Paris Trance (26 page)

‘Let me qualify what I said about looking at you making me happy,’ said Luke. ‘I have X-ray eyes. It’s not just your outside that I had in mind. It’s your kidneys and liver and all those hidden bits of offal that make you work the way you do, that make you smell the way you do, that make you what you are.’

‘Is that why you’re always trying to get your fingers up my arse?’

‘Yes, that makes me happy too.’

‘It’s easy isn’t it, happiness?’

‘It’s all in the lubrication.’

‘Happiness is just the harmony between a person and the life they lead.’

‘That’s lovely. Is it you or someone else?’

‘Someone else.’

‘Who?’

‘I forget. Are you still bending and stretching your leg?’

‘No. Now I’m just chatting.’

‘I love chatting with you.’

‘Me too.’

‘Is it still all withered and feeble?’

‘My leg? Yes.’

‘Like your prick then.’

‘Yes, exactly.’

‘I’d like to make love.’

‘Me too.’

‘Tie me to the bed,’ she said.

Nicole had to work late the following evening. She and Pierre had just put the finishing touches to a proposal for a competition for an extension to a museum in Provence. Everyone else had left. It was hot. Pierre had taken off his tie, his shirt was unbuttoned at the neck. He went to the fridge and came back with a bottle of champagne. He opened it and poured two glasses.

‘A toast!’ he said. Nicole held her glass, waited. ‘To you . . . For all your hard work.’ She smiled, held up her glass, sipped from it and then looked down into it. Pierre was sitting on the desk, one foot on the bottom drawer. He poured himself a second glass, angled the bottle towards her.

‘No thank you.’

‘Come on. We’re celebrating.’ She smiled. Took another sip. Looking behind her, through the blinds, she saw a light go off in the office opposite. She heard Pierre moving from the desk. He was standing up. He put the glass down on the desk, quietly, and reached his hand towards her, touched her shoulder.

‘Nicole,’ he said. He moved his hand to her hair, pushed it behind her ear. She looked at him. He angled his face towards her. She felt his breath and then his lips on her. She averted her face, took a step back. Pierre remained where he was, his hand in the air.

‘Nicole,’ he said. ‘The truth is, Nicole . . .’ He took a breath, looked at the floor and then at her face again. ‘I am in love with you.’ His words were tender but there was a threat contained in this tenderness. He reached towards her, fingered her hair behind her ear again.

‘Please. Don’t do that.’ It had been so slight a gesture, and her reaction to it so excessive – to refuse him even this! – that Pierre felt as if he had been hit. He was embarrassed and his embarrassment made him angry. He left his hand where it was. With the other he touched her shoulder. He leaned towards her. She turned her face away. On the filing cabinet nearby was a pile of paper and the pen he had bought her.

‘I want to kiss you.’

‘No.’

‘Not even that?’

‘Let go of me.’

‘What do you think I’m going to do? Rape you?’

‘You couldn’t.’

He gripped her shoulder. She craned her head back, pushed him away. He pushed harder. She stepped back and rattled into the blinds. She reached for the pen and held it in her fist, as if she were about to plunge it into his face. His hand was still on her shoulder. For several moments they stood there like that, their faces inches from each other. Then Nicole reached up, moved his hand from her shoulder and manoeuvred past him. She put the pen on the desk and picked up her bag. Pierre had pulled out the chair from the desk and slumped into it. Ignoring him, Nicole left the room and closed the door, exactly as if she had just finished a normal day’s work.

Luke was sitting on the floor when she got home. He was wearing his ridiculous T-shirt, checking film times in
Pariscope
, munching his way through a bowl of cherries. Spunk was next to him, tail wagging, eyes fixed on the door, awaiting her return. She told Luke what had happened while he held her, his vision focused, for no reason, on a little area of the wall opposite where the paint had been applied too thinly. Women withheld themselves from men and then, for a while at least, they gave themselves to a man, to one man. And what a stroke of fortune it was, what a miracle, if you turned out to be that man! I am her man, Luke thought to himself. But how arbitrary it was, this privilege, and how precarious. There could come a time when he would find himself excluded as totally as Pierre from the invisible field of her consent, her desire, her trust. He held her tighter, as if this extra exertion of pressure could indefinitely forestall such an eventuality. Everything he could think of saying was inadequate. He was her man. Nothing he could do or say could do justice to this fact. He kissed her.

