The Third Sense

THE SCENT OF A WOMAN LINGERS IN THE MIND LONG AFTER IT FADES

The senses, "usually reckoned as five—sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch."

— The Oxford English Dictionary

He's the owner of one of the private airlines that have taken up the internal routes between small cities and local areas the national airline, flying at astro­nomical heights to five continents, hasn't bothered with. Until lately, that is, when its aircraft with full-length sleeper beds and gourmet menus haven't succeeded in cosseting it against falling profits. Now it wants to pick up cents on the local routes' discount market, enter into competition with modest craft flitting to unimportant places on home ground.

But that wouldn't have anything to do with this night.

Could have been some other night (Tuesdays he plays squash) if it didn't happen to be when there was a meeting of private airline owners to discuss their protest against the national carrier's intention as a violation of the law of unfair competition, since the great span of the national wings is subsidized by taxpayers' money. She didn't go along to listen in on the meeting because she was behind time with marking papers in media studies from her students in that university department. She was not alone at her desk, their dog lay under it at her feet, a fur-flounced English setter much loved by master and mistress, particularly since their son had gone off to boarding school. Dina the darling held the vacant place of only child. So intelligent, she even seemed to enjoy music; a Pearl Fishers CD was playing, and she wasn't asleep. Well, one mustn't become a dotty dog lover, Dina was probably waiting to catch his footfall at the front door.

It came when the last paper was marked and being shuffled together with the rest for tomorrow; she got up, stretching as she was instructed at aerobics class, and followed the dog's scramble downstairs.

He was securing the door with its locks and looped chain, safety for their night, and they exchanged, How'd it go, any progress? Oh, round in circles again; that bloody lawyer didn't show—but the master didn't have to push down the dog's usual bounding interfer­ence when the master came home from anywhere, anytime. Hullo my girl—his expected greeting ignored, no paws landing in response on his shoulders. While he was questioned about the evening and they considered coffee or a drink before bed, you choose, the dog was intently scenting round his shoes. He must have stepped in something. As they went upstairs together, he turning from above her to repeat exasperated remarks about why he was so late, how long the meeting had dragged on, the dog pushed past her to impede him, dilated nose rising against his pants legs. Dina, down! What d'you think you're doing! He slapped the furry rump to make her mount ahead. She stood at the top of the stairs in the hunting dog's point stance, faced at him. Dina'd never been in the field, her master

was not a hunting man. Some displaced atavistic tic come up in an indulged house pet.

While they undressed they decided for cof­fee. Dina didn't jump on their bed in customary invitation for them to join her; she was giving concentrated attention to his discarded pants, shirt, shoes. Must be the shoes that perfumed his attraction. Doggy doo, Eva said. Wait a minute, don't put them on the rug. I'll run the tap over the soles. Wendell laughed at the crumple of distaste lifting from her nose, her concern for the kilim. In the bathroom instead she wet a streamer of the toilet roll, rubbed each sole and flushed the paper down the bowl: Although there was no mess clinging to the leather, a smell might remain. She propped his shoes to dry, uppers resting against the wall of the shower stall.

When she came back into the bedroom he'd dropped off, asleep, lying in his pajama pants, the newspaper untidy across his naked chest: opened his eyes with a start.

"Still want coffee?"

He yawned assent.

"Come, Dina. Bedtime."

As a child enjoys a cuddle in the parents' bed before banishment to his own, it was the dog's routine acceptance that she would descend to her basket in the kitchen when the indulgence was declared over. Tonight she wasn't on the bed with master; she got up slowly from where she lay beside a chair, turned her head in some quick last summons to sniff at his clothes lying there and went down to her place while Eva brewed the coffee.

They drank it side by side in bed. "I didn't make it too strong? Looks as if nothing could keep you awake tonight anyway."

