Virtue, Lawrence wrote, watching the Pueblo Indians dancing, lies in the heroic response to the creative wonder.
She marks the page with her napkin, takes a sip of tea and pulls a face. She is in the breakfast room of the hotel in Albuquerque where she’s been for the last week, making phone calls, and where the crew will rendezvous. Quaid should have been here the night before but his plane was delayed. She consults her watch and then opens the Lawrence again. In woman it is the putting forth of all herself in a delicate, marvellous sensitiveness … She marks the passage with another napkin. The volume now contains more napkins than pages.
He sees her before she sees him. She is wearing a red, cable-knit, off-the-shoulder sweater. A garment he loves, though he didn’t know he loved it till he sees her wearing it. He would like to go straight over and tell her she has beautiful Grecian shoulders, but it’s a little early in the piece for that. And, anyway, she probably knows.
It’s a kerpow moment for her once again. She hasn’t seen him since their first encounter or spoken to him on the phone more than a handful of times after he hung up his objectionable No Trespassing notice, but he still makes her throat tighten. She’s forgotten nothing about him, except the degree to which everything she remembered doesn’t quite measure up, doesn’t quite do justice to his queer galvanic quality, as though a bolt of fire had raced through him, charring his skin and making the hairs on his head bristle like singed serpents. She imagines that men who’d been to war returned looking like this, allowing that he also looked as though he’d never so much as crossed a road at rush hour.
What can explain it? Her mother is an old woman and doesn’t hear well but she has a theory. ‘The bolt of fire has run through you, my dear,’ she’d say were she here. ‘I felt the same about your father, the lice-bearer. Some men just know how to get a woman to invent them. I’d be very careful if I were you and wash regularly.’
He, on the other hand, has allowed his first impression of her to dull. He is an out-of-sight, out-of-mind kind of man and doesn’t only forget but actually goes off people when he doesn’t see them. In the weeks since she called on him with her modest proposal he has blurred her, made her less of a distraction to his thoughts, flattened her shape, dimmed the challenging Atlantic grey of her eyes, lengthened her skirts, suppressed all memory of that look of hectic alarm that could break out at any moment and make him worry he’d done or said something amiss, and then make him want to be the person who could clear it.
Is his forgetfulness a function of his inability to be faithful in his head to more than one woman at a time? He doesn’t know. But ask him to describe his wife this minute and he won’t be able to.
He has read that there is an inexplicable electrical murmur in the vicinity of Taos, said by some to be caused by extraterrestrial visitations and by others to be what’s left of the psychic vibrations bequeathed by the distinguished mind-benders – Carl Jung was one – who flocked here in the 1920s looking for enlightenment. But Albuquerque is more than a hundred miles from Taos. So could the ringing in his ears be the sound of deckchairs being rearranged again on the sinking deck of his decency?
‘Good to see you, Lily,’ he says, taking her elbows and kissing her, but scrupulously, in the way you do when meeting a remote relative off a plane.
She leans, she fears, just a little too far forward to receive his kiss. ‘Good to see you, Sam.’
They stand for half a minute letting their words of conventional greeting dissolve, pleased with what they see. It is a wonderful thing to like the look of someone with whom you are about to spend time. They are still smiling when they sit. She orders him boiled egg and soldiers.
The waitress doesn’t understand why that makes the air between them hiss.
The crew, too, have been held up, which means they have time on their hands. They agree to go shopping in town. He is excited by the prospect. He hasn’t shopped with a woman in years.
She needs new sunglasses. ‘You?’ she asks.
He shakes his head.
She sits back in her chair to take a look at him. ‘What are you intending to wear for the shoot?’
They should have had this conversation before but his moodiness has made her wary.
‘This,’ he says. He is wearing a heavy brown leather backwoodsman jacket over jeans. ‘I’m told it gets cold in New Mexico.’
‘In winter.’
‘Ah – so what are we in?’
‘Summer.’
‘What would you say I need then? Shorts?’
‘Not for pieces to camera. Unless you have amazing legs.’
‘I have amazing legs.’
‘What else do you have?’
‘Amazing arms.’
‘To wear.’
‘Other than this and a few t-shirts, a velvet smoking jacket.’
‘Then let’s get you something.’
