The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [81]
She went to the refrigerator and started looking over things.
“Hey, stop that, eat your meal,” he said.
She was bent over, her butt in the air. “Yes, Daddy,” she said. She turned and looked over her shoulder—“We decided we’re both calling you ‘Daddy’ today”—and went on looking, lifting up one thing after another and smelling it. She found something and held it out. It looked like a bag of greens, Italian parsley.
“How can parsley smell so bad?” she said. Although it did look sort of liquified. “There must be something else.” She began poking around some more.
“Okay, okay, enough,” he said. He took the parsley bag from her hand, put it in the trash, took the trash bag out of the can and placed it outside the door. “Now can we eat?”
“I’d be delighted to,” she said.
There was tension between them, but it was of a different kind than before. It seemed her fascination with him, or with her fantasy of him, the big game she’d been after, had waned. In its stead was something else, a sort of charged repugnance. He had been her prey. Her interest had been in the pursuit, in tracking and seizing her quarry. Now that she had succeeded, she didn’t seem to have much interest in eating him. But it was not only that. There was also disappointment. He had surrendered too fully. She had told me on the way there that in their last encounter he had gotten down on his knees, begged her to marry him. Could it be true? He said she was a coward, she was denying something big if she refused him. She would regret it to the end. Again, the island came up, the island he would buy for her in Tigre.
He cared so much that she liked his food. But she wasn’t eating. I felt for him, a pang. There was nothing worse she could do to him than not finish his food.
She pushed her plate back. “This was so fun before. Now it’s ruined.”
“Why ruined?” he asked, in his radio announcer voice. He seemed to be attempting to make it emanate off the walls. But nothing worked anymore. He had to be great to warrant her humiliating him. His greatness alone, imagined or real, made it satisfying. When she didn’t answer, he chewed on his lip, rabbit-like, yet another specimen of small game, the streets outside full of such rabbit-like game, chewing on pale grasses. It was this that made her furious, that he was like the rest.
“Stop doing that!” He stopped, which seemed to irritate her even more. She stood up. “I’m going.”
“Wait.” We both said it, he and I in tandem.
“I wanted to open a bottle of wine, a very special bottle,” he said.
“Oh, you with the wine,” she said, rolling her eyes. But it was clear that this had had an effect.
“A Saint Emilion from ’76. It was written up recently.”
“In your wine magazine?” she asked with condescension. There was a wine magazine that he sometimes wrote for. He had managed to make her curious, but she still pretended to be bored, in a juvenile, boyish way. “Okay, I’ll have a sip before I go.”
He took tiptoe ballerina steps to the kitchen, as if any brusque move might make her leave.
I knew that, as always, the best thing was to distract her. I picked up one of his pipes from the windowsill. I lit it, puffed. She laughed.
He reappeared, wine bottle in hand. “Come this way,” he said, wisely changing the setting.
We migrated to the living room. He had opened the wine, was letting it breathe. I kept the pipe in my hand. It was evident, from her demeanor, that the tide had changed. Always, when she perked up, she was like a child. It was so easy to make her happy. He and I caught each other’s eye—here she was, happy again.
The night went on. The guards crossed the garden. We sipped the wine. She disappeared for a moment, then came out eating a slender bit of ham, pink and delicate, carved from the spit. She put her head back and let it drop into her mouth. He was watching her mutely. The ridiculous, hilarious thought occurred to me, he wants to be eaten like that ham.
Suddenly, she was excited. “I had an image, I had an image,” she said to him. “I came over,