”

Flashing a hasty look at him, I see the face of a man who’s delighted with a novelty. “Yeah,” I say, “make a note of the date and time, because you won’t be getting another one for quite a while.”

While he’s laughing at that, I take another look at my hands. They’re trembling.

Paul sits back, rests his head against the wall. I think he’s about to say something when he sees me staring at my hands.

“Um—” he says, meaning something, I’m not sure what.

I clench my fists, unclench them, and they haven’t steadied.

“As in catcher’s twitch?” says Paul.

I look at him, look away. “It—” It can be catching. Sympathy pains. I won’t have it, I can’t have it. “No,” I say, sounding fiercer than I mean to. “Just a bad day. Look, I’m just going to the bathroom, I’ll be back in a minute.”

He rises as I get up, standing when a lady leaves the room.

The bathroom has scruffy tiles and little circles of light fall on the floor from the bulbs overhead. I stand at the edge of one of them and watch myself in the mirror. My eye is steady. My face isn’t twitching. I fill up the tiny basin with hot water and bury my hands in it. They curl, the basin is that small, and heat encloses my skin. When I was still little, my first school, there was a teacher, a greasy-haired man with a pink, shabby face, who’d hit us on the back of the hands with a ruler. Not supposed to happen, thoroughly illegal in lyco schools, but the safeguards Becca had didn’t apply to me. “Stay in the real
world,
” he’d say, bringing the stiff wood down. “This is
life
I’m trying to teach you. You think staring out the window is going to prepare you for the
world
?” He taught us history, some of the worst facts. He was a twitcher. Probably he wouldn’t have been teaching if he hadn’t got the twitch. I think he knew that the freakishness of it, the little rightward jerk of his head, frightened our seven-year-old minds as much as the ruler. On days when his head pulled hard on his neck, jumping inches out of line, we knew we were in for a bad time. We’d keep our hands under the desk and hope he wouldn’t pull them out by the wrists. “Think you’re too young to deal with
reality
?” Always on the key words. Say “reality” or “cope” to any of us, and we’d flinch. This is where I learned this trick. We’d take a vote before each class, and someone would excuse themselves five minutes before the lesson ended, go to the bathroom, and fill the basins with hot water. Whoever had come under the fire of his disillusionment would have a bowl full of healing warmth to run to as soon as the class ended.

I’m standing here in this poky little room, remembering Mr. Davis, and it isn’t what I want to be doing. It’s silent in here. I dabble the water to make some noise and it’s as quiet as a sound heard from a great distance.

The trouble is, while no one can see me in this small, white bathroom, while it’s as good a hideout as any, it’s lonely in here. I want to be back at the table talking to Paul.

He’s sitting in his chair, quite placid. I walk soft, watching him from a distance, and he’s just sitting there and looking at the table. He isn’t even fidgeting. The candle seems to be holding his interest.

As I approach, Paul starts absently passing his fingers through the flame.

“What are you doing?” I hurry up to the table, trying to stop him from mutilating himself.

“Mm?” Paul turns his attention from the candle to me, and the next second burns himself because he hasn’t managed to get out of the flame before forgetting about it.

Paul’s hurt.

“Ohh…” I sit down, scoop some ice out of my water glass and press it to his scorched finger. “Dear God, that was silly. What on earth are you singeing yourself for?”

“I’m okay,” he says, “really.”

“Really. Actually sticking your hand into a flame and waiting for it to catch fire.” He winces as I turn the cube over, scraping the ridged edge against the burn. “Oh, don’t do that, I’m sorry. You poor bloody simpleton. No, hold still…”

Ice melts in my grasp, and water drips down, rivulets running over my palm, into my sleeve, drenching me. He sits there, letting me press ice against him, droplets soaking into the fabric of his jeans as they fall from our knotted hands through the air.

“It doesn’t hurt,” he says. Too soft to be casual.

“This is me being nice,” I tell him. “Don’t pass up the opportunity.”

