Dancing Girls and Other Stories

Under Glass

I’m feeling better. For once the sky is out, there’s a breeze, I’m walking through the ellipses and arranged vistas of the park, the trees come solidly up through the earth as though they belong there, nothing wavers. I have confidence in the grass and the distant buildings, they can take care of themselves, they don’t need my attention on them to keep them together, my eyes holding them down.

The steam-covered mothers and shrill, hyperthyroid children of yesterday’s trip to the zoo are far away, the traces they have left in me are faint as grease smudges and scratchings of twigs on window panes. That was a risk I shouldn’t have taken, it would have been cleverer to have waited, but I managed it. I even made it through the Moonlight Pavilion, darkened tunnels full of screaming, the goggling rodents and shrunken foetal-headed primates deluded by the grey light into going about their lives, so publicly, behind the soundproof panels. I enjoy knowing I can do it without anyone to help.

I pass the 7-B greenhouse: it glitters, it beckons. Inside are the plants that look like stones, their fleshy lobed leaves knuckle-sized and mottled so that they blend perfectly with the pebbles. I was pleased at first to have discovered them. I think with a kind of horror at myself of the hours I’ve spent watching them, all of us keeping quite still. Today, however, the greenhouse has no attraction: I walk on two legs, I wear clothes.

In the street outside the station I go shopping. It feels new, my legs ripple as though I’ve just gotten out of a wheelchair. I buy little brown paper parcels and stow them away inside my serviceable black bag with handles on it like a doctor’s. Bread and butter, grapes, greengages which he has probably never had before but we must all try different experiences. Before I zip the bag I rearrange the packages to safeguard the rose, encased in plastic wrap with stem swathed in wet toilet paper. Redundant. It’s a gift though and I’m proud of myself for being able, we don’t do much of that. I cut it in the garden, which isn’t mine. I admire roses but I’ve never wanted to be one, maybe that’s why I’m not worrying much about whether the stem hurts.

What part of a rose bush is the body? Last night I dreamed I had a baby which was the right size and colour. It’s a healthy sign, maybe I’ll be able to after all, the way other women are supposed to. Usually when I dream of babies they are scrawny as kittens, pale greenish and highly intelligent; they talk in polysyllables and I know they aren’t mine but are creatures from another planet sent to take over the earth, or that they are dead. Sometimes they’re covered with fur. But last night’s was pink and reassuringly illiterate; it cried. He ought to find this promising, he wants to have sons. I’ve thought about it, I’ve even gone so far as to read a couple of books on exercises and what they call natural childbirth, though having a gourd or a tomato would surely be more pleasant and useful these days than having a baby, the world has no need of my genes. That’s an excuse though.

I put the bag on my knees and keep hold of the handles. It’s playing house, we both know I can’t cook him anything till he gets his stove repaired, which somehow he postpones: still it’s the first domestic thing I’ve ever done for him. He ought to approve, he’s obliged to approve, he’ll see it’s getting better. I’m feeling so good I even look at other people in the train, their faces and clothes, noticing them, wondering about their lives. See how kind I am, what a cornucopia.

The cement stairway going down to his door smells of piss and antiseptic; I hold my breath as usual. I look in through the letter flap: he isn’t up, so I let myself in with my key. His two-room flat is more untidy than last time but it’s been worse. Today the dust and litter leave my skin alone. I set my black bag on the table and go through to the bedroom.

He’s on the bed, asleep in a tangled net of blankets, on his back with his knees up. I’m always afraid to wake him: I remember the stories about men who kill in their sleep with their eyes open, thinking the woman is a burglar or an enemy soldier. You can’t be convicted for it. I touch him on the leg and stand back, ready to run, but he wakes immediately and turns his head towards me.

“Hi,” he says. “Jesus I’m hung over.”

It’s rude of him to be hung over when I’ve come all this way to see him. “I brought you a flower,” I say, determined to be calm and cheerful.

