Heavy Water: And Other Stories Read online

  They ordered their Highballs. The clientele was all male but also middle-aged (woollen, paunchy), and Rodney received no more than his usual deal of stares.

  He said, “This’ll amuse you. The first time we, uh, ‘hid the salami’… No. The first time I revealed the salami—I felt a real pleb. A real cur. Like an Untouchable.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m a Cavalier.”

  “Me too.”

  “Of course. We’re English. But over here they’re all Roundheads. It’s posh to be a Roundhead here. Only the hicks and Okies are Cavaliers.” Rodney well remembered Mrs. Vredevoort, wife to the construction grandee: how, when at last she had found the salami (the salami having been located and identified), she gave a little mew of surprised distaste, and immediately came up for air. “Ours look like joints. As opposed to cigarettes. Which is what they’re used to. I bet they’re all Roundheads in Africa.”

  “But there’s not much difference, is there, when you’ve got the horn.”

  “Exactly! That’s exactly it. Anyway, mine didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t say anything.”

  “She never says anything.”

  “True,” said Rodney. “You know, there’s just one thing she won’t let me do. No, nothing like that. She won’t let me paint her. Or even photograph her.”

  “Superstitious.”

  “And I feel if I could just paint her…”

  “All slime,” said Rock, “and no paint. A reversal of your usual setup.”

  “Balls. I did pretty well with the wives. All slime and no speech. That’s what’s really weird.”

  “Come out to the house this weekend. It’s finished now.”

  “Ooh. That does sound like a good idea.”

  Love without words. A caveman could do it. And it sounded like something that Picasso or Beckett might have pulled off. But Sir Rodney Peel? He had never shown any sign of pretending to such masterful purity. More scavenger than predator, in matters of the heart, Rodney was the first on the scene after the big cats had eaten their fill. He liked his women freshly jilted. His lips knew the sweet tang of liquefying mascara; his eyes knew the webby rivulets it formed on the blotting paper of a powdered cheek. He was an old hand at the consoling caress. Rhythmically he would smooth the sideswell of the breast, murmuring there there… It suited him. Sexual expectation, in such circumstances, was generally low. In such circumstances, impotence could almost be taken as a gallantry.

  Love without voices. Usually she came around half past two. Flushed and blotchy from his shower, wearing his long blue robe, Rodney would be lying on the chaise longue, trying to skim a magazine or else just dumbly waiting. Sometimes he went and stuck his head out of the window and tried to glimpse her as she glided under the ginkgo trees; once he saw her out there in the middle of the street, sharply questioning the driver of the cab from which she had slid. When he heard her keys in the locks, he felt, beneath his robe, the ceremony of painless circumcision.

  A smile was all she wanted by way of greeting. Humbly he looked on as she walked the room, her head dipped over her folded arms. She had arrived at his place; but it took time for her to get around to him in her thoughts. Then she would move toward the two lacquered screens that bowered the bed. She undressed matter-of-factly, laying her clothes on the chair (as if ready for school). Around now a switch would be thrown in Rodney’s head, immersing him in greater gravity. His ears were trained inwards only, and he listened to the muscles creaking in the root of his tongue.

  There was something primitive about it—about what followed. Not least in the startling elevations engineered by his blood. But she was one thing and he was the other. Rodney Peel had come to Africa. Her body seemed preternatural in its alternations of the soft and the hard; and her skin, unlike his own, did not reflect the light but absorbed it, confidently annexing its powers. As for her scent, it seemed to Rodney to be of a higher proof, or just more concentrated. And his thoughts went further—to her volcanic breasts, her zebra-ripping teeth! Sun-helmeted and canvas-shoed (and settling down to his task of tribute), Sir Rodney parts the lianas and the sweating fronds and sees… Actually it reminded him of a barbecue at Rock’s place in Quogue, when he pierced the charred surface of the beef and saw that the flesh was still very rare.

  Afterwards she rested. She never slept. Quite often, and increasingly cravenly, he would point to his easel or his brushes; but she always swiped a finger through the air and turned away. And once, early on, when he sat on the bed with his cocked sketch pad, she wrenched it from his grasp with an awful severity in her snuff-colored eyes. With real strength, too—a strength he knew all about. Still, she had created or revealed something in him, and he thought it might be Talent. Rodney’s loft contained no internal walls, so he was allowed to watch her as she used the bathroom or made the milky tea she liked. She had the overdeveloped upward-surging calf muscles of a dancer. All her movements showed the mechanical security and high definition of intense technique. Rodney thought about it: of course she was an artist. A nonbusinesswoman under thirty-five living in Manhattan? Of course she was an artist. A dancer. Maybe a singer. The performing arts, without question. But which one?

