Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

Inside, the building put aside the slippery marbled pretensions of the foyer and there was the indigenous smell, that I was soon to know so well, of fried onions and soot, and behind the door on which Joel and I rapped and walked in, Jenny in an unexpected splendor.

What is meant by love at the first sight is really a capture of the imagination; and I do not think that it is confined to love. It happens in other circumstances, too, and it happened to me then. My imagination was captured; something which existed in my mind took a leap into life. I saw the bright, half-bare room, the books all round, the open piano and some knitted thing of the baby’s on a pile of music, a charcoal drawing tacked on the wall, a pineapple on a wooden dish and the girl with her bare breasts over the baby. Something of it remains with me to this day, in spite of everything; just as in love, after years of marriage that was nothing like one expected it to be, the moment of the first capture of the imagination can be recalled intact, though the face of the person who is now wife or husband has become the face of an enchanting stranger one never came to know. It was a room subordinate to the force of its occupants; the first of its kind that I was to live in.

“We really wanted a man” Jenny explained, while her husband wandered about the room looking tousled and vague, pushing his shirt into his trousers. “They’re less trouble, we thought.”

“Ah, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “She’ll be able to sit with the baby. You’ll see, Jen, she’ll be useful to you.” And we all laughed.

“Of course I’ll move all the baby’s things out of here.”—She drubbed her stiff dark nipple at the little creature’s nose and with a blind movement of frenzy it snatched it into its mouth. I was fascinated by the look of her breasts; the skin with the silky shine of a muscle sheath over the whiteness of flesh, and the intricate communication of prominent blue veins. They did not seem recogenizable as a familiar feature of my own body, so changed were they from the decorative softness of my own sentient breasts. As she moved about settling the baby when he had fed, they swung buoyantly with the strong movements of her arms; she was a big girl with the slight look of rawness about the tops of her arms you sometimes see in English women. Still talking rather breathlessly — that was her way — she wriggled into a brassière and buttoned the blouse. “We must take the other room, John? Because of the porch. — We’ve rigged up a kind of little room for the baby on the porch, and the door leads from the other room — We’re going to start putting him out there to sleep. It’s not healthy to have him in with us. And you’ll have this divan — the only thing is the cupboard.” She caught her lip and laughed, waving toward the door of a built-in cupboard. “That’s why we wanted a man — they take up less space somehow.”

“Oh, I see — you mean my clothes. Yes, I’d have to have somewhere to hang—”

She nodded. “Exactly. Well, I’ll have to take the groceries out of the bathroom one and put the junk out of this one in there.” “If the worst comes to the worst. ,” said John, hands on his hips, speaking slowly, “I could move those maps and other stuff of mine over to my father’s place.”

His wife giggled at him carelessly fondly: “Oh, no you couldn’t. Your mother’s acid about the stuff of ours they’ve got already—”

He had a way of raising his eyebrows exaggeratedly. “Is that so? We-e-ll. When, Jen? Did my father say anything—” And they got caught up in one of the wrangling personal exchanges that were always easily parenthetic to their participation in general conversation. Joel had his head in the cupboard, which John had o ened while he was talking, and he called out: “You’ve still got that archaeological data! Good Lord—” And started pulling out colored cardboard files. John dropped his discussion with his wife and went over to encourage him. Soon the floor was littered, and they sat in the middle of it. “It didn’t come to anything,” said John mildly. “I heard it was you, Jenny,” said Joel, with innuendo. “They tell me you put a stop to it.”

“Well, I like that!” she said. “Mickey backed out, and they didn’t have the money without him. All I did was say that I knew something like that would happen, that’s all.”

John pointed at her. “But she was pregnant and she couldn’t have gone!”

The two men laughed at her. I went over and sat down on the floor among the papers and photographs; they had the fascination of the practical details of something that had always been impressively remote: an archaeological expedition. While John and Joel explained and argued, she went about attending to the baby, dipping in and out the talk, competently. Once or twice the husband got up to help her with something; they laughed and pushed each other aside officiously over the child, like two people over a newfangled machine whose workings they do not quite get the hang of. “Look, put it this way—” “No, you idiot, they’re always supposed to be put down on the opposite side to the one they were lying on before.” The baby was like something they had bought for their own use and pleasure; a casual, forthright attitude quite different from the awe and flurry and worshipful subordination of normal life to a little sleeping mummy that I had known in homes on the Mine where babies were born. I had never cared for babies and I did not feel constrained to admire this one; even this small freedom appealed to me.

It was just as casually accepted that I should come and live with them. We had discussed little of what my mother would call the “details,” but when Joel and I were leaving, John said as if he had just remembered: “Well, look, when is she going to come?”—I noticed he had a way of addressing remarks to people in the third person, through his wife, as if he and she interpreted the world to each other, and again I felt drawn to them for their evidence of solidarity, what seemed to me an intimacy as simple as breathing. This was what had appealed to me in them the very first time I had seen them, at Isa’s flat. I felt in some obscure way that what they had was the basis of all the good things in life; from it like casements their minds opened naturally on beauty, compassion, and a clear honest acceptance. Now as we said good-by to them at the door, he leaning an arm on her shoulder, I felt a pang something like jealousy, but without bitterness, as for something which was still possible for me.

In the car I said to Joel: “I like them.”

The intensity of the way I spoke must have struck him, and he said quickly: “Why …?”

“They love each other.”

I kept my head down in a kind of shyness for what I had said. He did not answer, but later, in the silence of a long, straight stretch of road on the way to Atherton, he did something he had never done before; I was gazing at the green summer veld threading past when I felt his hand on the nape of my neck, which was turned away from him. I turned back in confusion and surprise, as at a summons; Ludi’s hand had come down upon me once just like that. And Joel was looking at me with the look of a smile in his deep, cool eyes, wondering in understanding, moved and questioning.

The little thread of continuity showing against a relationship so far removed in time, in experience, seemed part of the sense of disturbance and unreality that the upheaval at home had cast like a glare: a milk jug becomes an urn from another age; the feeling of fear, resentment and longing that I hold against the angry voice of my mother somehow becomes the feeling I had, pressed against the door of my room after a hiding. With my mind only half there, I watched the profile of the man sitting beside me; the hand that had rested on my neck relaxed on the steering wheel. Joel will never handle me with love, not even that love of the moment, like Charles’, that deeply desired, faintly insulting recognition of the pure female, discounting me, making of me a creature of no name. Yet I said to myself, Why? And I saw him then for a moment not as Joel, but a young man alive and strange beside me, the curve of his ear, the full muscle of his neck, the indentation at the corner of his closed mouth, his thighs with the unconscious lordliness of any young male’s legs. A faint ripple of sensation went over me. And instantly I was ashamed, I felt I had lost Joel for that instant. That was why it could never be; if I get him to touch me he will never be Joel again, he will never look at me the way he did just now, but with the concupiscence of lovers.