Lurid & Cute (6 page)

CANDY

Where were you? I had Hiro call you too but he –

I had my own plans for how this thing between us would now be scripted and I felt it was important to immediately begin with the absolute invention. You have to, I think, if you want to succeed in these sometimes difficult situations.

ME

So I was at this party, but I felt just really
down
so with some other people we went to another party but I left that also because it was making me sad too, and on my own I went to a cafe and just sat there, like in some cafe, and had a coffee.

CANDY

All night?

ME

I didn't know if I'd wake you and I was just: sort your head out, bro, keep cool.

CANDY

You didn't think I'd be awake already if you weren't home at like six in the morning?

ME

Dude, I truly am sorry. You are totally in the right. I was just like feeling totally I don't know
benighted
.

CANDY

Benighted?

ME

That not a word?

That was how I tried to preserve the plausible and the real and I don't think it was so bad. I'm not saying at all that this was perfect but in the end there are always limits to one's inventions. Each invention is followed by another, and that's very tiring. Next, for instance, she was asking about my change of clothes – for these of course were not the jeans in which I had left the house the night before and she was always sensitive to such things.

ME

A superstore?

CANDY

Sorry what?

ME

I thought it'd make me happier.

CANDY

What superstore?

ME

Out on the motorway, the twenty-four-hour one.

CANDY

So you are currently kind of freaking me out right now because –

ME

But why?

CANDY

Because – if you just let me finish – either you are lying like some crazy person or you are in some kind of breakdown situation.

ME

Is it really so bad? Like really?

CANDY

You know it, no?

ME

Know what?

CANDY

This cannot happen for ever.

And it was like the way a wave uses the water in the sea – the way the wave moves but the water doesn't. That was how Candy stood there and was overtaken by her painful thinking. It passed through her, like a wave. And I felt for her because it's always painful when you doubt your confidence in other people. If she didn't actually say anything it didn't mean I couldn't imagine what it would have been if she had.

for lies are one way of inventing another world

But I was also thinking that nevertheless it was undeniable that such silence had its beauties. I had noticed this before. In my infancy I liked stealing from my mother. She used to keep a supply of stickers featuring international footballers and other treats in her handbag, as bribes for her difficult son – which then meant that one day I realised that since she bought in bulk she wouldn't notice if gradually I removed a chocolate bar, or single packet containing the portraits of my favourite soccer stars, the Brazilians, with their single names. Or I realised that even if she noticed she would never mention this out loud. I wonder if always this is what happens in the families of dauphins. There Candy was and she was willing me to find the tone or story that would allow us somehow not to mention my strange behaviour, or examine its real causes, to exist in a world beyond the actual, and I wanted to be worthy of that performance. At last I came out on –

ME

I'm just not happy. I think that's what this is.

And I was pleased because at that moment I could see she was relieved. Yes, I could see she was thinking that if we played it at that pitch then she could play it too, like we were in the nineteenth century and I had performed some difficult transposition of a bassoon piece to the trombone, or some such tour de force. I do mean tour de force. It's often not acknowledged how lying needs such total impresario talent. The problem with lying is that you are told not to think about the truth while you are lying, to believe the lie completely, but what else will you ever think about when you are lying except the fact that you are lying? There's really nothing else to think about, it imposes itself, absolutely, so that even as you begin your first speech you are considering its shadow speech, in which you tell the truth, and when you are then embarked on your second speech the shadow first speech is still there, but now accompanied by its twin, the shadow second. And that Candy understood it was a tour de force needed no more proof than that she was looking at me with such love. It occurs to me that in my family history there were other such performers, I mean people who could bend the world to their desire, like those hypnotists bend spoons. By this I do not just mean the strongmen like my father, who could found business empires, but also the more devious strongmen like my many uncles, among whom were those who found it useful to present themselves as kooks. And if this coincided with your wife discovering one of your secretarial affairs and preparing to leave you as in the case of Uncle Marvin, or that your wife, in the case of Uncle Milo, wanted another child, or other sundry catastrophes, then this couldn't be helped. In a similar way therefore in this conversation with Candy I very simply became the person I needed to become in order to make the lying plausible, which was therefore someone whose life was not going so well and who was depressed, which wasn't after all so difficult because in the end this is not a role that's unavailable to most people. And in particular it was available to me: being (a) unemployed and (b) often seething at home in my pyjamas with all the rank smells you care to mention. I think you can see how easy it is for such a subject to lie to his beautiful wife, to tell the world that he is in a deep unhappiness when really all along he is also contemplating the picture that is a naked girl bleeding from the face, or that same girl's face not bleeding but looking up at him with sweat on her nose and above her lips and the light beginning to filter through the curtains as she comes.

CANDY

Zezette, what's wrong?

ME

I think I might just always be about to cry? You know? I think I'm maybe I'm unhappy.

CANDY

With us?

ME

With – no, with everything. Not us.

