Bewilderment and a sense of confusion close to fear came to me so strongly that I stood there, unable to go through even the mechanical motions of hanging away my clothes, finding something for supper. This feeling, like an overwhelming lethargy, seemed to come from the room itself; all the ordinary things I had used, taken and put down thoughtlessly in my happiness, filled me with depression. The lamp, the faded quilt, the yellow cushion I had bought, the Egyptian cotton hanging, the ebony mask from the Congo in whose mouth there hung the flower I had stuck there last week, now dead, dangling like a cigarette stub. Where is he? How will one half of him spend his life working at what the other half opposes? How will he do it? How can you do it? Where will he be himself, all the time? The mask. The quilt. Calendar ringed in red (last month’s date so that I shall make no mistake this month). Stitched Egyptians with their long cold eyes. Plant in pot that didn’t let anything grow. Nothing has anything to do with anything else, I thought. How can he do it. What will become of him, while he does …
And at the same time, my mother’s mouth saying, Filthy beasts. The living room with the cushions plumped and the curtains drawn and the clock striking alone, like a sleeper speaking suddenly in a dream.
Nothing fits, I repeated to myself. Ridiculous, one side; horrible, hurtful, the other. But of course it was ridiculous. I could see my mother and me in that scene now and of course it was ridiculous, flinging about like puppets. Of course it was ridiculous. …
Paul said, with the attention of his eye, his mind sunk deeply somewhere else: “What is in there, anyway.”
I looked at the parcels. “Some things they brought me. Put them on top of the bathroom cupboard.” I felt I should never open them.
The next day I was walking out of a theater booking office during my lunch hour when I came face to face with Joel Aaron: with a little start of horror, as if Atherton, the Mine, my mother, had suddenly opened before me in the Johannesburg street. I covered this recoil which even in the second that I knew it must be showing on my face shamed me, by pretending an exaggerated surprise. — That in itself was unconvincing, I realized as I feigned it, because why should I find it a shock to meet someone whom I knew to be fre quently in town? — But one awkwardness leads to another, and I could only say with an effusiveness which did not belong with Joel, and did just exactly what I wished not to do: put him in the category of a stranger: “What are you doing now? — Why don’t I ever see you!”
He stood there looking up and down my face as if he were measuring it, faintly smiling. He was getting heavier in the shoulders; he wore the kind of jacket he had always worn, shabby or merely nondescript, one could never decide. He said absently: “Drawing houses.”
“Joel! You graduated at the beginning of the month.” Shame and regret stunned me like a slap across the mouth. I did not know how to express it. I stood there turning the tickets in my hand. He shrugged, smiling.
“I should have been there. Oh, I wanted to come. …” But of course the notice of the graduation ceremony had been in the papers. He knew and I knew that I had known about it.
I kept saying, “… Oh, how could I have … I wanted to, really I meant to … I shouldn’t have missed …”
He did not answer, but only went on smiling quietly, as if waiting for me to finish.
My protests petered out into silence between us. People passing jostled against our shoulders so that we seemed to be bobbing toward and away from one another. At once he said over this: “How do you like the work in the Welfare Department? Is it giving you some satisfaction?”
“It’s not much, you know. Nothing more than a typist really. How did you know?”
“I was in the shop on Tuesday, and they told me you weren’t working there any more.”
There was another silence. I pushed back a strand of hair that kept blowing down over my eye with a gesture that, I suppose, to someone who knew me well, was particularly my own: I have always liked my hair tight and smooth. I saw his eyes travel with my hand; come back to rest directly on my face again. I had the curious feeling that I was apparently always to have with him, no matter what distance of time or commitment to others came between our meetings, that he saw in me what no one else did, things, even ordinary, trivial, physical differences of which only I myself was aware. For instance, I felt now that he noticed that I had not penciled my eyebrows that morning (they were heavy, for a red-haired person, but too light in color) and that under his eyes I was tautening the muscle at the left side of my mouth that would show where I had got the faint line, from cheek to mouth, that I had surprised on my face lately.
“It really isn’t much of a job at all …,” I said again.
“Paul’s must be pretty damnable now, though,” he said. It was a polite and sympathetic observation that anyone who read the papers and knew Paul might make. But again I had that feeling of the prescience of Joel; something disturbing, that I felt in some obscure way was a comfort, but that I was impelled to struggle against.
Now suddenly I was impatient to get away from him.
“With his temperament, it’s likely to make him schizoid.” I turned the question into the exaggeration of a joke. We went on to talk inconsequentially for a few moments. — He must promise to come and see us (he wrote down the telephone number on a cigarette box; I wrote his — he was sharing a flat with Rupert Sack — on the theater tickets). — That was a good play; he had seen it on Saturday night. His job was in the nature of marking time. … — Oh, he didn’t quite know yet: maybe Rhodesia, after all. Maybe Europe, and lately he’d been thinking seriously about Israel. …
“Well—” I made the little shrugging gesture of collecting myself to go. “Yes …” He pushed the cigarette box into his pocket and touched me momentarily, so lightly it might have been by mistake, on the elbow.
As I turned, and he was already a little distance from me, I suddenly called back: “I was there yesterday. I spent the week end. …”
He nodded. “Been away, I know. … See them about again now I suppose.” And he nodded again, deliberately, lingeringly, as if the nod were some message he must get to me silently over the distraction of the passing people.
So we both stood a moment arrested in the current of the pavement. And then he was gone and I turned quickly and hurried across the street walking fast in the kind of burst of release. The refrain went foolishly inside me: I don’t want to think of the place, I don’t want to be reminded of it.
But when the relief of fast movement was checked and I stood, panting a little, in the lift going up to my desk in the Welfare offices, remorse, the real pain of wanting back the chance to do something left undone, that I do not think I had ever felt in my life before, filled me with distress; distress maddening and sad in its uselessness. I should have gone to his graduation, how was it I did not go when I had wanted to go so much: now I felt so much how I had wanted to go. How could I have ignored this—forgotten. Yes, I had forgotten. Now I could not believe what was true: that I had forgotten. The thought of it, like awareness of a lapse of memory, an aberration of which you have no recollection; as if there is discovered to be another person in you who mysteriously wrests you from yourself and takes over, thrusting you back to yourself in confusion when the fancy takes it — the thought of it made me sick with dismay. I had the instinct to clutch, searching at my life, like a woman suddenly conscious of some infinitesimal lack of weight about her person that warns her that something has gone, dropped — perhaps only a hairpin, a button — but maybe a jewel, a precious letter.