It was a house where she had learned to restrain noises signifying pain or pleasure. You choked them back, held them tight in your throat, buried them under blankets or drowned them in noisy water. But tonight the timbers of the house were saturated with the ultrasonic hiss of television and the canned laughter would drown her sobs as well as any pillow. She lay on the bed and cried. There was no pleasure or release in it, only self-hatred and the feeling that you might die from lack of air.
She had felt lonely before, and unwanted before, and even unloved, but she had never felt unnecessary. She was a dec-oration on a poisonous cake. She was like the great bloated whale of a Cadillac that sat on the front lawn and consumed energy and enthusiasm and interest, all for no useful purpose. It was refitted with pleated silk door trim while its body rusted.
She felt his hand and pulled away.
'No, Joel, go away.'
But it was David, his dark eyes full of sympathy, who sat gingerly on the edge of his father's bed.
'Here.' It was a handkerchief.
David had changed his mind about Honey Barbara the night she told the story about the amphetamines.
'This is a story,' she began, 'about a million dollars' worth of amphetamines.' She told the story, as seemed the custom, in the first person. Even Harry did this and it was sometimes confusing because he said 'I' when the 'I' in the story was Vance Joy and once even it was Vance Joy's father, but it was always 'I' in Bogota and New York.
The story was not hers at all; it belonged to her friend Annette Brownlee, or Annette Horses as she was more commonly known, who had once been involved, so she claimed, with this hoard of amphetamines which lay buried still in a city in Europe. Honey Barbara, always cautious about such matters, had changed Europe into South America, and it was just this change of geography which had so enraptured David Joy, who knew by heart the old city of Quito, and when she described the little plastic bags of white powder and the damp underground passages, he went very pale and his eyes contracted as if he had heard someone recite his dreams.
Days later Honey Barbara knew that something had hap-pened, but she never ever guessed that it was Annette Horses' old story about the amphetamines which had caused it. After all, it was only one of the stories in the great repertoire of drug-paranoia stories, which were all a little too real to have any romantic interest for her.
Annette Horses, and therefore Honey Barbara, always ended the story with the claim that she was the only person in the world (only person in the world not in jail) who knew where these drugs were. Yet it was not avarice that made David change his mind about her – he had lived in Palm Avenue long enough to know that a good story always had a little extra romance than real life. ('Every good story should always have at least one tower in it,' Vance Joy had said and, typically, having made the rule to suit a story about a tower, abandoned it in the desert, a puzzling shard that was polished and cared for by his descendants.)
So slowly that it was not at first remarked on, David Joy became polite to Honey Barbara and, once polite, helpful. He helped her to wash dishes and even, on one occasion, weed the vegetable garden, although he loathed the dry too-smooth feeling that settled on his dirty hands and he retired as soon as was politely possible to wash them and rub them with Bettina's Oil of Ulay. He did not go for walks with her like Harry did, or brush (suggestively) past her like Joel did, and he was certainly far too inhibited to ask for Kissing Rights. But he did, in his strange tight whisky voice, talk to Honey Barbara here and there and, at certain quiet times when the others were busy, make some confessions of his plans, his ideas about South America.
She had not discouraged his dreams. Better, she thought, that he got out of that job and actually did something.
He showed her selected sections of his dreams and she saw something black and glistening like oil, but not without beauty. While Joel looked at television she and David some-times looked at the atlas together and she felt pleased that he liked her, for he had seemed so cramped, so tense, so unnatural that she thought about him in the way she thought about Bonsai trees which she always ached to liberate: to gently break their pots, unbind their roots, to take them back into the bush and let them grow. Her pride was that she was good with living things and she liked to see David Joy smile and she was proud to see him become calmer and more confident. At least, she thought, she could do something good at Palm Avenue, and tonight just when everything was so bleak he came and gave her a beautiful handkerchief made from yellow silk.
She lay on her stomach and he touched the muscles around her neck. 'Knotted,' he said softly.
He began to massage them and she was surprised, first that he touched her at all, and second that he massaged her well.
'I did what you said,' he said. 'I went to the workshop at the Zen Inn'.
She felt his fingers breaking up the knots and smiled. She had taught him things he had begun by ridiculing, and she smiled that he had done these things in his secret way, and imagined how they would have handled him in the workshop, seeing him there in his shiny black shoes and expensive grey cardigan.
In her most paranoid moment she would never have imagined that David Joy had mentally rehearsed this moment for the last month, had nightly run over it in his mind, had taken the massage course for this, and only this, reason and moment. He had watched her with a cunning, a furtiveness that, to him, in no way contradicted the feeling of his heart. He had observed her slow collapse and had managed to at once welcome it-and disapprove of Harry for causing it.
'I'll have to sit up here. O.K.'
'O.K.'
He massaged her back, working her spine through her singlet and she was the one who took it off. He went quickly to his room for oil. He massaged beautifully, with great sensitivity, and understood the importance of an uninterrupted stroke as he drew all the tension from her shoulders out through her fingertips.
When he turned her over, her eyes were shut and he gasped, privately behind his frozen face, to see the beauty of her breasts.
'Take your baggies off.'
'I haven't got any other pants on.'
'It's O.K.'
She must have suspected that it right not be O.K., that he right have changed a little, but he had not changed that much, and he was still the same dark-eyed, furtive, inhibited boy who had begun by despising her and wanting her removed; but she was a sucker for massage and he had learnt his lessons well. He did her legs and then her arms and her neck and her stomach, and her breasts and she did not even know by then it was not O.K., but when he worked the fleshy mound of his palms between the petal lips of her vulva her wetness smeared his hand and gave the lie to it.
He had so many dreams, so many fantasies, revenges, loves, schemes, hopes, impossible Eldorados that when he felt this perfumed smear he was awash with emotions and his limbs felt so weak that he fell over trying to remove his clothes.
His body was surprisingly hard but also lithe like a snake in its sinuous movements and she took him into her with a sound which could have been heard as either a whimper or a sigh.
Through all the lovemaking her eyes were shut, and what-ever she saw or thought she kept secret from herself. She felt him quiver and come before she was ready, but he did not stop thrusting and it was then she looked up into the eyes and saw specks of brown, almost gold, gleaming like cats' eyes in sunlight. He asked so desperately for her pleasure that she acted it for him and she dug her hands hard into his back and gave him, in a place that would not show, a bite that would glow sullenly for weeks.
Then she saw – just as, in a milling crowd, one might see a flash of a knife moving from pocket to pocket, just a glimpse the small glint as it catches the sun – a look in his eyes. It was triumph, a cold hard thing, like a spring on the lid of a box. She understood in an instant, that she was a dream he had caught in a net.
Damn you and your dreams. She carefully wiped his penis with the yellow handkerchief then placed the damp silk between her legs lest the marks of her infidelity show on the eiderdown.
She had come to this, this seedy betrayal, and she knew it was time to leave these people, who had such trunk-loads of dreams, ideas and ambitions but never anything in the present, only what would happen one day, and it was time to get away from it and face whatever might be waiting for her at home and hope that it might be as it had been: better and deeper pleasures with smaller, more ordinary things, pleasures so everyday that these people would never see anything in them but tiredness, repetition, discomfort, and no originality at all. The light in the
