Transgressions (5 page)

“Oh, well,” she muttered. “As of now I haven’t had a better offer.”

Together they mounted the curling staircase to her room. It was 2:10
A.M.
by the clock. On the bedside table the receiver was buzzing angrily, British Telecom’s way of telling you you’re out of contact. She replaced it and this time it stayed silent. She went over to the window. The world outside was silent. The light of a half moon had opened up the garden to a series of shadows. On the back wall something was moving, but it was too dark to see what it was. Black against black. Poor Millie. She was either going to have to find the will to fight back or admit defeat. The cat had curled herself up at the end of the bed. It seemed she had already made her choice.

three

 

W
hen the state stops paying the garbage collectors, the garbage stops being collected.

The street was awash in litter. Some of it would be recycled. Most of it you wouldn’t want to use again. Like the condoms and the needles. The decay suited the surroundings. Veer off any tourist track in this city and it isn’t long before old style turns to new shit and you hit the gulags: suburban wastelands of Soviet architecture—the result of Stalin’s steel mills pumping out industrial crap for the satellite states to buy—modern housing for modern workers. Poor fuckers, thought Jake, seven years into capitalism and there wasn’t much gain for their pain. At least in America if you were born into shit it didn’t mean you had to die there, too.

Still, they had done their best. Most windows had their own touch of pathetic individuality: the lace curtain, a vase of scrubby flowers, the odd figurine. Nobody gave much of a fuck about second from the left on the top floor, though. This window was so filthy you wouldn’t need to draw the curtains at all. Junkie town. Jake had seen it all before.

Inside, the room was so dark they had the light on, a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. Its glare did the woman no favors. She was sitting on a kitchen chair, her legs slightly apart, hands on her knees, not quite relaxed. She was probably in her late thirties, attractive, with shoulder-length blond hair and an English rose complexion on the edge of losing its bloom. She was wearing a T-shirt, expensively casual, tight, accentuating the heavy pull of her breasts, and a short black skirt. On someone less good-looking it would be the outfit of a hooker. On her it still had the gloss of Western style. Until you looked closer. On the floor beside her lay a pair of tights.

She slid both hands slowly up her legs and under her skirt, shimmying her ass down to help her reach the top of her panties. She teased them loose, letting them slip down onto the floor and stepping carefully out of them. She pushed a lock of hair back from her face and lifted her right foot onto the chair, the skirt pulling up high over her thighs to reveal a line of naked leg right up to the curve of her buttocks. Then, slowly, she slid the fingers of her hand up into her crotch.

She moved her way inside for a moment, probing, playing, all the time keeping her eyes fixed on the man who was sitting opposite. Her face showed no signs of pleasure, no emotion at all, just a cool expressionless stare.

He kept on looking. He was thin and sallow-skinned, a man who hadn’t seen the sun for so long he had started to feed on darkness. His eyes flicked between her face and her fingers, lips parted in a half-smile, his breath an echo of sound.

After she had played for a little longer she slowly removed her fingers. Between them she held up a thick plastic tube, six or eight centimeters long, glistening, its covering slightly wet. She tossed it across the room. The man caught it neatly, lifting it briefly to his nose before peeling off the wrapping. Released from its covering, a heavy little bag unfolded, packed with white stuff. He held it up, weighing it casually in his palm.

“Ninety percent pure,” she said softly, as if amused at the ritual, both his and hers. “A thank-you from Jerome. He says to remember who it came from.”

“Tell him I already have,” he said quietly. “I’ll also remember from where.”

She nodded, then sat back down and reached for her panties: the gesture this time more ordinary, more self-absorbed—a woman getting dressed after the show, regardless of who was watching her.

“Uh-uh.”

She glanced up at him, as if surprised to still find him there.

“Why don’t you open your legs again,” he said quietly.

She gave a shrug, her hand already under the chair, the white lace curled up in her fingers. “Sorry. I’m not part of the free gift,” she said coolly.

“I said open your legs.” This time the voice was harsh. “Or I’ll open them for you.”

She sighed slightly, as if his threats bored her, but she did as she was told, moving her knees just far enough apart to show the pubic bush under her skirt.

He sat staring directly at her snatch. She let him stare. She almost seemed to like it. Slowly she shifted her buttocks forward on the chair, spreading her legs farther apart, so the view was better and more insolent. He laughed, tossing the bag down onto the table and walking lazily over to her. With one hand he lifted her chin up and held it cupped in his palm, a little too high for comfort. Then he slipped his other hand up into her. “Just checking that everything that’s mine is out of there,” he said slyly, his fingers working overtime.

She sat absolutely still, apparently oblivious to his touch.

“Satisfied?” she said after a while, and this time the voice dripped with scorn.

He slammed a finger farther in and up, savagely deep, and this time she cried out. “Bastard,” she said between clenched teeth.

“And what other kind of men do you know?” he said as he used his other hand to unzip his fly. “Let’s get on with it, eh?”

“Yeah, well, you’d better get your finger out if you want to fit anything else in. Unless, of course, it’s even smaller than I think.”

“Bitch,” he said, as he hit her hard across the face. “That’s not where I’m going to put it.” And he hit her again.

Her eyes glazed over, the look of a woman on automatic pilot. “Shit,” she said under her breath as the skin around her right eye began to swell.

“You got it, sweetheart.”

 

Outside in the shabby bar/café across the road Jake looked up to check the top-floor window. Then he ordered another beer and dug out a magazine.

She pressed the save button. The little numbers at the bottom of the screen danced upward.

