garish. I was wondering why he had insisted that we get into the bathtub. I hadn’t thought it was a good idea, I much prefer the bed and I knew the tub would be too small and uncomfortably hard and ridgy, but I hadn’t objected: I felt I should be sympathetic because of Trigger. However I had taken the bath mat in with me, which softened the ridges.
I had expected Peter to be depressed, but though he wasn’t his usual self he certainly wasn’t depressed. I couldn’t quite figure out the bathtub. I thought back to the other two unfortunate marriages. After the first, it had been the sheepskin on his bedroom floor, and after the second a scratchy blanket in a field we’d driven four hours to get to, and where I was made uneasy by thoughts of farmers and cows. I supposed this was part of the same pattern, whatever the pattern was. Perhaps an attempt to assert youthfulness and spontaneity, a revolt against the stale doom of stockings in the sink and bacon fat congealed in pans evoked for him by his friends’ marriages. Peter’s abstraction on these occasions gave me the feeling that he liked doing them because he had read about them somewhere, but I could never locate the quotations. The field was, I guessed, a hunting story from one of the outdoorsy male magazines; I remembered he had worn a plaid jacket. The sheepskin I placed in one of the men’s glossies, the kind with lust in penthouses. But the bathtub? Possibly one of the murder mysteries he read as what he called “escape literature”; but wouldn’t that rather be someone drowned in the bathtub? A woman. That would give them a perfect bit to illustrate on the cover: a completely naked woman with a thin covering of water and maybe a bar of soap or a rubber duck or a bloodstain to get her past the censors, floating with her hair spread out on the water, the cold purity of the bathtub surrounding her body, chaste as ice only because dead, her open eyes staring up into those of the reader. The bathtub as a coffin. I had a fleeting vision: what if we both fell asleep and the tap got turned on accidentally, lukewarm so we wouldn’t notice, and the water slowly rose and killed us? That would be a surprise for the connection when he came to show his next batch of apartment renters around: water all over the floor and two naked corpses clasped in a last embrace. “Suicide,” they’d all say. “Died for love.” And on summer nights our ghosts would be seen gliding along the halls of the Brentview Apartments, Bachelor, Two Bedroom and Luxury, clad only in bath towels…
I shifted my head, tired of the swans, and looked instead at the curving silver nozzle of the shower. I could smell Peter’s hair, a clean soap smell. He smelled of soap all the time, not only when he had recently taken a shower. It was a smell I associated with dentists’ chairs and medicine, but on him I found it attractive. He never wore sickly-sweet shaving lotion or the other male substitutes for perfume.
I could see his arm where it lay across me, the hairs arranged in rows. The arm was like the bathroom: clean and white and new, the skin unusually smooth for a man’s. I couldn’t see his face, which was resting against my shoulder, but I tried to visualize it. He was, as Clara had said, “good-looking”; that was probably what had first attracted me to him. People noticed him, not because he had forceful or peculiar features, but because he was ordinariness raised to perfection, like the youngish well-groomed faces of cigarette ads. But sometimes I wanted a reassuring wart or mole, or patch of roughness, something the touch could fix on instead of gliding over.
We had met at a garden party following my graduation; he was a friend of a friend, and we had eaten ice- cream in the shade together. He had been quite formal and had asked me what I planned to do. I had talked about a career, making it sound much less vague than it was in my own mind, and he told me later that it was my aura of independence and common sense he had liked: he saw me as the kind of girl who wouldn’t try to take over his life. He had recently had an unpleasant experience with what he called “the other kind.” That was the assumption we had been working on, and it had suited me. We had been taking each other at our face values, which meant we had got on very well. Of course I had to adjust to his moods, but that’s true of any man, and his were too obvious to cause much difficulty. Over the summer he had become a pleasant habit, and as we had been seeing each other only on weekends the veneer hadn’t had a chance to wear off.
However the first time I had gone to his apartment had almost been the last. He had plied me with hi-fi music and brandy, thinking he was crafty and suave, and I had allowed myself to be manipulated into the bedroom. We had set our brandy snifters down on the desk, when Peter, being acrobatic, had knocked one of the glasses to the floor where it smashed.
“Oh leave the damn thing,” I said, perhaps undiplomatically; but Peter had turned on the light, gone for the broom and dustpan, and swept up all the bits of glass, picking the larger ones up carefully and accurately like a pigeon pecking crumbs. The mood had been shattered. We had said goodnight soon afterwards, rather snappishly, and I hadn’t heard from him after that for over a week. Of course things were much better now.
Peter stretched and yawned beside me, grinding my arm against the porcelain. I winced and withdrew it gently from beneath him.
“How was it for you?” he asked casually, his mouth against my shoulder. He always asked me that.
“Marvellous,” I murmured; why couldn’t he tell? One of these days I should say “Rotten,” just to see what he would do; but I knew in advance he wouldn’t believe me. I reached up and stroked his damp hair, scratching the back of his neck; he liked that, in moderation.
Maybe he had intended the bathtub as an expression of his personality. I tried thinking of ways to make that fit. Asceticism? A modern version of hair shirts or sitting on spikes? Mortification of the flesh? But surely nothing about Peter suggested that; he liked his comforts, and besides it wasn’t his flesh that was being mortified: he had been on top. Or maybe it had been a reckless young-man gesture, like jumping into the swimming pool with your clothes on, or putting things on your head at parties. But this image didn’t suit Peter either. I was glad there were no more of his group of old friends left to be married: next time he might have tried cramming us into a clothes closet, or an exotic posture in the kitchen sink.
Or maybe – and the thought was chilling – he had intended it as an expression of
He was twining his fingers in the hair at the nape of my neck. “I bet you’d look great in a kimono,” he whispered. He bit my shoulder, and I recognized this as a signal for irresponsible gaiety: Peter doesn’t usually bite.
I bit his shoulder in return, then, making sure the shower lever was still up, I reached out my right foot – I have agile feet – and turned on the COLD tap.
8
By eight-thirty we were on our way to meet Len. Peter’s mood, whatever it had been, had changed to one which I hadn’t yet interpreted, so I didn’t attempt conversation as we drove along. Peter kept his eyes on the road, turning corners too quickly and muttering under his breath at the other drivers. He hadn’t fastened his seat belt.
He had not been pleased at first when I told him about the arrangements I’d made with Len, even when I said, “I’m sure you’ll like him.”
“Who is he?” he had asked suspiciously. If it wasn’t Peter I would have suspected jealousy. Peter isn’t the jealous type.
“He’s an old friend,” I said, “from college. He’s just got back from England; I think he’s a T. V. producer or something.” I knew Len wasn’t that high on the scale, but Peter is impressed by people’s jobs. Since I had intended Len as a distraction for Peter I wanted the evening to be pleasant.
“Oh,” said Peter, “one of those arts-crafts types. Probably queer.” We were sitting at the kitchen table, eating frozen peas and smoked meat, the kind you boil for three minutes in the plastic packages. Peter had decided against going out for dinner.
“Oh no,” I said, eager to defend Len, “quite the opposite.”
Peter pushed his plate away. “Why can’t you ever
I was hurt: I considered this unfair. I like to cook, but I had been deliberately refraining at Peter’s for fear he would feel threatened. Besides, he had always liked smoked meat before, and it was perfectly nourishing. I was about to make a sharp comment, but repressed it. Peter after all was suffering. Instead I asked, “How was the wedding?”
Peter groaned, leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and gazed inscrutably at the far wall. Then he got up
