Infidelities

by Kirsty Gunn

  ‘But I don’t agree at all,’ said Clare – I think that is how the conversation kicked off proper: I don’t agree at all. ‘Why shouldn’t a story be made of bits and pieces?’ she said. ‘And what do you mean by “lack of rigour” anyway? That’s just a fancy way of saying someone doesn’t do things according to the way you do them, that you don’t like their approach. I felt Melancholia was a great film, actually—’

  ‘You felt?’ I said. ‘What’s the point of you telling me what you felt? I want to know what it is about the film that made you have that response – of a “feeling” towards it. I want you to give me a reason why it’s great – not just some old “feeling”.’

  Clare laughed then, showing her gums in that pretty, sexy way that I think Tolstoy used when he drew an image of the little princess in War and Peace and describes her in terms of that particular physical configuration, ‘she had a short upper lip and showed her teeth very sweetly when she smiled,’ he writes. I’ve always found those kinds of smiles pretty and sexy – surprising somehow – and fun. Blame it on that dear old Russian if you want to. Then Clare took off her jersey and settled into her seat, because this was the discussion beginning fully now; we’d just laid out the opening of things and now we could fully get into the subject and its ideas.

  I looked over at my husband in the corner of the room, and then at the other guests. They were all happily talking and engaged. Clearly no one was going to notice or mind if Clare and I got deep into some private, esoteric conversation about feeling and reason that, in a way, didn’t belong at a party like this – a cocktail party, really, but with a buffet and music that might lend itself later to dancing – that would shut everyone else out, like a portcullis coming down, ‘No Entry’, our fancy kind of talk. I had a sip of my wine, and Clare began.

  ‘There’s something I want to tell you about,’ she said, ‘that happened to me years ago when I was still a student. I was reading semantics and philosopy as you know, and it was all Roland Barthes and Irigaray and Deleuze and Guattari. Books like Language and the Text – do you know that book?’

  I shook my head. I knew of the book but I hadn’t read it, and Clare went on to describe it in brief, ‘all about signs and the signified’ she said, and told me how important it had been to her, that particular title, as a young woman, when she was learning who she was, who she was to be. She’d been thinking about all of this, she said, because she’d just finished reading the new novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, and that book began with a character reading an inspirational book by Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse. In fact, that information was ‘the way in’ to Eugenides’ novel, she told me, which she had also loved. In fact, she said, she’d even written an email to Jeffrey Eugenides telling him how much she’d enjoyed his latest work, and he’d ‘pinged an email straight back’, telling her how delighted he was that she’d liked it.

  ‘And all because of a book by Barthes being at the beginning of it,’ Clare said. ‘Reminding me of a whole period of my life.’

  The story, proper – I’ve used that phrase before, I know – as she started to tell me (we’d both topped up our glasses of wine by now and were fully and cosily settled, like two cats, is how I thought of it, into our chairs – though my husband told me much later that night, before we went to bed, that throughout the entire period of the evening, while we’d all been having those pre-dinner drinks, I’d in fact been sitting in the most vulgar way possible, with my legs wide open so that everyone could see right up my skirt), began all those years ago when Clare was a young woman at the LSE and studying semiotics with a woman who I will call X, who is a leader in her field, the author of seminal texts about meaning and perception, language and the body, ‘high, high theory’ as Clare put it. ‘These were impenetrable books,’ she said, ‘that I desperately wanted to read and understand because I fancied her rotten.’ She stopped for a second, then laughed out loud. ‘For me,’ she said, ‘the books, the reading … It was all about sex and love and feelings and wanting her to fancy me and not the world of words, of ideas, at all!’ She laughed again, showing her teeth. ‘I just wanted to kiss her! Nothing to do with books! And I felt like a fraud because I was supposed to be understanding all this theory and learning from it. Signs and the Signified. I was supposed to be her student and she my tutor – and I felt like a charlatan, an impostor, because really it wasn’t about what she was teaching me. It was about bodies and sex.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said. She’d given such a clear definition of things. Writing and the Body – that was a book I’d read and found very influential at university, myself, by Gabriel Josipovici, and it covered the same kind of ground. ‘I see exactly why you’re telling me this off the back of what we said about Melancholia,’ I said. I think I said that then. Because we were having, Clare and I, that particular delicious feeling you sometimes get when talking with someone, about the conversation actually being about several things at once – the primary subject having been about that film, and how it had caused both of us to express quite opposing views, and then this other very different, narratively oriented conversation that had come out of that, all about bodies versus language and what had happened to Clare with a glamorous older woman when she was a student. And what had happened? I was interested, you see, in finding out more on that subject of whether or not the feelings that coursed through any response to anything, whether a film by Lars Von Trier or the story Clare was presenting now, might have value and be of interest.