Now that there was no chance of losing the text, she scrolled back up the page, highlighting certain phrases with the cursor. “. . . she slid the fingers of her hand up into her crotch. . . .”
Crotch?
Or should it be
snatch
?
Snatch
was more insulting. But for that reason it fitted better later, when the man was doing the feeling.
Snatch.
Certainly more a male word, in English at least. She sighed.

Not the same problem with
panties.
The choice of that word was more cultural than linguistic. Her instinct would have been to use
knickers,
but that was too British. Only English girls wore knickers. The word carried instant overtones of school uniforms and dirty old men. But these guys were meant to be dangerous rather than pathetic. And a book that had its eye so firmly on the American market had to give its women a more scintillating kind of underwear.
Panties
rather than plain old
pants.
Decisions. Language and sex. Always a challenge for the translator.

She read the completed three pages back again. If her father had still been alive she could have asked his opinion. The thought made her smile. He’d always been so proud of her proficiency. Would the pride have helped overcome his sense of shock at the material? It was a tacky little vignette, though not without its erotic power. I wonder if it presses the same buttons for men as for women? she thought. For her the trick of it was the woman’s confidence and contempt, the sense—at the beginning of the encounter at least—that her body was its own kind of weapon. In her imagination she would be a younger version of Catherine Deneuve, with echoes of her impenetrable middle-class,
Belle de Jour
personality. The image of the uncrossing of the legs was grossly derivative, of course. For zeitgeist just read Hollywood. Whatever his literary pretensions, the writer had simply risen to the basic instincts of Sharon Stone working a room full of American policemen. Not so much a comment as a rip-off. But while that scene had at least given Stone some of the trump cards, this one, in contrast, refused to let the woman get away with anything.

The same theme echoed through the book: sassy women finding themselves punished rather than rewarded for their daring. Still, it seemed to be the kind of thing people wanted to read, already selling well in half a dozen languages in Europe. And you could multiply any figure by a hundred when the English version coincided with the release of the movie.

She scrolled up farther to the first description of the woman. Would anyone notice that the word
still
was missing? In the original text the woman was described as “in her late thirties, attractive still.” She had left out the qualifier. Hardly a subversive omission (though she knew from the publicity blurb that the writer had recently left his childhood sweetheart to shack up with a wafer-thin young foreign model), but it gave her a sense of pleasure. The quiet hand of the translator.

She looked at her watch: 6:40
P.M.
Outside it was already dark. She should call it a day if she was going to get showered and dressed and make it to Sal and Patrick’s in time for the party. It would be her first time out in what, two, no, maybe three weeks? Good old Sally, persistent as ever. Most of the rest of her address book had given up on her long ago.

She went into close-down, checking, as she always did, how many words she had done that day. Twenty-five hundred. Not bad. At this rate she should finish the first draft by the end of January, and deliver maybe two to three weeks later. A winter spent in the company of pimps, prostitutes, and tough guys. Some girls get their kicks in different ways. At least she was being paid for it.

Under the hard rain of the shower she thought some more about the book. She was 130 pages in already. Jake had already screwed up his career in New York by taking his sorrow and fury with Mirka out onto the streets and had been shunted off to Prague on the pretext of watching the bad guys, while they in turn were watching him. She’d made good progress. But, then, she’d been at it solidly, not stopping for weekends, and working most evenings till about eight or nine o’clock. It was a tried-and-true method for her, a way of submerging herself in a writer’s style, infiltrating herself into their world until gradually it became hers, her choice of words mirroring theirs. There was a quiet pleasure to be had in this, like working in unison with an invisible partner, someone unseen at your shoulder, whispering in your ear. It could have its drawbacks though. Like with this one, when getting into the words meant getting into the sensibilities, and the undertow of threat and sexual sadism.

To begin with, it hadn’t troubled her much. She had managed to keep the meaning of the images at a critical distance: dissecting syntax, looking for ways to reproduce linguistic rhythms. But in the last few days the violence seemed to have burrowed its way farther under her skin. She would lie in her bed at night, rerunning certain scenes from the book, substituting herself for the women in the text. As with today’s scene: imagining herself sitting in that sparse cold room, crossing, then uncrossing, her legs, enjoying the insolence and the power, down to the moment of the pain.

In the mornings she made light of such stuff, seeing her identification simply as a reflection of a job well done. But the images of dodgy eroticism had uncovered something else, a series of memories that she would prefer to have left buried, about a time in her relationship with Tom when a visit to Amsterdam had sparked off a joint interest in porn. They had brought a clutch of the more graphic magazines home with them, giggling together as they sauntered through the green channel with half a dozen obscene publications stuffed under Tom’s shirt.

But he had not been as cool as he appeared. He had been sweating so much on the way through customs that the imprint of one of the cover pictures had leaked onto his skin. That night as they lay in bed, she traced the outline of the man’s erect penis and the woman’s arched buttocks, the two of them caught between hysteria and desire.

As the months passed she realized, to her surprise, that she was getting more into them than he was, relishing the way in which the sex was so anonymous, and how the women’s passivity took on a power of its own. For a while they used them a lot, relying on them as a kind of—what was the marketing phrase?—“sex aid.”

Then she started to find herself coming back to them when she was alone in the house working. She discovered that she liked the fantasy even more when she didn’t have to incorporate a real lover into it. So what? she had thought at the time. It wasn’t as if the sex in them was particularly violent or damaging, more that it was so, well, so divorced from real life. The more she used them the easier she found it to have orgasms with them, to orchestrate and control the pace and flow of her pleasure. Until, in the end, she got a little scared of how good and how alone they were making her feel.