(2012) Paris Trance

by Geoff Dyer

  ‘Let’s hope that’s not the only thing he remembered,’ said Luke. ‘Oh, could you bring some scissors when you come back Sahra?’ He handed Alex the postcard: a Bonnard showing his wife Marthe, standing in the bath, blazing with naked light. Alex passed the card to Nicole who gave it back to Luke. When Sahra came back he began cutting into it with the scissors.

  ‘You’re spoiling it!’

  ‘Only the top corner,’ said Alex, watching attentively as Luke cut into one of the two stamps. It was not stuck in the middle, only around the edges. Luke eased the scissors under the stamp and slit it down the centre. Underneath were two squares of grey blotting paper.

  ‘Is that what I think it is?’ said Sahra, reaching out her hand.

  ‘I rather think it is,’ said Luke.

  ‘What are they?’ said Nicole.

  ‘Well, whatever they are,’ said Luke, fiddling with the scissors again, ‘there are two more under the other stamp.’

  ‘Good old Daniel,’ said Alex.

  That afternoon Nicole and Sahra made the most important discovery of all: the lake. One side of it was popular with tourists – at the weekend it was jam-packed – but they had found a track to the far side that was inaccessible by car and therefore almost deserted. The edge of the lake was dark, muddy. Your toes sank in as you entered the cold water and spooky-looking reeds waved around your ankles and shins as you got deeper. The women loved spending whole afternoons there, swimming, sun-bathing. Luke and Alex preferred to play tennis and come along later, sneaking up quietly, like schoolboys, hoping to discover their girlfriends naked. If they came for the entire afternoon they brought a football and played head tennis on the shore. Sometimes they stayed at the lake until late in the evening and then cycled home in the twilight, slowly, in a group, until Luke or Alex suddenly staged an impromptu speed trial as far as ‘that gate’, ‘that tree’, even the house itself. In the course of their time in the country Luke and Alex had worked themselves up into a frenzy of competitiveness. As well as killing themselves on the tennis court and, on windless days, monopolising the Ping-Pong table, they took any opportunity to throw down a challenge: running races (sprints and middle distance), stone-throwing (who could throw furthest, who could hit a Coke tin balanced on a stick pushed into the silt at the lake’s edge), skimming pebbles. The world had become an arena in which to test themselves against each other.

  ‘If we had boxing gloves we’d build a ring and I’d knock his fucking teeth out,’ said Luke as the four of them sat by the lake’s edge.

  ‘Luke!’ said Nicole.

  ‘How would you do that when you’d be in a coma with a broken jaw and brain damage?’ said Alex.

  ‘It must be an English thing,’ said Sahra, shaking her head.

  ‘Actually, I tell you what I wish was here,’ said Luke. ‘A place where you could jump from cliffs into deep water from incredibly high up.’

  ‘I love doing that,’ said Sahra.

  ‘Me too,’ said Alex. ‘Though I’d dive rather than jump.’

  Back at the house Luke and Alex leaned a ladder against one of the walls and took it in turns to see who could climb highest using only their arms. This was a potentially dangerous game – for Luke. Alex was able to get to the top and down again but Luke could only get two thirds of the way up. By that stage he was too high to drop safely to the ground but his arms were so numb that it was only by wrapping his legs around the ladder and waiting for the fire in his shoulders to diminish that he found the strength to descend.

  ‘Luke, you’re so stupid,’ said Nicole when he was back on terra firma. ‘If you fall from there you’ll be back in plaster again.’

  ‘That’s exactly what kept me hanging on,’ laughed Luke, shaking the blood back into his hands. Undeterred, he continued practising, adding a few rungs every couple of days. While ostensibly taking a dim view of their boyfriends’ antics on the ladder, the women actually enjoyed this particular event.

  ‘It’s so horny isn’t it, watching men hanging by their arms like that?’ said Sahra.

  ‘It is isn’t it!’ said Nicole. ‘I was just thinking that.’

  ‘I always used to get turned on watching trapeze artists at the circus when I was young.’

  ‘Me too!’ giggled Nicole. ‘Don’t tell them that though. They’d probably rig up some kind of trapeze.’

