(2012) Paris Trance

by Geoff Dyer

  ‘Do you have children?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘Do you have a photo?’

  ‘Of the kid?’ I said, reaching for my wallet. ‘If you want to see it, sure.’

  ‘Actually I don’t. I hate pictures of children.’

  The froth of my beer had subsided enough to drink. I said, ‘So what about you Luke?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘How do you pass your time?’

  ‘It’s like Sahra said that day, at the coast. There is no more time.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Nothing. Actually that’s not true. I wait.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For it all to come round again,’ he said. We watched the game in silence. A fight started between two players and in seconds half a dozen of their team-mates were piling into each other. That was when I asked if he remembered the time we had beaten the guy up, on our way home from football. It was the only thing I said that afternoon that made him smile. We fell silent again. Then he asked the question I knew he would be unable to stop himself asking.

  ‘Have you heard from Nicole?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where is she – in Paris?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And does she have a child also?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then she’s no longer beautiful. No longer a woman in fact. Once women have children they stop being women. They become mothers.’

  I could have said something. I didn’t. I was too . . . what? Not angry, something milder, indifferent almost: to the bitterness, to the hate I felt in him. To the hate he felt for himself.

  There is an extreme form of meditation – I forget the name – which requires that you concentrate on your dead body, in its grave, rotting, crawling with worms, turning to earth, becoming nothing. I had read also of an American writer who, while doing something as ordinary as drying the dishes, found himself thinking of his dead mother, lying in her grave. Death appeared to him ‘a force of loneliness, only hinted at by the most ravening loneliness we know in life; the soul does not leave the body but lingers with it through every stage of decomposition and neglect, through heat and cold and the long nights’. Both ideas are shocking but are they any more disturbing, really, than one we take almost for granted: that the soul rots, or wears out, like cartilage, before the body dies?

  ‘I was going to ask how she was,’ said Luke. ‘But I think I’ll leave it at that.’

  ‘What happened Luke?’

  ‘When? What? To whom?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘To Nicole and me?’

  ‘To you.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  I knew, from Nicole, some of the nothing that had happened. I knew about their last moments at the Café Bastille, knew that Luke had said he was leaving Paris, leaving her; abandoning everything, even himself. I knew that she had placed her hand on his and looked at him, and I knew what he saw: all the love in the world a man can ever be given by a woman.

  ‘You know, Nicole,’ he said, ‘you’ve never once tried to restrain me. Never held me back. Never tried to stop me doing what I wanted.’

  ‘I’ve never had to.’

  ‘Not till now.’

  ‘Not even now.’ They were holding hands. ‘Whatever you want, Lukey.’

  ‘What I want,’ he said, ‘is for you to get up and leave. To watch you walk away.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So I can see you. So I can see you until the last possible moment.’

  She gripped his hand. He moved his face towards her. They kissed. Then she moved her face and he felt her lips moving by his ear. She looked at his eyes that gave nothing back. Right up until the moment that she turned and left everything was reversible, saveable. The whole course of their lives, of our lives, hung in that one ordinary moment, indistinguishable, to anyone looking on, from the hundreds of other times that he had sat and watched her walk away. Perhaps that was why it was so easy for her to comply. They had rehearsed this moment so often that it required no effort, no will. As if nothing was at stake. She put her spectacle-case into her bag. Stood up, pushed her chair back into place and he watched her walk away, banging one table with her hip as she did so. He watched until he lost sight of her. He sat for a few moments, paid the bill and then stood up. He left Paris the same evening and, until that afternoon when I visited him in London, none of us saw him again.

  After Luke left, Nicole came and stayed with us for a few days. Then she returned to the apartment but we still saw her every day. I remember thinking that it was less fun like this than it had been when there were four of us, all together. I remember thinking, too, that she would never recover from what had happened. I held her in my arms while she sobbed, could feel myself, even then, desiring her, wanting her. Several months later she went back to Belgrade.

