My one hand lightly touched against the texture of Paul’s jacket and the other held his, a warm hand, not thin, in which you felt the bones. He said: “I saw a friend of yours today. Joel Aaron.”
“Oh, where?” I asked with pleasure, hardly knowing what he said.
“Bumped him in town.” When he wanted to talk, he had to press his chin back and down away from me, looking at me along his small nose with the beautifully curved nostrils. “I didn’t know you knew him. But he seems to know all about you.”
I said: “He’s the best friend I’ve ever had—” It sounded lame and almost insincere. I arched back from Paul a little to give what I had put so poorly the emphasis of my look.
But he was looking at me, smiling, ignoring my look. “Is he, is he. …” he murmured, and drew me back to him.
“Yes …,” I said, and it no longer seemed to matter what we had been talking about. Under the flow of cold air from the vents he dropped his head and kissed me delicately and passionately.
We moved round and round, slowly, among the others. I was sunk in the voluptuous relief of leaning against his body: ah, how I wanted this, I kept saying to myself, how I waited for this from you. A kind of midnight frenzy was on the place now. Smoke made the dark mist and the candlelight radiance, and the lonely young men were a little drunk. Two traffic policemen had wandered in and, with some hazy notion of keeping in with the law, were being made much of. Marcel carried a demijohn of wine above the crush; the one policeman put his foot, with the calf gleaming militarily in its fine high boot, up on a bench. The other man stood jeering amorously with a girl who had put his peaked cap on her huge head of curls that danced like springs as she moved. As we passed we heard his deep voice speaking a coy Afrikaans, egging, insinuating.
Everyone looked at two girls who had begun to sway before each other, each holding the gaze of the other like cocks about to fight. A woman danced with her whole body droopingly suspended from her arms about a man’s neck, her face sunk and eyes closed.
I smiled to Paul in the dark half-jokingly: “We’re just like the rest.”
He said: “Of course.” And I was suddenly pleased; I felt a kind of loyal partisanship with the crude advances of the traffic policemen, the lonely determination for gaiety with which men without girls passed the metallic-tasting wine, the hoarse, sentimental voice of the gramophone — the whole half-pathetic, half-greedy demand of the place. It seemed to me that all we wanted was music, someone to hold, a little talk. It made all human beings seem so simple; it was the touch of love that sounded so impossible in books and speeches. The one touch of love, of regret for barriers erected, misunderstanding, sneers and indifference, without which all intentions came to nothing. But although it was needed there so badly, it was not a thing that always attended or even, paradoxically, survived the conscious efforts of human beings to reach one another. Look at Mary, I thought; I tried hard with Mary. They try with justice, with declarations of human rights, with the self-abnegation of Christ. Love one another. — It becomes nonsense when you decree it. An absolute, like black and white, that has no corresponding reality in the merging, changing outlines of living.
When it does come, it comes irrelevantly; out of the unworthy cheap atmosphere of a place like this; out of the deep receptivity of a personal emotion. But it doesn’t matter where it comes from. Gods come like that, not in the places prepared for them, but appearing suddenly among the rabble. I only wished it would last, that I could take it with me away from the warmth of Paul and these faces pitiful with the strange strength of the desire to assert life in pleasure.
We went up the stairs and into the quiet street. We could not even hear the music. The night was clear but the blue light of the police station showed as if it burned through a fog. His short, self-possessed profile fascinated me with its detachment. When he had kissed me he said: “I wanted to do that properly,” and we both swayed a little, like people who have just stepped out of some unfamiliar motion, a swing or a boat. I drew his head down and, in the street, kissed him again, pulling the flesh of his lower lip through my mouth with soft ferociousness. When I let him go he gripped my arms with a little shake of pride and gratification, smiling at me. And all his gaiety and restlessness swept back to him with a boast. “Let’s get them some hot dogs,” he cried. “Come, there’s a stand about two blocks away.” We ran as if the air were nipping our heels.
Back in the Cellar again, the warm exhausted air burned against our cool cheeks. The others were hungry and exaggeratedly delighted with the hot dogs. Isa held hers away from her dress as if its steamy heat were dripping and called to me: “You shouldn’t let Paul drag you around the streets. He could have gone on his own.” But I only said, with the swagger in my voice of the child who has been tumbling out in the cold to the grownup who huddles at the fire: “But it’s a beautiful night, really — I could have walked miles.”
Later I smelled her perfume and found she was beside me. I said: “Do you want another? There’s a half left here—” I felt her looking at me appraisingly in the dark. “Yes,” she said to me, “you’re the kind. You’re a giver. You’ll pile everything on the bonfire. But don’t marry him.” She was a little drunk, but I felt also that she had caught from the atmosphere of the place, as I had, a sympathy and a softening toward the pain and danger of being human. So I was not annoyed or offended at her presumption. I merely mumbled something foolish about a gypsy’s warning. “Cassandra,” she said irritably, on a rising note, “Cassandra tipping it straight from the horse’s mouth. …”
Herby had his head on the big blonde’s shoulder; he had to sit up very straight to get it there, because he was much shorter than she. Jenny was begging John in a low, insistent, reasonable voice to come home. And Paul was offering some wine to a straggling group of burly young men who had hailed him and now drew him admiringly into their midst with the air of showing off in the flesh someone about whom they often spoke among themselves. They were heavily built, and the two blond ones had beards on their broad faces. They listened with smiles of anticipatory pleasure while he spoke: he was repeating some anecdote, apparently at their request; now he was mimicking someone; he shook his head and gave a quick twist to his shoulders, tossing the plaudits of their laughter away like the butt of a cigarette.
I watched him and suddenly Isa’s idea of me excited me; the warning, if that was what it was, aroused in me in the desire to stake my whole life, gather up from myself everything I had stored against such a moment, and expend it all on Paul. Everything on the bonfire. I stood up. Our heads were still in the smoke, the music and the voices, but a stiffening cold was coming up from the cement floor of Marcel’s Cellar, the cold of the earth that comes with the early hours of morning.
Chapter 22
It was on a Sunday afternoon that we made love for the first time. I remember the deserted silence coming up from the streets where we had forgotten to pull the curtains; dawning on me slowly as I opened my eyes and saw, past the corner of the old eiderdown that covered us and the piece of feather that flattened every time I breathed, Paul’s room. I could see his shirt on the floor; one shoe. My skirt and the light heap of my stockings thrown down as only a man would handle them, irritated with their clinging substancelessness, snagging them on the wood of the chair. My sweater I had so often worn in our house in Atherton. Perhaps the last time I had had it on was there.