I tell him I don’t want him to watch me while I put this thing on; I’m still shy in front of him, about my body. He says he will turn his back, and does so, and I take off my shoes and stockings and my cotton underpants and slide the feathers on, under the tent of my dress. Then I take off the dress itself and slip the thin sequined straps over my shoulders. There are shoes, too, mauve ones with absurdly high heels. Nothing quite fits; the shoes are a little too big, the waist on the costume is too tight, but it will do.
“There,” I say, and he turns around. I feel stupid; I want to see myself in a mirror.
“Charming,” he says. “Now for the face.”
All he has is a lipstick, old and runny and smelling of artificial grapes, and some eyeliner and mascara. No eye shadow, no blusher. For a moment I think I won’t remember how to do any of this, and my first try with the eyeliner leaves me with a smudged black lid, as if I’ve been in a fight; but I wipe it off with the vegetable-oil hand lotion and try again. I rub some of the lipstick along my cheekbones, blending it in. While I do all this, he holds a large silver-backed hand-mirror for me. I recognize it as Serena Joy’s. He must have borrowed it from her room.
Nothing can be done about my hair.
“Terrific,” he says. By this time he is quite excited; it’s as if we’re dressing for a party.
He goes to the cupboard and gets out a cloak, with a hood. It’s light blue, the colour for Wives. This too must be Serena’s.
“Pull the hood down over your face,” he says. “Try not to smear the makeup. It’s for getting through the checkpoints.”
“But what about my pass?” I say.
“Don’t worry about that,” he says. “I’ve got one for you.”
And so we set out.
We glide together through the darkening streets. The Commander has hold of my right hand, as if we’re teenagers at the movies. I clutch the sky-blue cape tightly about me, as a good Wife should. Through the tunnel made by the hood I can see the back of Nick’s head. His hat is on straight, he’s sitting up straight, his neck is straight, he is all very straight. His posture disapproves of me, or am I imagining it? Does he know what I’ve got on under this cloak, did he procure it? And if so, does this make him angry or lustful or envious or anything at all? We do have something in common: both of us are supposed to be invisible, both of us are functionaries. I wonder if he knows this. When he opened the door of the car for the Commander, and, by extension, for me, I tried to catch his eye, make him look at me, but he acted as if he didn’t see me. Why not? It’s a soft job for him, running little errands, doing little favours, and there’s no way he’d want to jeopardize it.
The checkpoints are no problem, everything goes as smoothly as the Commander said it would, despite the heavy pounding, the pressure of blood in my head. Chickenshit, Moira would say.
Past the second checkpoint, Nick says, “Here, Sir?” and the Commander says “Yes.”
The car pulls over and the Commander says, “Now I’ll have to ask you to get down onto the floor of the car.”
“Down?” I say.
“We have to go through the gateway,” he says, as if this means something to me. I tried to ask him where we were going, but he said he wanted to surprise me. “Wives aren’t allowed.”
So I flatten myself and the car starts again, and for the next few minutes I see nothing. Under the cloak it’s stifling hot. It’s a winter cloak, not a cotton summer one, and it smells of mothballs. He must have borrowed it from storage, knowing she wouldn’t notice. He has considerately moved his feet to give me room. Nevertheless my forehead is against his shoes. I have never been this close to his shoes before. They feel hard, unwinking, like the shells of beetles: black, polished, inscrutable. They seem to have nothing to do with feet.
We pass through another checkpoint. I hear the voices, impersonal, deferential, and the window rolling electrically down and up for the passes to be shown. This time he won’t show mine, the one that’s supposed to be mine, as I’m no longer in official existence, for now.
Then the car starts and then it stops again, and the Commander is helping me up.
“We’ll have to be fast,” he says. “This is a back entrance. You should leave the cloak with Nick. On the hour, as usual,” he says to Nick. So this too is something he’s done before.
He helps me out of the cloak; the car door is opened. I feel air on my almost bare skin, and realize I’ve been sweating. As I turn to shut the car door behind me I can see Nick looking at me through the glass. He sees me now. Is it contempt I read, or indifference, is this merely what he expected of me?