  We wrote, exchanged Christmas cards, talked on the phone sometimes. She wrote to say she was married, that she’d had a baby. Then we lost touch for several years until she phoned, out of the blue, and said she was back in Paris. She had split up with her husband – her choice – and had come to Paris because of an offer of a job.

  ‘So you’re back for good?’

  ‘I hope so. What about you? How is Sahra?’

  ‘She’s great. She’ll want to see you. She’s not here at the moment. When can I see you?’

  ‘Whenever you like.’

  ‘What are you doing this afternoon?’

  I drove over to the apartment where she was staying, in the Thirteenth. She looked older, tired. We hugged each other. It was almost a relief to find that I was no longer attracted to her. Her face looked brittle. Her skin had lost its promise. She was still thin – like Luke – but whatever it was that had made her beautiful had passed. Maybe it was Luke’s loving her that made her beautiful. Beauty, I thought, is a moment. It passes.

  Her little girl was sleeping in the bedroom. She was three, a year older than our own son. We left her sleeping and went back into the kitchen.

  ‘How does it feel to be here again?’

  ‘It feels fine Alex,’ she said.

  ‘I spoke to Sahra before coming out,’ I said. ‘She’s dying to see you.’

  ‘And me she,’ she said.

  ‘It’s great to see you,’ I said.

  Sahra and I helped her find an apartment, to get settled. We saw a lot of her. The three of us became friends again, real friends. I saw her more often than Sahra did. She had a great need to talk about the past, to tell things to me. I came to see that I was wrong. Beauty is not a moment. Or if it is a moment, it is one that can last for ever.

  I had finished my beer. I said to Luke, ‘Do you have any idea of how much unhappiness you caused?’

  ‘I’ve done . . . questionable things.’ That was the only thing he said that afternoon that made me smile. Then, serious again, he said, ‘Do you have any idea how much unhappiness I have experienced myself?’

  ‘Your choice.’

  He shrugged. ‘There’s a café near here – I use the word café in its broadest, very unParisian sense – and I always go in there for a tea on my way back from the supermarket. The owner has a dog, a Dalmatian, and I go in there because of that, because I like the dog. When I went in there last the dog was nowhere to be seen. The owner said he was dead, he’d been hit by a car. And I sat down there and sobbed like . . .’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like someone still alive.’ I looked at my glass. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I was just telling you what happened in the café.’

  ‘Why Luke?’

  ‘Why am I telling you what happened in the café?’

  ‘No. The big “why?”’

  ‘That’s a question I don’t understand. It makes no sense. I don’t think about that any more. “Why?” Because that’s what happened.’

  The game had ended. The two teams tramped off the field, caked in mud. Luke flipped through the channels. There was nothing on but he did not tur
n the TV off. I stayed another ten minutes. Then we said goodbye and shook hands and I walked to the tube.

  It was not yet four and already it was almost dark. A black cab went by, For Hire, but I walked. It was not raining. There was a fifteen-minute wait for a train. I looked at posters for the latest films. London, England. It seemed awful to me: the weight of the place, the hardness. I was glad to be leaving the next day. I took out my wallet and looked at the picture of my son. A picture of a little boy like hundreds of other little boys. Except this was my son, Luke. He looked like his mother, like Sahra.

  The day after getting back from what Luke had taken to calling their ‘skiing holiday’ Nicole took the train to Belgrade, to visit her mother. Luke saw her off at the Gare de L’Est. She pushed down the window of the carriage door. They kissed.

  ‘It’s nicer to part at a railway station than an airport isn’t it?’ said Nicole.

  ‘Much. More cinematic,’ said Luke. ‘You’ve got the Walkman, yes?’ She pulled it out of her pocket and held it up. Luke had some reservations about lending her his new Walkman. In his experience it was a good idea, as soon as you lent something to Nicole, to prepare yourself for never seeing it again – at least not in good working order.

