I shower, I shave, I tidy the bed.
I tip the pasta into the bin and push it down to hide it behind the rest.
The friends are actually half of the dance company. They are clever, pretty, and wild. They drink a lot, smoke a lot, laugh loudly and put me at ease.
The menu contains one hundred percent meat dishes, so I eat lettuce and raw carrots. Hugo says I’m, “Qu’un villain lapin.” – Nothing but a naughty rabbit.
I manage to be funny, witty, and irreverent, I reflect my surroundings. I had forgotten just how “up” I can be. Red, smiling faces beam at me from around the table.
Everyone says goodnight, including Hugo. The company are invited somewhere for drinks; they are leaving me behind.
I stand nonplussed, next to my car, watching them climb into theirs, and then, just as Hugo lifts a leg to get into the last car, he changes his mind. He runs across the car park and kisses me, deep and hard. I am so surprised that I don’t move.
He grins. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he says.
And thus it starts. We sleep in his house; we sleep in my house. We build towering inferno log-fires and roll around in front of them.
We drink too much, argue about everything, agree in the end, and have sex again. He loves my mess; I love his heaps of junk. It feels relaxed and easy and right.
“I had forgotten how easy it could be,” I tell Isabelle.
We hang out with his friends from the company. I feel like a student again, feel the way I did before, when I was young, when all that mattered was having a laugh. I feel the way I felt before I started shopping at Habitat.
I realise that my life has been so empty. That living in the middle of nowhere, being made redundant, and being single, huh! No wonder I was feeling depressed, Hugo is my very own universal solution.
He fills my mornings, my lunchtimes, my evenings and my nights. He’s so hyperactive that I need the time when he’s working just to catch up on my sleep quota.
We spend half of our time alone, the other half with his friends, his colleagues, his family. When he goes away, sometimes I get to travel with him: we go all over France, to Amsterdam, to Prague, to Seville. When he gets complimentary tickets to some cultural event he takes me with him, and he gets a lot of complimentary tickets.
His friends turn up at my house just to play ping-pong. His life fits me like a glove.
I tell Isabelle, “I have never been so happy.”
But she’s worried, and she’s right. “Isn’t it all a bit much though?” she asks, inarticulate, but accurate as ever.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say.
She shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “It all just seems a bit … unsustainable.”
I have folded into this relationship and I’m disappearing fast.
Isabelle is right, it can’t be sustained, but I can’t do anything else. My own life is a big blurred mess, I don’t know where I’m going or what I’m doing, so we live Hugo’s life instead and it suits us both – one size fits all. I am so happy, so busy, so overflowing with joy that I can’t even be bothered to think about the implications of any of this.
When summer arrives, Hugo has time off and we languish in bed until twelve. We walk in the forest; we diet together and drive to the mountains to buy more hens.
When we have dinner parties, some of my friends reappear, tempted to travel out to me by the chance to escape the heat and overcrowding of Nice in August. They seem to love Hugo almost as much as I do. “Try to keep this one a bit longer,” they say.
I awaken in the mornings, snuggle to his back and he stretches, yawns and snuggles into me.
One morning in September, he rolls onto his back instead, stares at the ceiling. “How long have we been together now?” he asks sleepily.
I count. “Feb, March, April, May. Nine months,” I say. “Nearly nine months.”
Hugo moves away, it’s barely perceptible, but he definitely moves away.
“Why?” I ask, propping myself up on one elbow.
He pauses a moment. “Does that mean that we’re a couple?”
I can tell that this is multiple-choice. I know deep down, that it’s a trick question, that there’s a right answer and a wrong answer, and that the obvious answer may not be the correct one. I can sense that there’s a lot to lose.
In panic, I go for honesty. “I suppose the fact that we’ve slept together almost every night for nine months could imply that we’re a couple, yeah. So? What’s wrong?”
Hugo says, “Hm.”
He gets up; he dresses. Saying, “Sorry, but I need some space today,” he leaves without eating breakfast.
