*
From above, from somewhere in the ether, the checkered tablecloth resembled nothing so much as a chessboard. Fate was marshalling its pawns, buttressing its defences, plotting its lines of attack. But such an engagement can dispense with the convention of alternating black and white squares. It’s a game that can be played in the desert, on the ocean. The motif of the tablecloth was merely a private joke for the cognoscenti.
Lighting a cigarette, beaming at Matthew, Isabelle said simply, ‘Well!’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Come, come, little man. Why have you never dazzled us with these philosophical speculations of yours? Papa was awfully impressed.’
‘Papa’s full of shit,’ said Théo, morosely picking his teeth.
‘I liked him. I liked them both,’ said Matthew. ‘I thought they were both really nice people.’
Isabelle, as usual, had a theory. ‘Other people’s parents are always nicer than our own,’ she said, tipping ash into the cup of her palm. ‘Yet, for some reason,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘our own grandparents are always nicer than other people’s.’
Matthew gazed at her.
‘You know, I never thought of that before. But it’s true, it’s absolutely true.’
‘You’re sweet,’ said Isabelle with a smile that was transformed halfway into a yawn, ‘and I’m for bed. Night night.’
Removing her flat slip-on shoes as she made the round of the table, she kissed Théo first then, without any hesitation, Matthew.
‘By the way,’ she said, half in, half out of the door, ‘are you staying?’
‘If you’ll have me.’
‘Goody.’
Théo led Matthew to his own room. The bed was unmade. An upright piano stood in one corner. The bookshelves were stuffed with film histories, directors’ monographs and ghosted autobiographies of Hollywood stars. On the walls were pinned photographs of actors and actresses: Marlon Brando leaning with cool pantherine nonchalance against a bulbous motorcycle; Marilyn Monroe standing astride a New York subway grating, her white dress billowing around her thighs like the petals of a fabulous orchid; Marlene Dietrich, the snowy grain of whose flawless complexion could not be distinguished from that of the photograph itself. Piled up on a divan near the door were copies of Cahiers du Cinéma. And over Théo’s bed – and, by virtue of having been framed by a professional frame-maker, accorded a more elevated prominence than the other pin-ups – was a small oval portrait. It was of Gene Tierney in a still from Laura.
Though he had been impatient to know this room about which he had so often fantasised, Matthew was assailed by a sensation of déjà vu, by the obscure conviction not only that he had been here before but that something had taken place here of import to him. It took him an instant to locate the source of his malaise. What was this unmade bed, what were these piled-up Cahiers du Cinéma, these pin-ups and this oval portrait but, mysteriously transposed, the unmade bed, piled-up board games, college pennant and beautiful faces spread out in profile over the carpet of his best friend’s bedroom in San Diego?
It was now after midnight. Plainly, Théo had been hoping to talk shop. He had been looking forward to discussing movies late into the night, lounging on the bed, perhaps smoking a joint.
But Matthew wished to be alone, free to replay, in slow motion, the film of the day’s events. So he barely responded to Théo’s queries. A naïve actor, he yawned in a conspicuously studied manner, trusting that his friend would take the hint.
At last, reluctantly giving in, Théo accompanied him to the flat’s spare room, spare above all in the sense that it was furnished elegantly and starkly, with its parquet flooring, its three straight-backed chairs, its narrow cot and, above the cot, exactly where the portrait of Laura hung in Théo’s own bedroom, a framed reproduction of Delacroix’s La Liberté guidant le peuple. A snapshot of Rita Hayworth had been scotch-taped over the face of the voluptuously bare-breasted personification of Liberty.
Left to himself, Matthew lazily undressed and started threading through his mind’s projector the unedited newsreel footage he would screen for himself that night. Details already stood out like individual frames scanned by an editor as he holds a strip of celluloid up to the light – Watteau’s Gilles in the Louvre, the kisses exchanged outside, the shell and shot of battle on the esplanade. Furiously, he tried to banish these fragments from his inner eye. He would not be satisfied with an assortment of highlights. Everything had to unfold in the correct order, at the correct speed.
