She is still asleep in the next room, a single white sheet covering her body. I have moved the typewriter to the table by the window so I can watch the movements in the street as I write. Or pull the shade and watch the movements in my head.
The City lies on the south coast, shielded from the warm sea by a crooked ribbon of porcelain white beach. The factories to the east at Zarkov cast their debris into the water and some of it finds its way here, washed and rounded by the sea. The students from the University compile it in makeshift sculptures, transient salvage collages that checker the sand like the posing pieces in an impossibly alien chess game. Panther to king wolf's four. Gargoyle takes hetaera. Panther devours gargoyle, check.
Above the beach, along the old ladies' flagstone boulevard, tumid parasols conspire in syrup conversations of the good days before the war. "Which war was that, the one before or the one after?" Her face once full now shows its bones and yes, we all have our problems, lamenting a wayward child soaking the precious hours in hot butter sun, dreaming of mustaches and bells. We all have our problems and there comes a time when the skin no longer shrinks to hold its shrinking cargo, the tendons of the neck turn to loose string, the joints corrode, and even the eyelids crinkle and roughen as the butter sun freezes in a mud-gray sky.
Until then the game continues. In a seaside outdoor cafe Carmichal takes a table by the railing and orders a grenadine. He crosses his British legs and the tweeds crackle. He cleans his spotted glasses with a perfect handkerchief, watches the gulls, speculates on the waiter's genealogy, draws an angle with his eyes and calculates the sun time.
Carmichal is precision honed. He moves in geodesics like a great circle, the shortest distance between two points. The right-angled streets of the City are a hindrance. He spreads his butter to the four corners and a bare spot of bread can confound the day. His dress is immaculate though a bit dated, trailing a step or two behind the rhythms of the fashion dance. He cannot tolerate her uncapped cold cream jars, scattered hairpins, broken sunglasses. Thus respectability is not the only reason for their separate rooms.
He has written in his diary: "I have long since learned that her mind requires attention only to the point of discipline. Her chief attributes lie in the heavy breasts, the fine arching of her back at the moment of orgasm, etc."
At the hotel she awaits his morning call, wondering just how he will arrange her day. He has warned her of the penis men in the park. The subway is a dirty maze filled with foreign dialects and hostile eyes. Directions confuse her. On her last lone sojourn into the streets of a foreign city she became hopelessly lost and had to call their hotel so he could retrieve her. Broad face bending over the match, she lights another cigarette. Dark hair pulled back. Aquiline nose, wet metal eyes. Vogue gone sensual. She tries to read an Italian magazine. Uncurls her toes in red fluff slippers. Time becomes the clock on the mantel and a fly buzzing a foot below the ceiling in placid parabolas. She feels her legs and the gray room trades colors with the gray sea.
She has been his mistress for over two years. He paid to have the hair removed from her upper lip by painless electrolysis. He demands that her calves and underarms be shaved at all times, but prefers a bit of down on the upper thigh. Of course she tells me all of this later, lying in bed strung out on nicotine from too many strong French cigarettes.
Carmichal is one-quarter Jewish, mother's side, a fact which he carries under his hypothetical homburg to spring at the proper ethnic moment. Perhaps this explains his talent for accumulating both money and women.
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