I go out to the other room and unwind the rose from its toilet paper and look for something to put it in. There’s a stack of never-used plates in his cupboard, the rest of the space is books and papers. I find a lone glass and fill it with water at the sink. Forks and knives, also unused, are rusting in the drainer. I list to myself the things he needs: a vase, more glasses, a dishtowel.

I carry the rose in to him and he sniffs at it dutifully and I set the glass beside the alarm clock on the improvised table, two chairs and a board. He would really like to go back to sleep, but he compromises by pulling me down beside him and involving me in the blankets. His head seeks the hollow between my shoulder and collarbone and he closes his eyes.

“I’ve missed you,” he says. Why should he have missed me, I’ve only been gone five days. The last time wasn’t good, I was nervous, the wallpaper was bothering me and the bright peel-off stick-on butterflies on the cupboard, not his, prior to him. He kisses me: he does have a hangover, his mouth tastes of used wine, tobacco resin and urban decay. He doesn’t want to make love, I can tell, I stroke his head understandingly; he nuzzles. I think again of the Moonlight Pavilion, the Slow Loris creeping cautiously through its artificial world, water dishes and withering branches, its eyes large with apprehension, its baby clutched to its fur.

“Want to have lunch?” he says. This is his way of telling me he’s in no shape.

“I brought it. Or most of it anyway. I’ll go round the corner and get the rest. It’s healthier than those greasy hamburgers and chips.”

“Great,” he says, but he makes no move to get up.

“Have you been taking your vitamin pills?” They were my idea, I was afraid he’d get scurvy, eating the way he does. I always take them myself. I feel him nod ritualistically.

I can’t see whether he’s telling the truth. I turn over so I’m looking down at him. “Who were you drinking with? Did you go out after you moved the furniture?”

“The furniture was already moved when I got there. She couldn’t call to tell me.” That’s true, he has no phone; our conversations take place in booths. “She wanted to go out and drink instead. I spilled chop suey all over myself,” he says with self-pity.

I am supposed to commiserate. “Was it digested or undigested?” I ask.

“I hadn’t touched a bite of it.”

I’m surprised at her for being so obvious, but then she’s always seemed unsubtle, blunt and straightforward, captain of a women’s basketball team, no, high school gym teacher with whistle in mouth. An old friend. No nonsense. Mine had bloomers and skinny legs and made jokes about what she called The Cramps in a way that suggested we weren’t supposed to have them. Trampolines, the body contorted, made to perform, the mind barking orders.

“She’s been trying to seduce you for months,” I say, smiling; the thought amuses me, she looks like a marmot. At this he tries to shrug, but I have him pinned, one arm across the neck. “Did she succeed?”

“By the time we got out of the bar the subway was closed.”

I hadn’t been serious, but this is suddenly a confession. I want to ignore it but I go on. “You mean she spent the night here?”

“As opposed to trying to get all the way back to her place,” he says, “yes.” It would be a reason like that. Logical as hell.

What do you think you are, the YWCA, I want to say, but instead I ask the obvious. “I suppose you slept with her.” My voice is steady, I’m steady too, I won’t let it tip me.

“It was her idea. I was drunk.” He thinks both these things are good excuses.

“Why did you tell me?” If he hadn’t told me and I’d found out I’d say, Why didn’t you tell me; I know this while I’m asking it.

“You could have figured it out for yourself, the alarm’s set for eight.”

“What does that mean?” I say; I don’t connect. I’m cold, I get up off the bed and move backwards towards the doorway.

I am sitting in a brand-new hamburger palace; across the table from me is a man eating a cheeseburger. Feeding places are the only chances I have to watch him: the rest of the time I’m looking at the blurs through taxi windows or tracing the unfamiliar wallpaper designs. The colour of his face matches the Formica tabletops: off-white. At other tables are other men, also eating cheeseburgers and being watched by other women. We all have our coats on. The air shimmers with rock music and the smell of exhausted french fries. Though it is winter the room reminds me of a beach, even to the crumpled .paper napkins and pop bottles discarded here and there and the slightly gritty texture of the cheeseburgers.

