Lucca (10 page)

As they walked along the quiet side streets she wondered at
their walking there together, she and Harry Wiener. He said he had wanted to see her on stage for a long time. He had seen photographs of her. They had interested him, the photos, she had a distinctive face. He looked at her. She didn't need to be sorry about that! He spoke of photography, about how photographs reveal what we can never see with the naked eye because our eyes are always seeking a mirror of our ideas. How photography can reveal a reality that is otherwise inaccessible to us, how faces become visible in all their startling and fascinating strangeness. She had never thought about it like that before.

It was an old Mercedes cabriolet, silver-grey with a beige-coloured leather trim. She wondered if he might have chosen that colour because it matched his grey hair. Everything about Harry Wiener was tinged with silver. She sat with her hands between her thighs in the thin dress. Now and then he threw a glance at her knees in their black tights under the hem, beside his hand resting on the gear lever, but she felt it would be absurd to cover them. She listened to the hum of the motor and looked out at the illuminated town turning and turning around her. It seemed slightly foreign, the town, seen from his car. She told him where to turn off and asked him to stop a few doors from her own. He switched off the engine and turned towards her. Again she was astonished at his directness. He would like to kiss her, would she permit him? She smiled and shook her head. She was both very talented and very attractive, he said, and she was wrong if she thought the two things had nothing to do with each other.

After she got out she bent forward with another smile. He hoped they would meet again. She thanked him for the evening and slammed the door. His front lights threw a hard beam on the pavement slabs. The cats' eyes on the bicycles leaning against the wall shone red, and her long shadow rose abruptly and swung over the façade as he passed. She caught a brief glimpse of his silhouette in the back window before he turned and was out of sight. Otto had gone to bed. She took off her shoes in the hall and undressed without switching on the light. She imagined Harry Wiener thinking of her while he drove through the town. A strange thought. She lay down close to Otto's
back, so they lay skin to skin beneath the duvet, pleased with herself.

In the morning Miriam called while Otto was in the bath. Had anything happened? Lucca was irritated. What did she mean, happened? Miriam laughed, that was obvious enough. Lucca protested, he had talked to the others just as much. Miriam laughed again. Lucca sat in an easy chair with a shiny, worn silk cover, pink flowers on a curry yellow background. They had found it in a skip. She was wearing one of Otto's creased shirts, nothing else, she had just woken up. She pulled her legs up in the chair and looked at herself in the tall mirror leaning against the wall beside the bed. She held the phone between her chin and shoulder as she gathered her hair into a loose knot. It had grown long, half of it fell down again around her cheeks. Otto liked her to put her hair up that way, casually. Miriam talked about her boyfriend, she wanted to have a baby, he was not keen. She was afraid he didn't love her any more. Lucca let her talk on. A child, that was almost impossible to imagine.

She looked at her legs. She had nice legs, they were long, and her thighs were narrow and firm. Her cunt was nice too. She had shaved it so only a little tuft was left. That was where the King of the Gypsies would have liked to make his way. It was comical to think of all the wiles he had made use of, with champagne and stories and sage advice drawn from the experience of a long life, all of it to no earthly use. Just because he had seen a picture of her and taken a fancy to such a young, talented cunt.

She spread her legs so they lay over the chair arm, listening to Miriam going on about the child she so much wanted. Now she looked like the front page of one of the porn magazines she sometimes saw Otto glance at sideways in the all-night kiosk. Imagine if the Gypsy King could see her now. He would go right out of his mind. Be jolted out of his old, flabby, wrinkled skin. It would almost have been worth letting him, just to be able to enjoy his crestfallen face afterwards. Was that all? Yes, your Majesty, that was the lot! She decided not to say anything to Otto. Even though she had been firm he might go on thinking
about it all the same. Besides, it irritated her that she had stayed there listening to the Gypsy King and his profundities and allowed him to drive her home in his flash Mercedes.

