An Uncertain Grace Read online

  As I rub myself dry with the bath sheet I become myself.

  They are watching me. I am aware of them now. All eyes on me and I see myself here, my threadbare cardigan over a T-shirt with a comic panel on the front. Zombies approaching a car. The hero standing on top of the car with a cricket bat. I am probably too old now for a novelty T-shirt. I pull the cardigan close around my chest and fumble the buttons closed. Maybe I should start working out. It would be good for my health to start some physical activity. I am fatter in the stomach than I would like to be.

  Jane is looking at me. Plain Jane, who is so far from plain. I smile in her direction. I feel a sudden need to accelerate my habitual leisurely seduction. I need her to think of me in a different way. I need her eyes, glancing approvingly at my belly, my solid hips, my chest. I need her to give me back my cock, which used always to be so present. It has become difficult to imagine myself without a vulva, and I need to address this as soon as possible. I need Plain Jane to smile back at me, to see me as a man.

  She smiles. I feel my feet planted more firmly on the floor. I open my laptop. A flutter of panic. I track my cursor to the finder, search for the file in case it has embedded itself there, but I ejected the slim memory stick before I left. It is carefully tucked away in the envelope it came in. Her address on the back. Evidence.

  ‘Today,’ I say to the class, but I am really speaking to one person. I keep coming back to her, locking my gaze to hers. ‘Today we will discuss how a writer can seduce a reader.’ The predicted swell of laughter from the group. They are still young. This doesn’t change. In all my years of teaching, every first-year group will laugh in embarrassment when the subject of sex is even vaguely referenced. ‘As a writer,’ I say, ‘you are in complete control of the story. You have the reader in your hands. And as with any seduction, it is up to you to…land the fish, shall we say. Tickle it out of the water. Like a trout. Have you heard of trout tickling?’ Lots of heads shaking. ‘Well, look that up some time. The reader is like the fish and you just need to get your hands under there. A little tickle to reassure them. Then you follow up quick smart and land them. Seduction. Look that one up, too, while you are at it. It is an art, a craft. You have to craft your story so that it seduces the reader.’

  She doesn’t take her eyes off me. It won’t be hard to get her. She has read my novel, or she should have. It was required reading for last semester’s fiction subject. She has read it and therefore half my work has been done for me. She has been tickled. My hands are already hovering under her. All that I need do now is to lift her and flip her onto the shore.

  Jane seems nervous. She holds her satchel in front of her, shielding her crotch. I step aside, holding the door open. She has to push past me to get inside and her skin presses against my shirt. I smell her perfume, sweet and unapologetically feminine.

  My own house feels unfamiliar. I dump my briefcase on the table where I always put it. I shrug my jumper off onto the back of the lounge. I open the fridge, my fridge, and pull out the wine, my wine, but I am seeing all of it through a distorted lens. Each action familiar and yet equally unfamiliar.

  ‘You have so many books.’ She says this as if she is surprised that a lecturer in literature might read books. She touches a row of them with her delicate fingers, each one tipped with a pale shell pink. I imagine her fingers spreading those similarly coloured lips. Her nails seem to promise me the pink of her sex. I take her hand and wrap those cuntish fingers around a glass of sauvignon blanc. This is a perfect beginning.

  She is here to borrow Speak Memory by Nabokov but of course we both know that isn’t the reason we are here. She wouldn’t like the book anyway. I glance down at her tanned and hairless legs, the elegant red high heels that she slips off one by one, easing her feet into the long pile of the carpet as if it were unmowed lawn. She is like an old-fashioned girl from seventies soft porn. She is all warm limbs and Vaseline lens.

  She plumps herself down on the couch and crosses her legs and her skirt kicks up. She manages to seem shy and flirty all at once. This would be the signal to pounce as she arranges herself in front of me. She glances up at me, stretching her neck as if to offer her throat. I ease myself onto the couch beside her and I could so easily lean forward, press my lips onto her skin. This would restore me to myself. I take a long sip of my wine. I lean forward, looming over her.

  Looming.

