Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

He admired and was amused by his mother, as, bare-footed and flushed-faced, she cha-cha-cha-ed round the table with Boaz, between the stew and the fruit salad, or, with narrow eyes and a challenging grimace, forgot her food and waited to make a point. He was afraid to show his pleasure; he knew it so quickly grew into the pawing attention that irritated everyone.

All Jessie’s animation, that evening, was for Morgan. She was conscious of a picture of herself, as a woman is conscious of a picture of herself for the eyes of a lover.

When the Stilwells had gone upstairs to bed Boaz and his wife hung about a little longer. Boaz had the true scholar’s tendency to turn furtively, as to a secret assignation, to his work, to “finger it over”, as Jessie had once described it, after any sort of break from it. Quite naturally, for him, the boisterous evening ended in a quiet hour of the night when he might as well play over a few of the new tapes he had made in the bush. He went upstairs to fetch the portable player. Jessie, coming from the bathroom, said “I’ve left the alka-seltzer out.” They both thought of something they had been laughing over earlier and burst out laughing. Tom called from the bedroom “Good night”, and Boaz said, “I’m going to have a little music first.”

In the living-room, Ann lay on the divan watching him come in and said, automatically, “We ought to go up.” But she did not move, except to roll over on her stomach and rest on her elbows. Drumming and nasal humming began to come from the player, and she swayed and began to fit the words of a jazz-jargon song to it. “That’s it, that’s it,” he grinned as he went through a box of tapes. The tape in the player snapped and at once he was busy, exasperated and absorbed. When it was fixed, and the music began again, he said: “Come on?”

She had begun to examine her finger-nails; again and again she pushed down the surrounding skin and looked at her hands. She was frowning in deep concentration, the concentration of keeping something out, rather than in, but one of the penultimate ripples of drunkenness reached her and suddenly she rested her outstretched chin on her hands and flung her head back, smiling brilliantly, sleepily, uncontrollably.

“Isn’t this a good one?”

“So tender! What is it?”

“ Makhweyana bow accompaniment. Zulu woman. It shouldn’t be on this tape, with that other snake-charmer thing, but I was short.”

“Gorgeous!” she said again, as a particular phrase in the song was repeated.

“Pasty-face,” he said. It was an overture of affection, to show he noticed her. In the generous outpouring of trivial intimacies when they first fell in love, she had told him how this had been a hated nick-name at her first school. He used it whenever he wanted to tell her he found her beautiful.

She did not attempt to brush the acknowledgement aside; as always, the temptation to accept it overcame her; denial would have been guile: the acceptance was innocent.

The mood between them was affectionate, and the mood of the evening behind them was one that suggested that men and women were neither good nor bad, happy nor unhappy, but taking pleasure here, suffering there, as they tried to live; rash, occasionally exalted, often funny. To be human was to bear with one another through all this. He was looking for another tape that he particularly wanted to play to her and telling her how he had come to make the recording, when she said, with obstinacy and even a little humour: “You know, this business of going about with Gideon Shibalo. I’ve been having a sort of”—she did not pause, but interrupted herself with a quick lurching sigh—“love affair.”

The second sentence was something she forced herself to say, for herself. He knew the moment she said Shibalo’s name; she saw it at once in the slackening of muscular tension in the line of his neck from ear to shirt collar. His ears went scarlet, like a girl’s. She watched these things although she didn’t want to. Boaz had a waxen, oriental skin in which the blood never showed unless he cut himself.

She spoke again before he could say anything. “Did you have any idea?” At the dinner table, she had told — very well — the story of the incident at the night-club. Now she tried to let herself off lightly by believing that she had really confessed then, in a way, in a general context of the culpability of experience.

He was frowning, to ask for time; he stayed her. He said, above some tumult, “You’ve made love to Shibalo?”

“I’ve told you.”

There was a silence; the first real silence of their lives together. She was sober, but the ultimate ripple of the wine’s tide just touched her, once more. Without meaning to, she made the funny, doleful smile, lips pursed down at the corners, eyebrows wide, that she used to draw his attention to, and make mock excuse for, some trivial blunder when she was doing drawings for him.

He smiled slightly, slowly, fascinatedly; it was as if she had done it on purpose, to play with him, to demonstrate a power over him, and from that moment she did begin to feel power.

He came and stood above her. He faced her without weapons and in an honesty as different from her own as his conception of work was different from hers. “What’s it all about, though?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

He nodded. She spoke the truth, for her.

“It’s just one of these things that happen. Before you realise it …” She was ready to embroider, to invent, now, but he stopped her by squatting on the floor beside the divan and putting his hand in a sort of muffling caress over her face. “Poor Pasty-face.”

She sat up, offended. “Don’t you believe me?”

“Of course I believe you.”

“I mean don’t you believe about him and me?”

She felt that it was her eyes that made him walk about the room; they did not follow him so much as propel him.

“Yes, but you don’t know what it’s all about. You don’t tell me it’s because he talks to you, or because you admire him, or because he’s great in bed, or because you wanted to try a black man — I mean, it’s like a child picking daisies …” He was patient but distressed, and she was alert to the feeling that the distress was a moral one that by-passed her. Like many people who do not mean to wound but want merely to draw attention to themselves, she found it might be necessary to make her mark draw blood.

“Why should the reason matter?” she said, smiling at him. The unspoken “to you” stopped him as if she herself had risen from the divan and stood squarely in his way. How could she force him to say, in the debased verbal currency of the film close-up, do you still love me? Don’t you love me any more? The cat’s whine repelled him. He tried, in the moment, in his mind, to jumble the mumbo-jumbo so as to get sense and reality out of it: Is it me you still love or is it because you don’t love me — the worn units were idiotically unusable.

They talked a little while longer, but as though musing gently on something that had come upon them without volition — the inexplicable behaviour of friends, or a venture that had gone wrong through outside circumstances. “I suppose I ought to have come with you more.” “Nonsense. You can’t run away from these things.”

“Have you really never wanted to make love to anyone else since we’ve been living together?”

“I don’t think so. Oh, perhaps once—”

“Viveca, that time at Ellman’s?”

“Yes, well, she hadn’t changed a bit, she was as crazy as she used to be—” But it was still only just after midnight; the night stretched long as soon as their voices gave way to the creaks that went over their heads as the house eased itself.