Nadine Gordimer - Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

While they undressed they decided for coffee. Dina didn’t jump on their bed in customary invitation for them to join her, she was giving concentrated attention to his discarded pants, shirt, shoes. Must be the shoes that perfumed his attraction. Doggy-doo, Eva said, Wait a minute, don’t put them on the rug, I’ll run the tap over the soles: Michael laughed at the crumple of distaste lifting her nose, her concern for the kelim. In the bathroom, instead, she wet a streamer of the toilet roll, rubbed each sole and flushed the paper down the bowl: although there was no mess clinging to the leather a smell might remain. She propped his shoes to dry, uppers resting against the wall of the shower booth.

When she came back into the bedroom he’d dropped off, asleep, lying in his pyjama pants, the newspaper untidy across his naked chest: opened his eyes with a start.

Still want coffee?

He yawned assent.

Come, Dina. Bedtime.

As a child enjoys a cuddle in the parents’ bed before banishment to his own, it was the dog’s routine acceptance that she would descend to her basket in the kitchen when the indulgence was declared over. Tonight she wasn’t on the bed with master, she got up slowly from where she lay beside a chair, turned her head in some quick last summons to sniff at his clothes lying there, and went down to her place while Eva brewed the coffee.

They drank it side by side in bed. I didn’t make it too strong? Looks as if nothing could keep you awake tonight, anyway.

There were disturbed nights, these days, when she would be awakened by the sleepless changed rhythm of the breathing beside her, the interrupted beat of the heart of intimacy shared by lovers over their sixteen years. He had put all their funds into his airline. Flight Hadeda (her choice of the name of ibis that flew over the house calling out commandingly). Profits of the real estate business he’d sold; her inheritance from her father’s platinum mining interests. Those enterprises of old regime white capitalism were not the way to safe success in a mixed economy — politically correct capitalism. Such enterprises were now anxiously negotiating round affirmative action requirements that this percentage or that of holdings in their companies be reserved for black entrepreneurs with workers becoming token shareholders in stock exchange profits. A small airline, dedicated to solving something of the transport problems of a vast developing country, had patriotic significance. If Michael and his partner are white, the cabin attendants, one of the pilots and an engineer are black. Isn’t it an honest not exploitative initiative on which they’ve risked everything? She knows what keeps him open-eyed, dead-still in the night: if the national airline takes up the homely routes its resources will ground the Everything in loss. Once or twice she has broken the rigid silence intended to spare her; the threat is hers, as well. There is no use to talk about it in the stare of night; she senses that he takes her voice’s entry to his thoughts maybe as some sort of reproach: the airline is his venture, way-out, in middle age.

The coffee cups are on the floor, either side of their bed. She turned on her elbow to kiss him goodnight but he lifted a hand and got up to put on the pyjama jacket. She liked his bare chest near her, the muscles a little thicker — not fat — than they used to be; when you are very tired you feel chilly at night. Climbing back to bed he stretched to close the light above. His sigh of weariness was almost a groan, let him sleep, she did not expect him to turn to her. Let the mutual heart beat quietly. Before moving away for private space they mostly fell asleep in what she called the spoon-and-fork way: she on her side and his body folded along her back, or him on his other side and she curved along his. Of course he was the spoon when enveloping her back in protection from shoulders to thighs, her body was the slighter line of the fork, its light bent tines touching the base of his nape, her breasts nestled under his dorsal muscles. This depended haphazardly on who turned this or that side first, tonight he rolled onto his right, approaching deep sleep giving him a push that way. The gentle impetus reached her to follow, round against him. The softness of breasts in opposition to the male rib cage and spine are one of the wordless questions and answers between men and women. In offended vanity which long survives, she never forgot that once, in early days, he’d remarked as an objective observation, she didn’t have really good legs; her breasts were his admiring, lasting discovery. In bantering moods of passion she’d tell him he was a tit man and he would counter with mock regret he hadn’t ever had a woman with those ample poster ones on display. In tonight’s version of the spoon-and-fork embrace she always had her closed eyes touched against his hair and her nose and lips in the nape of his neck. She liked to breathe there, into him and breathe him in, taking possession he was not conscious of and was yet the essence of them both. These were not the sort of night moments you tell the other, anyway they half-belong to the coming state of sleep, the heightened awareness of things that’s called the unconscious. None of his business, secret even from herself that she enters him there as, female, she can’t the way he enters her. Or it’s just something else; the way you would bury your face in that incredibly innocent sensuous touch and smell of an infant’s hollow under the back of its skull. But that’s not a memory which persists from the distant infancy of a fifteen-year-old whose voice has broken. She moves her face, herself, into the nape as she does without at first meeting the skin, not to disturb, the touch of the lips to come after the gentlest touch of her breathing there.—

She’s sniffing. She’s drawing back a little from the hollow smooth and unlined as if it were that of a man of twenty. Comes close again. Scenting. Her nose drawn tight, then nostrils flared to short intakes of whatever. Scenting. She knows their smell, the smell of his skin mingled with what she is, a blend of infusions from the mysterious chemistry of different activities in different parts of their bodies, giving off a flora of flesh juices, the intensity or delicacy of sweat, semen, cosmetics, saliva, salt tears: all become an odour distilled as theirs alone.

Scenting on him the smell of another woman.

She moved carefully out of bed. He was beyond stirring as her warmth left him. She went into the bathroom. Switched on the light above the mirror and forced herself to look at herself. To make sure. It was facing a kind of photography no-one had invented. It wasn’t the old confrontation with oneself. There was another woman who occupied the place of that image. Smell her.

She, herself, was half-way down the passage darkness to the bed in the room that served as guest and storeroom when — despising that useless gesture, she went back. In their bed she lay spaced away from where she would allow herself to approach, scenting again what she already had. Rationality attacked: why didn’t he shower instead of dozing bare-chested and then climbing into bed. Yes, he’d got up and put on the pyjama jacket; in place of the shower’s precaution. He showered when he came home after squash games. Was it really from the squash courts he returned, always, Tuesday nights.

It wasn’t that she didn’t allow herself to think further; she could not think. A blank. So that it might not begin to fill, she left their bed again as carefully, silently as the first time, and in the bathroom found his bottle of sleeping pills (she never took soporifics, a university lectureship and the take-off and landing of a risky airline enterprise did not share the same ‘stress’). She shook out what looked like a plastic globule of golden oil and swallowed it with gulps of tap water cupped in her hand. When she woke from its unfamiliar stun in the morning he was coming from the bathroom shiningly freshly shaved, called, Hullo darling; as he did ‘Hullo my girl’ in affectionate homecoming, to their dog.