Absurdly, he crossed himself in front of Delacroix’s Liberté, recited a dutiful prayer and, wearing only his underpants, climbed into bed. In the semi-darkness he made out the whisper-soft rustle of the curtains at the other end of the room. He closed his eyes. He watched the curtains part. The film began.
Later in the night, when the newsreel had long since run its course, he woke up. At first he had no notion where he was. Then he remembered. Then, as well, he was dismayed to realise that he was awake because he had to go to the lavatory and that Théo had forgotten to show him where it was.
He hurriedly slipped his clothes on and stepped into the corridor. But he had lost his bearings. He was incapable of figuring out the topography of a flat that was a beehive of cells. The first corridor led off into another at a right angle. A door on the left stood ajar. Stealthily, he pushed it open and peered inside. A bathtub, a washstand, towel racks. He switched on the light, walked in and drew the lock behind him.
This bathroom, unfortunately, turned out to be only a bathroom, not a lavatory. But months of living in a miserably underfurnished Left Bank hotel room had made going to the washstand almost instinctive for Matthew. He turned the cold tap on, raised himself on tiptoe and urinated into the basin.
Back in the corridor he retraced his steps. The air in the house had turned to stone. Straight ahead was a doorway underlined by a narrow filament of light. He padded soundlessly towards it. With a final glance at the corridor, he opened the door.
It was Théo’s room, not his own. A pink bedside lamp, left on, threw a pallid spotlight over the bed. What did he see? Théo and Isabelle.
Isabelle was a Balthus. Sprawled out asleep on the bed, half under the covers, half on top, her whole body askew in a pose of rapturous lassitude, her dishevelled head cast back on its pillow, a strand of hair grazing her lips, she was wearing a plain white vest and white panties and looked about fourteen years old.
Beside her, Théo lay naked. He too slept, one leg under the covers, the other free, like Harlequin in parti-coloured pantaloons, the left leg dark, the right one light. He lay on his back, his ankle dangling over the end of the bed, his head resting on the palms of his hands, like that of someone stretched out in a field. Two curly shadows were visible in the cups of his armpits; the third, that which in the male body forms the apex of an inverted triangle, was concealed by the bedclothes where one exposed thigh emerged from beneath them.
What made them such an extraordinary sight was that the limbs of one seemed also to belong to the other.
For a long, long time Matthew stood stock still on the threshold of the room, transfixed not by the entanglement of bodies in a motor accident but by the enigma of the Androgyne.
Then at last he softly closed the door and tiptoed away.
When he opened his eyes next morning after a fretful night, it was to see Isabelle, as though ready to pounce, crouched on his bedclothes, on all fours, peering into his face. Over her shoulders she had on an old-fashioned woollen dressing gown of a dark maroon hue with, on its sleeves and lapels, corded braiding as convoluted as that which loops the loop on the uniforms of operetta hussars. Just a flash of pastel-pale thigh intimated that, underneath the robe, she was still wearing the plain white vest and panties of the night before.
Matthew had no idea how long she had been crouching in front of him. Nor did she give him time to put the question to her, for she immediately raised her forefinger to his lips and, in a hypnotist’s voi
ce, whispered, ‘Don’t speak. I command it.’
Her tongue protruding, her hand unshaking, half schoolgirl, half surgeon, Isabelle inserted her finger into the soft crevice at the corner of his left eye and slowly excavated the brittle stalactite of sleep that was lodged there. After she had subjected it to a thorough examination on the tip of her finger, she flicked it off, then drew another scabby, yellowish fragment from the right one. If, on her finger, these two incrustations looked quite minute, it felt to Matthew as though a pair of dice had been extracted from his eyes.
When the operation was complete she gracefully slid back into a kneeling posture.
‘Good morning!’
Matthew eased himself up on to his pillow. He continued to shield himself with the bedclothes as he was wearing only his underpants.
‘What was that all about?’