  Not to be outdone, the women organized a swimming race – the only event in which Luke and Alex did not compete against each other. A hopeless swimmer, Luke was reduced to refereeing. Alex, being strong, could swim well but could not keep up with the women who pulled ahead of him and then, having left him in their wake, achieved their own kind of victory, undermining Luke’s motto of ‘Victory at all costs’ (‘an inappropriate motto for a compulsive loser,’ according to Alex) by finishing neck and neck.

  Although he did not enjoy swimming Luke did like going out with Nicole on the blue lilo she had bought in town. They lay across it, using it to keep them afloat, kicking with their legs for propulsion. When they had gone a good distance from the shore they clambered aboard and sat on it together, their combined weight pushing it a foot beneath the surface. Using it like this was well outside the lilo’s performance envelope, but each time they went out they strayed a little further from the shore, passing through sudden bands of cold and warmer water until Luke judged, one day, that they were in the dead centre of the lake. As he lay on the lilo with Nicole in his arms, her tanned body pressed against him, the sun drying them, Luke wondered what would happen if the lilo exploded, burst, sank. Would he be able to make it back to the shore? It was a freshwater lake. There was no salt to keep him afloat. The water was dark. Reflected in it he could see the single cloud that skirted the sun. Nicole’s wet hair was streaked across his arm. He glanced across at her. She was wearing her yellow swimming costume. Her eyes were open, smiling oddly, watching him.

  ‘You’re thinking about drowning aren’t you?’

  ‘I was actually, yes. Or at least wondering if I would drown.’

  ‘If what?’

  ‘If the lilo burst.’

  ‘We can see if you like.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Without replying Nicole reached down and pulled the stopper. Air whooshed and bubbled out of the lilo. It began deflating immediately.

  ‘Nicole!’

  In his panic Luke capsized the lilo and they both rolled under the water. When he bobbed up again, spluttering, he saw Nicole clinging to the lilo, reinserting the stopper. He stroked towards her. The lilo sagged but was still floating.

  ‘Fuck Nic.’ He rested his arms on the lilo, his face close to hers. ‘You’re crazy. What if you hadn’t been able to get the thing back in?’

  ‘Then you would have seen how stupid you are, thinking about drowning like that, little boy Shelley.’

  His anger vanished immediately. ‘You’re right, I would have done,’ he said, leaning across the lilo and kissing her.

  ‘I wouldn’t have let you drown,’ she said.

  ‘I love you,’ he said, aloud, for the first time.

  ‘I’ve heard you before,’ said Nicole.

  ‘When?’

  ‘In the mosque was the first time. But I heard all the others too, my love.’ She put her arms round his neck, kissed him.

  ‘You’re so beautiful,’ he said.

  ‘It’s your loving me that makes me beautiful,’ she said.

  Cycling home they stopped by an oak tree. Luke lacked a vocabulary of landscape. He didn’t know the names of trees or birds, could identify only the most rudimentary crops: wheat, rape, vines. As a result he saw the landscape only in the vaguest terms: trees, fields and colours. Yellow, shades of green, slopes and gradients, the shadow-drift of clouds. Even as he noticed the landscape he was, simultaneously, oblivious to it. He looked but could not listen. It appealed only to his eye. There was nothing for him to learn from it, it had nothing to tell. Perhaps the fact that he knew the name of this tree is why the scene stru
ck him so forcibly.

