Lucca (11 page)

It wasn't that he was indifferent to her. For the most part he was considerate, at times downright affectionate, but just as often he left her in peace, and she could feel he expected the same from her. Now and then she asked if he would rather be alone, but he merely looked at her in amazement and smiled, as if she had said something odd. When he wanted to be alone, he went out. There was a pub round the corner where he played billiards, a rough gloomy place with tobacco-yellow crochet curtains, where none of her friends would dare set their feet.

He could make her feel invisible when he concentrated on washing up, watching television, polishing shoes or lifting weights. As if she wasn't there. At times she felt she was nothing more than a pair of hungry eyes that clung to his detached mien and perfect body. His attacks of introspective self-sufficiency had a titillating effect on her, like the maddening, pleasurable expectation when she lay in bed giving herself up to his circling, teasing caresses. His silence could fill the flat with an atmosphere that was as agonising as it was agitating, and it completely took possession of her until her body and gaze were a swollen, quivering receptivity.

If neither of them had anything to get up for they slept late. When she woke up one spring morning he was sitting in his underpants in front of the open window sunning himself and reading the paper. She called to him but he didn't answer. She lay watching him for a long time. The strong light glistened on the hairs on his chest and the dust motes hovering in the air. She crept over to him from behind, placed her hands on his chest and bent forward to kiss him, so her hair fell over his face. He moved his head and with a preoccupied air took hold of her chin while he went on reading, just as you pick up the loose skin on a puppy's jaws.

She sat down on the floor under the window and rested her feet on the edge of the chair seat between his knees. His face was hidden behind the paper. She let one big toe brush his inner thigh and massaged him softly in the crutch. He did not move
but she could feel it worked. Then she bent forward and coaxed his cock out of the fly. It was violet in the spring sunshine, she took it into her mouth. He moved the paper and looked at her, neutral and interested, like a spectator. She met his eyes, trying to visualise what she looked like from up there with his cock in her mouth, like one of the whores in his daydreams.

The next moment she was lying underneath him on her stomach. He forced her down with all his weight so she could barely breathe and penetrated her, pressing her face against the dusty floorboards. She enjoyed his sudden violence, like a pent-up fury suddenly let loose. It hurt her, and he came before she had a chance herself, but soon afterwards when she was in the shower feeling his warm seed running down her thighs she couldn't help smiling at the thought that his sudden passion must express part of everything he obviously had no words for. All that was hidden behind his silence and remote gaze.

It was getting hot. Drops of sweat crawled slowly down from the roots of her hair over her nose. She lay on her stomach sniffing the smell of sweat and sun cream on her arms, the smell of summer. The little waves melted together in a winking field of reflections, and in the empty sky she saw the jet stream of a plane making its way like a needle glowing whitely. She turned and shaded her eyes with a hand. The tail of the white line spread out and dissolved into small clouds like the knobs on a backbone.

She closed her eyes. More people had arrived, children screamed when they jumped into the water, and the adult voices blended together so she couldn't hear what they said. The planks gave under her every time someone walked past. She stretched out her arm and let the back of her hand rest on Otto's belly. She looked at him. He lay motionless, as if asleep. She could perfectly well have told him about her meeting with Harry Wiener when they were at breakfast the next day. They could have laughed over the Gypsy King's unsuccessful attempt at seducing her. It was too stupid, and still more stupid of him to suspect something had happened.

Otto sat up, her hand slipped off his stomach. He looked out at the Sound. She wanted to say something, it didn't matter what. He stood up too quickly for her to be able to catch his eye. He walked to the end of the jetty and stood for a moment with his back to her before jumping in and vanishing. A few seconds later he emerged and began to swim off.

He had looked at her without interest when she described how Harry Wiener had turned up at the dressing room unannounced and invited them all for champagne. She plastered herself with sun block, slowly and thoroughly, so she didn't have to look straight at him all the time, as she reported what he had said about their performance. She described how happy that had made her, mostly to offset her astonishment when she came to his approaches in the car. She had taken it in good faith, she would never have dreamed that the Gypsy King could come to humble himself like that. She even exaggerated slightly and took pains to go into details about his old, rather feminine hands and how pathetically he had displayed his slobbering raunchiness. But the more she said the more she felt it sounded as if she was hiding something.

