Finishing touches, p.9
Finishing Touches, page 9
I thought about that, then said, “It sounds like you’re trying to frighten me.”
“I am.”
I thought about that even more. “Well, I’m still here.”
We sat there looking at each other for some time, my hand tightly in her grip. The drinks were dying of neglect.
“Come on,” she said at last, rising from her seat.
A few minutes later we were walking across Waterloo Bridge. It was cool and drizzly, but it was also Saturday night, and the West End was full of people. We stopped halfway across the bridge. Lina hugged me to her against the railing. Over her shoulder I could see the dark oily water of the Thames swirling far below. Lina was kissing my neck, and then she had my overcoat unbuttoned.
“Come on,” she whispered urgently. “Come on.”
I was leaning on her, one arm wrapped around the back of her neck, the other hand thrust up inside her fur coat. I could feel the excitement escalating in her – and in me. She had my pants unzipped, and I was quickly in a state of aroused erotic terror.
“Fuck me,” she moaned softly.
“Lina – ”
“Fuck me – now – here – now – pleasepleaseplease – ”
Under the miniskirt was only Lina, drawing me in, and again, again . . .
“Oh, yes, oh, yes, yes, fuck me.” Her voice tiny, brief as vapor in the night.
I made long slow movements that prolonged the event, but also enhanced it to an almost unbearable degree. People were passing by, walking within a few paces of us. Nobody seemed to take any special notice, and I could only hope we looked like any other smooching couple out on the town. We didn’t stop for some time.
“Oh, God . . . I don’t believe you,” I told her when we finished. “I honest to God don’t believe you.” And I was thinking: Talk about getting your fantasies out on the street! Talk about scenarios of enactment!
But now I was glad, even proud we had done it. And that smile on her face – I knew right away I’d do anything to keep seeing that smile. It unlocked new parts of me. For the first time Lina looked as if she really did believe in me. I felt I had crossed a line, passed an important test, and I was glad, very glad.
Later, in the back of a taxi, I said, “All I have to do now is persuade you to come back to the States with me.”
Lina gave a short, high-pitched laugh, as if I’d said the silliest thing.
SIX
Life became not easier but ever stranger. I spent the rest of the weekend at Lina’s house. Thirty-six hours of almost nonstop sex, drinking, and more sex. We were like whipped kittens early Monday morning when a hit of Special revived us both, but before that our relationship had veered into what were for me dark and uncharted waters.
We seemed to feed off each other, Lina leading, driving me on, my willingness and enthusiasm fueling her hunger. I was learning about myself, as well as about her. What a dull, blinkered, uneventful life I had lived on the other side of the ocean. I had been some other person, less and less recognizable to me now. A sleepwalker, one of the ambulatory functional dead. It was not that Lina was showing me the good life, as it is commonly thought of and portrayed in advertisements, but, rather, that she was leading me in a dance that drew us ever closer to the searing, terrifying inferno at the very heart of life. It might not seem that. It might appear that we were exploring the farthest, most decadent fringes of behavior, but later I came to see that was the only route to the blinding center of things.
Sometime Sunday evening Lina came downstairs. She had a brush and a small mirror mounted on a stand. She was wearing a virginal white chemisette, which, with her pale skin, made her look more like a ghost girl, an apparition, than a real person. She sat on the far side of the pit from me, as if I weren’t there. She was braiding her long hair. I watched for a few minutes, astonished by the seeming endlessness of this woman’s beauty.
I crawled across the waterbed, and Lina looked up at me, startled, as if she had never seen me before. When I reached for her she hit out at me, slapping my face so hard I was dazed, my ear burning. I thought she hadn’t meant to be so forceful, that she was resisting playfully, but she didn’t give me a chance to recover. She pushed me back, slapping, kicking, fighting as fiercely as any cornered animal. I tried to pin her down and smother her hands beneath me, but she could barely be contained. Her fingers drew blood on my shoulders and chest, and then her hands locked in an incredibly tight grip around my throat. I couldn’t get a word out, and suddenly I was frightened, and angry, and I responded furiously. I slapped her, again and again. Her cheeks turned crimson, and blood came out of her nose, but that only increased her frenzy. It was as if, knowing that I was ultimately stronger, physically, than she was, Lina was nonetheless determined to fight, to make me use every ounce of that advantage. The rhythm of the action took over, pushing us both to the maximum, and for the first time in my life I learned what it is to be enflamed by the sight of blood, to answer force instinctively with even greater force. I realized she really did want to hurt me, was hurting me, and so I wanted to hurt her back. More than that, I wanted to punish her for starting this. The fight became something other than sex play. It became a turn in our relationship. From the moment we’d met, Lina had led the way, but now I sensed the time had come to take a new hand in it. I wanted to beat her at her own game, mentally as well as physically. The longer you play a game, the harder it is to think of it as a game at all.
I did hurt her, forced her, humiliated her sexually, and then raped her – that is the only word for it. When it was over, I moved a little away from her and sat back against a pillow, letting my breath slow down. We had a lot of each other’s blood spattered on our bodies. I was shocked, as much by my own behavior as hers, but I didn’t regret it. Okay, my mind said, here we are, now let’s see what this place is. I felt as though I’d pulled even with her somehow.
