Heavy Water and Other Stories

began to move around the room with purposeful curiosity, one arm folded, the other crooked, a forefinger tapping on his chin, pausing to inspect a nicknack here, a doodad there. Rodney wasn’t thinking about his other guest (who, he assumed, would still be wedged behind the bed). He was thinking of her simulacrum: her portrait, arrayed on its stand, in blazing crime. Redigesting a mouthful of vomit, Rodney watched as Pharsin loped up to the easel and paused.

The black shape on the white sheet. The beauty and power of the rump and haunches. The sleeping face, half-averted. Rodney, out of sheer habit, had salved and healed her bruises. That was probably a good idea, he thought.

“This a real person pose for this?” Pharsin turned, artist to artist, and added, “Or you take it from a book.”

“A book?”

“Yeah, like a magazine?”

“Yes. From a magazine.”

“Know who this kind of reminds me of? Cassie. My wife, Cassie.” Pharsin smiled ticklishly as he followed the resemblance for another second or two. Then he rejected it. “Maybe ten years ago. And she never had an ass like that in all her born days. Well, Rod. I want you to know what this last hour has meant to me. There was a man crying out in the dark here. You my friend have answered that cry. You’ve given me what I wanted: a hearing. I sent that novel to every registered publisher and agent in the city. All I got was a bunch of printed slips. Know what I think? They didn’t read it. They didn’t even read it, Rod.”

“That’s a terrible thing, Pharsin. A terrible thing. Oh, by the way. You once told me that your wife was an artist. What kind is she?”

Then for a second their eyes met: horribly. And in Pharsin’s face you could see the ageless and awful eureka of every stooge and sap and cinch. He said,

“You read my book and you’re asking me what Cassie does?”

But it came to Rodney and he said, “I know what Cissie does. In the book. I was just wondering how close you were sticking to life. I know what Cissie does?”

Pharsin’s voice had Rodney by the lapels. It said, “What?”

And he told him: “Mime.”

With Pharsin caged and dropping in the elevator, and all loaded up with his typescript like a bearer, Rodney’s head remained limp and bent, hangdog with relief. Even the strengthening conviction—not yet entire, needing more thought—that he, Rodney, had no talent: this brought relief. He let his head hang there a little longer, before he faced the music of human speech.

She said, “You fucking done it now.”

He said, “Oh dear. Have I said the wrong thing?”

“All a slight nightmare, really. She couldn’t leave, do you see, because Pharsin was on the door. So she rather let me have it.” Rodney was no stranger to the experience of being denounced from dawn to dusk; but he wasn’t used to accents such as hers. “A terrible way for things to end. Our first night together and it was all talk and no sex. And such talk. She was livid.”

“What about? I wish those people would go away.”

Cocktails alfresco in Rockefeller Plaza: Amber Dreams under a cold blue sky. The square was punctuated by people dressed as mannequins and posing as statues. Just standing there with painted smiles.

“Oh God, don’t ask,” said Rodney—for her grievances had been legion. “She knew someone or something had been driving him nuts. She didn’t know it was me. He’d never been violent before. It was me. I put those marks on her.”

“Oh come on. It’s in their culture.”

Rodney coughed and said, “Oh yeah. And she said, ‘He’ll write another one now.’ She’d been moonlighting for two years. As a waitress. To support him. And she could tell I hadn’t read it. By my voice.”

Rock looked on, frowning, as Rodney imitated her imitating him. It sounded something like: Ooh, ah say, wort simplay dezzling imagereh. Rodney said,

“She thought I was sneering at him. Him being bleck, do you see.”

“Yes, well, they can be quite chippy about that over here. Do you think his novel might have been good?”

“No one will ever know. But I do know this. She won’t have to support him while he writes the second one.”

“Why not?”

“Because she stole my money.”

“Oh you tit. How many times did I tell you? Jesus Christ, what a silly old tart you are.”

“I know. I know. Waitress? If you please? Two Amber Dreams. No. Four Amber Dreams.”

“Are you telling me you just left it lying around?”

“In the middle of the night I… Wait. When I first met her, in the bar, do you see, I offered her five hundred dollars. No, as a sitter’s fee. So I reckoned I owed her that. Went and got it out for her. Thought she was sleeping.”

“Oh you tit.”

“She did leave me the five hundred. Ah. Thank you most awfully.”

And on her way to the door she paused in front of the easel and whispered a single word (stressed as a menacing and devastating spondee): “Wanker.” And that was the end of that, he thought. That was the end of that.

Rock said, “Were they in it together, do you think?”

“No no. No. It was all pure… coincidence.”

“Why aren’t you angrier?”

“I don’t know.”

Pharsin he never saw again. But he did see Pharsin’s wife, once, nearly two years later, in London Town.

Rodney was consuming a tragic tea of crustless sandwiches in a dark cafe near Victoria Station. He had just left the Pimlico offices of the design magazine he worked part-time for, and was girding himself to catch a train for Sussex, where he would be met at the station by a childless divorcee in a Range Rover. He no longer wore a ponytail. And he no longer used his title. That sort of thing didn’t seem to play very well in England anymore. Besides, for a while Rodney had become very interested in his family tree; and this was his puny protest. The scars had deepened around his eyes. But not much else had changed.

Weatherless Victoria, and a cafe in the old style. Coffee served in leaky steel pots, and children eating Banana Splits and Knickerbocker Glories and other confections the color of traffic lights. In this place the waitresses were waitresses by caste, contemplating no artistic destiny. Outside, the city dedicated itself to the notion of mobility, fleets of buses and taxis, herds of cars, and then the trains.

She was several tables away, facing him, with her slender eyebrows raised and locked in inquiry. Rodney glanced, blinked, smiled. Then it was dumb show all over again. May I? Well if you. No I’ll just…

“Well well. It is a small world, isn’t it.”

“…So you’re not going to murder me? You’re not going to slag me off?”

“What? Oh no. No no. No.”

“…So you’re back here now.”

“Yes. And you, you’re…”

“Me mum died.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. So you’re just here for the…”

“For the funeral and that, yeah…”

She said that her mother had been very old and had had a good life. Rodney’s mother was also very old and