Heavy Water and Other Stories

so on.

“You and your bleck girl seem to be made for each other.”

“We do. We are. Capital cocktails, these. Blimey, though. Bit strong, aren’t they? Feeling rather tight. It’s loosening my tongue. Rock, can I ask you something? Why do I know it’s going to end in tears? Why do I feel all this anxiety? And all this guilt?”

“Because you’re getting something for nothing. Yet again.”

Rodney’s eyes widened. He thought about the first time: the fraudulent feeling, when he watched her undress. As if he had reached his objective not by normal means (flattery, false promises, lies) but by something worse: black magic, or betrayal. For a moment he had the strange suspicion that she was his cousin, and they were playing doctors.

“Because you’ve bucked the work ethic. Yet again. Oh. I’m seeing Jaguar tomorrow. Have you done something with that money yet?”

“Yes,” said Rodney. He had done something with that money, if you counted counting it and rolling around in it and spending a lot of it on cocaine.

“I’ll check with Jagula. I mean Jaguar. Whew, that last one just hit me.” Rock went on in a smudged voice, “I sometimes feel like a trader in slaves. A white slaver. Onna butlers. Anna nannies. Maybe that’s what’s worrying you. It’s just because she’s bleck.”

Rodney said suddenly, “Blick? No.”

Could that be it? No. No, because he had always felt that she was a woman who carried freedom around with her. On her person. Somewhere in the jaws it seemed to lurk.

Soon afterwards he started to find the bruises.

Nothing florid or fulminant. Just a different kind of dark beneath the dark. The hip, the shoulder, the upper arm. On noticing a new one, Rodney would arrest his movements and attempt to meet her eye—but he never achieved this, and, having faltered, went back to what he was doing before; and afterwards he didn’t smile at her in praise and gratitude, as he usually did, turning instead to the stain on the wall, oval and the color of nicotine, where his head had rested these many months.

He thought he knew something about women and silence. There they would sit before him, the wives, engaged in self-conscious small talk as he made his preliminary sketches—as he situated the human posture against the jut and rake of the chair, the wall cabinet, the low table. Artists of course crave silence. They wish their sitters dead, stilled: a bowl of apples, a wineglass, a cold fish. But the sitter is alive, and must talk, perhaps sensing that speech is needed to bring color and indignation to the throat, the cheeks, the eyes. And the painter chats back with his skeleton staff of words until the moment comes when he is incapable of vocalization: when, in short, he is getting the head. Even Rodney knew this moment of deafened concentration (it felt like Talent). And the sensitive sitter would come to note such moments, maintaining a pious hush until her next thrice-hourly intermission. Her breather, when it was okay for her to be alive again.

He thought he knew something about women and silence. But this? Rodney slipped from the bed and, in his blue robe, set about the preparation of English Breakfast Tea. He watched her through the gap between the two screens: the pillow clutched to her breast like a baby. And always she was following the argument inside her own head. The bruise on her shoulder, tinged with betel or cinnabar, looked artificially applied—caste mark, war paint. Rodney assessed it with a professional eye. It was no accident that he worked in oil. Oil was absolutely right. His brush, he realized, was not an artist’s wand so much as a cosmeticist’s tweezer. Oil, in his hands, was the elixir of youth. It would be different with her, he felt. Because everything else was different with her. But he would never dare broach it now.

For an instant she loomed over him and then moved past, to the shower. Rodney had never supposed that he was her single—or even her principal—erotic interest. How could he own her? He thought of a scene in a huge American novel he had read, years back, where a young man comes of age, pleasantly, in a Chicago bordello. And it went something like, He had used what others used. So what? That’s what cities are.

On the other hand he suddenly knew what he wanted to say to her. Three words: a verb flanked by two personal pronouns.

“Hey. Hey.”

No black shape—no roller or mugger, no prison-yard rapist, no Hutu warrior, no incensed Maroon on the blazing cane fields of Saint Domingue—could be as fearful to Rodney, now, as the man who occasionally guarded his building: namely Pharsin. Rodney’s weekends were entirely devoted to avoiding him: four of the last five had been spent in Quogue. He had even made a couple of phone calls about the possibility of moving. There was apparently a place in midtown, quite near Rock’s offices…

“Ah, Pharsin. There you are.”

Rodney turned, physically wincing, but only from the rain. He was afraid of Pharsin, and generally well attuned to threat. But his anguish here was almost wholly social.

“What’s the latest, Rod?”

“Yes it’s high time we, uh, ‘broke bread.’ I find myself leaning toward a Chambertin-Clos de Beze. And a swampy Camembert.”

“I keep hearing about these goddamn wines you got. But I’m thinking these are the exact same hoops we were going through before. What do I got to do, Rod? It’s not just me who’s hurting—it’s everyone around me. I never thought a man could do this to me. I never thought a man could reduce me to this.”

It was raining. Raining on the terrible city, with people suffering through it and giving voice to their pain, groaning, swearing, babbling. In New York, if you had no one to talk to or shout at, then there was always yourself: always yourself. As Rodney debarked his umbrella he noticed the way the raindrops fell from the lobes of Pharsin’s childishly small ears.

“Friday at five.”

“That’s in stone?”

“On my mother’s life. Hock and smoked salmon might be more the thing. Or some Gewurtztraumeiner. Or what about some Trockenbeerenauslese, with Turkish Delight?”

“Friday at five.”

“Busy week?” said Rock on Thursday evening.

They were drinking in a bar they usually went to only very late at night: Jimmy’s. Although he had been there perhaps a dozen times, it turned out that Rodney had no idea where it was. “Where is Jimmy’s?” he asked, as Rock guided him there. The place looked different, in the happy hour.

“Not really,” Rodney answered. “But you know how it is in New York. You’ve got nothing on and you think, I know: I’ll stay home and read a book. Then the next thing you know… there’s an opening or something. And then you’re bawling your head off across some restaurant.”

“Got anything on tonight? There’s a freebie at some punk club in Brooklyn. I’ve got all-you-can-drink coupons. It doesn’t start for hours and it’ll be a bugger to get to.”

“Oh all right,” said Rodney.

The next day he left for Quogue rather earlier than usual. He rose at noon and, held upright only by the strata of dried come in his pyjamas, made tea. He took a fifty-minute shower. He performed surprisingly creditably during his tryst (she seemed relieved that afternoon, but expeditious) and he practically joined her in the elevator. To the weekday janitoriat he entrusted a long note for Pharsin about his aunt’s exhumation and reburial in another plot; by way of a PS he switched their date to the same time on Monday. Only when the Jitney was idling outside that cinema on its stop near the airport did Rodney question the packing choices in his garment bag: the three new magazines, along with his standard weekend kit.

Just gone one on Monday afternoon.

He was sitting at the kitchen table and reading—in preparation for his task—the back of a cereal packet. Lifting his head and blinking, he thought of the corpulent Victorian novels he had gaped his way through at university, the Middlemarches and Bleak Houses: they had taken him at least a month each. Still, he had never contemplated spending more than about half an hour with