What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(61)

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AISHA TOOK to knocking on my door as she went past, inviting me to screenings and more, but no matter what meeting time we agree on she arrives half an hour later than that, sometimes forty-five minutes late. I’d probably wait for an hour or longer but she mustn’t ever discover that. Perseverance doesn’t seem to move her: I only ever get to seduce her up to a very specific point. I’ve tried to think this through, but I only get as far with the thinking as I do with the seduction. When entwined, our bodies build the kind of blaze in which sensation overtakes sense—it becomes possible to taste sound—that half hiccup, half sigh that tells me she likes what my tongue is doing to her. And so we each take a little more of what we like and lust swells until, until she pulls away. No penetration permitted, no matter how naked we are or how good the stroking and sliding feels, no matter how delectably wet she is when I nudge her legs open with my knee. I look into her eyes and see craving there, but there’s also what seems to be abhorrence. Then she breaks contact.

Could it be that nobody likes a man without ambition and everything is withheld from him until he changes his ways? Is A saving herself for some fictional character, Willow Rosenberg or f*cking floppy-haired Theodore Lawrence or someone like that? Is there somebody else, somebody nonfictional? Is she doing this to make me tell her in words that I want her? I don’t like saying that kind of thing. So for now, if she doesn’t want to then I can’t. This sounds completely obvious but I’ve heard stories, from men, from women, that demonstrate that that’s not how it is for others. Consent is a downward motion, I think—a leap or a fall—and whether they’ll admit it or not, even the most decisive people can find themselves unable to tell whether or not their consent was freely given. That inability to discover whether you jumped or were pushed brings about a deadened gaze and a downfall all its own.

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PIERRE SAYS it sounds like Aisha “just doesn’t want dick.”

“So she prefers *?”

“Perhaps, but the only thing that concerns you in particular is that she doesn’t want dick. I just mean . . . OK, so there’s some guy, and he’s absolutely desperate to get inside you. Maybe it’s a bit off-putting?”

I can always count on Pierre to offer his honest opinion. Or to try to give me some sort of complex. Or both.

Here’s the thing that keeps me from trying anything rash: Aisha’s other passions expose her. She loves cinema so well that I can find her there, hints and clues in each of her favorites. I know whose insolent lip curl she imitates when she hears an order she has no intention of following, and I know who she’s quoting when she drawls, Oh, honey, when I lose my temper you can’t find it anyplace! Full carnal knowledge of this woman eludes me, true—yet I know her. Aisha used to want to write poetry, since she liked reading it. But the muse spake not unto her. Then she’d wanted to write prose, but had stopped bothering when she realized she couldn’t bring herself to write about genitalia. “A real writer has to be able to write about the body. They have to. It’s where we live.”

So A’s foible could simply be this: She doesn’t want lust to be the one to lead me in. It may be that lust is a breathtaking traitor, the warden’s daughter seen in the walled city at all hours of the night singing softly and teasing the air with a starlit swan’s feather. Lust, the warden’s daughter; a little feckless, perhaps, but not one to cause injury until the day her telescope shows her that troops are marching on the walled city. When darkness falls she slips through the sleeping streets, meets the foe at the city gates, and throws those gates wide open: Take and use everything you want and burn the rest to the ground . . .

. . . When it’s all over no observer is able to settle on a motive for this brat’s betrayal, illogical or otherwise. Historians dissect her claims that she was sleepwalking. Such are the deeds of lust, a child of our walled cities. But say whatever you want about her, she will not be denied. Or will she???

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I DRIFTED into unemployment without really noticing; I hung around in the lobby of the Glissando so much I didn’t have time to go to work. Somebody at the hotel might need some skill of mine and then I could rejoin the rest of my family and continue the Barrandov tradition of providing debatable necessities. But nobody had need of me. I watched my mother dashing to and fro muttering into a walkie-talkie and my dad and Odette striding about with their thumbs tucked into the vacant loops in their tool belts. Had I missed my chance? As I ran through my savings I decided to work on developing ambition at the same time as amusing myself. I stole expensive items and in the moment of acquisition found that I didn’t want to keep them and couldn’t be bothered to sell them. I returned them before anybody noticed they were gone. The trickiest and most pleasing endeavor (also the endeavor that required going up to London and applying the most detailed makeup and speaking with a Viennese accent that was perfect down to the pronunciation of the very last syllable) was the theft and fuss-free return of a diamond necklace from Tiffany’s on Old Bond Street. I almost didn’t put the necklace back, but Aisha didn’t like it and I couldn’t think of anybody else to give the thing to. The diamonds looked muddy. Upon stealing the necklace my first impulse was to give it a good wipe.

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THERE’S A SHORT film of Aisha’s I watched more than a few times during this period. It’s called Deadly Beige, is set in Cold War–era St. Petersburg, and relates the dual destruction of the mental health of a middle-aged brother and sister. The siblings share a house and are both long-standing party members, employed as writers of propaganda. One night they receive notification from Moscow that it’s time for them to do their bit toward helping keep the party strong. They are to do this by raising subtle suspicion among their fellow party members that they, the brother and sister, are in fact spies and observing the investigation into their activities at the same time as doing their genuine best to thwart this investigation. Discussion of this “exploratory exercise” is prohibited, so the siblings are unable to discern whether their St. Petersburg colleagues are aware of this exercise. Neither do they have the faintest idea who to report back to in Moscow. The letter they received was stamped with an authentic, and thus unrefusable, official seal, but was unsigned. This letter is delivered to them very late at night—the sister takes it from the trembling hand of a man who is then shot by a sniper as he walks away from their front door. The siblings then hear further shots at varying heights and distances that suggest the sniper has also been shot, followed by the sniper’s sniper. There can be no doubt that disobedience would be stupid. So would halfhearted obedience: If the brother and sister fail to perform their tasks satisfactorily they will receive “reprimands”—what does that mean, what is this suggestion of plural punishment per failed task? The first task is to tear the letter up and eat it. In order to receive their instructions they take turns visiting a derelict house on the outskirts of the city, where they find that week’s instructions written on a bedroom wall. They’re instructions for setting up various staged liaisons and the preparation of coded, nonsensical reports. Having read and memorized the instructions, they are to paint over them. The brother and sister are forbidden to enter the house together. So she enters alone, he enters alone, and it wasn’t so bad concocting slanders against each other as long as they took care not to look each other in the eye. Another concern: Some of the staged liaisons they set up feel all too genuine.