Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

“Like a vaudeville act.”

The terse casualness of the summing-up fell lightly between us.

I looked at him.

And it came to me suddenly: I did not care. It mattered as little to me now as it did to him. The reaction, the revulsion I had waited for fearfully in myself was not there. I thought with a kind of pride of surrender to something painful and sweet in its dangerous completeness: Nothing matters. Nobody. Not even Isa.

I sat with my hands resting on the typewriter, looking at Paul.

“You look a little drunk,” he said. “That’s rotten brandy of John’s. It kicks you in the back of the head about two hours after you’ve forgotten drinking it.”

At the end of 1949 I went to live with Paul in the flat in Bruton Heights, Krause Street.

He had had a very bad infection of the throat during which I had gone every day to stay with him, and sometimes spent the night because it was difficult for me to get home alone after dark to Parkcrest — where I had moved, with the Marcuses, to their house. Then when the infection cleared, he had to have his tonsils removed, and I went home with him from the nursing home.

I sent a message to the bookshop to say that I was ill. All day long we were alone together in the hot bright little flat, Paul’s pajamas that I had washed flapping on the balcony, our cigarette smoke blue in the sunlight round the bed, the collection of newspapers, books and lozenges littering the sheets. Walking up the street to the vegetable shop in the morning, I had no compunction about my job, really would not have cared if someone had seen me. In the shop I stood enjoying the little imposture of waiting among all the other housewives, middle-aged women who weighed out their own tomatoes — not too green, not too soft — and smart young women who dangled a car key on the index finger and pointed, without touching, at what they wanted. Back at the flat, Paul would mimic for me the funny, charming speech of the Portuguese market gardeners who both grew the vegetables and ran the shop. I cooked our food and read to him (he liked the sound of my voice reading something familiar, a translation of Stendhal, the poems of Donne) and at twelve we would eat together, the tray between us on the bed. Then I would push the windows as wide as they would go, and pull the curtains. The summer day seemed to curl up asleep outside; we would hear the sound of the native laborers’ picks digging the foundations for a new block of flats on the other side of the street.

I lay down beside him (he had the warm puppy-smell of people who are in bed) and with his arm hooked around my neck, he read, very swiftly and silently, detective stories that, the moment I began to follow the lines from the angle at which I lay, sent me off into a kind of singing sleep, like the sound of cicadas rising in my head. Sometimes we made love. I would tease him: “But you’re supposed to be a weak convalescent. If you’re strong enough for this you should be working.” “For some things,” he would say in the hoarse closed whisper which was the only way he could speak, “you don’t need your voice.”

We would lie there quietly, spreading our limbs for coolness on the rumpled sheet. “Listen,” he would say, “everyone’s away. Everyone’s working. The whole town’s reckoning and arguing and persuading and measuring up and putting down. Only us.” And there was a special pleasure in the sense of our desertion, our malingerers’ possession of the hot quiet afternoon in the emptied building and the emptied street. We could still hear the picks, pitching dully and regularly into the earth.

When evening came — we could see nothing but the sky from where we sat, deepening green and now showing a star like a glistening drop of water, though the noise of homeward traffic beat and swirled below — he did not want me to go and I did not want to go. I would run down out into the street again to get a paper. We drank gin and lime juice to the mild intermingling of other people’s radios, city equivalent of the cheeping of birds in the dusk. We did the crossword together in that desire to stretch one’s concentration lazily — like making a muscle — that comes pleasurably from idleness. For half an hour, on the gay confidence of the gin, I felt entirely in command of the pots I set cooking, pans I set sizzling. Paul sat up in bed shelling peas. I shouted a running commentary to him from the kitchen as I cooked. And afterward he liked me to come to him smelling of talcum from the bath, my hair brushed out and the make-up washed off my face, and we lay together listening to records and hearing the roar of the traffic rise, far down, as other people went off to cinemas and visits. Quite late, because we talked so easily at night, circling out from the still center of ourselves to politics and death, the confidence with which we spoke of the uncertain future, the hesitancy with which we spoke of the certain past; gossip, impressions — we fell asleep, curled round each other like two cats in the narrow bed.

When we talked about the kind of life we should live together I would say: “I want to live with you in the greatest possible intimacy.” I said it with a deep earnest satisfaction that was at the same time apprehensive, lying back on the pillow and looking at him. And I do not know that I knew exactly what it was that I meant; though I knew what it was that I did not mean. I did not want to belong to the women’s camp while my husband belonged to the men’s camp. I did not want to sit talking to women of things that “did not interest” men, while he sat with the men talking of things that “did not interest” women. I did not want him to be a scapegoat, hidden behind a newspaper: “I’ll have to ask my husband,” “I don’t know what my husband will think”—as if he were a kind of human reference work, a statute book on which the state of the household internally and in relation to society was based. … When Paul questioned me, I could only pause, and then say, like another question, an obstinate question rather than an answer: “… This, I want this. It must be like this.” I knew this warmth of physical intimacy — eating, bathing, sleeping, waking together — was not all of two human beings rooted in each other but free, yet it was all I had so far come to know of the state I imagined.

Paul delighted in it for itself; for him I think it was immediate and complete. There was a peculiar charm in loving a woman, a girl as young as I was, whose desire was to identify herself entirely with his being. Older women he had known had, I imagine, wanted to possess him; they took him to themselves. But I wanted to devote myself to him. He felt he owned me, and all the love and pleasure I could give him. It was a sort of young male’s kingdom into which he had come into his own after being the darling page boy of the court. When I put into words the way we spent our time together, he was quite maddened; he kissed me and caressed me and worried at me in enchantment with the way I was made and the things that I said.

I never went back to the Marcuses’. When the week was up and we both descended into the world, like two children who have made a suburban room their secret tower, we could not live apart again. It was senseless to see each other in snatches, to lie at night the distance across the town away from each other, to eat and talk with others. All that was senseless; the only thing that was right and simple was to stay together. It is curious how moral censure never seems applicable to oneself. I would say of others: “Aren’t they living together? — I heard he had some girl in his flat?”—But it never occurred to me that people might speak of Paul and me in the same casual tone, that I might be to them merely some girl who lived with a man. In any case we were as good as married; the marriage was a mere formality we had still to go through. We had wanted to marry at the end of the year, when we had saved a little money and could perhaps go to Europe. But now: “We’ll get married when they come back,” said Paul, speaking of my mother and father. “I want to shoot you down to Natal at Easter to show you to my people. We’ll go for the long week end and then I can take you to the Drakensberg, and we’ll climb.”