  ‘You won’t break it, will you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Or lose it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  A guard said the train was about to leave. A whistle sounded and the train began inching its way out of the station. Luke ran alongside for a few yards, as you are supposed to. They called to each other and then they waved and then the train was gone.

  When Luke went to bed that night he found an envelope under the pillow. Inside were two triangular pieces of black card, L written on one, N on the other, joined by a length of her hair.

  Within four days Luke was beside himself. He gazed at the photograph of Nicole in Belgrade and the Polaroids they had taken. He pulled her knickers out of the laundry basket and masturbated with them pressed to his face. His head ached. He was suffocating. All his longing was focused on Nicole but it was exacerbated by everything he saw, even the photograph in Pariscope – of a woman squatting, her back to the camera – advertising a sex show. He translated it into an image of Nicole squatting over him, her cunt in his face. He shoved the thought almost physically from his mind but then found himself dreaming of her smell, her neck, her breath, her hair. Unable to remain indoors he went for a walk in the frigid air, hurrying in the direction of his old apartment and the Tuileries.

  Grey boulders of snow lay piled up outside the gates of the park. Inside, the statues were rigid with cold. Having endured the blaze of summer they now waited out the brittle agony of winter. The trees were dark as iron. The sky was grey, heavy. Apart from that, as far as the statues were concerned, nothing had changed. Not even the old woman who sat there with her sign: ‘DITES MOI’. She was wearing a coat, wrapped up in a scarf, sitting in the same place she had occupied all summer, carved out of a silence as extreme as that of the statues around her. Luke ignored her and, repeating his habit of the previous summer, went to the cinema.

  The film was an adaptation of Homo Faber, a book Luke had heard of but never read. It began in Athens airport, in 1957, and then flashed back a few months to another airport, in Central America. The plane crashes and Faber finds himself stranded in Mexico. He gets back to New York and then decides to take a boat to Europe.

  During the ocean-crossing Faber finds himself falling for a young woman called Sabeth. He watches her play Ping-Pong, and then he joins in, not because he wants to play but because he wants to participate in the act of watching her. When he is not watching her he is filming her with a super-8 camera, as if he were already anticipating remembered happiness. Every moment is a promise – of how it will seem on film, in retrospect, when it has passed. She tells him that his name, Faber, means forger of his own fate. From Paris they drive down through France and Italy. They become lovers, they travel on to Greece. Faber films her with his little camera, too fascinated by watching her speak to listen to what she says.

  Words have nothing to do with happiness, they can only frame it. Happiness is a question of colours: the blue of the sea, yellow fields of rape, her hair against the sky.

  In Greece Sabeth suffers a terrible accident. ‘What was the use of looking?’ Faber asks himself when he hears that Sabeth has died as a result of this accident. ‘There was nothing more to see.’ He is back at Athens airport and the film is back where it began. ‘I wished I’d never existed,’ says Faber, pale, devastated.

  On the day of Nicole’s return, still haunted by the film, Luke woke early. How was he going to survive until she came? The minutes were sweating by. He could hardly breathe. He had cut his nails down to the quick and put clean sheets on the bed. It took the will-power of a saint not to masturbate. He turned up at the station early and found that the train would be an hour late. He drank a shitty café au lait at one of the station bars, enjoying the commotion of departure and arrival, the rapid flick-a-flick of the departure board, the potential for robbery and harm suggested by the hundreds of strangers milling around in a place designed with getaway in mind. There was a sense of the whole of Europe converging here, on this station, and Luke at this moment felt that he too was in the precarious centre of something: of his life, of the life he had dreamed of. No, not the life he had dreamed of: the life he had willed, the life he had achieved. An unshaven man next to him lit up a cigarette. Luke left his coffee and headed to the platform.