Smiling crookedly Otto said she would soon be getting an offer to play Ophelia or Juliet, it wouldn't be long. Couldn't she speak up for him and get him the part of Hamlet or Romeo? Or would that interfere with her plans? He said it lightly and she cuffed him on the shoulder, pretending annoyance in return for his ironical smile.

Rows of people were lying along the jetty and on the beach, so many by now it was impossible to see who was with whom. Quite close to her was a group of fragile-looking teenagers with budding breasts and bony shoulders. They whispered and giggled, now and then one of them raised herself a little and shaded her eyes as if looking for someone. At the edge of the sea a bald fat man carried a small boy in water wings. The man's stomach wore a mat of black hair and the boy's arms were so thin that the water wings kept sliding down to his wrists.

The wind was getting up and stirring the water into confused golden points. It whipped the sheets against the mast of a sailing
dinghy keeled over on its side on the wet sand where the waves fell together and slid back. The sound reached right over to her, sharp and rhythmical, and the gusts of wind tore at the trunks of the tall beech trees in front of the sun. The top branches waved and their leaves glittered nervously in quivering sighs behind the intricate tape of smoke winding up from the cigarette between her fingers.

When she turned round Otto was on his way over to the jetty with long strokes. She lay down again. Soon she felt his heavy stride making the planks rock. He dripped over her and the cold drops woke her heated skin out of its trance. One drop fell on a lens of her shades as he sat down beside her with a sigh. The drop made the sky quiver and melt. He lit a cigarette and placed a hand on her knee. Her kneecap rested within it as in a cave. She asked if he was hungry. She sounded like a little housewife worrying about her spouse's nourishment. He took his hand away from her knee. Not specially . . . was she? He ate in a revolting manner, it was the only unpleasant thing about him. She had never thought much about it, merely noticed it. He smacked his lips and bent over with a protective arm round his plate as he shovelled in his food with his right hand and looked around scowling as if he was afraid someone might come and steal it.

He asked if she would like to go. Obviously he too was at a loss for something to talk about. As they cycled into town she asked herself whether she had invited the Gypsy King to try it on when she met his eyes in the dressing-room mirror. Maybe she had waited too long to look away or else she had taken her eyes off him too quickly as if feeling herself seen through. She bit her under-lip in irritation. Couldn't you look around as you liked? It might well be that she had wondered for a second what impression she had made on him, and so what? Surely her thoughts were her private property. Besides he had seemed to mean what he said about her performance. Could it all have been just a manoeuvre, a stage in the cunning strategy of seduction?

It was her first leading role and she had been dreadfully nervous. When Otto came home the afternoon before the première
she had been standing in the living room doing voice exercises. He had bought a CD of Iggy Pop and played it at once, throwing himself on the sofa and starting to roll a joint. She caught his eye and narrowed her lips. He asked with false innocence if the music worried her. She went into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her. The drone of Iggy Pop's voice penetrated through the door with its monotonous bass and throbbing drums. On the other side of the narrow back yard she could look into a kitchen lit by an unshaded light bulb behind the dirty window. An old man in a net vest stood at the stove. His back was bent, it faced her so she saw only his bony shoulders and prominent shoulder blades in the vest, which was too big for him. He was frying bacon, she could smell it.

She took a deep breath and produced a low note that rose like a column from her diaphragm, as she had been taught. Then Iggy Pop started up again. She lay down on the bed, she couldn't remember a single line, and in three hours she had to be on stage. She turned and in surprise regarded the little dark spot spreading over the pillowcase, as if it was not hers, the tear sucked in by the finely woven cotton.

