Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (18 page)

‘Max, greetings!’

‘How did you know it was me? Have you got caller ID on the hotel phone? Is that why you haven't answered all day?’

‘No. I've been out. I just
hoped
it was you and, like a dream come true … ’

‘OK, to cut to the chase—’

‘Did I say “dream”? Excuse me, I meant nightmare, of course.’

‘Very funny. So, what happened?’

‘It's all worked out really well,’ Jeff smirked. ‘And the interview was fine too.’ Smirk turned instantly to frown as he tried to think how best to respond to the inevitable next question, about the picture he hadn't got and the photo he hadn't taken.

‘And … ’

‘Yep, all fine,’ he said. ‘But listen, I've got to go. I'm going out to meet her now, to do the picture. I'll call you tomorrow, OK?’

Max must have been in a hurry too. Jeff was able to get off the phone without clarifying – in the sense of deliberately clouding – things any further. Laura emerged from the bathroom, naked, her hair turbaned in a towel. It was a very homely moment, like being married.

That might have been why, as they walked to the party (Jeff didn't know where they were going, he was following Laura like a puppy), he had the sense of not feeling completely up for it. By the time they got there, had queued up and got inside, this had changed to the extent that he felt completely not up for it. He wanted to ask about their future, about when and where they might meet again, but to have done so would have been a distraction from the perfect present that still surrounded them. But it would not do so for long. They were running out of time and, at the back of his mind, he was conscious of the problems awaiting him when his time here
had
run out, when he was back in London without the picture and photo and without having paid adequate attention to the art he was meant to be writing about. Not that that was his main concern. Far from it. As far as he was concerned, the Biennale had always been more about the parties than the art. It's just that tonight, instead of going to a party, what he'd most like to have done was to have gone home (i.e. back to the hotel) with Laura and lain on the bed while she wiped her cunt with his face. Desirable though this may have been, it
was, for the moment, impossible. The whole point of coming to Venice was to go out, to go out to parties like this, where, if everything went like a dream, you might end up going home with someone … His thoughts were grinding away pointlessly, as they do when you're tired. Why, when everything had turned out so perfectly, more perfectly than he could ever have dreamed, was he fretting like this? Because a residue of cocaine-fuelled excitement, overlying a deeper sub-stratum of tiredness, was turning into all-purpose anxiety. It was as if the grey roots of his hair were already growing back. The answer, obviously, was to drink more bellinis to calm himself down and snort more coke as a way of waking himself up.

And it worked, sort of. He and Laura did a line each in the toilet and came out together, sniffing, glowing. Anxiety turned instantly to excitement, albeit excitement with an anxious edge. Dance music was booming away on the sound system.

‘That sounds familiar,’ he said. ‘D'you recognize it?’

‘It's a Paul Oakenfold remix of Nigel Kennedy playing
The Four Seasons,’
said Laura. He didn't know if she was joking, but it certainly sounded plausible.

Monika came over and said she had not told Jean-Paul how much she hated him because she realized that she actually quite liked him after all. Jeff said this showed a weakness of will and that, if he saw him, he was going to tell him he hated him anyway, irrespective of how he personally felt about him. He introduced Monika to Laura, who introduced him to someone whose name he didn't catch because, at that same moment, Phil Spender came up to him. He apologized to Phil about not making it to his party, the party he'd been so anxious to go to and which, he remembered now, he had completely forgotten about until two seconds ago. Ditto the secret Kraftwerk gig. For his part Phil wanted to know about Jeff's hair. Had he dyed it? Jeff admitted he had, yes.