‘You taste of cherries,’ she said.

Nicole was out of a job and, at the warehouse a few days later, Luke and Alex became convinced that they were heading the same way. Unusually Lazare said that he wanted to see them at three o’clock: normally he simply put his head out of his office and shouted to whoever he wanted to speak with – i.e. yell at – to get in there immediately. The uncharacteristic formality seemed ominous and, sure enough, when they turned up promptly at his office everything about his manner suggested imminent redundancy. He was sitting in his chair, smoking one of his non-Cuban cigars.

‘Sit down,’ he said. Luke and Alex looked round. There was only one chair. Perhaps this was how it would be settled: whoever sat down would get the bullet: a comfortable version of Russian roulette. They remained standing.

‘How’s that ankle Luke?’

‘Great. Almost back to normal.’

‘Good. Listen, we’re coming up to a very quiet period. There won’t be enough work to go round.’ The phone rang. He picked up the receiver, hung up, and then left it sprawled on the desk: his own no-frills version of ‘No calls, please. I’m in a meeting.’ The dull dial tone could just be heard. ‘I can’t keep everybody on here. You two were the last to arrive. So it’s you who have to go.’ The dial tone turned to the higher pitch intended to alert the caller that he had taken too long to dial. ‘Which is a shame because I like you both. And the other guys like you.’ He shifted in his chair, a little embarrassed by this admission of affection. His cigar was not drawing well. He stubbed it out and picked up a pen instead. ‘But there’s something I could suggest to you that you might like anyway. I bought this house in the country. A small place, very run down. It’s very pretty. It’s been done up but there are a few things still need doing. A lot of things actually, but nothing too major. Plastering, painting, cleaning, tidying. So if you want to you can do that for me: do the place up. In return you get a nice – well, a place that will be nice when you finish working on it – home for the summer. Plus I’ll pay you something. Not much, but something. Take those sweet girlfriends of yours. By the end of the summer things will have picked up here. You can come back. So what do you say?’

They said they would let him know tomorrow, when they had talked to their sweet girlfriends.

Since she had lost her job and had no chance of finding work before September, Nicole said yes immediately. Sahra, too, could think of nothing she would rather do: there was never much work in the summer.

‘It’s a unanimous yes,’ Luke told Lazare the next day. ‘We’ll do it.’

‘That’s good. When d’you want to leave?’

‘The week after next?’

‘That’s good too because I was going to have to get rid of you then anyway.’

Both couples advertised their apartments in
fusac
and were immediately inundated with calls from eager sub-letters. They boxed up their belongings and arranged to set off the following Monday: a year to the day, Luke realized, since he had first arrived in the city – just as everyone else was leaving for the summer. Now, by leaving, by joining the exodus that had rendered his first weeks so desolate, he felt he was demonstrating how completely he had come to belong in the city, to feel at home in it.

In the biography of Luke’s time in Paris, the area around his old apartment, the Tuileries especially, constituted his childhood. A few days before leaving he took Nicole there on a valedictory tour. They rode the 29 to the Opéra (the nearest Luke had ever come to taking it with a purpose, in order to
get
somewhere). Nicole’s hair blew across her face as they leaned on the balcony rail, looking back, watching life recede. A roller-blader clung dangerously to the back of the bus as it snaked along the narrow streets by the Musée Picasso. Waiting on lights, a couple squabbled furiously in the front of their car. An old woman’s shopping bag split, spilling oranges on to the pavement and into the road. Nicole spotted Alex and Sahra, arm in arm, walking along rue des Archives, laughing. She called out, too late. A wild-looking African berated a traffic warden for the ticket she had just written. The balcony filled up and thinned out. Louis XIV and his horse were framed, briefly, against a whirl of blue as the bus nipped around the Place Des Victoires. Something had set off a car alarm; a thin man conducted the noise serenely. When the bus was held up in traffic two workmen crossed the road carrying a large mirror which flashed back the image of Luke and Nicole in the balcony of the 29.

