Thing of the Moment

by Bruno Noble

  We sat with my low glass table between us and I found comfort in the act of pouring him tea, my body registering the familiarity of the action, of my knees-together posture and my elbows-close-to-body movements. His eyes wandered around my sitting room, lingering on my books and videos. He looked around me to take the measure of me. And rightly so, I thought. Every book is a brick in the building I have become and every film a feature. My parents and the culture I was born into may have laid the foundations but the interior and exterior are mine.

  Relaxed, on home ground, I thought this would be the time to press my advantage. The unfamiliarity of his presence here, in my home, the strangeness of the space he filled on my low sofa provoked me to forget my manners as host and to pose the question I had intended to ask him for some time. Taller than me, he appeared even bigger in my flat than he did elsewhere. I placed my cup and saucer on the table, tugged at my skirt and smoothed it over my knees and woollen stockings; I had thought them on the just-fashionable side of neutral, but now feared they might seem school-girly to him. ‘So, you have seen my apartment and now you know everything about me,’ I said coquettishly. ‘But I know nothing about you.’ The change from small talk was abrupt.

  Sebastian just raised his eyebrows at me.

  ‘Well?’ I hoped he would see I was smiling.

  ‘Can one really know anyone?’ He seemed unsure of what I expected from him.

  I declined to indulge in an abstract, intellectual discussion and made it personal. ‘Are you married?’

  I surprised him.

  ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ To have brought him home and asked him, in the privacy of my domestic setting, these questions so unexpectedly in such a forthright way rattled him, I could see. ‘Where do you live? Who do you live with? Do you have children? Siblings? Are your parents still alive? Do you believe in God? You see, I know nothing about you.’

  ‘Mie, if I had been married, I would have mentioned it by now.’ He narrowed his eyes.

  I had upset him. I had become emotional. He said nothing and I heard myself say, ‘I’m sorry for the interrogation!’ I hoped I had communicated the exclamation mark at the end of my statement, my attempt at levity. I felt like weeping and the anger I felt at wanting to weep compounded the perturbation I had brought upon myself.

  ‘That’s okay.’ He too put his cup and saucer down. I made for the teapot but he shook his head. Where we had been reclining on our respective sofas, we were now both leaning forward across the battlefield of a coffee table and he spoke earnestly. ‘You never asked. Any of these questions. You never asked once.’

  ‘You never volunteered any of it.’

  ‘You never volunteered anything, either.’

  ‘You never asked.’

  ‘I never asked because I respected your culture. And you. You didn’t open the door, never once, so I never tried to kick it down.’

  ‘You never even knocked. I couldn’t ask because you were my superior. In the bank. And you never showed interest in people or in me. Only in ideas or in paintings or in books.’ My voice tailed off as I recognised the injustice of my comments and the sentiment they betrayed.

  ‘Don’t forget finance, economics and the odd film,’ he added gently.

  An image came to me of the back room, the prep room, of my parents’ shop when, on a Saturday evening, it had been scrubbed clean and disinfected and all the knives had been put away and the unsold meat returned to its rightful store room. The overhead electric light would bathe the walls of the room in an anaemic blue hue, but the floor stayed a pinkish gray. The room would seem devoid of life, with no indication of the activity, the endeavour, the humour or the anger, the normal range of human emotions and animal body parts that had filled it only hours earlier. The room would seem dead, as though past exhaustion or in suspension.

  It took me all of my effort and my hands on my knees to force myself up, to stand. In lieu of the speech I was no longer capable of, I described abstract patterns in the air with my hands that communicated the fact, or so I intended, that I no longer had the energy for this. Deliberately, focusing on each small step, I entered my bedroom in which the setting sun’s rays, interrupted by the light brume of the lace curtains, gave the room a subaqueous quality and only increased my sense of wading through a substance thicker than air. I stepped out of my slippers and lay down on the far side of my double bed. I looked at him, beyond the sunlit motes of dust above me, leaning against the doorjamb looking at me, and fell asleep.

