“What’s the matter with your behind?” he noticed one evening.
I was rubbing where the wall had cut into my thigh and now the blood was pricking back. “Gone to sleep,” was all I said. He went to the kitchen for a bottle of soda. I took it from him to open while I held it out the window, because he was bad at opening bottles and always let them fizzle out over the floor. “Hell, Helen, you’re becoming a rotten wife. You might have put food on.” He had seen the empty stove.
“I was tired.”
“If that job tires you …” He smiled, sighing, pouring out our drinks.
I took my glass in silence.
“Oh, don’t start, now, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “I can’t even joke. If you’re that bored, you can change it. The Department will go on without you. There probably isn’t anything it couldn’t go on without, that Department. It matters so little whether it goes on or not, and whether it goes forward or backward. … — You wanted it badly enough. You pestered me to get it for you, and I told you at the time—” He stopped, looking at me over his drink with annoyance that I felt was more at himself than at me.
Yet I said, watching the way he always sat, one shoe rolled over underneath the sprawl of his leg: “I’m not bored.”
“Disappointed. Well, I’m sorry. I told you it’d be as dull as ditchwater. You might as well sit and knock out brewery orders. Sell ladies’ underwear.”
We said nothing.
His eyes traveled round the room for the ash tray which he expected not to be, and was not, there; he dropped two dead matches into the neck of the empty soda bottle. I stood against the window sill, taking my drink in regular gulps, like medicine.
At last he said suddenly, as if he was giving in to an insistent importunity he had refused to hear: “Oh, come on. Come here—” And his voice was impatient, sullen and pleading, all at once. He drew me down to him awkwardly, pulling at my arm, and we kissed anxiously. When we kissed out of longing his mouth was warm and firm, drawing me in softly; now he tried to impress the kiss upon me so hard that it was not a kiss, but a distinct awareness of certain separate things, his lips, the wetness of his saliva, the sharp edges of his teeth. Yet his eyes were a little dazed, as when we had been kissing in passion, although he looked at me keenly, almost suspiciously, as if to dare the appearance of something he was watching out for. Close to his face, I gazed at him unashamedly, watching him watch me, and the alien quality of this moment between us, the incongruity of it, a moment so detached, lonely and critical that it had no place in the merging exchanges of love, surprised us both in quick guilt at the same instant, as if one, resigning himself to his own untrustworthiness with the regret because of the unquestioned integrity of the other, went to steal a treasure known to both and found the other in the act of stealing it. … He slid his hand over the smooth material that covered my thigh, and smiled with the corner of his mouth. “Pins and needles? Shame. Shame. … I’ll wake it up, this little rump. … These bloody Indians. I spent an hour and a half trying to persuade a Diagonal Street fruit merchant to let a colored family stay on in his house in Vrededorp. He’s got an eviction against them and they can’t find anywhere else to go. After seven years or so. Says he wants the place to turn it into workrooms for his brother who’s a tailor. He can’t find anywhere.” He was looking at his hand on my thigh with close attention, his eyelashes showing against his cheek, his nostrils drawn down toward his mouth, the way an artist regards a composition assembled for a painting. He pressed his fingers gently into the flesh, watching his nails whiten, then slowly relax into pink again. “Quite true of course. Where can an Indian get a shop? He was sorry, but family must come first. If we can find his brother a shop … Swine. Wouldn’t give them even another month.”
After a moment he shook his head and said: “See …?”—placing himself before himself and me.
I knew what he meant; how he had caught himself out, thinking, almost by infection, the way that he fought all day against people thinking. He was annoyed with the landlord because he was being hard and unreasonable: the fact that the man was an Indian had no bearing on the hardness or the unreasonableness.
I gently detached myself from him — I could never bring myself to move away from Paul’s lightest caress abruptly; it was as if I feared always to break something that might never be made intact again — and went to the kitchen. Steak in the refrigerator, two tomatoes, half an avocado pear. Paul had balanced the pip on matchstick supports over a marmalade jar filled with water. The steak looked bright red, tough, long fibered. As I pounded it with the handle of the bread knife to soften it, I saw that the pip had already parted and let one pale string of root down into the water. Nearly half-past seven. You’re a rotten wife, Helen.
As I cooked and all the small noises of cooking rose up around me in the little dark kitchen that smelled always of curry, I thought, It’s funny, we hardly ever talk about marriage now. Neither of us has mentioned it for months. We were going to get married when my parents came back.
Yet I could not imagine it. Moving with mechanical deftness that was not without a certain pleasure in the doing of a number of simple things at once — turning the steak, freeing the eggs from the edge of the pan, keeping an eye on the toast — I said to myself, Feel it; just like this, yet you would be married. Another name; I smiled at this schoolgirl realization of it. The first thing it implies is some sort of common future. And that was what stopped me. I know how we are now, I can go into the next room and put my hands on Paul’s shoulders, speak to him (and at this point I called out absently, Shall I lay the table, or put it on a tray? — No, it’s too hot. On a tray. We can eat outside), but we seem to be living a kind of interim period. I caught my breath in a little gesture of distress to myself, for the difficulty of understanding this feeling that was more knowledge than feeling. How to explain this feeling of not having started; of something in oneself crying in excuse: Wait! We are nowhere, not ready, so many things to be settled, so many things taking our attention, swerving out lives this way and that. … Yet how can human beings wait? Wait to live until an atom bomb explodes, a government is overthrown, a white man knows a black man to be just such another as himself?
Then there would be no world. Human beings cannot wait for historical processes, I thought with dismay and anger. Then why must we. … But the cry comes out, a head lifted from the preoccupation of confusion — Wait! Please wait! Paul throws himself more and more violently into a job in which he believes less and less. So where does that lead? Where does that find a future? It has only a now; it cancels itself out.
It cancels itself out! — I was afraid of this thought I had stumbled on. I was appalled at the frame of it in words.
My mind sought to distract itself from the contemplation of our state; this place where we wished to stay in order to convince ourselves that so much that was in us and our circumstances was temporary, to be overthrown, and then …