Gravity Box and Other Spaces (11 page)

He had arrived that morning and this was Conny's first look at him. As she drew nearer, she stared, shocked. A deep reddish-purple scar trailed across the left side of his face from the bridge of his obviously-broken nose to the hinge of his heavy jaw. William was taller, but Geoffrey possessed a robustness that more than compensated.

She jerked her attention back to William just before she reached her place.

The parson cleared his throat and proceeded through the ceremony. He ended by having them sign their certificate. The parson held out his pen. William hesitated, then pulled a pen from his pocket—the ivory one Conny had talked her uncle out of—and signed. He handed the pen to Conny. She scrawled her signature and returned the pen to William, who tucked it in his jacket pocket. Conny's cousin took the parson's pen and signed in one of the spaces for witness. Geoffrey bent over the parchment.

“Ah!” he shook the pen, tried again, then dropped it, empty. “Pardon me,” he said and snatched the ivory pen from William's pocket. Deftly, he uncapped it and signed on the second line for witness.

Conny felt a brief, giddy vertigo. She blinked at Geoffrey, who frowned for a moment, then gave the pen to
William. William looked around as if startled, then laughed.

“That's it, then,” he said.

They followed the parson to the parlor, where his housekeeper set out scones and punch.

“I'm sorry for arriving so late,” Geoffrey said. “No excuse. I just lost track of time.”

“Geoffrey almost ended up expelled for tardiness,” William said with a wry grin. “Never could keep an eye on the clock.”

“Don't like them much,” Geoffrey admitted.

“Still, you made it,” Conny said. “I'm glad you did. I haven't met any of William's friends.”

“He doesn't have any but me.” Geoffrey frowned in the silence. “Now he's got you,” he added softly. He ducked his head. “Excuse me.”

Conny watched him move away. He managed with a kind of artless grace to pass by people at the exact moment they were turned away from him.

“What does he do?” she asked.

“Lately? I don't know. He's been a miner. Worked on the docks in Liverpool. Barge hand on the Thames.”

“I meant his profession.”

“He doesn't have one, really. He could never decide.”

“How did he get his injury?”

“Um—a misunderstanding.”

William said no more. Geoffrey had disappeared. She did not see him again until she climbed into the taxi her uncle had rented them. Then he was there, leaning in through the window.

“Luck,” he said, clasping William's hand. He looked at Conny. “I'm pleased he found you.”

Conny moved quickly and kissed Geoffrey, first on the scar, then on the mouth. He looked startled. Then his face relaxed into a grin.

Conny watched morning sunlight dapple the walls and furniture, filtered through the thin curtains that shifted across the windows, and thought how it even seemed to get into her dreams, the same color and lucidity. She sat up.

The other half of the bed was neat, unslept in. Conny stared around her and wondered who had woken her.
Who was touching me?
Her nerves rippled pleasantly. She bent over herself, hands between her thighs, and tried to remember what she had dreamed. Men and women with no faces, standing around her, hands outstretched, moving—Gone. She pushed the damp sheets back.

She found William in the next room, the dining room-turned-study. Books piled everywhere. He sat at the long table, still dressed from the night before, jacket draped over the back of his chair. He rubbed his forehead absently, staring at the pages spread before him, the ivory pen in his hand. Conny hesitated. Since his last bout of illness he wrote seldom, little besides reviews of other people's books and the letters he drafted for her almost every night. Judging from the pages stacked by his elbow and the sensations she woke from, he must have been writing those letters all night.

He looked up. “Oh. Good morning.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt.”

He shook his head.

“What are you writing?”

“Dreck, by the look of it. I thought I'd solved a problem with the new novel, but—” He tossed the pen atop the sheets.

Novel?
“Then maybe I should let you work. I thought I'd go out. Do you want me to bring you anything back?”

“No.” He flashed a smile, then picked up his pen again.

Conny dressed, grabbed her bag, and hurried out of the apartment.

