The Forgiven Read online

  N THE LARGE GLASS TABLE THAT DOMINATED THE salon of the second floor, the servants had set down dark chocolate—colored terracotta plates of figs and segmented oranges with vases of white orchids between them. Since the windows had been opened and the curtains drawn back all the way, the desert air came in and it was not nearly as hot as it had been the previous night. A change in the weather, a momentary cooling: it was enough to loosen her mental hinges, to open the hatches (she thought of herself as a warren of hatches, like an old cargo ship), and let her bend down to put her nose to the lines of cocaine that Richard had carefully cut with a paper knife.

  “No, honey, not with your nose. We have the tube.”

  The tube was like a thin pencil made of engraved Arab silver with one end shaped like a cat’s mouth. He handed it to her and watched her try to use it, sucking up half a line with one nostril. Her profile from his angle was beautiful: precise, aquiline, wonderfully edged. She wasn’t smiling like everyone else. Though he had no interest in women, he could not help trying to admire her heterosexually. Did men fall in love with her, coming to a moment when they had to look past her dowdiness, her scholarly affect? Because there was no quickness in her, no vividness of reaction. She was always old, in the noblest sense of that word. Even when she snorted a line of coke through a silver tube, her profile never decomposed. It was like someone studying a rare nematode in a lab, every nerve devoted to the task. It must take a very particular kind of man, he thought as he watched her inhale his exactly cut line, and it was not David or Day. It was likely that she had not found him, and never would. There are women like that. One sees them everywhere.

  When she had finished, she sat up again and quickly wiped her nostril.

  “Believe it or not,” she said, “I haven’t done it in years. Maybe never. I can’t remember.”

  “Take your time. It’s quite a boring drug anyway. I only do it because Dally insists. What about you, Tom?”

  Day refused the offer. “It’s a bit eighties for me. These days, it just makes me fall asleep with aching nostrils. I can do without aching nostrils.”

  The French girl was at the table, snorting away feverishly. Her Moroccan lover looked at her aghast but didn’t interfere. Her face had gone pink and shiny and her eyes seemed to be bleeding in some way.

  “Mohammed, the whole place is full of reptiles. You’re a reptile, too. A sweet little reptile.”

  “She had a zoo as a kid,” Mohammed explained to the table. “She had a pet lizard called Mohammed. I think she ought to be decapitated for that.”

  Jo held herself still so that this alien force could surge through her at its own speed. She took a small ham sandwich from the table and crammed it into her mouth. Everyone laughed. Day caressed her foot under the low table, where they were all barefoot. And then the cool air struck her face and she was aware of the light film of sweat that clung to it.

  “Usually,” Dally chimed, “they can’t eat a thing. Especially not with my A-Force snow from Marseilles.”

  Richard purred to Jo directly. “I’m glad you’re feeling a bit better. David’ll be back tomorrow. But personally, I’m glad you got to have a day and a night by yourself. I think you needed it.”

  She wanted to reply by blurting “What?” but she knew he was right. A marriage is a stifling affair much of the time.

  “It would be great if I wasn’t worried,” she said dutifully.

  The staff came around with hot napkins as Swann grew belligerent. He was more left wing than he looked.

  “Are you sure they don’t hate you, Dicky? I think you’re being complacent. They’d never accept you as an infidel. I don’t care what you say.”

  “Why should they accept him?” the French girl wailed. “They have every reason to hate Americans.”

  “Is that so?” Richard felt a headache coming on with this one. “I would have thought they had more reason to hate you.”

  She looked genuinely astonished.

  “But we have excellent relations with the Arabs. We share the Mediterranean with them. But you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Oh, I understand. You mean you have them in your ghettos, so you feel close to them. Do you feel close to them when they’re burning cars in the suburbs and ransacking your synagogues?”

  “That’s a—how you say—problème sociale.”

