inspo/attraction-watershed

“Then I saw your car parked at the motel. And I knew. This thing was on.”

“On?”

“Or did I read you all wrong?”

If this age, forty-five, turned out to be the halfway point of my life, then this moment right now was the exact midpoint. A body rises, reaches an apex, and then falls—but at the apex, the peak, it is perfectly still for a moment. Neither rising nor falling.

“Why did you come back?” he said. “Why are you here?” He waited, his sharp, dark eyes on mine. “You came back for me. You’re here for me.”

“Why would I do that? That’s crazy. That would be crazy.”

He smiled a little, sympathetically. “Yep. But that’s what people do.”

We sat in silence. I wondered if I was misunderstanding. He reached across the table and touched the back of his hand to the back of mine, ever so gently. There weren’t very many ways to take that. Just one, really. [...]

As they watch her go, Bernadette reaches under the table and touches him, softly at first, then more boldly. It’s amazing, she thinks, how you can just do this to people. Like stealing. Luckily, the youngest girls don’t know it.

Jann looks at her and swallows. She decides that he is younger than she thought. She sips her beer, which tastes of smoke, and does not move her hand. “What does this remind you of?” she says.

He shakes his head. Color fills his cheeks.

“Let’s go upstairs,” says Bernadette.

Then there was a silence, and I was happy in the echo of my name. “What’s happening, Valeria?” he asked, without looking at me, still staring at that initial. I said, “I don’t know,” and looked down. He continued, “Shall we be frank? May I speak?” I would have liked to say no, to put on my coat and go, instead I nodded. “I was afraid,” he confessed. I looked up again, surprised, because I had always thought of him as a strong man. “It began about two months ago, when you told me—you remember?—that your family’s financial situation had improved. I asked you, half in jest, if you would abandon me. You answered seriously, instead, as if you had already reflected on this possibility. You said, I remember it well: ‘Not for now.’ ” Immediately I explained to him that I had said that without intending to, maybe instinctively, considering that, if there was no financial reason to work, at home they wouldn’t accept this, my personal activity; on the contrary … He interrupted me: “Yes, I understand. Besides, I myself didn’t give it any weight at the moment. It was later, that Saturday, when we were alone here in the office by chance. Suddenly, while we were working together, I felt an unknown sensation of sweetness and your words came to mind. From then on I began to be afraid, I imagined coming here every morning and not finding you. Maybe because the others—you saw Marcellini?—work only to get their salary and leave, they work with me the way they’d work with anyone. Or maybe because you know everything about the office, and know how much tenacity, how much effort … Or maybe that’s not why,” he added, lowering his voice. “In other words, I was afraid of being alone again, the way I was when I started. Worse, in fact, because today I no longer have that enthusiasm, that anxiety for achievement that sustained me then. I don’t believe in anything anymore, today. There: I understood that here, without you, I would be alone just as I am at home. First I thought it was a moment of weariness—every so often I like to feel sorry for myself … Instead, as the days passed, I understood better what my life would be without you, Valeria. An overwhelming boredom with work seized me, a boredom with life, in fact, a nausea. Do you understand?” I murmured, “Yes, I understand.” And then, after a pause, “It would be like that for me, too.”

“He’s a doctor,” said Meriel. She was about to start explaining about the funeral, the accident, the flight down from Smithers, but the conversation was taken away from her.

“But I’m not here officially, don’t worry,” the doctor said.

“Oh, no,” said Aunt Muriel. “You’re here with her.”

“Yes,” he said.

At this moment he reached across the space between their two chairs and picked up Meriel’s hand, holding it for a moment in a hard grip, then letting it go. And he said to Aunt Muriel, “How could you tell that? By my breathing?”

“I could tell,” she said with some impatience. “I used to be a devil myself.”

‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘I’m not hungry.’ She couldn’t have touched a thing. She just wanted to go on drinking gin with him. She wanted to get slightly squiffy, a thing she ’d never done before in the middle of the day.

She wanted to put her arm through his.

‘It ’s been nice meeting you,’ he said.

‘A bit of luck.’

‘I think so too, Marie.’ He ran his forefinger between the bones on the back of her hand, so gently that it made her want to shiver. She didn’t take her hand away, and when she continued not to he took her hand in his.

The wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.

On Hassanein Bey’s lawn – the grand old man of the 1923 expedition – she walked over with the government aide Roundell and shook my hand, asked him to get her a drink, turned back to me and said, ‘I want you to ravish me.’

Roundell returned. It was as if she had handed me a knife. Within a month I was her lover. In that room over the souk, north of the street of parrots.

I sank to my knees in the mosaic-tiled hall, my face in the curtain of her gown, the salt taste of these fingers in her mouth. We were a strange statue, the two of us, before we began to unlock our hunger. Her fingers scratching against the sand in my thinning hair. Cairo and all her deserts around us.

There was a brief silence and then I asked, 'Why should a woman who's free to do as she pleases sleep with everyone on earth?'

He looked at me severely. 'If a man, a man for whom you might have a little liking, asked you straight out to spend the night with him, would you do it?'

'That depends.'

'On what?'

'On him, on me, on the circumstances.'

'Let's suppose that I asked you now. What then?'

'I don't know.'

I had seen it coming ever since we broached the subject but, nevertheless I was taken by surprise.

“Sit down.” He began to unmake the towers and arrange the pieces on the board. “What’s your favorite color?” Not waiting for her to answer, he said, “I forgot something.”

“What?” Her favorite color was the blue of his robe. He flicked off the light and left the room without replying. Two minutes, six minutes. She raised the blinds so that moonlight crisped the edges of shadows. Time goes slowly, too, she thought, and stood to leave. Then he reappeared. “I thought you went to bed,” she said.