So they go looking for an outfit appropriate to doing pieces to camera in a pueblo and find an oatmeal linen travel-writer’s suit from a shop which, to their amusement, is called Lawrence’s Wearhouse. But he also wants shorts, for the hell of buying them with her, and tries on a baggy pair in khaki.
‘What say you to these?’ he asks. ‘Do you think they make me look like D. H. Lawrence?’
It is, he thinks, a seminal moment. If this were his wife shopping for shorts with another man he’d – well, right at this moment he wouldn’t give a damn.
‘No,’ she says. ‘In the only photographs I’ve seen of Lawrence in Taos he is wearing a black undertaker’s suit.’
But the shop assistant likes them. ‘Your husband looks good in those,’ she says as he changes back into his winter wardrobe. Lily flushes and hopes he hasn’t heard. ‘He isn’t my husband,’ she says, rather definitely, as though it matters what an assistant in a gents’ outfitters in Albuquerque thinks.
Could he have heard? Will he be angry if he has?
They no sooner leave the shop than she has to dash back in. He assumes she’s left something on the counter but he’s wrong. ‘For you,’ she says, handing him a paper carrier. It contains a plaited leather belt with a snake buckle. Made by local Indians. ‘To go with your new suit.’
As they navigate the unfamiliar city he is protective of her, laying a steadying hand on her back as they cross the road. By the time they return to the hotel their fingers are touching.
He is first down for dinner. He wants to see her arrive.
He thought of turning up in his new shorts but decides against putting a joke before whatever the word is for what they’re doing. Better, tonight at least, to be a symbolist poet, without the floppy bow. He wishes he hadn’t given up cigarettes. He would like to see her through plumes of smoke. In the event, his eyes steam up of their own accord when she arrives in a wrap-around floral dress of such fine material he could whistle it off her. He stands to kiss her, using his height, but again they kiss chastely.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
‘What for?’
‘I seem to be over-kissing you.’
‘Two in one day is hardly excessive. Especially on my birthday.’
‘It’s your birthday! You look too young to have a birthday.’ And this time he kisses her on the lips.
‘I’ve been wondering,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘What you taste like.’
‘And?’
‘Now I know.’
‘No, you don’t. Now you only know what my lipstick tastes like.’
They have the regulation pre-affair ground-rules conversation while pretending to be talking about something else. She was brought up virtually without a father. In a manner of speaking, so was he. Mine wasn’t in a manner of speaking, she says. Sorry, he says. They both had overprotective mothers. She read psychology at university. He read English. University was the best time of both their lives. Her first job was as an editor on a men’s magazine. No, not that sort of magazine. She means a blokes’ magazine. Cars. She got into television accidentally, through someone she edited on the magazine who wanted her to edit him forever. He looks hard at her. Did they …? No, no they didn’t. He directed his first play as a student and was given an internship at the National. He was writing full-time by the age of twenty-five. She has never had or wanted children and is now too old to change her mind. You can’t be that old? I can. And if she weren’t too old? Still no. He the same. Does that make them selfish? No. Quite the contrary. They don’t seek their perpetuation in mirror images of themselves. They don’t mind dying out. Though maybe I will when the time comes, he laughs. She doesn’t think she will, so long as the life she’s led gets close to what she’s wanted of it. Which is? Activity. Interest. Company. Talk. Love? Yes, but love as defined by activity, interest, company, talk. You? Yes, to all those. Such concurrence! He has, though, by the by, two stepdaughters, one sired on his wife by a tree-hugging hippie before he met her, another by a concrete poet, ditto. Where are they now? The fathers? No, the daughters. He shrugs. At university … he thinks. Her? If she is not the mothering type is she the marrying type? No. But living with someone, he imagines. Yes. In what she supposes could be called a fairly stable relationship. Only fairly? Well probably unfairly – to him. Because? Oh, time. Not that they – this after a decent pause – are open-relationship people. They don’t discuss what would be too upsetting to discuss. She has never been in love. He neither, which is a lie. But he doesn’t want to devalue this moment by alluding to others like it. Not that … They are both straight. She is not experimental. He is, within the confines of straight, but says he isn’t.
Does she invite him to her room or does he invite himself?
Neither is entirely certain. But she asks him to give her thirty minutes. To show he understands women he gives her a full hour. Time enough to call his wife, but he doesn’t.