‘Why, my little Matthew,’ she replied, ‘I was removing the sleep from your eyes. You have beautiful eyes, you know. Théo lets me do his every morning but I wasn’t going to pass up the chance of a second helping.’
‘What a strange thing to want to do.’
‘You think so?’ said Isabelle, leaping to the floor. ‘Didn’t you enjoy it?’
‘Was I supposed to?’
‘Naturally,’ she answered. Then, clapping her hands, ‘Up, up, up! The house is alive and awaits Monsieur’s pleasure.’
Manoeuvring the train of her robe, she lingered in the room, picking up objects at random and weighing them in her two hands, as though rediscovering some long-unvisited haunt of her childhood years.
Matthew didn’t move a muscle. He watched her, fascinated, from under the covers.
Finally, she turned to face him.
‘What are you waiting for?’
‘Isabelle, please, I’m not dressed.’
She smiled at him, raised her eyebrows as though to say ‘So what?’ and continued to glide around the room, flitting from the bed to one of the straight-backed chairs, from the chair to a Biedermeier chest-of-drawers, from the chest-of-drawers to Delacroix’s Liberté, dusting each of them lightly with her fingertips or else lovingly stroking it with the palm of her hand.
Suddenly, at the height of this gala performance, she fired a question at Matthew.
‘Who in what film?’
Without a second’s hesitation he answered, ‘Garbo in Queen Christina. The scene where she bids farewell to the room in which she made love to John Gilbert.’
‘In the future, in my memory,’ croaked Isabelle, imitating the accent of the Swedish actress, ‘I shall live a great deal in this room.’
High-kicking a bare leg behind her from under the trailing robe, she opened the bedroom door and called back to him, ‘The bathroom’s at the end of the corridor, then first on the left. We’ve got a private wing to ourselves, you know. If you aren’t there in one minute, we’re coming to get you.’
The door slammed shut.
Matthew had awoken into a state of semi-conscious malaise, one that Isabelle’s intrusion had not given him time to identify. Now he traced it to its source. She had just said that she and Théo had ‘a private wing to ourselves’. Did she mean a wing of the flat? Could that be why brother and sister slept together in perfect impunity, a Romeo and Juliet star-crossed not because they belonged to two families but to a single one? But couldn’t it simply have been solace that Isabelle had sought in her brother’s arms, solace from loneliness or insomnia? Couldn’t he, Matthew, have misinterpreted the ecstatic demeanour of her body cast every which way, her hands, her feet, those lovely far-flung extremities of hers, connected each to each, like the stars of a constellation on an astrological chart, by milky white limbs in disarray?
In the same bathroom into which he had stumbled the night before he found Théo and Isabelle. They were both in their underclothes. Théo was shaving with an electric razor, while Isabelle sat on the edge of the bathtub clipping her toenails.
Cleanliness is next to godliness as a swimming-pool may be located next door to a church. Innocuous as this little vignette was, it filled Matthew’s nostrils with the ambiguous aroma of all the swimming-pools he had ever known.
As a boy, he’d had such a fondness for public pools that he eventually developed into a better, faster, stronger swimmer than either he or anyone else could have predicted of one so frail.
It wasn’t really the pools themselves to which he had felt drawn, though he liked to watch their youthful, virile divers, like those delightful statues which earn their living as caryatids or fountains, plunge into the water with the heavy grace of torpedos then furiously set about cutting it into strips like so many pairs of scissors. Rather, it was what took place backstage that had excited his scarcely developed senses. There, with a jolt, he had discovered a cocktail of soap and sperm and sweat, as lithe young men, millionaires of beauty, dandies of nudity, gold medallists in vigour, poise and assurance, would stroll to and fro among squalid cubicles, exhibiting their bodies like mannequins, in the poses of mannequins, in the pose of Botticelli’s Venus or Boucher’s Miss O’Murphy, on the rosy cheeks of whose bottom one would so like to lay a resounding slap. Nor was it unusual to glimpse, cross-legged, a carelessly draped towel revealing just the skylight of his body, an adolescent Narcissus in flagrante delicto with himself, his pose and grimaces making one think of a Samurai at the height of hara-kiri.
