Paul pushes the past aside; the present rushes in. Nalini remains pressed against him, unhesitatingly slipping a hand into her lover’s briefs. What she desires, he knows, is a commercial equality of bodies. The rest follows suit. The future will always have to wait.
Equality is a serious matter. It is the sign that two parallel beings touch only in rare additions and multiple subtractions. Equality superimposes, no more, no less. It resembles friendship; one might therefore consider the bond now joining them a friendly relationship, a sexuality between brother and sister, a commerce of fellowship. Or a narcissistic incest abdicating in favour of blind thirst.
Yet everything does not always tip into equality. This evening of rain over the city is one example. Paul’s dream adds itself to the atmosphere, and Nalini’s unvirtue tallies the sum.
Nalini suddenly pulls away from him and goes to open the curtains. Paul remains motionless, his cock awake. With a violent effort, he drives away his unease and, with it, his strength. He looks at the rolled bundles of banknotes lying on the small table beneath the mirror.
He understands all too well the power of this money, this mathematical money. He understands that his soul is not so far removed from his body and that it opens its eyes wide when he is hard. He understands that he is what he is, despite his books and despite the Zen of his life.
He lets his bathrobe fall. His briefs are misshapen, angular, breaking the lines of his waist. She has sat down in her usual place and is watching him, half drunk, half amused. The ritual reasserts itself. He knows she is distraught, chiefly because of a divorce looming on the horizon. It will change nothing about their arrangement; Nalini’s romantic destiny is not part of the equation, even if Paul’s desire for her may have destroyed the opaque wall that isolated each of their hearts.
“Take off your briefs, please,” she says in a gentler tone than he expected.
He complies. The full force of his erection points toward Nalini. He settles over her and kisses her. Then he lies down on the bench of the exercise equipment incongruously placed in his living room. He begins lifting dumbbells. Lying there on his back, his legs straddling the bench, he is in full view of Nalini.
He is not ashamed; he has discovered that he likes putting himself on display. An erection is like an indelicate knife, capable of tearing through veils and tenderness.
Nalini is drunk; she is probably babbling some misguided freedom. He pushes hard against the dumbbells as though reaching into them, arms arched, for the air he lacks. He stares at the ceiling. He thinks of his dream. His apartment has five large windows overlooking the city. Five women to a window. Twenty-five women, one for every hour Nalini has kept him waiting. Exertion and unease turn him into a mathematician. With each thrust of a dumbbell, his mind murders a red silhouette, and he thinks he can hear again the sound of the sausage being pierced. None of this prevents him from remaining aware of his cock, still hard and swollen.
“Nalini is the twenty-sixth hour, and her money is stronger than your knife.” Paul’s inner voice, eternally rebellious, the voice that indulges its taste for turning reality into irony and thus accepts everything, now reminds him of the strange union of his soul and body. Still. Paul manages to preserve his discovery. Twenty-six hours.
He rises, his chest damp, and stares at his client, displaying the beauty he remembers having used before her each time without effort; the gruelling work of seeing nothing, of waiting, so little hope. Paul wears himself out.
“All that effort and you’re still hard. That’s quite a feat!”
He does not shift his gaze.
“It’s like making love to certain people…”
The retort makes her laugh sincerely.
“Well then, pick me up, my big troubled man!”
Paul waits a few seconds. Life carries him along. “Can she read me? Has she counted the hours too?” He lifts her. Her ivory skin drinks his sweat. He carries her toward the bathroom.
She motions for him to go first to the bar. Keeping herself in Paul’s arms as best she can, she sets about pouring herself a bourbon. Once the glass is full, she raises the bottle for him to drink from it. He complies. The alcohol is warm at the back of his throat. Nalini increases the flow, and the liquor spills from Paul’s mouth, reaches his shoulders, begins a long, rapid descent toward the hollow of his back, then plunges into the ravine of his buttocks. On the other side of his body, the alcohol Nalini now pours as if in baptism passes between them and cleanses Paul’s crotch. His cock, meanwhile, is almost silent.
