Nothing happened that night because dear old Dolfie was at home (and Ruth was nowhere to be found) so, thinking of ravishing his wife while he snored next to her, I went solo again. Twice.
The next night I was just getting ready to call Klara when the phone rang. It was the old man, who never called me because he never knew what to say and didn’t understand cellphones. The amount of times he’d visited me (with Ma) could be counted on a butcher’s hand – Johannesburg’s traffic terrified him – but now he was calling me because he had some bad news for me.
“What is it, Dad?”
“Your Aunt Esther has died,” he said, matter-of-factly.
“You must go to the funeral,” I said, equally.
“No,” he said instinctively.
“Dad, you have to go. I will book a flight immediately and I will take you to the airport and I don’t want to hear any arguments about it.”
There was a slight pause on the other side of the line and, once again, I thought he might explode, but he thanked me, as subdued as a chastened child. I immediately called Karla after that and asked her whether I could come over. Okay, she said, but only if you behave yourself. Of course I’m going to behave myself, I said, and put the phone down, shakily.
She let me in as if were a brother and we went through all the idle chatter of family members as Verdi barked at me incessantly and she finally locked it out and asked whether I would like something to drink. I followed her into the kitchen, where she told me about how depressed Dolfie had been.
“Why?” I said, leaning against a low cupboard, half blind and faint with desire.
“He’s not used to sitting for so long in a car. His back is killing him.”
“How old is he?”
“Sixty,” she said, wearily.
He’s impotent, I thought, socially castrated, but then he’s probably been smoking, drinking and eating so much meat it’s no wonder he looks seventy.
“Ja, it must be hard,” I said, hard myself, wishing Dolf would die of a heart attack or in a car crash. Actually, no, I wanted him to carry on doing exactly what he was doing: going away often so that I could come and remind myself what it felt like to be a man in the most primal sense again. Beyond that I couldn’t quite think right now.
“And you?” she said, taking a beer from the fridge.
“What about me?”
“How old are you?”
“I’m forty-two,” I said as she held the beer out to me and I put my hand on her breast.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m fondling your breast,” I said, not sure whether she was going hit me with the bottle or not.
“You can’t do that,” she said.
“I know,” I replied, taking my hand down to her middle and slipping it inside her blouse. “But I am.”
“Len, this must stop.”
“I know,” I said again, taking my hand up to her sagging breast and realising that she wasn’t wearing a bra and just had a light vest on under her blouse, wondering whether that was a coincidence or not.
“Len, stop it.”
Now I had that full warm orb in my hand and could feel her responding.
“This is wrong.”
“Then step away,” I said, but she didn’t.
I slipped my other arm around her waist and pulled her towards me, pelvis first.
“You must go,” she said.
“All right, but then I want a decent kiss this time.”
“Okay. Then you go.”
“Right,” I said, feeling as if I was about to explode.
So she tried to brush my lips with hers but I wasn’t going to have any of that and kissed her full on the mouth, cheeks and neck, moving my left hand down and gripping her flattish buttocks.
“Get out of here,” she finally half shouted, even though it wasn’t very convincing.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll behave myself. Let’s go and sit down and have a drink.”
“That’s better,” she said and adjusted herself as we went back to the living room.
“Put the lights down,” I commanded.
“The cheek of it,” she said, but did as told.
“Can I put something on?” I said.
“Yes.”
I put on that churchy second movement of the twelfth, starting with a low, dark note that has to concede it can’t stay that way and starts moving. It felt like another Sunday in my youth, but at least the conversation here was more interesting. She was waiting for me to sit on the couch before she lowered herself onto a single chair opposite me.
“Come and sit next to me,” I said.
“No.”
Okay, I told myself, I would have to regroup: “So tell me about yourself.”
“There isn’t much to tell,” she said.
“I’m sure there is. How did you meet Dolf, for example.”
She had come from Windhoek and he had come from the old Northern Transvaal and they had met at a party, an opskop, at the teacher’s training college in Pretoria, where he was studying. She had been studying bookkeeping at the technical college. He had still had all his hair then, but the moustache was there already, had always been and, though they had been very different, they had instantly clicked.