I sit and wait.
Isabelle says, “C’est normale!” “A break after nine months is normal. Just give him some space.”
“But is it just a break?” I wonder. “Let it just be a break,” I pray.
A week drones by, I give him space. The emptiness in my house is overpowering, as if everything is frozen, everything is on hold.
I swear even the plants stop growing.
I sit and wait and bite my nails.
Hugo has taken everything: the friends, the cuddles, the sex, the laughter. It’s still summer, but I can’t be bothered to do anything, so I sit indoors waiting.
It feels like winter.
It takes two weeks for him to get his thoughts together.
One afternoon I glance out into the garden and he’s there stroking the cat. I run out to him, run at him. “Thank God!” I say.
But the expression on his face tells all: panic and pain. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t understand myself, but I … I guess I need a break, I need time to think.”
“I thought we had a break,” I say. “I thought that’s what we were doing.”
His eyes shine, his hands are trembling. “A month,” he says. “Give me a month to work out what’s going on.” …
He walks around the house, collects his remaining stuff and rides away.
I wait six weeks before I go to see him. He sits me down, holds my hand. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but what we have, well it’s not what I want.”
Which is funny really, because it’s everything I want.
He hands me a bag with, “some things” of mine.
When I get home, I angrily empty the bag onto the bed. It contains every gift I ever gave him, oh and my spare toothbrush. The toothbrush makes me weep; the toothbrush strikes me as really final.
But deep down, I always think he’ll come back.
I’ll guess I’ll always expect that call.
20-20 Vision
I drag through the classic trauma cycle, only this time it takes longer than usual. Denial: he’ll be back; it was just too wonderful. Anger: I bet the bastard’s actually shagging someone else. Depression: toast, cigarettes, rosé and chocolate. Rebound: diet, swimming pool, gym, reading the personals all over again.
These are promising as always, so I answer a couple, but it’s the usual mirage in the desert, lots of guys who sound hopeful, who seem even better in the contact email, but who when I call them either say, “Come round now, I’m nude and waiting with my throbbing tool in my hand,” or “Yeah I really like your voice, I’d like to meet you tomorrow, and hey, if it all goes well we could we live together!” If all else fails then, the voice, when I call, sounds like Tinky Winky on ecstasy.
I will not get depressed, I will not give in, I will survive. I will, yet again bounce back.
I force myself to go to the pub, to attend bike club meetings, secretly hoping to see Hugo again or if not, another, better Hugo. Could such a thing exist?
The night I meet Laurent I am drinking with friends from the bike club outside La Rusca. The bikes are lined up along the pavement.
Jean-Paul says, “Mark, meet Laurent.”
Laurent smiles at me, and Jean-Paul moves away. I can tell that he’s dumping him on me but I think, Cute and I think, Young.
Laurent grins, smiles, winks and moves to
my side.
When we move on to a restaurant, Laurent sticks with us, sticks to my side. He is gushing, enthusiastic; he stares at me with huge brown eyes. He asks me what bike I have, tells me that he loves motorbikes and that he loves bikers. I smile at him indulgently.
Around eleven p.m. he says, “I’d love to go out with a biker like you.”
I make my excuses and escape.
Over the next two weeks he pursues me by all means, low and high tech combined. I get postcards, telephone calls, emails and SMS messages. Jean-Paul calls me as go-between to tell me that Laurent is “desperate” to see me again.
I ask him why he dumped him on me in the first place.
“No reason really. He’s nice,” he insists. “He’s just a bit, well, clingy.”
“I KEEP THINKING ABOUT U,” says an SMS, “CALL ME!”
The truth is that I do like him; he’s very cute, relaxed and funny, in a twenty-year-old kind of way. I wonder myself why I don’t go for it.
It’s the age thing, but why should the idea worry me so?
I discuss the dilemma with gay friends who ask me how old he is and wince as they calculate the difference. They say, “Why not, but what would you have in common?” or, “Well the ancient Greeks did it, but then we’re not ancient Greeks, are we?” At the same time they egg me on. “And do call me and tell me what happens if you do,” they say excitedly.