  I was sitting there, as my husband told me later, with my legs wide open and thinking about that – while all the time holding fast to all my ideals about the real artist being someone with a unifying vision, the kind of person, in other words, who wouldn’t need to rely on the famous bits from Tristan and Isolde – the bits that everybody loves anyhow – to make the audience believe that what had been created was meaningful and somehow righteous, in the aesthetic sense, well made and fit for purpose, beautiful that way.

  And there was Clare, just the opposite, who’d told me on a previous occasion that – and she was adamant that she was not being post-modern at all – she always cried in the bit of the film of Mary Poppins when the old crippled woman comes out into the twilight and Mary Poppins sings ‘Feed the Birds’ to her. So yes. We were different, she and I. We were different, all right, and I was intrigued, I was coming to realise, over the course of our discussion, by the rigidity of my own views that seemed so dull, somehow, me sitting there in my black tights and my high heeled black shoes, my short black skirt – what a trip! – next to this free and open-minded intellectual with her pink gums and white teeth and a story to tell …That had a river in it, she went on, and a bridge, and the cold air of midwinter on her exposed skin, on her throat and face and, when her shirt was unbuttoned, on her breasts, a story braced with coldness, December in London, a chill wind coming off the Thames, the ‘freezing’ and ‘exciting’ qualities of the day.

  For there she was in the story, too, wild and free. Fancying the pants off this extraordinary-sounding older woman and – ‘What was she like?’ I kept asking Clare. ‘Like, physically? Tall? Fair?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, all of that,’ said Clare, right back. ‘She was amazing’, and she kept returning to that phrase of how much she fancied her: ‘I fancied her rotten,’ she repeated.

  For that reason, I never got a real portrait of X for the purpose of writing this, something I would have liked, actually, to have been able to create a portrait of that woman in the Henry James way of showing character that is not the Tolstoy way but more uptight and detailing all the moral qualities of a person before you get anything of the physical, like you always get with Tolstoy straight away, the physical, you read about that first. Instead I’m left just with that ‘tall’ and ‘fair’ of my own here – enough to make X a Valkyrie, I suppose, to keep the Wagner theme live, more a daughter of the god Wotan than an earthly Isolde – and Clare said she was having classes with this woman every week and loving the classes, of course, just suc
king in every single thing about signs and signifiers, and going off and doing all the reading in between, reading that Barthes book and Lacan and Foucault and everyone, and all because she was in love with this person, X, and this was the only way, through reading the books X had read and had written about, those many texts of hers, Clare could get close.

  ‘Finally,’ Clare said, ‘after all this, after all the tutorials and the flirtation – because I knew she was flirting with me, using the books, her texts, to flirt with me – so, finally …’ And this is what I thought Clare said … ‘We had a day together.’

  Finally we had a day together.

  As I say, that is what I thought she said. The next part of the story depends upon me writing it like that – faithfully, but with a sense of drama, of narrative fulfilment – in the way I heard Clare say it, that ‘Finally’ performing its trick, you see. ‘Finally we had a day together.’

