Affection (22 page)

Of course we will not jump in the spa bath together. This will not happen. I am not even sure that I like him very much. We sit and we drink wine and we talk and the rain gets heavier and heavier.

“I think I'll ride home after all.”

Which is ridiculous given the weather and I see Paul cast around frantically for an escape. There are women with cars. He quickly negotiates an alternative to the motorcycle and I am glad, because it will be suicide to ride in this weather, no visibility, dodgy tires, no wet weather gear. I am also disappointed because somewhere on our trip back it would become impossible and we would be stranded at the side of the highway and we would have to huddle together for warmth.

I gather my still-sodden jacket and helmet. I glance at the room with the spa, which is right there near the entrance to the house. I
wave goodbye. I do not hug Paul although I feel perhaps we should shake hands. I move out toward the bike and clip the forlorn spare helmet onto the side. The lining will be soaked by the time I have found my way home.

The rattle of tires skidding on wet gravel. I can't see a thing. My right index finger becomes a windscreen wiper for my visor. Even this just makes the world a blur of light and shade. I flip open the visor and the rain pierces my eyeballs. I will look into them and see the bruising on them, on the skin around them, when I am safely home.

Safely home after an hour and a half of breathless terror. It was never worth the risk. I should have stayed the night.

But then there was that spa bath. I dream it. It becomes a recurring theme for the next few nights. We come to it fully clothed, Paul and I, drinking, laughing, acting like children in the early hours of the morning.

Still. I barely know him and I barely like him. Perhaps I don't like him at all. I see Paul's little green light pop up on the Internet and I could talk to him. I could ask him how his lift home was. Instead I close my computer and reach for my sodden book and ease the pulp of pages apart. Tonight I will not chat with him. Tonight I will read, or I will write. Anything but chat.

I close my eyes and all I can see is a spa bath, a glass of wine, and bubbles.

Richard bought a car at an auction although neither of us could drive.

He was always buying things. He had a way of making money disappear. I was barely capable of keeping track of the rent but he was worse than I was.

“Let's eat out,” he'd say, meaning a fine restaurant and perhaps a new shirt to wear to it, and the most expensive meal on the menu. He bought me gifts that I didn't want. Kitschy little things, oil burners and homoerotic prints and subscriptions to expensive gay porn magazines. I felt myself digging my heels in, feeling responsible. I was not his mother and yet he made me like a mother to him, always setting boundaries, the voice of reason.

“It's always up to me to find our partners,” I complained to Laura
one day after a shift. “I never see him put any effort in. If it were up to him it would be just him and me.”

Just him and me. I could see the humor in it. Just him and me should not be so bad really, but when I thought about this possibility, all the life seemed to escape out of the relationship.

“You love him, don't you?”

I couldn't be sure I really loved him at all. I loved what I did with him. I loved the potential of our relationship. We had fun. It was exciting, but I had lost my drive to go out every night in search of fresh blood, and our evenings alone together left me irritable.

Brian moved off the couch and into the spare room. We didn't charge him rent but he brought us food and vegetables and I began to enjoy the distraction of him being around. He did the washing and helped with meals. Sometimes when I snapped at Richard in frustration, Brian would be there to pull me aside.

“Let's go for a drive,” he said one particularly restless Sunday afternoon.

My final assignments were due and I should have been working, but I was raging about one thing or another and I knew that the afternoon would start to plummet if I didn't leave the house. It had been days since we'd had anyone. I felt cooped up, I had started to pace in the evenings.

“You look like you need your fix.”

Brian parked at the edge of the Botanical Gardens. We would
walk, he told me. We would smell the herb garden and maybe steal some cuttings to plant in our own.

“What fix would that be?”

“Someone to distract you from the problems with your own relationship? Sex. Sex with some complete stranger to make you guys feel like you are not all alone with each other.”

He seemed like a wise man then, someone twice my age and just as perceptive. He had been in our home for a handful of days and he had put his finger right on the problem, our problem, that we didn't love each other enough.

I felt his hand on my knee and it was a comforting weight.

“I'm tired,” I told him. “University is almost over. I don't know what I'm going to do next.”

When his finger inched inside the elastic of my panties it was unexpected. I hadn't felt any kind of sexual energy between us. I didn't find him attractive and I had decided that he didn't find me attractive either, but here was his finger inside me, teasing me, changing my mind about my own attraction to him so easily.

