BODYBUILDER, SHORT STORY Options

[ROBERTDAVIDSON]

BODYBUILDER

By Robert Davidson


‘Can I give you a hand with those boxes?’

The upstairs flat had been let at last and Helga could see that the new tenant was only a few years younger than herself. He was unloading boxes of books and computer equipment from a utility parked in the drive outside. Columns of heat shimmered in the air in the street in front of the block of flats. He was sweating profusely in the afternoon sun. Not very good-looking, she thought, noting the thin brown hair and underweight body.

He was making his way into the entrance hall to where she was standing, giving a brief greeting as he passed carrying a computer monitor up the stone stairs. He won’t last long in this heat, she thought.

Clay had met Helga Lindblom the previous evening when he first drove up and they had introduced themselves in the driveway. ‘Hello, I’m your neighbour on the floor below,’ she greeted. She was the phys ed teacher at a nearby secondary college, she said and looked it. He worked in an insurance office in the city, he told her. Now when he came back downstairs again, she asked, ‘Would you like some help with that box?’

Helga was a Nordic blonde who had won several bodybuilding competitions, she’d told him in the course of conversation. Exquisitely fair with gold-glistening hair. Her sun-tanned body, long and strong in tight blue shorts and cotton blouse. A regular Juno, although there was nothing grotesque about her body. But aggressively athletic. She’s like a flame that dances, he thought. He averted his eyes - disturbed - the shadow between her breasts.

Hardly likely to be interested in me, he told himself ruefully. For here was woman, woman at her best, an ample madam, gracefully proportioned, with a body shaped and refined. Her luminous eyes surveyed him with a sort of queenly pity and forbearance,

He felt over-awed, couldn’t seem to stop watching her tanned body and legs as she hoisted one of his boxes onto her shoulder and carried it up to his flat. He following, struggling with a suitcase.

Later, as they relaxed in his flat with a cool drink, he explained that he was a great reader and did a bit of writing at nights. He worked in a routine job in a city office during the day. Because she’d lingered a little longer than he expected, he invited her out to dinner and a movie that evening.

Like the touch of a scorching flame, her lips brushing his with her own as they stood outside her flat late that night. The warmth of that kiss lingering as he made his way upstairs.

During the next few days the desire to sleep with Helga never gave Clay a moment’s rest. She was in his blood. The longing for her.

She took it for granted he was coming to her flat a few nights later. Good-natured, she hated sleeping alone, she said as she closed the door behind them. Her mouth moving down the line of his neck, his shoulder. Trembling under her touch, he held the length of her body pressed to his.

He opened himself to her. Spoke his fears. Self-doubts. His surprise that she could be attracted to him. And she now coming to him looking down at him on the bed. He Gazing up the length of her. Her legs - twin towers of power above him. Her movement told him what to do.

Later she told him straight out that she like passive men, that she needed to be in charge, make the decisions. That everything would be all right between them providing he did not come the heavy male with her. ‘I divorced a brute of a man two years ago. I don’t want the strong male stuff again.’

No doubt he had wanted to be wanted, Clay thought to himself. He was netted and like it. At first! Perhaps there’s a touch of the female in me who wants to be dominated, he reasoned. Or was it because being an unprepossessing male he had wanted Helga so much, overwhelmed by her interest in him. He was prepared to play along with her, adopt the submissive role. Submission to a female body-builder!

At the beginning Helga had a curious masculine detachedness to their whole affair. ‘I’m fond of you, Clay. But no more,’ she told him. Towering above him, he succumbed to her once more. Held in those strong arms he felt like a love-doll.

In the evenings Helga would spend time reading and commenting on Clay’s stories and poems. Frequently she would make constructive comments and he would then rewrite. When one of his stories wins an important prize, Helga said she thought he had a future. One night she told him: ‘You must give up your job, Clay, and concentrate full-time on writing. I have money enough,’ she said ‘to support us both for a year.’

Initially Clay was reluctant to accept this offer, fearing it would make him too dependent on her. But with some persuading he eventually agreed. After moving down into her flat, he was happy with the arrangement at first. But as the weeks went on, he began to feel a loss of identity,

So he would turn to writing for relief. Tried to lose himself in work. Words. A search for validation and self-identity through language.