He pushes away his cole slaw.

“You should eat it,” I say.

“No no; can’t eat vegies,” he says. The suppressed dietician in me notes that he is probably suffering from a vitamin A deficiency. I should have been a health inspector, or maybe an organic farmer.

“I’ll trade you then,” I say. “I’ll eat your cole slaw if you’ll finish my cheeseburger.”

He thinks there’s a catch somewhere but decides to risk it. The switch is made and we both examine our halves of the deal. Beyond the plate-glass window slush drifts from the night sky, inside though we are lighted, safe and warm, filtering music through our gills as though it’s oxygen.

He finishes my cheeseburger and lights a cigarette. I’m annoyed with him for some reason, though I can’t recall which. I thumb my card-file of nasty remarks, choose one: You make love like a cowboy raping a sheep. I’ve been waiting for the right time to say that, but maybe peace is more important.

Not for him; hunger satisfied, he turns back to an earlier argument. “You’re trying to see how much shit I’ll take, aren’t you?” he says. “Stop treating me like a nine-year-old.”

“There’s one good way to keep me from treating you like one,” I say. What I mean is that he should stop acting like one, but he doesn’t bite. In fact he may not even have heard: the music is louder.

“Let’s split,” he says, and we get up. I check the cashier as we go out: cashiers fill me with dismay, I want them to be happy but they never are. This one is waterlogged and baggy, saturated with too much sound and too many french fries. She is apathetic rather than surly. Fight back, I tell her silently.

We hit the air and walk, not touching. I can’t remember what he did but he won’t get away with it. He’s wearing a long khaki army surplus coat with brass buttons; it’s handsome, but right now it only reminds me of my fear of doormen, bus drivers and postal officials, those who use their uniforms as excuses. I steer my course so he will have to go through all the puddles. If I can’t win, I tell him, neither can you. I was saner then, I had defences.

“I never get up at eight. She had to go to work.” He’s conscious now that I’m not going to laugh with him over this one as I have over the others. “If you’d been here it wouldn’t have happened,” he says, trying to put it off on me.

I see it so clearly, in such an ordinary light, I know what he did, how he moved, what he said even, one warm body attracts another, it’s how people behave and I want to be sick. More, I want to take my carefully selected brown paper parcels and shove them down his never-cleaned toilet, which I even—crown of idiocy—had thoughts of cleaning for him, poor thing, no one ever showed him how to do it. Where they belong. So this is what it would be like, me picking up his dirty socks and cigarette butts in my experienced way, woman’s greatest joy, safely eight months pregnant so you can’t get out of it now, grunting away at the natural childbirth exercises while he’s off screwing whatever was propped against him when he hit the mystic number of drinks. A spiritual relationship with you, he said, and merely physical ones with the others. Shove that. What does he think I saw in him in the first place, his remarkable soul?

“I’m going out to do some shopping,” I say. I’m too visible here, desert mice with their burrows running down the side of the glass, what an intrusion I thought at the time. “Do you want me to come back?”

This is the call to repentance, he nods without speaking, he really is unhappy but I don’t have time to think about that, I have to get out where there are a lot more around me, camouflage. I’m careful not to slam the door, I cross to the market street and dig in among the crowd of shoppers.

It’s a room, with bed, dressing table surmounted by mirror, night table plus lamp and telephone, linoleum-patterned drapes covering the windows which in their turn cover the night and a drop of ten stories to molten lights and metal parts, hall opening on bathroom which includes a sink and two taps, hot and cold, closed door. Outside the door is another hall and a line of similar closed doors. It is all correct, all in place though slightly dented around the edges. I’ve been trying to sleep in the bed, with no success. I’m going back and forth across the floor, raising from the carpet an airport smell of upholstery cleaner. Earlier there was a tray with steak rinds and shreds of old salad on it, but I set it out in the hall a long time ago.

