Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

(That day on the balcony. We’d tried this before, but there was still the faint hope that it would be different, the dazzled blank hopefulness of wine and sun, I would let Leonard do it and everything would change, if he were different, could I be different? — and which came first? We were chicken and egg, awkward, tense-thighed, a tight flurry of feathers, my blouse on the ground, the sawing sound of his dusty panting, the warm hard stone which softened none of his cockerel force, this had nothing to do with my own dear husband, and his eye shone, desperate, staring, mad, and then it was over, and I had felt nothing, just hard dry friction and loneliness.)

I don’t recall how we reached Ahmet’s bedroom. I know that I had slipped off my shoes — the pain so sharp, the relief so sweet. I think he took me by the hand. ‘Bedroom,’ he whispered, as if there were listeners. This time he did not put a light on. It smelled of him, and of something — earthy, not unpleasant, not socks, surely? He opened the window. The night rushed in, sweet as beginnings, fresh and cool.

Gently, Ahmet sat me on the bed. I stretched out my fingertips and found the wall. It was obviously only a single bed, but that was good, we would be close together. In any case, I dared not stay overnight, Angela would notice, Angela would worry!

(In retrospect, yes, I had forgotten my conference. But that was tomorrow, this was the present, I could not think about the morning.)

There was just a great hunger I knew he would fill. He was doing something odd by the side of the bed, kneeling on the rug, gently parting my knees. There was a tickle in my throat; was he a dog? — but no, I liked dogs, my satin-eared spaniel, the panicky urge to cough left me as my elegant shell-pink American undergarments (thank God! my old ones had been blunt white cotton) were lifted away like a silken veil, and I had no time to feel shy or worried, my nakedness felt the faint breeze in the air — a millisecond later, Ahmet was there, and my hands reached out of their own accord and pulled his dear head with its wire-fuzz of hair (round as an infant’s, I thought, briefly), towards the lost place at the heart of me, and my secret part was no longer empty, my lips, my openings were made complete by the hot rose of his working mouth, he was kissing me at my deepest centre, it pulled and called and gathered me, there was a warm vortex, growing, glowing, low down in my back a congestion began, I was drawn down into my deepest body, my head, my belly, my thighs were all one, something was radiating out through my core, up through my stomach, spine, ribcage; my eyes were closing, my lips parting, it was lifting me up, no choice but go further, I pressed against him, my hands urged him on, oh more, higher, the peak, oh go on –

and a broadening wave of silent laughter broke in my body, glossy, muscular, rolled from my toes up to my shoulders, it found no limits, surged on and on, and somewhere a long croon of ecstasy began, somewhere in the room a cat’s voice unspooled through octaves of sound, a cat in bliss — and as it abated, the ebb-tide of blood warmed every abandoned cell of my body, finally freeing, unfastening me –

‘Shush, Ginny, shush’ — his voice, breathless.

I realised the deep-throated sound was my own, a ribbon of happiness thrown from nowhere: my body singing its own lost song.

In a split second, the man was inside me. I was the sand as the sea pressed in, he entered me as the waves rolled onwards, he waited, kissing me, ‘Beautiful woman, seni seviyorum ,’ and the more he kissed me, the further he came, and soon we were rocking in time like a boat, was I the boat and where were we sailing as we swayed together in the cinnamon night, ‘I love you, Ginny, tim eyot ,’ and I didn’t know, was he laughing or crying? the waves grew higher, he was brave, he was desperate, at the height of the storm he was my sailor, I held and stroked him, his back, his neck,

gather — gather — no otherness –

I thought, in a tear-drop of light, my Leonard –

and with an explosion of helpless noises, a broken, happy, almost childish sound, he lay inside me on the distant shore.

Briefly, I think, both of us slept.

I woke unhappy to jerking and banging. A woman was shouting outside the room, or maybe a little further away. Ahmet must be pulling his trousers on, I heard his belt buckle hit the wall and coins were falling from his trousers.

‘Who is it? What’s happening?’

‘I think — is Mother.’

‘Why is she here?’

‘Because she live here. But she is supposed to stay with sister. I think they have another quarrel.’

‘What shall I do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It must be all right for you to have … girlfriends.’

Even in that crisis, I enjoyed the term. I wasn’t dead, nor old: I was a girlfriend. But as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. It could not be all right for him to have girlfriends, and if Mother saw me, it would be worse still.

‘No, not all right.’

‘How does she know I’m here?’

‘Maybe we leave something in drawing-room?’

‘Oh God, I left my shoes in there.’ Not that I’d be able to get them back on.’ My feminine, painful, American shoes.

‘Is OK, I tell her I clean them, for hotel.’

It transpired, in the end, that all Mother wanted was a kindly ear for her tale of woe — the sister’s lies, the thieving nephews. There was a side-door via a neighbour’s garden. This house was only a block from the hotel, though our roundabout route had made it feel much further. He was very insistent that he should come with me, and I equally insistent that he should not.

The shoes remained a problem, and we only solved it once we realised we had similar size feet.

Which is why, at half-past eleven that evening, I was stomping — a verb I had never used, a verb for negroes, a verb from jazz — I was stomping, feeling both proud and foolish, downhill through a back street in Istanbul, under the stars, under a winking moon, born up by drink and by my warm, calm body, in a coral dress and shiny black men’s lace-ups.

And yes, I was singing. ‘They’re singing songs of love, they’re all for me …’

The night of love was not yet over.

ANGELA

10.45 AM: we arrived united. In fact, she seemed in a very good mood.

The architecture: Ottoman grandeur. Young dark-eyed people smiled at us, in twos and clusters; notebooks, backpacks. Not like the English; few were fat.

I forgot, or forgave, the panics of the morning now I had what I needed, Virginia’s blessing. I was not an academic, but I took enough pride in having had an academic training (first generation in my family, so it mattered) to want to make a good impression. Academics didn’t always like novelists. Especially conference-going hybrids like me. As the first plenary speaker, I felt exposed.

But, yes, Virginia’s good opinion mattered.

Even the opinion of this modern chimera, from whom I could never gain any credit. One quote from Woolf on the cover of my novel! … No, she would never bother to read me. To be fair, I had never seen her reading. Or writing, when it came to that.

It was odd, affecting, this perilous friendship. It was in itself and for itself, no-one knew about it, it could end any second, I had no photographs or messages.

(So was she — could she be — just a projection? No, I protested, it could not be true. She laughed, she ate, she frequently crossed me, my Virginia Woolf was definitely human .)

Professor Melike was excessively delighted to see me, boring through the crowds with clipboards and coffee cups to seize me by both hands, and kiss me. A pantomime of elaborate relief. Of course, the traffic jams, terrible, yes, but they had sent the car, yes, never mind, she hustled us towards the hall for a sound check. I tried ‘This is a friend of mine …’, she barely blinked, but as we strode up the stairs, she heard ‘distant relative of Virginia Woolf’s,’ and stopped dead, causing chaos behind us, people collapsing like a house of cards, to shake Virginia’s hand and make her welcome. ‘An honour,’ she panted as she hurried us on.