May We Borrow Your Husband? (12 page)

‘He writes about literature. Eighteenth-century poetry,' she added, rather inanely under the circumstances.

‘Oh.'

‘What did you do? I mean when you worked.'

‘This and that.'

‘And now?'

‘I watch what goes on. Sometimes I talk to someone like you. Well, no, I don't suppose I've ever talked to anyone like you before.' It might have seemed a compliment if he had not added, ‘A professor's wife.'

‘And you read the
Digest
?'

‘Ye-eh. They make books too long – I haven't the patience. Eighteenth-century poetry. So they wrote poetry back in those days, did they?'

She said, ‘Yes,' not sure whether or not he was mocking her.

‘There was a poem I liked at school. The only one that ever stuck in my head. By Longfellow, I think. You ever read Longfellow?'

‘Not really. They don't read him much in school any longer.'

‘Something about “Spanish sailors with bearded lips and the something and mystery of the ships and the something of the sea.” It hasn't stuck at all that well, after all, but I suppose I learned that sixty years ago and even more. Those were the days.'

‘The 1900s?'

‘No, no. I meant pirates, Kidd and Bluebeard and those fellows. This was their stamping ground, wasn't it? The Caribbean. It makes you kind of sick to see those women going around in their shorts here.' His tongue had been tingled into activity by the bourbon.

It occurred to her that she had never really been curious about another human being; she had been in love with Charlie, but he hadn't aroused her curiosity except sexually, and she had satisfied that only too quickly. She asked him, ‘Do you love your sister?'

‘Yes, of course, why? How do you know I've got a sister?'

‘And Joe?'

‘You certainly read my letter. Oh, he's O.K.'

‘O.K.?'

‘Well, you know how it is with brothers. I'm the eldest in my family. There was one that died. My sister's twenty years younger than I am. Joe's got the means. He looks after her.'

‘You haven't got the means?'

‘I had the means. I wasn't good at managing them though. We aren't here to talk about myself.'

‘I'm curious. That's why I read your letter.'

‘You? Curious about me?'

‘It could be, couldn't it?'

She had confused him, and now that she had the upper hand, she felt that she was out of the trap; she was free, she could come and go as she pleased, and if she chose to stay a little longer, it was her own choice.

‘Have another bourbon?' he said. ‘But you're English. Maybe you'd prefer Scotch?'

‘Better not mix.'

‘No.' He poured her another glass. He said, ‘I was wondering – sometimes I want to get away from this joint for a little. What about having dinner down the road?'

‘It would be stupid,' she said. ‘We've both paid our
pension
here, haven't we? And it would be the same dinner in the end. Red snapper. Tomatoes.'

‘I don't know what you have against tomatoes.' But he did not deny the good sense of her economic reasoning: he was the first unsuccessful American she had ever had a drink with. One must have seen them in the street . . . But even the young men who came to the house were not yet unsuccessful. The Professor of Romance Languages had perhaps hoped to be head of a university – success is relative, but it remains success.

He poured out another glass. She said, ‘I'm drinking all your bourbon.'

‘It's in a good cause.'

She was a little drunk by now and things – which only
seemed
relevant – came to her mind. She said, ‘That thing of Longfellow's. It went on – something about “the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts”. I must have read it somewhere. That was the refrain, wasn't it?'

‘Maybe. I don't remember.'

‘Did you want to be a pirate when you were a boy?'

He gave an almost happy grin. He said, ‘I succeeded. That's what Joe called me once – “pirate”.'

‘But you haven't any buried treasure?'

He said, ‘He knows me well enough not to send me a hundred dollars. But if he feels scared enough that I'll come back – he might send fifty. And the interest was only twenty-five. He's not mean, but he's stupid.'

‘How?'

‘He ought to know I wouldn't go back. I wouldn't do one thing to hurt Sis.'

‘Would it be any good if I asked you to have dinner with me?'

‘No. It wouldn't be right.' In some ways he was obviously very conservative. ‘It's as you said – you don't want to go throwing money about.' When the bottle of Old Walker was half empty, he said, ‘You'd better have some food even if it is red snapper and tomatoes.'

‘Is your name really Hickslaughter?'

‘Something like that.'

They went downstairs, following rather carefully in each other's footsteps like ducks. In the formal restaurant open to all the heat of the evening, the men sat and sweated in their jackets and ties. They passed, the two of them, through the bamboo bar into the coffee tavern, which was lit by candles that increased the heat. Two young men with crewcuts sat at the next table – they weren't the same young men she had seen before, but they came out of the same series. One of them said, ‘I'm not denying that he has a certain style, but even if you
adore
Tennessee Williams . . .'

‘Why did he call you a pirate?'

‘It was just one of those things.'

When it came to the decision there seemed nothing to choose except red snapper and tomatoes, and again she offered him her tomatoes; perhaps he had grown to expect it and already she was chained by custom. He was an old man, he had made no pass which she could reasonably reject – how could a man of his age make a pass to a woman of hers? – and yet all the same she had a sense that she had landed on a conveyor belt . . . The future was not in her hands, and she was a little scared. She would have been more frightened if it had not been for her unusual consumption of bourbon.

‘It was good bourbon,' she commented for something to say, and immediately regretted it. It gave him an opening.

‘We'll have another glass before bed.'

‘I think I've drunk enough.'

‘A good bourbon won't hurt you. You'll sleep well.'

‘I always sleep well.' It was a lie – the kind of unimportant lie one tells a husband or a lover in order to keep some privacy. The young man who had been talking about Tennessee Williams rose from his table. He was very tall and thin and he wore a skin-tight black sweater; his small elegant buttocks were outlined in skin-tight trousers. It was easy to imagine him a degree more naked. Would he have looked at her, she wondered, with any interest if she had not been sitting there in the company of a fat old man so horribly clothed? It was unlikely; his body was not designed for a woman's caress.

