If neither of them had anything to get up for they slept late. When she woke up one spring morning he was sitting in his underpants in front of the open window sunning himself and reading the paper. She called to him but he didn’t answer. She lay watching him for a long time. The strong light glistened on the hairs on his chest and the dust motes hovering in the air. She crept over to him from behind, placed her hands on his chest and bent forward to kiss him, so her hair fell over his face. He moved his head and with a preoccupied air took hold of her chin while he went on reading, just as you pick up the loose skin on a puppy’s jaws.
She sat down on the floor under the window and rested her feet on the edge of the chair seat between his knees. His face was hidden behind the paper. She let one big toe brush his inner thigh and massaged him softly in the crutch. He did not move but she could feel it worked. Then she bent forward and coaxed his cock out of the fly. It was violet in the spring sunshine, she took it into her mouth. He moved the paper and looked at her, neutral and interested, like a spectator. She met his eyes, trying to visualise what she looked like from up there with his cock in her mouth, like one of the whores in his daydreams.
The next moment she was lying underneath him on her stomach. He forced her down with all his weight so she could barely breathe and penetrated her, pressing her face against the dusty floorboards. She enjoyed his sudden violence, like a pent-up fury suddenly let loose. It hurt her, and he came before she had a chance herself, but soon afterwards when she was in the shower feeling his warm seed running down her thighs she couldn’t help smiling at the thought that his sudden passion must express part of everything he obviously had no words for. All that was hidden behind his silence and remote gaze.
It was getting hot. Drops of sweat crawled slowly down from the roots of her hair over her nose. She lay on her stomach sniffing the smell of sweat and sun cream on her arms, the smell of summer. The little waves melted together in a winking field of reflections, and in the empty sky she saw the jet stream of a plane making its way like a needle glowing whitely. She turned and shaded her eyes with a hand. The tail of the white line spread out and dissolved into small clouds like the knobs on a backbone.
She closed her eyes. More people had arrived, children screamed when they jumped into the water, and the adult voices blended together so she couldn’t hear what they said. The planks gave under her every time someone walked past. She stretched out her arm and let the back of her hand rest on Otto’s belly. She looked at him. He lay motionless, as if asleep. She could perfectly well have told him about her meeting with Harry Wiener when they were at breakfast the next day. They could have laughed over the Gypsy King’s unsuccessful attempt at seducing her. It was too stupid, and still more stupid of him to suspect something had happened.
Otto sat up, her hand slipped off his stomach. He looked out at the Sound. She wanted to say something, it didn’t matter what. He stood up too quickly for her to be able to catch his eye. He walked to the end of the jetty and stood for a moment with his back to her before jumping in and vanishing. A few seconds later he emerged and began to swim off.
He had looked at her without interest when she described how Harry Wiener had turned up at the dressing room unannounced and invited them all for champagne. She plastered herself with sun block, slowly and thoroughly, so she didn’t have to look straight at him all the time, as she reported what he had said about their performance. She described how happy that had made her, mostly to offset her astonishment when she came to his approaches in the car. She had taken it in good faith, she would never have dreamed that the Gypsy King could come to humble himself like that. She even exaggerated slightly and took pains to go into details about his old, rather feminine hands and how pathetically he had displayed his slobbering raunchiness. But the more she said the more she felt it sounded as if she was hiding something.
Smiling crookedly Otto said she would soon be getting an offer to play Ophelia or Juliet, it wouldn’t be long. Couldn’t she speak up for him and get him the part of Hamlet or Romeo? Or would that interfere with her plans? He said it lightly and she cuffed him on the shoulder, pretending annoyance in return for his ironical smile.
Rows of people were lying along the jetty and on the beach, so many by now it was impossible to see who was with whom. Quite close to her was a group of fragile-looking teenagers with budding breasts and bony shoulders. They whispered and giggled, now and then one of them raised herself a little and shaded her eyes as if looking for someone. At the edge of the sea a bald fat man carried a small boy in water wings. The man’s stomach wore a mat of black hair and the boy’s arms were so thin that the water wings kept sliding down to his wrists.
The wind was getting up and stirring the water into confused golden points. It whipped the sheets against the mast of a sailing dinghy keeled over on its side on the wet sand where the waves fell together and slid back. The sound reached right over to her, sharp and rhythmical, and the gusts of wind tore at the trunks of the tall beech trees in front of the sun. The top branches waved and their leaves glittered nervously in quivering sighs behind the intricate tape of smoke winding up from the cigarette between her fingers.
When she turned round Otto was on his way over to the jetty with long strokes. She lay down again. Soon she felt his heavy stride making the planks rock. He dripped over her and the cold drops woke her heated skin out of its trance. One drop fell on a lens of her shades as he sat down beside her with a sigh. The drop made the sky quiver and melt. He lit a cigarette and placed a hand on her knee. Her kneecap rested within it as in a cave. She asked if he was hungry. She sounded like a little housewife worrying about her spouse’s nourishment. He took his hand away from her knee. Not specially… was she? He ate in a revolting manner, it was the only unpleasant thing about him. She had never thought much about it, merely noticed it. He smacked his lips and bent over with a protective arm round his plate as he shovelled in his food with his right hand and looked around scowling as if he was afraid someone might come and steal it.
He asked if she would like to go. Obviously he too was at a loss for something to talk about. As they cycled into town she asked herself whether she had invited the Gypsy King to try it on when she met his eyes in the dressing-room mirror. Maybe she had waited too long to look away or else she had taken her eyes off him too quickly as if feeling herself seen through. She bit her under-lip in irritation. Couldn’t you look around as you liked? It might well be that she had wondered for a second what impression she had made on him, and so what? Surely her thoughts were her private property. Besides he had seemed to mean what he said about her performance. Could it all have been just a manoeuvre, a stage in the cunning strategy of seduction?
It was her first leading role and she had been dreadfully nervous. When Otto came home the afternoon before the première she had been standing in the living room doing voice exercises. He had bought a CD of Iggy Pop and played it at once, throwing himself on the sofa and starting to roll a joint. She caught his eye and narrowed her lips. He asked with false innocence if the music worried her. She went into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her. The drone of Iggy Pop’s voice penetrated through the door with its monotonous bass and throbbing drums. On the other side of the narrow back yard she could look into a kitchen lit by an unshaded light bulb behind the dirty window. An old man in a net vest stood at the stove. His back was bent, it faced her so she saw only his bony shoulders and prominent shoulder blades in the vest, which was too big for him. He was frying bacon, she could smell it.