  “No. They dislike you for the same reason they dislike us. We’re not Muslims and we lord it over them. It’s against what they regard as the natural order of things, which would be them lording it over us. I understand them, though. They are rival imperialists. I don’t hold it against them.” By now he did not have the heart to tell her that he was not American, and she probably would not have cared. “Besides, in America the Muslims are prosperous and peaceful. They don’t spend their time rioting in the suburbs and pelting police cars with trash cans.” Richard put on a sickly voice. “Why do they do that in France only? It must be—how you say—solidarité.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she shouted. “We’re not killing hundreds of thousands in Iraq!”

  “No, darling, the local mujahideen are. But I am not arguing with you about Iraq. I was a protester against, after all.”

  “Then you know how they feel. I can hear them talking in the kitchen. All the Arabs feel that way. You’d have to be stupid not to feel that.”

  Richard took out his nutcracker and turned his attention to a large bowl of walnuts.

  “You’re bitter because of 9/11,” the tiresome one droned on. “As if you didn’t have anything to do with it …”

  “There were these beautiful statues of the Buddha in Afghanistan,” Richard said, as if to himself, very quietly, “and one day the rulers of that happy land came to them with a pile of demolition bombs and destroyed them. I suppose, if you were high on coke, that you could argue that poor old Buddha had it coming to him. Perhaps the statues said something offensive or there was something lewd in their complicated hand gestures. I know how it is. One gets so hotheaded about Buddha and his ways. It sometimes seems that the only way to respond to it is by …”

  Jo suddenly found herself laughing out loud.

  “It’s the coke,” Mohammed drawled, giving her a wink.

  “Mohammed,” the French girl protested, “back me up against these babbling Americans. They’re arguing …”

  “No, we understand that when in doubt, we Americans must be blamed. I would miss it if you didn’t blame us. I’d feel less important somehow. Believe me, we’re masochists. We enjoy it, and it makes us feel bigger than we actually are. It makes us insufferably arrogant. I wish I could make the Arabs understand that. I wish I could make you understand that. They’d be amazed. Blame us less and we’d be a lot more humble. We wouldn’t think we were the center of the world.”

  “Excellent speech,” Day said, slow-clapping. “Why can’t we put you on Al Jazeera?”

  “I don’t believe you,” the girl snapped. “You’d think you were the center of the world anyway.”

  Richard gave her a shelled nut. “It’s an understandable delusion. We were for a fairly long time. Now I think you should go back to being stoned. You’re very cute when you think you’re surrounded by reptiles.”

  “I am surrounded by reptiles.”

  “Center?” an old man whom nobody knew blurted out from the end of the table. “Of ze world?”

  “Is there a dance tonight?” another of the girls asked Dally.

  “We’re all too fagged, really.”

  “Fagged?”

  “It’s an English expression. Exhausted.”

  She shouted across the room. “He says they’re too fagged.”

  Richard cut new lines on the glass tabletop and the servants lit the brass oil lamps. Everything turned deep gold. Jo’s pupils shuddered with pleasure. A mood of subtle depression soon spread around the crowd.

  “We’ll be going down to dinner soon,” Richard said, “and I want you all properly toasted before we do. I’m tired of sober gues
ts. Sober guests are my problem right now. I must seek them out and remedy them. Dally, I believe there are some in the library.”

  “What?”

  “Sober guests. I will seek them out and remedy them.”

  He leaned down with the silver tube. Day looked over and passed his hand over Jo’s belly, which also contracted with an unnoticeable pleasure.

  THE TABLE WAS LAID WITH THE SAME ORCHIDS, WHICH found themselves reflected in the surfaces of the tureens. Their stamens were inflated, elongated, and the flesh of the corollas had reached their maximal plumpness before they would die in a few hours, and certainly by morning, their babyskin pinkness beginning to deepen and the stamens thickened with golden powder. It seemed to her that this dinner of the third and final night was different from the previous two. The men were all in dinner jackets; the dresses were fancier. There were rollicking multilingual speeches, and the eyes were wild and unstable, as if an atropine dropper had been handed around and they had inhaled an airborne pollen from those orchids coated with an unknown stimulant. The decorum that had held the previous two days together frayed, and something wonderfully ugly emerged. Her blood was up. A sexual note had appeared. It is difficult, she thought coldly, for women to be promiscuous, precisely because it is too easy. When they put themselves out for it, they get used in a nanosecond; then again and again. And meanwhile they begin to think anxiously about the birth canal. But what if the birth canal were no longer much of an issue? Would those small and swift exploitations matter as much as they once had in the days of fertility and youth? Men, too, became sadder and more hopeless as they aged, and there was mutual recognition. One became free.