  Clare knows she looked great that day. She was wearing a leather jacket and a shirt that she loved. ‘It was from Flip’ – I know I’ve got that part exact. ‘And it was beautiful, beautiful cotton,’ she said. When I asked her more details about that later – when we went on to talk about the importance of the feel of the clothes you wear on top of your body, that first layer of clothing and how that makes you feel when you are with someone you fancy, how you remember every detail – she said it was a pale blue shirt with a thin, thin yellow stripe, ‘a fine stripe’, Clare said, putting her thumb and forefinger together to show how very fine it was. ‘It was quite preppy—’

  ‘A Connecticut shirt,’ I interpreted. ‘Like the boys wear there, on the Eastern Seaboard.’

  ‘Yes,’ Clare said. ‘And it was made of, as I said, this beautiful cotton and I know I looked great in that shirt. I knew I looked just great.’

  So, and again I say it, finally, there she was. Dressed as she was – and it was ‘illegal’. Clare kept using that word. ‘It was illegal,’ she said. For them to be having this day together, time out, a whole day, first having lunch, somewhere in Soho and then walking around London, the two of them, in term time, and on their own … And they’d ended up on Westminster Bridge kissing – with the air cold, it was freezing on Clare’s exposed skin, from where this woman had unbuttoned her shirt right there on the Bridge, had unbuttoned that pale blue and yellow stripe cotton beneath her leather jacket in order to touch her breasts as they kissed. December and a thin cold wind was blowing across the Thames and there they were, these two women, a young woman in a leather jacket and a rather gorgeous sounding boy’s shirt and a sophisticated and should I write splendid older woman? (I want her to be splendid, so keep it in), a beautiful tall older woman, her teacher. Yes, ‘tall’ and ‘fair’, and they were kissing, they couldn’t stop and X had put her hand inside the boy’s shirt, ‘and she groped me, she was groping me!’ Clare said.

  She took a handful of the soya nuts she’d been eating and crunched them all down. I saw the flash of those wild and lovely pink gums, those white teeth. She laughed, and I did. We both laughed.

  ‘So you see what I mean?’ Clare said. ‘It was illegal! For me to be with my teacher this way, for her to be doing that. She was my teacher and I was loving it, kissing her and being kissed, being felt up. I was in love with her, I wanted to run off with her … And all of this happening on Westminster Bridge in the cold, in December, we were kissing, it was wild, and then suddenly she pulled back,’ Clare said. ‘She pulled away from me and asked me, “Do you read Feminist Review?”’

  ‘What?’ I said. And then, ‘Wow.’

  ‘I know,’ Clare said. ‘“Do you read Feminist Review? ”’

  ‘I don’t even know Feminist Review,’ I said. ‘I mean. I’ve never read it. I’ve heard of it but—’

  ‘I know,’ Clare said again, back to me. ‘And I hadn’t read it either – but I wasn’t going to tell her that …’

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Well I went, Yeah,’ Clare said. ‘I said, “Yeah, a bit. I know Feminist Review.”’

  ‘And—’

  ‘Then she said to me – and remember the cold air, it was on my face, on my skin, my shirt was still unbuttoned, my jacket was open to the December air—’

  ‘And the river flowing beneath you …’ I said.

  ‘Sure, the river. And it was cold. It was bloody cold, and a second ago we’d been kissing and she’d been feeling me up, and then – get this, okay? This is the part of the story I’ve been wanting to get to – she said to me, after I’d said that, yes, I knew Feminist Review, she said that, well, could this be a scenario?’

  ‘Hah!’ I said.

  ‘I know!’ Clare replied.

  ‘Because what does that even mean, right?’ I said.

  ‘I thought the same thing! What is that, a scenario?’ Clare grabbed another handful of the soya nuts and chewed and crunched and swallowed them so quickly it was as though ravenous hordes were chasing her.

  ‘Well I think it has a capital letter, for a start,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know … what it is. Do you know now?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Clare. ‘But on the other hand, maybe not.’

