(2012) Paris Trance

by Geoff Dyer

  It was five in the afternoon by the time they left hospital with crutches and a bottle of pain-killers. Back home they found three messages from Alex on the answering machine. Nicole was tender, loving. Luke had never loved her more: a predictable enough reaction, partly comprising self-pity, shock, helplessness; but Nicole, too, felt as if her love for him were being raised . . . no, not raised, the opposite: deepened. They had tapped into some elemental current that has always existed between men and women, that causes nurses to fall in love with the crippled men they are caring for. And this did not extinguish or run counter to the sexual energy between them. Having arranged Luke comfortably on the bed she undressed and knelt over his face. She closed her eyes and began stroking her breasts, reached down and separated her lips with her fingers. She stopped after a while and walked over to the filing cabinets. When she returned she knelt over him again, facing away from him, rubbing the vibro along her cunt.

  After Nicole had come she said, ‘Can you move over on to your side?’ He did so slowly, careful not to jolt his ankle. He felt the slick touch of saliva and her finger slipping inside him. Then the harder buzz and pressure of the vibrator. He had never wanted anything more. He pressed back. At first there was a sensation of extreme tightness and then he felt himself open up. She had often pushed her finger inside him but he had never felt anything like this. It was as if he were dissolving. He moved his right knee up towards his stomach and felt her move more deeply into him. She touched his prick and in seconds he was coming.

  ‘Now we’re quids,’ said Nicole.

  ‘Quits,’ he said, correcting her English for once.

  For three days Luke didn’t leave the apartment. Then he began hobbling around, going to the shops for milk, to the Petit Centre for breakfast. The world had changed utterly in the interim. Now, he realized, it was peopled overwhelmingly by the halt and the lame. Everywhere he went he saw fellow limpers, hobbling and shuffling their way through the world. Infirmity was the norm. The highly mobile minority were missing out on a fundamental fact of life: getting around was difficult. It was like a premonition of being old, when even the smallest task would require planning, concentration and determination. Everything changed. Those men who levered themselves along the street in gallant, hour-long expeditions to the tabac for a Lotto card seemed less like unfortunates, more like the elders of the city, gurus in possession of the final secret of debility.

  Lazare transferred Luke to what Alex termed a ‘desk job’ at the warehouse: filling in orders and manifests, checking deliveries. The lunch-time kick-arounds were starting again and Luke went along too, on his crutches, feeling sorry for himself, to watch. He was glad when the lunch break was over and they went back to work.

  An outsider might have thought it strange that we stayed so long at the warehouse, working at what must have seemed a dead-end job. It was a dead-end job but everyone was happy to stay there. Several people – Matthias, Daniel – had vague plans to paint, to write, to make films (Luke’s Route 29 was a case in point), but no one showed any sign of putting these plans into practice, possibly because working at the warehouse, surrounded by other people who had no immediate plans to get on, made it easy to forget that in the world beyond the warehouse people were making plans and films, holding exhibitions and forging careers. And at the same time, because the guys at the warehouse were working – as opposed to being miserably unemployed – and because most of them were foreigners, working abroad (gastarbeiters, according to Alex), this easy-going purposelessness had an automatic element of achievement built into it. Besides, Luke insisted, it didn’t matter if they weren’t achieving anything.

  ‘Life is there to be wasted,’ he joked.

