Little Caesar (28 page)

I meet Tate Bloom from New York. She’s a public relations manager for the Four Seasons chain, she has an office job in New York and travels every few weeks to Nevis, the Bahamas and Costa Rica,
to maintain the local contacts
, as she puts it during an introductory dinner in the dining room. She hands me her business card. I hand her mine. I’m feeling rowdy and steal bites of food from her plate.

‘Please, Ludwig,’ she says, ‘try to respect the process.’

That’s enough to give me a hint of what the future has in store.

She has red hair, a Jewish-looking face, an Irish-American background. Tate is thirty, only a couple of years older than me, it will be nice to be normal again. We go to Eddy’s Bar in my little four-wheel-drive rental. The music is loud, we can barely hear each other. A black man comes over and sits down at our table, he talks to Tate and a few times fetches us bottles of beer. He puts Tate’s glass on a napkin and pours her beer slowly. His dedication is over the top. He’s friendly to me. Being desired by two men does her good, she laughs and glows. Her light slip-ons gleam like silk. The polish on her toenails is still fresh. I tell the man it was nice of him to bring us beer, but that I’d like to continue my conversation with the lady now, without him around. He gets up, starts to say something, but then leaves without a word of protest. Tate is aghast, she says, ‘Do you know who that was? The owner!’

‘He was putting the make on you. Three is a crowd.’

She forgets her decorum for a moment, she bursts into laughter. In the car we kiss. She smells sweet, her teeth are perfect. American. Like new.

‘I have to get back to the hotel,’ she says, ‘I can’t . . .’

The sky is wide open, its cool breath pours over us. I park in front of the Creole restaurant and she goes upstairs with me. Her resistance has an end. She whispers nasty things in my ear, words I’ve never heard that way before. I push into her a little ways, then there’s an obstacle.

‘Sorry,’ she says.

I’m drunk and boundless but she refuses, the tampon stays in. She exhibits an exciting pattern of surrender and refusal. She kneels in front of me on all fours, her body floating like a pale spot in the satin of the night. I smear saliva on my sex and put it in her with short, steady thrusts. Her little cries are broken by the pillow. She holds her hand back and presses it against my pelvis, a brake. I’m dizzy with pleasure. The jungle begins to throb. A cry rings out there, then another, then the tense silence returns, the bated breath.

She moans.

‘Oh, fuck. Oh, goddamn.’

We ride the rhythm of spasms. The blue mist in the room surrounds us like a shell.

She shakes me awake, frightened.

‘What’s that?’ she whispers.

‘Monkeys,’ I whisper back.

They move in little bands along the forest’s edge. Sometimes one of them will dare a leap onto the roof. They have flap-ears and black, serious little faces. I go to the window and see them in the weak, peach-like light, moving cautiously from tree to tree.

‘I have to get back,’ Tate says nervously. ‘You have to give me a ride.’

I drop her off along the lane of palms that leads to the Four Seasons; she doesn’t want the staff to see her now and know that we were together. She chooses a shortcut across the golf course, her heels punch holes in the mossy grass. She takes her shoes off, holds them in one hand and walks towards the first row of apartments, then disappears from sight.

That first night determines our routine. We sleep together, we wait till morning, the rustling of the monkeys at the forest’s edge, then I take her back to the hotel. During my time on the island she flies in from New York four times, for a couple of days. The last time she brings with her a new player in the game: Todd Greene, a designer, a New Yorker like her, they’re going to get married in December. The fisher – men have drawn their sloops up onto the sand for the season, you know that there is a skeleton of ancient trusses and planks beneath the thick layers of paint, the green, the blue, the yellow, the names
Praise Him, Morning Star, Light of My Eyes
.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I should have told you before.’

I wonder to myself whether you could swim to St. Kitts, how long that would take. Or whether you would perhaps sink halfway, in peace, swaying like seaweed.

‘I wanted to be honest,’ she says, ‘I didn’t want to keep anything from you, but you’re a risk. Haven’t you ever noticed that? That women want to save you? I think – I know you won’t let yourself be saved. You enjoy the attention, the worrying about you, but you don’t want to be saved. That’s your life. I’ve thought about it, about a life with you, but I kept seeing scenes of people being dragged down while they were trying to rescue someone else.’

