Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

Roxanna felt herself blushing.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I was angry about something.’

‘You think it’s not Hilpert?’

And then she saw: it was working, it was really working, even though she used a swear word, it was happening like the book promised it would. Nothing in her life had ever worked out, but here she was, talking with a rich man. She knew stuff he didn’t know. He was looking at her tits.

‘What year did Herichsen start business?’ she asked him.

‘Your calendar?’ he said. ‘240.’

She knew it was 236. She did not want to show him up. She knew the answers. She knew the questions. She felt everything, her destiny, at her fingertips.

‘It’s very detailed,’ the man said. ‘There’s that — the detailing on the musket.’

‘I didn’t mean that. I mean — there was no native cavalry until after the native wars. And the native wars did not end until 249, and then they put a few survivors in a uniform.’ Reade would have died to see her answer. He knew her, or thought he knew her, back in Jonestown High School: never knew the answers, purple lipstick, black eyeshadow. Bad Girl, Fast Girl, I’ll-cut-your-fucking-face-Girl.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked her. He was cute. His accent was cute. He had the suggestion of a smile, a wonderful cool, almost scary blue about his eyes.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Then they shipped them off to fight in Europe, and they died.’

‘So,’ he said, ‘that’s very bloody astute.’

Roxanna giggled.

The collector smiled.

She liked him, she liked him anyway. She wanted to touch his mouth with her fingers.

‘Could I buy you lunch?’ he said.

And it was done. They had met.

When, exactly three hours later, she went with him to his hotel, she guessed it was too fast, that you should not conduct this sort of relationship like that. She knew a lot about him, but. His mother was a waitress. His daddy was missing. He grew up in a little town where they used poisonous snakes to prove their faith in God. He was very high up in a bank. If you sat in his office you could look across at the Skyscraper Cathedral, and down to the Bleskran. He was not married. He was funny and kind of wild. She thought: whatever happens, happens.

As she walked into the elevator in the Ritz she wished Reade could see her.

Reade would have been frightened to walk into a hotel like this. She too, once. But she read a book and here she was. She was in a daze, and only once — the moment she entered Room 2302 — did she feel a crackle of anger, out of nowhere: the unfairness of it, that there were women who lived every day of their lives in places like this.

Wealth was not like she had imagined — no dark panelling, no gilt — all these different pearl greys, dove greys, this velvety, almost colourless luxury with its single big bed, crisply turned down, and its antique writing desk and the big bathroom with its phials and canisters and silk kimonos, and this wide, deep anger lay glowing beneath a silky sheet of pleasure and gave her that dangerous ecstatic feeling she knew she should not encourage in herself.

‘Would you like an Aqua?’ Gabe asked her now.

Eficans never used the word. It was as exotic and beautiful to her ears as a glass angel.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said in the breathless little voice which she had learned from Irma.

He went to the bar and she sat at the writing desk. Probably it was called a bureau, something unexpected. She ran her hand over the leather desk top. She thought: there are people who do this every day of their lives.

He brought her the drink. She took it without looking at it, half giddy with what she had done.

‘I have to go soon,’ she said.

He smiled at her.

He was not very much taller than she was, but he had a broad strong body and a handsome olive-skinned face with a neat, short haircut and a cute grin which showed the edge of one slightly (only slightly) crooked tooth and made his eyes crease up. He was forty, maybe forty-five.

She tried to sip her drink slowly, but something inside her made her gulp at it. She squeezed her eyes shut against the bubbles. When she opened them he was smiling at her and she knew he thought she was cute.

‘Tell me more about your job in the bank,’ he said.

‘You’re the one who’s got the job in the bank.’

‘I know.’

‘Then I can’t talk about it.’

‘But I love the way you talk,’ he said. ‘Talk to me about anything.’

She loved the way he talked. She liked the bright, clean confidence of his voice and that three-showers-a-day smell, all soap and steam and light spicy after-shave.

It made her giddy, gave her that feeling, made her laugh more than she might have otherwise, and when he came behind her and put his hand on her thin straps she curled her shoulders up and let the straps slip down over her soft white shoulders, and she turned and bowed her head a little and pulled up her hair to let him see the tattooed dove she had hidden on her neck.

He did not go away. Indeed, he kissed her there, and made a little moan in her ear, and in a moment that 450-dollar dress was on the floor like a great black bloom fallen on to the soft grey carpet and he was telling her he was crazy about her lopsided smile.

Now the dress lay on the floor as if it were nothing better than a pair of shucked-off overalls. She should hang it up. She should say, well, honey, you’re just going to have to wait . But he already had his jacket and trousers lying there beside the dress and if she was going to insist she would have to stand up and walk across the room in her pants and bra and she didn’t want him lying there and looking at her. She was prettiest when closest, so she left the dress where it had fallen, but it stayed in the corner of her mind, this big black worry which had cost her all her capital.

She just wanted to hold him against her, feel herself sort of folded into his chest, but whenever she reached for him he was not where he had been — his face was in her stomach, at her knees for Chrissake.

Now he was at her ankles. She blushed bright red and tugged away.

‘No.’

‘Babe,’ he said reproachfully.

‘Let go.’ Her ankles were like meat, fat, pork-chop, ugly.

But he took a hold of them, against her will. That really pissed her and she suddenly felt that sort of distance — she just watched him as he kissed them. He was kneeling on the floor and kissing her ankles, taking off his wrist-watch while he did it.

‘Please don’t.’

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Babe, please.’

‘I hate my ankles.’ Her voice caught on the word. She hated to have to say it out loud.

Gabe ran his tongue between her toes.

She felt the tears run down her face before she even knew she was crying. It just came out of her as if she were a thing, a sponge, soaked with too much moisture.

‘Hey, hey.’ He crawled up towards her. Oh thank God, she thought. He held her. It was like she wanted. ‘Don’t cry, hunning. Daddy’s here. Why are you crying?’

She held him hard. She pushed her face into his neck and sobbed. She could not say.

‘What did I do?’

She shook her head.

‘I love your feet,’ he said. ‘I just love your feet.’

‘Don’t mock me,’ she said.

‘These are the kind of feet I like.’

She looked up at him, tear-smeared. ‘Really?’

‘Really.’

She snorted. She could not help it. It was not quite laughing, but that’s what it became.

‘I mean it,’ he said, blushing. ‘There are leg men and breast men and feet men. I am a foot man.’

‘Gabe, my ankles are ugly.’

‘What do you know?’ he said. ‘These are beautiful feet.’