Paris Trance (22 page)

‘D’you want to come up?’

‘Sure,’ I said quickly, as if it had not been a question but an invitation. There was another pause.

‘Third floor,’ he said, and the door was buzzed open.

He was waiting in the doorway, not smiling. I was shocked by how he looked: not because he had changed dramatically or terribly – or no more dramatically than most people we haven’t seen for close on eight years. ‘You look great,’ we say in such circumstances and we say it because it is almost never true. We say it to buy time, to try to adjust to the way they look so bad. In Luke’s case it was the subtlety of the change that affected me. His hair had greyed, but he was still thin. He was wearing a cardigan and dull trousers. His skin was stretched tight, his face looked sore from shaving. What was shocking was the resignation in his face. Anyone who passed him in the street could see it immediately, in his eyes, his mouth. His face had that unsupple look of someone who gets few opportunities for talk and laughter.

We shook hands: his handshake had not changed but, since it had never developed into the handshake he hoped it would, it
had
changed, totally.

‘It’s been a long time.’

‘Eight years,’ he said, standing aside to let me in. The flat was at least as dismal as the apartment he had moved into – and out of – on rue de la Sourdière. As soon as I stepped inside I could feel the loneliness, could smell the life he led: how he wore the same clothes for many days, how his body never got a chance to breathe. There was no variety in his life. Every day was the same as every other. It was too warm in the flat. The TV was on. Rugby. I asked him the score.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m only watching it because it moves.’ We sat and watched the rugby, a game neither of us was interested in. Eventually he offered me ‘a drink, or tea if you prefer’.

‘I’ll have a beer,’ I said. I would have preferred tea but the atmosphere in the apartment was so unyielding that it seemed essential to try to do something to change it, to soften it. He went to the kitchen. I looked around the walls which were bare except for the photograph of the demonstration in Bucharest. I heard the fridge door gasp open and slam shut.

‘Nice place,’ I said when he came back.

‘Sure,’ he said, sitting down. I poured my drink carelessly: it was all froth. We held our beers and looked at the game. After a while, without taking his eyes off the screen he said, ‘Are you still with Sahra?’

‘Yes.’

‘How is she?’

‘She’s great.’

‘Do you have children?’

‘One.’

‘Do you have a photo?’

‘Of the kid?’ I said, reaching for my wallet. ‘If you want to see it, sure.’

‘Actually I don’t. I hate pictures of children.’

The froth of my beer had subsided enough to drink. I said, ‘So what about you Luke?’

‘What about me?’

‘How do you pass your time?’

‘It’s like Sahra said that day, at the coast. There is no more time.’

‘What do you do?’

‘Nothing. Actually that’s not true. I wait.’

‘For what?’

‘For it all to come round again,’ he said. We watched the game in silence. A fight started between two players and in seconds half a dozen of their team-mates were piling into each other. That was when I asked if he remembered the time we had beaten the guy up, on our way home from football. It was the only thing I said that afternoon that made him smile. We fell silent again. Then he asked the question I knew he would be unable to stop himself asking.

‘Have you heard from Nicole?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where is she – in Paris?’

‘Yes.’

‘And does she have a child also?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then she’s no longer beautiful. No longer a woman in fact. Once women have children they stop being women. They become mothers.’

I could have said something. I didn’t. I was too . . . what? Not angry, something milder, indifferent almost: to the bitterness, to the hate I felt in him. To the hate he felt for himself.

There is an extreme form of meditation – I forget the name – which requires that you concentrate on your dead body, in its grave, rotting, crawling with worms, turning to earth, becoming nothing. I had read also of an American writer who, while doing something as ordinary as drying the dishes, found himself thinking of his dead mother, lying in her grave. Death appeared to him
‘a force of loneliness, only hinted at by the most ravening loneliness we know in life; the soul does not leave the body but lingers with it through every stage of decomposition and neglect, through heat and cold and the long nights’. Both ideas are shocking but are they any more disturbing, really, than one we take almost for granted: that the soul rots, or wears out, like cartilage,
before
the body dies?

‘I was going to ask how she was,’ said Luke. ‘But I think I’ll leave it at that.’

