Sparrow Nights (8 page)

“Good heavens!” I protested.

“I’ll slow dance with you, Professor,” Jennifer said.

“Now?”

“Sure, why not?”

I didn’t look at her husband as I got to my feet, but I thought I heard him shout a not very pleasant “Oh boy!” and clap his hands. I followed her past the front few couples and put my hand on her damp back.

“My husband is getting wrecked,” she said. “This always happens on the last night of our holiday.”

“No trouble, I hope.”

“None worth talking about.

She slipped her cheek against mine and it seemed to me that she gave just the tiniest squiggle.

“Anyway,” she said.

A couple banged into us.
Sorry, sorry
.

We danced on for a few moments and then I found myself coming to the gradual realization that I couldn’t remember who I was dancing with. The white rum had taken a lethal step forward. I tried to
visualize
the face of the young woman with her head on my shoulder.

“What are you thinking about, Professor?” she asked. “You did a sort of change-up there.”

“Nothing really.”

“You must have been thinking about something. I could
feel
it.”

I pulled back my head and looked at her.

“Oh,” I said quietly. “It’s you.”

I heard her husband call out something. In a second he’d stagger onto the dance floor or she’d touch her temples and say, I don’t feel well, I have to sit down.

“Listen,” I said, “may I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“It’s a little favour actually.”

“What sort of favour?”

“Maybe not such a good idea after all.”

“Say it, Professor.”

“Okay then.” It came out as if it were all one word. “Do you think it would be all right if I put my hand under your arm?”

She pulled back her head and frowned. “Under my arm? Like here?”

“Yes.”

“It’s pretty sweaty right there.”

“I know.”

She looked over at the table. Blurry pause. “Can you be discreet?”

I could feel the pressure of her hand on my back as she manoeuvred me out of the table’s sightline. “Okay, go,” she whispered.

I slipped my hand up the side of her ribcage.

“Did you get it?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Do I smell all right?”

“Yes. Great.”

“What? What is it?”

“You smell like Emma,” I said.

^{C H A P T E R}        
7

E
n tout cas
. I was sitting in a café at the foot of my street, killing time before bed. Over the past few weeks I’d been organizing a book of essays on Arthur Rimbaud, but it was slow going. Several key contributors who had promised me papers had proven unreliable. One dropped out entirely, claiming he no longer believed his central thesis (that Rimbaud had not been a homosexual after all). No big loss there, but still it left a hole in the book, one which I was now obliged to fill with my own paper. Others were not up to scratch, obviously dashed off at the last moment, and I was in the delicate position of having to tell their authors that a complete overhaul was necessary. A woman at the university of Tel Aviv, who had been promising me her piece for months now, had taken to not replying to my urgent e-mails. My goodness, they were worse than undergraduates, and I was beginning to regret that I’d ever undertaken the project.

So that evening I found myself in a neighbourhood café. I liked the waiters there. Sometimes I went for a drink, and just a little chitchat with one of them satisfied my hunger for a human voice or touch, and I could return home and resume my work without that hollowing sensation that I was living somehow on the margins of life.

I’d taken half a recreational sleeping pill and chased it with a pint of beer. Waiting for that certain flavour of burnt nuts to take hold, I picked up a local tabloid and while flipping through it noticed in the back a full three pages given to sex ads. Escort services, women who were men, a dominatrix named Sheeba, massage parlours. I’d seen this stuff before, but now I found it sort of disturbing. No, I’m being coy, it wasn’t in the least disturbing. It was erotic.

Reading more closely, keeping an eye out for the waiter—I didn’t want him to see me scrutinizing
de près
such material—I noted there was a massage parlour just down the street from where I was sitting. The Gold Hat Health Club. Odd, I’d never noticed it before. So I wrote down the phone number and, just for fun, or so I told myself, went over to the house phone on the bar and called the number.

Soft music came over the line and a girl’s pleasant voice greeted me. I asked if they were open for business. “We are,” she replied with a tone of barely suppressed high spirits, which for all its transparent commercial motivation made me feel
quand même
as if somehow she and I had struck up a strangely immediate rapport, as if she had recognized something (ahem) special in my voice.

I asked how late.

“Late,” she said offhandedly, and the word seemed charged with implication, as if gumdrops hung suspended on its frame.

I went back to my table in an uneasy state. I had the sensation of sliding into a dark hole, like those nights years ago when, brushing my teeth in the bathroom, I caught myself daydreaming about Emma, about what was going to happen in a matter of minutes when I slipped into bed beside her delicious-smelling body.