  She never slept. She drank her tea, and rested, sighing sometimes and powerfully yawning, but she never slept. Her thoughtfulness seemed centralized and assiduous, as if she were following an argument taking place on the near side of her eyes. Rodney worried about interrupting this argument when he later returned to the bed, but her body always fully admitted him to its heat. He often imagined, as he squirmed and bounced above her, that the first word he would ever hear her say would be the forename of another man… All the same, what they did and made together had nothing to do with art. No play: sheer earnest. It felt like honest work.

  “Hey. Hey! Ain’t no damn use you sneaking out like that. Have you read my novel yet?”

  “Yes,” said Rodney.

  Rodney said Yes, not because it was true or anything like that, but to make a change from saying No. It was an impulse thing. And Rodney was surprised it worked so well.

  Pharsin stepped back. For several seconds he wore a plugged expression. Then with his brow softly working he bent and lowered his head. Rodney almost reached up a hand to stroke the black filings of Pharsin’s hair.

  “So, man. What did you think?”

  It was gently said. What a welcome change this makes, thought Rodney (putting all that unpleasantness behind him): these chaps are perfectly sweet and reasonable, when tactfully handled. He laughed, saying,

  “Ho no, my friend. With a novel like that… with a writer like that, I’m not going to stand here in a doorway as if I’m talking about the weather. Oh no.”

  “But you saying it measures up?”

  “Oh no. Pharsin, don’t try and do this! You my friend are going to come up to my studio. One day very soon. We’re going to take the phone, uh, ‘off the hook,’ put a log on the fire, and open a bottle of good red wine. A claret, I rather think—a nice sharp Morgon. Then we ‘ll talk.”

  “When?” said Pharsin, with familiar vigilance.

  “Actually there’s a good reason why we can’t do it this weekend.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m rereading it.”

  “…I applaud your rigor. Such works seldom render up their secrets on a first absorption.”

  “Exactly so.”

  “As I’ve said, Rod, a great deal hinges on your critique. It’s been suggested to me that I’m not cut out for fiction, and I’m impatient for a second response. I’m at a stage in my life where… You got a minute to hear this?”

  Half an hour later Rodney said, “Of course. On second thoughts, perhaps we’d be better off with something thicker—like a Margaux. We’ll have some Stilton. And black olives…”

  On parting, the two men performed an old ritual (now long disused): a series of street-guy handshakes. Rodney, as ever, looked like someone slowly and painfully learning how to play Paper, Scissors, Stone.


  It was a gallery opening near Tompkins Square Park—an occasion sponsored by a new brand of vodka, and marked by a nostalgic deluge of Martinis. Rod and Rock had established themselves near the caterers’ table. Sexually at peace, and additionally numbed by cocaine, Rodney was temporarily under the impression that everybody loved him. Now he bantered with the barman, affecting interest in the lot of barmen everywhere. Though invariably polite to servants, Rodney never differentiated them. Failing to see, for example, that this waiter was definitely an actor who had waited way too long.

  “I have reached a bold conclusion,” he said, swinging round on Rock. “All my troubles with women come from… from words. From speech.”

  And there was something in this. Surprisingly, for such a fragile and ingratiating presence, Rodney, over the years, had had his face slapped practically out of alignment, so often had his patter gone awry. He was a flatterer—by profession. He believed in flattery and was always trying to deploy it. But something went wrong with the words: they came out, as his mother would say, just a bit off. If conversation was an art, then Rodney was no artist. He created ratty atmospheres around himself. “Put a sock in it, Rodney,” they would say. “Oh shut up, Rodney, do.” And the fat beak of his upper lip, after framing its latest unwelcome bauble, would stoically self-transect. Prose wasn’t any better. His scented notes routinely caused year-long froideurs: “non-speaks,” as in “She and I are now on non-speaks.” Non-speaks: that’s how they should have started…

  “Silence,” he went on, “was the only reason I got anywhere with the wives. You can’t speak while you paint.”

  “I thought women liked the kind of rot you talk.”

  “Me too. But they don’t. I always seem to say the wrong thing.”

  A while ago, as an experiment, Rodney had reopened his flirtations with two of the wives: Mrs. Globerman, wife to the telecommunications tycoon, and Mrs. Overbye, wife to the airline boss. The idea was to see if his new puissance was transferrable and could be tried out elsewhere. Both efforts were failures—impossibilities. The things he said and the things they said. The things they all said. It seemed far stranger than silence. With these women Rodney had felt the utter superfluity of human speech. So the rain held off. So tell me about your week. So how have you been? Oh, you know: so-so. So-and-so said this and so-and-so said that. So tired. So soon? And so on and 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 ra
indrops 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.