  At her job, meanwhile, Nicole was becoming increasingly aware of the attentions of her boss, Pierre. He was approachable, polite, friendly, interested. He complimented her on her work, listened attentively to any suggestions she had about the projects that were coming through the office. He sought out her opinions and then, when they had finished discussing work-related matters, he asked her about films, books. They had lunch together (he paid). He found himself wanting to stand closer to her when they were talking in the office, drinking mugs of coffee. Pierre loved his work, was ambitious, had always looked forward to going into the office, but now what he most looked forward to was seeing what Nicole would wear to work, how she would wear her hair. He came to recognize her perfume. Sometimes she was sure she could feel his eyes on her back, the touch of his gaze. When she turned round he would be looking the other way, doing something else, but he was there, always. Nicole was efficient, reliable, friendly. She never flirted. Describing her to a friend at lunch one day Pierre said that what fascinated him about her most was her absolute chastity. What he didn’t say was that he felt – as surely as Nicole could feel his eyes on her back – her to be a woman who would give herself utterly to a man. Her chasteness was somehow the outward proof, the external manifestation, of a potential for sexual abandon all the more alluring for being hidden, invisible. This certainty – a conviction whose strength derived, paradoxically, from an apparent lack of evidence – drove him to distraction. He came to love and, almost, to hate her. He bought her a present – an expensive fountain pen – and then made light of it. On several occasions Nicole made a point of using the word ‘boyfriend’ but to Pierre this nameless boyfriend seemed just that, a boy who was not to be taken seriously, an impediment. When he heard that the boyfriend had injured his ankle this seemed less an accident than a manifestation of his physical inadequacy. The knowledge, the certainty, that Nicole’s erotic ‘potential’ – and he found himself using that word frequently when telling her about future business ventures – was still to be unleashed, caused his attitude towards her gradually to coarsen. Pierre was urbane, charming, but Nicole was becoming increasingly aware of a leer in the things he said. As she came to know him better his charm began to falter. His habitual poise only just managed to prevent his flirting and innuendoes appearing crude rather than suave, suggestive. Nicole came to dread days that ended with just the two of them alone at the office: not because she feared him but – as she told Luke – because it was becoming tiresome dealing with him.

  One evening Pierre pushed back his chair, took off his glasses, stretched his arms upwards and outwards to relieve – and signal the end of – the accumulated stress of eight hours of hard work, and suggested a drink.

  ‘I’m sorry. I have to go home.’

  ‘To your boyfriend? What’s his name?’

  ‘Luke.’

  ‘Luke, yes. How is his ankle?’

  ‘He moans and groans but he is getting better, I think . . .’

  ‘It must be frustrating, physically,’ said Pierre. ‘For him, I mean.’

  ‘He wishes he could play football.’

  ‘I’m sure. Oh well, another time maybe.’

  ‘Yes, for sure.’ Nicole gathered up her things and put her jacket on. ‘Au revoir Pierre.’

  ‘Au revoir Nicole.’ He watched her leave, noticing about her the same things that Luke had noticed.

  The weather became warmer, the days longer. One particular Sunday, Sahra declared, was The Day That Was The First Sunday of Spring, the first day when it was warm enough to sit comfortably in the sun on a café terrace. The four friends met at the Café Bastille but the terrace was jam-packed so they went to the Kanterbrau which was also packed. All cafés with terraces were packed so they went back to the Bastille and waited for fifteen minutes before a table became available. It would have been an even longer wait if Luke had not had his crutches.

  People were crowded together as tightly and neatly as an audience at a cinema but here they were both audience and subject; in watching everyone else they were watching themselves. Everyone had a part to play and everyone played the same part. In these circumstances, sunglasses – looked at, looked through – came into their own. Implicit in the idea of sitting on the café terrace was both question (‘It’s nice sitting here is
n’t it?’) and response (‘Yes, lovely’) and all conversations were more or less elaborate versions of this basic call-and-response of reflexive affirmation: ‘What better place to be in the world than here at this café?’ ‘Nowhere, this is perfect.’ The friends sat together, playing their part, letting the sun warm them. It grew hot. Nicole took off her cardigan. Her arms were thin, pale.

  ‘I’ve developed a liking for olives,’ said Alex.

  ‘I hate them,’ said Luke.

  ‘I’ve always liked them,’ said Sahra who wanted to write down the recipe of a meal that Luke had cooked for everyone a few nights previously. Nicole thought she had a pen and began looking in her bag.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Luke. ‘Every time I see Nicole looking in her bag like that I get tense. Implicit in the idea of rummaging is not finding, and implicit in not finding is losing: usually something of great importance, i.e. belonging to me. Oh how I used to love my property.’

  ‘Used to?’

  ‘I’ve had to renounce it as a condition of being with Nicole. Now all the things I most love are Nicole’s. That is to say they were mine once and either she’s broken or lost them, or has come to have absolute ownership of them.’

