Then it occurred to her that she was leaving him. Her interest was exactly the kind displayed to a cousin with whom one has grown up and whom one does not expect to see again for a long time. One clamours to hear everything about the family — for a little while.
When she slept with Med it was merely the signature to a note of absence she had been writing for almost a year.
He was a visiting professor from Lebanon, a remarkably handsome young man who was an expert in these matters, who, in intimate circumstances, would admit to his companion that the constant proximity of “desirable little things” was what most attracted him to the academic life. He was over six feet, thin, hair black and carefully wild and swept back, eyes black and always slightly squinted as if he were looking over stretches of sand for high deeds to perform. He was a T. E. Lawrence Bedouin with an Oxford accent and theatrically exquisite manners. He was always so obviously on the make, so captivated by his charm and indisputable good looks, so dedicated to his vocation, so phony that he was altogether delightful.
Shell allowed him to court her extravagantly for three weeks. He was not in his best form because he really believed her beautiful and this intruded on the perfection of his technique.
He gave her a filigree brooch shaped like a scimitar which he claimed belonged to his mother but which she wouldn’t have accepted if she hadn’t been sure he travelled with a bag of them. She accepted a transparent black nightgown like the ones advertised in the back of Playboy, the kind he seriously believed every American girl coveted — she was delighted with his naïveté.
Deprived of sweet sexual fiat for so long, indeed never having known it, she righteously defended the privilege to make herself sick. And because he was so pretty, so absurd, nothing she did with him could be serious or important. What she knew was going to happen would not really have happened. Except that she needed the dynamite of adultery to blast her life, destroy the rising house.
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
