Goya'S Dog (38 page)

“Look at this,” she said. Next to the sink there was a counter with a gas burner, beneath the counter a cabinet: she'd opened it to reveal that it was full of books too. She kneeled down.

“
How to Play the Clarinet. You Can Be a Dollar Millionaire
. He's generous! But what does he eat?”

Dacres didn't care. She held his gaze now, watching him warmly with a forgiving, expectant look.

So he went towards Darly and pulled her into his arms. She squealed and kissed him hungrily. His hands moved up and down her bare arms, and then she pulled him across the room, picking at his
shirt buttons. They blundered on four legs like a pantomime horse.

He tried to turn her but she squeezed his face together in her hands, urgent and eager, and he felt waves of blood and excitement. His hands wondered if they'd ever felt a greater pleasure. She was awkward and he was out of practice: but we're very willing, he thought. They kissed and bit and she pressed her tightly shut lips against his. She was too brave and then suddenly timid, like a boy picking up a bow and arrow for the first time, in front of his friends; Dacres felt he was on a new world altogether, orbiting a different sun, a better one. He half-remembered it; only he didn't quite know his way around any longer. Then he stopped thinking.

In his vest now Dacres unhooked her dress, and kissed the side of her neck, held it between his teeth. She sighed dramatically, and held the silver fabric bunched before her as it came down, and told him to turn the light off—but he said he wanted to see every detail, every line of her. She insisted; he gave in. Coming back from the switch, heart gigantic, he fell to his knees and pushed his head into her midriff.

Then up again and by the bed they kissed and struggled and fell. She unclipped his belt. He suddenly wondered what she'd done with Lorne and asked her if she was sure and she hummed
yes, yes
instantly, busily. It was the absurd softness of her skin, the body perfected, most of all the living warmth. He kissed her eyes and her nails scratched at his hips. When she lay back her eyes were half-closed, but she stopped, pained, and pulled a small hardcover out from under her and dropped it onto the floor with a clunk.

There was the first difficulty and the first pain; grimaces; and then his belly was banging against her ribs. These sharp ribs, like elephant bones in the desert. She raised her hands and turned them back, fingers down, and pressed her palms against the wall like a contortionist. He saw her painted nails and the flowers on the wallpaper and kissed the water that was coming from her eyes and sliding sideways down towards her ears.

It was all too much: he had to withdraw almost immediately, and spent himself on Janusz's bedding. He shuddered, dead. Dead. And
then immediately heard his mind again, telling him to feel guilty about the poor chap's sheets; he brushed that thought away, felt the warmth of her again. But then came intimations of a broader, much more sweeping regret. He rolled away, out of her arms, to lie on his back, gasping. He closed his eyes, and then curled forward to reach for something to cover himself up with, and his spine complained.

Darly was sweaty, curious, still panting, with a pink flush all over her neck and the top of her chest. A minute passed and neither of them spoke, their breathing slowing down, listening to the silence of the house. But she leaned on her elbow and pulled at the curly hairs on his chest one by one; two were grey. She caressed at his body a little but there was nothing he could do for now. I'm not as young as you, it's not so easy, that's one thing you have to learn about me.

He was falling into sleep but she was excited, full of plans again. She stared happily at him.

“We'll drive to New York. But first stop city hall: we'll show everyone.”

“Yes,” said Dacres.

“Show them all.”

He looked at the tulips on the wall: one, two, four, eight.

“You really want to marry an old duffer like me?” he asked, lightly but gravely.

“You're not old,” she said, in a shocked voice. “Not that old.”

He grinned.

“What's a duffer?”

“It doesn't really matter,” Dacres said.

“I'll join the Red Cross. I'll be a nurse. You can be a war artist.” He said nothing, and perhaps because she sensed hesitation she quickly started talking about artists' colonies; she was saying she could volunteer anywhere there was fighting. They'd be free, she said, they could go anywhere at all, anywhere in the world. They could decide. A very enthusiastic smile on her lips. The easiest thing for him to do was agree. And then suddenly, between sentences, she was asleep.

There's a certain power relation here, Dacres thought, moving his weight uncomfortably in the chair, watching her sleep. I'm awake and dressed, out here; she's asleep and naked, under the covers. One must be the artist and the other the subject when you're together in a room. You have to be one or the other, though I'm not sure which: it seems to switch. He thought of Dover, the cottage, drawing the sheets, Evie's poem. She's all states, all princes I. Nothing else is.

He got up and went to the dresser. It seemed to do double duty as a desk: there was a hollow-backed wooden chair at its side and papers, a list of words in a language Dacres didn't speak with what he assumed to be their English translations alongside.
Home, Handsome, Hurdle, House, Hotel, Horrible
. Janusz wrote in sharp black script, and he had drawn a perfect ink line between the two columns. The corner of the paper was curling, however. Across the room—Dacres moaned silently—there she was, an icon. He looked away from Darly because looking at Darly hurt. There was a magnifying glass on the counter. There was a waistcoat hanging on the back of the chair. A cyclone was sweeping across the continent, he was in its path. On the dresser, Janusz's metal ruler engraved with a globe and a grid: longitude and latitude. He traced the lines with his finger.

Dacres moved the curtain aside and was looking out of the window at the car, a huge sleeping beetle in the narrow street. Stolen goods. He'd driven it, he thought. Turning away, rubbing his neck, he knocked over a pile of newsmagazines. He looked: the noise hadn't woken her, but she'd wake up soon. Dacres's throat was dry. How warm her forearms had been! He didn't want to be a war artist. Did she really want to be a nurse? When she'd kissed him, she'd held his head in place with her hand. Not something he could forget. It had felt like someone from heaven was stirring him and lifting him into the air; she'd sliced him in two, she'd split him. But he couldn't stay.