  They propped their bikes against the oak. The wheat had been taken in on either side of the road. The grass was scorched yellow: it had been months since there had been any rain but that did not matter. Life here had adjusted long ago to the huge thirst of summer. There were a few scars of cloud; otherwise the sky was empty blue. The light struck Luke almost as a moral force. Nicole was sitting on the grass at the edge of the road. Her hair was still wet. She took an orange from her bag and offered it to him. He nodded and she tossed it to him. Luke retreated a few paces and then threw it back. Nicole caught it easily and threw it to him again. Luke walked further back. Nicole stood up and clapped her hands. Luke threw her the orange which she caught, just. Then she stepped back and threw it to Luke who had to stretch to catch it, head tilted up to the sun. They continued throwing the orange back and forth like this, the distance between them increasing all the time. The orange looked like a planet as it hung in the blue sky. Neither of them dropped it but, as the distance between them increased, so the accumulated impact of catches made it leak. Snags and rips appeared in the peel. It became mushy and then Nicole’s fingers grasped the sky instead of the orange and it splatted on the road. She raised her hands, shrugged, smiled, wiped her hands on her dress. Began walking towards him. The road wound out of sight behind her. On either side of the road were fields of wheat. The oak cast a shadow across the road. She was wearing plimsolls, her white sleeveless dress, a single bracelet. Her hair was long, still wet, black. She walked towards him but, even as she moved, there was a stillness about the scene, something Luke recognized, something it shared with other moments from his life that he could neither recall nor anticipate. A windlessness, a silence. The landscape breathing and rippling. Time going nowhere else, staying.

  Sahra and Alex had prepared dinner. As usual the table had been set in front of the house. Nicole sat down with them and Luke brought out two beers from the fridge. He tried to open one of the bottles Zimbabwe-style and, as always, failed. He passed them to Alex who flipped off the top and handed back the open bottle.

  ‘You’re going to break your thumb if you keep trying to do that,’ he said smugly. Luke rolled a joint and he and Sahra played a couple of games of Ping-Pong. Then they opened a bottle of wine and ate dinner. For dessert they each ate a grin of melon. Alex rolled another joint which only he and Luke smoked. The sun had sloped off somewhere else and they were waiting for the moon to show. Nicole was sitting on the floor between Luke’s legs, her eyes closed. Stoned, Alex watched Luke combing her hair with his fingers.

  If you watch someone’s hands closely enough, can you feel what they have felt, touch what they have touched?

  Alex became aware of a tightening in the atmosphere: an alertness. Feeling Sahra watching him, he shut his eyes, blanked off his thoughts.

  The long curve of the days was marked by the movement of the sun, by the changing light. Every day was like every other: they worked on the house, ate lunch, played tennis, swam, went for cycle rides and walks, got stoned, cooked dinners. The passage of the weeks was marked by their deepening tans and the gradual improvement of the house. Luke finished cleaning out the barn. The house had been painted. Only odd jobs remained to be done. The house was still sparsely furnished but in every other respect it looked like a home.

  Alex was cleaning paint drips from the floor in the living room. The window was open. Straight ahead was a view of the blue unclouded weather but the window itself reflected an angle of the exterior that he could not see directly. The reflection in the window was darker than reality, imparting a tint to the sky like a premonition of thunder. He went over to the window and opened it inward. As he did so the view in the glass panned round to reveal the gravel path leading to the barn. It was like a form of elementary surveillance and Alex felt as if he were spying. He opened the window wider, until he could see the barn itself. At the extreme edge of the window frame, he saw Nicole walking into view. With the window open as wide as possible he watched her lay a towel on the parched grass and take off her shorts and T-shirt. Underneath she was wearing her yellow swimming costume. She sat down and rubbed sun lotion on to her arms and legs and shoulders. She picked up a book but put it down again almost immediately and lay back in the sun. Alex heard the door open behind him. He glanced round as Sahra stepped into the room. She saw him silhouetted against the shock of light.

  ‘Hi!’ he said, moving the window slightly.

  ‘Alex?’

  ‘Yes.’ He stood up, giddy with the blood draining from his head.

  ‘Are you busy?’

  ‘Not at all.’ Sahra walked towards him, put her arms around him, kissed him. ‘What is it?’ He held her.

  ‘We’re still looking in the same direction aren’t we?’

  ‘At this moment, no. We’re looking at each other.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I mean, we are still looking in the same direction.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I promise. Look,’ he said, moving so that they were both facing the open window, looking out at the blaze of wheat and sky.

  One night, when Alex and Sahra had gone to bed, Nicole and Luke carried their mattress and bedding out into the yard. They made love, Luke manoeuvring, selfishly, so that he was underneath and could see the sky. Nicole moved slowly, pulling away from him until he almost came out of her, then sliding back over him, taking him inside her again.