NINE

W
hen I woke in the dark, it was midnight, and he was awake and looking at me. He lay still, the stillness of a man who needs little sleep and has no need to toss and turn if he finds himself wakeful, and his eyes gleamed in the dim room. Rested but not fully alert, I stretched my arm across the few inches between us, to find him.

“How is it that you’ve only got cereal?” Paul says, coming back to bed with two bowls balanced on my cutting board in place of a tray. The tiny room is taken up entirely by my disheveled double bed, and he has to start crawling to get into it.

“I accept no criticism from a man in a hula skirt,” I mumble, making a half-hearted gesture at the two sweaters he’s wearing around his waist. He’s wider awake than I am. “I think there’s a tomato in the fridge.”

He disappears, and comes back with it.

Later he asks me to come out with him. I don’t want to leave the warm room, but I am hungry. The first thing that comes into my mind is, “You’ve already had dinner with me.”

This, I do not say.

Once outside the restaurant, we kissed without the waiter’s eye on us. We found an alley, light from a streetlamp slanting through it and casting cold shadows in the corners, and we pressed together for warmth as the brick wall pushed into my back. His coat baffled my touch, and all I wanted to do was pull aside these layers of fabric that were keeping him from me. He had the same taste I did, the burnt stew and cheap red wine, but softened and fluid in his mouth, and I dipped in, trying to take some of it with me. His hand traced the back of my neck, and I balanced his head in my palms.

Disengaging, it was hard to talk through the shape he’d left on my mouth, and my lips bumped up against each other as I said, “Come home with me.”

If he was surprised, he didn’t show it for more than a moment. He touched my face.

Inside my apartment, I took him into my blue, dark bedroom and unloosed the blinds. I had put no lights on, and all I could make of him was a warm silhouette. I was pulling him down onto the bed when he laid his hands on my shoulders and moved me a little distance away from him.

I leaned toward him, reaching through the space between us, and he said, “Wait a moment, Lola.”

“What?” I didn’t want to stop. I couldn’t even think of reasons why he might.

“Why not sleep a little first?”

“No.” I was out of words, couldn’t hold more than one thought at a time.

“There isn’t any deadline, is there?” I was straining to see his face in the dusk. “It’s Friday.”

“Friday?” I grasped his shirt, close to the skin beneath.

He sighed, stroked my hair out of my eyes. His tone was almost apologetic. “It’s just that—to an onlooker, it might seem that you’ve had a bad day and you’re running on autopilot. I don’t feel like I have your full attention.”

“You have my full attention.” My head was rocking on its neck, I was sleepwalking, but it was a sensual dream I was sleepwalking through.

He sat on the bed beside me, put an arm around me and lay down. Outside, rain sighed against the streets. His fingers played around my ear, and though my heart was beating in my stomach, I let the stroking action lull me. I was sure I wouldn’t sleep, but my eyes closed nonetheless.

It was dark when I woke. His face was close to mine, and a little light coming through the blinds showed that his eyes were open. I stretched, shifted, reached out and touched flesh. I didn’t know where his clothes had gone, but his arm was bare, his shoulder, and I ran my hand over him wordless, reacquainting myself with this stranger in my bed.

There was barely light enough to see by. My hands became eyes and searched, my skin became hands and grasped. I lay back to be shaken awake. We turned and plunged like swimmers, drowning in air, and in my narrow room full to the corners with a mattress, the bed rocked like a raft, and the sea opened under me, miles deep. And I sank.

I did not mistake any of this for love, but I’ve been alone a long time.

Sleep with a man and you lose him. That’s what my mother would have said if I had asked, what her mother would have said, all those certain armies of older women. They had the world laid out in neat rows, they had topiary shears that trimmed human nature into clear and defined outlines that they understood and tried to teach us, me and girls like me, back when we were still girls. Of course, we scorned them for it. I lay in bed, thinking about older women, while Paul slept, his eyes finally closed and his head buried in the pillow, unable to see me.

I think they meant that he wouldn’t respect me. I think even Becca thought that, in some ways. Sleep with a man and you lose him. When I grew up, I tried it. They were right.