The streets of Newport, this near the waterfront, were relatively empty in the mornings. Everyone was either down at the docks or farther in. This thin slice of shops and cafes remained quiet till nearly noon. Conny was grateful for the solitude. She strode along the narrow avenues that twisted through the district until the sensations pulling at her ebbed. When they seemed at a safe distance, she stopped in a small café and ordered coffee.

It's never happened with anything but the letters before—

They joked about the letters, pretending that their influence was purely suggestive—what was that delicious word from the psychoanalysts?—psychosomatic. Conny's reactions came from her own imagination while he wrote. He did them after lovemaking, or had, until illness stole his energy and all he could do was write about making love. He had missed several days during the worst of it. Afterward, when he wrote, scribbling earnestly to her with the ivory pen, she responded. Perhaps it was imagination, as he said. Perhaps he even believed it. She no longer did. Especially not now. She was disinclined to question it too closely—sometimes it seemed like the only thing they had together.

The waiter brought her coffee. She looked down the cobbled street, her attention caught by workmen walking
along, heads bowed, caps pulled low on their foreheads. As Conny watched them go by, one of them looked her way. A heavy line staggered over half his face.

Conny stood abruptly. Coffee sloshed onto the table. She fished two-pence out of her bag, dropped it, and hurried after the workmen. When she got to the corner they were gone. She continued down the canyon-like avenue, but she saw no one.

Most of the shops were still closed. Conny framed her eyes to peer through the dusty windows. Through one she noticed, among the assorted bric-a-brac, an attractive oak chest with brass trim. When she looked up she saw the shopkeeper, smiling at her. She pointed to the box and he nodded, motioning her to the door.

A musty, decayed odor escaped the box when she opened it. Shreds of felt still clung to the inside. “How much?”

“Oh—two pounds.”

She surprised him by not haggling. Instead she counted out the notes and laid them in his hand. She lifted the chest. It was only a little larger than what comfortably fit in her arms.

When she stepped from the shop, Geoffrey was standing there, hands tucked in his pockets.

“I thought I saw you,” she said.

He touched two fingers to the bill of his cap, then came forward and took the chest from her. He tucked it under one arm.

“I'll carry this home for you,” he said.

They stopped in another café, not far from the apartment.

“After he recovered he wanted to leave London,” she said. “I suppose he blamed it for making him sick.”

“Hmm. Well, that's as good a reason as any, I suppose.”

“It hasn't helped much.”

“He still isn't selling? How are you getting by?”

“He writes reviews. My uncle sends money. We have friends—I have friends. One or two seem to find it romantic to help an aspiring writer. William almost never goes out.”

“He never was one for socializing.” He nodded at the chest. “What are you going to use that for?”

“Oh—memories.”

Geoffrey smiled. It eased the severity of his scar.

“William said you got that because of a misunderstanding.”

“Did he now? Interesting way of putting it.”

“Was he wrong?”

“To tell you? No, I suppose not.”

“No, I mean—”

“Maybe someday I'll tell you about it.”

Conny drank her coffee to cover her disappointment. “What are you doing here?”

“I've got a job working dockside.” He lifted his cup to his mouth. His hands were wide and heavy. Conny imagined them holding and lifting, easily, as though born to it. She imagined them palms out, calloused, flat against her face, her breasts, her thighs—

“I really ought to get back,” she said, looking away.

Without a word he picked up the chest and followed her.

“Would you like to come up?” she asked when they arrived home. “I'm sure Will—”

“No. I have to get to work.” He handed the chest to her, touched his cap and walked off.

William was asleep on the sofa. Conny carried the chest into the bedroom. She took the letters from the suitcase where she kept them and transferred the pages
into the box. Two stacks fit side by side as if the container had been made for them.

She locked the chest and slid it under the bed. Listening to William's labored breathing from the next room, Conny sat by the window, chewing on a thumbnail, thinking about Geoffrey's hands.