There were disturbed nights these days, when she would be awakened by the sleepless changed rhythm of the breathing beside her, the inter­rupted beat at the heart of intimacy shared by lovers over their 16 years. He had put all their funds into his airline. Flight Hadeda (her choice, the name of the ibis that flew over the house call­ing out commandingly). Profits of the real estate business he'd sold, her inheritance from her father's platinum mining interests. Those enter­prises of old-regime white capitalism were not the way to safe success in a mixed economy— politically correct capitalism. Such enterprises were now anxiously negotiating round affirma­tive action requirements that this percentage or

that of holdings in their companies be reserved for black entrepreneurs, with workers becoming token shareholders in stock exchange profits. A small airline, dedicated to solving something of the transport problems of a vast developing country, had patriotic significance. If Wendell and his partner are white, the cabin attendants, one of the pilots and the engineer are black. Isn't it an honest, not exploitative, initiative on which they've risked everything? She knows what keeps him open-eyed, dead-still in the night: If the national airline takes up the homely routes, its resources will ground the Everything in loss. Once or twice she has broken the rigid silence intended to spare her; the threat is hers as well. There is no use to talk about it in the stare of night; she senses that he takes her voice's entry to his thoughts maybe as some sort of reproach: The airline is his ven­ture, way out, in middle age.

The coffee cups are on the floor, either side of their bed. She turned on her elbow to kiss him good night but he lifted a hand and got up to put on the pajama jacket. She liked his bare chest near her, the muscles a little thicker—not fat—than they used to be; when you are very tired you feel chilly at night. Climbing back to bed, he stretched to turn off the light above. His sigh of weariness was almost a groan, let him sleep; she did not expect him to turn to her. Let the mutual heart beat quietly. Before moving away for private space they mostly fell asleep in what she called the spoon-and-fork way: she on her side and his body folded along her back, or he on his other side and she curved along his. Of course he was the spoon when enveloping her back in protec­tion from shoulders to thighs; her body was the slighter line of the fork, its light bent tines touch­ing the base of his nape, her breasts nestled under his dorsal muscles. This depended haphazardly on who turned this or that side first; tonight he rolled onto his right, approaching deep sleep giv­ing him a push that way. The gentle impetus reached her to follow, round against him. The softness of breasts in opposition to the male rib cage and spine is one of the wordless questions and answers between men and women. In offended vanity that long survives, she never for­got that once, in early days, he'd remarked as an objective observation, she didn't have really good legs; her breasts were his admiring, lasting discov­ery. In bantering moods of passion she'd tell him he was a tit man, and he would counter with mock regret that he hadn't ever had a woman with those ample poster ones on display. In tonight's version of the spoon-and-fork embrace she always had her closed eyes touched against his hair and her nose and lips in the nape of his neck. She liked to breathe there, into him and breathe him in, taking possession he was not conscious of and was yet the essence of them both. These were not the sort of night moments you tell the other; anyway they half belong to the coming state of sleep, the heightened awareness of things that's called the unconscious, (continued on page 126)

THIRD SENSE

(continued from page 84)

None of his business, secret even from herself, that she enters him there as, female, she can't the way he enters her. Or it's just something else, the way you would bury your face in that incredibly innocent sensuous touch and smell of an infant's hollow under the back of its skull. But that's not a memory that per­sists from the distant infancy of a 15-year-old whose voice has broken. She moves her face, herself, into the nape as she does, without at first meeting the skin, not to disturb, the touch of the lips to come after the gentlest touch of her breathing there-----

She's sniffing. She's drawing back a little from the hollow, smooth and unlined as if it were that of a man of 20. Comes close again. Scenting. Her nose drawn tight, then nostrils flared to short intakes of whatever. Scenting. She knows their smell, the smell of his skin mingled with what she is, a blend of infusions from the mysterious chemistry' of differ­ent activities in different parts of their bodies, giving off a flora of flesh juices, the intensity or delicacy of sweat, semen, cosmetics, saliva, salt tears; all become an odor distilled as theirs alone.

Scenting on him the smell of an­other woman.

She moved carefully out of bed. He was beyond stirring as her warmth left him. She went into the bathroom. Switched on the light above the mirror and forced herself to look at herself. To make sure. It was facing a kind of photography no one had invented. It wasn't the old confron­tation with oneself. There was another woman who occupied the place of that image. Smell her.

She, herself, was halfway down the passage darkness to the bed in the room that served as guest room and storeroom when—despising that use­less gesture—she went back. In their bed she lay spaced away from where she would allow herself to approach, scenting again what she already had. Rationality attacked: why didn't he shower instead of dozing bare-chested and then climbing into bed. Yes, he'd got up and put on the pajama jacket in place of the shower's precaution. He showered when he came home after squash games. Was it really from the squash courts he returned, always, Tuesday nights.