  When I awoke Sebastian was lying next to me, he too on his back and awake. Direct sunlight, brokered by the naked branches of oaks and beeches and by my drawn lace curtains, caressed the far wall as it edged towards the ceiling, so low was the sun. When I turned to look at him, he turned and looked at me.

  ‘How long have I been asleep?’

  ‘Twenty, maybe thirty minutes.’

  ‘Is that all?’ My sleep had rejuvenated me. I lifted a hand to push my hair from my eyes and allowed it, relaxed fingers splayed, to fall in the direction of his. I felt the back of his hand with mine, those long blond fine hairs, the backs of his fingers with mine that interlaced cautiously, delicately. ‘The hand of friendship.’

  ‘Friendship,’ he said, giving no indication that he had noticed the slight, the raising of a barely imperceptible barrier. Then, ‘So, you want to know more about me. Is this a good time to start?’

  ‘It’s a good place to start but as to the time…’ I sat up. ‘Please excuse me.’ I was relieved to have a good reason to extricate my hand from his before we reached the embarrassing position of wondering what to do with them next. Leaving my bathroom only once the sound of the cistern refilling had ceased, I sat cross-legged on my bed.

  Sebastian placed his hands on his stomach, stared at the ceiling and spoke. ‘When I meet someone, at a party – wherever – I never ask them what they do for a living. Knowing what they do, what their profession is, only gives you the illusion of knowing them but, actually, you see them less, you see them through a veil, you bring to them your preconception of what a lawyer, banker, baker is; what that person really is, that becomes harder to grasp. So, of all the questions you asked, the only one that, if answered, would tell you anything about me, is the God one, to which the only honest answer I can give is, I don’t understand the question.

  ‘If I had to believe in anything, it would be in something like a life force – Spinoza called it conatus, the inner drive of every being to persist in its existence, but let’s call it Life. Life wants only to persist through time, to survive, and we all – people, gorillas, crocodiles, amoebae, spiders, ants, birds, fish, germs – are Life’s multiplications of its chances of continuance. Species are just rolls of the dice. Life is indifferent about which survives. Life doesn’t care that the dinosaurs have died; there will be dead ends, blind alleys, but evolution will open other paths. Environmental destruction? Life doesn’t care. Organisms that feed on carbon dioxide and higher temperatures will thrive. Ants and ivy may take over the world – well, that’s Life. May humans become extinct, destroy themselves? Yes. Is that necessarily a bad thing? No, not from Life’s perspective: more than any other species we have destroyed more species and so closed more doors, blocked more ends than any species before us. Every species seeks to protect itself and to propagate itself according to Life’s programme. What’s interesting about our species is that we, perhaps more than any other, have developed the fiction of the self in order to do so. We believe this little collection of cells that is us – you, me – to be important, worthy of protection and propagation and so, at the individual level, by maximising our own chance of survival, we do the same for our species’. Therefore, nothing matters. We, all we people, are one. We, all we species, are one. This is what I believe – what I really feel to be true.’

  ‘Nothing matters.’

  ‘Not really. Not in the long run. And not even in the short run unless you want it to.’ Sebastian put one hand on my knee. ‘I haven’t up
set you?’

  I had been looking out of the window at the setting sun-lit clouds while he had been speaking, so that when I turned and looked down at him in the crepuscular room all I could make out immediately before me were the whites of his eyes floating above an indistinct, darker duvet. An emerging halo of ruffled fair hair restored structure to a face that returned my look with one of concern and, in part, I ungenerously thought, conceit.

  ‘If nothing really matters,’ he continued, ‘we can embrace hedonism and, well, just enjoy ourselves.’ Gently, enquiringly, he began stroking my stockinged knee; I saw rather than felt his action through my ribbed, thick woollen hose.

  I caught his fingers and held them in mine before, my heart beating too fast to allow me to formulate an answer, I lifted his hand off my knee and placed it back with its twin on his stomach.

  ‘Or we can do as existentialists propose and create meaning, invest our actions with a purpose of our choosing – which doesn’t preclude simultaneously enjoying ourselves.’ Slowly raising his hand and extending his fingers he placed them oh so deliberately on my knee again. ‘In other words, we could take the fun very seriously.’

