Slow Hand (5 page)

She stubbed out her cigarette with a sudden urgency, as if she had been waiting for a signal and now, having received it, could get on. Putting her glasses back, she smiled, but so slightly it was hardly there.

“Do you have to be somewhere?”

With you,
I thought.

“No, not really.”

“Then why don’t we go back to my flat and have a drink? I live just around the corner. It’s too depressing sitting here. Why don’t we turn our back on this melodrama? Refuse to allow it any power.”

She gathered her black leather bag from the table and stood, inviting me to join her.

“My name is Diane.”

We crossed the road at the traffic lights in front of the cafe, and she led me to a street directly opposite the station. If we had turned to look in the other direction, we would still have been able to see the entrance to the underground. But neither of us did.

The flat was as well-manicured as her fingernails. She made me a drink.

“So you find death exciting?” she said, handing me a large Scotch.

“I suppose so.”

“And does going home with a strange woman excite you, too?”

“Yes, that also excites me.”

She smiled.

“Death has a way of sharpening our desires. It makes us want to eat good food or listen to a sublime piece of music. Or make love. To lie in someone’s arms and feel warm flesh respond to our touch. Death is very sensual, don’t you think? The dead have a secret we can’t grasp. The secrecy of sex is as near as the living can ever get to it.”

Did I say she was beautiful? Apart from all those other things, she was beautiful. Her face was a carved frame for the long, green eyes that looked and looked. Her body was beginning to show its age, loosened a little, but full, ripe, and round. I haven’t ever rejected the idea of women as lovers, but the event had never occurred.

She undressed me slowly, looking carefully at my body and then checking back with my face. Whatever she saw in it seemed to give her permission not to hurry. When she had finished her slow examination she took off her own clothes, just as leisurely, giving me as much time for taking her in as she had given herself. Then she took me in her arms with as much passion as Dan would show, but it was different. Not his fast, harsh, funny fuck, but a long, slow pleasuring, a drawing out of desire. It was a lesson in timelessness. By the time she led me to the bed she had woven a veil around us with her intricate caresses that seemed to exclude the light. She made the world contract to a capsule containing only the two of us on the white expanse of her bed. And I knew that that was what we were there for: to create that veil that confused time and light.

All the time, the green eyes watched with the same humor and detachment I’d seen at the cafe. But I didn’t mind. It exhilarated me that she was in control, building my excitement with careful touches and stroking, checking my response as she increased or decreased the pressure of her elegant fingers and
beautiful mouth. Then she took my hand and guided me toward her pleasure. And all of it was more than sensual delight, it was also a promise that she could respond to my cri. That she could give me the energy and certainty that I couldn’t find for myself. Everything she did corresponded to that person in my head who seemed too weary now to help.

I lay naked in her arms, waiting. There was no urgency. I drifted in and out of sleep listening to the buzz of traffic in the distance, content with the memory of the tone of her voice and the touch of her hands. I knew nothing about her beyond her name and the style in which she lived. But that, along with her capacity to guide me through desire, was enough information, and I had no real curiosity then about her past. Now that I was sated, it was my solved future that interested me. She would, I knew, encourage and insist I work, understand my necessity, wrap my insecurities in a blanket of her strength. At that moment I thought I had everything. Found, at last, the solution to the panic that threatened to swamp me. I remember the quality of that moment, even now. It was, I think, the first and only time I really felt that everything was going to be all right.

“So you write?”

Her voice was languid and deep, the scent of sex seeped into her low murmur.

“What do you write?”

I lay pillowed in the angle between her arm and breast, smelling the sharp mix of expensive perfume and satisfied desire.

“Stories, articles,” I told her, whispering. “I think soon a novel.”

I held my breath at the power of the moment, those seconds before one’s life comes right.

“You must show them to me,” she said and stroked my hair gently. “I’m sure they must be very good.”

And the moment was gone.

I sat up and looked about the room. The afternoon sun poured in through the long windows, washing the beige tones of the furnishings with a warm pink. But I was cold. I wondered for a second if they had brought the stretcher up.

“You met me two hours ago, you can’t possibly know whether I can write or not.”

I was as confused by my chilly reply as I suppose she was. She sat up beside me and rubbed the side of her face against my hair.

“Well, then, you must show me, so I can judge. I’d like to see the story you’re working on at the moment. The one you’re having trouble with. We’ll have dinner tonight, and you can bring it.”

I swung my legs out of the bed and stood up.

“I don’t show unfinished work. Unfinished work is nothing.”

“Then perhaps something you’ve completed. Bring that so I can see what you do.”

She lay back in bed, and I began to dress. Everything, suddenly, had slipped from my grasp, and I watched as reality wrenched at my fantasy of reassurance and tore it to shreds.

“I don’t want to talk about my work,” I heard myself say. “It’s not something anyone else can be involved in. You have to do it alone, or it’s not yours.”

And this, also was something I knew bone-deep but had forgotten in the surprise of death and sex and comfort. There is no alternative to the panic and the fear, because it is the panic and fear—and the isolation—that
are
the writing. The desperation created the necessity that made me write. I fed on it.

I was only ever half a romantic, the rest of me, the part that keeps on going, knows how things are and would not swap the final satisfaction of a finished piece for the easy comfort of that voice in my head. I had forgotten that voices in the real world have bodies and intentions of their own—and flats and furnishings and make dinner, and need.

I looked at her lying on the bed. She looked to me tired, terribly weary, worn, but her green eyes shone bright and hard still.

