Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (14 page)

‘It seems a lot for a glass,’ said Jeff, ‘but I guess there are plenty of people in Venice this week who can afford them.’

‘It's not about being able to afford them,’ Laura said. ‘It's about being able to not worry about breaking them. Besides, what does it mean to be able to afford something? It's a way of externalizing and gauging how much you desire something.’

They stood staring at these inessential, very desirable glasses.

‘D'you know,’ she said, ‘I'm going to buy one for you.’

‘No!’

‘Yes. And not only that. You're going to buy one for me.’

‘Am I? Ouch!’

‘Yes. But the condition of doing so is that we don't care at all about breaking them. Obviously we'll wrap them in paper on the plane, and we won't put toothbrushes in them, but we'll use them whenever we feel like it. And you know how that will make us feel?’

‘I'm tempted to say poor, but I think the correct answer is rich. Mainly, though, I'm relieved that you're not going to steal them.’

She led him into the shop. It was a wonderful shop, but just being in it made him feel clumsy, bullish. A careless gesture could prove extremely expensive. Anxious that even staring too hard at the glasses might cause cracks to appear, Jeff tried to look at them
gently.

The glasses were all different, but they were so uniformly beautiful that choosing became somewhat arbitrary. For Laura he picked one that had a swirl of red and white, as if a scoop
of raspberry ripple had been imprisoned in the glass. For him she chose one that was pale blue with tiny bobbles of orange. They paid. The sales assistant wrapped their glasses in pink tissue paper, handling them as if they had just been plucked from the tomb of Tutankhamen and might shatter on contact with the coarse air of not-the-afterlife.

Outside, Jeff noticed that they were right next door to Prada. For a moment he worried that a precedent had been set, that having bought each other an amazingly expensive glass, they were now going to up the stakes still further, splashing out on even more expensive clothes.

‘So,’ said Laura, ‘let's go and use our new glasses.’ Jeff's instinct was to squeak out ‘Where?,’ but he forced himself, instead, to say ‘Sure’ and, once again, to fall into step beside her.

‘Are we allowed to put them in a dishwasher?’ he said, as they walked.

‘Of course. They get no special privileges. They're just glasses, not shrines to be worshipped.’

‘I suppose there is another problem,’ he said. ‘Are all other glasses going to seem inferior to these? Will drinking out of a normal champagne flute seem like drinking out of, I don't know, a jam jar or something?’

‘If everyone felt like that,’ she said, ‘we would never even have evolved to the point where we drank out of jam jars.’

They walked on, through a reassuring part of town where the shops were selling normal things at normal prices.

Laura said, ‘Do you know where we are?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Do you know where we're going?’

‘No. But I'm certainly interested in finding out.’

Five minutes later he did. At the end of an alley was a small but grandly-named hotel, the Excelsior. Laura picked up her key from the woman at reception, who greeted her
with a big smile and took no interest in her new friend. In the tiny lift – a squeeze even for two – Laura pointed to a sign, covered in plastic and taped neatly beneath the maintenance certificate and said, ‘Check out this piece of conceptual art.’

‘You're right,’ said Jeff. ‘It should be in the Arsenale.’

Her room was small, dominated by a white double bed it was impossible to evade or ignore. She washed out the new glasses, crushed the pink tissue paper and threw it into the bin.

‘What would you like for the inaugural drink? There's all the usual mini-bar stuff, plus I bought some pomegranate juice and soda because of the heat.’

‘That would be great.’ It was a relief, in the afternoon, to be free of the obligation to consume alcohol.

‘If we break these glasses now we can think, “Wow, that was an expensive pomegranate juice.” That way the pressure's off. Chin chin.’

They clinked glasses carefully, kissed. Delighted, evidently, at finding themselves in such luxurious vessels, the pomegranate and soda fizzed enthusiastically.

‘You taste of pomegranate.’