  She looked over the scornful Moroccan boys lining the walls. They were Dally’s magazine fantasy. Would she give in to them? Were they beautiful? It didn’t really interest her. Beauty didn’t really interest her. There’d be no struggle. Her struggle was with Day, whom she would give in to, but not because he was merely available. It was rather because he had bothered with her, when men rarely did. He had taken the time to consider her, to take her into account. To measure her qualities and faults and weigh them like ounces of gold and slag.

  When she looked over the Europeans girls next, she saw at once why men were more attracted to them. They were internally playful in a way that she could never be. Their faces were full of unmalicious malice. They knew what men wanted. They were bitches in the magnificent sense of the word, and they ruled their domain without forethought.

  “And I am not even one percent bitch.”

  The tureens were full of turtle soup. Amphibious claws peeped up around their edges, and the European girls shrieked. Day was sitting next to her, unrelenting in his way, and his breath had turned pepper-hot like a cheap curry. She wanted to spit in his face, but he leaned over. “You’re looking beautiful. It’s the coke.”

  “Don’t look at me. I’m pink!”

  “What’s wrong with being pink?”

  “I look like a cake. I look like I have frosting all over me.”

  His eyes shone like photographic paper.

  “Frosting—would I object?”

  They went through the whole dinner chattering and forcing their laughter at other people’s jokes, but hour by hour, silence was falling around them, as if they were walking together into a sandstorm and letting the peripheral sounds disengage from them and the lights of the world gradually go out. They were listening only to each other. He talked about his house in Bali, rarely visited but frequently embellished. Bali, that place that had been turned into an extension of a folkloric airport. “What do you like about Bali?” she asked, as the chocolate cake was being carved up and some Arab coins were being excavated from its center.

  “I’m not very romantic about these things. I like hot weather and cheap restaurants. I like affordable spas because I’m old. I thought Mick Jagger lived there, and then it turned out he didn’t.”

  “No girlfriend? I thought all white guys had a girlfriend in Asia. In fact, I think you have a few sluts on the side, Mr. Day.”

  “Oh, do I?”

  “I’m not judging. I think men need sluts.”

  His eyebrows rose.

  “Original,” he murmured. “Personally, I think women need to be sluts. They can’t manage it except when they’re drunk.”

  “That’s because you don’t know how to ask.”

  “Me?” He laughed.

  “Yes, you. You haven’t forgotten about my husband.”

  “Well, we oughtn’t to forget about him. It’s just that, in a way, we have, haven’t we?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  He stirred, his face opening wider a little: “I never thought this would happen at all. I am surprised. I think you have me all wrong, Mrs. Henniger. I didn’t mean what I said about sluts. I was being facetious and ridiculous.”

  “Just banter.”

  “Yes. Everyone needs to banter at dinners.”

  Seduction, she thought. How she hated seduction.

  Then he faltered.

  “I feel like I have been quite phony with you in some way. Playing a part. It’s not me at all. I didn’t want to meet a married woman because I thought she would be a quick, cost-free …”

  “But we have our uses, don’t we?”

  And she smiled as brilliantly and as unharshly as she could.

  “I wouldn’t say uses,” he objected, but they burst into laughter, and the damage, so to speak, was done. He laid the edge of his hand against hers as it lay on the dazzling white of the tablecloth, among the silver napkin rings and engraved forks. It was the slight, inconsequential gesture of a man already familiar with her body, already swimming among her waters. It was as light and animal as the motion of the huge moths fluttering against the lozenge-shaped windowpanes just out of hearing of the table.