When she had put down the receiver she rose and stood for a while in front of the mirror. She unbuttoned the shirt, she had lost weight, her stomach was perfectly flat. She didn't want any child, for the time being she would keep her stomach to herself. Otto had turned off the shower, she could hear him swishing water down the drain with the rubber swabber. She pushed the duvet on to the floor and lay down on the bed with closed eyes. She felt the air from the open window on her face, stomach and thighs. Music wafted down from one of the other floors, a monotonous thumping bass rhythm. A dog barked down in the street.

Otto opened the door of the bathroom. In a moment he would be with her. It was a game. She would lie there without moving, and he would walk to and fro as if he were searching for something and had not even noticed her. He would let her wait, the room would grow silent, and in the silence she would be completely exposed to his gaze, unmoving, in an extremity of tension, trying to guess where on her body she would feel his first touch.

L
ucca met Otto eighteen months after she left drama school. She had heard about him and seen him at cafés and bars when out with her friends. He was already then a star in the making, an underground star if such exists. He had been interviewed in a woman's magazine as the rumbustious puppy of young film, and if he showed up at a party you could be sure of fireworks. He had been in a relationship with a well-known rock singer and in general was the type girls kept a watch on out of the corners of their eyes over their cappuccinos and looked away from with a chilly, unapproachable air. They always referred to him in ironical terms if one of their group lost her grip and naïvely gave way to her curiosity. In their opinion he was already established although according to the usual standards he was still only promising. And Lucca thought he seemed to fancy himself a bit too much when he swaggered around in a football shirt, knitted cap and flip-flops, or whatever he hit on, scanning the bar.

When she was offered a part in a television serial in which Otto was also appearing she felt surprised at first that he could be bothered with such a job, although she naturally accepted. He had just got out of prison, she was his girl, and while he was banged up she had naturally fallen for the cop who had run him in. It was a totally fatuous script, but Otto was good and that made her better than she would otherwise have been. He was kind to her, he calmed her down with a smile or made her laugh when she was nervous, and she was surprised at his discipline. He could sit and read the newspaper or tell stories until the moment before they had to go into action and then make his entry and throw himself into his part as if with a snap of the fingers he became one with it.

In fact, he did not act. He was always himself, a fictitious edition of himself, as he would have been if chance had shaped his life along the lines of the script. He summoned the aspects demanded of the role with ease and carried everything off with his drawling diction and adroit muscular physique. They sat chatting among the lamp stands and rolls of cable in a corner of the studio while the cameramen set up their lights. Otto had never been to drama school and wasn't planning to do so. He couldn't be bothered to spend three years lying on the floor touching people and breathing deeply. She might well have protested, but she didn't.

How did it start? As such things do start, as vague notions, playful fantasies, a special feeling aroused merely by sitting beside him, listening to his voice and feeling his eyes. His presence was reflected in all her words and movements, even when she turned her back on him and talked to someone else. One moment she could be really dissatisfied with herself, with her appearance, her voice and what she said, and the next she could have a sneaking feeling of not being quite what she thought she was. As if she hid a secret version of herself, so secret that she was unable to make out who she actually might be, the other woman behind her distrustful reflection.

He provoked her with his self-assurance and cool dispassion. She felt he could see through her ironic aloofness. When she tried out a sharp comment he quite simply appeared not to have heard her, unless he stared straight in her eyes so that his silence seemed a grosser insult than the most offensive reply. She admired his insolence, but kept her mask on. She waited for him to relax for a second, open up a chink.

One day when she arrived at the studio he was sitting outside in the sun studying his script. A toy-shop carrier bag lay beside him. She glanced inside it without asking leave and found a transparent box containing a red toy car. She asked him if he still played with cars. He said it was for his son. She sat down beside him, how old was his son? Six, he replied, putting down the script. He leaned his head back against the red-painted planking wall of the studio and closed his eyes. He must have
been very young to be a dad. He shrugged his shoulders, she felt stupid. What was his name, then? Lester . . . that was an unusual name. He looked across the courtyard. He hadn't seen his son since he was born. He had met the mother when he was living in the States, she had fallen pregnant by accident. They hadn't been able to make a go of it. He said this dryly as if just describing what he had done on Sunday.

