A plea, a cry.
— Oh perfectly well, Ma! I can look after myself!—
— I don’t mean that. Anyway, I don’t think you do, you have someone who looks after you, doesn’t she? Husband, wife, whatever she is. You’ve just said there’s never a fair division of labour.—
— All right. Granted. Of course you can’t know of the other dependencies, how that works between her and me, just as it does between your kind of couple.—
Vera was hearing her out with the gathering silence of a determination to speak, against reluctance to reveal oneself. — I mean the love-making.—
— The love-making! — The amused, coaxing tone; her mother might have been an adolescent timidly seeking information.
— I have to tell you, Annie, I can’t understand how you can prefer it without a man. — Vera got up and went to close the glass doors that led into the house. In privacy she turned passionately. — Without a man!—
— It’s wonderful. Let me tell you. A woman is like you, she knows what you feel, what makes you feel, and so — she does — instinctively she does what you want, she’s feeling what you’re feeling, at the same time. It’s not like that with a man, who wants his kind of stimulation while you want yours. Oh I suppose you’ve never made love with a woman, for all your independence—
— Never felt in the slightest attracted to one. Though you know, you’ve seen, I’m affectionate with a few women friends—
— But it’s men you like. Always men— There was an edge of judgment, the twinge of an old injury in the smile. — I suppose you’ve had a few more lovers I don’t know about. You’ve experienced nothing but men, men.—
— Yes. I love men. I mean exactly what I’m saying: how can there be love-making without the penis. I don’t care what subtleties of feeling you achieve with all those caresses — and when you caress the other partner you’re really caressing yourself, aren’t you, because you’re producing in her, you say, exactly what you yourself experience — after all that, you end up without that marvellous entry, that astonishing phenomenon of a man’s body that transforms itself and that you can take in. You can’t tell me there’s anything like it! There’s nothing like it, no closeness like it. The pleasure, the orgasms — yes, you may produce them just as well, you’ll say, between two women. But with the penis inside you, it’s not just the pleasure — it’s the being no longer alone. You exchange the burdens of self. You’re another creature.—
Annie was fascinated by and yet moved to retreat from her mother. — The beast with two backs.—
Vera looked at her with a flash of anguish. — Annie, what did I do to put you off men?—
— What makes you always think what I am is determined by you! It’s against all your principles vis-à-vis other people, isn’t it.—
It was not only the door that closed them off from the house and its familiars, their separate existences. They had moved into a territory that might never be re-entered, never found again. As voices that come out of the mouth of a medium, they spoke with the dreamy groping of the subconscious, silences aloud between them.
Coming into the kitchen — the woman with wet tendrils of hair fresh from the bath at One-Twenty-One taken to disguise the roused flush of love-making — startled, because she was so far out of mind, to see the schoolgirl at the table with a mug of cocoa, doing her homework: —Did I disgust you?—
— No no. I was sorry for you, I don’t know why. I wanted to comfort you. Seeing you come home, fucked out. I thought you’d come to the age when you’d need peace instead of what you were doing. What age! At seventeen anyone over forty seemed old to me. — The sense of a conspiracy unacknowledged in the past; neither brought up the name of Ben. — Tell me. We disgust you — Lou and I.—
— Of course you don’t.—
— No ‘of course’ about it. Tell me.—
— Not disgust—
—‘So long as I’m happy’, mnh? — what all the parents deprived of grandchildren swallow bravely and say.—
— No — I don’t disapprove, I don’t consider what you do is wrong. It’s just the penis. I have to say it. I regret for you — no penis.—
Annie gave the smile that acknowledged: you mean well, and they both laughed. — What about Ivan? With the penis, and the grandchild, it still didn’t work out.—
— Ah, it doesn’t solve everything, I’ll admit—
— But it’s the essential.—
— For me, yes.—
— So you see— Someone was rattling at the glass door, the eager black face of Thandeka was distorted through it. Annie thrust in quickly, their eyes already on the door: —You really have the same view as Dad, for him that thing’s also the essential, because he has it, he can’t bear to think of any woman rejecting what’s gained for him the treasure of his life, you, you— Thandeka burst out onto the stoep, her face the standard-bearer of the old man’s presence back in the house, and the lifeline between Annie and Vera fell before alarm that some crisis in his state had occurred.
But it was only that Vera was wanted on the telephone. Thandeka, so close to the drama of death, seemed to transfer a disproportionate sense of events to everything, even a telephone call.
Sally Maqoma: she stuttered interruptions through Vera’s expressions of pleasure at hearing from her again after many-weeks and cut short the exchange of circling civilities by which friends excuse neglect of one another. She had something to speak to Vera about, it could not be discussed over the phone. Vera felt the valves of her heart exposed, her blood vessels lying open from the time and place with Annie from which she had just emerged. Sally’s voice came as a disembodied assault loud in her ear. She recoiled, distrait. She explained that her father in-law had had another stroke, nurses in the house, confusion — could whatever it was possibly wait a day or two?
Without a man.
Bereft.
To imagine that state.
Why, if Renoir could say he painted with his prick, has no woman ever had the guts to say I live by my vagina? Love affairs as a neat motif, a sprig recurring woven in the textile of her life — it’s been nothing like that. She is the one who, she understands, sent her soldier husband a photograph ringed in revenge — that was it; she has never forgotten or forgiven him premature ejaculation. That’s the fact of it. The only time he didn’t end up by himself like an excited little boy was after they had parted for divorce. A lover only in name; a father who has never known he is one. Wasn’t that the real reason for abandoning him, never mind all the others more acceptable she gave to all around her: his conservatism, his love of sport that she didn’t share, the mistake, for which neither was to blame, of wartime marriages between people too young to commit themselves.
Wasn’t that the real reason for the passion for Bennet; not his remarkable beauty nor his attraction as an artist, a creator in clay, but his ability discovered on the mountain holiday to sustain what the other had failed at, to stay within her and exchange the burden of self.
Make the beast with two backs.
The emblem under which her Hitler Baby remains with her is that of the first image that drew her attention to his flesh. As he sat in her office one of his gestures brushed against a wire letter basket and loosened a scab from a scratch; he ignored it while she was aware of a trickle of blood below his rolled-up sleeve tracing a hieroglyph down his forearm — a warm message to her.
Spending on silk shirts and gold weights while the schoolgirl is kept short of clothes and once from a school camp wrote a pleading note because she hadn’t had money to buy toothpaste and was ashamed to keep using other girls’; she must understand her parents are not rich, she must not be indulged.