The Honeymoon, page 8
When I returned to the delicatessen the following day, I requested half a pound of cheddar cheese sliced into medium-thin pieces, and when her back was turned, slicing the cheese, I put a brown envelop containing the photograph on the counter. As she turned back to hand me the cheese, she caught sight of the envelope. She took it gingerly between the palms of her hands, careful not to dirty it. She pressed it against her belly as she unclasped the metal binding with only the very ends of her fingers and peered inside at the photograph.
“I’m glad you didn’t forget,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t.”
“I’ll look at it later. I don’t want to get anything on it.” She smiled. “Thank you.” It had not before occurred to me that she was vain.
“I’d like to know what you think,” I said. “Could you let me know? I’m studying photography at the college. I like the early photographers, myself . . . Julia Cameron, Brassai.” I smiled idiotically and felt myself begin to redden. “Different centuries,” I continued, trying to reclaim what I was afraid might have been pretentious conversation. I only made myself feel worse, but kept talking in hopes that if I did not allow her to speak I might get things under control again. “I’d like to know, if you’d tell me . . . Perhaps you’d like to have a drink,” I finally got out.
She looked at me carefully, perhaps considering my intentions. “If you like,” she said.
I waited across the road from the delicatessen in the newspaper shop reading the headlines of the evening papers and flipping through fashion magazines. I didn’t want to get to the pub before her and wait, and become nervous. I knew I would end up drinking too much and having to leave for fear of embarrassing myself.
When Annie came out of the shop, she wore a pink wool car coat buttoned up tight beneath her neck. She carried a black bag slung over her shoulder and carried the brown envelope under her arm. From where I stood across the road, my face partially concealed behind a luxurious smelling magazine, I could see that she was smiling. I hoped the photograph was responsible.
I followed her down the road from across the street. She wore childish black leather shoes with covered toes and buckles. She kept them close together as she walked and pressed them tightly shut when she paused at a curb to let a car pass. Her manner of walking would become familiar, but at the time, I was struck by it. It was as if she was carrying something between her knees. She had let her hair down. I had never seen it that way before. It curled beside her neck, at the collar of her coat. Her face shone in the cold.
At the corner, she stopped and stepped into the chemist. It was the chemist where she now works. I did not know what to do, whether to walk ahead to the pub and wait for her there, or to follow her in and meet her coincidentally. I decided that a trip to the chemist together was a sophisticated intimacy, one that I wasn’t ready for, so I stepped into a phone booth, and picked up the phone. I felt like a detective. Married men hire detectives to watch cheating wives, or visa versa, but I was following another man’s fiancée. I watched the entrance and pretended to be listening to someone on the other end of the phone, even nodding and smiling at something they might have said. The shop windows glowed out onto the darkened evening street, but I could not see Annie.
When she emerged, she looked up and down the street as if she were deciding which way to go. She pulled the shoulder bag further up towards her neck, and arranged the collar of her coat beneath her chin. She frowned as if she were personally offended by the cold and walked down the high street, past the toyshop, and then the video store and turned left towards the pub. Once she had gone a safe distance, I hung up the phone and followed.
I gave her, by my watch, five minutes before entering the pub. When I had my hand on the door, it suddenly occurred to me that she could have been sitting inside by the fire watching me wait outside. Before I had time to worry sufficiently, two men came roughly through the doors almost knocking me to the ground. When I entered, Annie looked up as if she had been looking up every time the door opened. She smiled politely and indicated the chair opposite her. Her formal smile meant that this was an appointment rather than an engagement. I immediately felt it was a mistake to have come. In front of her sat a half-full glass of Bailey’s, and a half-smoked cigarette, the filter lined with freshly applied pink lipstick. Beside the ashtray, rested the brown envelope containing her photograph.
“Hello,” she said. The way she spoke was somehow different in the pub and in that one word she conveyed more sophistication than had existed in any of our previous exchanges. I can remember the sound of her voice. Although blue-smoke drifted from between her lips, it made her throat seem narrow and clean. “I think it’s a lovely photograph . . . Really lovely. Sort of sad.”
“I didn’t mean to make you look sad,” I said. “I’ll get us a drink.” I pointed down at her glass, still more than half-full.
“Bailey’s, please,” she said and drank the rest of the liquid. She handed me the glass and looked up at me. Her eyes watered slightly.
It took me a long time to get the barman’s attention. I ordered, and took a large sip of my pint before returning to the table. I focused all of my attention on not spilling any of either drink, but as I approached the table I could see she had the photograph out of the envelope.
When I put the drinks down, she did not look up. She guided her cigarette to her lips and said, with a gust of smoke, “you’ve also made me look quite pretty.”
I craned my neck over to take a look at the picture from her angle. I was standing above her looking down at her looking at a picture of herself. The image was black and white. The large window to her left is a washed out grey. The lights above her head were bright white, but without form, like snowflakes falling across the lens. Her hair was tied tightly behind her, and her eyes looked larger than they were. She looked young, younger than she looked, even then.
“What’s the matter? You don’t think I could look pretty?”