  ‘Well it’s not like saying “Affair”, is it?’ I answered. ‘Though “Affair” most certainly has a capital letter as well. But it’s not like that, is it? Scenario?’

  ‘But neither is it just a situation,’ Clare added.

  ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘It’s not that. It’s not just a situation. It’s definitely something that’s—’

  ‘A Scenario. Exactly,’ Clare said. ‘It’s what was happening – right there, at that minute. It was her way of saying – what? That this could be the reality for the two of us? To be together? That it could be this big deal—’

  ‘Or also,’ I said, ‘a way of saying that what was going on was nothing at all.’

  ‘Yeah!’ Clare grinned, then she gave out a quick laugh. ‘Weird, eh?’ she said. ‘To use that word when all that time I was feeling so much. You know, the cold, the kissing. My shirt unbuttoned. Feelings you see. It’s what we were taking about before. And then this word came down – in the midst of all the feelings—’

  ‘It came between the two of you,’ I said.

  What I was thinking, that moment, as Clare was crunching nuts and talking about all of this, was that ‘Scenario’ was a word all right. A word that that glamorous woman had used, knowingly, wisely and slyly, a word she’d used on purpose – whether or not it had come out of the pages of Feminist Review – she was using it for her own purpose, that word, to stand, meaningfully and solidly between herself and this young woman she was kissing and fondling. It was a word she carefully, mindfully inserted between herself and Clare, between her hands and the opened shirt, the bare breasts, the cold, shivery skin.

  Scenario.

  ‘Like, what is that, right?’ Clare said to me.

  I was sitting there, my husband said, as I wrote earlier, with my legs akimbo, wide open, like an old lady or a man sits, and I wasn’t wearing trousers but a short, short black skirt.

  ‘Scenario,’ I said.

  ‘What did it all add up to?’ My husband asked me, later that same night. We were having a discussion about the evening; he’d met a really nice couple, he said. He was in television production, but interesting programmes, art and culture, and she was a painter. ‘You’d have liked them,’ he said. He wanted to invite them for supper sometime.

  ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘where did your discussion with Clare lead you in the end?’

  It was quite late. I was getting ready for bed.

  ‘You sitting there with your legs wide open, like some old man, for Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘Your legs all over the place … Jesus, Mary.’

  ‘It led nowhere at all,’ I told him. After all, that wasn’t the point of it. We were exploring the concept of language and feeling, the right of one over the other. We didn’t have a conclusion to reach.

  ‘Well, I thought it was a bit rude,’ my husband said
. ‘A party, after all, and you two holed up in the corner talking in a way that seemed exclusive. You know, Mary,’ he said. ‘You two shut all the rest of us out.’

  And he was right, when I look back on it. I’d been aware of it at the time, whether it was an okay thing to do, have this separate conversation while the party was going on, I wrote about that earlier, but had ignored the thought.

  ‘She said: Could this be a scenario?’ Clare said.

  An invitation. And a dismissal.

  ‘It was both those things,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘By calling it a scenario,’ I told Clare, ‘while she was touching you. She was both inviting you to have an affair with her and denying the significance of what was going on at the same time. She was opening up the possibility of something happening, while closing down the likelihood of it ever occurring.’

  ‘Like a discussion about semantics,’ Clare said. ‘Language and the body.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘The Scenario. It sounds like a short story. I’m going to write it all down.’

  ‘Beginning with this party?’ Clare said.

  ‘Oh, don’t do that,’ my husband told me. ‘Don’t go turning all that into fiction. Bad enough that it happened, darling. You sitting there flapping your legs around … No thought for anyone else in the room.’

  That’s what he said, I told Clare weeks later, when the party was long over and the story was done. That my husband had said I’d had no thought for anyone else in the room.

  ‘Except me,’ Clare said.

  ‘Except you,’ I replied. ‘The conversation we were having.’

  ‘Was it a scenario then?’ my husband had asked me. ‘What happened? Did you figure that out at least?’ I’d finished telling him about the party, what Clare and I had been talking about. It was late and I was undressing.