Tours of the Black Clock

58

WE GET OUTSIDE AND she breaks for the Ringstrasse, pulling me behind her. We catch a cab and head for a section of town on the other side of the Wien-Fluss from Dog Storm Street; in the cab I’m breathing hard and feeling myself all pumped up. She’s looking out the window and then she’s looking at me from out of the dark of the backseat of the cab; we get to her place and she gets out. The door’s still open for me to climb out so I do. She pays the driver and off he goes; if I had plans to take the cab back to my flat, she clearly has other ideas. She hasn’t said a word in all this, she understands exactly what she wants, and what she wants is exactly what’s going to happen. She unlocks the door and we go up to her flat.

It’s a nice enough flat. In the light she unpins part of her hair, which is even redder and longer than it’s looked all night. “My name’s Megan,” she says, and begins to prepare tea. We’ll have little shortbreads too, I guess. “Banning Jainlight,” I tell her. “Make yourself at home, Banning Jainlight,” she says. She has a lovely little beestung mouth but other than that and the blizzard of freckles there’s nothing special about her face. From what I’ve seen so far nothing’s unnerved her in the least about the evening, she acts as though she manages her way through episodes like this all the time. She’s twenty-four years old and, more than once in our short lifetime together, the four years difference will feel profound.

We sit on a little sofa in the corner of the flat, something she finds cozy and I find like trying to cram myself into a doll’s house. We talk about this and that, the woman’s pulled me out of a tough spot; it would be rude of me just to get up and leave, wouldn’t it? Her father runs some sort of shipping empire out of London or something. I gather he owns half the boats on water these days, though in no way is she making a big thing of it. Somehow she’s totally in charge without seeming the least bit overbearing. I tell her I’m a writer but I suppose it’s clear I don’t want to go into it, what I write or for whom I write. She doesn’t press the matter at all, she’ll toss a line out if I want to bite, and if I don’t she reels it back in empty. “And what am I going to do with you now, Banning Jainlight?” she says.

“Do with me?” I say.

It’s not my fault, it’s seduction pure and simple. She’s brilliant at it, always giving just what I can handle at the moment, in fact giving just a little less than I can handle if you want to know the truth. I … I never forget you, though. I always have you in my mind, when she’s got her hands in my hair and her full little mouth on my face, you’re still there, though I’ve never seen your face so well in the shadows, and some time’s passed now since I saw you there in that window. My brain grasps for an image of you, and all it retrieves is your pink body in the black petals on my bed; and I try to hold that when she unbuttons her clothes. Her breasts float up enormous and white, I must look completely stunned because she laughs. “Now come on,” she jokes, “I just know they’re not too much for you.” And in that instant it’s all I can see, whatever else I want to see, whatever else the mind’s eye searches for; I’m lying back in this ridiculous little sofa and soon she’s straddling me and rocking back and forth. I’m so far up in her I can feel the tip of me tickling the underside of her heart. “Oh love love love love,” she moans.

And when I come into her, it’s then of course you come over me. You and I know it’s infidelity. There in the little sofa with her slumped over me I can hold grief and torment at bay only so long; when I feel her asleep I move her, pick her up and put her in her bed. She whispers in her red hair; I like her. I haven’t even begun to know what she’s worth. Ten weeks from now I’ll marry her, though at this moment it doesn’t remotely occur to me I’ll even see her again. I escape in anonymity. I return to Dog Storm Street, when I come into my room I’m sure you can smell her on me. The first thing I do when you come to me is trace with my finger your face so that never again will it defy my reach. Your banal mud brown eyes and your dirty blond hair, and in the corner of your mouth, for the first time it’s clear to me, the scar where you were struck by the rock that first day I saw you. It’s small and white, and sparkles like a diamond in your tooth. I open you beneath me and expect your reproach, but you’re happy. You already know that the seed left in the folds of a little English redhead has sanctioned that love in a way you would never choose: I would rather, you say when the window blows violently open, be your adulteress than your wife, it makes me fuck you ferociously. I would rather, you say as the window bangs open and shut, hold the part of your love that’s clandestine and damned, it’s what you created me for.

I deny it completely, my lie to you.

“Is there someone else?” Megan asks me later. Not at all, I answer, my lie to her.