Transgressions (32 page)

But it had definitely been her money. Ah, well, not worth arguing about now. At least she still had the wooden giraffe, brought back in the hold of a charter plane from Kenya, and arriving at Heathrow with its ear broken off. They had never bothered to stick it on again. Had it been earlier in their relationship Tom would have done it for her, but by then there was a certain selfishness to their mutuality. Your giraffe, your problem. She couldn’t even remember where the ear had gone now. Maybe he’d taken it with him.

A one-eared giraffe. Did that mean the room would stay like this forever, a touch of the Miss Havishams creeping in as decay and dust settled over the years? It made her realize that she hadn’t really thought in terms of the future at all.

Who would she be in five years’ time? Would she be alone? It was probably better than the alternative. What would she do with another lover? Somebody else’s furniture would mean somebody else’s taste, somebody else’s agenda, their own game plan.

For all the pain of the breakup she wouldn’t easily give up her newfound independence; she knew that now. Better to be alone. If you liked your own company enough there was no particular reason why life shouldn’t be a catalog of occasional one-night stands. As long as the sex was safe and good enough. Maybe she should invite Malcolm back after all, give him some lessons, teach him how to make sure they both got their rocks off this time. Learning how to ask—the kind of skill all women have to master.

He probably wouldn’t mind that much. Wasn’t it every boy’s dream: a girl who knows what she wants? Sex without commitment? He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d be up for sharing the milk bill anyway. No danger of communal fantasies there.

She was thinking Malcolm but that was not who she was seeing. She was seeing
him,
seeing his wild, taut body at the end of the bed, feeling the dry rub of his skin and the jerky power of his penis as it swelled into life under her hand. She remembered how wet she had been and how the terror and the power had connected as he came inside her.

If you didn’t feel like a victim, then maybe that meant you weren’t one. Perhaps it was time she acknowledged that and owned up, to the other stuff: let herself tap back into the seam of control—was that the same as pleasure?—that their encounter had opened up in her.

For a shy girl she was playing with a lot of dangerous fantasies. It must be the booze. If she was sober she’d feel scared. When had she last been this drunk? She couldn’t remember. But she knew she didn’t want to be sober. She got off the sofa, the tension in her thoughts making it impossible to keep still anymore.

This time she couldn’t find the right music for the mood; all that seventies American rock she’d grown up with was too laid back, too forgiving. Even Springsteen’s urban nightmare had too much compassion in it. She went for the Clash. Although she’d been the right age for it, punk had never been her identity badge, too “in your face” for that. But she’d liked the knowing scream behind it, liked to think that that was who she might have been if she hadn’t been herself.

Maybe it was never too late. She could become that person now. She went in search of more booze. On top of the drinks cabinet she caught sight of a family portrait: her father and mother standing in a field, she young and pretty, laughing into the wind, he older, more serious, as always. What did they do together in bed, eh? They had spent the first ten years of their marriage trying for a child that didn’t come. That would have meant making a lot of love. Was it all David Niven politeness and Doris Day headaches, or was it more primal? Was that where her father hid the violence of his despair? Sex. Everyone’s dark secret.

At the back of the drinks cabinet she found an unopened bottle of Glenmorangie that Tom must have missed in his clear-out. He wouldn’t have approved of her pouring it into the same glass as the brandy. But, then, he wasn’t here to complain. She could do what she liked. With whom she liked.

So what was it she wanted to do? Was this about the power of powerlessness? She knew she had a talent for that. Seven years of living with Tom had been proof enough. But in the end it had been more social than sexual. What exactly would it mean if you translated it into sex? Her mind went back to the stash of porn magazines by the bed. They had acted more as aphrodisiac than example. If she had been less scared and he had been more keen, where might they not have gone? The thought of it made her scared all over again. Is this me talking? she thought. Elizabeth Skvorecky, single white female in search of a future?

You know what your problem is? You should have more to lose, more sense of a vested interest in life. Then you wouldn’t be so cocky about taking risks. But when she looked back on herself she realized she’d never had that. Even as a child she had grown up with a sense that the world had been designed for somebody else, someone more connected, and she was simply a casual visitor who’d have to make do with the edges and the margins.

Was that what
he
felt, too? That he belonged to a sense of not belonging? Who knows? Could be they were made for each other and she should exploit the feeling. Write him an invitation to dinner. Just know when to press the panic button, or keep an ice pick under the bed.

