The Ivory Swing (6 page)

He must have sensed her scrutiny because he turned, embarrassed, and murmured apologetically: “I'm sorry. I'm blocking your view. Selfish of me.”

“No, please! Not at all.”

But she was curious to know what had held him in such absorption. It was a bronze figurine of a dancing girl, less than six inches high, her body gaunt as spring twigs, her breasts like not-yet-ripened crab apples.

“What is so special about her?” Juliet asked. “I mean, she's graceful, but a trifle anorexic, don't you think?”

The man who had floated down from an Uffizi canvas winced.

“She was cast in bronze early in the second millennium BC,” he said reverently. “Close to four thousand years between the artist and us, and here we stand inches away from her. I call that” — he searched for a word — “a sacrament of history.”

She raised her eyebrows in wry amazement. Is he real? she wondered.

“Look at her face,” he said.

She looked and hazarded: “It's sort of Negroid. Flanged nostrils and lips. And she certainly doesn't approve of being stared at.”

“Pre-Dravidian. And after her there was nothing for fifteen hundred years. Think of it. Not a single artefact for all that time! And then suddenly a carnal explosion at Mathura and Sanchi — all those bountiful breasts and buttocks that crowd the stupas and temples. It's a different iconography entirely. This one's so exquisitely non-voluptuous. She was probably a sacred prostitute,”

“Really?” Juliet looked at the miniature, at the naked boyish figure, with fresh interest.

“Yes. We deduce it from the bracelets and their ritual arrangement. And the stylized pose.”

The dancer's matchstick left arm was sheathed from shoulder to wrist in bangles. An armour against what? Suddenly the awe of the gentle pedant beside her settled on Juliet like a mist of light. She was drawn into the magic.

Who was the woman, the actual flesh-and-blood woman, who four thousand years ago had tossed her head back with that look of disdain? For what priests or lesser men did she dance clad in nothing but bracelets? And what was she thinking when she jutted out her pelvis like that, its cleft visible and taunting? Did she despise the watching male eyes? Did she dream of enticement or of smashing, with her jewel-mailed arm and her fist clenched like a boxing glove?

Well? demanded the haughty eyes. Do you think you're any smarter after four thousand years? Have you figured out a better solution?

As Juliet formulated her answer she realized that the Quattrocento man was moving on. It was like an eclipse.

“Oh please don't go,” she said impetuously, catching hold of his arm. “I feel as though you've peeled cataracts off my eyes.”

He was decidedly embarrassed, exposed, stripped now of the protective instructional role. She saw that he was not as young as she had first thought, that he was a number of years older than she, and that a network of fine lines radiated out from the black and mesmerizing eyes.

“I was going to the concert,” he said awkwardly.

“Oh.”

“Of course, you could come.” He seemed appalled that he might have been impolite. “It's free, you know. Every lunch hour, in the third-floor music room.”

In the music room a group of students played on shawms and crumhorns and viols. Music of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

“It's beautiful,” she whispered. “Though I don't know what to listen for. I know nothing about it.” Tempting him to offer instruction. And he did. Over coffee afterwards. Over dinner that night. Over lunch the next day, His name was David, he said. She thought: I knew it would be a saint's name.

She did not tell Jeremy about him. Why should she? Their rules did not require it. And how could she explain him? It was like finding a unicorn in a city park. He beckoned her into a world hung with intricate glowing tapestries and haunted by the melody of extinct instruments.

One day he called her at her apartment and Jeremy answered the phone.

“For you,” Jeremy said neutrally.

David spoke in a rush of confusion. “I'm sorry … I didn't think … I had no idea … Please forgive me.” He hung up.

She called him back. “What did you want to ask me?”

“It's nothing. I had tickets for a concert … But it really doesn't matter.”

“Where should I meet you?”

“Are you sure?” He seemed both nervous and reproachful.

And later, after the concert, he said stiffly: “It was presumptuous of me. I don't wish to interfere in your private life.”

