She didn't want to hurt me, she said before taking another puff.
You can't hurt me.
Though life is full of contradictions, she said, because when I opened my mouth she had the impression she was sticking her finger into dough, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing either.
Let's not kid each other, I said, it wasn't me she imagined, for her I was more like some necessary supplement, a little extra workout to keep her bones from getting rusty.
Brazenly she laughed in my face; in our crouching position our faces were only inches apart; then she pushed herself away from the trunk and, still crouching, began to sway, letting her face get even closer, then pulling farther apart, she kept playing with the space between us.
No, no, I was wrong, she said, offering the cigarette again; she did imagine me also for herself.
Also, I said.
We are greedy, aren't we, she said.
We were splashing about in the joy of boldness, crude openness, in the way we traded imagined nakedness for shamelessness; the wrinkles around her eyes disappeared; and yet there was something very uncomfortable in all this, as if we were exchanging our cheapest, most superficial aspects.
She even imagined, she said, or at least tried to imagine, what on earth we two could possibly do with each other.
Her face was beaming.
By now the cigarette, having gone back and forth, had only one good puff left; I carefully handed it back to her, and she took it from me just as carefully; as she took the last drag, a long one, as if in the time it took before the cigarette burned her finger, everything had to be decided, she blinked and buried her embarrassment in that blink.
And whatever it was we did together, why wasn't it happening to her, my mean and cynical self thought to itself.
However, the question struck me as a possible answer to a far larger question: why did we consider direct bodily contact, the pleasure deriving from one body penetrating another, more complete and more intense than any kind of mental pleasure, why was that the ultimate in human contact? and even farther afield, almost at the very edge of thought, loomed the question of whether war itself wasn't just such a necessary and deceptive pleasure in the contact between different peoples, for we know all too well that in most cases physical union is nothing more than the manipulation of biological drives, more like a quick, always conjurable, easy, and false consolation for unfulfillable spiritual needs than a true fulfillment.
In principle she had no objection, Thea said, and did not lean back against the tree.
The earlier brightness had gone from her face; pensively she stubbed out the cigarette and pressed it carefully into the ground, under the thick layer of pine needles.
Well, maybe a tiny one, she continued after a brief pause, and that's something every woman must feel when something is taken away from her, something that should be hers to give, but because in this case she was that woman, she involuntarily, almost instinctively, approved.
Oddly enough, she wasn't jealous of us, she said; yes, that first time, at the opera, when she finally figured out what was going on, she might have been, but only because it caught her by surprise, and did it ever occur to me that she was the one who had brought us together?
The next day when the two of us showed up at her house, and she saw what an effort it took for us not to let on that something had happened between us in the meantime, and how charmingly solemn and serious we became from all that effort, by then she wasn't jealous, but rather glad, well, maybe not glad, that would be going a little too far.
And did I ever notice, she asked, that women were much more tolerant of male homosexuals than men were?
All right, women would say, it's terrible, unnatural, disgusting, but still, I could be his mother.
She stopped talking, didn't look at me, kept patting and smoothing the ground over the buried cigarette, absently contemplating her fingers' fire-prevention activities.
I had a feeling she was going to say it — it was hard for her, but she would say it — and perhaps that's why I didn't want to interrupt, for this was about her and me, the two of us.
But in the present situation, which was very demeaning for her, she went on, she might have been very difficult and she might torment me and say ugly and stupid things to me, but she was really grateful to me, because just by being there I kept her from doing something that could turn into a tragedy — or a farce.
She fell silent again, still unable to say it.
Then she looked at me.
I'm an old woman, she said.
Her statement, her look, the slight quiver of her voice had not the slightest trace of self-pity and self-indulgence, not even as much as might seem natural and understandable; she looked at me so openly with her beautiful brown eyes that the physical image of her face blotted out the meaning of her sentence.
The inner strength she mustered to utter that sentence, the strength she hurled into my eyes, now did something to her: she was no longer a woman, or old, or beautiful, or anything, but a single human being struggling with the heroic task of self-definition in a universe still enthralling in its infinite possibilities — and that was beautiful.
She certainly could not have done it inside a room; there all this would have turned into sentimental soul-searching or lovemaking; between four walls I would have found her statement comical, too true or too false, either way it was the same, and would have protested vehemently or made light of it; but here, with nothing to echo these meaningful sounds, they left her mouth, came up against my face, I took some into myself, and the rest dissipated, vanished into the landscape, found their proper, final place.
And in that moment I realized that the source of her beauty was always her raw anguish; I had met a human being who did not want to eliminate her own suffering or exploit it either, but simply wanted to retain her capacity for pain, and that was the quality that might explain my attraction to her: she wasn't interested in enlisting sympathy, which was why she objected so strenuously to living-the-part or getting-lost-in-the-part method acting; she had nothing to conceal, since what she showed of herself was something she extracted from me — something I always tried to keep hidden.
And in exchange I was giving her my own pain, so similar to hers and forever obscured by clouds of self-pity and self-deception.
It wasn't her age that made her old, she added quickly, as if wanting to destroy any illusion that her self-pity was meant to elicit my sympathy, or her own; no, counting only her years she could still consider herself young, it was her soul that was old, but that was silly, too, she didn't have a soul, she said, she didn't know what it was, then, something in her or about her.
It was strange that lately she had to play all these lovesick women, vamps and all sorts of seductive females, and she was always good at it, but when she had to fall into the arms of strange men and kiss strange mouths, she found she wasn't there anymore, it was as if someone else were doing it for her, someone else was playing at being in love.
Love and desire in her — and she begged my pardon if she was about to say something stupid — became something no longer directed at another living human being but at everyone, anyone, yes, silly as it may sound, aimed at anything and everything that was humanly impossible to reach, and she was no longer interested in reaching, but feeling this way made her very pitiful in her own eyes.
If she really didn't want to reach it, she wouldn't be able to act, I said quietly, and since she did want to act, she had to reach what she no longer wanted.
Her eyelashes quivered hesitantly; she either didn't understand what I said or didn't want to; she chose to ignore it.
She said she'd be lying if she claimed this was the first fiasco of her life, it wasn't, not by a long shot, she was never beautiful enough or ingratiating enough to rise above a constant state of failure, she got used to it.