Free None to Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer

makes his bed. The motherly friend is helpfully surveying the needs of the new kind of tenant. She is briskly preparing the dirty stove to warm up her provision of snacks. The evidence that she knows her way about this kitchen as if she lived there is attributed to the general familiarity of women with the domestic domain: I haven’t got the hang of the stove yet, the new kind of tenant says, apologetically male.
    What you have done once you will do again. Sometimes Vera had reminded herself, sneered at herself, jeered in reproach; but this did not stop her. She felt resentment at self-confrontation with this evidence of what, when she was a child, her mother termed ‘behaviour’—which implied only transgression. Bennet was her lover, he was the one with whom she had slept while her young husband was fighting a war, expecting tocome home to her. Bennet therefore would be for ever in the category of lover, the one chosen above the sexual bond and moral ties of marriage, even when he became husband. That was how it was for how long? Again, the reality comes at an unnoticed pace, in the brief human time-span of one life the equivalent of the smoothing of the thumb on a holy effigy by centuries’ homage of those who kiss the hand. Bennet became Ben. The skill of his love-making became satisfaction to be counted on. She could not believe she was being strongly attracted to another man; Ben, Bennet
was the other man.
Yet in a way it was he who made another man possible, wanted, because he it was who had shown her, up in the mountains with those friends of a group photograph, what love-making could be, how many revelations of excitement and wild sensation it could mean beyond what she had thought was its limit, with the husband who was out of the way at war. If Ben had taught her that the possibilities of eroticism were beyond experience with one man, then this meant that the total experience of love-making did not end with him. The understanding of this, in her body, must have been there for years—logically, ever since she first was made love to by him? But it remained unaccepted or dormant until, somewhere in her forties, oh when her hair was still abundantly glossy, not a single broken vein showing a red spiderweb on her legs, a man came to the Foundation to film an interview on its work for a documentary he was making about forms of resistance in the country. He left his card to join those of other visitors to the Foundation who imagined they might be contacted again, though what for, politeness forbade asking. Otto Abarbanel. The surname was one she had never heard of; he worked for an Austrian television network and spoke with a slight—to her—German accent. He was solemn going about his filming and formal in manner, like Germans she had met. He telephoned her severaltimes and came back to the office, apologizing for disturbing her, wanting to verify this information or that, and when she realized these were pretexts she was at first amused to find she did not find him a nuisance. Then, that afternoon, without any transition from formality, he grasped her fist where it was resting slackly on her desk, covered it tightly in his own. She placed her other hand over this grip. And so suddenly, there was a covenant of desire.
    Will you come and see me, he had said, to make it possible to seem that some professional appointment were being discussed, there in the office where anyone might come in upon the atmosphere the gesture had created. —For coffee on Saturday afternoon.—
    Vera and Ben were busy people who did not need to account to one another for every movement. He had invited for lunch an old schoolmate who had become a successful painter. She was tranquil, serving at table, unbelieving of what she was going to do, and in the same state of mind went to the bathroom after lunch and fitted into her body the rubber device that had prevented her from conceiving since the birth of Annie.