A silence. Then, ‘That wasn’t very kind. I’m sorry.’

‘I guess . . . I guess I thought it might amount to something.’

‘What do you mean, Ludwig? What exactly might it have amounted to?’

‘A possibility.’

‘That’s not particularly reassuring. A possibility. A woman wants to hear a bit more than that, you know. What kind of possibility were you thinking of ?’

It took a long time before I came up with the answer. Then I said, ‘The possibility of a roof over my head.’

I went on with my life as a liability. Many things were relegated to the background. During those years I was the lover of wives, widows, women who said
but I’m old enough to be your mother
. That was what I goaded them into, to care for me, to feed and clothe me, to be my mother. The only way that could happen was along the road of sexuality. I couldn’t stand them when they acted like nervous schoolgirls or when I saw them paying too much attention to their appearance before we went out to dinner at a restaurant. I preferred to have them be a bit indifferent towards my person, but to take full possession of my body.

I had, generally speaking, little to fear from them, as little as they did from me: we were not out to fool ourselves. Concerning our position with regard to the other, there was to be no doubt. Upright statements of infatuation I responded to by putting an end to relations. Emotions disturbed the process. An older woman who asks
may I hold your hand?
and then begs for your love is a terrible thing to see. It is disgusting. I was ashamed of myself then for having prompted that disfigurement, for being part of that disfigurement.

It was an equilibrium that demanded a great deal from both parties. The woman who was best at it was Lotte Augustin, a German. I met her on the Lagonissi peninsula, close to Athens. She had a life to go back to, which helped. She was the ironic beauty from the television series, who appears whenever a murder has been committed upon a wealthy industrialist – the detectives repress their awe of crystal and Japanese wallpaper as they enter the salon. As soon as the widow appears, blonde, a red suit-dress, rings glistening on her fingers and looks that are the subject of professional maintenance, you know who did the killing.

That Lotte Augustin is staying at this particular resort says a great deal, but not everything. The expenditure of one thousand euros a night for a Junior Waterfront Suite with private pool must not feel like the loss of a limb. Not even when you extend your stay twice, for a week each time. After that she goes back to her life, her work, to her marriage to a CDU federal state minister that had remained intact first for the sake of his career, then for the sake of the children, and now simply because it has already remained intact for so long. Against the tanned skin above her breasts, gleaming and redolent of suntan lotion, there hangs a little golden cross. She is not a church-goer, but sometimes she prays for her children’s souls.

I feel her prying eyes in the piano bar. She smiles distantly at me from behind a magazine. Later on she says, ‘I thought you were German.’

‘My grandfather was German. I’m half Dutch, half Austrian. Two times almost a German. Does that count?’

She shakes her head.

‘Fraternal peoples.’

She bears an air of fluid melancholy. She has sold the shares in the health-care interim management company she set up, for three and a half million euros, she still holds a position on the board of supervisors, but has turned the daily management over to a woman in her early forties – she believes that women have to help each other climb the ladder of success. She spends a lot of time phoning from her recliner beside the infinity-edge pool. I float in it and try to remain motionless. From that position the water of the pool blends perfectly into that of the Saronic Gulf. None of the people she talks to know that she is almost naked. Her heavy breasts hang a bit to one side of her chest; when you lift them, the skin in the creases beneath is pale. Her areolas are almost black from the sun, the prominent nipples always erect. Beside the recliner is an ashtray with a layer of sand in it; a skyline of Dunhill filters marked with red lipstick. When she speaks German she is forceful and to the point – when she switches to another language her personality changes along with it. In English, she is less confident. She hesitates over certain expressions and words, sometimes she will finish a sentence in German, irritatedly. She swims without getting her hair wet. I lie in wait like an alligator. Her blue eyes glisten. Her pubic hair is thin and closely shorn, she pays careful attention to the magazines and the latest fashion. We mate on the broad marble steps of the pool. The water makes her dry, later it gets slipperier. She lays her head back on the sun-warmed marble. She wears waterproof mascara. The light makes its way into her open mouth, I see gold molars, worn fillings, I avoid the flow of her breath. All the scents of age can be masked, except for this one. The water laps against the pool’s edge, sparkling drops slide from her oiled skin.

