‘You looked like you were fast asleep,’ says Olga. ‘Did you take something last night?’
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The keys are where she left them. As well as the Post-it note with her number. And the concierge’s greeting was perfectly natural. She knew immediately that he had left just like that, shut the door, no note, nothing.
The bed is unmade but there’s nothing lying around, no clothes. He didn’t make himself coffee. He didn’t eat. Didn’t touch anything. Didn’t make himself at home.
He gets up, late. He gets dressed. He finds his way to the kitchen, which is also the way out. He sees the Post-it note.
At that point she can’t work out what his expression is. She can’t decipher it.
Or else he wakes when she leaves. He leaps up to catch her, but her taxi has already left. He lets the curtain fall shut again, goes back to bed, and grabs a pillow. He gently scratches his flat belly, his nose buried in the smell of her. He thinks about what they did together, what they said. Or else…
Or else he orders a taxi, waits at the entrance of the apartment block, chats to the concierge, and heads off somewhere, she has no idea where, perhaps in the direction of Topanga Canyon.
She is sore all over but she goes back out to see the concierge. They must have talked. They would have at least said hello to each other. The concierge is black, too.
That’s the first time she’s thought about it. Black, under the red cap. Did he see, did he notice this morning (he notices everything: it’s his job), did a guy with a long coat come by? It feels like she’s describing a thief. But she’s not going to dwell on her private life. ‘He used to be in that series, you know, Connection.’ The series was very popular among African-Americans. And, anyway, a guy like that doesn’t walk through a secure residential complex without being noticed. With his long coat.
But perhaps he had it folded under his arm. It was already hot this morning. She starts again. She is exhausted. Her night, her day, something has made her exhausted. ‘A really tall guy, with long thin braids.’ She knows perfectly well that they’re called dreadlocks. But she can’t do it. Not in front of the concierge. She has never said dreadlocks in her life. Or perhaps once, referring to Bob Marley. ‘A tall guy with a coat. A coloured guy, wearing jeans.’ There is not a single black person living in the apartment block. Or in the entire neighbourhood, now that she thinks about it. ‘Coloured’—how ridiculous.
The concierge’s inertia is getting on her nerves. She feels like asking him what is the point of being a concierge, asking him for the footage from the security cameras. To find out what time he left. What he looked like. What his expression was, his mood. She’d like—she doesn’t know, really—to talk about him. For someone to tell her: ‘I saw him. He’s charismatic. Enigmatic. But what was apparent, as clear as day, was how much he was thinking about you.’
She would like to see him again.
She goes to YouTube and looks at clips from Connection. It’s amazing. There he is, just like she saw him the first time. His voice. His gestures. Not his vocabulary, although he effortlessly delivers a string of motherfuckers. His presence. His glorious presence. Still radiating around her apartment. He was there, here, in her bed. The videos only last three minutes. She wonders about downloading a whole episode. She has to sleep: she’s filming again tomorrow.
His name is there in the different sets of credits, with different spellings, but the most common is Kouhouesso Nwokam. Which is not all that complicated. She doesn’t learn much online, nothing about his private life. On Wikipedia, his date of birth: if it’s correct, he is two years older than her. A Canadian citizen born in English-speaking Cameroon. She had no idea there was an English-speaking Cameroon. Google Images photos, some flattering, others where he is smiling broadly, which doesn’t suit him, others where he is heavier and it suits him.
She jumps: the sound of a text message.
Natsumi. She forgot to return the bra.
A clip from a film that was very successful three or four years ago: Dazed. He plays a cop. It takes place in a house by the sea. His white colleague, the hero, interrogates a handcuffed dealer who swears at them. He doesn’t do much: he’s slightly in the shadows, but he’ll get his turn. He’s going to—no, not speak—but he turns slowly to the bay window. A veil of softness suddenly descends like a halo on the scene, a yellow, powdery light—a weary archangel shaking his wings. As if gazing into infinity, he stares out over the sea. The look of a bored cop, of an actor who is thinking. Beyond that place, beyond the film. He stares at the sea and she’d like to be the sea. He stares at the waves and she’d like to be the waves. She’d like to be the empty space, she’d like to be that place elsewhere, she’d like to be the song he has on his mind and she’d like him to sing it, sing her, let him drift off, yes, but in her direction. She’d like to be that wandering, absent thought, that aside of his in the film from three or four years ago.