“All right,” she watched me tie the laces on my shoes. “Dinner without your work. We must get to know each other better. When you’re ready I may be able to help you. I have contacts. I can help in various ways. But tonight, just dinner.”

She didn’t want to be alone, I realized, although there was
nothing of that in the tone of her voice which remained cool and steady. And not just tonight. I wondered, at last, about her life.

“Do you live here alone?”

“Yes. I do now. There was someone living here with me, but she’s gone.”

Her voice was so vague it was impossible to place this information in time. She could have been talking of decades or moments. I felt as if one of us was no longer in the room.

“I must go,” I said, turning to the door. “I’ve got to get back to work. I don’t know about tonight. It depends on how the work goes. Shall I ring you later on?”

She reached for a cigarette. The phone rang as she drew on the flame from her lighter, but she made no attempt to answer it.

“Yes, call me later,” she said airily and lay back on the bed watching the smoke spiral through the light beams. The phone continued to make its mechanical bird call.

“Your phone …”

“I’m not going to answer it.”

“But it might be imp—”

“I know what it’s about.”

She got out of bed, slipped on a faded silk kimono, and moved away from the phone to stand and look out of the window. There was nothing to see except the houses across the road. The phone went on ringing.

“It sounds important.”

She inhaled deeply on her cigarette and turned her head slightly in the direction we had walked. From this angle, the station was out of view.

“They will have found this address on Helen. She must have had a letter or something in her jacket, because she didn’t take her bag with her.”

She turned and glanced at the chair by the door where a tan shoulder bag lay open.

“I suppose they’re calling to find out if a relative lives here. They’ll be wanting to inform her next of kin.”

She spoke more to herself than me, her cool unchanging
voice almost inaudible beneath the insistent squeal of the telephone.

“Are you sure you won’t come to dinner this evening?”

She looked at me questioningly, her face an impassive sculpture of angles and planes.

“You lived here with Helen?”

The room for all its elegance was a desert, suddenly, an empty cold place being worn away by time.

“Helen lived here for two years. She left this afternoon. She wasn’t a happy girl. I tried to look after her, she needed to be taken care of. But some people just won’t be helped.”

The telephone stopped ringing as she spoke. We both stared at it for a moment. The silence was shattering.

“I must go,” I said. “I’m sorry but I can’t stay.”

She smiled.

“We must meet again soon. I would very much like to read your work.”

But I was already closing the door behind me.

AU
THOR’S NO
TE

Wendy Law-Yone herself comments on the (for her) natural juxtaposition of the erotic and the exotic; in this synergy was the inspiration for a unique creation, a sexual coming-of-age story that takes “what if?” for its spur and then proceeds single-mindedly to describe an answer. Bold, clever, and also, ultimately, wise, “Drought” is a fable that will be difficult for any reader to forget.

I
t was wartime, with its crazy misplaced fears—a time when suddenly it wasn’t the bloodshed I dreaded as much as drought.

Maybe it was the Red Reservoir incident that sparked these new threats. In the north, where the fighting was fiercest, the rebels had run amok and wiped out an entire European compound, hacking up the bodies of the whites and throwing the parts into the private reservoir until the water turned red. It must have been the rumors that followed—rumors about poisoned wells and severed water lines—that brought on my nightmares about a water crisis.

But as though in a rush to make the nightmares come true, I became wasteful, not sparing, with water—especially once Auntie was gone and I was left alone with him. Amazing, how quickly I took to stripping and washing him as I pleased, using up water heedlessly. And to think how scared I’d been at first: scared to touch, even to look at him.

A white man! In those days—the early days of the Liberation—we all knew what they were doing to the whites on the mainland. We’d all heard about the Red Reservoir. Things were different, of course, on our island, where no one seemed to feel strongly about whites, or about much else. Still, the war had spread to other islands in the archipelago, and some said it was just a matter of time before we too would be caught up in it.

But I was afraid for another reason. I couldn’t cast off the uneasy sense that I’d somehow caused an accident to happen.

Because I’d seen it happen. Standing on the veranda that morning, I had watched the plane go down. I didn’t know it was a plane, then. It looked like a hawk, diving and disappearing in a flash from its straight-arrow course. The crash was that silent and graceful and swift. In the split moment before the sudden dive, I foresaw the whole thing.
Fall!
I’d said to myself even. And—just like that—the hawk had fallen.

I gave it no more thought until hours later, when they brought the survivor to our bungalow. It was only then that I put it all together. That hawk had been a small plane plunging headlong somewhere into the rubber plantations.

They carried him in on a makeshift bamboo stretcher. Our bungalow was on the hill overlooking the
kampong,
the village, below. From the veranda I could see the small procession snake up along the path that led from the plantations past the
kampong—
and through the gates at the foot of the hill.

“He fell out of the sky!” one of the
kampong
boys was shouting. “Like a god!”

They set him down underneath the monsoon-flower tree. He might well have been a god—large and dead to the world, but radiant. The tree was in full flower—a sign that the monsoons were close—and gold blossoms hung in clusters above him like ceremonial lanterns. His hair was gold too, though
darker than the flowers; very thick and straight. A slight breeze plowed this way and that, revealing bits of scalp that looked as tender as wounds. He was wearing a short-sleeved khaki jacket—the kind with many pockets—and khaki shorts. In the glow of the flowering lanterns he shimmered all over as though dusted with mica or powdered glass.