‘So do you.’ She bit his lower lip. Her mouth opened. They were kissing again. He had never loved kissing anyone as much. Then – it was impossible to tell who instigated this – they manoeuvred in such a way that he was kissing her thighs while she licked his stomach. He lifted up his hips so that she could tug his trousers down. She pulled his prick from his underpants, began licking along its length. He pulled her
knickers – white again – over her hips and off. He was unsure what to do about her dress, bunched around her middle. She sat up and pulled it off. Her smell – and his desire for her – was stronger than the night before. He breathed in that smell and pressed his face between her legs. She moved over on top of him. Drips fell from her, into his mouth. She sat back, twisting his nipples, rubbing herself in his face. His face gleamed with her smell. He reached up so that he could pull gently on her nipple ring. She disengaged herself from him, lay back on the bed, her legs raised.

‘Now fuck me,’ she said. He reached for his trouser pocket, for the condoms. ‘You don't have to use a condom. I have a cap. I didn't have it with me last night.’ He moved on top of her. His prick slipped into her cunt, her tongue into his mouth.

He began moving inside her. It was like nothing he had ever experienced before. She had opened herself to him at a non-physical level that increased the intensity of the physical sensation of their bodies moving together. He was conscious of being inside her, but it was like an
out of body
experience. The word that insistently came to mind, afterwards, as they lay in each other's arms, was unusable in a way that ‘cunt,’ ‘cock’ or ‘fuck’ once were: communion. She was licking her fingers, moistening them with the saliva from her mouth and his, arching her back, pushing her hips towards him.

‘I'm coming,’ she said. Her wet finger pressed into him and, a moment later, he too was coming, joining her, coming inside her.

They lay still.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘That was most agreeable.’

‘Wasn't it?’ she murmured. When his prick slid from her, they moved onto their sides, in each other's arms. He felt himself drifting to sleep.

He woke up just ten minutes later, his arm numb under her
neck. She was waking too. His arm, as he disentangled himself from her, pinned and needled back to life.

‘You're the thinnest person I've ever slept with,’ she said. ‘It's like making love to an ironing board.’

‘There must be some culture in the world, possibly an ex-Soviet republic, a very poor place suffering from a dearth of consumer goods, where that is the greatest compliment a woman can ever pay to a man. Wherever it is, I am going to find that place, ideally with a view to taking up permanent residence.’

‘That is where I'm
from
,’ she said. They kissed. He continued lying on the bed while she got up to take a shower. He watched her walk into the bathroom: small hips, thin, long back. He heard the toilet flush and the noise of the shower. She emerged from the bathroom with a white towel wrapped round her and he took her place in the steamy shower. When he came out she had put on the same white dress that she had worn that afternoon. He helped her with the zip and the hook at the top.

They left the hotel and walked to an almost empty trattoria that, in a few hours, would be crammed, hectic. Neither of them wanted wine, just fizzy water. Jeff asked for risotto; Laura ordered a veal cutlet.

‘A strange and potentially controversial choice,’ he said, ‘though I can see why, after stuffing your face at the Guggenheim last night, you can't face any more risotto.’

‘Actually,’ said Laura, ‘there's something I have to tell you about that night.’

His stomach flipped. ‘What?’

‘I lied about the risotto. There wasn't any’

‘No!’

‘I overheard you and your friend talking about it.’

‘Why, I oughta … ’

‘It's funny, no one says that any more: “Why, I oughta.” We should start a campaign to bring it back.’

‘You're right. We oughta.’

‘We otter.’

While Jeff tucked into his pea and mushroom risotto – even more satisfying in the wake of Laura's confession – she told him about an exhibition she hoped, one day, to curate. Having seen the look of stunned disappointment on the faces of so many gallery-goers, she aimed to take the bull by the horns with a show called ‘Is That
It
?’ featuring works by some of the most consistently disappointing artists of the day. Soon they were trading titles for a series of related exhibitions:

‘This, That and “The Other.”’

‘Something of Nothing.’

‘Next to Nothing.’

‘Slim Pickings.’

‘Climaxing with a symposium of curators and critics,’ Laura said. ‘Something along the lines of “Now Talk Your Way Out of That.”’

It was fun, talking like this, but Jeff had the nagging sense that they were talking themselves out of what he most wanted to talk about: how they were going to spend the rest of their lives together. They ordered another bottle of mineral water. He watched her eat a strawberry gelato for dessert. They each had an espresso.