Often Helga would break into his thoughts, seemingly inconsequentially. ‘Well, I do want a child one day in the not too distant future’. Her voice as she talked had a low and throaty timbre. ‘Best to be honest with you.’ Then calmly went on to say without the slightest change of vocal inflection. ‘But, of course, if you’re not interested, Clay, eventually I’ll have to move on, have to find somebody else.’ Helga was as self-contained as stone.

But Clay within himself feared that a child at this time would tie him completely to Helga and so he remained silent. She chided him not too harshly for his lack of enthusiasm.

And so the relationship continued for the rest of that year. Helga was of course the better lover. Gave finesse and imagination to it. Clay was in abject surrender before her. His face to her inner thigh, offering that humility which a slave might render a queen. Her kiss was like a bruise on his lips.

But many times he felt trapped, caught like a wasp in a spider’s web. Soon they began to quarrel. They even spent Christmas Day not speaking. He went down to the pub in the next street and when he got back she had gone off to visit friends.

On top of it all, he was not writing well. He had made several attempts at a pot-boiler of a novel. A spy-thriller that never got off the ground. Even tried an abortive love-romance. Losing himself in a wilderness of words. Words place clumsily on one another like stones.

Then another quarrel. Another evening at the pub.

When he got back Helga was asleep, the covers thrown back to reveal her naked breast and the curve of her thigh. He undressed, went to the bathroom and made ready to slip into bed beside her. Her body now stretched out face downwards on the bed. She stirred. He made love to her over-riding her resisting will. His very selfhood was at stake, he thought. To relinquish her will to his!

But such was the labyrinth of loving. Helga now began to withdraw from him physically. She had set herself against him. And then she was saying she was going off to Adelaide for a week or so. Her mother was sick.

However, once she was gone, Clay began to feel trapped in the flat and by the walls of that other prison, his self. He might at any moment splinter into all directions, he thought. By the bedeviled depths of his own nature! Many have murdered those they love, he mused. This deadly Hera he had been living with. Helga - the eternal mother, provider of shelter, warmth and even his food. It was the sense of power it afforded her he supposed.

Alone Clay was very much at odds with himself. He was increasingly dissatisfied with being the passive partner in the relationship. This dark mood clung to him like the cobwebs of a nightmare. His emotions rubbed raw. An all or nothing woman. It was as though he was being stripped of his skin, he thought. It had all begun because she was eager and I was seized with the need to affirm my virility, he reflected. I was like an insect being drawn into the Venus fly-trap, he thought. She’ll devour me completely if I let her.

Feeling such desolation within himself, Clay realized he must break off with Helga. I must look for another job and a flat of my own, he decided. In the days that followed he was lucky enough to find another day-time office job, but not nearly so well-paid. This meant problems in finding another suitable flat so he moved to a single room in a hotel. But by evening the black devils were at him again. He could not bear the solitude of his room and went down to the bar for a drink.

In the crowded bar-lounge he hesitated a moment, looking about for a vacant table. Then he made his way across to the far side of the room. ‘Mind if I sit here?’ he asked a girl sitting alone. ‘You’re not waiting for anyone?’

‘No.’ she smiled, giving it full in his face, beckoning him to join her. Those parted lips, he thought. A lipstick of the bloodiest tone. She was on the look-out, he was convinced. The sleeve fell back from her rather thin, but elegant arm as she took up her drink. After a few moments of small-talk, she held out her hand.

‘Zadie, Zadie Tyburn. It’s a stage-name, of course,’ she explained. ‘On the stage. Small parts. Film and TV work,’ she said, recrossing elegant legs. ‘I’m just waiting for the right part to launch my career.’ And laughed.

Zadie, a very feminine girl attracted Clay greatly. She was a tonic. Just what he needed. He felt rooster pleased when she readily agreed to go on to another pub and then to a dance with him that night. He was convinced that with a girl like Zadie, he would be playing a much more masculine role than with Helga.

He returned with Zadie to her room in South Melbourne late that night. She lived in the glassed-in end of a veranda of a old terrace-house. An although they spent much time touching and caressing one another, she held back sexually, saying: ‘Not on the first date!’ And when he protested she made a mocking mouth at him.