*
‘Here,’ said Théo, pressing the electric razor into Matthew’s hands. ‘Use this.’
For a moment Matthew was uncertain how to respond; and it was by hesitating as he did that he forfeited his chance to dissemble. All at once Théo scrutinised his features, the features of a housebroken mama’s boy, as intently as his father had done the evening before.
‘You don’t use a razor, do you?’
Isabelle slid off the bathtub and approached Matthew.
‘Let me see!’
These two white vests, these two pairs of white underpants, one of them bloated at the crotch, the other undershadowed by the dark silhouette of a triangular mound – nothing was more calculated to arouse him, to thrill him to the core, and at the same time to alarm him.
He backed off, only to be pinioned against the closed door, on which a variety of dressing gowns and bathrobes were hanging up.
When Isabelle extended a hand to caress his cheek, he held her off at arm’s length.
‘Stop it. Leave me alone.’
Brother and sister retreated. They had come to expect docile submission to their banter and teasing. They imagined that Matthew had become immune to it, as they themselves were immune to the boisterous give-and-take of their own mutual raillery. It startled them to confront, in so enclosed a space, his huge, hurt eyes, eyes that devoured his face, devoured the cramped bathroom, craned against its walls and ceiling, its lintels and cornices, like a pair of outsized apples by Magritte.
‘All right. I don’t shave,’ he answered sulkily. ‘What of it?’
‘Nothing,’ murmured Isabelle, smirkingly contrite.
‘My father was the same,’ he went on. ‘He didn’t shave till he was in his twenties. It’s not uncommon.’
‘Of course not. It’s just …’
‘What?’
‘Unusual for an American, no?’ said Isabelle. ‘More like a Mexican.’
‘A Mexican?’
‘A Mexican Hairless.’
‘What’s a Mexican Hairless?’
‘It’s a dog,’ said Isabelle. ‘And what’s interesting about it is that it isn’t hairless at all. It has hair where people have hair. The question is, have you?’
‘What?’
‘Have you hair … there?’
Without embarrassment, she indicated the spot on her own body.
Love is blind but not deaf.
Matthew felt his lower lip tremble. In a moment or two it would have dissolved into a nerveless, blubbery pat of redcurrent jelly. His mouth awash with toothpaste and water, he abruptly left them.
Walking along the co
rridor back to the spare room, he could hear a quarrel erupt between Théo and Isabelle, then the slamming of a door. Out of breath, still in his underclothes, rubbing his chin with a towel, Théo caught up with him.
‘Don’t take it so seriously,’ he said, sliding his arm about Matthew’s shoulders. ‘It’s nothing to what I get every day of my life.’
‘Too late. I’m leaving.’
‘Leaving? You haven’t had breakfast yet.’
‘I never eat breakfast.’
‘But we were going to invite you to stay on.’
‘What?’
‘Our parents are off tomorrow to Trouville. For a month. And we thought you might like to move your things here. You don’t have to return to that room of yours, do you? You haven’t paid up in advance?’
‘No …’
‘Well, stay. Isa will be disappointed if you don’t. We talked it over last night.’
That was a slip of the tongue. Since, on the evening before, Isabelle had risen from the table first, she and Théo shouldn’t have been able to communicate with each other until morning. But Matthew’s mind had begun to dwell on arguments less petty and more potent.
He had been offered privileged access to a secret world, a world from which he had always been excluded, a planet far from the solar system of average, upright citizens who, like mediaeval astronomers, tend to confuse that solar system with the universe itself. It was a world of which he had known nothing a mere twenty-four hours earlier. Its inhabitants he had frequented only when it had taken their fancy, like Caliphs or angels, to roam incognito through the ordinary world of average, upright citizens.
This planet, orbiting as it did around the place de l’Odéon, already boasted entangled legs, unmade beds, a communal bathroom that was warm, moist, dewy-windowed and redolent of suspect odours, as well as other mysteries which remained as yet unveiled but might be made accessible in their turn.
The Dreamers Page 5