From time to time I open the windows and the room is inundated with traffic noise as though it is part of a city-sized motor; then I close the windows and the room heats again, internal combustion engine. Sometimes I go into the bathroom and turn the taps on and off, taking drinks of water and sleeping pills, it gives me the illusion of action. I also look at my watch. It’s early spring, there are no leaves and no snow; the days have too much sun, it shows the dust on everything, it hurts your eyes. Three hours ago he phoned to say he would be home in half an hour. He speaks of this room where we have never been before and will never be again as home, I suppose because I’m in it. I’m in it and I can’t get out, he has the key, where would I go, it’s a foreign city. I work out plans: I’ll pack now, leave, he’ll come back after being—where is he? He could have been in an accident, he’s in the hospital, he’s dying, no, he would never do it so neatly. The room will be empty. The room is empty now, I’m a place not a person. I’ll go into the bathroom, lock the door, lie down in the tub with my arms crossed in the lily position, eyes weighted with invisible pennies. I’ll wash down the rest of the sleeping pills and be found draped over something, the bureau, the telephone, in a coma. Their breathing is always described in murder mysteries as ‘stertorous,’ I’ve never known what that meant. He’ll come in just as I’m about to fly out the window into the solid hurricane below, my nightgown spread out around me like a huge nylon kite. Hold on to the string, it’s tied to my head.

The mechanisms of the room continue their clicking and gurgling, indifferent. I’ve turned all the knobs on the heating unit but nothing happens, maybe I’m not really here. He ought to be here, he has no right not to be here, this machine is his creation. I get back into the bed for the fifth or sixth time and try to concentrate on the shapes moving across my closed eyelids. Sun, dust, bright colours, headlights, a Persian carpet. There are pictures now, ducks oddly enough, a woman sitting in a chair, a lawn with a country house, Grecian portico and all, clocks made of flowers, a line of dancing cartoon mice, who put them there? Whoever you are, get me out and I promise I’ll never never again. Next time it will be just from the neck down, I’ll leave his motivations alone.

It was so simple at first, you should have kept it that way, it’s the only thing you can handle. Cool it, said the doctor, trying to communicate but coming through like Fred Mac-Murray in a Walt Disney family picture, take pills. Maybe he’s just asserting his freedom, you’re too possessive. He’s escaping, you’ve driven him to it, into the phone booth and out comes Superstud. A self-propelling prick with a tiny brain attached to it like a termite’s, couple of drinks and he’d stick it into anything. Like night-hunting snakes it has infra-red sensors on the front end, in the dark It strikes at anything warm. When the lights went on he was fucking the hot air register.

That’s unfair. What really annoys you is that she got it last night and there wasn’t any left for you. Why couldn’t he have chosen some other time? He knew I’d be there this morning. He didn’t choose it, it just happened. Why can’t you see him as a confused human being with problems? Do I ever do anything else? Already I couldn’t tell you whether he’s my lover or my out-patient. You think you’re so magic, you can cure anything. Can’t you admit you’ve failed?

Maybe I’m not a confused human being with problems, maybe I’m something altogether different, an artichoke… None of that.

Actually she’s his type, they must have made it fine together, they’re both athletic, maybe she keeps time with the whistle, peep! they’re off…

In a way I admire her, she gets through the days.

When I come back he’s dressed and miserable. I move about the room in a parody of domesticity, savaging the bread into sandwiches with his one inadequate knife, sloshing water over the fruit. I open the Pepsi I’ve brought him.

“Do you have more than one glass?”

He shakes his head. “There’s only the one.”

I bring the soft-headed rose out of the bedroom, throw it into the clothes hamper he uses for trash, rinse out the glass and pour half of the warm Pepsi into it for myself. That’s the nearest I can bring myself to physical anger. He starts to eat; I can’t. I’m shivering; I get his coat down from the hook and wrap myself up in it.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he says.

“Like what?” I say.

