Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

“She must. — I should think so, at the beginning, at any rate. The one may have become awfully familiar — you know — it may not seem like the same thing, perfectly harmless. — You never liked her much, did you?” she said, taking up the tone of curiosity.

“I don’t know. I was pleased that he was so thrilled with her—”

As he was dropping heavily asleep, Jessie’s voice woke him: “There was something wonderful about her today, though.” The quiet, ordinary voice startled him convulsively and his hand as it jerked out came into contact with the bony yet padded eminence of Jessie’s pelvis. In the dark behind his eyelids it was at once a skull turned up by a boot, and a grassy bank.

They went to a party, in the week that followed, with Ann. It was one of those shapeless parties that people give to introduce foreign visitors to a succession of faces they will never see again. Tom got trapped in a corner with a bore who always lay in wait for him at such parties, and Jessie drifted ruthlessly from group to group, finding herself talking to people whose identity she ought to have known, since they appeared to know her. The only liveliness came from the small company where Ann was. She herself held the same glass of gin and tonic the whole evening, but her presence roused an appetite for pleasure in the others around her, so that there was constant traffic between their corner and the bar. Laughter, raised voices and general animation surrounded her yet appeared to emanate from her; she was not looking her best that night, her hair was in need of a shampoo and the dress she wore was not a really good colour, but she had, Jessie recognised, the attraction for men of a woman who is excited by some private amorous involvement. It was a state both helpless and powerful. The attention was not something one set out for; but the power! The power came from the brief time of balance between two men, the extraordinary moment before guilt, shame or regret set in, when one gave to and took from each of them an identical pleasure. Jessie remembered with something of a shudder the discovery that one could make love to one man one night, and another the next: the taboo that had lived in one’s mind as a hoop of fire — and simply fell apart, as one jumped, a thing of tissue paper.

Tom was coming home one afternoon when he saw Ann’s car draw up outside the gate, Ann get out, and a man with a beard, whom he recognised as Gideon Shibalo, drive off again. When she caught up with him along the path, he said, “What’s happened to your car?” She laughed, gave him a look of surprise that might have been a rebuke. “I’ve lent it to Gid Shibalo.” The initiative seemed to have changed hands swiftly, so he said, “What is he doing these days?” They went up the steps together. “Teaching.” She smiled at him as he pushed open the door for her to enter; her hair was wet on the ends, she must have been swimming, and the powder had rubbed off her face on the cheek-bones and nose as the bloom rubs off the round prominences of a fruit. She never had the dazed look that, paradoxically, clouds the face of someone who has been doing intellectual work, she never carried the dull smell of smoky rooms, the staleness of ink, papers or cooking. She did not bring an ether of cold perfume, either. He felt it almost as an insult that he was unmoved by her living beauty. He went upstairs and said to Jessie: “So he’s driving around in Boaz’s car, now.”

“Oh, several times lately.” She answered with the impatience of someone who has something else to say.

“Didn’t he have a long-standing affair with that woman Callie Stow?”

“Mmm. A few others, too.”

Tom felt vaguely reassured; the thought of Boaz, whose name gripped his mind in unease, slackened and let go.

“My mother says the tenants are definitely going to be out by the end of May,” Jessie said, beginning to put papers and photographs steadily back into her dressing-table drawer, so that she could ignore any reaction he might be showing. She was talking about Fuecht’s house.

He was careful what he said. “But what’s it like? I mean have you any idea whether there’s enough furniture and so on …?” and while they talked Ann’s heels went lightly, loudly about the old wooden floors, and clattered away from them.

Although Morgan had gone straight from school to a farm — Tom had arranged for him to join the three sons of the professor of botany — the little girls were at home for ten days at Easter and Jessie felt obliged to come home to lunch with them every day. It was not so much that they needed her; the reprieve of responsibility for Morgan usually produced some compensatory piece of dutifulness towards the other children. The second day she found Gideon Shibalo sitting in the garden. The angle of the two chairs (they were set slightly awry, as if their original intimacy had been put out by the restless movement of occupants in tense discussion), the remains of some clumsy sandwiches, the torn lace of beer-foam dirtying a glass, the litter of cigarette stubs — all these conveyed to her a sudden hope of signs of crisis. But when she came down into the deep shade where they might have isolated themselves in a deadlock of reckoning, she was at once aware that her high pitch was wrong: there was nothing to meet it. Gideon greeted her and belched, raising his eyebrows at himself. He had the slightly out-of-place look that she noticed Africans sometimes had in a garden. Ann had kicked off her shoes and sat pinching up grass blades between her toes. The children were playing house not ten yards away, in the curtains of the pepper trees.

“Was there anything to eat?” Jessie asked, falling back on hospitality. Ann assured her that it was all right, they had found something. An air of normality, of commonplace almost, prevailed between the three of them; Jessie felt that she ought to throw it off, but she was hampered by what now seemed to her the impossible code of personal freedom by which they lived. How could she suggest to Ann that she did not want Gideon Shibalo there? Why should she not want him to come? Was Ann in the house as an appendage of Boaz? If — and it was unthinkable, with the concept of individual dignity that the Stilwells held, that it should be otherwise — she was nothing less than herself, then that selfhood was entitled to determine its own actions, and they should be seen as such , and not at the angle at which they lay across Boaz’s being. Why choose Boaz, and not her? Oh it was all right to choose him, for oneself — but one could not put a finger out to flick her direction to suit his. Jessie had a horror of the attempt by a third person to deflect the life of one to serve another; without God, the unquestionable existence of this horror beyond the strength of a moral sense was a scrap of torn paper from the difficult documentation that might put together his existence. Any influence directed by consideration of Boaz’s life should come only out of a private covenant — and, to Jessie, this did not mean marriage — between Ann and Boaz.

Yet she was resentful in some constant, concealed part of herself at Shibalo’s presence, as at the awareness that he was at the other end of telephone calls, and the regular sight of him driving the car—“Boaz’s car” as she and Tom referred to it lately, although Boaz had bought it for Ann. She was resentful and yet she sat and talked with them amiably, because she liked him. He treated her in a good-humoured, dry way, certain they would get on. Ann again did not talk much, though at least her air was animated. When she did say something, it was invariably a corroboration of, or corollary to, what Shibalo was saying: “He really did. You should have seen the faces of the others.” “—And then that was when you met him alone and said to him …”