We’re in an alleyway behind a building, red brick and fairly modern. A bank of trash cans is set out beside the door, and there’s a smell of fried chicken, going bad. The Commander has a key to the door, which is plain and grey and flush with the wall and, I think, made of steel. Inside it there’s a concrete-block corridor lit with fluorescent overhead lights; some kind of functional tunnel.
“Here,” the Commander says. He slips around my wrist a tag, purple, on an elastic band, like the tags for airport luggage. “If anyone asks you, say you’re an evening rental,” he says. He takes me by the bare upper arm and steers me forward. What I want is a mirror, to see if my lipstick is all right, whether the feathers are too ridiculous, too frowzy. In this light I must look lurid. Though it’s too late now.
Idiot, says Moira.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
We go along the corridor and through another flat grey door and along another corridor, softly lit and carpeted this time, in a mushroom colour, browny-pink. Doors open off it, with numbers on them: a hundred and one, a hundred and two, the way you count during a thunderstorm, to see how close you are to being struck. It’s a hotel then. From behind one of the doors comes laughter, a man’s and also a woman’s. It’s a long time since I’ve heard that.
We emerge into a central courtyard. It’s wide and also high: it goes up several storeys to a skylight at the top. There’s a fountain in the middle of it, a round fountain spraying water in the shape of a dandelion gone to seed. Potted plants and trees sprout here and there, vines hang down from the balconies. Oval-sided glass elevators slide up and down the walls like giant molluscs.
I know where I am. I’ve been here before: with Luke, in the afternoons, a long time ago. It was a hotel, then. Now it’s full of women.
I stand still and stare at them. I can stare, here, look around me, there are no white wings to keep me from it. My head, shorn of them, feels curiously light; as if a weight has been removed from it, or substance.
The women are sitting, lounging, strolling, leaning against one another. There are men mingled with them, a lot of men, but in their dark uniforms or suits, so similar to one another, they form only a kind of background. The women on the other hand are tropical, they are dressed in all kinds of bright festive gear. Some of them have on outfits like mine, feathers and glister, cut high up the thighs, low over the breasts. Some are in olden-days lingerie, shortie nightgowns, baby-doll pyjamas, the occasional see-through negligee. Some are in bathing suits, one-piece or bikini; one, I see, is wearing a crocheted affair, with big scallop shells covering the tits. Some are in jogging shorts and sun halters, some in exercise costumes like the ones they used to show on television, body-tight, with knitted pastel leg warmers. There are even a few in cheerleaders’ outfits, little pleated skirts, outsized letters across the chest. I guess they’ve had to fall back on a mélange, whatever they could scrounge or salvage. All wear makeup, and I realize how unaccustomed I’ve become to seeing it, on women, because their eyes look too big to me, too dark and shimmering, their mouths too red, too wet, blood-dipped and glistening; or, on the other hand, too clownish.
At first glance there’s a cheerfulness to this scene. It’s like a masquerade party; they are like oversized children, dressed up in togs they’ve rummaged from trunks. Is there joy in this? There could be, but have they chosen it? You can’t tell by looking.
There are a great many buttocks in this room. I am no longer used to them.
“It’s like walking into the past,” says the Commander. His voice sounds pleased, delighted even. “Don’t you think?”
I try to remember if the past was exactly like this. I’m not sure, now. I know it contained these things, but somehow the mix is different. A movie about the past is not the same as the past.
“Yes,” I say. What I feel is not one simple thing. Certainly I am not dismayed by these women, not shocked by them. I recognize them as truants. The official creed denies them, denies their very existence, yet here they are. That is at least something.
“Don’t gawk,” says the Commander. “You’ll give yourself away. Just act natural.” Again he leads me forward. Another man has spotted him, has greeted him and set himself in motion towards us. The Commander’s grip tightens on my upper arm. “Steady,” he whispers. “Don’t lose your nerve.”