  The train curved into view, ground to a halt. The doors opened. Passengers began spilling out of the carriages, lugging their bags, embracing relatives, hurrying for taxis. Then he saw her. She was wearing a new coat, black. Her hair was long, loose, her skin pale. She looked tired, drawn. She walked down the platform, unhurried as always. She saw him. They were smiling, waving, then kissing. He breathed in the smell of her skin, her hair. He took her bag and they walked to the Métro.

  ‘How was Belgrade?’

  ‘It was like Belgrade.’

  ‘And your mother, how was she?’

  ‘She is happy. I showed her a photograph of you. She thinks you are handsome but immature.’

  ‘Which picture?’

  ‘The one of you when you were a boy, in the cowboy hat.’

  ‘It doesn’t do me justice.’

  Sitting next to Nicole on the Métro Luke saw his Walkman in one of the side pockets of her bag.

  ‘Incredible,’ he said. ‘I’d resigned myself to never seeing this again.’ To his surprise it showed no obvious sign of damage. He checked there was a cassette and pushed the headphones into his ears. ‘How was it?’

  ‘Fine.’

  He pressed Play. Nothing happened. He tried again.

  ‘The batteries must be flat,’ said Nicole.

  Luke spent the rest of the journey wondering what he most wanted to do when they got back to the apartment: make love immediately or check that his Walkman was working properly.

  As soon as they arrived home Nicole ran a bath and undressed.

  Luke knelt in front of her, his face in her pubic hair. ‘Let me lick you before you get in the bath,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve been on a train for ages. I need to wash.’

  ‘No, before you wash.’

  ‘I’m embarrassed. Is not too much?’

  ‘No, it’s beautiful.’ She raised one leg, put her foot on the edge of the bath. He squatted so that he was almost under her, pushed his tongue as far into her as he could. She reached down and held his head with both hands, pressing his face against her.

  Nicole lay in the bath, reading her mail. Before Christmas she had applied for a job in an architect’s office and in this batch of mail was a letter asking her to come for an interview on the twelfth—

  ‘Tomorrow!’ she exclaimed. ‘Luke!’

  ‘Yes!’ He was in the other room, hunting for batteries.


  ‘I’ve got an interview for that job at the architect’s. Tomorrow.’

  ‘Good timing!’ He put new batteries in the Walkman and went into the bathroom. ‘The moment of truth,’ he said, sitting, cautiously, on the toilet seat (it had never been fixed). Even with new batteries the Walkman did not work. Nicole stood up in the bath, began drying herself with a white towel.

  ‘I’ll take it back to the shop,’ said Luke. ‘I hope Alex and Sahra have the receipt. It must have been faulty.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nicole, walking, naked, into the other room. ‘Though I did get honey in it.’

  In the morning she got up, showered and dressed while Luke lay in bed, watching her and her reflection in the mirror. He was always hoping that the mirror would begin to ghost but for months now it had worked completely normally.

  ‘You know, I could spend my life watching you get dressed and undressed. However many times I see you naked I can never get over the shock of actually seeing you with no clothes on. And then, when I see you getting dressed again, when I see your pubic hair disappear into your knickers, when I see your breasts covered by your bra and your back by a blouse. Or when I see your legs going into your jeans . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I was going to say. It’s a simple thing but complex. Without clothes you’re naked. With them, you’re not. On the floor your clothes are just clothes, then when you put them on they’re part of you.’

  ‘That’s profound Luke.’

  ‘Maybe all I mean is I love watching you get dressed.’

  ‘I like you watching me.’

  ‘But you don’t watch me in the same way, do you?’

  ‘I’ve never been fast enough. You’re dressed in less than ten seconds. Also watching’s not the same as noticing. You don’t need to watch to notice. Men watch, women notice.’

  ‘Good distinction. Did you notice that I jerked off into your knickers while you were away?’

  ‘I hope you washed them afterwards. How do I look?’ She was wearing her smartest suit, green, shoes with slight heels.

  ‘You always look beautiful.’

  ‘Thank you.’