  It was true. The surprising thing was that he had come to love Nicole’s infuriating disregard for her – and his – things. Every time he saw her wearing a favourite dress – the blue one, for example, with the knotted halter neck that he had bought in a sale at the shop next to a place where they had eaten minestrone soup one lunch-time in November – was, potentially, the last. There was no telling how or when she was going to ruin or lose it.

  After dredging the depths of her bag Nicole triumphantly held a pencil aloft. It was broken, unfortunately, prompting another bout of rummaging. This time she came up with a pencil sharpener, shaped like a jet whose cockpit gradually filled up with shavings from the pencil. Sahra wrote down the recipe. They ordered another round of coffees. Alex took off his sweater and said how greatly the discovery of fabric conditioner had improved his life. Luke also took off his sweater, revealing a T-shirt of which he was immensely proud. Across the front, in red letters, was written: try burning this flag, asshole. Sahra loved it too. Nicole was unsure. Alex asked him to put his sweater back on. Miles walked by, laden down with shopping from the market. Luke called out, waved. Miles called back that he couldn’t stop: ‘omelettes to make, wine to drink’. A young woman distributed green pieces of paper which demonstrated the deaf and dumb alphabet. She returned a few minutes later, smiling, silent, and picked them up again. A waiter, carrying a full tray of drinks, tripped over Luke’s crutches. He looked like he was about to go flying but managed, somehow, to stay on his feet and keep the tray level. It was an heroic, awe-inspiring performance, applauded warmly by all who witnessed it, especially Luke. The phone box opposite was out of order. One person after another went in, tried to call, and came out looking disappointed and, surrounded as they were by the many people using mobile phones, anachronistic. Trees were coming into leaf. The traffic lights went about their business.

  ‘What shall we do next?’ said Alex.

  ‘Sit here some more,’ said Sahra.

  ‘We could ride the 29,’ said Luke. ‘That is, we could ride the 29 if it wasn’t a Sunday.’

  ‘When are we going to start shooting the movie Luke?’

  ‘Route 29? Today would have been perfect but the frigging 29 doesn’t run on a Sunday.’

  ‘Plus there is the small obstacle of not having a camera,’ said Sahra.

  ‘A mere detail,’ said Luke. They sat just looking for a while. At each other and the people going by, looking at the people who were sitting down, looking.

  ‘What about seeing a film?’ said Luke. ‘As opposed to making one.’

  ‘In this weather? Crazy.’

  ‘A searing indictment of racism, that’s what I’m in the mood for. Or maybe a film noir where people are always turning up their collars against the rain and throwing cigarettes into gutters.’

  ‘Or throwing away the murder weapon.’

  ‘A great trope, that.’

  ‘They’re all lovely tropes.’

  ‘Some are horrible,’ said Sahra. ‘I hate the laugh that turns into a deranged cackle.’

  ‘I hate that too,’ said Nicole.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘And me.’

  ‘I like the Styrofoam cups that the cops drink coffee out of on a stake-out. Sitting in a car, eating burgers and drinking out of Styrofoam cups.’

  ‘Tossing the Styrofoam cups out of the window and squealing the car round when the dealer – “It’s him!” – finally shows.’

  ‘Or drinking out of them in the overworked precinct. A place where the phones are always ringing.’

  ‘Hookers being brought in.’

  ‘Handcuffed Chicanos.’

  ‘The phones always ringing.’

  ‘Desks crowded with papers and Styrofoam cups.’

  ‘The Styrofoam cup is crucial. It’s easier to knock over when you’re rummaging through your papers on your over-worked desk. The spilled coffee adds to the chaos.’

  ‘Also to throw it in the bin in the corridor as a way of emphasising a point. Walking along a corridor, tie askew, on your way to interview—’

  ‘Q and A.’

  ‘Right. The shooter—’

  ‘The perp.’

  ‘Right again. Shoulder holster revealed. Tie askew, drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup, draining the last drops and throwing it in the bin.’

  ‘Maybe we should go to a film,’ said Alex. ‘Could you pass me Pariscope, please Sahra?’