In that aftermath of silence I could have said something like, “Hey, let’s take it easy, huh?” or “What the hell was that all about?” or a million other foolish things. But I said nothing. I was on course with her, and I had no interest in getting off. You want to screw on Waterloo Bridge with pedestrians passing by, okay. You want to try to tear out my throat, okay, try. There is as much to me as there is to you. Let’s keep on seeing what it is and where it takes us.
And I was rewarded. As Lina lay there in her tattered white chemisette, her face smeared with blood and semen, that smile came back, a subtle transformation at the corners of her mouth and in her eyes. What did I see in that smile? That she was proud of me? That she felt she hadn’t made a mistake? Perhaps even a sense of wonder that she had, after all, found someone equal to her? I wondered if I was imagining all this, if it was just something my ego had conjured up in the wake of sexual violence. But I didn’t think so, because I had never seen that look on anyone’s face before. And if a man needs to see anything else in a woman, I don’t know what it is.
Later that night Lina and I made love again, as sweetly and gently as lovers in a daydream romance.
The days that followed were lost in withdrawal pains. West Kensington was beginning to seem as far away from where I wanted to be as America. I resented – hated – my time away from Lina. I had one nightmare, the constant fear that I would be restricted to seeing her only on weekends – and I had only a limited number of them left in my London visit. It was infuriatingly difficult to see her, even in a pub, during the week. Nothing I could do or say worked. When the next weekend finally came, I did manage to get her talking about it.
“Is Nordhagen your father?”
“God, no.” She laughed.
“He seems to own you during the week.”
“I can’t help it.”
“What is it between the two of you? It isn’t just an ordinary employer-employee relationship, is it?”
“I can’t tell you that,” Lina said.
I’d heard that before, and I did consider the possibility that it was her way of confirming my worst suspicions.
“What is he like, really?” I pushed on. “I mean, I know he is one of the best cosmetic surgeons in Britain, and he has a thriving practice in Mayfair. The rich and superrich follow their noses to his door, so it’s not surprising he’s involved in a place like the Feathers – which fits that wisecrack about a place God would own if only He could afford it. But then, other times I see him and he’s juiced to the eyeballs, stumbling around from one SoHo dump to another.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Tell me.”
“Roger was a brilliant surgeon,” Lina said. “And he still is, no question about that. But there are problems. Not just the drink – he has that well in control, confined to regular, carefully planned and scheduled . . . binges. But there’s something else.”
“Is he ill?”
“I don’t know, but I do know for sure that his age is wearing on him more. This last year it seems he’s begun to die slowly inside.”
“Why doesn’t he retire and take it easy? He’s loaded. He could relax and enjoy his old age on the Costa del Something-or-other.”
“That wouldn’t help; he’s not that way inclined. Besides, the practice is the smallest part of his involvements. You might say it’s only the tip of the iceberg, actually. There are other things he can’t just walk away from.”
“Such as?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
Back to Go, but do not collect £200. I had been thinking he kept a busy social calendar, or something like that, but Lina’s last response seemed to blow that notion right out of the water. No matter what I heard, no matter how much more I was told, no questions were answered – only new ones raised.
“I still don’t understand why I can’t see you weeknights.”
Lina nodded her head sympathetically. “I don’t like it either, but that’s the way it has to be, for now. But soon, I promise. Soon.” And the word seemed to linger in the air, resonating with unspoken possibilities.
We talked every day. I worked hard to keep her on the phone a minute or two longer each time. It was desperately unsatisfactory, but it kept me going. I didn’t completely understand it at first, but those five-day interludes also served to put the initiative back on her side. By the time the weekend arrived, I was a panting pup, hot and ready to please. When calm and equilibrium were regained, it was Monday again.
But one Wednesday night Lina surprised me. It was early, I wasn’t thinking of going into town, but I didn’t know what to do. Sitting around and moping was awful, and I’d probably end up in some dire nightclub in spite of myself. I heard the sound of fingernails scratching at my door. It must be Eileen Fothergill, I thought; the woman had finally gone over the edge. But no, it was Lina. Before I could overcome my surprise and say something, she had gently but firmly pushed me back into the darkened bedroom, pushed me down on the bed, and made love to me.
“A little present for you,” she said softly. “I’ll have another, much better, one for you. Very soon.”
Then she slipped out and was gone. I couldn’t move. I was sprawled across the bed, thinking: Don’t let this end I don’t know what it is love or madness but don’t let it end not yet not yet . . .
When Friday came and I turned up at Nordhagen’s offices to pick up Lina, he was there to greet me in the waiting room. He was impeccably dressed, clear-eyed and genial.
“Lina will be out shortly, Tom,” he told me. “Have a seat, why don’t you. Would you care for a drink?”
We had whiskey and sat facing each other in the fat leather chairs. I was in a good mood because I was about to see Lina, and the waiting room had a comfortable, clubby feeling.
