by Lucy Ellmann
Although such togetherness made it rather hard to get a cup of coffee.
Splutters often seemed to be following me about, but after we’d seen the Pompidou, Robert and I went off on our own for a walk.
We had hardly gone further than a few streets away when someone grabbed me by the neck and pulled me into a dark, narrow alleyway.
At first I hoped it might be Robert, suddenly overcome with desire.
But then I saw that he too was being dragged along by two men wearing berets.
There were three of them altogether, and they all wore berets.
They tied us up, back to back.
It was rather romantic.
They went through our pockets and took all our money.
And then they ran off.
Of course I was crying.
But I soon stopped.
I realized that if I went on I would need to blow my nose and that would be difficult with my hands tied behind my back.
And it was a joy, after all, to be in such miraculous proximity to my love, even though he was wiggling about rather irritatingly.
I felt him warm against me.
If only I could turn my head enough, perhaps he would kiss me.
All of a sudden he jumped up, and turned to release me from my bonds.
He said he had studied Houdini’s methods.
He was able to escape from almost any knot.
I looked at him with wonder and admiration.
My saviour.
Who beneath his stiff bearing had been studying Houdini all along.
Whose stiffness, I had always hoped, might some day soften into tenderness.
Paris in the Spring: IV
Pol wasn’t sure why, but she found she fancied Splutters in Paris. His predatory air turned her on in the new surroundings. Instead of looking at paintings, she watched his progress with women. At supper that night she sat by him. She needed something to entertain her. She was tired of Syms’s arrogance. She was tired of watching Isabel and Robert making eyes at each other. She put a hand between Splutters’ thighs and whispered in his rather hirsute ear, ‘Don’t you know I bloody fancy you? What the fuck are you going to do about it?’
Splutters choked and was led away somewhere by one of the waiters. Pol proceeded to eat his rognons, which he had ordered by accident, having tried to say oignons. His accent was not what it had been.
Paris in the Spring: V
That evening, we all had supper together at a large restaurant.
I was sitting across from Lionel and Robert.
It was heavenly.
Until Pol turned up and sat down between them.
She put her fat arms around both the men in my life, and began to pick at their suppers.
Then she said, ‘Ugh! this mussel’s off.’
Robert and I had both ordered mussels because we thought it was the thing to do in Paris.
I didn’t think they were that bad.
What troubled me much more than the mussels was the depressing amount of fondness for Pol which I detected in both Lionel’s and Robert’s eyes.
When she went to the loo, they watched her until she was out of the room.
Could it be that Robert still pined for her?
The thought was horrifying.
And was it possible that the Splendid Young Man, firm in mind and body, the idol of everyone at the Catafalque and beyond, in fact the Platonic ideal, could wish to sully his soul and other more material aspects of his persona, with the likes of Pol?
My feeling was that he could have done better.
Much better.
This was pure selflessness on my part.
I no longer had any intention of troubling him with my attentions.
Robert was the man for me.
We had been through a bonding experience together, Robert and I, when we were tied up by those thieves.
Ever since, I had been wondering whether he might have kissed me if we had been tied up for a little longer.
And besides that, I still had the delicious and tantalizing memory of his tentative movement towards me when we were by the porthole.
Pol returned and we all left for an evening promenade by the Seine.
The lights of Paris at night were truly twinkling.
The only problem was that almost as soon as we reached the river, I fainted.
It was very romantic.
I think Robert was one of the ones who caught me.
I had just said to Pol, ‘I don’t feel very well.’
And then I fainted.
When I awoke, I was sitting on the pavement, with Pol, Lionel and Robert circled around me.
I immediately wondered if it had been a dainty fall.
Robert, gratifyingly, seemed particularly flustered by the event.
In fact, as soon as I was on my feet again, he began to hyperventilate himself.
He said he thought he was having some kind of heart attack.
(All because of me!)
Pol was very worried about him.
Although she no longer cared for him personally, she considered him a great Art Historian.
She made me run and get a taxi.
I told the driver to take us to the hospital, in my faltering French, whilst pointing at my chest.
‘Le coeur?’ he asked.
I didn’t know what he was talking about so Pol handled the rest, plonking herself down in the front seat.
Robert sat between me and Lionel in the back.
I patted Robert’s hand.
I tried hard to empathize with his suffering.
I did not want to live if he died.
And soon I was gasping for breath myself.
My heart seemed to be exploding.
My hand, which had been patting his, went limp.
I felt him clasp it, but I was far, far away.
My soul seemed to want to drift out of the window.
I had to keep reminding myself to live.
Robert pressed my hand and said something encouraging, but I knew we were dying.
I did not want to die without telling him I loved him.
But I was incapable of speech.
I turned to him.
He looked down at me.
His face was near.
So … I … kissed him.