I looked up, and saw that she was smiling at me, with more familiarity this time. I walked around to the opposite side of the table and sat down. She took a drink of her new Baileys and continued staring at the photograph.
“I knew you’d look pretty,” I said. “You are pretty.”
“Thank you,” she said. “You’re very sweet.”
“I’m not saying it to be sweet. I mean it.”
A group of men were playing pool in the back room. Throughout the evening, they grew steadily more drunk and steadily louder. They let up cheers when one of them won or lost, or just made an especially good shot. As we spoke, when they let up a particularly loud cheer, Annie would look over my shoulder to see what the commotion was about, and I would be forced to look as well, to keep up the momentum of our conversation. We had three or four more drinks each. I suppose we got to know each other over the few hours we sat there. She asked why I was living in England, and where I had lived in America. “You get to travel, a lot, then,” she said. “I’d love to travel. I’ve been to Spain once.” She thought for a moment and then glanced up at me. “And I’ve been to Paris.” I wanted to ask about her engagement, but I didn’t. Once when I said something she found amusing she put her hand on the back of mine, and she didn’t move it away right away. I almost asked her then, but decided against it.
Several times, she took the photograph in and out of the envelope. She held it slightly off the table to be sure it wouldn’t get wet, down at her side where I couldn’t see it, as if she was looking at a kitten in a box. “Funny, isn’t it,” she said. “I’m not sure it looks like me.”
“You never know how someone’s going to photograph. You can compensate once you know. You can get parts of someone. You can get at it, but not all of it.”
“Oh, I know that,” she interrupted. “You just get a bit of what’s floating on top.” She finished her drink and stood wobbling slightly on her heels. “I’ll get another.”
“I’ll get it,” I protested, but she silenced me with the open palm of her hand. “I want to get it.”
I let my vision dissolve over the orange and red flames in the fireplace, and felt that I was drunk. The windows above the empty seat where Annie had sat were steamed against the cold outdoors. I turned in my chair to look at her, weaving slightly at the bar. She had left her coat heaped on her empty seat. She wore a conservative black skirt, and a cropped grey wool v-neck sweater. She turned and glanced back at me. When she saw that I was staring at her, she looked away.
“What is it about pictures?” she asked as she put my drink down in front of me. “I’ve never seen a painting look as sad.”
“No,” I agreed. “My mother disagrees. She says a photograph can’t do half of what a painting can. Tristan Tzara, this man who used to write about photographs in the twenties when people didn’t understand them as well as they do now, said a photograph presents an image to space which is more space than space.” She looked puzzled. “It’s specific, but not . . . Perfectly clear and static yet ephemeral and inconstant . . . Intangible in another way altogether, almost because it’s so specific.” I trailed off because she no longer listened as much as just watched. I had been reading about it in school and was interested in the theory of it all. I can’t believe now that I ever was. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Oh, Gordon,” she smiled. “The way you talk.” She was smiling again. I think she found me slightly ridiculous. She was just looking at me. She looked so lovely at that moment. She leaned forward. I thought she wanted to whisper something to me, but when I leaned in to hear what she had to say, she kissed me. When she stopped, the billiard players let up another cry and she looked up again over my shoulder. “They’re rooting for us,” she said. I turned in my chair to see several drunken men raising drinks in our direction.
“Well done, son!” one of them called.
The air had grown colder since we had gone into the pub. As we walked along the pavement, ribbons of grey steam curled from our mouths around our faces. I looked down at her hand out of its pocket, swinging limply beside her. I reached for it before thinking, or rather, the thought of what I had done came back to me like an echo or a memory in that drunken way that thought follows action. She did not flinch. She held my hand softly. We walked that way together, my hand in hers. Occasionally, I’d look over at her to see what look she had on her face, but she just looked ahead, smiling happily. I remember thinking how absurd it seemed that I should be already holding her hand. But I was enjoying it, just as I was the way I allowed her to lead us wherever we were going.
She led us to a corner of the blackened heath. The wet asphalt path reflected the orange streetlights in pools of color between long black stretches. We walked deep into the park, past several empty benches, and a line of tall oaks planted a determined distance apart. Behind the trees, a field opened up, and the moon made the sky brighter between a pair of rickety goal posts. I don’t remember where—and I have since wandered around that part of the heath trying to remember—she pulled me off the path into the dark, wet grass. She began to kiss me, slowly at first, and then (it may have been the drunkenness) with what seemed to be increasing speed, her face darting at me from behind her pink coat, as we turned dizzily around until we tumbled over. I felt the leftover rain seep through my trousers. She carefully undid my belt, unbuttoned my trousers and pulled them down just slightly so that the zipper wouldn’t rub uncomfortably against my skin. And then she raised her skirt and stepped out of her tights. I remember looking at them there on the ground beside us, cold and curled, the life of her seeping out, as she pulled a packet of condoms from the pocket of her coat. She threw the white paper bag from the chemist’s into the darkness. She opened one of the little blue packets and helped me put it on. She smiled, and then slowly, without a word, lowered herself onto me. Her feet were flat on the ground beside me. I put my hands on her thighs, but she didn’t look at me. She kept her eyes closed, her lips parted as if she were feeling around for something in a sack. I began to concentrate on the sensation. She felt warm and kind, like an underwater hug. As I watched her raise and lower herself, her bent knees propelling her rhythmically up and down, the thought came to me that she had embraced many others. For a moment I had the feeling I needn’t be there at all. Then, all at once, and all too soon, the sensation swept over me. I lifted my head slightly and she met my brow with her hand and stroked my hair. She smiled down at me with sympathy and reassurance as if she were a doctor who knew just how I felt—my shyness, the sudden remembered coldness of the air—but she’d seen it all before. And I found that profoundly comforting. “Thank you,” I said.