His body remembered: he'd rested his cheek on her collarbone.

Did he want to go to Mexico, he wondered.

His suitcase was by the door.

Dacres crept to the bathroom silently. Brown lino, the yellowed tub, a stack of comics by the WC. Urine, interrupted by other things, sputtered painfully out; he tried to aim it against the sides of the bowl so as to be quiet. Then all of a sudden he was cold. The sink was orange and blackened under the taps, it stood on wrought-iron legs. A kettle balanced precariously at the wall (he pushed it away from the edge of the sink), a mint-coloured box of soap flakes, a rusty pair of nail clippers.

“Am I wasting time?” he asked himself aloud.

Through the frosted-glass window the size of a breadbasket he could see nothing. He turned the tap and washed his hands in a dribble of water and scrubbed under his nails with industrial-looking soap. He dried his hands on his trousers, though they were still dirty and still smelled of her, and he patted down his shirt collar and even smoothed his hair back in the scuffed mirror, getting ready to disappear.

No: what we'll do, he thought, is go down to city hall. We'll find ourselves two toothless old cleaners as witnesses. They'll be illiterate so they'll have to sign with an
x
. After that, what she said: we drive south, south as far as we can, away from Burner and Lorne. Away from everything. New York, she said, Mexico. Or, no: we'll join up, we'll save the world, just as she wants. And I won't drag her down into myself or curse her life before it really begins because there's something in her that burns all that off.

He nodded to himself in the mirror, trembling. Yes.

She sees something in me, he thought, so she won't regret it. She won't regret wasting the time with me that she really needs alone now, to grow. She doesn't need to grow, she's decided she needs me. Life will be day after day of bliss: this bliss. And we'll never part. She'll want for nothing but me. We'll win the war, and then we'll be the toast of Manhattan, and then we'll go south. She won't miss the money or the certainty or the happiness because she'll be my muse. She'll never feel she wrecked her life in a moment of whim. Then we'll live together with Spanish names in a tiny town until we die. We'll die
at the same moment and then we'll be buried together, hand-in-hand, in a tomb that we'll design ourselves, together. It starts today.

Yes.

Dacres walked very slowly down the corridor, in the dark, trying to suppress the floorboards' creaking. This is a miserable mean house, he thought, with a closed-in smell; it reminded him of his flat in London. He wondered how his horrible neighbours there were, and whether they remembered him. God, all these things that come into your head, he thought, all these people in a life.

He came back into the blanched room as quietly as he could, though the door complained. Down by his feet was his suitcase; Darly appeared not to have woken. Her face down now, her hair spread over the pillow, her elbows out wide. For a long time he watched her. He wondered if she was actually awake, whether or not she was watching him too, thinking. Woman or girl, he thought. Sometimes you're asleep but your eye is fractionally open, white, unseeing. He couldn't be sure without getting closer and if he got closer disasters would follow, he knew that much. He looked away, down at his colourless shoes, and looked back at her.

Well, something else is, Evie, he thought. He thought: it mustn't happen again.

It took him a while in the blue, dewy light to find his way, walking past shuttered soda bars and boarded-up stores until the neighbourhood improved, and then he was on a street he dimly recognized: King, or Queen. He was passing hat shops and furriers and walking away from the sun. And then he knew where he was: Yonge Street. He turned left.

He'd been worried that Janusz would appear with a baguette under his arm. He'd stopped of a sudden and tried to leave Darly a note on the windshield but couldn't think what to say. He'd stopped, taken a step back to the house, stopped again, looked up at Janusz's window. And then he finally walked away.

The city was bright and quiet and cool and almost empty, as if it were his alone. The low buildings waited for something to happen, waited for pigeons and seagulls to bring them the good news. Dacres walked, passing a succession of shoe stores, then advertising hoardings, and there were a few more faces in the city now and more cars. A bit of life. He knew where he was going, at least. He passed places he recognized and places he didn't, feeling dry inside, feeling determined, regretful, tired, unsure, at peace. He was walking quickly, quickly and in a straight line for the first time since he'd arrived in Toronto. Then he stopped, he turned, he turned again, and started on again. Awnings and jewellers and everything just two storeys high. A cigar store and a fluttering, unexpected Union Jack. Then he was on Front Street, and there was a line of cars, and there was that Roman bank: the train station.

With money taken from Darly's purse he'd bought a ticket. “West,” he'd said, “west,” and thrust bills across the counter. The man at the window had looked at him doubtfully, and moved slowly, and then had told Dacres to step on it: platform two, he had one minute. He'd tried to run, immediately out of breath, through the vast atrium, then past the milling ladies at the railing, knocking over children, calling out excuses. He'd had to jump through a cloud of smokey steam, into the void, but then breathing hard he'd found his hand was on the door and he was lifting himself up and in as the whistle blew. He'd fallen into his seat as the train began to pick up speed, and had thought for a mad second that he recognized the guard on the platform, the curling moustache. Their eyes had met. But he couldn't be sure.

Amazed, Dacres looked out of the window. The city: taxis, stock still, waiting for fares. Then warehouses, frozen men disappearing, hats raised in farewell. Empty roads, and then houses, the train starting to hum and accelerate. Other lives and other stories. Hers too, somewhere. Beginning anew? He looked down. He didn't have a newspaper. He felt the start of a hunger in his belly.

The sight was astounding: gigantic clouds, stacked one over the other against the roofs; the sky behind them perfectly clear.

Dacres searched in his pockets for pen and paper. He found a stubby pencil, yellow, gnawed all the way up and all the way down. He crossed his legs, his ticket was on his thigh. He exhaled, and leaned forward, and in his tight grip the lead waited an inch from the paper. The banging carriage moved his hand up and down; the lead moved closer to the paper, and then further away. And then finally closer.