I paid my bill and went over for a peek. It was a nondescript low-rise next door to a pharmacy. On the door, along with a list of doctors, income tax services for Portugal’s newly arrived, even a night dentist, were the words The Gold Hat Health Club. Even the letters that spelt out this absurd name seemed charged and beckoning, a kind of, how shall I say, naughty come hither, provoking in me the fluttery stomach an adolescent might experience as he smuggles a girlie magazine past the parental living room. It was a sort of
black
excitement.

I went through the double glass doors and walked to the far wall, where a small elevator waited. The doors rolled open with a clang and I got in, pushing a button for the top floor. We lurched upwards, small square portals giving view to colourless hallways, before coming to a stop at level number three. A bear-shaped man, Slavic I assumed, and his bear-shaped wife (keep the Kalashnikov out of
her
hands) got in. They must have been the cleaning staff. The doors closed and we proceeded upwards. Realizing they were going up, not down, the man lurched forward, slapping the buttons with the heel of a meaty hand as if the carriage were whisking the three of us to our deaths. The wife, who was wearing a faded purple coat, looked at me with considerable embarrassment, although I thought I detected a hint of something else in her sympathetic features, as if she knew where I was going and wished me to know that while she understood my being a man and all, there was still something unattractive about it. It unnerved me, this glancing regard, because it made me feel as if I were carrying my soul on the outside of my body, the more easily to be bruised, even scarred.

I experienced a moment of short, stabbing doubt. Surely I should have done better than this with my life. Had I not scoffed at people like me in my early twenties? Felt sorry for them, ached for them, those middle-aged men talking too energetically to young women on a street corner or in a café. Yes I had, it’s true, but those were unforgiving years. I had scoffed at
everything
. I had assumed in the privacy of my own darting thoughts that everyone wanted to be me but lacked the vigour, the courage, the élan. The only thing in common between those years and now, I observed unhappily, was a capacity on my part to find a persuasive explanation for anything I chose to do. In other words, viewed from my own eyes, I was seldom on the wrong team for very long.

The lurid draw of the ad in the back of the tabloid seemed a long way off now. Its spell had worn off like Novocaine, and I saw a discomfiting image of myself as a chinless dentist led by the nose into a Mexican brothel, where in the space of an hour I would be fleeced for several hundred dollars’ worth of drinks for the señoritas, jacked off into a dirty washcloth and sent out the door minus my passport.

With a kind of numb dread I got out of the elevator on the fifth floor, the Russians staying on board, and I picked my way down a mucous-green hallway, passing the night dentist’s office where a nurse sat in full view, door open, cap and whites on, watching with mild contempt all those who made their way to the Gold Hat Health Club.

I tapped my knuckles on suite 501 and as the door swished shut behind me I found myself in a dark, heavily carpeted foyer. Chocolate rugs, chocolate walls, wall hangings, paintings, all virtually indistinguishable under subdued track lighting. Latin pop music issued from invisible speakers. A large fish tank gurgled in the corner, in which one almost expected to see a human head, the hair swishing slowly back and forth like seaweed.

I was not alone long. A door opened and a tall young woman with a bony face and crimped hair emerged from a back room.

“Yes?” she said.

“Could I get a massage here?”

“Oh,” she said, pleasantly surprised, and revealed a set of small pointed teeth. “Didn’t I just speak to you on the phone?”

“Yes, that was me.”

“You certainly got here fast.”

“I wasn’t far away.”

“Have you been here before?”

“No, actually, I haven’t.”

“It’s sixty-five dollars for a forty-five-minute workout. Plus any tip you might care to leave, of course.”

Workout?

“Of course.”

Opening a door on her right, she led me into a narrow hallway. A heavy musk hung in the air. She knocked softly on a door and went in. It was a small, immaculate room with drawn curtains and a linen-covered massage table at its centre.

“Is there anyone you’d like to see?” she asked with professional sunshine.

“What are my choices?”

“Well, there’s Cindy, Minky, Sally.” She paused coyly. “Or me, of course. I’m Wendy.”

I looked at her long bare arms.

“Are you available?”

“I am.”

“That would be lovely.”

She smiled her pointy-toothed smile again. “I’ll give you a few minutes to get yourself ready.”

The door shut and I was alone again. I took off my clothes and laid them neatly on a chair, like a schoolboy. I looked around for a towel, something to wrap myself with, but there was nothing, just a small nightstand at the head of the table with a box of Kleenex, a can of baby powder and a large bottle of baby oil. I lay on my stomach on the table, but not without first examining the sheet for unsavoury stains. There were none, not that I could make out much; it was very dark in there. I must have been nervous, I could smell myself. Well, not exactly myself. This was the second time it had happened. I smelt like Emma. That sharp, almost frightened animal smell came out from under my arms. I sniffed again. By now the whole room smelt of her.