Laurent is ever present, ever persistent.
One Friday I phone my oldest straight friend Steve.
He’s flabbergasted. “But I thought you were supposed to be immoral sex machines, endlessly shagging everything in sight,” he says. “I thought it was easy for you guys, I thought that was the whole point.”
“Not the whole point, surely?” I say.
“Well if I was single and met a cute twenty year-old bird who was up for it I wouldn’t hesitate for a second,” he says. His demonic laugh reveals it as complete truth.
I like this advice, so I call a couple of other straight male friends. They unanimously would have sex with a twenty year old, and their enthusiasm is such that I suspect they probably wouldn’t mind doing it together. They are all shocked that the idea should present me with any kind of moral dilemma. “The guy is an adult for God’s sake,” they say.
It’s true. “He does have a beard,” I think.
In the end of course the hormones win, I go with the straights. I like to have opposing advice; it lets me do what I like and still feel justified.
So I drag little Laurent into my lair and it’s not so difficult.
The first week goes fine, in a vanilla kind of a way. He has no real opinions on anything, so it feels a bit like trying to read an empty exercise book. But he’s always in a good mood, always willing to do anything, and for once his homosexuality seems to pose him no problem at all. His friends at college know, his parents know. “A different generation,” I think.
I lie in bed watching him sleep: his face looks lovely. He always smiles as he sleeps, sometimes he actually laughs as he dreams.
I ponder the fact that the gays I know these days have more hang-ups about sex than their straight equivalents. I wonder if we thirty-somethings haven’t gone from defining our sex lives in spite of what others may care to think about us, to defining them in the very hope of disproving what we worry others might think about us. As far as Laurent is concerned no one actually seems to care enough to think about us at all.
I wake up one morning next to him. He’s sleeping soundly and as I lie there I wonder if the sex will get any better – he never seems to actually move very much. I think, “Whatever, this is fine.”
As I stroke his bare shoulder, he wakes up, stretches animal-like then turns and hugs me.
He says, “I love you.”
I cough. I say, “That’s nice, but you might want to slow down there.”
He says, “But I know. I really love you.”
I go to make tea and he follows me to the kitchen. He’s nude and his dick stands out at ninety degrees.
I look at him, slim and fit and youthful. I don’t remember ever having a physique like that. “What sport do you do to have a body like that?” I ask him.
He grins at me; he shrugs. “I don’t,” he says. “I’m naturally muscly.”
“Typical,” I say, stirring the tea.
He says, “So can I come and live here?” The question comes out naturally, apparently, a waking, logical, obvious thought.
I turn to frown at him. I shake my head. “Absolutely,” I say. “Not!”
“But it does make sense,” he argues.
“We’ve been seeing each other a little over a week,” I say.
“Nearly two weeks,” says Laurent. “Anyway, my friend Josette moved in with her boyfriend after a week. Now they’re getting married.”
I stare at him. I shake my head. “Laurent!” I say, “It’s not gonna happen.”
He frowns at me; he goes a little red. He looks angry, upset, and his eyes start to shine.
I know that this won’t last and I wonder, “Why not?” When did the relationship game all get so heavy, so weighted, so complicated? When did it become impossible to just say, “Sure, why not?”
Mobile Fantasy
Even the way it starts is strange, a simple text message on my mobile phone, a message to call Jean-Luc. Jean-Luc – the cute one, the guy I have been bumping into infrequently for nearly ten years, every time with a different boyfriend in tow. Jean-Luc who always seems pleased to have a coffee with me but nothing more.
Jean-Luc has the kind of charm that people recruiting salesmen dream of, that flirty way of giving you his complete attention, of staring deep into your eyes with a cocky smile, whether you’re his landlady or his prey.
I phone him immediately. I guess he needs instructions on how to get to Isabelle’s party, or maybe someone’s phone number.