The following week Lucca and Otto were filming at night in a marina. It was the last scene they were acting together. They had a long wait before the lights were set up. He had to fall into the water during a fight in a speedboat, and he fell again and again, but she was the one who got cold, although it was the middle of July. He lent her his jacket. Later they shared a taxi into town. They spoke of the difference between making a film and acting in a theatre and about one of their older colleagues who behaved like a silent film star even when he was in close-up. He shook her hand, a bit formally, she thought, and said it had been good to work together. She agreed. Standing in the street when the taxi had gone she discovered she still had his jacket on. It was a motor cycle jacket with a zip, the sleeves were too short. That made her smile, as if it was touching. She had not even noticed she was taller than him. She put her nose under the collar and caught the scent of his strange smell.

She called him next day about the jacket. He sounded as if she had woken him up. She was sorry. She asked him to forgive her. He said she could just come round. His apartment was in a side street. She rang several times and was about to go when he finally opened the door. He wore a shabby bath robe with claret-coloured stripes like the ones old men wear for the beach. She couldn't help smiling and he smiled back. Smart, wasn't it? She didn't know if he meant the bath robe or the jacket he had let her keep. Then he pulled her inside, pushed the door to and kissed her. She closed her eyes and pressed herself against him with a sudden force that surprised her, as if she had to make haste not to be paralysed by the strangeness of the situation.

*      *      *      

From the windows you looked down on a building site covered with weeds and rubble, haunted in winter by street girls and local pushers who warmed themselves at a fire in a rusty oil barrel. The flat was sparsely equipped with junk furniture which looked as if it had come from a house clearance. Some time in the Fifties it must have been in a working-class home with ambitions for higher things, and now it had been resurrected thanks to Otto's slightly perverse but extremely chic feeling for teak and moquette. On one of the walls hung a huge, hand-drawn poster for a Sergio Leone film, and in the window a reversed neon sign in fiery red letters announced
Fish is healthy
. She sometimes wondered whether the junkies down on the building site brushed back their greasy fringes and raised their heavy eyes to Otto's window. She pondered whether the message in their stoned brains seemed like a revelation or a studied insult.

The street offered a Turkish greengrocer, an Egyptian restaurant with belly dancers, a paraffin merchant, a Halal butcher and one or two massage salons. The entrance was dark and scruffy, it smelled of gas and cooking and wet dogs, and sometimes she surprised a bent figure on the stairs having a fix. She rather liked the atmosphere of kinky sex and shady dealings, the exotic scents, men with black moustaches and little knitted caps who spoke Turkish and Arabic, and women with their heads covered, wearing long coats. She had even grown used to the junkies and prostitutes. They knew her and scrounged cigarettes from her, and she had come to feel she belonged there as much as they did. But in their eyes she no doubt still seemed an upper-class git who had lost her way in town, strutting off with long steps and chin in the air.

When she wore high-heeled shoes she was almost a head taller than Otto, but he didn't seem to mind that. If he had they would hardly have been lovers. She was a tall woman, but always wore high heels. She liked glancing at her legs, reflected in shop windows as she strode along the pavement and could still feel like a little girl playing at being a lady, hardly realising she was supposed to be grown up, although she had long ago taught herself to walk on high heels without looking awkward. As a teenager she had been clumsy, hadn't known what to do
with her long arms and legs, constantly tripping over furniture and knocking over glasses and china. She was still like a bean pole, her face was long and narrow, even her nose, and when she was in a bad mood she thought she looked like a horse. But that wasn't the worst thing to be. Her hair was coarse and as fair as straw, with a reddish tinge, her eyes were green and her lips were full and kissable. Anyway that was what Otto said when for once he was playing the gallant.

They couldn't have been more different. There was something compact and square about Otto. He had broad shoulders and broad hands, jaws and thighs, but his bottom was slight, and his eyes were a guileless blue which contradicted all the power he held within him. When he walked he put all his weight into each step he took. His movements were sure and precise and he always looked people straight in the eye without blinking. He had a dragon tattooed on one arm, he had been a sailor. Perhaps that was what had made him so meticulous about himself and his surroundings. He was always clean-shaven and his clothes newly laundered. He did all the housework, energetically with wide arm movements, as if it was the deck of a merchant ship he was scouring and swabbing.

