Charades Read Free Page A

wife, by the way, who chose to display that particular drawing? Green teddy bears. It invites analysis, doesn’t it? Joey’s your more interesting artist, I think. Sara’s drawings are too neat and proper, it’s happening already, you see, it gets to girls awfully quickly, the desire to please the teacher, to do things right. You’re going to have to watch that, it’s a real killer. Though I myself was spared from the worst of all that by having a mother who was known as the Slut of the Tamborine Rainforest.”
    He considers how best to explain Joey and Sara and the presence of their drawings in his kitchen, but instead, slightly dazed, echoes: “Tamborine Rainforest?”
    â€œOutside Brisbane. You do know where Brisbane is?”
    â€œUh,” he gestures apologetically. “Well, Australia. But I guess I’m a bit vague about the precise …”
    She shakes her head. “That’s another thing about Americans, you’re so parochial. Your geographical ignorance is absolutely stunning.”
    â€œWell,” he begins, “I suppose it’s …” and trails into an uneasy silence that spreads and fills the space between bed and armchair and settles onto the girl. He cannot bring himself to ask what news she is bringing of Rachel, nor what the mysterious Katherine Sussex has to do with anything (though that name is beginning to evoke a pervasive and non-specific dread).
    The blues music of Cambridge traffic, muffled, rises into the room and holds them in some kind of spell. When it is fractured — a collision somewhere, quite close — they both jump, and Charade continues as though the track of her thought, briefly on hold, has been nudged back into sound.
    â€œThe consequence of having Bea for a mother,” she says, “and having no father at all — although in another sense I had scores of fathers, but I could take them or leave them you see — the consequence was I escaped a lot of that caging, the bound feet business, the stuff that happens to girls everywhere, but especially in Australia. Charade, my mum would say …
    â€œBy the way, you keep mispronouncing my name. It’s Shuh -rahd. I hope you don’t mind my pointing it out. It’s because Americans mispronounce the word itself. The word charade, I mean. The proper way, well, the Brit way, which is much the same thing isn’t it? is the way I say my name.”
    Koenig is aware of a rising sexual excitement, its origins murky. He is dimly conscious that it has something to do with the provocation of a woman who does not seem aware of his … well, standing in the scientific community. (Only last week a woman he had met at a Wellesley dinner party wrote a note inviting him for dinner and postcoital champagne. When she telephoned she said there was an aura about him.) Of course this kind of thing is tiresome.
    Nevertheless.
    Still.
    Has Charade Ryan no awe at all?
    Her hands flash, her eyes flash, she springs out of the armchair like a dancer and paces back and forth around his bed.
    â€œAnyway. Aunt Kay — Katherine — whom you have met in Toronto, though you remember nothing whatsoever about her —” It is clear, from the tone of her voice that this is a particularised item in a more general condemnation. “Aunt Kay is not really my aunt, though she’s close to it. She and my mother Bea were half-sisters. Sort of. For a few years anyway. It’s complicated, but I’ll get to that.”
    Yes, he thinks. She probably will.
    â€œAnyway, up till now I’ve thought that Aunt Kay and my mother were either right or wrong about my father, and that eventually, if I was persistent enough, I’d find out which. But after what you said about Heisenberg … I mean, if electrons can exist and not exist at one and the same time … Well, maybe the stories about