“You're not interfering. I live with a guy on and off, that's all. His name's Jeremy. We don't police each other.”

“I see. Are you in love with him?”

“He's an exciting person,” she said. “Brilliant, I think. Politics and ferment, that's his thing. Mine too, I guess. I mean, I'm doing my doctorate in history but paying my way as a researcher for a politician. Housing statistics, watch-dogging government spending, speech-writing, that sort of thing. Gathering material for a book as I go. I love it.”

Amazed, as though a long telephone conversation had turned out to be a wrong number, David said: “But the art gallery? The concerts? I simply assumed you were —”

“I'm a hybrid. Or maybe just a dilettante. As an undergraduate I had a terrible time choosing between history and political science and literature and art history. I had to toss a coin, more or less.”

“I see. Then of course you have a lot in common with … with this man.”

“He stretches my mind. Gives me wings.”

“And you are … it seems you are in love with him?”

“That's a state of being he considers anachronistic.”

“But are
you
in love?”

“It's amazing!” she said. “You can say the word without the least trace of embarrassment. The way the rest of us say sex, or fuck, or something”

“You haven't answered my question.”

“I don't know how to answer it. I suppose, if love is measured by the degree of pain I feel when I know he's with someone else, then yes, I suppose I'm in love with him.”

“I see.” David rested his elbows on the table and rubbed his eyes jerkily with his fingers. “I think it would be better if we didn't see each other again.”

“But why ever not? I love being with you.”

He looked at her sadly as though she were the bronze dancer in the glass case, as though an immense mystery of time and cultures separated them.

“When the code on the Indus Valley tablets is deciphered,” he said, “I might be able to explain. I've enjoyed knowing you.”

She could not believe he would walk out of her life. She leaned towards him, flinging a net of seduction. What would it be like to make love to David? She and Jeremy made love like animals in heat. But with David, she thought, it would be like Tristan and Isolde, splendid, languid passion against a backdrop of Celtic music — harps and viols and haunting wooden flutes.

“David,” she murmured, her eyes bright, “do you think I wouldn't make love to you because of Jeremy?”

She might have struck him across the face.

He said sadly: “I think we live in different worlds and speak different languages, Juliet. In another age I would have been a scholar priest, I suppose”

And he did walk out of her life. When she called, he was never home, or else didn't answer.

So, she thought, shrugging. One more loss to absorb, I'm an expert. And the sunless weeks passed — weeks without unicorns or sacraments of history or viols, although she went regularly to museums and concerts and galleries from which he perversely stayed away. Until the day she saw him again on the subway …

“David!” she called with gauche abandon, pelting down the platform. “David, I've missed you terribly.”

He could not disguise his agitation or delight and she felt triumphant.

“Couldn't we have dinner together?” she pleaded. “Please.”

“How can I refuse?”

And on the lurching subway car she rocked against him, wanton as Mary Magdalene with her harlot's heart, hoping to scorch his body.

From above he said into her ear: “The subway is unbearable at this time of day. Like a circle in Dante's hell.”

“Oh no! I love it! You never know whom you'll meet. And look at the faces. I wish I could paint.”

“I hate it,” he said. “The ugliness, the pushing and shoving … I love small towns and green and open spaces.”

“Oh well then,” she said blithely, secure in her power, “we're incompatible. I couldn't live without a subway.”

But he looked so stricken that she said quickly: “I don't necessarily mean that literally. I do like ferment, though.”

“Actually,” he said, “I'm leaving next month. I've been offered an assistant professorship at a small university.”

“You're leaving?!” Even in the harsh artificial light of the subway there was a sense of rain clouds massing, of the sun shrouding itself. “Oh, I suppose congratulations are in order. Where are you going?”

“It won't interest you.”

“What a statement! I've been desolate for lectures on art history and for crumhorns and shawms, and you tell me I won't be interested in the fact that you're leaving!”