When he embraced her it sometimes made her think of a drawing she had seen on a poster when she was small. She had forgotten what it advertised but could still remember the drawing of a naked man with legs apart holding a boa constrictor by its head and tail. The snake was much longer than the man, it wound itself around his muscular outline and hissed in his face with its cleft tongue, but it was held fast in his grip. She felt a bit like that snake. She liked teasing him and showing resistance and she quite enjoyed it when he got rough. When she finally gave in, reluctantly so he had to keep a tight hold on her, it seemed as if she was also enticing him to reveal who he really was. They had been together for almost two years now. She had never lived with anyone for so long, and she had not had other men since she moved in with him. Sometimes she wondered how long it would go on. She found it hard to imagine it just continuing, but still played with the idea.

It was not so much an idea, it was almost only an image, at a restaurant, for instance, when she saw a middle-aged man helping his wife on with her coat, lifting her hair over the collar and holding the door open for her with a smile. She calculated how long they might have been together, and for a second it was herself and Otto that her eyes followed through the window of the restaurant. Two slightly round, slightly wrinkled adults walking side by side looking at tempting kitchen equipment in the shop windows, chatting casually about everyday matters. Two who knew each other's habits, weak points and embarrassing little secrets. Maybe they were happy and serene, maybe it was a comfortable hell of mute resignation and an inexplicable bitterness. Maybe a bit of each.

She didn't talk to Otto about such things. That would have been out of order. She thought she knew him better as time went on, and they had more or less been through all they had to tell each other about previous lovers, and what else their lives had held. There were still closed doors and dark corners in him, she could feel that, but she would not have known what to ask about if she had dared. As far as she knew he had not been with anyone else since they met, but then she was there the whole time. It was easier to reach out for her than rush around town chasing strangers. Otto was not at all the lady-killer she had believed and everyone claimed he was. He was well aware of what he did to women, but didn't allow himself to be affected by it. On the contrary, he seemed shy and hadn't known anything like as many as she had believed. He had not pursued her, either, she came of her own choice.

Now when she was with her women friends she sensed she had crossed an invisible threshold. Their behaviour was unchanged, almost demonstratively the same, but she could see it in their eyes. If she casually mentioned Otto she had to take pains to make him sound like a perfectly ordinary guy. As if in reality he was a monster and not the unattainable object of their green-eyed jealousy. Everything was different, she had become visible at one blow. When she and Otto showed themselves in town people were gushingly friendly to her even when she had never met them
before. The ones with stature even asked about her plans and responded with evasive half-promises. She mentioned it once to Otto but he didn't understand her. If people were nice it must be because they liked her. She thought he must be rather ingenuous to be able to appear so confident.

She was fascinated by his composure. He was the same whether they were alone or with others. She often had the feeling that it didn't make a lot of difference if she was there or not. Just as his body closed compactly around its perfect proportions, so his interior being was apparently self-sufficient. You could plant him on a desert island or in a foreign city whose language he did not speak, and the result would be the same. He seemed like someone who could get by anywhere, in any circumstances. He could spend hours without speaking, not because he was in a bad mood. It didn't prevent him from suddenly stroking her bum as he passed by, or bringing her a cup of coffee she hadn't asked for.

She had moved into his flat gradually, in a series of carriers and bags. They hadn't said much about it. Her cosmetics packed the bathroom shelves, her clothes crowded against his in the wardrobe and her paperback editions of English and American plays mounted up in piles on the floors among his thrillers and videos. It seemed neither to bother him nor make him reflect on what it was all about, where it might take them. Was it taking them anywhere, in fact? They went to London one spring and Morocco one winter, when he had a break between two films. It looked as if they belonged together.

When they were going out she occasionally asked him what he thought she should wear, but he didn't mind whether she pulled a sweater over her head or put on a short low-necked dress. He was never jealous, and although she gave him no reason to be, that did surprise her. There were plenty of men if she had been interested. There had never been a lack of those, for her. Several times she allowed herself to be talked into a corner by some stud who had the hots for her just to see if it provoked a reaction. But Otto went on calmly chatting to his friends without looking in her direction, and
she had to disentangle herself from her experimental flirtation.