& can happen very casually

Because, to put this another way, it turns out that in the perfect marriage where you are absolutely trusted there is no end to what you can do. For lying only distils its gorgeousness if you are doing it to the person who wakes up next to you every day, who believes they know your inner heart more than they know their own, that's the perfect person to lie to because only when you lie to someone like that can you create a perfect lie, the kind that opens out new possibilities of other lives and other worlds, as if you'd made a voyage to the moon in your own home-made jetpack. You just do something with panache and anyone who loves you will believe you, if they have no other reason not to – and most of the time they do not. Although the problem with lying is that if what I wanted to do was consign just one aspect of my life to unreality then I think I was mistaken. Unfortunately, it leaks all over the picture. Sure, terrible things may well be often said in conversation but much more terrible can be the way that nothing is said at all. In either case there will be consequences, so that what looked like nothing but silence and absence may well turn out to be a grand event. For on reflection I do have to also admit that it was the particular way that Candy and I constructed this nothing that was in fact important for the future story I have to tell. That there were no consequences in the immediate future turned out to be the darkest consequence of all for the genuine, more long-distance future. It was the way we silenced each other that had the explosive possibilities inside it. And I do say silence. Because let's say that however cool a person is, very few are the people who definitely enjoy the row and the argument. I am certainly not one of them. If what you want to film is sharpshooting in the bars of silent towns, with shotguns and other props, I am not necessarily the ideal star. Nor can I do the shouting in restaurants thing so very well – those scenes with women who upturn tables and scrawl lipstick on their faces like bloodstains or bad clowns. Such scenes make me scared. In fact, brawls scare me in every form they take. The only other person in the world who dislikes conflict like I dislike it is Candy and maybe this is one reason why we will love each other for ever. We prefer there to be silence between people, even though of course there is no such thing as silence, for even as you move your head or hand in a certain way you are offering communication – which is maybe why there are so many possible art forms, because while film is possibly the greatest if what you want to do is silence and the many truths of gesture, then also you need an art form made of words for all the elaboration of the inside thinking. Just one of the art forms is not enough to do the entire cosmology, the vast interior and the small exterior. And in this case the cosmology was how much truth a man must tell his wife, in the early and suburban morning of a giant city. I would not say I totally yet knew.

ME

You go to work all day and it's difficult –

Yes, the only problem is that lying has to be managed with care, and for a moment we were careless.

CANDY

I only do it for us – I mean – I just want you to have your space –

Suddenly this was a more difficult place for me to argue from and so I paused there. But also I did try to make the right sort of noise because I totally agreed with her. She was in no way being cruel and in fact the opposite, which often happens. It was like my mother long ago berating me in some Chinese restaurant for not wanting the salt-and-pepper chicken feet when I had ordered them myself. But there I suppose I can be excused by my youth and inexperience. Almost definitely it was catastrophic harm that I was causing but I don't know if harm should be the only or even main criterion for judging any of one's actions: what about for instance glee or marvelling or simply the grotesque? For there it is. Lying is lovely. True, to make that discovery is also very troubling. If you have a desire for moral outcomes, if your aim is the most ideal society possible – and that is always what I try to achieve – then lying has its fearsome aspects. But it just happens very softly and fast, like I'd just discovered that all the leather-bound volumes along one wall of a stately library were false, and then the wall swings slowly open and you walk on through, into another book-lined room. Somehow, I was thinking, it was now a situation that was true and not true, at the same time. For once again Candy regained the acceptable tone.

CANDY

But maybe do you think you should get a job? Would that be good? Do you think you're just getting bored? Is it good for you to be around the house all day? I mean doesn't your mother get you down?

ME

Like a job like where?

CANDY

I've always thought you'd be a good teacher – like a good primary-school teacher and you'd work with kids and I think it'd just be great for you. You'd still have time for other things. I think you'd enjoy it.

ME

I think, no. I think no way.

CANDY

What's happening with your work?

ME

I'm not sure.

CANDY

You think that's why you're not happy?

ME

Is possible.

CANDY

Why don't you write a horror flick?

ME

A horror flick?

CANDY

Something with gore –

ME

You think?

CANDY

I want men bleeding from their eyes. Or at least I want something
happening
. Why doesn't anything ever happen? Like make a movie about a massacre?

ME

I don't think you can show it –

CANDY

You don't?

ME

I do not.

And so we chattered on. And once again catastrophe had receded, just receded into the blurred and pastoral distances.

even if the gore remains, as a token, or proof

Always I had felt about as moored to the world as that airship was moored to the landing stage on the Empire State Building – and that's probably to be expected if you live a life where catastrophes are infinitely postponed. To be a stevedore or farmer is no preparation for a life like mine, where the real is more like sherbet. That feeling is enveloping – so that even as I turned and Candy asked what I had on my teeshirt, I was not perturbed. I looked down and with a surging recognition, the way a surfer must recognise the wave that will pull her under and cause the wipeout to end her days, I saw that in my hurry I had simply put back on the teeshirt with which my evening had begun. It was, therefore, a teeshirt with a range of bloodied stains.

— That? I said.

— Uh-huh, said Candy.

— I don't know, I said.

And once again we paused there. As I said, we are no sharpshooters, Candy and I. We let the pause suspend itself, engorge itself. Because it's really not so hard, to ignore things. And so it was like – what was it like? It was like that story of the man who passed through Paradise in a dream, and had a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there. And indeed, when he woke up, he held a flower in his hand. That's one sort of similar story – or no, this is what it was like. It was like the story of that prince in the eastern realms who once upon a time dreamed he no longer lived in his palace but in the city, and was very poor. In this new life of his, he had no servants or cooks. He only had a wife, who went out every morning to work as a sales clerk in some department store. They lived in a house in the suburb favelas of a giant city together with a single hound. His life was shanty town and barrio. And then one morning he woke up and was back there in his palace with his courtiers or flunkeys, while the second hand on his gorgeous watch was perhaps just describing a minutely more obtuse angle –