within the structure of all civilizations, not just in distant cultures. You boys are sentimental. Death and glory. A guy I know fell in love with me because of my laugh. We hadn’t even met or been in the same room, he’d heard me on a tape.’
‘And?’
‘Oh, he swooned over me like a married man, made me fall in love with him. You’ve heard the story. How smart women become idiots, ignore everything they should keep on knowing. By the end I wasn’t laughing too much. No bell-ringing.’
‘Was he in love with you before he met you, do you think?’
‘Well, that’s interesting. Perhaps it was the habit of my voice. I think he’d listened to the tape two or three times. He was a writer. A writer. They have time to get into trouble. I had been asked to chair a talk at a conference given by a teacher of mine, Larry Angel. A lovely, funny man, so I was in fact laughing a lot at the way he thought and put things together with his nonlinear mind. We were onstage sitting at a table and I introduced him, and I guess my microphone was on and I was chuckling as he gave the lecture. The old guy and I always had a good rapport. Favourite-uncle atmosphere, slightly sexual but definitely platonic.
‘I guess the writer, my eventual friend, also had a nonlinear mind, so he was getting the jokes. He had ordered the tape because he was interested in researching burial mounds or something, a rather serious subject, and he wanted information, and details. That was our meeting. In proxy. Not a big moment across the universe . . . We were on a high wire for three years during our relationship.’
*
Their first adventure together: Anil drove her unwashed white car that smelled of mildew to a Sri Lankan restaurant. It was just a few months after Cullis had heard her on the tape. They were driving through early-evening traffic.
‘So. Are you famous?’
‘No.’ He laughed.
‘A little?’
‘I’d say about seventy people who are not relatives or friends would recognize my name.’
‘Even here?’
‘I doubt it. Who knows. What is it, Muswell Hill?’
‘Archway.’
She opened the window and yelled.
‘Hey, listen, everybody—I’ve got the science writer Cullis Wright in my car! Or is it Cullis Wrong? Yes, it’s him! He’s with me today!’
‘Thank you.’
She rolled up the window. ‘We can check the gossips tomorrow, to see if you were busted.’ She rolled down the window and this time used the horn to gain attention. They were stuck in traffic anyway. Maybe from a distance it looked like a fight. An angry woman half out of the car gesturing towards someone within, trying to get passersby on her side.
He nestled back into the passenger’s seat, watching her loose energy, the ease with which she swept her skirt up to her knees and leapt out of the car once more after pulling the hand brake with a grunt. She was now waving her arms, banging on the dirty roof of the car.
He would remember other moments like this later—times when she tried to strip off his carefulness, tried to unbuckle his worried glance. Making him dance on one of the dark streets of Europe to a small cassette player she pressed against his ear. ‘Brazil.’ Remember this song. He sang the words with her on that Paris street, their feet dancing over the painted outline of a dog.
He sat there, pressed against the back of his car seat, traffic all around him, watching her torso through the car door as she yelped and pounded on the roof. He felt he had been encased in ice or metal and she was banging on its surface in order to reach him, in order to let him out. The energy of her swirling clothes, the wild grin as she entered the car again and kissed him—she could have broken him free. But as a married man he had already pawned his heart.
She left him eventually in the Una Palma motel room in Borrego Springs. Left nothing of herself for him to hold on to. Just the blood as black as her hair, the room as shadowed as her skin.
He lay in the dark room watching the twitch of his arm muscle flick the knife into movement. He drifted, a boat without oars, into half-sleep. All night he could hear the faint whir of the hotel clock. His fear was that the beating in his blood would stop, that the noise