‘What happened Luke?’

‘When? What? To whom?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘To Nicole and me?’

‘To you.’

‘Nothing.’

I knew, from Nicole, some of the nothing that had happened. I knew about their last moments at the Café Bastille, knew that Luke had said he was leaving Paris, leaving her; abandoning everything, even himself. I knew that she had placed her hand on his and looked at him, and I knew what he saw: all the love in the world a man can ever be given by a woman.

‘You know, Nicole,’ he said, ‘you’ve never once tried to restrain me. Never held me back. Never tried to stop me doing what I wanted.’

‘I’ve never had to.’

‘Not till now.’

‘Not even now.’ They were holding hands. ‘Whatever you want, Lukey.’

‘What I want,’ he said, ‘is for you to get up and leave. To watch you walk away.’

‘Why?’

‘So I can see you. So I can see you until the last possible moment.’

She gripped his hand. He moved his face towards her. They kissed. Then she moved her face and he felt her lips moving by his ear. She looked at his eyes that gave nothing back. Right up until the moment that she turned and left everything was reversible, saveable. The whole course of their lives, of our lives, hung in that one ordinary moment, indistinguishable, to anyone looking on, from the hundreds of other times that he had sat and watched her walk away. Perhaps that was why it was so easy for her to comply. They had rehearsed this moment so often that it required no effort, no will. As if nothing was at stake. She put her spectacle-case into her bag. Stood up, pushed her chair back into place and he watched her walk away, banging one table with her hip as she did so. He watched until he lost sight of her. He sat for a few moments, paid the bill and then stood up. He left Paris the same evening and, until that afternoon when I visited him in London, none of us saw him again.

After Luke left, Nicole came and stayed with us for a few days. Then she returned to the apartment but we still saw her every day. I remember thinking that it was less fun like this than it had been when there were four of us, all together. I remember thinking, too, that she would never recover from what had happened. I held her in my arms while she sobbed, could feel myself, even then, desiring her, wanting her. Several months later she went back to Belgrade.

We wrote, exchanged Christmas cards, talked on the phone sometimes. She wrote to say she was married, that she’d had a baby. Then we lost touch for several years until she phoned, out of the blue, and said she was back in Paris. She had split up with her husband – her choice – and had come to Paris because of an offer of a job.

‘So you’re back for good?’

‘I hope so. What about you? How is Sahra?’

‘She’s great. She’ll want to see you. She’s not here at the moment. When can
I
see you?’

‘Whenever you like.’

‘What are you doing this afternoon?’

I drove over to the apartment where she was staying, in the Thirteenth. She looked older, tired. We hugged each other. It was almost a relief to find that I was no longer attracted to her. Her face looked brittle. Her skin had lost its promise. She was still thin – like Luke – but whatever it was that had made her beautiful had passed. Maybe it
was
Luke’s loving her that made her beautiful. Beauty, I thought, is a moment. It passes.

Her little girl was sleeping in the bedroom. She was three, a year older than our own son. We left her sleeping and went back into the kitchen.

‘How does it feel to be here again?’

‘It feels fine Alex,’ she said.

‘I spoke to Sahra before coming out,’ I said. ‘She’s dying to see you.’

‘And me she,’ she said.

‘It’s great to see you,’ I said.

Sahra and I helped her find an apartment, to get settled. We saw a lot of her. The three of us became friends again, real friends. I saw her more often than Sahra did. She had a great need to talk about the past, to tell things to me. I came to see that I was wrong. Beauty is not a moment. Or if it is a moment, it is one that can last for ever.

I had finished my beer. I said to Luke, ‘Do you have any idea of how much unhappiness you caused?’

‘I’ve done . . . questionable things.’ That was the only thing he said that afternoon that made
me
smile. Then, serious again, he said, ‘Do you have any idea how much unhappiness I have experienced myself?’

‘Your choice.’

He shrugged. ‘There’s a café near here – I use the word café in its broadest, very unParisian sense – and I always go in there for a tea on my way back from the supermarket. The owner has a dog, a Dalmatian, and I go in there because of that, because I like the dog. When I went in there last the dog was nowhere to be seen. The owner said he was dead, he’d been hit by a car. And I sat down there and sobbed like . . .’