When he asks me to dinner, I am more than surprised.
Jean-Luc has changed. He’s still beautiful; he still has those big brown eyes and the little smile lines emanating from them, and he still asks endless streams of questions. But he no longer listens to the replies. Most of the time I can’t even finish the phrase before he interrupts me with the next question. “Maybe he was always like that and I didn’t notice,” I think.
I wonder what I am doing here, but in a very detached kind of way, as though I am reading a story, as though it is unfolding before me one page at a time, I am intrigued – an actor in my own life. So I accept the invitation to his flat just to see what will happen.
What happens is that we have frigid, sterile, dull sex. Afterwards – and it doesn’t take long – I leave feeling more bored than cheap.
The next day he calls me again, he wants me to spend another night with him.
When I say, as kindly as I can, “No, sorry, but this isn’t working for me,” he breaks down and weeps into the phone. Luckily he can’t see my surprised grimace.
“I’m sorry, I should have told you,” he explains. His sister is dying – cancer. He can’t think of anything else, he’s not usually like this; he wasn’t listening to anything I said. “I couldn’t even concentrate when we were having sex,” he says.
The conversation floods on and on and on until I feel saturated. I am interrupted by a knock on the door and so I promise, out of kindness, to visit him later that evening.
Back in his flat, he tells me the whole story. She’s in the terminal stages of leukaemia and he’s leaving tomorrow to stay with her until the end. He needs me to stay with him tonight. “I’ve got no right to ask you this but I’m asking you anyway,” he pleads.
So I stay.
He grips my arm as he sleeps a deep tormented sleep. I lie looking at the patterns the blinds make on his ceiling, listening to the passing cars, wondering why I’m doing this, wondering if anyone wouldn’t do this for a fellow human being.
In the morning he’s sullen but grateful, and I am tired. I take him to the airport.
&
nbsp; The text messages start an hour after he arrives.
“I MISS U. I WISH WE COULD BE TOGETHER” This is surreal enough to start to interest me intellectually; strange enough to make me follow through, just to see where this will go.
Day by day, by telephone and by text message I follow the death of a woman I have never met, the sister of a man I barely know.
“SHES HAVING TR BREATHING. I NEED YOUR ARMS AROUND ME.”
The next day, “SHES ON VENTILATOR. WE DISCUSS WHO LOOKS AFTER KIDS.”
Then, “THEY’VE STOPPED THE DRUGS … I THINK IS THE END.” And, “HER EX IS HERE SHE HATES HIM. V DIFFICULT. I MISS YOU”
Finally, exactly a week later, the chapter ends, “THATS IT ITS OVER. PLEASE CALL.”
Robotically, at three a.m. I counsel him over the phone; he needs to know that I will be there for him when he returns. Dishonestly I assure him that I will; I think he needs that answer.
I don’t love him; strangely I don’t think I even like him – he strikes me as dishonest and hysterical and selfish. “But,” I reason, “who wouldn’t be under these circumstances?”
I follow the preparations for the funeral, the negotiation of the inheritance, the visits to the notary. I get confused and think I’m following a radio play.
Friends seem confused as well and ask me for the latest instalment, but this play is real life, it actually moves me to tears.
It makes me sad with the loneliness of my role, of his role, of the whole plot.
Two days before he returns, I have to go away to England. My own brother Peter is in intensive care with a burst appendix.
Everyone says he should be OK, but my mother says he could die. “You just can’t tell with a burst appendix,” she says, as ever, the prophet of doom.
“Synchronicity,” I think. “Maybe it’s a sign.” But a sign of what?
During my trip, Jean-Luc’s SMS messages dry up. I resist the temptation to keep him posted on Peter’s illness and he doesn’t seem interested anyway; he’s had enough to deal with, I tell myself.
I spend Christmas in the hospital trying to make conversation. Peter and I know virtually nothing about each other’s lives, but we still can’t think of much to tell each other.
50 Reasons to Say Goodbye Page 15