You could make a much greater mess with a hammer, though. What had he done to those other girls, the ones in the garden apartments and the alleyways? It didn’t take three days in the hospital to get over rape. What had they not seen fit to put in the papers? Think about it. If someone’s pain was your pleasure, then once you started hitting them why should there be any reason to stop? Are you ready for this, Elizabeth? Is this really what your life has brought you to?

The malt seemed rougher on the taste buds than the brandy. Sometimes you get a wolf in lamb’s clothing. But you could also get it the other way around. How would it be if she discovered that all his violence was just a cover for his pain? That the sobbing was more real than the hammering?

Why was it that sex was so complicated? Why did it have to be dark to be so alive? She rubbed her hands over her eyes, then back into her hair, enjoying the stretch as it pulled back from her scalp.

Just as he had done.

There had been a time when she had first started with Tom when she couldn’t get enough of him, when she wanted every bit of him inside her, all her holes filled with his smell and his maleness. She could get aroused by watching him pull a coin out of his pocket, or the way he walked back to a restaurant table from the men’s room. She had loved that sense of being almost out of control. Clever Tom, to have smelled that in her. Clever Tom.

Clever
him.

If you’re going to do this, you have to do it now, she thought. You won’t get any drunker, and there’s a danger that if you keep looking into the drop you might get vertigo.

She got up, only slightly unsteady on her feet, and, carrying the glass with her, went into the kitchen and turned on the computer.

twenty-two

 

“C
all the desk if you need anything, anything at all. We’re here to serve you.”

The manager turned to her and said something else in Czech. She nodded and murmured back, then she gave him a small smile. The door closed quietly behind him.

It was the best suite in the place, a mix of faded precommunist history and new hopes. Its charm wouldn’t last long. Trusthouse Forte would get its hands on it and turn it into an International Hotel: the fax, the minibar, and the shower cap—credit-card culture, so suitable for business, so unsuitable for life.

But not now. Now it was still poignant enough to be the setting for this scene.

Jake watched the door close, then turned toward her. She was sitting on the bed. They had found her some other clothes, a shapeless cardigan that she had put around her shoulders over the torn, bloody dress, and a pair of shoes, a little clunky, not her style at all. They had offered to dress her finger again, but she couldn’t cope with the idea of the pain or the attention, so the grim little bandage remained, the wound soothed by further painkillers rather than antiseptics. That suited her fine, too. She didn’t want to be in her right mind. She wanted to be asleep. She also wanted to be alone.

He was staring at her. She knew that look. She had lived through nearly two years of marriage with it. It still scared her. He thinks he loves me, she thought. He thinks I am the meaning in his life and that having me is the only thing that matters. Oh God, please don’t let’s get into this again. Not now.

He came up to her and knelt down at her feet. He smelled of blood and death. His face was a mess, one eye almost closed under the bruising and his lip split and swollen. Not everybody consents to die without a fight. The cut would make kissing difficult. But it wouldn’t be the first time. You get used to it, he once told her. She had thought then she never would. Who had been right, him or her?

He reached out and took her good hand in both of his, holding it in front of him for a minute, then moving out toward the other one. She drew it back, instinctively nursing it against her stomach. He looked up at her, kept her gaze, then reached out again. “I won’t hurt you,” he said almost in a whisper.

This time she let him take it. He was careful not to go near the finger. He held the hand gently, turning it over so it lay palm up, his fingers playing with the soft skin inside, following her lifeline, caressing the creases almost to the edge of the stump. She stayed stubbornly looking down, then at last lifted her eyes to his face. He was in more pain than she was. How many times have we been here before? she thought. He lifted the hand to his mouth and softly kissed the inside of the palm.

“Oh, Christ, I thought I’d lost you,” he said, his voice fracturing under the emotion. “When I burst into that cell and saw the blood, I really thought I’d lost you.”

She closed her eyes and replayed the scene on the blank screen of her eyelids. She saw herself rushing up the stairs, into one room, then the next, with the hammering in her heart echoed by the hammering on the door behind her. Then she turned and saw the shadow in the doorway. She heard a hail of gunfire, and Jake’s voice from somewhere screaming, “Get down!”

But she was on the floor already, flinching in time to the rhythm of the bullets coming from somewhere behind her and tearing into the fleshy body, jerking it every which way, making it dance like a kinetic sculpture, alive after it was dead. And every bullet hole opened up a spray can of blood and bits. By the end there was so much blood. She was covered in it. They both were.

“Are you all right?” he had shouted as soon as he got to her.