After dinner – and how nice it was eating early, like pensioners – they walked through Venice in the hot evening, holding hands. He'd read somewhere – it was another of those things that practically every writer-visitor remarked upon – that Venice was a narcissistic city, always looking at itself in the mirror. What he saw reflected everywhere was his – their – well-being. The city was radiant with reflected happiness.

They had both been invited to the Australia party, on Giudecca. They stopped at Jeff's hotel briefly, so he could change, and then walked to the vaporetto at Zattere. Twilight was falling. In the church behind them the bells started up, tumbling over each other, becoming a torrent of sound. The wide stretch of water separating them from Giudecca glowed darkly with the surplus light absorbed in the course of the day. Then it dulled, grew dark, as dark as the sky – navy blue and then Atlantic-black. The vaporetto chugged into view, the first stars appeared.

They got off at Palanca and walked west a couple of hundred yards. The party was packed by the time they arrived. Or at least the terrace was packed. As had happened on the previous two nights, the heat had driven everyone outside. Every few seconds there was the pop of a new bottle of prosecco being opened; bellinis were being prepared in vast quantities. It was, in other words, exactly like every other Biennale party except Jeff had turned up at this one with Laura, was arriving with the woman he'd met at the first party on the first night and slept with after the party of the second night. He took a couple of drinks from a tray, passed one to Laura, who was immediately greeted by a friend. In turn Jeff was greeted, not by a friend but by Graham Hart, art critic for the
Observer.
Either he'd been here for a while or he'd not waited till he got here to get his snout in the bellini trough. It wasn't just difficult to understand what he was saying; it was difficult to tell where one word ended and the next began. What emerged from his mouth was an undulating torrent of what was obviously language, but which had no capacity to convey information. That was not the only thing to emerge from his mouth. He sprayed slightly as he spoke and a blob of spit landed on Jeff's lower lip. He could feel it there, wet and alien, but out of good manners refrained from wiping it away. To have done so would have been to acknowledge what they
both preferred to ignore: that Graham had spat on him. Graham was sweating profusely, more than all the other guests who were also sweating profusely. He mopped his forehead with an old-fashioned handkerchief.

Gradually Jeff grew acclimatized to what Graham was talking about, namely the prodigious amount he'd had to drink in the course of the day, but his ability to understand served only to confirm the lack of any desire to listen. Fortunately Graham was so far gone he didn't mind – probably didn't even notice – when Jeff sidled away. One of the reasons he was keen to get away was because he worried that Graham was a prophetic mirror. Was
he
like this when drunk? Was Graham a premonition of how he'd be a couple of hours and a dozen bellinis down the line? What must the world seem like to the ex-drinker, the teetotaller, the permanently sober, recovering alcoholic, surrounded on all sides by pissheads and drunks? It was a horrible prospect, enough to drive Jeff back to the bar. On the way he bumped into vehement Monika Weber, who presented a cultural affairs programme on German TV. She asked if he was going, tomorrow, to the exhibition curated by Jean-Paul. Jeff had completely forgotten about this show, but said he would be going, yes.

‘I am going for one reason,’ she said. ‘I want to go just to tell him how much I hate him.’ It was an excellent plan, one Jeff immediately fell in with. He was more than happy to tell Jean-Paul how much he hated him, even if he didn't actually hate him, could scarcely remember who he was. There was no opportunity to clarify things. Having spotted other people they knew, both he and Monika continued in their respective directions. In some ways the Biennale was like
A Dance to the Music of Time
condensed into four days: the same people cropping up, expectedly and unexpectedly, generally looking somewhat the worse for wear.

Jeff grabbed a drink and retreated from the bar, jostled and jostling as he did so. It had gone from being crowded on the terrace to being very crowded, impossible to move, difficult to drink without spilling bellini over your neighbour. And the area outside the party, as more and more people clamoured to get in, was almost as crowded as it was inside. Jeff was congratulating himself on this, on being one of those
at
the party rather than one of those trying to get into it, when someone tapped him on the shoulder: Laura, not looking any the worse for wear.