‘I don't.'

‘You don't what?'

‘I don't sleep well.' The unexpected self-disclosure after all his reticences came as a shock. It was as though he had put out one of his square brick-like hands and pulled her to him. He had been aloof, he had evaded her personal questions, he had lulled her into a sense of security, but now every time she opened her mouth, she seemed doomed to commit an error, to invite him nearer. Even her harmless remark about the bourbon. . . . She said stupidly, ‘Perhaps it's the change of climate.'

‘What change of climate?'

‘Between here and . . . and . . .'

‘Curaçao? I guess there's no great difference. I don't sleep there either.'

‘I've got some very good pills . . .' she said rashly.

‘I thought you said you slept well.'

‘Oh, there are always times. It's sometimes just a question of digestion.'

‘Yes, digestion. You're right there. A bourbon will be good for that. If you've finished dinner . . .'

She looked across the coffee tavern to the bamboo bar, where the young man stood
déhanché,
holding a glass of crème-de-menthe between his face and his companion's like an exotically coloured monocle.

Mr Hickslaughter said in a shocked voice, ‘You don't care for that type, do you?'

‘They're often good conversationalists.'

‘Oh, conversation. . . . If that's what you want.' It was as though she had expressed an un-American liking for snails or frogs' legs.

‘Shall we have our bourbon in the bar? It's a little cooler tonight.'

‘And listen to their chatter? No, we'll go upstairs.'

He swung back again in the direction of old-fashioned courtesy and came behind her to pull her chair – even Charlie was not so polite, but was it politeness or the determination to block her way of escape to the bar?

They entered the lift together. The black attendant had a radio turned on, and from the small brown box came the voice of a preacher talking about the Blood of the Lamb. Perhaps it was a Sunday, and that would explain the temporary void around them – between one jolly bunch and another. They stepped out into the empty corridor like undesirables marooned. The boy followed them out and sat down upon a chair beside the elevator to wait for another signal, while the voice continued to talk about the Blood of the Lamb. What was she afraid of? Mr Hickslaughter began to unlock his door. He was much older than her father would have been if he had been still alive; he could be her grandfather – the excuse, ‘What will the boy think?' was inadmissible – it was even shocking, for his manner had never ceased to be correct. He might be old, but what right had she to think of him as ‘dirty'?

‘Damn the hotel key . . .' he said. ‘It won't open.'

She turned the handle for him. ‘The door wasn't locked.'

‘I can sure do with a bourbon after those nancies . . .'

But now she had her excuse ready on the lips. ‘I've had one too many already, I'm afraid. I've got to sleep it off.' She put her hand on his arm. ‘Thank you so much . . . It was a lovely evening.' She was aware how insulting her English accent sounded as she walked quickly down the corridor leaving it behind her like a mocking presence, mocking all the things she liked best in him: his ambiguous character, his memory of Longfellow, his having to make ends meet.

She looked back when she reached her room: he was standing in the passage as though he couldn't make up his mind to go in. She was reminded of an old man whom she had passed one day on the campus leaning on his broom among the unswept autumn leaves.

4

In her room she picked up a book and tried to read. It was Thomson's
Seasons.
She had carried it with her, so that she could understand any reference to his work that Charlie might make in a letter. This was the first time she had opened it, and she was not held:

If she could be so cowardly, she thought, with a harmless old man like that, how could she have faced the real decisiveness of an adventure? One was not, at her age, ‘swept off the feet'. Charlie had been proved just as sadly right to trust her as she was right to trust Charlie. Now with the difference in time he would be leaving the Museum, or rather, if this were a Sunday as the Blood of the Lamb seemed to indicate, he would probably have just quit writing in his hotel room. After a successful day's work he always resembled an advertisement for a new shaving-cream: a kind of glow. . . . She found it irritating, like living with a halo. Even his voice had a different timbre and he would call her ‘old girl' and pat her bottom patronizingly. She preferred him when he was touchy with failure: only temporary failure, of course, the failure of an idea which hadn't worked out, the touchiness of a child's disappointment at a party which has not come up to his expectations, not the failure of the old man – the rusted framework of a ship transfixed once and for all upon the rock where it had struck.

She felt ignoble. What earthly risk could the old man represent to justify refusing him half an hour's companionship? He could no more assault her than the boat could detach itself from the rock and steam out to sea for the Fortunate Islands. She pictured him sitting along with his half-empty bottle of bourbon seeking unconsciousness. Or was he perhaps finishing the crude blackmailing letter to his brother? What a story she would make of it one day, she thought with self-disgust as she took off her dress, her evening with a blackmailer and ‘pirate'.

There was one thing she could do for him: she could give him her bottle of pills. She put on her dressing-gown and retrod the corridor, room by room, until she arrived at 63. His voice told her to come in. She opened the door and in the light of the bedside lamp saw him sitting on the edge of the bed wearing a crumpled pair of cotton pyjamas with broad mauve stripes. She began, ‘I've brought you . . .' and then she saw to her amazement that he had been crying. His eyes were red and the evening darkness of his cheeks sparkled with points like dew. She had only once before seen a man cry – Charlie, when the University Press had decided against his first volume of literary essays.

‘I thought you were the maid,' he said. ‘I rang for her.'

‘What did you want?'

‘I thought she might take a glass of bourbon,' he said.

‘Did you want so much . . .? I'll take a glass.' The bottle was still on the dressing-table where they had left it and the two glasses – she identified hers by the smear of lipstick. ‘Here you are,' she said, ‘drink it up. It will make you sleep.'