She hadn’t needed to move her head, it was doing that for her, a kind of violent trembling she couldn’t control. He tried to help her up, but she pushed him off. “The other one,” she babbled. “Downstairs—there’s another one, I—”

“It’s all right. It’s all right, baby,” he said, holding her tightly to him, making sure the words got through. “He’s dead, too.”

She felt the knife slide in again, in and up through the lining of the stomach. She heard his groan opening up into her own mouth. “Did I . . . did I kill him?”

“No.” And this time grinned. “But I did.”

She opened her eyes onto the fading lilac wallpaper pattern. No more deserted farmhouse, no more bodies. It was over, it was over. It wouldn’t happen again.

“I’d thought I’d lost you,” he murmured again.

The memory of it brought them closer. He laid his head on her knee. She put out her good hand and stroked his hair. Her fingers came across little particles of stuff: somebody else’s brain or body fluids. She hadn’t seen what had happened in the cell downstairs, but she knew that her kidnapper must have fought back. Even with his stomach opened up and his trousers halfway down his legs.

Someone always has to win. Someone always has to be the victor. Is this the way they prove their manhood? Maybe, but they still need a woman to convince them, to welcome them home. This was the bit where he turned from man to boy, then back to man again. The head between the breasts leading to the head between the legs.

Just one more time, she thought. Just one more time then you can go to sleep. . . .

No, no, no, Elizabeth.

She leaned back from the computer, shaking her head impatiently, running the cursor over the last three paragraphs, highlighting the text.

Cross it out, she said to herself. You give Mirka the upper hand now and it won’t work. Who cares about her wisdom? It’s women’s wisdom that freaks men out. Stop her thinking. Give her a body, but no brain. Remember whom you’re writing for.

She hit the erase key. The words tumbled over into space and Mirka re-formed herself as someone else: someone more angry, more fuckable—with a little persuasion.

 

She opened her eyes onto the fading lilac wallpaper pattern. No more deserted farmhouse, no more bodies. It was over, it was over. It wouldn’t happen again.

“I thought I’d lost you,” he murmured again, pulling her back to the present.

“No.” She shook her head, and her voice was loose with exhaustion. “You can’t lose me, Jake. There’s nowhere I could go where you wouldn’t find me.”

Sensing the resistance under her words he glanced up at her. “That’s right. That’s absolutely right, babe.”

They sat looking at each other. It was still a contest. Always had been, always would be. This he understood. This he was good at. He got up from his knees. “D’you want a drink?”

She shook her head.

“Well, I do.”

In the corner they had an ersatz version of a minibar. The lock was stiff. He pulled at it a couple of times, then kicked it. It opened. He dug out the three miniatures of bourbon and poured them all into a tumbler. He took a slug, then turned to her.

“Are we gonna talk about it?”

Again she shook her head.

He looked at her for a moment. “Well, I want to talk.”

She gave a little laugh. “So now
you
want to talk. You don’t think it’s a little late for us to be speaking each other’s lines?”

He sighed, his anger barely in check. He used to be proud of her English, how fast she picked it up, how charming it sounded. Now all he could hear was her sarcasm and her lip. “I’m your husband, Mirka. I love you. I want to know what they did to you.”

There was a pause. She said in a cold, deliberate, matter-of-fact voice, “They cut my finger off.”

He looked at her. “Is that all?”

“Why?” she said angrily. “What else would you like them to have done, Jake?”

He frowned, then turned abruptly away from her and threw himself into a chair across from the bed. He took another slug from the tumbler, then ran his hand over his face. He wasn’t looking at her.

“You know, after you left I dreamed about you every night. Every
fucking
night . . . I’d close my eyes and there you’d be, standing in front of me, in that green dress of yours. Remember? The one where your nipples used to show through. I used to watch you and think about sucking those nipples, just pulling the strap off the shoulder and feeling your breast fall into my hands, heavy, warm.”

She sat completely still. This was nothing to do with her. He was talking to himself. She felt more like his confessor than his wife. But, then, that had long been a problem between them.

“You think I played hard to get, don’t you? That day we met, that day on the subway. You think I could have walked away from you? You don’t know shit, Mirka. And you never did.

“I knew you were the one from the first moment I laid eyes on you. You were in a café on Broadway, between Eighty-sixth and Eighty-seventh. I was having lunch when you came in. You sat in a window seat and ordered from the breakfast menu. You didn’t understand that it only went up till eleven
A.M.
The guy was nice to you. Probably wanted to fuck you. Or maybe he still remembered what it was like not to speak the language so well. You had a BLT with fries. He recommended it. Said it was very American. You said you liked it. Then you paid the check and walked ten blocks down to the museum, remember?