“You’re a fortunate young man,” Nordhagen said. “Normally I don’t put much stock in luck, but sometimes it happens that the right person appears in the right place at the right time. Is that luck, or destiny? An irreversible process, in any event. Let’s just call it good fortune, for it surely is that. Cheers.”
Maybe I was being deliberately obtuse, but I had no idea what the little doctor was talking about. Did he think I was going to marry Lina? The notion was quaint. Not that I have anything against marriage, but my relationship with Lina seemed to have passed marriage by. It was on some higher, more intense level, and was still on the way up as far as I was concerned. Marriage suggested a certain plateau, a quietus even – the last thing likely with Lina and me. Why try to dam up a mighty river when the best thing you can do is enjoy it for all it is? Our relationship worked because it was open and undefined; it was a dynamic, a force, not a static thing or a mere fact.
Nordhagen was talking about London now, how was I liking it and so on. I was only half in the conversation, going through the motions. I was too close to Lina, my drug, to concentrate on small talk. But then Nordhagen got through to me.
“So, are you thinking of staying on here?”
The end of my time in London. Possibly the end of my time with Lina. The return to work in America. All this made up a sharp facet of reality I wasn’t prepared to deal with yet. It loomed in the near distance like a thundercloud. I could try to ignore it for the time being, but I knew it would catch up with me eventually.
“I really don’t know,” I answered. “I haven’t given it much thought. I’d love to stay, but I really don’t see how that would be possible.”
“One must go where one belongs,” Nordhagen declared rather pompously. “Or stay where one belongs. Whichever the case may be.”
He was in that kind of mood, but it did me no good to laugh silently at him. I felt like a small bettor on the verge of being forced out of a big poker game for lack of funds. But Lina appeared just then, to rescue me before depression could take hold.
On Mount Street I started looking for a cab, but Lina took my arm. “Let’s go to the Feathers first,” she said. “Or somewhere else, if you like. We have to have a talk.”
I was a little worried, since I couldn’t imagine why we had to go anywhere other than her house by Queens Wood to do our talking. By the time we reached the Feathers I was convinced she had bad news to break to me, but when we were seated in the piano bar Lina was cheerful, even excited. She could hardly wait for the girl to bring our drinks and go away so that she could begin.
“Remember when we were talking about fantasy, and you asked me what my special fantasy was?”
“Sure.”
“And I wouldn’t tell you. Have you wondered since then what it might be?”
“Well, yes. But I can’t imagine. Everything about you and the way you live seems to me to be one gigantic fantasy. That’s what I like about it. Among other things.”
“But one specific thing,” she urged me on.
“When I first saw the inside of your house, I thought, This is it. This is her special fantasy, her house.”
“But . . .”
“But it isn’t, I guess.”
“No.”
“Then, when we fucked on Waterloo Bridge, I thought that really had to be your big sexual fantasy. But I guess it isn’t what you’re talking about either. They’re minor fantasies, among many other minor fantasies. But still not the main one. Am I right?”
“Yes. Now go on from there.”
“I don’t know. As I said, I can’t imagine what it might be. Anything would be fine with me.”
We were sitting close together, but Lina moved even closer when I said that. She had on another slit skirt, and she held my hand tightly between her legs in a press of warm, silky thigh. Even in the dim light her eyes were bright with fire.
“Do you really mean that?” she asked. “Is it fine with you? Anything? Anything at all?”
I had already learned not to take anything Lina said as a joke. “Absolutely,” I told her. I felt a nervous thrill, but I wasn’t turning back. “Do you know that Dylan line: I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.’”
“All right,” Lina said. “That’s it exactly. And you’re in mine, and tonight we’ll make it happen.”
I was right where I wanted to be.
“Now, remember,” Lina continued, “I told you I’d have another present for you? That’s part of it too. You have to accept this gift I’m going to give you. You have to, otherwise the whole thing falls apart.”
“No problem.”
“Once we start, there’s no turning back.”
“I’m with you, I really am.”
“All right. Good.”
Lina would say no more. She rested her head on my shoulder in the taxi. It was windy and raining, and traffic was slow. There was nothing to be seen but blurred lights through the water-streaked windows of the car. I was glad we were headed for her house in North London – it seemed we wouldn’t have to do this number out in public, which suited me fine.
But another one of Nordhagen’s verbal time bombs went off in my head during the drive. “An irreversible process,” he had said earlier, and now those three words seemed to take on an added significance. I was caught up in something I couldn’t claim fully to understand. But I didn’t want out. What if Lina wanted me to help her steal the crown jewels? Would I balk at such folly? I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure there was anything that could make me back away from Lina.
Once we were inside the house, we left our coats and shoes in the front hallway.
“We’re going upstairs,” Lina said, taking me by the hand.
But we didn’t go into the bedroom. We went on up to the top floor. I hadn’t seen it, nor had it interested me until now. There had always been more than enough to occupy me on the two floors below, and I had assumed this was just an attic. It wasn’t. We came to a small landing. There was one door, locked. Lina had a key in her other hand.
“Another playground,” I said.
“Yes, that’s right. Another playground. A very special one. Now, out of your clothes.”
