Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [47]
“Silence,” he went on, “was the only reason I got anywhere with the wives. You can’t speak while you paint.”
“I thought women liked the kind of rot you talk.”
“Me too. But they don’t. I always seem to say the wrong thing.”
A while ago, as an experiment, Rodney had reopened his flirtations with two of the wives: Mrs. Globerman, wife to the telecommunications tycoon, and Mrs. Overbye, wife to the airline boss. The idea was to see if his new puissance was transferrable and could be tried out elsewhere. Both efforts were failures—impossibilities. The things he said and the things they said. The things they all said. It seemed far stranger than silence. With these women Rodney had felt the utter superfluity of human speech. So the rain held off. So tell me about your week. So how have you been? Oh, you know: so-so. So-and-so said this and so-and-so said that. So tired. So soon? And so on and so on.
“You and your bleck girl seem to be made for each other.”
“We do. We are. Capital cocktails, these. Blimey, though. Bit strong, aren’t they? Feeling rather tight. It’s loosening my tongue. Rock, can I ask you something? Why do I know it’s going to end in tears? Why do I feel all this anxiety? And all this guilt?”
“Because you’re getting something for nothing. Yet again.”
Rodney’s eyes widened. He thought about the first time: the fraudulent feeling, when he watched her undress. As if he had reached his objective not by normal means (flattery, false promises, lies) but by something worse: black magic, or betrayal. For a moment he had the strange suspicion that she was his cousin, and they were playing doctors.
“Because you’ve bucked the work ethic. Yet again. Oh. I’m seeing Jaguar tomorrow. Have you done something with that money yet?”
“Yes,” said Rodney. He had done something with that money, if you counted counting it and rolling around in it and spending a lot of it on cocaine.
“I’ll check with Jagula. I mean Jaguar. Whew, that last one just hit me.” Rock went on in a smudged voice, “I sometimes feel like a trader in slaves. A white slaver. Onna butlers. Anna nannies. Maybe that’s what’s worrying you. It’s just because she’s bleck.”
Rodney said suddenly, “Blick? No.”
Could that be it? No. No, because he had always felt that she was a woman who carried freedom around with her. On her person. Somewhere in the jaws it seemed to lurk.
Soon afterwards he started to find the bruises.
Nothing florid or fulminant. Just a different kind of dark beneath the dark. The hip, the shoulder, the upper arm. On noticing a new one, Rodney would arrest his movements and attempt to meet her eye—but he never achieved this, and, having faltered, went back to what he was doing before; and afterwards he didn’t smile at her in praise and gratitude, as he usually did, turning instead to the stain on the wall, oval and the color of nicotine, where his head had rested these many months.
He thought he knew something about women and silence. There they would sit before him, the wives, engaged in self-conscious small talk as he made his preliminary sketches—as he situated the human posture against the jut and rake of the chair, the wall cabinet, the low table. Artists of course crave silence. They wish their sitters dead, stilled: a bowl of apples, a wineglass, a cold fish. But the sitter is alive, and must talk, perhaps sensing that speech is needed to bring color and indignation to the throat, the cheeks, the eyes. And the painter chats back with his skeleton staff of words until the moment comes