“You were a bit bored by that. I could tell. I thought you would be. All that natural history. Dead stuff. I knew you were more physical than that. Not enough going on for you there. You don’t remember this, do you? You don’t remember that I was there, too? Well, welcome to law enforcement, baby. That’s what cops are good at, tailing people so they don’t know they’re being tailed.

“You don’t even remember me on the subway platform. How romantic it was that we got on at the same stop.

“I’m not sure what I would’ve done if that jerk hadn’t started to hit on you. Could be I would have had to cause an incident. I got it ready-made, though. And you liked it. Oh, yeah, I know you may think you were scared but I saw it in your eyes. This is what you’d come to America for. To be frightened, to be fought over. To be wanted. Course you didn’t know that. For you it was all stars in your eyes and neon flashing. Like a kid with a paint box. You didn’t see the horror, or the fuckups, didn’t feel the violence in the graffiti. You just liked the colors. America. Where women don’t have to pretend. Where a hard man is good to find.

“We were looking for each other, Mirka. Don’t you realize that? I only played it cool so you’d feel you’d won me. To give you the pleasure of getting your own way. Or thinking you had.”

The room was silent. She felt her pulse through the throb in her hand. The painkillers were wearing off.

He let his head fall back against the chair. “You can’t leave me now, Mirka. It isn’t possible. Where would you go? What would you do? They’ll never be enough for you, all those soft-fingered old men with their accents and credit cards and old-fashioned diamond bracelet courtships.”

She took a sharp intake of breath. He looked up.

“What, you think I didn’t know?” He laughed. “It’s me, baby, Jake. Remember? You can’t take a shit without me being there. Oh, sorry. Not the kind of language you like, eh? What words would
he
use? Don’t tell me, ‘the ladies’ room’?”

But it wasn’t any fun without her talking. He let the silence hang.

She took a deep breath. “I’m not going back with you, Jake,” she said gently. “I’ve decided to stay here.”

“Here?”

“Yes, here. I’m going home.”

“Home.” And this time it was a big laugh. “Well, that’s a good joke. What happened? Did playing around with a country boy make you homesick?”

“I—”

“Jesus, Mirka, it’s about time you grew up,” he cut her off. “Stay here? This place is falling apart, or haven’t you noticed? I’ll tell you about here. They don’t have the money or the vision to hold it together. Capitalism hurts too much when you’re this far behind. And these guys have already had too much pain. So people are going to get dissatisfied and then it’s all going to come bubbling up from below. You can export crime like you can export everything else. And we’re not even talking future here. They’ve already arrived. Who do you think was paying your hay boys to keep you captive? The locusts have come, Mirka. The plague is upon you.

“You don’t have a clue how fucking powerful these guys are. We’re talking sophistication here. They half-run America already. What price a crummy little country like this one? They’ll buy anyone they want, and the ones that aren’t for sale they’ll kill. You think I’m a big boy, Mirka? I’m shit compared with these guys.” He laughed. “Though I can still kick their ass when I want.”

He took another swig. “You’re not going to stay here. You’re coming back with me.”

She waited till he was listening. “No, I’m not, Jake.”

He slammed the glass down on the arm of the chair. “So, tell me, was it just him or was it the fat one, too?”

She left a beat of a pause. “What are you talking about?” she said quietly, though they both knew.

“You know what I’m fucking talking about, Mirka. He had his pants around his ankles. I got a real good impression he’d been persuaded that way.”

“Jake.” She got up from the bed, and for the first time there was a kind of energy in her eyes. “Jake, listen to me. They cut my finger off, do you understand? If you hadn’t come they would have killed me.”

“But I was coming, Mirka. You knew that, fuck you.”

“No, fuck
you.
Fuck you, Jake, and all your Superman fantasy. You want me to sit around and wait till you burst in like something from an action movie? Well, I didn’t want to be saved by you. You understand? I wanted to save myself.”

He was listening. But, then, he had needed to get her talking, back in the race. “So, tell me about it,” he said lightly, as if it didn’t matter to him.

She sighed. “He was a farm boy. He didn’t know what had hit him. He just wanted to be rich, that’s all.”

There was a pause. “And now he’s dead.”

“Yes, well, that’s the way you like them. Did you kill Luis, too? You’d better be careful. In America diplomats have got more power than cops. Even a cop as good as you.”