  An hour later they were in the cinema, watching a film from the pre-Styrofoam era: The Man With the X-ray Eyes.

  ‘A parable,’ claimed Alex afterwards, ‘if ever there was one.’

  A month after trashing his ankle – a month of shoving knitting needles down the cast to ease the itching which doing so exacerbated – Luke had the plaster removed. He was shocked when he saw his leg, amazed at how withered, white and useless it had become. The physio instructed him in exercises to build up the muscles in his legs and to restore movement in his ankle.

  ‘Comme exercice y’a pas mieux que la natation,’ said the physio. ‘Faut nager!’

  ‘Je déteste nager,’ said Luke.

  But he did like the swimming costume that Nicole bought herself the day after his plaster came off. It was yellow, a one-piece, but so much of that piece had been left out that it looked, if such a thing were possible, like an all-in-one bikini. Nicole swam twice a week at the pool on Alphonse Baudin but this costume, she said, was only for best. Luke took a Polaroid of her wearing it, smiling, patting Spunk on the head, framed by a sky so blue it was impossible to tell that it was taken indoors, by the window in their apartment. This, Luke discovered, was one of the great features of Nicole’s apartment: the distinction between outdoors and indoors was not absolute – which is why, by the time he took that picture, Nicole was already slightly tanned. When the sky was clear it was possible to lie stretched out on the floor for an hour in the afternoon, bathed from head to foot in sun. As the summer approached so the length of time that the sun perched in the right place extended itself. Luke loved to watch her lying there, naked, her breasts rising and falling slightly, her hair streaming over the red cushion. Looking at her, it seemed to Luke, was a form of thinking.

  On one occasion, as she dozed, he took down from the shelves the anatomy textbook that had belonged to her father. Photos showed the body stripped of successive layers: clothes, skin, fat, muscle. There was not a drop of blood to be seen, hardly even a hint of red or pink. Cuts and injuries revealed a pulsing arterial richness; these photos showed a world of uncured, brownish leather. Luke kept looking from the pages of the book to the naked woman lying asleep on the floor, then back to the book again. The photos became more explicit by the page. Every nook and cranny of the body was held up to impartial scrutiny. A foot, ankle ligaments (he winced), a shoulder, a shr
ivelled brown cock. It was like pornography taken to some numbing stage of total disclosure. By comparison pornographic or bodybuilding magazines seemed gentle and elusive as fairy tales. Everything was displayed, nothing was revealed. By the closing pages he was half expecting to see the soul itself revealed as a dark tumour-shaped lump or a resilient piece of gristle which, like the appendix, served no real medical function and could be disposed of as superfluous.

  It was depressing, looking at this book, to think that this is what we all were and would become: a mass of dry, spongy material, nine tenths of which seemed dedicated to waste disposal. He looked at Nicole: her stomach growled. She was the only woman he had ever seen shit. Not seen her shit exactly, but at least been in the bathroom while she sat on the toilet, shitting . . . Inside, as this book made plain, every man and woman was exactly the same as every other. There was nothing to choose between anyone. But there was Nicole, the woman he loved, lying on the floor.

  He thought of The Man with the X-ray Eyes, with Ray Milland as the doctor trying to find a way of seeing through the skin of his patients to offer immediate and accurate diagnoses of their illnesses. He applied drops of chemical solution to his eyes and, at first, was able to see through a few sheets of paper. Then – the fun part – he was able to see through nurses’ dresses and underwear. The experiment got quickly out of control because he couldn’t control the duration or depth of penetration of his vision. After a while repeated, unregulated exposure to the X-ray solution caused Milland’s vision to be filled entirely by the ghastly viscera and skeletons he’d hoped only to glimpse in the course of his medical research. All the time his eyes were getting more and more bloodshot, like someone who’d been sleeping in gritty contact lenses for a month. God, his eyes looked sore. People and walls began to fade altogether. To control this creeping omniscience he wore sunglasses which had to get thicker and thicker and darker and darker. Eventually only dense lead sunglasses could prevent his peering through buildings. By the climax of the film the world was melting away and he was staring into a psychedelic infinity of colour.