“Hello,” he said, in a gentle, reproachful voice.
She said, looking at his eyes, her expression bewildered and yet on the verge of recognition, “I’m so sorry. I must have the wrong—” and then she let go of her suitcase and said, “Gott behüte!” The suitcase hit the floor with a thud and bumped the side of her leg.
Beard said, “Inger,” and he didn’t think so much as feel, with an odd little sense of gratification, that she wasn’t very pretty. There was a timeless, silent moment in which they stared at each other and his feelings collected. The moment gave Beard a chance to see Inger exactly as she was: a slender, pale girl with pensive gray eyes whose posture was exceptionally straight. She made an impression of neatness, correctness, and youth. In this access of plain reality, he felt no anger and no concern for the earrings. As he could now see, they would look absurd on the colorless Inger. He felt only that his heart was breaking, and there was nothing he could do about it.
With a slow, uncertain smile, Inger said, “How are you?”
Beard picked up her suitcase. “You always travel first class?”
“Not always.”
“It depends on the gentleman who answers the door.”
“I’m very pretty,” she said, her tone sweet and tentative and faintly self-mocking.
“Also lucky.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m sure of it.”
He put her suitcase onto the seat strewn with magazines. Then he took her hand, drew her toward him, and slid the door shut behind her. She said, “Please. Do give me a moment,” but she didn’t resist when he pressed her to the floor, his knee between her thighs. Her gray eyes were noncommittal and vast as the world. Beard raised up on his knees to undo his trousers and then he removed Inger’s sandals. He kissed her feet and proceeded to lick her legs and slide her skirt to her hips. Then he hooked the crotch of her underpants with an index finger and drew them to the side and he licked her until she seized his hair with her fists and pulled him up, needing him inside as much as he needed her. He whispered, “I love you,” his mouth against her neck, and he shut his eyes in a trance of pleasure and thrust into her, in her clothes, as the train pressed steadily into a mute and darkening countryside.
Tell Me Everything
CLAUDE RUE had a wide face with yellowish green eyes and a long aristocratic nose. The mouth was a line, pointed in the center, lifted slightly at the ends, curving in a faint smile, almost cruelly sensual. He dragged his right foot like a stone, and used a cane, digging it into the floor as he walked. His dark blue suit, cut in the French style, armholes up near the neck, made him look small in the shoulder, and made his head look too big. I liked nothing about the man that I could see.
“What a face,” I whispered to Margaret. “Who would take anything he says seriously?”
She said, “Who wouldn’t? Gorgeous. Just gorgeous. And the way he dresses. Such style.”
After that, I didn’t say much. I hadn’t really wanted to go to the lecture in the first place.
Every seat in the auditorium was taken long before Rue appeared onstage. People must have come in from San Francisco, Oakland, Marin, and beyond. There were even sad creatures from the Berkeley streets, some loonies among them, in filthy clothes, open sores on their faces like badges. I supposed few in the audience knew that Claude Rue was a professor of Chinese history who taught at the Sorbonne, but everyone knew he’d written The Mists of Shanghai, a thousand-page, best-selling novel.
Onstage, Rue looked lonely and baffled. Did all these people actually care to hear his lecture on the loss of classical Chinese? He glanced about, as if there had been a mistake and he was searching for his replacement, the star of the show, the real Claude Rue. I approved of his modesty, and I might have enjoyed listening to him. But then, as if seized by an irrational impulse, Rue lifted the pages of his lecture for all to witness, and ripped them in half. “I will speak from my heart,” he said.
The crowd gasped. I groaned. Margaret leaned toward him, straining, as if to pick up his odor. She squeezed my hand and checked my eyes to see whether I understood her feelings. She needed a reference point, a consciousness aside from her own to slow the rush of her being toward Rue.
“You’re terrible,” I said.
“Don’t spoil my fantasy. Be quiet, O.K.?”
She then flattened her thigh against mine, holding me there while she joined him in her feelings, onstage, fifty feet away. Rue began his speech without pages or notes. The crowd grew still. Many who couldn’t find seats stood in the aisles, some with bowed heads, staring at the floor as if they’d been beaten on the shoulders into penitential silence. For me it was also penitential. I work nights. I didn’t like wasting a free evening in a crowded lecture hall when I could have been alone with Margaret.
I showed up at her loft an hour before the lecture. She said to her face in the bathroom mirror, “I can hardly wait to see the man. How do I look?”
“Chinese.” I put the lid down on the toilet seat, sat on it.
“Answer me. Do I look all right, Herman?”
“You know what the ancient Greeks said about perfume?”
“I’m about to find out.”
“To smell sweet is to stink.”
“I use very little perfume. There’s a reception afterward, a party. It’s in honor of the novel. A thousand pages and I could have kept reading it for another week. I didn’t want it to end. I’ll tell you the story later.”
“Maybe I’ll read it, too,” I said, trying not to sound the way I felt. “But why must you see what the man looks like? I couldn’t care less.”
“You won’t go with me?” She turned from the mirror, as if, at last, I’d provoked her into full attention.
“I’m not saying I won’t.”
“What are you saying?”
“Nothing. I asked a question, that’s all. It isn’t important. Forget it.”
“Don’t slither. You have another plan for the evening? You’d rather go somewhere else?”
“I have no other plan. I’m asking why should anyone care what an author looks like.”
“I’m interested. I have been for months.”
“Why?”
“Why not? He made me feel something. His book was an experience. Everybody wants to see him. Besides, my sister met him in Beijing. She knows him. Didn’t I read you her letter?”
“I still don’t see why …”
“Herman, what do you want me to say? I’m interested, I’m curious. I’m going to his lecture. If you don’t want to go, don’t go.”
That is, leave the bathroom. Shut the door. Get out of sight.
Margaret can be too abrupt, too decisive. It’s her business style carried into personal life. She buys buildings, has them fixed up, then rents or sells, and buys again. She has supported herself this way since her divorce from Sloan Pierson, professor of linguistics. He told her about Claude Rue’s lecture, invited her to the reception, and put my name on the guest list. Their divorce, compared to some, wasn’t bad. No lingering bitterness. They have remained connected — not quite friends — through small courtesies, like the invitation; also, of course, through their daughter, Gracie, ten years old. She lives with Sloan except when Margaret wants her, which is often. Margaret’s business doesn’t allow a strict schedule. She appears at Sloan’s door without notice. “I need her,” she says. Gracie scampers to her room, collects schoolbooks for the next day, and packs a duffel bag with clothes and woolly animals.