Dagger Key and Other Stories

During the first thirty-one years of his life, Hota had made love to but one woman: his wife. Since then, he had made love to many more and thought himself reasonably knowledgeable as to their ways. Magali’s ways, however, enlarged his views on the subject. For the most part she lay quiescent, her eyes half-closed, as if her mind were elsewhere and she were merely allowing herself to be penetrated; yet every so often, abruptly, she would begin to thrash and heave, pushing and clawing at him, breath shrieking out of her, throwing herself about with such apparent desperation, he was nearly unseated. Initially, he took this behavior for rejection and flung himself off her; but she pulled him back between her legs and, once he had entered her, she lay quiet again. This alternation of corpselike stillness and frenzied motion distressed him and he was unable to lose himself in the act, half-listening to the sounds of more commercial passions emanating from adjoining rooms. When he had finished and was lying beside her, sweaty and breathing hard, she demanded that he repeat the performance. And so it went, the second encounter like the first, equally as awkward and emotionally unsatisfying. In her frenzied phase, she seemed even less a complicitor in pleasure than she did when she was still. She took to snapping at his arm, his shoulder, making cawing noises deep in her throat. But their third encounter, one into which Hota had to be vigorously coerced, was different. She drew up her knees and met his thrusts with sinuous abandon and kept her arms locked about his neck, her eyes on his face, until at long last she offered up a shivery cry and clamped her knees to his sides, refusing to let him move.

After he withdrew, pleased, feeling that they had managed actual intimacy, he tried to be tender with her, but she shrank from his touch and would not speak. More confused than ever, he decided that her behavior must be due to a lack of familiarity with her body, and he counseled himself to remain patient. They had come this far and whatever road lay ahead, there would be time to smooth over these problems. Fatigued, his eyes went to the lamp lit ceiling. It looked as if all the dragons imprinted in the grain were quivering, shifting agitatedly, as if preparing to take flight. He watched them, imagining that if he watched long enough he would see one fly, the tiny black sketch of dragon flap up off the boards and make a circuit of the room. Eventually he slept.

The following morning, gray and drizzly, with a touch of chill, he woke to find Magali at the window, which stood half-open. She had on her favorite green dress and was looking out onto the street. He sat up, groggy, rubbing his eyes. The bedsprings squeaked loudly, but she gave no sign of having heard.

“Magali?” he said.

She ignored him. The rain quickened, drumming on the tin roof. Feeling the bite of the cold, Hota swung his legs onto the floor, grabbed his shirt from among the rumpled bedclothes and began to pull it over his head.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

Without turning, she said glumly, “You’ve given me a child.”

He paused, the shirt tangled about his neck, and started to ask how she could know such a thing, then remembered that she had knowledge inaccessible to him.

“A son,” she said dully. “I’m going to have a son.”

The idea of fathering children no longer figured into Hota’s plans and his immediate reaction was uneasiness over having to shoulder such a responsibility. He tugged the shirt down to cover his belly. “You don’t seem happy. Is it you don’t want a child?”

“It isn’t what I want that’s of moment.” She paused and then said, “The birth will be painful.”

Her attitude, so contrary to what he would have expected, provoked an odd reaction in him—he wondered how it would feel to be a father. “It might not be so bad,” he said. “I’ve known women to have easy births. At the end we’ll have our son and perhaps that’ll give…”

“He’s not your son,” she said. “You fathered him, but he will be Griaule’s son.”

The rain came harder yet and, amplified by the tin, filled the room with a kind of roaring, a din that made it difficult for Hota to think, to hear his own voice. “That’s impossible.”

Magali turned from the window. “Haven’t you heard a thing I’ve told you?”

“What have you told me that would explain this?”