He seemed to kiss me back.
At last we understood each other.
Now, when it was almost too late.
I surrendered myself utterly to the magic and enchantment of his lips.
Though not for long, as we were both out of breath and apparently having heart attacks.
After our kiss, I lay my head on his shoulder.
At last.
It had been said.
We loved each other.
There was nothing more I needed to do in life.
I could have died happy.
I would have died very happy.
But we survived.
‘Foetal Heart Heard’
It seems that it was the mussels.
After a few hours at the hospital, we were sent back to our hotel.
The future seemed certain and bright.
But we were very tired.
I was pooped.
I was worried about my hair.
And I needed to get to a loo quickly.
We parted listlessly in the corridor.
And met again the next morning, at breakfast.
Pol immediately reported to Robert that I had spent most of the night on the loo.
He admitted he had too.
Pol said, ‘Well, I’ve heard of togetherness, but this is ridiculous. First you were mugged, now you’ve both got diarrhoea!’
She cackled for some time.
It was a relief when she left the table.
I was not feeling totally comfortable.
For once in my life, I had not had the strength to rinse out my Janet Reger knickers the night before.
I had had to borrow some of Pol’s.
>
They were not Janet Reger.
Janet Reger does not make knickers that big.
They were by Marks & Sparks and I had to do them up with a safety-pin.
So I was suffering from various indignities as I contemplated my love across the table.
I felt sorry for Pol in a way.
She would probably never know what it is like to meet the man you are to marry, in a Parisian café, the morning after a near-death experience.
We were a little shy together at first, laughing sheepishly about our adventures.
Then we made small talk about Paris.
Alone at last.
Feeling fragile.
Pooped.
And very much in love.
There was a pregnant pause.
Then Robert spoke.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s the last time I eat mussels.’
That broke the ice a bit, but I could not help wondering who would be the first to admit that bad mussels had not been the only cause of our irregular heart-beats.
That love had played its part.
That we had nearly died of love, in fact.
As Robert went on to speak of his health purely in technical terms, I saw that it would have to be me that brought up the true significance of the event.
It was a little while before I could think of a delicate way of putting it.
Finally, I said, bashfully, ‘Robert, I hope you didn’t think I was sexually molesting you in the taxi.’
That was bound to provoke a firm denial and an even firmer declaration.
Or so I thought.
But he merely said, ‘Oh, that was just like two people clinging in the snow.’
Well, I have my pride.
I excused myself and went to the loo.
It was a porcelain hole in the ground, and I vomited into it.
Two people huddling together in the snow as they die.
A relationship based on happenstance and necessity.
Our moment of greatest understanding was to him just the result of a medical emergency.
He had filed the incident under ‘Kisses Received When Unable to Refuse’.
He had denied our love.
I looked at my worn-out face in the mirror.
The stain on my left eye.
The hair that fails to come to life in the sun.
I cupped my breasts in my hands, as heroines are supposed to do when in front of mirrors.
It was hopeless.
Paris in the Spring: VI
The Splendid Young Man took Pol to Fontainebleau one evening. He was determined to rekindle their affair. It was the only reason he’d come on this silly Paris trip. They sat in an outdoor café and drank red wine. He talked to her of many things. Despite his obvious defects, she had to admit that this was better than her recent attempt to discuss Kant with Splutters.
They walked among the trees until dusk.
Then he pushed his tongue into her mouth.
He took her saggy-baggy breasts in his hands.
He licked her purple cunt until she opened for him.
They fucked until they both saw stars.
This indicated that it was night-time.
They sensibly proceeded back to the train station.
Exit Robert, Pursued by a Bear
While Isabel longed to tell Robert she loved him before she died, Robert had been worrying rather more about the after-life than whether or not he was loved in this one. He was not concerned at that moment about his place in her heart. He was afraid of losing his place in the whole scheme of things. Her kiss had astounded and frightened him. All in all, she seemed a rather dangerous woman. The first time he’d met her he thought she was a burglar. The next time, a drunk had tried to beat him up. Now he had been assaulted, tied up and robbed, and later involved in a near-death experience after following Isabel’s advice on what to order at a restaurant.
All in all, it was not the worst of times to be offered a lucrative job back home. When he got back to London, under the usual letter from his mother detailing her health problems was an official envelope from the large and famous university based in his home town. Robert wasn’t certain he wanted to return to his old home town – he’d gone to some trouble to escape it fifteen years before. But he’d been in London for some time without being offered any steady form of employment. The American in him felt a failure on this account.
And he’d recently had that fright. He felt like seeing his mother. He thought he should give the lucrative job a whirl for a trial period. He was sure that he wouldn’t last long in America, though. He would miss his London life, his flat, his friends. Yes, and he would miss Isabel. Elusive though she was, he had grown attached to Isabel. Eating toast and drinking tea with her had for some time been the high point in his life.