‘Join the club,’ said Phil. Ha! So they were all at it! They did a semi-ironic chest-bump, taking care not to spill anything on Phil's still-pristine cream suit – amazing, really, that it had stayed the course. To Phil's left, he spotted Jane. And, nearby, Jessica and the Kaiser. He knew loads of people here and recognized lots more, possibly from the preceding nights' parties, possibly from just this one. Factor in the people he knew but failed to recognize … Everyone was here, including people he was meeting only now, for the first time, people he was yakking away at and who yakked back at him, saying things they'd said a few minutes earlier, just as Jeff found himself bound to an ever tightening loop of incessant repetition. Whoever they all were, tonight was the last night they were all here, in Venice together, swilling bellinis, even though some of them had already left, this afternoon. The Biennale – or at least this part of it, the
vernissage –
lasted an incredibly short time. While you were in the midst of it, it was so relentless it seemed like it went on forever. You craved a night off, an evening in. But you couldn't afford to do that because, at the same time that it went on for a long time, it also went on for an incredibly short time, was over before it had even begun. No sooner had it started than it was over, moments after it had started. There he was, grinding away again. He'd noticed this lately, about drinking and drug-taking. Doing either was like shining a UV light into his brain, illuminating its burned-out circuitry. Over the years great stretches of cognitive processing had been ruined, laid waste. Under normal conditions the full extent of the damage was hidden from view, but it took only a bit of bingeing to reveal the inner disintegration. A few years from now his brain would be like damaged coral, like brain coral, in fact, brain-damaged coral, lifeless, colourless, dead. Hair you could fix, dye, but the brain … At the very least he was going to have to start taking supplements: memory stimulants, serotonin
boosters, neuron steroids. In the meantime, spying an approaching waiter, he held out his glass, his begging bowl. The act of doing so enabled him to regard his brain troubles in a new, less troubling, more optimistic light. When he was young he had prided himself on
being clever.
Walking down the street, not even thinking anything, just walking along like every other moron, he'd had a distinct sense of how
clever
he was. He'd never done anything with that cleverness except write stupid articles and make occasionally clever remarks, most of them not even clever. He just
felt
clever, and it was a good feeling, feeling clever. Now he felt, with equal conviction (and rather more evidence), that he was entering the stupid years. The stupid years complemented the vague years. They went together. The vague years and the stupid years were the same years and they had already started. Well, bring them on. Forgetting everyone's names – as those adverts in the newspapers were always reminding you – was embarrassing, but apart from that, being stupid was fine, like a premonition of enlightenment.

In his pocket he had his little digital camera. He got it out, intending to take what would turn out to be one of those pointless, universally disappointing pictures of a party in red-eyed progress. When he turned it on, the camera was still in
View
mode. The screen showed not the scene moving around him, but the picture from earlier in the day, of him and Laura on Giudecca. He pressed the optical zoom, eliminating himself from the frame, focusing on her face and then just her eyes, continuing to do so until they were not eyes at all, just an exploding galaxy of pixels.

Laura's flight was at two in the afternoon. It was eleven in the morning now. He lay on her bed, head aching, holding a tissue to his bleeding nostril, watching her pack. The white dress, the
red and gold one she had bought in Laos (a place he'd never visited but which he now knew how to pronounce), the navy blue dress – all were folded neatly into her wheelie. It was like an awful inversion of a striptease, but it was worse than that too, like watching her prepare things to take with her into the afterlife – the after-Venice life, the after-him life – and leaving him for dead. If it had been him, he would have tried to change the return flight and, if that was impossible, would have just blown it out, bought another ticket for a later date. But she was going, had almost finished packing.

They had swapped email addresses and phone numbers, but had no plans to meet again. The traditional way of these things was that men came and went, leaving women weeping in their wake, but he was the one being left behind and, if he was not careful, he could easily start weeping. The prospect of crying brought with it a related thought, of his dyed hair dripping blackly down his forehead, running down his cheeks like a girl's mascara. Yesterday afternoon he'd felt like a Roman emperor, capable of anything; now, with his nose bleeding, his mouth a sour desert, his head parched and fried, he felt like sobbing, wailing. When he was seventeen he'd read
The French Lieutenant's Woman
and had been much impressed by John Fowles's distinction between the Victorian point of view – I can't have this forever, therefore I'm miserable – and the modern, existential outlook: I have this for the moment, therefore I'm happy. It had stayed with him ever since but it seemed absurd, now, to have any pretensions to existential contentment. In 2003, in his mid-forties, he had got in touch with his inner Victorian. In Venice he discovered that he was the last Victorian.