We lay there together. A little breath of wind passed over us: a cold piece of silk lain down upon us and then lifted off again. She kissed my neck and I looked into the dark sky at the trees’ bare branches above us. We lay there together in silence for a time, her knees pressed into the cold ground beside my arms. We reassembled ourselves silently beside one another. She tied a knot in the condom, and threw it into the bushes. It made me momentarily sad the way she tossed it away. I strained to see where it had gone, but couldn’t find it in the moonlight. I redid my trousers in time to watch her put herself together. As she stepped into her tights I caught a glimpse of her white skin and black hair and realized, with a pang of remorse, that I had not yet seen her naked.
We began to walk back the way we had come. She leaned on me. I felt tired as well, and suddenly nakedly sober. Above all, I felt proud to support her head against my shoulder. I put both arms around her and gave her a little squeeze and Annie stopped. We had not gone twenty yards from where we had lain together. She turned and faced me. I thought the hug had upset her and regretted my excitement. “Gordon,” she said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Certainly,” I said.
“I don’t mean to offend you.” She was reluctant. “Was that your first time?”
I felt I had no choice but to tell the truth. “Yes,” I said with as much dignity as I could gather.
Annie’s face instantly clouded over. “Oh, Gordon,” she said. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“Why?”
“Well, it shouldn’t have been in the park like that.”
“Why not? It’s as good a place as any.”
“I suppose.” Annie did not look at me.
I took her by the shoulders and looked confidently into her eyes. “Annie,” I said. “That was quite unlike anything I’ve experienced.”
She smiled. “Well, of course it was.”
“No. I mean unlike anything at all. A totally different thing altogether. Not just more of something else, but something completely unique.”
Her expression softened and I felt with both surprise and excitement that my look had landed in the right place.
“Annie,” I continued. “I’ve been thinking about you for months. The only reason I come into the deli at all is to see you.”
“Really?”
“. . . I think I might love you.”
“Poor Gordon,” she smiled.
An instinct I did not know I possessed compelled me to lean towards her. I had seen it in numerous paintings, and in numerous films, and this is how I account for the fact that I knew what to do. As I moved slowly towards her, I was conscious that this was something I should remember: our first kiss.
After I had released her, I noticed that Annie’s eyes were no longer closed. She was looking across the field behind me. There was a man standing there. He stood quite still wearing a hooded jacket. He held a stick in his hand. It seemed, from the way he stood, that he had been watching us for some time. “Do you think he saw us?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. She laughed. “Heathcliff out wandering the moors.”
I laughed as well, although I didn’t know why. I didn’t know who Heathcliff was at the time. I thought she meant her hairdresser fiancé, which frightened me. When I realized it wasn’t him, and he wasn’t going to charge towards us and challenge me to a fight, I felt sad for him. He had begun to swing his stick back and forth, swatting at the moist grass at his feet. I wondered how she could say such a thing. I didn’t know then how much Annie loved to read.
I waited two full days before I stopped in to see Annie at the delicatessen. I stood across the street and watched her clouded form through the blue frosted glass. I had the feeling that I should not go in. If I made the effort to see her again, I felt, I would be ignoring some unspoken adult agreement. When she had bid me farewell that evening on the high street, she made the separation easy; she did not mention any further arrangements. She was, after all, engaged.
After pacing the pavement opposite for several minutes I resolved that I would handle the matter casually. She could not expect me to stop shopping there, I reasoned.
It took me fifteen minutes to work up the courage to approach her. I meandered through the aisles, staying close to the shelves, reading labels, and collecting unwanted items in my wire basket. When I changed aisles, I took a peak at Annie working behind the glass at the meat counter. When I saw one of her coworkers, I was convinced that they looked at me strangely, as if she had told them the funny story about what had happened in the park and what I had said. By the time I approached the meat counter I had accumulated far more than what I usually allowed for my weekly grocery allowance.
“There you are,” she said before I had raised my eyes to her lovely face. “I thought you’d forgotten me.” I wanted to tell her that I had not forgotten her, that as I lay in my narrow orange bed at night, I pictured the slowly inflating outline we had left in the wet grass. “You had me worried,” she said firmly. She finished wrapping wax paper filled with cold meat for the little old woman standing in front of me at the counter. Annie avoided my gaze and took a long time putting the cap back on the marker and the marker back in the breast pocket of her coat. A bouquet of stray flicks of ink spread out around the pocket on her chest.
