In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [23]
– What?
– I said, were you dreaming?
– I don’t know. Why?
– You were twitching.
– Hmmm. What kind of twitching?
– You know, like a dog asleep in front of the fire.
– Maybe I was chasing a rabbit.
They were sitting on the floor leaning into the corner of the room, her mouth on his nipple, her hand moving his cock slowly. An intricate science, his whole body imprisoned there, a ship in a bottle. I’m going to come. Come in my mouth. Moving forward, his fingers pulling back her hair like torn silk, he ejaculated, disappearing into her. She crooked her finger, motioning, and he bent down and put his mouth on hers. He took it, the white character, and they passed it back and forth between them till it no longer existed, till they didn’t know who had him like a lost planet somewhere in the body.
The next day they drove along the country roads in her Packard. He watched her as she spoke of the Wheeler Needle Works where her father had worked, the Medusa factory by the railway.
– This is the tour of my teenage life, Patrick. I’ll show you where I almost got seduced.
– The crucial years.
– Yes.
He loved the eroticism of her history, the knowledge of where she sat in schoolrooms, her favourite brand of pencil at the age of nine. Details flooded his heart. Clara said once, “When I know a man well socially, the only way I’ll ever get to know him better will be to sleep with him.” Seduction was the natural progression of curiosity. And during these days he found he had become interested only in her, her childhood, her radio work, this landscape in which she had grown up. He no longer wanted Small, he wanted to exorcise Small from Clara’s mind.
It was raining and they couldn’t get out of the car. She rolled down the window.
– This is where I used to bury my lunch.
Taking his pocket handkerchief she wet a corner with her tongue.
– You’ve got mud on you, she said, rubbing his forehead.
All these gestures removed place, country, everything. He felt he had to come back to the world.
– Tell me something about Ambrose quickly.
– Whenever he lied his voice became quiet and reasonable.
– What else.
– We used to fuck on the Cayuga.
– The day ferry? Jesus, on the Cayuga?
He was drawing out her history with Small, a splinter from a lady’s palm. He was constantly appalled.
– Would it be forgivable to say I stayed with him because he gave me a piano?
– What are you telling me?
– I loved the piano. It was something to get lost in. My exit, my privacy. He had his money, gambling, he had his winning elsewhere. I had my radio work and my piano. Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy. And you?
– I don’t know.
– There was a time when I could have slept with his friend Briffa, for instance. Around him the air was always fraught with possibilities.
– I like fraught air.
– Briffa was lovely. European courtesy, a suggestion of brutality, happily married. I liked him because he was shaved down and focused. He decorated theatres. He had his vision, and that of course is a great aphrodisiac. The only man I met who had a vision. Ambrose didn’t. But he drew people like Briffa and others around him. Nobody else would touch them, let alone give them jobs. It was a battle – Small and his friends against the rest. Ambrose was laying siege, attacking all those remnants of wealthy families who really were the end of the line.
– And you were the pianist.
– Yes, the pianist, the musical interlude, the romance in the afternoon.
– He was the first to bugger me.
Patrick lay shocked and still beside her in the afternoon sunlight. When he spoke of his own past he was not calm like her. He flashed over previous relationships, often in bad humour. He would disclose the truth of his past only if interrogated with a specific question. He defended himself for most