“Don't you want to come?”

William looked up from the desk and shook his head. “I need to work.”

In the two hours since he had sat down he had done nothing but stare at an empty sheet of paper, one finger rubbing along the hairline at his temple. Conny felt the stir of unease. She had not told William about the party invitation from Brian, the man who owned this house and the car they—she—had been using for weeks now. William knew only that they were invited to a party.

“Then I'll stay,” she said, half hoping he would say “Yes, please stay,” half afraid that he would.

“Don't. You want to go. There's no point in both of us suffering through this.”

Despite his open shirt and the cool breeze coming off the Channel, his skin glowed with a fine sheen of sweat. He slouched in his chair. A typewriter—a gift from Brian's wife, who was in Paris this month—sat before him like a model of some improbable temple. Beside it lay sheets of handwritten manuscript, the ivory pen on top of them.

“Are you sure?”

He nodded.

“It could be a late evening.”

He shrugged and picked up the pen.

She kissed him quickly on the head, hurried downstairs and out to the car. She had not thought too
directly about tonight's party. Brian had given her directions to a house down the coast road east of Brighton and had somehow made it clear that while certainly William was invited, he would prefer her to come by herself.

Her body told her the moment William touched nib to paper. The villa was two miles away. Halfway there she considered pulling over, but she kept driving.

A mass of cars filled the grounds in front of the house. She could hear the jazz band even before she turned off the engine. She sat in the car for several minutes, pressed against the door, waiting for the rush of passion to pass, imagining the sound of his pen, the faint susurrus of William's breath. Tonight's work, she decided, would be very good and as unsalable as the rest. He wrote it all for her anyway—he said so, but he did not mean it the way it really was. Conny leaned her head back and closed her eyes, bringing the tension between her legs into completion. If anyone walked by they would hear her small sounds and politely veer off to leave the lovers alone. But, she wondered, if they did not go away, if instead they indulged a voyeuristic impulse and came to see, they would find her alone, lying on her side, legs parted, face bright with pleasure.

Just me and his work—

She never asked if he received anything from the connection. They never talked about it anymore; he seemed antagonistic toward the subject. They coupled so seldom that it always surprised her when he pressed against her and explored. She made it as convenient as possible for him, opened herself, shifted at the slightest hint of where he wanted to touch her. She had learned all his wordless signals and more often than not paid no attention to her own pleasure. Afterward, every time, he
went to his desk, naked, and wrote another letter for her. Some of them covered less than half a sheet; others went on for three or four. She woke in the mornings to find them beside her on the bed, William asleep in the next room, captive to his exhaustion. The letters went directly into the chest.

Her breath shuddered out in a last wave, and she felt control return. She smelled pungent and dug out her bottle of perfume. A few minutes later she walked over the grass to the gravel driveway to the marble entrance. With each step, the music, now mingled with laughter, grew louder.
I've made a mistake
, she thought as she walked into the storm of revelers.

Just inside she took a glass of champagne from someone and entered the beast. Hands, hips, elbows, and knees all touched her, seeming to caress her as she passed along, deeper into the antic folds of expensive clothes and cigarette smoke bluing the air. Everyone seemed on display, but crammed together so no one could get a clear look. Conny drank her champagne and made greeting noises, searching idly for a familiar face, one with a name that she could talk to. The faces all looked so earnest about being casual that they lost all legitimacy and their smiles seemed overburdened with meaning. She recognized no one. It was pleasant, though, to be stroked and petted through the careless gauntlet. She missed it, touching and being touched by flesh. It would, she thought, be pleasant not to miss it. She finished her drink and found another before she made it to the far side of the room.

A bar had been set up, tended by three men in short white jackets. She caught herself on the edge, held onto the polished wood like a shipwrecked passenger grasping a floating plank, and watched them busily mixing drinks. She stared at their hands, at their quick efficiency working
with bottles, ice, and glass. She finished her second glass and set it down with a solid click.