It isn’t that he won’t respect you. But in all the world, nothing isolates you more than sex. It locks you in your own body. The more aroused a man is, the further he retreats from you, because all he needs of you can be felt on the skin, and at the moment of climax, you disappear. I didn’t lose men like I’d lose friendships, keys, or faith. They vanished from me as the moon vanishes when the rising sun throws out so much light that it blocks whatever is beyond it. Dazzled, they lost sight of me, and unseen, I lost them, over and over.

I knew I was going to sleep with Paul. I knew I wanted to, anyway. Perhaps I should have waited until after we finished working together so that he could leave more easily.

When he wakes, though, he pulls me to him again, and afterward he wants to talk, and the clock moves from eleven to twelve, from noon to afternoon, and he hasn’t gone away.

“You don’t have any food in this place,” says Paul.

I point at the cereal, and he takes a flake out of the bowl and sticks it on my forehead.

“That’s not food,” he says. “That’s sustenance.” He leans across, his lips and tongue brush me as he cleans the cereal off my face.

“You don’t have to eat it.” I get all the words in the right order, distracted but still coping.

“Yes I do, I’m starving.”

I take a spoonful out of his bowl. “Well then.”

“Well, I could have cooked you breakfast if there’d been food.”

His sexual etiquette includes staying the night, I suppose, and serving me in the morning. He’s been well brought up.

“Did you know,” he says, playing with my hair, “that you finger the bedclothes when you sleep?”

“What?” I cover my face, uncomfortable. “Do I do anything embarrassing?”

“No, no, it’s quite sweet. Like this.” He lays his hands flat on the sheet, and starts running them to and fro, tapping out rhythms. “It’s dainty. I like it.”

I look at his hands, and realize what he’s doing. “Ohh…”

“Oh? Does it mean anything? I figured maybe you were typing or something.”

“No.” I lay my head down on the mattress, and he pets it. “I’m playing the piano.”

“You play the piano?” He bounces up at the thought of this, looking enchanted.

“No.” I sigh. “I used to. I don’t have room for one here.”

He lies down, scoops me onto his chest. There’s a moment of vertigo. He’s stronger than he looks. “There’s a piano in one of our occupational rooms quite near here, it’s open access. Like a library. You could play that.”

I make a noise of disagreement, knocking my head lightly against him. “You’ve only known me a few days. You aren’t allowed to certify me yet.”

He laughs, puts an arm around me. We could argue, heckle each other, or set about renewing foreplay, or he could get up and leave. None of these happen. I lie still, and listen to his heartbeat, a soft double stroke pressed against my ear.

It’s dark again, and he suggests we go out. What he wants to do is go and have dinner. I am hungry. Neither of us has had anything but cereal all day. The trouble is, it’s cold outside, icy cold.

The trouble is, I don’t want him to leave.

“Come on, I’m starving.” He jostles me, trying to persuade. “Don’t tell me I don’t get a second date.”

“What?”

“Anyway, we’re all out of condoms…”

“Thought that was encouraging our invention.”

“Yeah, but we could be even more inventive if we had some. Look, I think we should shift venues. There’s actually food at my place.”

“Your place?” I look at him, try not to look away. I don’t know what he sees in my face.

“Yeah, look. Let’s go and get some dinner, then go back to mine.” He’s drawing patterns on my forehead with his fingers.

You’ve already had dinner with me, I think. Why aren’t you making an exit? Do you just want another day of this?

We shower, dress, and go out. We eat again, and I’m hungry. I eat like I haven’t eaten in months. Then we go back to his apartment.

And on Sunday, he asks to see me during the week.

How have I got into this, part of me wants to know. I didn’t do anything clever. I didn’t do anything good. Yet somehow, here I am, lying in the arms of a man named Paul, who laughs at my jokes, who likes my hair, and who doesn’t want to escape from me.

I want to ask him why, but I don’t. I don’t want to do anything that might change his mind.