She opens the door to him wearing a white silk kimono which parts and comes together again with a sound like breathing, filling his famed nostrils with her perfume.
This will be the smell of the second half of my life, he thinks.
He is astonished by himself. Has he decided?
His olfactory organ has.
She is surprised by how lightly he holds her and how bristly he isn’t. She imagined him spikey like his character, his arms and chest covered in coarse black hair, but under his shirt he is fair and feathery.
He relaxes quickly under her touch. She owned a bendy doll when she was a little girl, Captain Twisty, whose arms she could knot behind his back. She feels she could easily do the same with Quaid’s.
Funny, she now thinks she wants to call him Quaid.
He is hamstrung by his education. He slides his hands under the silk of her kimono but can’t tell her she has beautiful breasts. ‘No, you don’t,’ Miss Gore warns him. ‘Mmm!’ he says instead. The sound takes him back more than forty years to the first breasts he ever saw and thought Mmm about. He lowers his head and suckles.
Strange creatures, men.
‘Mmm,’ she says.
Once a man has suckled a woman’s breast can he ever again be a man in her eyes?
Or in his own?
As though to reassert some sort of authority, if only of appraisal, he takes a half-step back to look at her. She turns her head away in shyness.
Voluptuous is not a word he likes to use. It is not a writer’s word, unless what you write is soft porn. But how else is he to describe – to himself – the unexpected fullness of her, the plenitude, the easeful fleshliness which is somehow – miraculously – compatible with her being slender and even slight?
But why does he need to find a word at all? Why, if she is marvellous, can’t he just marvel?
Because he is a writer and a writer is not fully alive to himself until he has found the language that tells him he is.
She isn’t sure who initiates the kiss. The kiss proper. Neither of them has good teeth so they are both careful to keep their mouths a secret in conversation. And not to laugh with abandon. Behind his lips she imagines a harsh and fiery tongue. There’s a joke. Behind hers he imagines a small, warm cavity like a chinchilla’s nest. In the event they are both wide of the mark. His mouth is soft and yielding. Hers is scented and capacious.
‘Hot tongue,’ she says, pulling away to catch her breath.
‘Cool mouth,’ he answers. ‘I feel I have been swimming in a temple pool in Andalucia.’
Who’d have thought so austere a speaker would be so flowery a lover? ‘Not drowning, I hope.’
Drowning? Not any more. ‘Floating,’ he says.
They laugh nervously, unamused. Their eyes daren’t meet. He thinks hers could blow up in his face, like his stepdaughters’ firework.
She opens the minibar, asking him what he wants, her robe flying open.
‘Everything I have ever desired is here,’ he says.
‘In the minibar?’
They laugh again, but now their eyes do meet. What has he just said? Everything he has ever desired!
‘Don’t,’ she says.
He is afraid he has gone too far too soon. Yes, it’s months since he first set eyes on her, but this is Day One of the Creation of the World and you don’t show your heart on Day One unless you want it to be broken before you even make it to Day Two. But it’s her heart she’s protecting. She says ‘don’t’ because she knows the risk to herself of thinking ‘do’.
But now he’s started he can’t stop. Is this what his linguistic reserve has all along been about? Has he been holding back a tide which, once allowed the slightest ingress, will come flooding in?
‘Greedy boy,’ a woman twice his age had called him once. Abashed, he’d turned away, put his hands in his pockets and left with nothing. Such are the errors of youth. Let Lily call him a greedy boy and he will devour her in her own sanctum in a single bite. Desire can make a hungry man religious. Lawrence’s acolytes called him a Priest of Love. Quaid is too much the ironist to see himself like that but he doesn’t find it absurd to think of Lily as a Priestess of Love and he her votary. Her perfume is myrrh and spices, cedar and sandalwood, swung in a silver thurible. Her fluttering robe invites prostration. ‘I wonder,’ he asks, peering once more into the minibar, ‘if they have sacramental wine in here.’
She kisses him again. She thinks of saying all the sacramental wine you will ever need is on these lips, but she guesses – correctly – that her action requires no explication. Without any fuss, they have entered the hushed Vale of What Doesn’t Need To Be Said. He drinks so deep of her she fears she will faint.