The girl was breathing faster. He slipped his hand inside her briefs and cupped the wiry mound of her pubis with the heel of his hand, arching his wrist to loosen the waistband of her jeans. Carefully he moved to part the seam of her, hot against the cool of his fingers. He wanted to speak. He wanted to whisper something that would break the awful fumbling quick-breathed silence that was filling the room, the mousy rustle of his hand.
Stanley found himself watching the scene from the position of a camera, and he began caring too deeply about what he might look like from above, or from the side—he tried to be sleeker, to thrash less, to push the hair gently off the girl’s face and let his fingers trail around her jawbone and touch the soft furry pouch of her earlobe, like he had seen done in the cinema so many times. It didn’t seem to be working.
“My arm’s dead, sorry,” the girl whispered apologetically, and wiggled it free.
“Shit,” Stanley said.
“What’s wrong?” the girl said in surprise, drawing the duvet up around her and tucking it carefully under her arms as she withdrew.
“I don’t—”
“You don’t know what to do?”
“No,” Stanley said, a little too savagely. “No, I know what to do.”
“It doesn’t matter,” the girl said, pushing his hair off his face with the rough heel of her hand. The action was coarse and tender at the same time, and Stanley was humbled, feeling her easily achieve the truth of the action when he had found it so difficult. “Just give me a cuddle. Come here.”
He crept across the bed and she opened up the duvet to let him in. They lay there for a while, Stanley’s heart thumping, the girl’s hands moving up and down the curve of his shoulder blade and into the thin hair at the nape of his neck.
“I didn’t think it would be like this,” Stanley said, without thinking.
The girl raised herself up on an elbow and said, “What?”
Stanley realized he had sounded rude, and said hastily, “I mean me. I didn’t think I would be like this.”
That sounded even worse, and he seethed for a moment in frustration and self-contempt. What he had meant to say was that all the films and television programs he had ever seen that might have schooled him for this moment had placed him in the position of the outsider, the snug and confident voyeur who is able to imagine himself in place of the hero but is never physically required to act. Now he felt utterly unscripted, marooned, desperate for the girl to act first so that he would only have to follow and the burden of decision would not fall to him.
“It’s your first time,” the girl said, and a note in her voice changed, becoming softer, even maternal. She gathered him up closer to her and he burrowed in. “Silly old duffer,” she said, and rubbed the top of his head with her knuckles. “You’ll be all right.”
They lay there for a while, listening as the ice-cream truck pulled into the street and sounded its theme tune for the children to hear. The truck whined away down the road, and it was quiet again.
“That was it,” Stanley said, looking up for the first time, into the lights.
“That was what, Stanley?” the girl said, rolling over and touching him lightly on the lower curve of his back with her fingertips. “That was what?”
“That was the most intimate scene of my life,” Stanley said. “Right then. That was it.”
“Cue Mr. Saladin!” one of the students shouted. “King of Spades! Where the hell are you, Connor?”
There was a commotion in the wings, unseen, and then the King of Spades appeared, red faced and trotting, ejected so swiftly from the parted cloth it was as if he had been physically launched.
“Sorry,” he called out wildly in the direction of the pit. He cast about to find his mark on the floor, two pieces of tape crossed in a pale X like a cartoon Band-Aid.
“Get your bloody game on,” someone shouted.
They watched with contempt and satisfaction as the King of Spades found his mark, drew himself up and took a breath. The stiff waxy breastplate of his costume had come untied on one shoulder and so hung at an odd angle across his chest. He had forgotten his gloves and his sword, but it was too late now.
The onstage students sighed and retraced their steps to give the boy his cue again. They said, “But look at it from another point of view. She lost her virginity, and in good time, before it began to cling unfashionably like a visible night-rag. She snared an older man. She achieved celebrity. And now she has a secret which everyone craves to know: a sexual secret, the best kind of secret, a vortex of a secret that tugs and tugs away at her edges so she’s never quite there. Oh, don’t pity Victoria. Pity poor lonely Mr. Saladin, who has tasted the bright ripe fruit of youth and purity, and now nothing else will do.”
There was a kettle-drum clash from the orchestra pit, on the beat. Its effect on the King of Spades was dramatic. He crumpled, as if he had been clubbed between the shoulder blades, and all in an instant he became crippled and fragile and old. As he began to speak and the lesser characters reformed like children around his knees, one of the boys in the stalls leaned over to whisper, “He’s still playing it for laughs. It won’t work if he plays it for laughs.”
The King of Spades said, “There was something so very endearing about it, right back in the beginning. The way she played it, out of a textbook, big moon eyes and an open collar, and her skirt hitched up to show her knee. It was so touchingly amateur. It was like a child’s painting, imperfect and discordant and poorly executed and crying out to be celebrated, to be pinned to the wall or the fridge, to be complimented and fawned over and adored.”
He trailed his foot and looked down at the floor and smiled secretly to himself, as if he was remembering something infinitely private. The band in the orchestra pit had struck up a jazzy pulse, drums and double-bass and the throaty murmur of a tenor saxophone.
He said, “In ten years’ time she will be able to look at a man in cold blood and think, We are compatible. She will think, given your generosity of spirit, given your ability to provide me with the emotional shelter I need, given your particular wry and self-deprecating sense of humor, your interest in silent film, given the things you like to cook, and your tendency toward pedantry, and the things you do to pass the time—given all of this, I can conclude that we’re compatible. Over the course of her life she will gradually compile this dreary list of requisites. Year by year she will reduce the yawning gulf of her desire to the smallness of a job vacancy: a janitor, or a sentry, or a drone. The ad will say, Wanted. That’s all.”
The King of Spades shrugged.
“But with me she didn’t have a formula,” he said. “She didn’t know her appetites, didn’t recognize the jumping pulse that leaped and leaped in the scarlet recess of her throat. Every time we touched she was finding out something new—not about me, but about herself, her tides and tolls, her responses, the upturned vase of emptiness she carried around inside her always, like something unfinished or unmade.”