Free None to Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer Page A

She left Ben and his visitor with an apology—she had to put in some duty appearance at a political gathering. She had many obligations of this nature and her husband looked up from his preoccupation, giving the goodbye-go-well salute that was their customary private signal before other people.
    And when she came home later in the afternoon it was as she could never have imagined it could be, what had happened in the three hours’ interim was something that concerned her alone, her sexuality, a private constant in her being, a characteristic like the colour of eyes, the shape of a nose, the nature of a personal spirit that never could belong to anyone other thanthe self. Bennet Stark stood in a doorway once, admired by some woman who did not know he existed in a relationship with the woman to whom she remarked on his male beauty; that unknown woman was demonstrating a truth Vera now euphorically believed she had only just discovered; sexuality, in his case displayed guilelessly by nature in the sensuous allure of his face, was a wholly owned attribute, could not be claimed by the naïve bid: He’s my husband. Now Vera saw herself in that doorway. She lay beside Ben that night with a sense of pride and freedom rather than betrayal.
    During those two years there was no yoghurt and apple lunch eaten over papers at the office. She fled, whenever there was an interstice in activity there or at home, whenever her absence would not be noticed or when there would be some reason for it plausible to her colleagues, her husband, her adolescent daughter (Ivan was already living in England); fled to number One-Twenty-One. The duplicate key she was equipped with hung with her car and house keys on the ring with the bluebird medallion, a birthday gift bought for her with pocket money saved by the daughter. She let herself in. He was there or was to be anticipated. Sometimes he arrived with the kind of food he liked—herrings or smoked sausage or cold Kasseler ribs—and they ate together in that kitchen before or after making love. They bathed together before going back to other people, soaping each other—why was it no one, least of all women, would admit the tender pleasure of handling like this a man’s slippery soft tube, pressing it a little, playfully, to make it grow, palpating, rounding out the shape of the two eggs, often uneven in size, in the pouch that keeps warm and alive the seed of the young, akin to the physical attribute that belongs, in the animal species, to the female kangaroo with her pouch of unborn young, quaintlyreversed in the human species to the other sex, the male; the pouch that is anciently wrinkled, as if about to atrophy, even in a young man.
    Otto was fifteen or more years younger than Vera. Vague about his age perhaps because he wanted to forget the age of his lover. But when, in talk, she made references he was too young to remember, the attempt to catch up, the momentary blankness in his expression, was obvious. He had a high forehead tight, anxious, shiny-skinned, like that of a rosy apple, was not good-looking; in fact, Vera did not know what he really looked like, if the face is what one is; she knew the body, the cruciform male body with its line of light brown curly hair branching up from the navel into a crossbeam at the nipples, following the dominant shape from the narrow hips and widening with a splendid thorax to the shoulders. His face was the disguise that bearded men all wear; dark shaggy-blond growth curled round his mouth and gave its own shape to whatever his chin and jaw might be. Thick-rimmed glasses protected the expression in commonplace blue eyes as if they were seen through the distancing of binoculars. His mouth was the soft one, upper and lower lip the same fullness, she associated with dissatisfaction with self, and generally found unattractive in other people. In him, surrounded by that seaweed beard, it was to her one of those fleshy creature-flowers