  I see this with a strange sense of deja vu: I have been here before, only I was the one being loomed at. I lean towards her and she stretches her chin up and out and I see myself leaning down to breathe on my neck. I am displaced. I am at once both the hunter and hunted. Too late to waver now, my lips are so close to that pale throat, the pearly fingertips reaching up to cup the stubble on my cheek. I bury my face in skin. I breathe in flowers, flesh petals it seems, with my eyes closed and the gentle brush of her against my mouth. She is floral. Her face is a bouquet. I am lurching between one perspective and the next, her face, mine.

  I pull back, dizzy. I take deep breaths. I try to be still within myself but I can’t seem to find my equilibrium.

  I close my eyes. My skin feels too naked on my body. I am vulnerable. It takes me a moment to realise that what I am missing is that other skin, that rubber-like material that heightens as it curates my bodily relationship with the world. My skin on her skin is just too intimate and yet even my leg pressed against hers feels like it is a long way away from her body. And something else, as she shifts, puts her hands up to the front of her summer frock, undoes one button after another, even with the lace of a bra poking up above the pastel-coloured cotton, all this feels like an interruption. These are not the people in the story of my life. This man I am inhabiting, this woman I am about to find my way into, these are mere distractions. Even the possibility of sex with this girl feels like an irritation.

  The suit is where I left it, drying on a rack in the bathroom. It is the thought of it that stirs me now. I feel myself beginning to become firm. I kiss her, imagining the tight grasp of the fabric on my calves. The suit is mine to wear, the story is mine to inhabit. Hard now, I push myself onto this girl. I knew her name but now I have forced it out of the way. She is just some warm thing under me as I fumble with her knickers, unzip, unbuckle. I feel the shape of my penis and it feels like the first time in a long while. The warm wet clutch of her cunt gives me length and breadth again. I measure the whole length of myself in a single thrust. Male again. I withdraw and lose my sense of it as I lose connection with her body. I thrust in again and my cock is returned to me, three-dimensional, whole. I punch it into her, swelling a little each time, floating up into my sense of self, but at what seems to be maximum altitude I begin to plummet. I fall into—no, become—a chasm. I open to a cold, hard disappointment. I am my cock and yet I am also the disappointment of flesh, losing all hope of pleasure, thrust by agonising thrust.

  I feel the infusion of loneliness that will be numbing her thighs. Each awkward forward motion pushing her further away from me. I know her eagerness to please and also the glimmer of an understanding swelling deep in her belly. This old man will be no different from any of the young men. This old man, expert in narrative structure, is inexpert in the business of sex. This man, me, I am slightly unclean, unskilled, good for nothing when I step out of a lecture theatre and ease into a willing young girl.

  I am deflating. My cock bends painfully at the next thrust. I lift it out of her, letting the lips of her cunt suck at the sudden cold rush of air. I open my eyes. The nausea rises up to meet me and I pull away, flinging myself to the far side of the couch. Her dress is pulled high, her knees parted. I can see the red pucker of her vulva pursed at the edge of her knickers. The cotton slips back, almost hides her slit from my gaze. Her cheeks are flushed. Her eyes are locked onto the shrivelled worm of my penis, glistening wet and hanging sadly from my open fly.

  I hold my hand to my mouth, my stomach clamps down on itself. I feel a hot rush in my throat and swallow it down quickly, and
when I am safe from the attacks of my own body I look back at her. Jane. I remember now. Plain Jane with the porcelain inner thighs and the perfectly bald shell-pink lip still poking out the side of her damp underwear and her pink lipstick kissing the rim of her wine glass, abandoned hurriedly on the side table.

  ‘Get up,’ I tell her. I can see that she is confused. ‘Get up,’ I say again, and, ‘Go away.’

  She blinks, and very slowly moves her pinked fingers to her crotch. She plucks the elastic from its lodging and smooths the skirt of the dress over her knees.

  ‘Done with me?’ she asks. And then, with her lip curled up a little, ‘Doctor Greenwald?’

  I am thirsty. I reach for my glass and sip but wine is not what I am hoping for. I need some water.

  ‘It would seem so,’ I tell her.

  She finds her shoes and her bag and then she opens the fridge door and plucks the bottle of wine off the shelf and carries it with her to the door.

  ‘Thanks for the drink.’ She holds the bottle up to make sure I have seen it.

