The lecture is a favourite among her students. It’s the one on the role of female camp-followers through the ages, before and after battles—their handiness as bodies-for-hire, rapees, and producers of cannon fodder, their tension-reducing, nursing, psychiatric, cooking and laundering and post-massacre looting and life-terminating skills—with a digression on venereal diseases. Rumour has it that the students’ nickname for this lecture is “Mother Courage Meets Spotted Dick,” or “Whores ‘n’ Sores”; it usually attracts a contingent of visiting engineers, who come for the visuals, because Tony has an impressive instructional film she always screens. It’s the same one the army showed to its new recruits at the time of the Second World War to promote the use of condoms, and features many a rotted-off nose and green, leaking male organ. Tony is used to the nervous laughter. Put yourself there, she will tell them. Pretend it’s you. Now: less funny?
At that time syphilis was considered to be a self-inflicted wound. Some guys used VD to get themselves invalided home. You could be court-martialled for having a dose, just as you could for shooting yourself in the foot. If the wound was the disease, then the weapon was the whore. Yet another weapon in the war of the sexes, the whore of the sexes, the raw of the sexes, the raw sexes war. A perfect palindrome.
Maybe that’s what West found so irresistible about Zenia, Tony used to think: that she was raw, that she was raw sex, whereas Tony herself was only the cooked variety. Parboiled to get the dangerous wildness out, the strong fresh-blood flavours. Zenia was gin at midnight, Tony was eggs for breakfast, and in eggcups at that. It’s not the category Tony would have preferred.
All these years Tony had refrained from asking West about Zenia. She hadn’t wanted to upset him; also she was afraid of finding out any more about Zenia’s powers of attraction, about their nature and their extent. But after the return of Zenia she couldn’t help herself. On the edge of the crisis, she had to know.
“Remember Zenia?” she asked West at dinner, two nights ago. They were having fish, a sole d la bonne femme from Tony’s
Basic French Cooking book, bought to go with her battlefieldof-Pourrieres fish platter.
West stopped chewing, just for a moment. “Of course,” he said.
“What was it?” said Tony. “What was what?” said West.
“Why you—you know. Why you went with her.” Tony felt herself tensing up all over. Instead of me, she thought. Why you abandoned me.
West shrugged, then smiled. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t remember. Anyway, that was a long time ago. She’s dead now” Tony knew that West knew that Zenia was far from dead. “True,” she said. “Was it the sex?”
“The sex?” said West, as if she’d just mentioned some forgotten but unimportant shopping-list item. “No, I don’t think so. Not exactly.”
“What do you mean, not exactly?” said Tony, more sharply than she should have.
“Why are we talking about this?” said West. “It doesn’t matter now”
“It matters to me,” said Tony in a small voice.
West sighed. “Zenia was frigid,” he said. “She couldn’t help it. She was sexually abused in childhood, by a Greek Orthodox priest. I felt sorry for her.”
Tony’s mouth dropped open. “Greek Orthodox?”
“Well, she was part Greek,” said West. “Greek immigrant. She couldn’t tell anyone about the priest, because nobody would have believed her. It was a very religious community:”
Tony could barely contain herself. She felt a raucous and unseemly merriment building up inside her. Frigid! So that’s what Zenia had told poor West! It does not at all accord with certain confidences Zenia once saw fit to share with Tony on the subject of sex. Sex as a huge plum pudding, a confection of rich delights, whose pleasures she would enumerate while Tony listened, shut out, nose to the glass. Tony could just see whiteknight West, dutifully huffing and puffing away, giving it his best shot, trying to save Zenia from the evil spell cast by the wicked, non-existent Greek Orthodox priest, with Zenia having the time of her life. Probably she told him she was faking orgasm to please him. Double the guilt!
It would have been a challenge for him; of course. Warm up the Ice Maiden. The first man ever to successfully explore those polar climes. But of course there was no way he could win, because Zenia’s games were always rigged.
“I never knew that,” she said. She fixed West with her large wide-open eyes, trying to look sympathetic.
“Yeah, well,” said West. “She found it really hard to talk about.”
“Why did you break up with her?” said Tony. “The second time. Why did you move out?” Now that they’d crossed the border into the never-mentioned, now that West was talking, she might as well push her advantage.
West sighed. He looked at Tony with something close to shame. “To be honest,” he said, and stopped.
“Yes?” said Tony.
“Well, to be honest, she kicked me out. She said she found me boring.”
Tony appalled herself by nearly laughing out loud. Maybe Zenia was right: from a certain point of view, West was boring. But one woman’s meat was another woman’s boredom, and West was boring in the same way children were boring, and interesting in the same way, too, and that’s what a woman like Zenia would never see. Anyway, what was true love if it couldn’t put up with a little boredom?
“Are you all right?” West asked. “Choked on a bone,” said Tony. West hung his head. “I guess I am boring,” he said.
Tony felt contrite. She was cruel for finding this funny. It wasn’t funny, because West had been deeply wounded. She got up from the table and put her arms around his neck from behind, and laid her cheek against the top of his sparsely covered head. “You aren’t at all boring,” she said. “You’re the most interesting man I’ve ever known.” This was correct, since West was in fact the only man Tony had ever known, in any way that counted.
West reached up and patted her hand. “I love you,” he said. “I love you much more than I ever loved Zenia.”
Which is all very well, thinks Tony, sitting in the lobby of the Arnold Garden Hotel, but if that’s really true, why didn’t he tell me that Zenia called? Maybe he’s already seen her. Maybe she’s already lured him into bed. Maybe her teeth are in his neck, right now; maybe she’s sucking out his life’s blood while Tony sits here in this perverse leather chair, not even knowing where to look, because Zenia could be anywhere, she could be doing anything, and so far Tony doesn’t have a clue.
This is the third hotel she’s tried out. She’s spent two other mornings hanging around in the lobbies of the Arrival and the Avenue Park, with no results whatsoever. Her only lead is the extension number, the one scribbled by West and left beside his phone, but she’s hesitated to call all the hotels and use it because she doesn’t want to alert Zenia, she wants to take her by surprise. She doesn’t want to ask for her at the desk either, because ‘ she knows in her bones that Zenia will be using a false name; and once Tony has asked, and has been told there’s no guest of that name, it would look suspicious if she were to keep on sitting in the lobby. Also she doesn’t want to be remembered by the staff, should Zenia be found later wallowing in a pool of blood. So she merely sits, trying to look like someone waiting for a business meeting.
Her theory is that Zenia—who is by habit a late riser—must at some point get out of bed, must take the elevator to the main floor, must walk through the lobby. Of course it’s not beyond Zenia to stay in bed all day or, sneak down the fire stairs, but Tony is betting on the law of averages. Sooner or later—supposing Tony is in the right hotel—Zenia will appear.
And then what? Then Tony will leap or slither out of her chair, will patter across the floor to Zenia, will chirp a greeting, will be ignored; will scuttle after Zenia as she sweeps out through the glass doors. Gasping for breath, her outmoded gun and silly cordless drill clanking together in her bag, she will catch up to Zenia as she strides along the sidewalk. “We need to talk,” Tony will blurt.