Days went by, however, without any word from him. Each time I drove past the house on Tokai Road I slowed down and peered, but caught no sight of him. Nor was he at the supermarket. There was only one conclusion I could come to: he was avoiding me. In a way that was a good sign; but it annoyed me nevertheless. In fact it hurt me. I wrote him a letter, an old-fashioned letter, and put a stamp on it and dropped it in the mailbox. ‘Are you avoiding me?’ I wrote. ‘What need I do to reassure you I want us to be good friends, no more?’ No response.
What I did not mention in the letter, and would certainly not mention when next I saw him, was how I passed the weekend immediately after his visit. Mark and I were at each other like rabbits, having sex in bed, on the floor, in the shower, everywhere, even when poor innocent Chrissie lay wide awake in her cot, wailing, calling for me.
Mark had his own ideas about why I was in such an inflamed state. Mark thought I could smell his girlfriend from Durban on him and wanted to prove to him how much better a — how shall I put it? — how much better a performer I was than she. On the Monday after the weekend in question he was booked to fly to Durban, but he pulled out — cancelled his flight, called the office to say he was sick. Then he and I went back to bed.
He could not have enough of me. He was positively enraptured with the institution of bourgeois marriage and the opportunities it afforded a man to rut both outside and inside the home.
As for me, I was — I choose my words with deliberation — I was unbearably excited at having two men so close to each other. To myself I said, in a rather shocked way, You are behaving like a whore! Is that what you are, by nature? But beneath it all I was quite proud of myself, of the effect I could have. That weekend I glimpsed for the first time the possibility of growth without end in the realm of the erotic. Until then I had had a rather trite picture of erotic life: you arrive at puberty, you spend a year or two or three hesitating on the brink of the pool, then you plunge in and splash around until you find a mate who satisfies you, and that is the end of it, the end of your quest. What dawned on me that weekend was that at the age of twenty-six my erotic life had barely begun.
Then at last I received a reply to my letter. A phone call from John. First some cautious probing: Was I alone, was my husband away? Then the invitation: Would I like to come over for supper, an early supper, and would I like to bring my child?
I arrived at the house with Chrissie in her pram. John was waiting at the door wearing one of those blue-and-white butcher’s aprons. ‘Come through to the back,’ he said, ‘we’re having a braai.’
That was where I met his father for the first time. His father was sitting hunched over the fire as if he was cold, when in fact the evening was still quite warm. Somewhat creakily he got to his feet to greet me. He looked frail, though it turned out he was only sixty-odd. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said, and gave me a nice smile. He and I got on well from the start. ‘And is this Chrissie? Hello, my girl! Come to visit us, eh?’
Unlike his son, he spoke with a heavy Afrikaans accent. But his English was perfectly passable. He had grown up on a farm in the Karoo, I discovered, with lots of siblings. They had learned their English from a tutor — there was no school nearby — a Miss Jones or Miss Smith, out from the Old Country.
In the walled estate where Mark and I lived each of the units came with a built-in barbecue in the back courtyard. Here on Tokai Road there was no such amenity, just an open fire with a few bricks around it. It seemed stupid beyond belief to have an unguarded fire when there was going to be a child around, particularly a child like Chrissie, not yet steady on her feet. I pretended to touch the wire grid, pretended to cry out with pain, whipped my hand away, sucked it. ‘Hot!’ I said to Chrissie. ‘Careful! Don’t touch!’
Why do I remember this detail? Because of the sucking. Because I was aware of John’s eyes on me, and therefore purposely prolonged the moment. I had — excuse me for boasting — I had a nice mouth in those days, very kissable. My family name was Kiš, which in South Africa, where no one knew about funny diacritics, was spelled K-I-S. Kiss-kiss, the girls at school used to hiss when they wanted to provoke me. Kiss-kiss, and giggles, and a wet smacking of the lips. I could not have cared less. Nothing wrong with being kissable, I thought. End of digression. I am fully aware it is John you want to hear about, not me and my schooldays.
Grilled sausages and baked potatoes: that was the menu these two men had so imaginatively put together. For the sausages, tomato sauce from a bottle; for the potatoes, margarine. God knows what offal had gone into the making of the sausages. Fortunately I had brought along a couple of those little Heinz jars for the child.
I pleaded a ladylike appetite and took only a single sausage on my plate. With Mark away so much of the time, I found I was eating less and less meat. But for these two men it was meat and potatoes and nothing else. They ate in the same way, in silence, bolting down their food as if it might be whipped away at any moment. Solitary eaters.
‘How is the concreting coming along?’ I asked.
‘Another month and it will be done, God willing,’ said John.
‘It’s making a real difference to the house,’ his father said. ‘No doubt about that. Much less damp than there used to be. But it’s been a big job, eh, John?’
I recognized the tone at once, the tone of a parent eager to boast about his child. My heart went out to the poor man. A son in his thirties, and nothing to be said for him but that he could lay concrete! How hard for the son too, the pressure of that longing in the parent, the longing to be proud! If there was one reason above all why I excelled at school, it was to give my parents, who lived such lonely lives in this strange country, something to be proud of.
His English — the father’s — was perfectly passable, as I said, but it was clearly not his mother tongue. When he brought out an idiom, like No doubt about that, he did so with a little flourish, as if expecting to be applauded.
I asked him what he did. (Did: such an inane word; but he knew what I meant.) He told me he was a bookkeeper, that he worked in the city. ‘It must be quite a schlep, getting from here to the city,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t it suit you better if you lived closer in?’
He mumbled some reply that I did not catch. Silence fell. Evidently I had touched on a sore spot. I changed the subject, but it did not help.
I had not expected much from the evening, but the flatness of the conversation, the long silences, and something else in the air too, discord or bad temper between the two of them — these were more than I was prepared to stomach. The food had been dreary, the coals were turning grey, I was feeling chilly, darkness had begun to fall, Chrissie was being attacked by mosquitoes. Nothing obliged me to go on sitting in this weed-infested backyard, nothing obliged me to participate in the family tensions of people I barely knew, even if in a technical sense one of them was or had been my lover. So I picked Chrissie up and put her back in her cart.
‘Don’t leave yet,’ said John. ‘I’ll make coffee.’
‘I must go,’ I said. ‘It’s well past the child’s bedtime.’
At the gate he tried to kiss me, but I wasn’t in the mood for it.
The story I told myself after that evening, the story I settled on, was that my husband’s infidelities had provoked me to such an extent that to punish him and salvage my own amour propre I had gone out and had a brief infidelity of my own. Now that it was evident what a mistake that infidelity had been, at least in the choice of accomplice, my husband’s infidelity appeared in a new light, as probably a mistake too, and thus not worth getting upset about.