Free A Day and a Night and a Day: A Novel by Glen Duncan Page B

nickels. The accident left her with a scar like a sickle under her bottom lip. Your sexy scar, he said, which annoyed her at first because she assumed he was performing the standard romantic inversion, force-loving the bit of her he hated. Then she saw the cruel white woman was part of his fantasy and subsided, enriched. Augustus remembers going to bed with her that first time. She shared a sixth-floor walk-up in the East Village with Vera, a bony white girl with small face and a mass of dark hair like a Cossack’s fur hat who wrote songs and worked at the ACLU and chain-smoked Virginia Slims. The apartment, on Eleventh Street between Second and Third, was a mess. Television said nice white girls were clean and tidy but the chaos and dirt here looked feral. Certainly both girls hated their parents but what might have started as juvenile rebellion had revealed innate laziness. Augustus, stunned, wondered if they were going to do it standing up, since there was no visible room to lie down, until Selina began slinging things off what turned out to be her bed, a mattress on the floor under the window. She went to the record player—then as if she’d caught his thought that this was too big for musical accompaniment changed her mind. The Harry’s consensus was you fucked without batting an eyelid but there was no fooling themselves: they were full of catastrophic potential. The months of flirting and fencing suddenly fell away, left thema nude insistent reality. In reverential silence they went to the bed. For a long time kissing was a way of avoiding looking at each other since their eyes when they did gleamed with fear. Augustus was so preoccupied by the fact of having got her that he found himself trying to pretend she was someone else so he could get hard. For the first few minutes both of them faked hunger out of terror that their instincts had been wrong. It was nearly a disaster. But between them they got her blouse buttons open and the exposure of her breasts stilled him for a moment. He lifted himself to look at them, then at her. For a second or two he thought she was going to cover herself or roll away. But she calmed and looked back at him with something like amoral curiosity, and that was that. There was no going back. Once he was inside her it was a terrible effort to slow himself down, and every time he did there was her stare of collusion.
    â€œYou were nineteen,” Harper says. “So we’re talking Sixty…what? Seven?”
    The arithmetic’s beyond Augustus. His face prickles, his feet are bags of blood. “Sixty-seven,” he says. “Yeah.”
    â€œNow they’re saying the sixties only happened in Haight-Ash-bury and the King’s Road. The rest’s just wishful revisionism.”
    Harper closes his eyes for a moment and Augustus risks a glance at the guards. They’re actually playing cards with the porn deck, which presumably requires a weird concentration. He gets his eyes back on Harper just in time. Don’t suggest these interludes are wasted. “Well there was a lot going on in New York,” he says.
    â€œThe Vietnam party and the miracle of contraception. Must have been something to be able to fuck strangers without wondering if you were signing your own death warrant. Don’t youthink it’s laughable there’s only been one window in history from the ’thirties to the ’eighties when sex wasn’t a potentially lethal activity? Syphilis at one end and AIDS at the other and between them fifty golden years of trouble-free fucking. You were lucky.”
    Selina dug out a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from somewhere and rolled them a joint. It was March, Manhattan’s nothing season, everyone reluctant to uncurl from winter’s searing. While they lay together talking about the world the apartment’s radiators hissed and tonked. Augustus, trying and failing to hold the feeling of cunning conquest, was in shock.