“It's the middle of nowhere. It doesn't have a subway or even a museum. It's exactly the kind of place you couldn't stand.”

“Where is it?”

“Winston, Ontario.”

“I've never heard of it.”

“Exactly.”

“How do you know I couldn't live there?”

“Are you interested in trying?”

“Are you asking me?”

“Would you marry me?”

“Oh!” she said, dancing on the toes of other passengers, flinging her arms around him. “Yes, I would!”

Later he said: “It's crazy, you know. You'll hate it. And then you'll hate me.”

“Impossible!” But feeling the first chill of small-town disorientation, she asked uneasily: “If I do hate it, do we have to stay there forever?”

“Of course not. Let's give it a trial year. Or you could even stay here for a year and then I could come back …”

But the thought made both of them nervous.

“I have some loose ends to tie up,” she said.

Neither of them mentioned Jeremy.

But Jeremy himself was incredulous. “You're moving out just like that?”

“You always said that was the way it should be. No rules, no shackles.”

“Yes, but I didn't think … I assumed we were both sufficiently civilized … Well anyway,” he shrugged, “at least I am. Your half of the bed will be waiting when you want to move back in.”

“We're leaving town. We're getting married.”

“Married!” She might have announced she was having her feet bound. Or being measured for a chastity belt.

“Why should you care, Jeremy? In the past month you've stayed out more nights than you've stayed in.”

They stood staring at each other. Jeremy looked like an animal wounded but belligerent. His pride is hurt, she thought. He did not mean for the rules to be played both ways.

He had his hands on his hips, his feet apart. An urban buccaneer.

If the city were to be bombed, she thought suddenly and we were all survivors crawling out of the rubble, Jeremy would grab a megaphone and stand just like that on top of a pile of smashed history.

We'll rebuild here! he would shout. Right here! Let's get organized, everyone pitching in. I'll start off getting rid of this debris …

And David would be sifting through shards with the care of a jeweller.

Look! he would whisper with excitement. (And the news would pass from mouth to mouth like rumours, like music.) The basement of the old art gallery, it's survived! Look! Paintings and tapestries and bronze figurines. Come and sit, everyone, and admire and give thanks. It is a sacrament …

And where, Juliet thought urgently, do I really want to be? On a dais with a megaphone, directing history? Or dreaming in the grotto of art?

And the real trouble was: she wanted both, she had always wanted both.

“Is that what all this is about?” Jeremy asked finally. “My staying out for a handful of meaningless nights?”

“No.” (Absolutely not! Surely not?) “It's about” — she took a deep breath and flung the words at him like a convent girl swearing at a nun — “it's about my falling in love with David.”

“David. That guy who phoned?”

She nodded.

He spread his hands in a gesture of incredulity then placed them on her shoulders.

“Well,” he said. “What can I say? I hope you've made a sensible choice.” He brushed her forehead with his lips. “Be happy, Juliet.”

Over the years she had come to realize there was no such thing as the right or wrong choice. Only a road taken and a road not taken.

What was truly amazing, however, a never failing source of astonishment, was where the road taken led. Who could have dreamed it would lead to India, to a house in a coconut grove from which she would write letters back to her past? To a house and courtyard swept daily with a tuft of palm leaves? To a place where she would pound out laundry in a manner used by women since the time of the gaunt bronze dancer of the second millennium BC.

She went out to the courtyard. If the sheets and towels were left to broil in the sun ten minutes too long they became as rigid and body-punishing as a
fakir's
bed of nails.

One of the cows was contentedly munching its way through the bedding.

“Oh no!” she cried, exasperated, seizing a stick and running into the courtyard. “Stop it! Stop it!”

The three children came running, and Prabhakaran, a look of horror on his face, flung his arms around the cow, crooning and scolding in Malayalam.

Her raised weapon stilled itself in mid-air.

“Naughty cow! Naughty cow!” he said. “O bad little one! O sweet little trickster! O naughty darling!”