  I shrug. She hates me. If I had continued on with it, met her tomorrow and the next day and the next, then she would have hated me more. As much as Liv hated me. Hates me. Hates me, in the present tense. I put my cock away and zip up. The memory stick is where I left it last night.

  Memory stick. That is exactly what it is. I pick her memory up and turn it between my fingers. Each scene plays out in real time but there are breaks, cracks in her recollection. The recreation of her history skips over the boring bits or the bits she has forgotten. Last night I immersed myself in three weeks of trysts and emerged from it before the next day arrived. I wonder how long it will take to trudge through the three long years of our time together.

  Will she include the time we borrowed a car from her mother? The quick duck to the hills? Would a reader have to suffer through each of the three Christmases, with their respective aggressions and humiliations?

  I walk quickly to the bathroom. I am out of my clothes and pulling the suit on before I have time to rethink. Just to check, I tell myself, just to know what she has included and what she has left out. I step inside the skin and zip it up and I might as well have shrugged her body around my own shoulders. I can even smell her on me, an earthy musk. I breathe it in, knowing that it is an illusion. I sit at the same table. My laptop. Her memory stick.

  I pull the mask over my head.

  *

  The phone is ringing. I try to reach into my handbag for it but I can’t and so it must be a phone in that other place. I am sitting at a cafe. There is a damp tissue in my hand. I am eating a slice of cheesecake to wash the taste of the woman off my lips. I don’t hate her. She is just another of his students, but she is prettier than I am. Her breasts are bigger. She is more skilled at taking him in her mouth. I dutifully let him push my head down between her legs and pretended to like it. I pretended to like what he wanted. I press the tissue to my eyes but they are dry now. He didn’t kiss me once. Her face was slick with his spit and yet he didn’t kiss me once. I touch the tissue to my lips. The phone rings. I try to purse my lips angrily but I can’t feel any anger. There is just the terrible wrenching sadness, and the slack frown.

  But the phone.

  My fingers are numb. It is almost impossible to fumble the mask off my head. The parallel pause lines leap into view. They are like a slap in my face. I am falling backward, but no, not me, the world is slipping away and I am still upright. I flex my fingers till the circulation returns to them. I have been clutching the edge of the table so hard my fingers feel bruised.

  My phone is ringing. It is in the pocket of my jacket, which is still lying crumpled on the lounge chair. I look at it lying there and it is as if the jacket is a person, someone I abandoned, mewing like a kitten, lost, lonely. Jane. I am equating my jacket with Jane and remembering her feels terrible. I am filled with a rush of self-loathing and, worse, I am filled with a sense of my physicality. I was the man who pushed Liv’s head down on Lee’s crotch. I was the man who pulled myself and aimed it at her mouth, spilling across Lee’s clitoris as she licked it. I was that man. It makes me want to crawl back into the suit just to escape the fact of my history.

  I glance to the window. The sun is just beginning to set. I have only been in the suit for a few hours but it feels like weeks.

  I push up to standing, sway. I have lost my balance and I sit down again. The phone stops ringing. I hear a last isolated beep telling me I have a message.

  I stand again, with more success this time, using the table to support my weight. I am ravenously hungry, and so thirsty I could drink a gallon of water. I stumble into the kitchen and stand at the tap pouring glass after glass. The phone rings again but now I need to urinate. My bladder feels swollen, ready to burst. I unzip the suit and it is too late to run to the toilet. I grab a plastic mixing bowl and sink into the relief of pissing.

  I notice that the suit is sticky at the crotch. I have come again. Several times, by the look of it. It must have been in that scene, I remember it now as I shake off the last drops and tip the bowl into the sink. A stink of urine fugs up into my face. That scene where I crept out of his bed—my bed—and locked myself in the bathroom and put one finger into myself and brushed the index finger of my other hand up and down across my clitoris until the lips of my vulva began to pulse, sucking at my finger. My first orgasm as a woman. Or her first orgasm with me, but not with me.

  I trot over to my jacket and fumble for my phone.

  ‘Caspar?’

  It takes me a minute to recognise the voice of Arthur, acting head of school.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Thank goodness. You’re alive.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Where were you? Why didn’t you call in?’

  ‘Call?’ I move over to the window, lift one of the venetians. The sun is just beginning to set. It can’t be later than six o’clock.

