“Oh, don’t look at me like that…”
She enters, preceded by her perfume. The silk of her blouse rustles beneath her fur. She is drunk; a lock of hair has succumbed to the alcohol. “This isn’t like her,” Paul observes. “She’s nasty tonight, and I’m being cruel.”
He remains silent. He glances into the hallway. A man he does not know opens his door. He resembles him. Perhaps it is him, in a parallel life, he thinks—the one he could not endure. The man has the look of someone finishing his day. Paul imagines him as a lawyer, one case pending, several won, worries, possessions, problems of conscience, and a jacket too new to be entirely pure. Before entering his apartment, the man turns his gaze toward Paul. Their eyes do not speak. The man smiles at him. Paul closes the door. The man’s smile might have been deliverance, a key to open this gaping jail. Paul rests his head against the wall of his prison. Freedom blocks the keyhole.
Nalini calls him from the bathroom. She has dropped her coat and accessories onto an armchair.
“The bath is cold!”
Paul does not answer. He hears her turn on the taps. He fetches the handbag and opens it. The envelope lies among a multitude of personal objects, all equally gaudy and useless. Assorted smells escape Pandora’s box. Paul pulls out the envelope. The banknotes are wrapped in a silk ribbon. “What game is she playing?” he thinks. “Dollhouse or insult?” He counts methodically. “It’s $7,800 short.”
“It’s $7,800 short…”
His mind: “Don’t be afraid.”
Him: “But I’m not afraid…”
She asks him to repeat himself, poking her head through the bathroom doorway. She has already undressed. No, this is not like her. For the past two years, she has always insisted that the lights be off while she removed her clothes; Paul would light a few candles around the bath and pretend not to look at her.
He thinks of his dream again, recalls his sudden unease, listens to a few notes of the Libera me, briefly considers this motionless day, like a city gone dark, and understands that something inside him has broken. Is he certain? Perhaps it is precisely the opposite, an unusual joining of two aspects of his existence, a motley bond between fire and water. He finds his courage again.
“I said it was $7,800 short. You’ve been coming here for two years, and you’ve been arriving late for two years. Add it all up and it comes to about $7,800.”
Nalini reels from the blow, unable to tell who is supposed to collect and who is supposed to pay. A little surprised, she surfaces briefly from her alcohol. Paul gives a bitter sneer. Asking a rich woman for money resembles heresy. She recovers and bursts out laughing. She imitates a society woman who keeps smiling through an embarrassing situation, taking a few minuet steps as she goes to retrieve her chequebook from her handbag. The antiquated gesture fits what little Paul knows about her: an Indian family that passed through several countries, a fortune whose source Nalini has never disclosed.
For the first time, Paul sees her in the harsh light. The white contours of her body outline a woman who is still beautiful. Her nudity resembles ivory that a sculptor amused himself by shaping into the likeness of a woman.
He touches her arm.
“It was just a figure of speech. No paper trail, remember?”
She smiles between two waves of drunken vertigo.
“I’ll reimburse you next time,” she says in a dry tone that betrays her anger.
Yet almost at once she tumbles back into uncontrollable good humour and snickers as she presses herself limply against him. Her breath has gathered up all the alcohol and the many perfumes that protect her.
“It’s almost obscene,” Paul thinks, “so much money and such ease in spending it.” When he deposits the bills, the bank’s computers will not even shudder. None will ever know where the money came from or be able to reveal it to her cuckolded husband, busy with his priestly rites to Mammon. The pounding in his head grows fiercer. Which of them is drunker?
Nalini suddenly becomes aware of the austere presence of the music.
“Where’s my jazz?” she asks, pressing herself against him to caress him.
Paul watches the drawn curtains. The red women from his dream may be behind them. Nalini continues her caresses. The beginnings of an erection unsettle him. “It’s too soon,” he thinks. “You usually have more control than this.” It is no use; his cock remains hard. Animals possess the manners of invaders.
“Duruflé’s Requiem…”
“Hmm. In a dark mood?”
She laughs like a child. She looks at the ceiling, her body swaying, carried along by the chant.
“It’s beautiful. I’ve always told you: I admire your ‘intellectual culture… and your physical culture.’”
She laughs at her joke, often repeated, worn out now. It is her way, Paul thinks, of taking pride in the slave he has become for her.