It wasn't that she didn't allow herself to think further; she could not think. A blank. So that it might not begin to fill, she left their bed again as carefully,

silently as the first time and in the bath­room found his bottle of sleeping pills (she never took soporifics, a university lectureship and the takeoff and landing of a risky airline enterprise did not share the same "stress"). She shook out what looked like a plastic globule of golden oil and swallowed it with gulps of tap water cupped in her hand. When she woke from its unfamiliar stun in the morn­ing he was coming from the bathroom, shiningly freshly shaven, called, "Hullo darling" as he did "Hullo my girl" in affectionate homecoming to their dog.

Eva and Wendell Tate lived the pattern of the working week, seven days and the next seven days differentiated only by the disruptions of Wendell's alter­nations of tentative hopes and anxiety about negotiations with the national air­line that might bring not a solution for Flight Hadeda's survival but a resolution as its bankruptcy. "That's no exaggera­tion." He rejected her suggestion that, as negotiations were lagging on, this was surely a good sign that the government was at last having doubts. After all its rap­ping the private sector over the knuck­les for not taking enough responsibility in new ways to develop the infrastruc­ture.... Beginning to listen to the pri­vate airlines. "Government could have just gone ahead and granted licenses to the national after that window-dressing democratic first meeting with all of you. Why didn't it? I think it's tiptoeing round a compromise."

He had pulled his upper and lower lips in over his teeth as if to stop what he didn't want to say.

There were also words she didn't want to say.

She did something out of her anger and disbelief that disgusted her. But she did it. She called the squash club on a Tuesday night and asked to speak to Wendell Tate. The receptionist told her to hold: for her, an admonition not to breathe. The voice came back, "Sorry, Mr. Tate is not here tonight." "Sorry," the regret a form of colloquial courtesy personnel are taught.

Eva read in bed, and the dog's indul­gence, there with her, was extended. Music accompanied them and she did not look at her watch until the dog jumped off and made for the stairs. Wendell was back. And early. Down, Dina, down! They were in the bedroom doorway, the dog with paws leaped to his shoulders.

Dina's come to accept what she scents as part of the aura now of the couple and the house; she does not have to recall the atavism of hunting instincts.

Eva does not remark on the hour. And he doesn't remark that he Finds her already gone to bed. Perhaps he isn't aware of her. She's never experi­enced coming home to one man from another, although she once had a woman friend who said she managed it with some sort of novel pleasure.

"Win or lose?" Eva asked. The old formula response would be in the same light exchange; a mock excuse if he'd been out of form, mock boast if he'd played well—they knew Tuesdays were for keeping fit rather than sport; avoiding the onset of that male preg­nancy, a middle-age belly.

"I think I'm getting bored with the club. All my contemporaries working out. Most of us past it."

She tried to keep to the safe formula. "So you lost for once!"

He did not answer.

He'd gone to the bathroom; there was the rainfall susurrus—he was tak­ing a shower this time. When he came back she saw him naked; yes, nothing unusual about that, the chest she liked, the stomach with the little fold—no, it's muscle, no, no, not fat—the penis in its sheath of foreskin. But she saw the naked body as she had seen herself in the bathroom mirror that first night when she and the dog scented him.

He spoke, turned from her, getting into pajamas. "It looks worse every day. There's a leak that's come to us. Adams knows one of their officials. They've had approved a schedule of the routes they intend to take up. Analyzing cost structures if bookings are to be taken only online, cut out the travel agents' levy on passengers."

"But you can do the same."

"We can? Travel agents feed us pas­sengers as part of overseas visitors' round-trip tours. We can't afford to ditch them." He came to the bed.

"Aren't you taking Dina?"

Recalled to where he was from wher­ever he had been, he put his hand on the dog's head and the two went to the stairs. When he reappeared he got into bed and did not lean for the good­night kiss. The alternate to his reason for avoidance could be the despairing abstraction: distrait. As Wendell turned out their light he spoke aloud but not to her. "Hadeda's down. Scrap."