  Unceremoniously, I raised both knees and clasped them so that his hand fell to the duvet. His citing a rehearsed philosophical position that I required time to consider compounded my discomfiture at having somehow allowed this situation to have developed. Sebastian, here, in my bedroom at dusk and with the upper hand. He, it would seem, knew what he wanted while I didn’t. I rested my chin on my knees and raised a finger when he made to resume his advances; I needed some time to think about what he had said. I responded to some of it with my body, essentially, viscerally, refuting from my very heart what he’d said about the fiction of self. I knew that not knowing what I wanted was not the same as knowing what I didn’t want. That my room was now in almost complete darkness and his features and mine too, I presumed, quite indiscernible gave me the required courage to talk candidly, and attenuated what physical attraction he possessed. I prepared myself to give the longest speech that he would ever hear me give.

  ‘Who am I? What do I think? Let me tell you something about Japanese women, some things I have heard Japanese women say.’ I began to list them and held one hand with outstretched fingers out before him.

  ‘Having a relationship can get in the way of one’s life.’ I bent my little finger down.

  ‘I don’t want a boyfriend. I don’t want to feel restrained.

  ‘Couples in the foreign films I watch stay together forever but, in Japan, love fades when you have children and they grow up.

  ‘Having a boyfriend is a hassle.’ Only my thumb remained outstretched.

  ‘Mie, hold on,’ he interrupted me. ‘Don’t start telling me who you are by telling me what other people think.’

  ‘Well, maybe I think in exactly the same way that they do.’

  ‘You don’t. Or you wouldn’t have said, maybe. Would you mind switching a light on? I don’t think I can do this in the dark.’

  I switched my bedside lamp on, which brought a degree of warmth and benevolence to the room. We blinked in the soft light, two crabs exposed on a summer’s beach and content to forego shelter while the sun shone. Abashed, I was not so much uncomfortable for us to be revealed to each other together on my bed as embarrassed at how comfortable I felt. ‘I had this big speech prepared but then you interrupted me.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry. Go on.’ He raised himself on his elbows. ‘Tell me what else you’ve heard Japanese women say.’

  I said, ‘When I see happy couples at Christmas I wish they would die.’ I lowered my closed hand.

  We looked at each other. The absurdity of that statement was greater than its misanthropy. I giggled and he chuckled. I convulsed as I snorted and I covered my mouth with my hand. He laughed expansively, chest out, head back and mouth open wide. Unbalanced, I fell onto him and allowed myself for a moment to rest my head on his chest, from which unusual angle the protrusion of his canines amidst his otherwise perfect teeth and the lush redness of his mouth confounded me. His arms flopped carelessly, caressingly around me. I saw myself a fly in a Venus flytrap, that scarlet-padded carnivorous plant that seems an aberration of nature, and I went rigid and opened my eyes wide to look up at him and he narrowed his to look down at me. His lower and upper eyelashes resembled the cilia that lace together when the trap shuts on its prey. We stopped laughing.

  The adamantine sense of immobility I must have communicated, my dissemination from every pore of the anticipation of an unwelcome advance (must have) led him to open his arms wide, theatrically, and to rest them by his side before saying in a voice that did little to hide his frustration and, even, anger, ‘Mie, do you know what you’re doing? You bring a horse to water but you don’t let him drink.’

  He was right, of course.

  I stood and walked to the window and looked out. I hadn’t put my slippers back on but considered it awkward to look for them so I stood there, my back to him but watching him closely in the window’s reflection. By changing focus, I could follow the red and white lights of the cars as they criss-crossed the common and traced patterns on the reflection of his face. The reflection of my ruffled hair clouded the sky in exaggerated imitation of the branches of the trees below it. I took satisfaction in the successful collimation of the tree branches with the common’s tangential roads much as I had, years ago, when aligning plane trails and telephone wires, confirmation that my intended course of action was the right one.

