David Szalay - All That Man Is

It is a strange moment — him just standing there, looking, while she waits.

He notices, eventually, that he has an erection.

She notices too, and with slow movements, she kneels in front of him and slides down the zip of his jeans.

Her mouth is soft and warm.

‘You have done this before,’ he says after a while, sincerely impressed.

She just shrugs. She wipes her mouth and moves back a bit. With a fair amount of shoving and tugging she gets herself out of her jeans.

Her legs do not quite have the overwhelmingly vertical quality of a normal leg — they have a definite and assertive horizontal dimension too. And not much in the way of knees. When she drags down her lace-edged pants, he sees, for a moment, somewhere among all the whitish flesh, a soft tuft of hair the colour of peanut butter.

She takes his hand and pulls him towards the bed where he sleeps, its sweaty mess of sheets.

While she stands there waiting, he sits on the edge of the bed and pulls his own jeans over his feet, his horizontally striped polo shirt over his head.

They are both naked now, and his hard-on is almost embarrassingly fervent. It almost hurts. She tries to lie back on the bed and open her legs. She needs to open her legs as wide as they will go or the flesh, pouring in from every direction, will obstruct him. The single bed, however, in its position flush to the wall, is simply too narrow for her to do that. She hardly fits onto it with her legs held parallel. After a few moments of frustration, Bérnard says, ‘I know. We put the mattress on the floor, okay?’

They stand up and start to move the mattress onto the floor.

Bérnard’s aching erection knocks against his stomach as he struggles with his end of the mattress.

They put it down on the brown tiles.

For a moment she stands there, in the veiled light, naked, looking like a huge melted candle, all drips and slumps of round-shaped waxy flesh. Pendulous surrenders. Those pale pink nipples the size of his face. There is just so much of her, it seems to him, standing at his end, stunned by how much he wants her now, so much of her, a quantity of woman nearly equal, if that were possible, to his need to possess it, physically, in every way imaginable. Though in fact at this moment that need seems infinite. His member nodding, his lungs pulling at the air, it seems that there is nothing else to him, that that is all he is.

She takes her place on the mattress.

And then it starts.

—

It lasts all afternoon, and into the evening. The light softens in the folds of the curtains. Finally they sleep for a while, and when he opens his eyes, she is dressing herself. Though she is wearing her shirt, she seems to be naked from the waist down.

‘What time is it?’ he asks.

‘Seven,’ she says. ‘You coming to supper?’

She pulls one of the curtains open and admits a wedge of light in which she immediately finds her enormous knickers. Sitting heavily on the second bed, she manoeuvres them on.

‘I don’t think so,’ Bérnard says. He is lying naked on the mattress on the floor, supine. Worn out by orgasms — at least five of them, he isn’t sure exactly how many — he feels sleepy and immobile. The idea of dressing, of dragging himself down to the dining room, seems impossible.

‘Fair enough,’ Charmian says, working her jeans on now.

‘I’ll see you later then?’ she says, when she is dressed, and standing at the door.

‘Yes, see you,’ Bérnard says.

When she has left, he lies there still, the air warm on his skin, his eyes fixed on the soiled paintwork of the ceiling as darkness slowly hides it.

Sounds arrive at the window

a moped’s noisy whirr

a snatch of music

very distant shouts

At lunch the next day he is shy and embarrassed. The women are normal, the same as always. Charmian, focusing on the food, hardly says anything, hardly looks at him. Sandra talks. She says, ‘You weren’t at the pool this morning, Bernard.’

He says he went to the beach.

‘Was that nice?’ Sandra asks.

He says it was.

‘We don’t really like the sea, do we?’

Charmian says, trying to force some last strings of meat from a scrawny, bleeding chicken leg, ‘It’s okay.’

‘I’m scared of sharks,’ Sandra says.

‘That is not a problem here, I think,’ Bérnard tells her.

Sandra is adamant — ‘Oh, there are sharks here. And anyway I always end up with my knickers full of sand. Sand everywhere. You know what I mean? Still finding it when we get home. Still finding it weeks later.’

‘Okay,’ Bérnard says.

‘They sorted out your shower yet?’ she asks him.

‘No.’

‘No? It’s just disgraceful. You need to be more assertive, Bernard.’

‘Yes,’ he agrees, ‘I think so…’

‘You’ve been here nearly a week now and they still haven’t sorted it out. It’s just not acceptable.’

‘No.’

Bérnard looks shyly at Charmian again. She seems to be avoiding his eye.

‘We’re going horse-riding this afternoon,’ Sandra announces, improbably.

‘Horse-riding?’

‘Yes. Our rep sorted it out for us.’

‘There is horse-riding?’ Bérnard asks.

‘Apparently.’

—

After lunch, while they wait in the lobby, Bérnard says to Charmian, ‘I will see you later? You will come to my room?’

Despite the exhaustiveness of yesterday’s session he finds, slightly to his own surprise, that he wants more.

She is eating a pack of toffee popcorn, the sort of thing she always has on her, in her handbag. She looks at him for a moment as if she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Then she says, ‘Yeah, okay.’

‘Okay,’ Bérnard says, feeling pleased with himself. ‘I will see you later.’

He looks quickly at Sandra — it was awkward, somehow, to speak out with her there. She doesn’t seem to have heard, though. She is just fanning herself with a brochure, and looking towards the brown glass door.

—

The afternoon passes slowly. Bérnard sprawls on the pummelled, stained mattress on the floor of his room. He looks out the window. Nothing interests him. The only thing he is able to think about is what will happen later, when Charmian shows up.

Finally, at about five there is a knock on the door.

He opens it, wearing only his pants.

It is not Charmian.

It is her mother — feathery blonde pudding-bowl, red face, even redder cleavage.

‘Hello, Bernard,’ she says.

He swings the door mostly shut, leaving only his shocked face visible to her. He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t even manage hello.

‘Can I come in then?’ Sandra asks.

‘I need…I need to get dressed.’

‘Don’t bother about that,’ Sandra says authoritatively. ‘Come on — let me in.’

He opens the door and stands aside and Sandra advances, with obvious interest, into the narrow stale-smelling room.

The thin sundress drapes her distended physique.

Her face is papery, parched, especially around the eyes.

‘Our room’s just like this,’ she says.

Bérnard is standing there in his pants.

‘You look worried, Bernard,’ she says. She looks at the mattress in its odd position on the floor. ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about.’ Her eyes stay on the mattress for a few seconds, as if inspecting it, and then she says, ‘I’ve heard good things about you, Bernard.’

He looks puzzled.

‘Oh, yes, very good things.’

‘What things?’ he asks worriedly.

She laughs at the expression on his face. ‘Well, what d’you think? You know why I’m here, don’t you?’ she says, looking him in the eye.

It takes him a few seconds.