But he wasn’t prepared for all that blue sky. With jet lag he woke up at five or six in the morning and went outside to find a sky that was unreservedly, undeservedly blue. It was not an economical, stingy pastel-shaded sky. It reminded him of the translucence of Isabel’s eyes. He revelled in it. He walked. He found he even liked the street names, the plain and simple ones like Central Street that hid nothing, and the more eccentric like Henry B. Goodrich III Avenue, which must have once meant something, to a limited number of people. It was all so familiar, it touched an ancient soft spot in his soul. He even liked the way the trash looked lying on the grass. The type of trash.
He realized suddenly that it was American women he was destined to love. They looked real to him. They were the women he’d seen as a boy and assumed he would one day marry. They were what women should be. Their voices sprang at him in crowds, their tans and the straight hair that fell like Niagara down their backs. And their lack of reserve, which softened his.
And his mother, who had always been ill, been ill and needed him and not needed him, was ill now and needed him. She was so glad he’d come home – she assumed, for good. Her love was different from the love of a holiday mother who knows your departure is imminent. He needed her like this. He needed it all. Why had he done without it for so long, punished and deprived himself? He’d been continually half-starved of love by the British, who can live on small quantities of the stuff. He even enjoyed the gift-bearing neighbours, who came over with Welcome Home coffee cakes. He suddenly wanted to be succoured and enveloped by love.
The terrible truth that he hadn’t dared admit to himself since the Vietnam war was that he was proud of his country, and of California in particular. As a child, a miserable child, he had known that California was the centre of the world. Lassie lived in California. Mr Ed probably lived in California. California had it all. Snow-capped mountains and glacial lakes. Waterfalls, earthquakes, the Pacific. It had a Spanish Colonial past, and native Indians. Mountain goats, red squirrels, white-tailed and black-tailed deer, elk and antelope, grizzly, brown and cinnamon bears, gophers and woodpeckers and roadrunners, mocking-birds, vultures, eagles, sea-turtles and whales. It had oranges, grapes, peaches, plums, prunes, cherries, pomegranates, avocados, olives, almonds and walnuts. Sequoias and cacti. Oil, copper, gold, diamonds, topazes as blue as Isabel’s eyes, quartz, coal, mercury, Borax and nitrate of soda. What else could he require?
Moreover, his mother was ill, old and frail. He had never seen her like this. And what had he to return to in London? A mess of dead-end feelings for Pol. His many attempts, failed and various, at love. And Isabel, who sometimes shuddered, sometimes stuttered, but never never revealed herself to him. Was he expected to go to England on the off-chance that a few of her tenderer tremors were on his behalf? And he was still smarting over her avoidance of him in Paris after that terrible night. All along, she had given him the sort of On-Off treatment scientists use to drive rats insane. In humans, this merely leads to a state of high anxiety. She was a mystery to him. A mystery banana.
California, and his place in it, seemed straightforward. And it just happened to be beautiful. And his mother just happened to live t
here. And it just happened to have on Special Offer today, a lucrative academic job.
How many innocent lives have been sacrificed for less?
Shit!
Down, down in the bowels, down in the basement of the Catafalque sit the dregs of society who consider themselves the crème. They coagulate in the cafeteria, they know not why. Everyone was treating each other with little care, and being treated with little care. Ours is not a romantic world.
Down, down in the basement of the Catafalque Institute sat Isabel, reading a letter from Robert. But it wasn’t exactly a letter. It was a change of address card.
Our Hero Regresses
It was by chance he met his first love in the local supermarket. His mother had sent him to get a few things they could just heat up. She (and he) loved things that could just be heated up. And there was Gail, her delicate hand, still delicate though bigger, fingering a box of cookies. Causing Robert to reflect that in all the days of their romance twenty years before, they had never made love. This seemed a bit of an omission. He pushed his trolley towards her.
Perhaps she’s the One, the only one for me.
My one and only.
He introduced himself near the beans. Barbecue Beans, Boston Beans, Franks ’n’ Beans. He dimly observed that the beans were in alphabetical order before she noticed, recognized and kissed him.
She let his agedness pass without comment, as he did hers. They had both become more substantial figures since they’d last met. Their bones had grown.
He was undone.
Ann Donne.
John Donne.
Undone.
Everything in California seemed sensual to him.
Even Gail, against a row of beans.
He liked the smell of her.
He liked the weekend smell of her later as he loosened the sheets of her bed.
Gail received him nimbly, deftly, as a California woman should.
Her vagina was tight as an acrobat’s, her breasts were firm rounded pyramids, as they should be.
She was tanned all over, except where she shouldn’t be.
The past could be recovered this easily.
To open an old trunk and find everything improved, more useful than before.