Nalini drops the bottle. The plush carpet absorbs the impact and sends it against Paul’s legs. The twenty-five women lie dead at his heels. He grimaces without letting it show. Cliffs are vain; Paul’s body mistakes itself for ore. She puts her arms around his neck and collapses against her lover’s chest. She laughs to herself, watching the glass at the end of her arm bring up the rear of their procession.
Paul lowers her gently into the water. She lets the fragrance and warmth envelop her, closing her eyes like a child finally fed by her mother and about to fall asleep. He goes to urinate. Nalini half opens her eyes. He turns his head toward her while he does it. She appears amused and pleased by the tranquil beauty he embodies.
“Masturbate.”
Paul is surprised. He stares at her in silence.
“Why.”
Not a question, but anger close to pride, and antennae sensing the danger of humiliation, more menacing still than this washing of the body by money. She is going too far now, and he tries to tell her so through his immobility alone.
In the silence that survives between two circles, Nalini seems to discover within herself a cruelty born of love or of the violence inflicted on her. Both, no doubt, he thinks, and also because he has the upper hand. He, the knife; she, the fragile dough of a battered destiny.
“Because,” she answers in a voice he interprets as sadness.
“But of course, because. Nothing else and all of it. When one can say nothing, one can assert anything.” Paul closes his eyes. He searches for a way to fantasize. He finds none. She watches him say his prayer. Paul’s senses remain undecided. Suddenly he feels violated and is astonished that it produces nothing more than a warm wind in his heart, a door and windows shattered, curtains swept along by the fury of the air as the wind rushes between his legs.
“All you have to do is watch your soul watching your body.” Paul understands what his voice is telling him: “You are the twenty-sixth hour.” The gestures come to him. The heat rises; the rest goes unrecognized. Nalini pushes a finger inside herself, lets the water enter. Paul breathes hard. He is now only himself and for himself. Nine thousand dollars. Leave. Come. A Dies Irae makes its soprano howl in distress; Nalini opens her eyes.
Paul is a dream stallion, and his mare is invisible. The dry sound of masturbation stretches over long minutes, embellished by the music and the civility of the apartment. Paul is not ashamed of what he is doing. At times he turns his back on Nalini; his body seems to possess more modesty than his soul. He dances, lets himself be danced, then faces her again.
Twenty-five dead women on the floor. He tramples them. He wants to trample them. Another long silence while the semen whistles. Nalini says nothing, watches the magic of his pleasure. The hardwood gleams with his seed.
“Get in the water.”
Nalini lifts herself slightly so that he can slide his legs beneath hers. Paul remains silent and catches his breath. Nalini sleeps off her alcohol with a smile, almost asleep, appearing embarrassed. But Paul sees only sand melting in the sun. This is not the usual script. He understands: she does not want him inside her.
He extends an arm and caresses Nalini’s belly beneath the water. Other music fills the room, as though a new question must be set in motion. Everything is gentle, possessed of a calculated impotence. Life, always life, struggles like a multitude of eels on the cold floor of the universe. Paul caresses the woman. Nalini adheres to the hand. Fragments attempt to fuse. What was the script again?
“What are you thinking about?”
Paul cannot answer at once. He does not like the performance. He caresses, skirts the space. What are the words? He must say now that he loves her. The water parts before the passing hand.
“I sincerely believe that I…”
“No! Be quiet now.”
…hate you. She will know nothing of this betrayal, at least not yet, since the future has no age. The ritual is truly broken. What will happen now? Will she return in a week? The possibility is dizzying. He understands that he is afraid.
He tries to pull himself together. He almost forgets the source of their relationship. His emerging hand reaches Nalini’s breast. The breast still there. The one the surgeon did not remove. A surgeon in too much of a hurry. Bastard. Butcher. Paul tells himself that Nalini wants revenge. And oblivion. He controls his fingers as they stiffen. The murder of her life. He slowly brings his hand toward the nipple. He brushes it. Nalini shudders.
Paul’s anger takes over again. He thinks of nothing; he is angry, an anger imprisoned for so long in a cylindrical cell with smooth, oily walls, no door, almost infinite. An anger that has consented to coming through submission, and with a slave’s contempt.
Outside, the city broods in the roadway veins over all the trouble it takes to live unconsciously; each of its blood cells, like human beings, gulps down the night with submission and necessity.
Paul caresses a woman.