  Soon the French windows were opened and the dinner disassembled into the night. There was no dancing that night, no music, because Richard wanted a more sophisticated finale to his weekend. The gardens were just left to the guests to fill up. An Italian TV personality had materialized out of nowhere, and as she stood on the lawn adjacent to the dining room, two or three photographers bathed her in hysterical flashlight. “It’s Monica Luciamora,” someone whispered near to them as Day and Jo made off across the same lawn with an armful of biscuits and strawberries and two glasses—the bottle was waiting in his cottage.

  As she hurried through that blinding spectacle, with smoke stinging her throat, she refused to think about anything. The dread inside her was pushed down; she was firm. He snatched her hand, and its copious sweat put him off a little. “Poor thing,” he thought, “she’s such a freckled English perspirer. She can’t take this climate.” As they crossed into the ksour’s narrow alleys, she actually closed her eyes, letting herself be led, and the man leading her was struck only by how easy it had been.

  When she opened those same eyes, she was inside the quietly opulent room with the sashes and Berber knickknacks and the orderly laundry boxes of the American she didn’t know. She saw a pair of leather slippers lying by the writing desk. One of Richard’s one hundred cats crouched in a corner lapping from a saucer of condensed milk. Day was peeling the foil from the bottle slanted in its ice bucket, and he was telling her that, technically, the wire cage underneath was called the muselet. Here, he was saying, is how you open a bottle of champagne, by holding it firmly by the base and turning the bottle, not the cork. A red wine is held by the neck, a woman by the waist, and a bottle of champagne by the derrière.

  “Mark Twain,” he said quietly as the cork came out without a pop. “But those priorities can be rearranged later in the evening.”

  “Oh, they can, can they?”

  He poured, and there was a hiss.

  SHE KICKED OFF HER SANDALS AND WENT STRAIGHT TO the bed. Her body felt as light as tin that has been beaten patiently and incrementally for days and nights. Her spinning top was slowing down and losing its impecca
ble balance. She flopped melodramatically into the bed, letting her hair splash on the crispy-crunchy laundered pillows and her legs separate wildly to form what she thought was a sexual pattern on top of the tribal coverlet. “You’re stoned,” she said to herself. “For once it’s you, not David!” But Day didn’t seem to notice. He unleashed the energies of the champagne and then poured out two glasses like a waiter in a third-rate bistro. He didn’t hear her heart beating at all. Was he supposed to hear it? He turned and watched her rolling on the bed.

  “It’s the same as your bed,” he remarked dryly.

  All her long-stifled, fermenting hatred of David was turning into champagne bubbles and evaporating into nothing. As it evaporates, even hatred has its sweetness. Day came to the bed with the two unsteady glasses and they sipped in silence, avoiding each other’s eyes. Then she took his cuff links and bit them open. He seemed paralyzed by her for a while, looking down at her as if she had ripped into his own skin. His mood did not grow gentle, as she had expected, and in a way it was better. He undid his buttons with one hand while she made unflattering remarks about the hair in his ears. He chuckled. Slowly, she took him in her legs like someone grasping an insect with a pair of pliers. They rolled over, and his dry mouth began to kiss her arm. It took a long time for him to make his insistence final. It was because she could not—even now—make up her mind. At any moment she could withdraw, run out of the room, and keep her system with David intact.

  In the wall mirror she kept seeing his naked feet, and they reminded her of pig’s trotters; she didn’t mind, but it made her think again. As he took off her panties, she struggled a little, and it was because she wanted to struggle. “All right,” she thought, “rape me if you can. Let’s see.”

  But he wasn’t raping her. If anything, she was raping him. Yet when she did struggle, his hands held her down and the door on escape was shut finally and for good. He put his whole weight into the denial. Instantly, her mind gave way, shattered into pieces.

  And those pieces began to whirl clockwise. She saw the fan turning in the opposite direction, and the result was vertigo. The bed turned as well, so that there seemed to be gears turning within gears. There was a look of triumph on his face, and a wetness around the eyes. His eyebrows had arched up as far as they would go and his pupils were like wet, boggy moss. She hated that look, but it was too late, and without warning he suddenly pushed his arms underneath her and lifted her up an inch. He held her there for a while, then let her down again. The muscles along his sides moved with a long, jittery electrical shock, like a horse when it’s pricked. She groaned because she couldn’t hold her lungs down.