This time it was his turn to be silent.

“You’re wrong about me, Jake. Maybe I was like that once. Maybe there were stars and neon. But I’ve changed. You’ve contaminated me. Now I have this disease, too, this American thing. But I’m not going to die of it. I’m going to get well. And without you.”

He stared at the carpet for a long time, his teeth playing over his bruised lip. Then he sighed. “I love you, Mirka,” he said, so quietly she almost didn’t hear it. “That’s the beginning and the end of it.”

“No, you don’t, Jake. You love the
idea
of me. Not me anymore. Me you have to let go.”

He left a pause. Like all good cops, timing was one of his talents. “So, did he come?”

“What!”

He looked up at her. “I would have asked
him,
only by the time I got to him he was having trouble talking. But he still wanted you. You could tell from the way he went for me.”

“Jake,” she said slowly, as if she were talking to a child and it was suddenly very important that he understand. “Jake, I stuck a knife into his stomach.”

“Yeah, I know you did. And I know how it feels. Because you’ve done it to me, too, babe. Only I didn’t have a hard-on at the time.”

She walked over to him, took the glass out of his hand, and slung it at the wall. It smashed into a fountain of slivers. “Is that it? Is that what you want? Well, come on, then. I’ll shove my finger stump up your ass.”

He let out a large laugh. “Oh, listen to you. What a mouth the lady has.”

“And where do you think she learned it, Jake? You don’t get stuff like that from English phrase books.”

She stared at him, then turned on her heel and went back to the bed. He didn’t move. For a while neither of them said anything. She sighed, shaking her head as if to clear it, then, eventually, she looked up at him. “So, what now?”

He gave a shrug. They held each other’s gaze. She opened her mouth a fraction, a half-frown on her face. He got up from the chair and crossed the room until he was standing right in front of her, his body suddenly very close to hers. “Why shouldn’t I be jealous, Mirka?” he said without moving. “I love you more than anyone else could. Is that so bad?”

She closed her eyes for a second, then opened them back into his gaze. He put out a slow hand, hooking his index finger under the rim of the cardigan and pushing it slowly down her arm, taking the strap of her dress with it. As it reached the elbow her breast came free. She didn’t move. Neither did he.

“So why don’t you tell me how much you hate this. Tell me to take my fucking hand away.”

She swallowed. “Take your fucking hand away,” she said, but with no feeling in her voice.

He smiled, then slipped his palm under her breast, lifting it up slightly. “You must be cold.” He moved the hand to her nipple, pinching it between his fingers. “Oh, look at that, your very own erection.” She took in a sharp breath. “Oh, but I forgot. You don’t like erections, do you? Too crude. Too ‘American.’ ”

And he let his hand drop away. When he pulled the other shoulder strap down it caught. This time he tore it. She flinched. He bent over slowly and took the other nipple in his mouth. When it was ready he pushed it out with his tongue, like a grape pip. It stood there quivering.

“Do you know what I’m going to do now?” he said as he stood above her.

She shook her head.

“I’m going to fuck you. Or should I maybe use another word? What do you think, Mirka? Would you like it better if I said I was going to ‘make love’ to you?”

No, fuck would do. He was sure he could feel it in her body. But that wasn’t what her voice said. “You don’t know the meaning of the word Jake.”

He snapped a hand back as if he were going to hit her. She didn’t flinch. But, then, she wasn’t the one who had been hurt. “No? You really think so. Well, let me tell you something, Mirka. It’s you who doesn’t know the meaning of it. You think you do but you don’t.” And now his voice was shaking with the anger. “You wash it out of us, do you know that? Drip by drip you wash it out of us, drown out the love, till all that’s left is the fuck. We bring you feelings and you walk all over them. Do you know what it’s like to be rejected? Do you know what it’s like to want to love someone and to hear them say that they’re not interested in you tonight? That you’re too up . . . or too down . . . or too caught up in yourself. Too crazy . . . Do you know what that’s like? Oh, baby, if we did that to you, you’d hate us. Fucking hate us. You’d feel worthless and ignored. But it doesn’t matter to us. We’re guys after all. Sex is just sex. Go and jerk off in the bathroom, Jake. Get the tension out that way.”

It was the conversation they had never had. How cruel to be having it now, when it was too late.

“That’s not true, Jake,” she said fiercely. “That’s not true. I did make love to you. I made love to you for a whole year. But it was never enough. That’s why we started fucking.”

“No. That’s why
you
started fucking. Or should I say faking?”