She had set the table, there were cloth napkins and place mats and candles. Let’s eat, Jana said. The food is in the oven, keeping warm. We didn’t know how late you would be. I realized that neither of them had asked for an explanation for my tardy arrival. She began taking foil containers of food out of the oven, she shook her head when I offered to help, and told us to sit down.
Adriaan and I stood by the dining table in silence, staring at the flickering candles—Jana or Adriaan or someone had taken the trouble to light them. How is work, how have you been? Jana called out. She was making a great deal of noise as she retrieved the food from the oven, banging the door open and shut and clattering plates. It’s fine, I shouted back, a reply that seemed barely to register. A part of me was relieved, it would have been difficult to talk about work without mentioning the arrest, I would have been speaking around something that loomed so large in my thoughts that they would have sensed it through its omission.
There was more noise from the kitchen, and after glancing at Adriaan, I went to Jana, saying, Let me help you, and together we began ferrying out dishes of food to the table. The food looked delicious and Jana was quick to compliment Adriaan on his choices, I never could have ordered so well, she said. It was a strange and slightly inane compliment and one that was almost certainly a lie, Jana loved to cook and eat out and at any rate it wasn’t a particularly stellar achievement, ordering a takeout meal. Jana lifted her glass of wine and said, Well, here we all are. She was still smiling and her voice was vibrating with tension. Adriaan nodded as he raised his glass, he thanked Jana for inviting him into her home, of the three of us he was the only one who seemed truly at ease.
For a moment, Jana and I both watched him serving the food. We were converted into women admiring a man’s competence, an absurd and appalling situation. He was only dishing out noodles and rice and chunks of meat onto our plates, and yet I also found myself watching him appreciatively, perhaps because of my awareness of Jana’s own admiration. I knew very well that the reason for Jana’s present excitement was her own attraction to Adriaan, she could be competitive and would have felt the need to establish primacy in this situation, one that she had initiated, after all, by suggesting dinner in the first place.
As for Adriaan, he might have been thinking or feeling anything. I couldn’t tell what he made of Jana, or indeed the entire situation. Perhaps he thought it had been a mistake to agree to the dinner, it was only the three of us, it was obvious that it had been organized so that Jana might get a look at him, so to speak. Meanwhile, Jana was being careful to avoid the subject of Adriaan’s marriage and separation, she asked Adriaan a little about his work, the area he lived in, innocuous questions to which she already knew the answers, she did not venture near territory that might be potentially compromising.
The entire exercise had an air of futility and falseness. Adriaan must have been perfectly aware of the fact that Jana knew everything not only about his job and where he lived, but also about his marriage to Gaby and its unresolved state. Nor could the skillful fa?ade of her conversation conceal the fact that Jana also knew that Adriaan knew that she knew, disavowed knowledge reverberated through the room. And yet our behavior did not seem especially strange, people behave with such conscious and unconscious dishonesty all the time. Or perhaps the dishonesty was more concrete, I suddenly thought, perhaps it lay in something they were keeping from me, some argument or agreement between them, and then I wondered if they’d had it out the moment Adriaan arrived, perhaps Jana had let him in and then said, Listen, I want to know how it is between you, I want to know exactly what your intentions are.
She was more than capable of doing such a thing—like Adriaan she could be unusually direct in her manner. Now Jana turned to Adriaan and said playfully, I know you don’t approve of a young woman living in this area—I looked up, startled, I had not told Jana this, and yet she was not incorrect in her assessment of him, and how he would feel about the neighborhood, she had intuited a conservatism I doubted he himself would recognize. And it’s true, Jana continued, it’s not as safe as other parts of the city, just the other day there was an incident. A man was mugged, right outside my front door.
Adriaan lowered his fork to his plate, as if to give Jana his full attention.
The other night, when I was here? I asked and she nodded.
The man is in the hospital. Jana paused. It could have been one of us, it could have been you, she said, looking directly at Adriaan. In fact he was not unlike you, I looked him up, he was wealthy, a professional, probably he was in the area seeing friends for dinner, almost exactly as you are doing now.