‘You see what an inconsequential film it will be?’ said Luke when they got out at Opéra. Nicole laughed. She was wearing a white dress, plimsolls, Luke’s sunglasses (the ones she had mislaid), a single bracelet. It was hot. There were a few scars of cloud; otherwise the sky was empty blue. On rue de la Paix Luke went into an alimentation and came out with two plastic bottles of fresh orange, one of which he threw to Nicole. She caught it, just. Luke was wearing a linen shirt, jeans. She watched him unscrew the bottle of orange and gulp it down as if he were pouring sun down his throat.

The park was packed with tourists. Litter bins were overflowing with Coke cans, buzzing with wasps. The grass had not yet been scorched by the summer heat, there were not too many cigarette butts in evidence. A group of boys were playing football. The ball bounced over to Nicole and she toe-poked it back. Sun dazzled the statues. To Luke’s surprise and disappointment the centaur was no longer there. It too had left the city for the summer: for restoration, a plaque explained.

Since seeing Luke that afternoon in London, and while writing this account of the period when our lives overlapped, I have thought constantly about what happened to him, have come up against that ‘big why’ again and again.

I think now that certain destinies are the opposite of manifest: ingrown, let’s say. Hidden, rarely revealing themselves, probably not even felt as a force, they work like the process or instinct that urges a seed in the soil in the direction of the light: as strong, silent and invisible – as imperceptible – as that. In Luke’s case, something took him away from the light, from what he most wanted and loved. As if the seed’s impulse towards the light becomes warped or damaged so that it takes itself deeper and deeper into the soil. As it buries itself deeper so it redoubles its efforts to attain the light. But in doing so, like the deer we saw exhausting itself by struggling in a trap, it succeeds only in burying itself still further. Eventually the urge towards the light withers because, as if through the workings of some last-ditch, built-in fail-safe, only by ceasing to struggle can it hope to survive. At some very late stage it senses that it is its
longings
which have condemned it. And so it remains where it is, a faint pulse of life in the darkness, directionless, not moving.

I think Luke could feel something tugging him, exerting not an attraction but a pull that was very faint and yet so insistent that he began to wonder if, by giving in to it, he might have found a way of being faithful to his destiny. Maybe some truth would be revealed to him that was denied to happier, more contented people. Even as he thought this he must have suspected that such a truth would be distorted, rendered false, because it would, inevitably, be encrusted by bitterness. We all want to believe that truth is incompatible with bitterness but this is wishful thinking. Perhaps truth
is
bitter, mean, miserly. The hankering to make of truth something ennobling and pure is itself a falsification. Perhaps it is actually the truth itself that twists you, that is twisted.

Obviously things could have turned out differently for Luke, could have worked out better. But by letting things occur as they did he believed he was penetrating more deeply into himself, getting closer to his core. Luke fell short of what he was capable of. He could have been many things, could have achieved more than he did. To all outward appearances he failed: he failed to keep the woman he loved, to pursue a career, to raise a family, to be happy. All of the things he associated with happiness came to be lodged absolutely in his past. But there was a sense, I think, in which he did fulfil his destiny. There are people who are destined to have lives like this and, in some way, his falling short was a kind of triumph; he was being faithful to some part of himself, to his destiny.

There are all sorts of propensities in people; we tend to look only at the positive side – their potential for success, for happiness – but there are other kinds of negative potential: the potential for wasting the talents we are given, for blighting our prospects of happiness.

So, as he sits there, staring at the TV that has been on all day, waiting for time to pass, as he looks at the bed where he has slept every night, or at the crumbs of bread scattered over the kitchen table, as he postpones for a little while longer the first drink of the day, or decides that he has waited long enough and opens the first bottle – perhaps he feels that at some level he has achieved his destiny, that he has been true to some part of himself, has touched some possibility which had been latent in him from his earliest beginnings. Perhaps he feels at home in himself.

I can imagine him sitting there, his mouth numbed by beer, knowing that he has ruined his whole life, that nothing will remain of him when he dies – no book, no children – and wanting nothing to be any different, accepting it. I can even imagine him almost happy.