  ‘Lucy covered your class but we were worried.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say and check the face of my phone. Thursday. Thursday night, 5:16 p.m. What happened to the rest of Wednesday? What happened to a whole new morning and a day? Could I have been sitting in that chair the whole time? My back aches and I stretch it out, leaning forward and resting my forehead on the sill.

  ‘I think I’ve come down with something nasty.’

  ‘We thought so.’

  ‘I seem to have…slept all day.’

  ‘No problem. Take your time. Just checking you’re okay.’

  I pause. I am not really sure if I am okay.

  ‘I might take tomorrow off.’

  ‘Good idea. We’ll see you Monday. Go to the doctor.’

  I nod but I’m not sure if a doctor can cure what I have.

  I look at my phone. Scroll through the contact list. I find her name. Liv. Phone number, email and address. I wonder if she is okay now. It has been years, but is she okay? I never once thought to wonder what her life has been like. She was in it, and then she was gone. I sent her away. She rang, kept ringing, but I just let it go to message. I thought it would be easier for her, for the breakup. Or did I? Did I think that? Or did I just not want to think at all?

  There was that girl with the really long hair. Hair to her thighs. Took her hours to caress it all with a straightener. She was already in the picture before I kicked Liv out. It was that strand of hair, that single fine thread, so long when I picked it out of the drain. Liv had to go before there were more hairs, in the sheets, swept under the kitchen bench, wrapped loosely around my balls. That’s why I kicked her out. It was to save her from knowing or to save me from the aftermath of her knowing.

  I lie back on the couch, exhausted. I am still hungry. I flick through my phone and call the number for the pizza place down the road. I order extra garlic bread, a packet of M&M’s. I could eat two pizzas but I just order the one.

  I lie with the phone to my chest. Liv. I wonder what happened to Liv. I should get out of the suit but it is so comfortable now, warm
and supple. I zip it up and hug my arms around the rubber shell. I slip the mask back over my face and click into the chapter menu. I am halfway through. Almost exactly. This is the mid-point in our story. I am tempted to play this out, just to the end of the scene, but I know I will become lost in it. My stomach groans. I haven’t eaten in almost twenty-four hours. I need a coffee.

  I peel the suit off and head back to the kitchen. I pour bleach into the sink and run the tap. The acid tang of urine is replaced by the alkaline slap of bleach. I throw the bowl straight into the recycling bin.

  While the coffee is brewing I snack on bocconcini from the plastic container. I eat a handful of olives and the oil runs down to my elbow. I wash my hands in dishwashing liquid. I am exhausted, and feverish, as if I really do have the flu. I slip my bathrobe on and sip coffee till the pizza arrives. The young man glances down at the rubber leggings poking out from beneath my robe but says nothing. He takes the tip I offer him and leaves quietly. Maybe he thought he’d interrupted me in the middle of some fetish game.

  Did he? I am certainly aroused when I lie back on the couch and pull the mask back onto my face. I am about to press play but then I roll over and wake up and although I am still in the suit I have not experienced anything but the cold dark emptiness of the universe and me plummeting through it.

  I would shower but that would take effort. I would have to get out of the suit. Taking the suit off at this point feels like it might hurt. Even when I unzip to take a piss it feels as if I am cutting myself open with a blade. I hold my stomach with one hand in case my bowels fall out through the gap in the suit. I zip up with no mishaps. And re-skinned I set the table with a picnic lunch, grazing on bread and cheese as I do it. I must eat. I must stop and eat and drink and defecate. I have a body and no matter how odd it feels to be inside my own body, it will need some sustenance or it will not be strong enough to finish what I have begun here.

  I am still swallowing a mouthful of coffee and a slice of ham when I press play. My teeth are chewing and I am swallowing and it is a nice segue because I am eating a toasted sandwich in the narrative, sucking up thick mucus along with tears each time I sniff loudly. I have been crying. This is real. This sucking in of air, the salt on the back of my palate. This is real. I have a vague distasteful memory of ordering pizza. It feels like that might have been a long time ago, or perhaps it is just a story someone told me, like when your mother tells you about that time you fell off the swing and needed stitches. The brief, distasteful tussle with Plain Jane is just a terrible story I have been told, a cautionary tale.