Ghosts and Other Lovers (25 page)

The problem with heights is that once you've reached the highest there is nowhere to go but down. The next few nights afterward we made love the old way: Fred in the manskin, I in the womanskin, until I began to grow restless and want something more.

When I suggested we swap skins, Fred was adamantly opposed. I didn't quite believe his opposition -- it had been so wonderful, how could he not want it again? I teased and pressed and pestered for a reason.

"It's not right, that's why. It's not natural."

"Oh, and the skins are?"

"Of course they are!" He glared at me. "I can understand curiosity, once, but you should be satisfied now. Aren't you satisfied with being a woman?"

"But it's not about being a woman! I'm still a woman, with the skin or without it -- whichever skin I wear. It doesn't make any difference."

"If it doesn't make any difference, why do you want to wear the manskin?"

"It's not about being a man or a woman, it's about being you. Well,
feeling
you, knowing you better than -- Knowing you from the inside. That's what it's like; that's why I liked it. Not because it was a
man
skin -- really, I couldn't tell any difference between them -- but because it was yours. Didn't you like being in my skin?"

"It's not your skin, it's just something I let you wear. And no, I didn't like it particularly. I don't like feeling like a woman. I'm a man."

I was suddenly frightened, aware that I was on dangerous ground. All at once the skins were his and I was -- who was I, what was I, to him?

"Of course you're a man. It's because you
are
a man, and I'm not, and it's because I love you, that I want to know you in every way there is. I want to get closer to you, I don't want to take anything away from you--"

"Then you shouldn't try. Loving me isn't wanting to
be
me; it isn't wanting to turn me into a woman. If you really loved me you'd want to be even
more
of a woman, to make me feel more of a man. That's what the skins are all about."

"I'm sorry." It was hard for me to accept the truth, that what had been for me a high point of intimacy and understanding had been no such thing for him. Instead of feeling closer to me in my skin he had simply felt, unhappily, like a woman. Any woman, I guess, with me as any man. I gave up trying to explain it to him. If he didn't want to be inside my skin I wasn't going to try to force him.

After that we made love less often. His aversion to wearing the womanskin created an ambivalence in me, an insecurity. Was the woman he had encountered traces of in the skin so unlovable? Who did he imagine that I was? We made love a few times without the skins in pursuit of our old closeness but it was never satisfactory. We tried very hard for a time and then we gave up trying.

We were drifting apart. The term implies a gradualness, and it was certainly not abrupt, yet it happened very quickly once it began. Both of us became busy with things that kept us out of the house and out of each other's way. I went back to my room more often, and even spent the night there, especially if I was going out with friends after work or if he said he would be out late.

Yet it wasn't easy, giving up on Fred. I'd always liked being part of a couple, and I'd never entered a relationship without intending it to last forever. And I missed him. Memories of the early days of our romance haunted me, memories of intimacy, wordless feelings I would never have again.

Neither of us said anything about what was happening, reluctant to bring it to a formal, final close. We spent two or three nights a week together, and although I had been gradually, unobtrusively shifting my things back to my own room, I still had my own key to his house.

One evening which we had planned to spend together I happened to get there first. I took my bottle of wine into the kitchen, and then went down the hall to the bathroom.

The skins, both of them, were hanging from the hooks on the back of the door. It gave me quite a start to see them, for Fred had long been in the habit of folding his carefully away after use. When it wasn't in his wallet he kept it in a small, round, leather stud-box on the bedroom dresser. I had tended to leave the womanskin hung on the back of the door where I'd first found it, but after feeling his disapproval of "picking up after me" a few times, I'd found a Chinese red silk purse and used that faithfully. I was sure that I'd folded it away after the last time; certainly the skins had not been hanging in the bathroom when I left on Sunday night.

Then I noticed that they were moving. It was only the faintest of gentle waving motions, as if they stirred in a breeze, but there was no breeze in the closed room, and if there had been, it would have impelled the skins to move both in the same direction not, as I could plainly see, in gentle flutterings toward each other.

What I saw, and I knew it, was pure yearning. They longed for each other all the time, but only by human intervention could they come together. We could live without them, but they needed us.

I lifted them down from their hooks, took them into the bedroom, and lay them flat on the bed, one on top of the other. I watched for a little while but there was no visible movement -- maybe, for them, no movement was necessary now they were so close. Then, feeling embarrassed by my own curiosity, I left the room, turning out the light when I went.

Fred and I had dinner in -- a take-away from the local Indian restaurant -- and then watched a production of
Don Giovanni
on television. Opera is not really my sort of thing; and he had offered to tape it and watch it by himself later, but I was getting the prickly sensation that Fred had decided it was time at last for our serious talk, and I was grateful for anything that would postpone it. Our relationship was nearly over, but I was determined it should last long enough for us to make love once more.

When we went into the bedroom together he looked startled at the sight of the skins on the bed.

"Oh, maybe not," he said. "Maybe it wouldn't be such a good idea tonight -- I've been meaning to talk to you--"

"Later. Don't say anything now. We'll put on the skins -- we could be any man, any woman -- we can talk tomorrow."

Hastily I stripped off my clothes, knowing that once I was in the skin he wouldn't argue with me, he would feel the yearning, too, and the compulsion to satisfy it.

Then I was in the skin and -- it wasn't mine anymore. All at once I was suffocatingly close to, intimate with, a complete stranger. It was like waking up in the middle of a rape, and the worst part about it was the hot, heavy desire all around. I felt it as if it was mine, and it was directed at Fred -- but I knew it belonged to somebody else. I wanted to scream but I couldn't. Somehow I managed to peel the thing off me, and then I stood naked, trembling, staring outraged at my lover.

"You've had someone else here -- you've been making love with someone else!"

