Any kind of intimacy? She turned away from the problem of interpretation again and again. Certainly not sexual. She knew without doubt from the impulse in the hand that had gone out to cover his that she was not making or responding to a sexual invitation. She knew, even in the tight warm grasp of his big hand, that the gesture from him was not sexual; the nerves of skin and flesh instantly recognize the touch of sensuality. Good god, was she not too old? Wasn’t it even ridiculous, a vanity, that she should imagine this gesture could have been any repetition of the other? She had sometimes feared, in the want, the involuntary yearning of her body for the man Otto, for One-Twenty-One, after he had gone, that when she began to grow old she would become one of those women who have a fancy for young men, that she would dye her hair and undress in the dark to hide drooping buttocks and sad belly from a lover paid with — what? Gold weights and silk shirts are only the beginning. Thank god, no sign of any taste for young men was occurring; but the passing mistrust of self projected upon the commanding outer reality of a community only just breathing under its own rubble, nine dead, a man with a slashed cheek driving while a woman was dying on the back seat — what meaning could the mistrust of self have, what reality, standing against that! To whom could she pose the very inappropriateness of any personal preoccupation arising from a situation where all individuality was in dissolution in terror and despair. Not the lover-husband to whom she used to tell — or thought she had — everything. Only to herself. First the schoolgirl confessional falls away, then the kind of friendships with men and women where, the awareness comes, confidences are regretted as weapons handed to others; finally, the bliss of placing the burden of self on the beloved turns out to be undeliverable. The beloved is unknown at any address, a self, unlike a bed, cannot be shared, and cannot be shed.
In the weeks that followed when Zeph Rapulana was back and forth at the Foundation on the matter of Odensville she slowly came to understand — not so much thinking about it as accepting, unknowingly as a physical change or change of mood come about — that what had disturbed her as a mimesis of the past was the beginning of some new capability in her, something in the chemistry of human contact that she was only now ready for. This country black man about whose life apart from his place in the Odensville case she knew nothing (wife, children, web of relatives and friends) already had this capability. That was why he was able to claim her with what was neither a sexual caress nor an impersonal handshake such as they customarily exchanged. He understood her fear that he was dead was an indication that for reasons not to be explained, nor necessary to try to explain, he was not one more individual at risk in the course of her work. There was between them a level of knowledge of one another, tranquil, not very deep, but quite apart from those relationships complicated and profound, tangled in their beings, from which each came to it, a level that was neither sexually intuitive nor that of friendship.
The circumstances of the lives backed up behind them each had lived so far were an obstacle to the shared references of ordinary friendship. She a middle-class city woman — that was as much decisive as whiteness, ordering the services of her life by telephone or fax, taking for granted a secretary and a bay for her car at the office; his status in his rural community marked — it was not difficult to picture from experience of these places — by neat clothes hanging on a wire and the small pile of books and papers in a shack — what did they share of the familiar, outside the Odensville affair?
His sexuality in late middle-age was no doubt satisfied elsewhere; although it was clear, from the sense even of her reserved persona behind her office desk, that her whiteness would not be taboo for him, or his blackness for her, sex had no part in their perception of each other except that it recognized that each came from a base of sexual and familial relations to a meeting that had nothing to do with any of these. Vera had never before felt — it was more than drawn to — involved in the being of a man to whom she knew no sexual pull. And it was not that she did not find him physically attractive; from the first time he sat across from her desk, his face wide-modelled and firm as polished basalt, his heavy but graceful back as he walked out of a room, his hands resting calmly palm-down on his thighs as he spoke, brought her reassurance she had not known she no longer found elsewhere with anyone. It was as if, in the commonplace nature of their continuing contact through the Foundation, they belonged together as a single sex, a reconciliation of all each had experienced, he as a man, she as a woman.
Chapter 10
Didymus’s left eye flickered open while the other stayed gummed with sleep. In the artificial night when curtains kept out the early morning — she stood, a burglar caught in the act. The eye held her. But this was no intruder: Sibongile off an early plane, the swirl on tarmac coming up in the silence as the taxi that brought her home turned in the empty street.
She released herself. Put down the suitcase. He closed the bleary greeting ashamedly, better pretend to be asleep, drop back into sleep. She drew the suitcase on its wheels across the carpet, fluttered papers and clicked objects against surfaces. Then the waterfall of the shower in the bathroom. The bed dipped to the side as she entered. He knew she wanted him to know she was trying not to wake him: as if she were not there; or had never been away.
He spoke. How was it?
He couldn’t dredge up in his mind where she had been sent, where was it this time, Japan, Libya, not the UN, no. Better not risk how was Qaddafi.
— Ex-tr-a ordinary.—
She lay willing sleep, all she had heard and done alight inside her, could not be extinguished, as he himself had felt when he returned from his missions about which she could not have asked, How was it.
The thick atmosphere of the world of discussion and negotiation came from her hair and skin as smoke clings to the clothing of one who has been in a crowded room. He scented it as a dog sniffs the shoes of its master to trace where he’s been.
She was a stranger and she was as familiar as his own body; that must have been how he was for her, those years when he came and went; if he thought of it at all, he had thought that was how it was; something for women. She slept, suddenly, with a snorting indrawn breath. This body beside him invaded the whole bed, lolled against him. His own felt no stir of desire for it.