Over whose hips was she pulling the flimsy black costume?
She could see her hair through the material.
In the mirror of a bathroom in the hotel on upper Broadway. Steel-rimmed, round-cornered mirror. Whose body?
Med had reserved the room for a week. The critical week. He had never spent so much money on an adventure.
The bathroom was brilliantly clean. She had been frightened that it would have a naked bulb on a cord, cracked porcelain, hair on old soap. Is this Shell? she inquired blankly of her image, not because she wanted to know, or even open the subject, but because that question was the only form her modesty could assume.
At first Med couldn’t speak. He had made a mistake, for men of his character the most painful mistake, occurring once or twice in a lifetime and crushing the heart: he might have loved her. The room was dim. He had arranged the lighting, tuned his transistor radio to the classical-music station. She seemed to create her own silence, her own shadow to stand in. She was not part of his setting.
“Isn’t that the Fifth?” he said finally.
“I don’t know.”
She knew which symphony it was. The answer she spoke was in response to the question before the mirror.
“I believe it is. Da, da da da da. Of course it is.”
She wished he would begin.
She felt no desire. This both pleased and pained her. Desire she would hoard for a lover. Med was not her lover. Desire would have made what she was doing important, and it was not important, it must not be important. A weapon, yes, but not a special night in her heart. Not with this clown. Yet, and this was the pain, he was a man and surely she should long for only someone to hold her after all this time. She had dreamed love, bites, surrender, but all she felt now was interest. Interest! Perhaps Gordon was her true mate after all.
Med relied on a Peeping Tom survey of her body to inflame him.
It fascinated her to see a man overwhelmed with desire.
Oh Shell, cries Breavman as he learns of the hotel, as she tells him in the voice she uses when she must tell him everything. Shell, fly away. Heap flowers in the stone fountain. Fight with your sister. Not you with the Expert Fool, in a room like the ones Breavman built. Not you who wore white dresses.
As Med lay beside her, silently cataloguing what he had gathered, Shell succumbed to a wave of hatred which made her grit her teeth. She did not know where to attach it. First she tried Med. He was too simple. Besides for the first time since she had known him he seemed genuinely sad, not theatrically melancholy. She guessed he was walking through a museum of dead female forms. She absently massaged the nape of his neck. She tried to hate herself but all she could hate was her silly body. She hated Gordon! She was here because of him. No, that was not true. But still she hated him and the truth of this threw open her eyes, wide in the dark.
She inspected herself as she dressed. Her body seemed an interesting alien twin, a growth which she didn’t own, like a wart on one’s finger.
Breavman bites his lip as he listens.
“I shouldn’t tell you this.” Shell says.
“Yes.”
“It wasn’t me. It wasn’t the me you’re holding now.”
“Yes it was. It is.”
“Does that hurt you?”
“Yes,” he says, kissing her eyes. “We have to bring everything to each other. Even the times we are corpses.”
“I know what you mean.”
“I know you do.”
If I can always decipher that, Breavman believes, then nothing can happen to us.
Armed with the betrayal, Shell approached her husband.
One needs weapons to hunt those close. Foreign steel must be introduced. The world in the married house is too spongy, familiar. The pain, present in plenty, is absorbed. Other worlds must be ushered in to cut the numb.
Gordon was running hot water over a box of strawberries. He knew it would happen like this. Auden had said so. After her first few words he seemed not to hear what she said. He had always known that this was the way it would come.
He answered, “I see” and “Of course I understand” and “I see” several more times. He kept his hand between the hot and the cold. Preserving the colourful wrapper intact assumed great importance.
Then suddenly she was leaving him. His life was changing right now.
“I want to live by myself for a little while.”
“A little while?”
“I don’t know how long.”
“In other words it could be a very long time.”
“Perhaps.”
“In other words you have no intention of returning.”
“I don’t know, Gordon. Can’t you see I don’t know?”
“You don’t know but you have a pretty good idea.”
“Gordon, stop. You won’t get anything out of me like that. You never have.”
At this point it occurred to Shell that when she had begun to speak to him she had not intended to leave but to give him a last chance.
“Stay here.”
He turned off the tap, pushed the box with deliberation into a corner of the sink as though it were a chessman, and wiped his hands. It was an ugly voice he used. The words were less than a plea and more than a proposition.
“Stay. Don’t break up our marriage over this.”
“Is it so little?”
“Women have affairs,” he said without philosophy.
“I was with a man,” she said incredulously.
“I know.” And the softer: “It’s not the end of the world.”
But she wanted it to be the end of the world. She wanted a mark on the forehead to prove the union was rotten. That he was fighting for his life was difficult