I’m not allowed to be angry, he thinks it’s unfair. In fact I’m not angry, I’m flipping through my images, trying to find one that will save me from speaking the unforgivable, the words that can’t be recalled. Tortoises in cement cubicles, the otters in their green-scummed pool, they were eating, bones and the head of something, no, what about the foxes; they were barking, you couldn’t hear them but you could see the insides of their mouths. The achidnas, waddling through the sawdust like fat fur-coated madwomen, that’s no comfort. Back to the plants, the water-lily house, and in Greenhouse 12, Victoria Amazonica with her huge plate-shaped leaves six feet across and her spiky blossom, floating in her pond, her harbour, doing nothing at all.

“Look,” he says, “I can’t stand these silences.”

“Then say something.”

“Whatever I say you’ll think I’m sinister.” .

“I don’t think you’re sinister,” I say, “I just think you’re thoughtless and stupid. Anyone clever would wait until after he’d got the woman moved in with him before starting on that.” Part of him, I know, doesn’t want me to move in at all, the stove stays broken. Hang on to your defences, I think; you’ll be sunk without them.

“I thought it was better to tell the truth right off.”

I look at him; he’s hurting all right, but I need my mouthful of flesh, I need back some of that blood. He’s so unhappy though and it isn’t his fault, it’s just the way he is, accept me, accept my nervous tics, and he thinks that’s all it is, a kind of involuntary muscle spasm.

I want to tell him now what no one’s ever taught him, how two people who love each other behave, how they avoid damaging each other, but I’m not sure I know. The love of a good woman. But I don’t feel like a good woman right now. My skin is numb, bloodless as a mushroom. It was wrong of me to think I could ever accommodate; he’s too human. “I’ll walk you to the subway.” He can’t cope with it, he doesn’t believe in talking it through, he wants me out of the way. He won’t come near me, touch me, doesn’t he know that’s all he needs to do? He’ll wait for me to cool off, as he puts it. But if I go away like this I won’t be back.

Outside I put on my sunglasses, though the sun has gone in. I walk severely, not looking at him, I can’t bear to. The outlines are slipping again, it’s an effort to press the sidewalk down, it billows under my feet like a mattress. He really is going to take me to the subway and let me disappear without making any effort to stop me. I put my hand on his arm.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“You just want out,” he says, “and you’re using this as an excuse.”

“That’s not true,” I say. “If I’d wanted that excuse I could have used it before this.” We turn off towards the small park where there is a statue on horseback with a lot of pigeons.

“You’re making too much of it,” he says. “You always exaggerate.”

“Oh, I think I know more or less what happened. You had a few drinks and felt horny, that’s all.”

“Very perceptive of you,” he says. He isn’t being ironic, he thinks I’ve had a genuine though rare insight. He leans forward and takes off my sunglasses so he can see me.

“You can’t hide behind those,” he says.

The sun gets in and I squint; his face swells, darkens, a paper flower dropped in water. He spreads tendrils; I watch them creeping over my shoulder.

“I wish I didn’t love you,” I say.

He smiles, his hair scintillating in the parklight, his tie blossoming and receding, his face oriental, inscrutable as an eggplant. I grip the handles on my black bag, force him back to snapshot dimensions.

He kisses my fingers; he thinks we have all been cured. He believes in amnesia, he will never mention it again. It should hurt less each time.

I’m happier though as I go down the stairs to the ticket window. My hands function, exchanging round silver disks for oblong paper. That this can be done, that everyone knows what it means, there may be a chance. If we could do that: I would give him a pebble, a flower, he would understand, he would translate exactly. He would reply, he would give me…

I ponder again his need for more glasses and consider buying him a large bath towel. Once on the train though, I find myself being moved gradually, station by station, back towards the 7-B greenhouse. Soon I will be there; inside are the plants that have taught themselves to look like stones. I think of them; they grow silently, hiding in dry soil, minor events, little zeros, containing nothing but themselves; no food value, to the eye soothing and round, then suddenly nowhere. I wonder how long it takes, how they do it.