Reading Madame Bovary by Amanda Lohrey Read Free Book Online Page A

once I wonder if she might not be right.
    This reminds me of a brief relationship I had with a young soldier, an electrifying encounter of the kind you read about in silly romance novels. At the airport, in the crush, he walked up to me and said: ‘Remember me? We queued together at the city terminal when we booked our tickets’ (this was before online booking). I looked up and barely recognised him: he was in jeans then and now he was in the uniform of an officer in the army. He could only have been my age, twenty-three. He took me firmly by the elbow and ushered me to the counter: ‘Can you put this young lady in a seat next to me?’ he said. Not bad for a second lieutenant. Lots of front.
    On the plane he held my hand possessively, as if he’d known me for a long time, as if he had plans for me. We drank whiskey and looked away from the cellophane sandwiches. Neither of us could eat. After we’d talked for a while I realised I knew his brother. ‘You know my brother?’ he asked, and something black flickered across his face. ‘My father always preferred my brother to me,’ he said. His eyes were angry and hurt. ‘When I finished my degree I joined the public service but that didn’t work out and now …’ he looked down at his khaki lapels and smiled. I hadn’t realised how attractive a uniform was, in all its subtle greens. The tie was especially nice, a soft smoky rainforest green. He ordered another two whiskeys and ice.
    I was hot, sweaty. My head was dizzy. I had a dim awareness of being swept off my feet. I tried half-heartedly to armour myself with irony; he’s practising at being masterful I told myself. But this didn’t work. He gave off voltage like a human powerhouse, exuding a force-field of sensual pain. I was in a daze. His wounded, urgent need was overwhelming. ‘My father is supposed to be meeting me at the airport,’ he said, his eyes hot and cloudy. ‘I’ll bet he doesn’t come.’
    He knew I wasn’t stopping over for more than an hour and would be taking up a connecting flight. He called the flight attendant and asked her to book me onto a later one. He was being masterful. I didn’t argue, I was still in a daze.
    We spent an hour in the pale-blue airport lounge talking in senseless, unmemorable phrases, broken off from time to time as he jumped up and strode away, in his authoritative peaked cap, to look for his father. I was by this time erotically lost to him. After several sorties his eyes had blackened and his skin was flushed. ‘I knew it,’ he said. ‘I knew he wouldn’t come.’ Something heavy in my chest thudded and fell away into space. We altered my flight yet again. Limply I stood by a line of phone booths while he rang his father. The phone didn’t answer. He waited for it to ring out and then he rang a hotel in the city and booked a room. We took a cab, saying almost nothing to one another by now. In our hotel room, it was the old Southern Cross, we made love all afternoon. We took no precautions. I thought he might cry after he came the first time but he didn’t. His briefcase stood propped absurdly by the door, his soldier’s jacket draped across a chair. My chest felt as if a leaden rose had grown within it to fill a cavity I had until then been unaware of. It anchored me to the bed; only my hips were light and floated above me.
    In a limbo of dim light and buckled sheets he lay on his back, his pink chest rising and falling. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said. He held my hand. ‘I knew he wouldn’t come,’ he said. ‘In a minute, now, I’ll ring his number again …’
    One thing I had learned by the time I was thirty: men never get over their fathers.
    Some of us live, some of us die
    When I was twenty-six, I was hospitalised with pneumonia. It was a ghastly time in my life and I’ve never been as unhappy since. I was in