  ‘Shoulders,’ she said. He moved his hands up to her shoulders, stroked them.

  ‘Shoulders,’ he said.

  ‘Back,’ she said.

  ‘Lovely back,’ he said, moving his hands down the steps of her spine and then back up again.

  Next she said, ‘Waist.’ He repeated the word and moved his hands down to her waist.

  ‘Hips,’ she said.

  ‘I love your hips,’ he said, moving his hand over the angle of bone.

  ‘Breasts,’ she said.

  ‘Breasts.’ He touched her breasts and kissed her on the mouth.

  ‘Lips,’ she said.

  ‘Lips,’ he said.

  ‘Tongue.’

  ‘Tongue.’

  ‘Ear.’ He kissed her ear, whispering the word in her ear.

  ‘Neck,’ she said, and he touched her neck as softly as he could.

  ‘Hair,’ she said. Her hair was falling over his face. He gathered it loosely in his hand and let it run through his fingers.

  ‘Hair,’ he said, gathering it in his fist.

  ‘Hair.’

  He pulled her hair, gently, then harder until her head was pulled backwards.

  ‘Hair.’

  ‘Hair,’ he said, threading it with starlight.

  Afterwards they lay side by side, staring up at the star-drenched night. Neither of them was able to recognize the constellations. To attempt to arrange the swathe of stars into patterns, designs, shapes or outlines of objects was to diminish them, to scale down the immensity of what was seen and render it manageable. Even to look at them through your own eyes, to seek to hold the view in your head seemed compromising, belittling.

  If only we could see without being – then we could be what we see.

  ‘How many stars do you think there are up there?’ said Nicole.

  ‘An astronomical number.’

  They watched for shooting stars, taking it in turns to call out: ‘There’s one!’ ‘Look, there!’

  ‘I’ve never been happier in my life,’ said Luke.

  ‘Nor have I.’

  ‘And I never will be happier.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘There’s a ceiling. A limit.’

  ‘Funny to say that now, now that there is no ceiling to be seen.’

  ‘You don’t think those stars are a ceiling?’

  They lay still. A satellite skimmed the earth. Passing, passing.

  ‘What are you thinking now?’ said Nicole.

  ‘I’m wondering if it’s possible that happiness
could become unbearable,’ he said. ‘I think I can imagine it, not being able to bear happiness any more.’

  Nicole said nothing. He moved to kiss her. Her face was wet against his lips.

  To see without being, to be what is seen . . .

  A few days before they were due to return to the city the four friends drove to the coast. It was an hour’s drive, and when they were almost there they took Daniel’s acid. Alex had done a trip once before, years ago, and so had Sahra. After much negotiation Alex took a whole blotter while the women – Nicole having once again been persuaded and reassured by Sahra – took a half each. Luke swallowed the rest.

  They parked the car and began walking. The wall beside the road was tumbled down and broken. It didn’t matter: its dereliction was part of a cycle that led ultimately to its being repaired. Everything had its season here. The road was dusty, dry. At the side of the road were stones, left over from whatever process had been used to make the road. All along the roadside was the sizzle of cicadas. They turned on to a smaller road. To the left were trees, bare and thorny as barbed wire. Leaves had been dispensed with as an unnecessary luxury. It was perfectly still but, after years in this normally windswept spot, the trees looked, even in repose, as if a gale were screaming through their spindly branches. Leaves had been sacrificed for roots, display for the more desperate task of clinging to thin soil. All energy passed down rather than out. All visual clues suggested the buffeting and howling of wind – even the grass was combed flat – but the only sound was of insects, twitching.

  They found themselves walking across the very different grass of a golf course. A group of men in pastel sweaters took it in turns to tee off. Because Sahra was the only one with a watch they called her Chronos, a name she was more than happy with. Here and there they tried to give names to various land formations. Although, between them, they had many names at their disposal, no one was sure if the words corresponded to the features intended. Luke thought of rock types and forgotten processes of erosion taking millions and millions of years, proceeding, so to speak, at a glacial pace.