He refocuses, back to the action, says the line they’re waiting for. Say something, motherfucker, interrupts the white cop grandstanding as a psychologist, and crushes the head of the dealer against the table. It cuts out, she rewinds…there… right at the moment he’s turning towards the window… there…he’s bored…good cop, bad cop…he really is bored, he stares at the sea, he’s thinking about something else. And the director has kept the take, he saw, that’s why he makes films, for moments like these, the moment when the film slips away, taking advantage of a mistake, a moment of detachment, of reverie, a shift—there: an actor stares at the sea and his grace detonates the image…
The movement, the powdery light, the eyes on the ocean.
It’s like the other evening in the hills. Exactly the same look, the same urgency, and it’s unbearable, and she has to live it, quickly.
SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE
Words. She remembered his words as if he was whispering them, passionately, between her breasts.
Let me kiss you, let me kiss you again, I love kissing you, I love the taste of your lips. I don’t want the morning to come.
But he’s no longer there. And he hasn’t called.
It happened in English. Perhaps it would not have registered with such force in French. Well, how would she know? The particular sentence that keeps coming back to her, his voice shuddering, could have been any sentence, but it was those words uttered with that voice: I want to stay inside you forever. How would you say a sentence like that in French? Je veux rester à l’intérieur de toi pour toujours?
She’s running, in the racket of bullets and her high heels, and all she can hear are those words, and all she can feel is the jolt in her belly of each word coursing through her. Each flash of memory catches up with her, and her destination—the corner of green canvas where she has to collapse, where Matt Damon will suddenly appear—that corner is a resting point, her thoughts stop, her suffocating brain and pounding legs clamour for a bit of basic, physical attention, and she catches her breath as she pretends to be in agony. Words, snatches of them, mantras. And she is back in that night again, a single night, far bigger than she is.
The director thinks she’s wild, sublime, you’re sublime, Solange, you’re wild.
He had fallen asleep straight away, into a deep sleep. It is rare for her to sleep with someone, and she had not anticipated sleeping with him. She looked at his face. She could look at him, knowing that he would probably hate it. Long and thin in profile, surprisingly broad face-on. Not the same man face-on and in profile.
She wanted to kiss his lips, his nose, the roots of his hair, the strange little triangles scored into the corners of his eyes. His large soft neck, the skin slightly wrinkled. The sturdy collarbone joints, the curve of his shoulders, his arms, his chest. His soft skin, tensile, smooth, thick, perfectly defining his contours, his muscles, his tendons, with the exception of his soft neck, where she glimpsed his age. A man asleep inside his strength, moulded by his skin.
A few minutes earlier, she had uttered some words, to
o. She said: I love your skin. And it was true, she adored it, she kissed it and caressed it, thick, supple, smooth, those words from her mouth a kiss alighting, a butterfly.
He had flinched, loosened his embrace, moved away ever so slightly, but it was a huge distance, a huge distance from his skin to hers. He had said: I know nothing about skin.
Skin is contact. That’s what she meant, that’s all. The softness of their skin, rubbing against each other, coupled: that contact.
He had taken her in his arms again; she was absolved, embraced, as if he approved of her reply. And he fell asleep (she is being grabbed by Matt Damon, who is grinding his knee between her breasts, and the blood is spurting), and she had been able to look at him. Gaze at him. He was copper-brown, chocolate, the hollow in his neck almost black, the palms of his hands almost red, the soles of his feet orange; and she was pale beige, bluish around the wrists, pale pink breasts, mauve-brown nipples, a slightly green bruise on her sternum. She was white and she didn’t know it.
They’re doing another take, straight away, from the top, Matt and Solange, the spurting blood, Hollywood. She says her line, in an exaggerated French accent: See you on the other side. Her only line, but it’s the title of the film. He flings himself into the green corner and you’ll see, in the cinema, it will be the spectacular entrance into a rift in the space-time continuum and she will be lying there on the threshold, dead.
