“I know I can tell you this,” Marc said, “because you don’t have a narcissistic disorder. Otherwise I would never have told you. But people like us, who love each other very much, don’t have to keep secrets from each other.”
“No,” the mother said.
Xavier looked at the dancing letters in his book. He thought about Awromele; he thought: Save me, Awromele, save me. Get me out of here. Get me out of here forever. Life is wonderful, but not here. Not here, never again.
“I’m going to bed,” his mother said. “I’m tired.”
“Wait a minute,” Marc said, rolling up his sleeves for the umpteenth time. “I want you to know that I’m not going to leave you. I want to stay here. I will never leave you. Nothing has to change. Between us. I’m staying with you because of the boy, but that doesn’t matter, I’m staying with you, that’s the important thing. I love him, so I also love you. You understand? I love everything that comes crawling out of you, and I would be so happy if more things came out of you, something that was mine as well.”
“I need to go to bed,” the mother said again. “It’s late.” She looked at her watch. A present from her late husband, she’d replaced the strap only recently.
She got up and took the thermos and the cups to the kitchen.
Before going to bed, she came back into the living room, where her son was still sitting across from Marc. “By the way, did you know about this, Xavier?” she asked.
Xavier saw the mother, whom he had wished to spare all grief, whom he had wished to spare the suffering of the world. But he couldn’t give up Awromele for her sake. That would be too much. That would be too great a sacrifice. Between him and Awromele stood the mother. “About what?”
“About this. About what Marc just said. Did you know about it?”
“A little,” Xavier said. “I don’t know any more than you do. I don’t know—”
“You don’t know what?”
Xavier shrugged, and looked at his book. His freshly healed sex organ usually began hurting around this time of night.
“What don’t you know, Xavier?”
“Nothing, nothing really.”
The mother crossed her arms. She looked at the two men in her house.
One of them she had made — the word made her laugh — the other she had met in a museum, at a cocktail party, he had started talking to her, she had looked at him willingly. That was what she had told herself to be that evening, willing.
“Why my son?” she asked. “I mean, there are so many men in Basel, so many young men. Why my son?”
The mother’s boyfriend looked at her son. All hope was longing, but why did longing have to be so complicated? He didn’t understand that. Why couldn’t he long for her? That would be simpler, and he had tried, he had tried so hard, even when he broke her nose he had been trying, he had been working on longing for her.
“That’s love,” Marc said at last. “Love is inexplicable, but beautiful. Don’t you think? So huge, so all-embracing. So vast, so mysterious — that, too, my sweet, so terribly mysterious.”
So filthy, he had felt like adding, so godforsaken filthy, filthy as a corruption scandal that will never completely be unraveled, filthy as a gas chamber from which the corpses have just been raked out with a hook. Yes, his love was filthy, he had always known that, and now he had reconciled himself to it. True love was filthy.
The mother nodded distractedly.
In the bathroom, she cleaned her face with a cotton ball.
Xavier came into the bathroom and put a hand on her shoulder. But she took his hand and laid it on the sink.
“Mama,” he said, “I really don’t know anything about this. I don’t know what’s gotten into him. You didn’t know about it, either, when you brought him home, did you?”
Xavier waited for a reply, and when it didn’t come he squeezed some toothpaste onto his toothbrush.
The mother crawled into bed. She couldn’t sleep, so she took a sleeping pill. It didn’t help. Marc had come in and lain beside her. He had tried to kiss her, but she had pushed his head away gently. “Not now,” she had said. “Not now.”
“I don’t mean anything bad by it,” he had answered. “I still think you’re pretty and attractive. I don’t want you to think that I suddenly have no more sexual feelings for you. If it had been possible, I would have liked to have a child with you. I would love to make a child with you. My dream is to have a child.”
Then he had stroked her arm, but she pushed away his hand as well. All she said was: “It’s still possible, just barely.”
In the middle of the night, she got up and went to the kitchen. She stood there silently, for minutes. Her own breathing was all she could hear. In the semidarkness, she looked at the dishes lined up in the dish rack. She leaned on the counter.
It surprised her that she still didn’t feel a thing. She tried to cry, but couldn’t. All she felt was a coldness, a repressed rage, not even that, the residue of rage and eternal bitterness. She took a cup and filled it with water from the tap. She took a couple of sips. Then she pulled her pajama pants down to her knees and, still in the semidarkness, looked at her thighs.
The flesh was white.
She took a fork out of the dish rack. Why didn’t she feel anything? She didn’t understand — she had every reason to feel something, everyone felt something. The only thing she could catch herself feeling was a vague sense of being cold, like when you’ve taken a walk outside in the winter too lightly dressed.
She put the fork back in the rack.
That she had borne a child, she hated that. The rest not, the rest was over, a closed book that had left nothing unpleasant in its wake.
She moved her hand over her left leg. Her hands were cold and dry.
“Cold hands and a warm heart,” someone had said to her once. She couldn’t remember who, maybe Marc, that evening at the museum, that evening when she had wanted to be willing, nothing but willing.
She picked up the bread knife, Italian design, purchased in Verona with her late husband. A little pubic hair was sticking out from beneath her panties. It had once been a different color, lighter — curlier, too — she thought. She wasn’t sure. She tried to picture her pubic hair as it had been twenty years ago, but couldn’t.
Using her right hand, she drove the bread knife into her left thigh, close to her cunt.
She pulled the knife out of the white flesh. The blood flowed slowly, almost too slowly in her eyes, but gradually it began flowing more quickly. The edge of her panties and a wisp of pubic hair turned red.
She thought about the Committee of Vigilant Parents, about her marriage, the bridge club, the trips to Italy.
The pain was a relief.
Pain is always a relief.
She washed the bread knife and put it back in the rack.
The blood dripped down her leg and onto the pajama pants that were drooping around her ankles. She took off the pants; blood spots are hard to get out of polyester.
Now the blood was on the kitchen floor. That was a matter of a little mopping.
Never again will anyone come right inside me again, she thought, no one will ever come right inside me again. I am Yours, and Yours alone.
She wasn’t sure who You was, God or You-Know-Who. Or maybe a combination of the two.
Our Genes
THE WEEKS FOLLOWING Marc’s confession went by in relative harmony. There was no more talk of his love for Xavier; there was no more talk of love at all. Marc occasionally urged the mother to make a baby with him, proposals the mother refused politely. “Not yet,” she said. “It’s all still so new.” She had never told Marc the truth about her age, and she wasn’t planning to now. In the course of time, she had chipped off a few years here and there. First two, then three, now it was more than five. And after her divorce she had undergone a rejuvenation cure. She looked good for her age. Almost no wrinkles, firm buttocks, no drooping flesh. She felt young. On the street she easily overtook women twenty years her junior.