“You want to sleep with us?” I asked him, shifting my hips closer to the driver's side of the car and spreading my knees for him. He slipped a second finger inside and slid it back and forth.

“No,” he said. “But I wouldn't mind sleeping with you alone.”

This was against the rules, our rules, the rules that I had set for both of us. The rules that Richard had agreed to.

When Brian removed his finger he held it to his nose and then he sniffed at it and he wanted me. This made me want him back.

“Have sex with me,” he said then and I could hear the desire in his voice.

“I won't break our rules,” I told him. “I won't sleep with someone without telling Richard first.”

“Are you going to tell Richard?”

“I think this thing with Richard might be over.”

“You won't regret it.”

“Maybe,” I said. “We'll see.”

My assignments were due all at once and I was moving house. This is how university ended for me. This is how Richard ended for me. There was no struggle, but he cried and I felt responsible. I was fond of him. We had shared so much and with such good humor. We packed our things and I hid myself away in the library at night. I needed more time for my work. I was doing too many things badly, and I watched my relationship crumble and I thought perhaps I should have put more effort in.

“We've had fun, haven't we?” And of course we had. So much fun.

There was a twinge of terror in me that this would be the end of sex. We had shared a new partner every week at least and the game had lasted a year. I could have counted them out, averaged them, but I was never good at counting and it wasn't about the numbers, it was
about the game, the variety, the smorgasbord. Richard was the safe place from which to begin our adventure. Now it was time to climb back down to the world where everything might be more ordinary. I thought perhaps that I was making a mistake. Brian lurked in the other room, watching us pack, whispering to me that I was making the only choice I could under the circumstances.

Richard left first and I thought this would be a good thing, barely remembering the cleaning and the scrubbing that would have to happen in his absence. Without Richard there was more time for my assignments, and then there was Brian.

He was much older than me and I had a strange kind of respect for the man. He was full of secrets and a manner that seemed to come from another time. He ate his food with his arms hunched around his plate, and once when I picked a piece of tomato off his plate, knowing that he didn't really like tomatoes anyway, he turned and roared like a bear defending her cubs. I was floored by it.

“It's just the army,” he explained. “My time in Vietnam.”

Vietnam seemed like such a mythical thing to me, the subject of movies and novels, a world of protest and world-changing and politics that I barely understood. Was he even old enough to have gone to Vietnam? When I questioned him about it he snapped shut like a clam and no amount of poking or shaking could rouse him.

We had sex and he told me that I was doing it the wrong way. Not my technique, which he said he enjoyed, but my habit of watching
my partner's actions, memorizing it all, then finding a greater pleasure when I was alone. He said that I should make noises. That this would free me from my inhibitions. He took away my vibrator saying that I should come to an orgasm simply by being in the moment. None of this made sense to my body and I found that I became self-conscious with it. The noises sounded fake and distracted me. Orgasms proved elusive. I almost had them and then they would slip away and leave me longing for my vibrator.

I was not used to this kind of exclusiveness, this one on one, and I began to misinterpret it. I made the mistake of calling him “my boyfriend” and he pounced on me.

“You are not a girlfriend kind of person,” he told me, another in a long line. “If I were to have a girlfriend she would be an earth mother kind of girl. You are too hard edged, too manly.”

I felt the hackles rising on my neck. We fought. There was nothing wrong with me, I said. I was honest and dependable and smart.

“I want someone feminine, someone with secrets. You have no secrets. You are empty and there is nothing about you that I have yet to learn.”

We fought in the car on the freeway and his temper was formidable. I watched him close his eyes and lean forward on the accelerator.

I laughed at him then and every time he performed this trick for me, which was often.

“Go on,” I said. “Kill us. Do you think I care if you kill us?”

I didn't care. I looked ahead past my university degree and there was just the café where I worked and more sex, but not enough, never enough sex and no bright and shining future to walk into. He stepped on the accelerator and closed his eyes and I said, “Bring it on. Kill us both now. Do it.” And he swore and hissed and eased back to a safer speed.

“You'd better find a house to move to,” he said in the last week at Ryan Street.

“What about you?”

He held up his key, his single key.

“You won't move in with me somewhere?” and he laughed as if I had offered to chop off his head for him.

“I would rather move in with your friends,” he told me, listing the women I knew one by one and telling me why each one would be a better choice than me.