The obscenity of this intercourse excites and repels me. The longer I put off my orgasm, the longer I can keep the worst of the repulsion at bay – the confrontation with suspicions about my own perversity, the reasons for things that someone my age is not supposed to do. The shame concerning the latter, until I am back in my room, until sleep has passed. The next day the feelings of lust return unabated: the climb to the high dive, the fear and the delight just before the leap, the fall, with an exploding heart.

Lotte Augustin accepts this pattern of comfort, ecstasy and escape. She says, ‘This must be a lot stranger for you than it is for me.’

It is an uncomfortable, interesting observation. Her desire for me, so much younger than her, in the flower and recklessness of my youth, is
healthy
. Everyone wants to possess youth, it is a respectable longing. That I make love to a woman who is almost sixty, on the other hand, is
sick
. But all forms of human intercourse, no matter how different in kind, tend towards a certain equilibrium. And so we cancel out her age against my sickness. Biology against pathology.

The modesty of the first few days has left her now, she takes her breasts in her hands and offers them to me, the sensation of her soft, fragrant flesh makes me light in the head. During the act her mouth is always open, with her constant keening she puts herself in a trancelike state, until suddenly her eyes open wide, as though awakening from a nightmare, and she digs her manicured nails into my flesh and moans things in German.

We take a taxi to Cape Sounion, the driver waits for us at the parking lot. On the reserve that is the hotel on the Lagonissi peninsula it’s easy to forget that you are in a country with an arid climate, that the sun here splits rock. In the pale blue haze over the sea, sailboats and islands are of equal weight.

At the temple of Poseidon, perched gloriously at the tip of the cape, Lotte shows me where Byron carved his name in the pillar, in graceful letters. She is wearing a sleeveless blouse embroidered with gold thread and a skirt that does not quite reach her knees, everything white, just like the espadrilles on her feet. Her nipples, the bumps they make, press themselves on me. She bends over to read other names scratched in the pillar, and slides her sunglasses with the monogrammed C’s up onto her forehead in order to see better. Her breasts sway heavily under the textile. I feel an erection coming up.

At the edge of the cape a guide wearing sandals announces in a loud voice that it was on this rock that King Aegeus waited for the return of his son Theseus, who had gone to Crete to slay the Minotaur. Theseus had left with black sails and, if he survived his mission, would return with white in the riggings. But because of the tragic end of his love for Ariadne, whom he was forced to leave behind on Naxos, Theseus forgot his promise and sailed back to Athens with black sails. From Cape Sounion, his father saw the black sails approaching in the distance. Overcome by sorrow, he threw himself into the sea.

I recall the contours of the legend, it had been impressive even when I’d heard it in a Suffolk classroom. A few tourists leave the group and walk over to the edge, one of them says, ‘It’s not really all that steep. It would be more like rolling instead of falling.’

Lotte comes over and stands beside me. I know the kind of mood she’s in.

‘In Germany you sometimes forget how lovely the world is,’ she says.

I tell her the story I just heard. We look out over the mythical sea, the line between water and sky has been dispelled, white sails float on the horizon, sons who have slain the beast and are now returning home.

The plane lands early in the morning. The passengers leave the aircraft and descend the stairs to the bus on the landing strip. It is cold, a purple veil lies over the desert. Between the layers of cold air drift the pungent, titillating odors of another world.

In the arrivals hall the flash of recognition – even far away and amid the crowd, I see from the way she moves, her silhouette among the others, that it’s her. Imprint. Lorenz. And desperate love as well. That tremor, risen from the depths where the child lies sleeping, opens its eyes now and sees its mother.

My smile is untainted, nothing grinds between my teeth.

She has a cobalt-blue mantilla draped over her shoulders. She is crying a little. She throws her arms around me, I feel her belly against my body, her breasts. The repulsion, sharp as a toothache. I will never have a normal relationship with that body. Not even now that we have arrived at the end, now that her days are numbered.