The door opened and I jumped.

“Would you like oil or baby powder?” Wendy asked. She was wearing a pair of fluttery black trousers, imitation silk, and a matching sleeveless top.

“Which would you recommend?”

“Some customers like the oil; others like the powder.” Seeing the uncertainty on my face, she continued, “We could start with the baby powder and save the oil till the end.”

So she began. I lay on my stomach and for the longest time her hands moved over my back, my neck and shoulders. I began to have the rather anxious concern that perhaps I’d made a mistake, that I might end up with nothing more than a, well, a massage. But why, I wondered, was she wearing that black sleeveless outfit? Surely professionals wore something more, I don’t know, appropriate. Her hands fluttered down to my buttocks. The brush of her fingernails made my skin rise with goosebumps. She moved lower and, while touching the inside of my leg, brushed ever so slightly a part of me that remains
hors de combat
in a regular massage. Was it an accident? I didn’t know, and the not knowing gave things an aura of titillating suspense. Her fingers whisked along the backs of my legs; they slipped around the side and ran up the inside of my thigh like a tarantula. It happened again and I let out an affected moan, more of a hint really, more of a
You’re getting warmer
signpost than a spasm of pleasure. I shifted my hips to make a necessary adjustment and observed that she waited with professional élan while things were being rearranged.

“Perhaps you’d be more comfortable if you rolled over,” she said.

I did.

“Oh!” she said with practised surprise, catching sight of me. “You must know what comes next.”

“Not exactly.”

“Would you care for a hand release?”

A hand release
.

“I’m not sure. Would I?”

“You’ve been here before?”

“No, I told you.”

“But you’ve been to places
like
this before?”

“Well, I’ve had a massage before.”

“Never mind,” she said. “Just close your eyes.”

I heard her move to the top of the table and then return. There was a squishing sound and her warm, slippery hand embraced me. She then executed a hand release, not a wasted stroke, which left me half sitting, my fists clenched to my temples.

After a moment I eased myself back down. Not knowing what to say (what
does
one say?), I said, “That was excellent.”

And then she did an extraordinary thing. She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. Slippery as an eel, still seeing stars, I stared at the ceiling while she went down the hall to fetch a hot cloth. I felt immeasurably better, as if a transfusion of bright red, highly oxygenated blood had been injected into my body. Better still, the smell was gone, Emma’s smell, replaced by the rather thick, cloying scent of baby oil that would later make my trousers feel as if they were sticking ever so vaguely to my skin.

Out on the street the night seemed brighter, the people lissom. I checked my watch and was indifferent to find that my long-armed friend with the beautiful touch had had me in and out of there in twenty minutes and still managed a twenty-dollar tip.

In front of me a young girl with a violin case walked along the sidewalk, her hair moving with the motion of her body. Such a graceful waist, such soft brown hair still streaked by the sun or lemon juice or perhaps by youth alone. At the corner, as if sensing the presence of something behind her, she looked quickly over her shoulder. Freckled cheekbones, green eyes. It was a lovely image, and I could look at it, admire it, without feeling despair at knowing I could never have her. I felt, for the next hour or so anyway, free not just from desire but, more important, from the
worry
that that desire would not be fulfilled.

So it began. I became a regular at the Gold Hat, turning up on Thursday nights for “a rub and a tug,” as the girls called it, right after my evening lecture (we had moved on to Molière by now). It was not an uncomplicated experience for me. Sometimes, hurrying along the street, I’d find myself thinking about Emma, about our final months together. I confess now that I made love to her every day I lived with her but even more, way more, near the end, when I felt the noose tightening around my throat, when I felt her young soul moving away from me. And as she withdrew, it was suddenly I who became the talker, who made the obscene requests, the memories of which can still make me blanch. I was like a rabbit in that sense, not the fraternity-joke rabbit but rather the rabbit with no memory. I seemed to have no
accumulated
familiarity with Emma’s body. I never got used to fucking her. When I smelt her in a movie or browsing through a store after dinner, it was as if my sexual memory of her had been wiped clean like a blackboard with a damp rag and her body was fresh and narcotically new to me again.

But I wondered now about those mornings when I had pinned her thin wrists to the headboard at the crack of dawn. Perhaps it had all been a bit much for her, a bit
gross
really, as if she were submitting to something. Perhaps her haste to get out of bed wasn’t always a hunger for an early start to the day but rather to avoid getting pumped by a soft-bodied, middle-aged man, who in the aftermath fell back to sleep like a drugged animal while she tiptoed about the house, trying not to rattle cutlery or drop the toilet seat lest she awake
monsieur
from his slumbers.