  Sebastian sat up too. ‘Where do we go from here, Mie?’

  My heart went out to him, not romantically, but sororally or maternally, as it would to a child for whom one had some responsibility or, at the very least, a deep reservoir of affection. I made a decision. ‘I know where you are going.’

  ‘Where?’ His tone, as his reflection gazed at mine, was defeatist and melancholy.

  I had intended to add, ‘Home,’ but sympathy and remorse mixed with mischief led to me to say, ‘Why don’t you go and see Sharon?’

  Sebastian sat up straight and wore an expression of extreme surprise. ‘What! Why on earth are you bringing her into this?’

  I wasn’t sure how to answer him; I had regretted mentioning Sharon the moment I had spoken her name. Confused, I brought my face close to the window, so that my expression might be concealed from him, and watched a cyclist dismount from his bicycle in order to cross at a pedestrian crossing. The red light on his bicycle pulsed in time with my heart. I had brought Sharon into this either to enjoy the petty thrill of sharing her secret, or because I considered her guilty of attributing the drift of our friendship to my promotion and resented her for it. Or a mix of the two. I said, as if by way of explanation, ‘She can give you what you want. I’m sorry I misled you. But she can, you know.’ I turned from the window to look at him directly. ‘She’s a stripper, you see.’

  Sebastian had stood, but sat immediately down on the bed again, keeping his eyes fixed on mine all the time. In them I read incomprehension, disbelief.

  ‘Or a lap dancer.’ That sounded weak. My confusion matched his, as I realised that I didn’t know the difference between the two and might have maligned Sharon. I gave him the name of her club, as though that would help him come to a clearer understanding of exactly what she was.

  Sebastian’s blue eyes lost their focus, they seemed to lose their colour and swim in the middle distance as though an original thought preoccupied him. He had blanched and in the bleaching light of the bedside lamp he resembled an albino, his tightly pressed lips his darkest feature. Eventually, he nodded and felt for his discarded guest slippers on the floor. He put them soles together, held them in one hand and stood again. I sensed the extreme effort he expended to turn his attention from Sharon to me. ‘Mie,’ was all he said, looking at me dolefully, and shrugged his shoulders.

  I smiled fixedly at him.

  ‘It’s so disappointing that, after all this time, you can know me so little.’ He waved the
slippers in his hand half-heartedly at me. ‘Or do you have this idea that “all men are the same”? I mean, really, I wonder what I’ve done to deserve this.’ He smiled ruefully at me.

  I gathered my slippers and followed him into the hall where I watched while he tied his shoelaces and shrugged his jacket on.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said and stood on tiptoe to kiss him on both cheeks. I understood his disappointment and frustration but felt no remorse at having been its cause; if anything, I was cross with him for having got this far with me. I opened the front door and stood by it.

  ‘Bye, Mie,’ he said resignedly, squeezing me by the shoulders.

  I watched Sebastian descend the stairs, following his gradual effacement with each step, first his feet, his knees next, then his waist, his hand on the banister, his arm and shoulder, the mop of his hair last until he had disappeared entirely from view on the landing below. I heard the building’s front door open and shut and, ever so quietly, unaware of the time and not wanting to disturb my neighbours, I closed my apartment door behind me and went to the window to monitor his progress across the streetlamp-lit common. My reflection, however, given the nocturnal landscape and internal light source, once again dominated the view and I found myself looking at myself, standing slim and straight, hands by my side, appearing to all the world like a bold, capital I.

  Sharon

  I was feeling a bit down, so Tony’s gloomy ‘Good evening, Sharon,’ as he held the door open for me resonated precisely within me, as though he weren’t announcing a welcome but a plague or a death.

  ‘Pierre must be thinking of retiring him soon,’ had said Melanie recently.

  ‘Pierre must be thinking of retiring himself soon,’ I had said.

  I sat next to Melanie in knickers and bra facing my reflection in my dressing table’s mirror. Three of its ten light bulbs had blown. There were nine such tables in the girls’ dressing room, ninety-one bulbs in the room in all, including the one overhead light.