“There’s no end to life’s riches,” I said.
He loved his rugby, his braaiing and his beer and did she replace those I drank, I wondered.
“Of course,” she said. “I might be stupid but I’m not that stupid.”
I could just see him getting himself into a suspicious froth about a missing beer and not believing that she had suddenly felt like drinking one of his precious bloody ales. But what were her interests beyond opera, I wondered.
“Not much, really. I’m quite involved with the church, helping the aged.”
And how come Dolfie had been retrenched as a teacher, I asked.
No, there’d been an incident.
“What kind of incident?”
Dolf had actually refused to teach black children.
“Why?”
“Because his brother had been killed by a kaffir.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say that that was ridiculous, but then I told myself that that was not why I was here. Why was I here? Because I was in lust.
“How?” I managed to squeeze out.
“In a car accident.”
It was getting more and more absurd, but then one forgot that there were still old-school idiots around and that when blacks said racism was still alive and well, Dolf and his dear wife were living proof of it.
“I’m sorry,” I lied, bored brainless for more than one reason.
“It’s all right,” she said, getting up.
“Where’re you going?”
“Somewhere.”
She went to the toilet and I sat drinking my beer, realising I also needed to go and fantasised about barging in while she was on the seat, but told myself to think of something else. How was Jay, for example. It seemed like he’d recovered from the enigma of depression, which Kay had called the black dog. Speaking of dogs, Butch. Eternal optimist. The old man. How he would disapprove of what I was doing. His sister, Aunt Esther, had faithfully sent me a birthday present from her African store in Eshowe, year after year. Now she was dead, gone.
The toilet flushed and I got up and walked in that direction, hoping for a bit of frottage with Klara.
“Where are you going?” she said, meeting me in the narrow doorway.
“Somewhere,” I said, putting my hand on her clavicle.
“Are you starting again,” she said, mock angry.
“I’m sorry. I can’t help it. Kiss?”
So she gave me a peck and told me to go and do my business, which took quite a while because I was so aroused that I had to sit and fold myself double on the seat to get anything out.
She wasn’t sitting on her chair anymore but on the far end of the couch.
“So tell me about yourself,” she said.
“Well, I’m completely turned on by you,” I said.
“You hardly ever noticed me in the park.”
“I did, but I was married until recently.”
“What happened?”
So I told her about how Shun and I had lived our lie and that I’d been at least fifty per cent to blame, which impressed her. She said she could understand why I might have been half the problem, but at least I had the balls to admit it, which of course got me all aroused again.
“Must be because you’re a liberal,” she said.
“I am not a liberal. I mean, if Frank Zappa could call himself a pragmatic conservative then that’s what I am too.”
“Who the hell is Frank Zappa?”
“He’s a musical genius and you’re a sexual goddess.”
“You talk such nonsense,” she said.
“Come here.”
And lo and behold, she snuggled up under my left arm, enjoying my warmth, saying Dolfie had become so cold towards her.
“That’s probably because he feels threatened, isolated, castrated.”
“I know. I feel so sorry for him.”
“You’re not a neo-Nazi or something, are you?”
“Would it be a problem if I was?”
“Right now? No.”
“Actually, I’m just a German Boer from South West Africa.”
“Namibia.”
“Whatever.”
“And you are absolutely desirable,” I said, meaning it and stroking her neck with my hand.
“You’re lying.”
“Take off your clothes and see if I’m lying,” I said, barely able to force out such a long – not to mention outrageous – sentence coherently.
“You must be joking,” she said as I started kissing her neck and taking my hand down to her stomach, under her blouse and vest and up towards her breast again.
“Do it,” I said, as Verdi barked at someone passing in the street.
“The cheek,” she said, getting up and doing exactly as I’d commanded, the movement ending on its ultra-quiet note, as provided by the Alban Berg Quartet. It was time for the comedy of the third movement and hacking of the fourth to begin, holding out for that clear, emphatic ending.