And as men will always want what is withheld, Clay spent a lot of time and effort pursuing Zadie over the next few days. His need to assert his manliness. At the same time he knew full well that he was simply trying to cope with stress by sexual release. Always it seemed in human relations there was the need to enter and consume the other. Always there was the urge - the need to let something out of oneself.

To make matters worse Zadie played up to other men outrageously at the theatrical parties she invited Clay to. Said it didn’t mean a thing, that the people she carried on with were useful, vital to her, could help her to get jobs. But in lust - one loses all pride. Clay felt the need to engulf her. To absorb Zadie completely. But still she held out on him. His uprushes of longing left him restless and moody.

That Saturday night Zadie introduced Clay to TV director Stan Parker. Stan was an educated man who made great efforts to sound like an outback Australian when he talked, Clay thought.

Stan, as it turned out in the course of conversation, was offering Zadie the lead role in a new TV mini-series. He stood there with his fingers swollen around a beer glass, fingers tufted with hackles of little black hairs. When he lowered his glass, you could see the fleshy bulges where his belt was eating into his stomach.

But there was a condition, Zadie later explained to Clay in the car on the way back to her room. She’d get the part, which meant everything to her. She paused. Providing she slept with Stan. This was the offer she couldn’t refuse. Zadie then went on to explain that seventeen girls did screen-tests and Stan could have given the part of Myra to any one of them. Such is the supply and demand of talent in show-business. Zadie says her career could never get off the ground otherwise. ‘I’m quite prepared to sell my body to build my career.’

Clay reflected. he had wanted sex with Zadie; he didn’t get it. Stan Parker only had to snap his fingers. Or wave a contract. The lady was a tramp, but she didn’t come cheap!

Then to his surprise Zadie did invite Clay into her bed that night. But what was born in him - was still-born. The loving with Zadie, such as it was, was brief and unsatisfactory.

The following day Helga returned to Melbourne and told Clay she was pregnant. Said she intended to have the baby alone. Now that he had moved out of her flat. She didn’t seem upset at all. In fact, there was a strange sibylline calm about her. Now doubt the new life that fed on her, he thought.
‘I want to share responsibility for the child,’ Clay said.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ Helga replied. ‘You need to go on with your writing.’

‘I’ve reached a bit of a dead end.’ Clay admitted. He then went on to tell her that he has had an affair with Zadie Tyburn while she was away. But was not emotionally involved with her.

Clay is surprised to find how pleased he is to see Helga and is astonished when she asks bluntly: ‘You didn’t love me at all?’

Helga’s question broke his resistance to her. She has mellowed, he thought. Quite a change in attitude.

She then said, ‘I must go back to Adelaide, there’s some legal business of my family that I must fix up.’

And after she was gone Clay realized how innerly lonely he was for her.

A few days later he was dumb-founded when he received a letter saying she was seeking an abortion in Adelaide.

Clay cannot understand why Helga wants an abortion seeing she wanted a child so much. He feels responsible. Guilt gnaws at him. Conscience, it seems, has become a scalpel to strip away self-deception. He realizes now he doesn’t was to lose her. He decides to commit himself to Helga and their child. Loving - without it, we have no certainty that we are ourselves, he thought.

Distraught, Clay tries to track Helga down by phone but is unable to reach her. He greatly fears losing her and of her having an abortion.

But when he finally meets up with Helga again, he moved to kiss her, but there was no response in her mouth.

Her eyes were red-rimmed. Her voice unsteady.

‘Hold me close, Clay. Please hold me close.’

This is astounding, he thought. He never imagined he’d see Helga so emotionally dependant.

And then she said, her mouth distorting. ‘I have had the abortion. Not because you didn’t want a child.’ She paused, wiped her eyes, took a deep breath. ‘ I have a very advanced stage of lymphoma and the prognosis is not good.’ He held her tightly in his arms. ‘There’s no point in having a child then dying,’ she said.

‘At the outside, I’ve got three months,’ she later told him. ‘A month or so of mobility.’

That magnificent body now wasting with disease, he thought. The wounds of human love. Guilt would now ripen into the deepest regret. Clay must now see Helga again and again and visits her every day in hospital. One afternoon he learned that Helga Lindblom at twenty-nine was dead.

Copyright 2007
www.robertdavidson.blogsource.com

[demolished]

Terrible man.