For the first time in 16 years there was no possibility of one comforting the other in embrace. She said in the dark, "You can't give up." She didn't know whether this was a statement about Flight Hadeda or a bitter conclu­sion about where he had been, this and other nights.

They did continue what the new-millennium vocabulary terms "having sex," not making love, from time to time, less often than before. This would be when they had had a night out with friends, drinking a lot of wine, or had stood around at her duty academic cel­ebrations when everyone drank succes­sive vodkas, gins or whiskeys to disprove the decorum of academia.

So, it was possible for him to desire her then. Hard to understand. She's always refused to believe the meek sex­ist acceptance that man's desire is dif­ferent from woman's. When they went through the repertoire of caresses real desire was not present in her body; for her, as it must be for him, desire must belong with another woman.

She was looking for the right moment to come out with it. How to say what there was to be said. The "Are you having an affair" of soap operas. "You are having an affair," restating the obvious. "You're making love to some woman; even the dog smells her on you." Away with euphe­misms. When to speak? At night? Early in the morning, a breakfast subject? Before

Patrick came home for the holidays? What happens when such things are said. Would they both go to work after the breakfast, take their son to the movies, act as if the words hadn't been said, until he was out of the way, back at school.

The night before Easter she was tak­ing from the freezer a lamb stew that was to be the last meal together before it was spoken. What she would find the right way to say. When he came home he closed the living room door behind him against the entry of the dog and strode over to turn mute the voice of the news­caster on the television.

"I'm shutting up shop. Just a matter of selling the two jets; no one's going to be stupid enough to buy the license. Fat hope of that. Adams and I have gone through the figures for the past 18 months and even if the national thing weren't about to wipe us off, it's there— we're flying steadily into loss."

The brightly miming faces were exchanged on the screen while he said what he had to say.

"But we knew you'd have to rely on our capital for at least two years before

you'd get into profit; it's not the same issue as the national one."

"The competition will make the other irrelevant, that's all. Why wait for that. Sell the planes. Won't make up the loss. The overdraft."

"It'll be something."

There were images dwelling on the dead lying somewhere—Afghanistan. Darfur, Iraq.

"For what. To do what."

He's been a man of ideas in maturity, with connections, friends in enterprises.

"You'll look around." That's what he did before, set out to change his life from earth-bound real estate to freedom of the sky.

He lifted his spread hands, palm up, and let them drop as if they would fall from his wrists, while the screen was filled by the giant grin-grimace of a tri­umphant footballer. "How are we going to live in the meantime."

"I don't bring in bread on the cor­porate scale, oh yes, but there's a good chance I'll be appointed head of the department with the beginning of the new academic year."

"It'll just about pay the fees at Patrick's millionaire school." That school also had been the father's ambitious mold-breaking choice for their son; if it was now a matter of reproach, the reproach was for himself, not a sharp reception of her provision of an interim rescue. Despair ravaged his face like the signs of a terminal illness.

She did not say what she had decided was the right time and the right words to say.

She saw he managed to eat a little of the lamb as some sort of acknowledg­ment of her offer.

Eva recalled that time, the Tuesday when he came home from the woman and said about his fellows at the squash court where he hadn't played with them—"Sorry, Mr. Tate is not here tonight"—he was getting bored with the club, "All my contempo­raries working out. Most of us past it."

Past it.

Too late. In middle age the schoolboy adventure of Flight Hadeda, even that night in unadmitted faltering and threat­ened by the national carrier he had no means to counter. Inside Eva, sometimes softening, the failure accepted; perhaps he had been too tired, stmsed's the cover­all word, to make love.

What other way to reassure, restore himself. Not past it; proof of the engen­dered male power of life, arousal to potency: by another woman.

Eva never confronted Wendell with the smell of the woman scented on him. She did not know whether he saw the woman some other time, now that he had given up the Tuesday night squash club; when or whether he had given up the alfair. She did not know nor return, by the means she and the dog possessed, for evidence.

THE SOFTNESS OF BREASTS IN OPPOSITION TO THE MALE RIB CAGE AND SPINE IS ONE OF THE WORDLESS QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN.

The intensity of sweat, semen, cosmetics, saliva, salt tears; all become an odor distilled as theirs alone.