During the curtain calls Lucca couldn't understand how they had pulled it off so well. She didn't know whether she had been good or bad, she had merely followed the patterns laid down by the words and movements, mechanically like a toy train that rushes confidently around on its rails. But everybody talked of how she had lived the part, so full of genuine feeling. She was the centre of the first-night party, everyone wanted to kiss her and give her a big hug, even people she had only met once. She allowed herself to revel in it without holding back. Otto stayed in the background, he spent the evening in a corner with one of his friends. When she walked past them she could hear the sarcasm in his voice.

When they got home he did not spare her his outspoken opinion of the play, and when he read the reviews, which all emphasised her performance, he snorted and warned her not to let herself be flattered by such a pack of fawning poodles. She asked if he was jealous, but that was showing off, she didn't
believe it herself. It was not a great success with audiences, and the flowers she had been given, gift-wrapped like the ones at the big theatres, withered after a day or two. Otto was the one who threw them out, the flat stank like a bloody brothel. He said it in his usual studiedly bragging tones, as he did when he wanted her to understand he didn't really mean it. But why couldn't he grant her a spot of success, when he wallowed in admiration like a happy pig in his mud?

She thought of the contrast between Harry Wiener's sympathetic, eloquent compliments and Otto's scornful comments. Who was she to believe? Maybe neither of them. Obviously the Gypsy King had had his demonstrable reasons for smothering her with his wit, but why couldn't Otto be generous about her success? Was he jealous, after all? In her scattered thoughts on the way home from swimming she confused the order of events, and saw Otto's scorn after the première as a reaction to the Gypsy King's erotic tricks three weeks later.

Maybe Otto had foreseen what might happen in the wake of her first outstanding reviews and the first newspaper interview she had ever given, in which she was presented with doe eyes, long legs and high acting ideals. Maybe he even felt that all the attention she was suddenly getting was a threat to his right of possession to what lay hidden behind those very eyes and between those very legs. If she had wanted to she could easily have stayed there in the Gypsy King's Mercedes. She could have gone up with him just like that into the legendary roof-top apartment where so many had gone before her, a little shy, a little girlish, with a coquettishly nervous hand constantly running through her hair, with her coat still on, as he mixed drinks and told stories about his meetings with Bergman and Strehler.

Otto cycled fast, as if trying to throw her off, and she had to tramp on the pedals to keep up. Sweat stung her forehead and her cheeks and made her blouse stick. When they had to stop at a red light she rode up beside him. She held on to his shoulder for support without putting her feet down, while the crossing traffic passed in a blue mist of exhaust and dazzling reflections.
She couldn't see his eyes behind all the shining movement in his shades. He smiled as he put out a hand and moved a lock of hair that had fallen in front of her eyes and stuck to her forehead. She felt like kissing him, but the lights changed to green.

She ought to be glad he had shown a touch of jealousy at the Gypsy King's come-on. It must be proof that after all she meant more to him than he cared to shout about. But that wasn't like him, it was more like Daniel. It was ironic, she hadn't thought of him for several months. Perhaps he was still sitting with his broken heart in his lap picking at the scabs.

She had never promised him anything. She broke it to him gently, at the same time safe-guarding herself. He sat on the piano stool staring down at the lid covering the keys. She could see herself, legs crossed, as a misty shining reflection in the curving instrument. The grand piano took up a third of the room, and his unmade mattress occupied another third. There was just room in between for the small table where he wrote out his scores. Here he spent most of his time bent over his bizarre music with its scattered, shrill notes and confused chords written for an orchestra he only heard in his own dark curly head. She had been fascinated by the invisible aura that spread around him when he played to her so that even the depressing surroundings took on a mystic air. He raised his head and looked at her through little steel spectacles. She stood up and walked to the window. He said he loved her. It was all very sad.

At the end of his street there was a damp-stained viaduct, and on the corner a run-down discount supermarket boasted garish posters advertising special offers. From the window she could look down on the street in front of an auto-repair shop. Splotches of bird mess shaped like flames covered the skylights and the cracked asphalt was blotched with oil. A tree stood in a corner of the yard, and even its roots were black with oil where they emerged from the asphalt. It was raining, the drops struck the window with a muffled sound and speckled the view with little pearl-shaped domes in which earth and sky changed places.