The Love Object Read Free Page A

get a stud through and he had a small sip of whisky as a celebration. The bow tie was another ordeal. He couldn’t do it. I daren’t try.
    ‘Haven’t you done it before?’ I said. I expect his wives – in succession – had done it for him. I felt such a fool. Then a lump of hatred. I thought how ugly and pink his legs were, how repellent the shape of his body which did not have anything in the way of a waist, how deceitful his eyes that congratulated himself in the mirror when he succeeded in making a clumsy bow. As he put on the coat the sound of the medals tinkling enabled me to remark on their music. There was so little I could say. Lastly he donned a white, silk scarf that came below his middle. He looked like someone I did not know. He left hurriedly. I ran with him down the road to help get a taxi, and trying to keep up with him and chatter was not easy. All I can remember is the ghostly sight of the very white scarf swinging back and forth as we rushed. His shoes, which were patent, creaked unsuitably.
    ‘Is it all-male?’ I asked.
    ‘No. Mixed,’ He replied.
    So that was why we hurried. To meet his wife at some appointed place. The hatred began to grow.
    He did bring back the safety pin, but my superstition remained because four straight pins with black rounded tops that had come off his new shirt were on my window ledge. He refused to take them. He was not superstitious.
    Bad moments, like good ones, tend to be grouped together, and when I think of the dress occasion I also think of the other time when we were not in utter harmony. It was on a street; we were searching for a restaurant. We had to leave my house because a friend had come to stay and we would have been obliged to tolerate her company. Going along the street – it was October and very windy – I felt that he was angry with me for having drawn us out into the cold where we could not embrace. My heels were very high and I was ashamed of the hollow sound they made. In a way I felt we were enemies. He looked in the windows of restaurants to see if any acquaintances of his were there. Two restaurants he decided against, for reasons best known to himself. One looked to be very attractive. It had orange bulbs inset in the walls and the light came through small squares of iron grating. We crossed the road to look at places on the opposite side. I saw a group of rowdies coming towards us and for something to say – what with my aggressive heels, the wind, traffic going by, the ugly unromantic street, we had run out of agreeable conversation – I asked if he ever felt apprehensive about encountering noisy groups like that, late at night. He said that in fact a few nights before he had been walking home very late and saw such a group coming towards him, and before he even registered fear he found that he had splayed his bunch of keys between his fingers and had his hand, armed with the sharp points of the keys, ready to pull out of his pocket should they have threatened him. I suppose he did it again while we were walking along. Curiously enough I did not feel he was my protector. I only felt that he and I were two people, that there was in the world trouble, violence, sickness, catastrophe, that he faced it in one way, and that I faced it – or to be exact that I shrank from it – in another. We would always be outside one another. In the course of that melancholy thought the group went by and my conjecture about violence was all for nothing. We found a nice restaurant and drank a lot of wine.
    Later our love-making, as usual, was perfect. He stayed all night. I used to feel specially privileged on the nights he stayed, and the only little thing that lessened my joy was spasms of anxiety in case he should have told his wife he was at such and such an hotel and her telephoning there and not finding him. More than once I raced into an imaginary narrative where she came and discovered us and I acted silent and ladylike and he told her very crisply to