‘Like what?’

‘Like someone still alive.’ I looked at my glass. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I was just telling you what happened in the café.’

‘Why Luke?’

‘Why am I telling you what happened in the café?’

‘No. The big “why?”’

‘That’s a question I don’t understand. It makes no sense. I don’t think about that any more. “Why?” Because that’s what happened.’

The game had ended. The two teams tramped off the field, caked in mud. Luke flipped through the channels. There was nothing on but he did not turn the TV off. I stayed another ten minutes. Then we said goodbye and shook hands and I walked to the tube.

It was not yet four and already it was almost dark. A black cab went by, For Hire, but I walked. It was not raining. There was a fifteen-minute wait for a train. I looked at posters for the latest films. London, England. It seemed awful to me: the weight of the place, the hardness. I was glad to be leaving the next day. I took out my wallet and looked at the picture of my son. A picture of a little boy like hundreds of other little boys. Except this was my son, Luke. He looked like his mother, like Sahra.

The day after getting back from what Luke had taken to calling their ‘skiing holiday’ Nicole took the train to Belgrade, to visit her mother. Luke saw her off at the Gare de L’Est. She pushed down the window of the carriage door. They kissed.

‘It’s nicer to part at a railway station than an airport isn’t it?’ said Nicole.

‘Much. More cinematic,’ said Luke. ‘You’ve got the Walkman, yes?’ She pulled it out of her pocket and held it up. Luke had some reservations about lending her his new Walkman. In his experience it was a good idea, as soon as you lent something to Nicole, to prepare yourself for never seeing it again – at least not in good working order.

‘You won’t break it, will you?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Or lose it?’

‘No.’

‘Promise?’

‘I promise.’

A guard said the train was about to leave. A whistle sounded and the train began inching its way out of the station. Luke ran alongside for a few yards, as you are supposed to. They called to each other and then they waved and then the train was gone.

When Luke went to bed that night he found an envelope under the pillow. Inside were two triangular pieces of black card, L written on one, N on the other, joined by a length of her hair.

Within four days Luke was beside himself. He gazed at the photograph of Nicole in Belgrade and the Polaroids they had taken. He pulled her knickers out of the laundry basket and masturbated with them pressed to his face. His head ached. He was suffocating. All his longing was focused on Nicole but it was exacerbated by everything he saw, even the photograph in
Pariscope
– of a woman squatting, her back to the camera – advertising a sex show. He translated it into an image of Nicole squatting over him, her cunt in his face. He shoved the thought almost physically from his mind but then found himself dreaming of her smell, her neck, her breath, her hair. Unable to remain indoors he went for a walk in the frigid air, hurrying in the direction of his old apartment and the Tuileries.

Grey boulders of snow lay piled up outside the gates of the park. Inside, the statues were rigid with cold. Having endured the blaze of summer they now waited out the brittle agony of winter. The trees were dark as iron. The sky was grey, heavy. Apart from that, as far as the statues were concerned, nothing had changed. Not even the old woman who sat there with her sign: ‘
DITES MOI
’. She was wearing a coat, wrapped up in a scarf, sitting in the same place she had occupied all summer, carved out of a silence as extreme as that of the statues around her. Luke ignored her and, repeating
his
habit of the previous summer, went to the cinema.

The film was an adaptation of
Homo Faber
, a book Luke had heard of but never read. It began in Athens airport, in 1957, and then flashed back a few months to another airport, in Central America. The plane crashes and Faber finds himself stranded in Mexico. He gets back to New York and then decides to take a boat to Europe.

During the ocean-crossing Faber finds himself falling for a young woman called Sabeth. He watches her play Ping-Pong, and then he joins in, not because he wants to play but because he wants to participate in the act of watching her. When he is not watching her he is filming her with a super-8 camera, as if he were already anticipating remembered happiness. Every moment is a promise – of how it will seem on film, in retrospect, when it has passed. She tells him that his name, Faber, means forger of his own fate. From Paris they drive down through France and Italy. They become lovers, they travel on to Greece. Faber films her with his little camera, too fascinated by watching her speak to listen to what she says.