Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

I said to him: “I almost thought you were in pain.” He did not seem to hear. He lifted his heavy arm and put his hand up to draw my head down into the warmth, groping as if it were dark. I found with delight that his ears and his temples were still burning. “You seemed just as if you were in great pain. The way you arched your neck—” Now he smiled at the wonderment in my voice. I could not explain to him the blast of tender anguish that had come upon me, quite maddening and unbearable, at the astonishing onslaught of his passionate release. I could not believe myself, my body, the mesh against which he struggled like a creature meeting death: I once had seen a bird die wildly, like that, its wings magnificently caught up in some net you could not see. How often again I was to say that to him! Are you in pain? To grip him and beg him with a kind of savage insistent tenderness, even tears. What is it? What is it?

Now he opened his eyes dazedly with the slow smile of someone who hears something about himself he cannot know, and while I traced the soft brush of his mustache (it was younger and lighter than his hair, bleached, like the short hair at his temples, brighter than brown) he said with almost an element of curiosity in his voice: “This is nothing. You understand? It will be better for you next time. I promise you, it will be wonderful for you. I want to make it wonderful for you.”

I said: “You thought I’d made love before.”

“Well, yes, of course.”

I was silent. He kissed me.

“I was so ashamed. I wanted to invent lovers I’d had. But that would have been all right only so long as you didn’t make love to me. … Was I all right?” I suddenly felt that perhaps I had not pleased, that in my inexperience I was not a good lover.

He kept on kissing me. What I had said seemed to fill him with an anxiety of delight. “Oh, I adore you, adore you.” He stopped and looked at me with exasperation. “My little demi-vièrge.”

His words sent an afterglow of passive sensuality through me, his bright, tousled, roused face above me, the blood pulsing against the angle at which he held his neck, seemed to bring me to a marvelously full consciousness of being alive. Those empty moments of falling terror when the wings of life suddenly cease and drop and all the props of one’s effort cave in meaninglessness — not because they may fail, but because the end itself seems nothing — seemed secured against at last in this. This was the answer of reality to a phantom: perhaps the mystery of the end to which life is directed is simply the miracle of the means. With my arms about this other young human whom I had just taken symbolically and strangely into my body, I felt myself secure against the void of infinity.

So I, who had inherited no God, made my mystery and my reassurance out of human love; as if the worship of love in some aspect is something without which the human condition is intolerable and terrifying, and humans will fashion it for their protection out of whatever is in their lives as birds will use string and bits of wool to make a nest in the city where there are no reeds.

When it was nearly five and the city afternoon began to darken with winter outside, we sat at the bright-barred heater drinking coffee that Paul had made. I was dressed again, a little self-conscious in the identical order of my clothes with the way I had been before. I felt suddenly like a visitor, looking round at the cheap, yellowish walled room that had the public look of rooms where people never live for long, like the eyes of restaurant cashiers who continually watch comings and goings. Paul’s few things, so eloquent of him as a separate entity, filled me with curiosity. My eyes wandered over the desk with its files and piles of paper, the bottles of green and red ink and the open typewriter, the snapshot of two shy native babies, the good old tapestry chair with the sagging arm where someone made a habit of sitting with his legs slung over, even the rumpled divan where we had lately lain, with its faded blue eiderdown quilt that belonged to an unknown childhood. Here he lived and moved among things when I was not with him and before I had known him: that old quilt must have followed him to boarding school in his mother’s winter parcel and covered him on cold nights in the antiseptic, serge-redolent atmosphere of a boy’s dormitory, his little boy’s rough hands clenched under the cold sheet years away from the softness of my breasts.

He put off the old coat he had used as a dressing gown and got into his clothes, and I watched this strong tender body, so different from my own, take on, like a public manner, the anonymity of men’s clothing. Those thighs with their dark warm hair, that other hair that drew a crucifix on his breast and belly, the bare-looking triangle of bony white at the base of his spine; all this which was withdrawn and secret from his outward appearance to the world made me conscious with a kind of solemnity of what else must be hidden; behind his voice and his impulses, the life he chose and the men and women with whom he chose to live it: even me, and what he believed he had found in me — all the unknown forces of memory, conviction and desire from which his personality glanced off, like a light. And I think I started then that strangest of journeys which is never completed, the desire to understand another in his deepest being. And I knew already, even then, that love is only the little boat that beaches you over the jagged rocks; for the interior something more will be needed.

When we got back to the Marcuses’ flat I was somehow a little irritated to find that they were waiting supper for us. We had not said, when we went out, at what time we should be back, and there was the echo of something irksome in the way Jenny came to the door of the kitchen as we came through the front door: “Well, now I can heat the spaghetti — at last! What happened to you?” It seemed to me that although she was young, she too had forgotten already the liberation from time, the privileged suspension from all the practical mechanics of life into which it is really a device for plunging men and women deeper than ever, with which love begins. Momentarily there had already dropped across her young, passionate eye the film of the matron, who in suckling children has forgotten the other urgency. We went into the living room and Joel was there, with Laurie Humphrey and John.

“Was she putting grated cheese on it?” Laurie asked. “Did you tell her to put cheese on it?” and I said in a queerly put-out, startled voice: “When did you come? I didn’t know you were coming.” Joel seemed to know that the nervousness of this meaningless compulsion to say something was directed at him, and he lifted his familiar head (what a big, heavy head he had in comparison with Paul!) from the paper over which he and John were bent and said with a mock air of relief at finding someone who would be bound to know: “Now come on, Helen — who’s going to win in Calvinia—?” And because I was still in the startled moment of taking in the changed relationships with which the room was innocently charged, and so merely registered the convention of a question requiring thought instead of realizing what he had said, my expression of weighing consideration was unintentionally comic. The three men roared with laughter; John with a childlike, expansive delight in someone making a fool of himself, Joel with the gentle human amusement of sharing an absent moment with someone, Paul with a proprietary pleasure in the idiosyncrasy of someone over whom one has the ascendancy of possession in love. The Sunday paper was holding a competition in connection with the national election which was to take place in the coming week: a list was printed with the names of constituencies, the candidates and parties returned at the last election, and the candidates and parties standing for this election. The winner of the competition would be the person who predicted most accurately which party would come to power, and with what majority. Calvinia was a Nationalist stronghold and the seat of Dr. Malan himself, so there could be no possible doubt about who would win Calvinia.