He heard Laura zipping up her bag, the same sound – but coarser, louder – as her dress being unzipped by him, for him. It was luck, just luck, the way they had clicked sexually – but as soon as luck revealed itself in that way it was changed into
something different, something that made it impossible to believe that it was only luck.

‘A present for you,’ she said, handing him the wrap of cocaine. ‘There's a bit left.’ He needed that like he needed a hole in the head, which he didn't need at all because he felt like he already had one. His head, in fact, felt like nothing but hole, but at least his nose had stopped leaking blood. He chucked the wad of tissue into the trash.

‘And don't forget your glass,’ Laura said. There it was, standing on the chest of drawers, expensive and delicate, looking exactly like the blue and orange shrine she'd said it wasn't. He stood up, wrapped it in a page of newspaper and put it in a plastic bag.

Laura came over and kissed him on the mouth. Their arms were around each other. Her hair smelled slightly of city. She didn't mention the future, when they might meet again, and neither did he. The reason he didn't was because she hadn't. Did she refrain from doing so because he had said nothing? He couldn't know for sure but he felt, reasonably or not, that he was taking his cue from her. A strange, modern form of intimacy – not Victorian at all – that made it easier to lick someone's ass than to ask when you might see them again.
When will I see you again?
The crap pop song, by whichever crap group it was, started going round and round in his head, his empty, thought-crammed, empty head.

‘Well, as I said before,’ he said. ‘That was most agreeable.’

‘Wasn't it?’

‘Personally, I found it so agreeable that I would love to do it all over again.’ There, he had said it, or was, in a manner of speaking, saying it.

‘Me too.’

‘Do you have any idea when that might be?’

‘No. But soon, I hope.’

‘You know, this time we can't just leave it to chance, can't just hope to run into each other.’

‘I know.’

‘It worked in Venice, in a small town, but on a global scale I think it's just, you know, the odds are stacked against it.’

‘You're right.’

Holding her against him, he could feel his cock growing hard, even now, when everything was so close to becoming just memory. Or the opposite of memory: a longing for something that would soon be impossibly remote.

‘I could come to L.A.,’ he said. ‘Or I could come to meet you wherever it is you're going to be, when you go travelling.’

‘That would be nice.’

‘So, we'll email.’

‘Of course.’

They had been holding each other while they had been speaking. Now the time came to let each other go, for him to pick up her wheelie and his glass, to leave her room and squeeze into the lift and look at the pointless sign about not scratching the plastic cover.

Laura settled her bill, checked out. She was walking to the coach station, but they were saying goodbye here, in the little courtyard in front of her hotel, the grandly-named Excelsior. They kissed again. He breathed in the faint smell of her hair that was still new to him, new and already familiar. Then she began trundling her case in the direction of the station and he began walking.

Where? It didn't matter. He was alone in Venice, walking through the stifling heat. She had gone, and he had gone from Plus One to Minus One. There was nothing to do except stroll, so he strolled through the crowded, empty city. It was like swimming in the sea, when you go from a patch of warm water to a band of chilling cold. One moment he was in a
busy, densely populated area and then he was in completely silent streets, deserted except for sunlight. It would have been a relief, now, to have encountered the Serbian pick-pockets, to have fought them and let them chuck his body into a canal. But he didn't see them or, thankfully, anyone else he knew.

He'd been tired from the moment he woke up, exactly as he had been after sleeping outside the station when he'd first come here, years ago. After strolling for an hour, he reached the pitch of weariness encountered only in dreams, those dreams when you are walking and walking and getting nowhere. He was in the death zone of tourism, where stroll turns to trudge, where every step requires the effort of ten. The air was filling up with the pleasant pealing of bells. As he approached the source – a church he'd not seen before – it became an avalanche of gold noise, pouring over him, tumbling into his dry head.