"I was going to tell you -- I tried--"

"You were going to tell me! And that makes it all right?"

"Oh -- please. Don't go all -- as if I'd broken your heart. You know perfectly well that things were already all but finished between us." His calm, weary, rational tone made me aware that I was playing a role lifted from a soap opera, but I couldn't seem to stop.

"All but, yes. All but. But not completely finished. It would have been nice if you could at least have waited, instead of ending it like this, humiliating me, and -- and why did you have to bring her here? Why did you have to use the skins?"

He stopped looking defensive.

"You know why," he said quietly. "You know perfectly well why. The same reason you dragged me in here and tore off all your clothes ten minutes ago. Nothing to do with love for me. Nothing much to do with you, either."

Anger and hurt rushed out of me like air from a pricked balloon, leaving me limp. I began to put my clothes back on. "I wasn't the first, was I."

He sighed and shook his head. "But it felt like the first time with you, it really did. That's all I meant. I didn't want you thinking it was routine, or old hat, or -- Because it really was special with you, like the very first time."

"Did you really find them in your garden?"

"Different garden. Down in Suffolk. Years ago -- the night I lost my virginity. Some fifty-odd women ago."

I was all dressed now. I looked at my watch, saw that the underground would still be running. I could go home. "Well -- good luck. I hope you're happy. Maybe she'll be the one."

He smiled a little, mocking my conventional expectations. "That's not what it's about. I don't need
one
."

The pub was one where we'd often met, and which I'd not visited since. I went in there today because I wanted a drink. It wasn't nostalgia or anything; to tell the truth, I'd hardly taken in where I was. The pub just happened to be the one I was passing at the moment I realized I really could not face the tube just then without a little lubricant.

With the end of our affair we'd ceased to see each other. It wasn't something that had to be arranged: we had never moved in the same circles, and our one mutual acquaintance had moved to America soon after she'd introduced us. About two years after the last goodbye I had seen Nick in Holborn underground station: I was on the down escalator and he was ascending; I don't think he saw me. The sight of him sent me into such a spin that I actually forgot where I was going.

Now at the sight, so familiar five years ago but not since, of my one and only adulterous lover, I came unanchored in time. I felt a little jolt, as if I'd seen a ghost, and then I shivered as that old sado-masochistic cocktail of lust and anger and loneliness began to spread throughout my system, and I went up to him with a sort of casual, sort of wicked grin, the way I used to, as if we'd planned this meeting and I was pretending we hadn't.

He was exactly the same. Those might have been the same pair of jeans, the same denim jacket, the same Doc Martens he'd been wearing the evening I first put my hand on his thigh under the table in the Café Pacifico. It was maybe not quite the same haircut, but definitely the same wire-framed glasses, the same blue eyes, and the same slightly crooked front teeth that showed when he grinned the same loopy grin.

Which he did, hugely, at the sight of me, and I realized he was honestly pleased to see me. He'd never been one to disguise his feelings, unlike every other man I'd ever been with.

"You look wonderful," he said.

"You look like a refugee from the seventies. Still. And I'll bet they're not even Levi's -- Marks and Sparks' own brand, am I right?"

"I was never a slave to designer labels, and, as you can see, success hasn't changed me."

"You're successful?"

"Meet my backer." He introduced me to the man he'd been drinking with; despite my hopeful first impression, he wasn't alone. I was about to make my excuses, but the man in the suit beat me to it: cordial smile and nods all around, and he was off. Nick ordered me a whiskey and dry ginger and I didn't stop him, although I didn't like the mixture. It was what I'd always drunk with him, and that he still remembered pleased me.

We gave each other cautious, curious looks.

"Well," he said.

"Your backer?"

"I'm making a film. Didn't you know? There was a piece about me in the
Face.
In April."

"I must have missed that issue."

"I did a film for Channel Four. Part of the four-minute film series.
Ratphobia.
Did you see it?"

"No. Sorry. I didn't know. The
TV Times
is another one of those must-reads that I just don't. . . . You should have sent me a card."

"I would have. But you told me once a long time ago never to darken your door again and that included your office mail."

I didn't know what to say to that because it was true, and he sounded hurt. I was always saying things to hurt and then feeling abashed by my success. An awkward silence fell, for about twenty-three seconds, and then my drink arrived.

"Cheers."

"Confusion to your enemies."

I would have to stay at least until I'd finished my drink, and all at once that seemed too long. We had nothing to say to each other; we never had. Back in the days when we were seeing each other, if we weren't making love we were either flirting or fighting; there was nothing else for us, no comfortable middle ground, none of the common interests on which friendships, or marriages, are built. He hadn't the least understanding of, or interest in, my work, and as for his, well, at the time when I knew him his film-making aspirations had progressed no further than production work on a couple of pop videos. He spent a lot of time talking himself up to various people who might help his career, and when he talked to me, too often the same well-practiced, self-aggrandizing phrases came rolling out. I hated it. Not only because I mistrusted people who tried to impress me, but because I felt he wasn't talking to me at those times, but performing for an imaginary audience. So I would not admire; I refused to be impressed. And I did my best (in a phrase of my grandmother's) to cut him down to size.

Sometimes I didn't even have to try. How could the names he dropped impress me if I'd never heard them before? I know he found my ignorance of famous film directors and musical megastars difficult to credit. But although he was only four years younger than me, we belonged to different generations, culturally speaking. I'd stopped paying attention to pop music in about 1978, whereas Nick still bought singles and read things like the
Face
and
NME.

"You still working in the same place?" he asked suddenly.

"And still doing the same thing." I wondered if he remembered what it was.

"That's good," he said. "I guess you're happy?"

"Well, I need the money. It's easier working than finding a backer."