From the top, again. Matt sits himself on her chest again, the bullet’s fired, she’s dying. Natsumi rearranges her outfit, Damon’s pelvis is right in front of her mouth—it’s weird, but she does have a dirty mind. A poignant expression on her face, the camera up close on the right side, as well as the sound guy, she’s surrounded by feet and knees, the camera’s rolling: si iou on zi ozer saïde, see you on the other side. Cut. She has to play up her accent, and her breathing, and how weak she is.
She had wanted to act with Desplechin, Carax, Noé, but not one of them contacted her; she remembers waiting after a so-called casting session when in fact the decisions had already been made. Now she’s the one who gets to say the titles of the big Hollywood blockbusters and she’s paid fifty thousand dollars for two days of shooting and they can get fucked. A twitch of impatience in Damon’s fingers; she refocuses. There are women who think Damon is good-looking. She thinks he’s white. See you on the other side. She warbles the words, with rising intonation, like a question: that’s the one, the director loves it.
Olga wipes off her make-up, they’re whacked. Natsumi and the make-up artist have already left. Two messages on her phone: a kiss from George, and a hi from Lloyd, asking if everything went well. That’s kind of him.
Olga massages cleanser gel into her face. Mirror. Night falls.
‘I’ve met someone.’
‘How nice,’ says Olga.
At first they trade clichés, stiff and rubbery like hamburger cheese. Then things thaw a little. Her make-up is running under the white gel, her eyes shiny with tears through the diluted mascara.
‘He hasn’t called me,’ her red mouth utters.
‘Since when?’ asks Olga, wiping her face again with cotton wool.
‘Two days.’
Olga smiles. ‘Two days is nothing. Men, men…’
‘But that’s not the point.’ She struggles under the cotton wool, turns to face Olga, rather than her own reflection. ‘Something really did happen,’—she tries to think of the word—‘a connection.’
All those words he said to her. She doesn’t summon them; she lets them hover between Olga and her. Words like jelly, quivering and translucent, through which Olga recognises the two of them, her and him. Observes them, caught in the amber of the words, in the golden light of the evening. Sees them caught in love.
No, she’s left something out.
‘He is black.’
Olga doesn’t understand.
‘He is a black man,’ she repeats. Why does she need to point that out? What has it got to do with the story? What kind of hair-splitting is she getting mixed up in? Why is she mixed up in it at all? That aching all through her body, in her throat, that weariness. Olga backs away. She recalls how Kouhouesso put some distance between her and him, not much, but measurable. That’s it: it’s exactly the same distance that Olga instinctively took, a tangible distance. It goes from here to there in space, in longitude and latitude, and it can be calculated by coordinates. Compared to the ocean or even to California, it doesn’t make much sense, but relative to the human body, it can be understood as the measurement from white to black, the measurement of the prejudices with which, for two days, she’s been battling.
Olga is Asian. It’s blindingly obvious. Her eyes, her hair. A good example of the nomadic Hun tribe. From that part of Asia where the names end in -stan, from that huge interior below the Ural River where they still believe in Europe but where there are deserts and actual camels. Why didn’t she choose a different confidante, someone like Natsumi? No. Natsumi is yellow, too. She has very pale skin, but she is not white, she is Japanese, of Japanese origin as they say in France; she’s probably whiter than a Chinese person and much whiter than an Arab, but less white than a Spaniard and even less so than a Portuguese person.
Olga stares at Solange, and at her reflection, one after the other. The cleanser gel has melted and Solange looks naked, transparent. She feels as if Olga can sense her thoughts—which are arising from some mysterious place, from the murky depths of her village, far from Los Angeles, but lying low in the back of her head. She would like to apologise, tell Olga that we are all the same. She would like to open up her skin to show her universal Benetton colour.
Olga smiles but seems to hesitate before speaking. Even now, at this time of evening, sharing a bottle of Merlot in the dressing room, when everyone has left, Solange is her superior. Solange is the one on the screen, it’s big budget, she’s the Warner Bros girl, she’s the one who ends up with bruises from the star. Olga purses her lips, half-disapproving, half-malicious. She laughs, her hand over her mouth. ‘Did he have a big one?’
IN THE GOLDEN NOCTURNAL LIGHT
She wasn’t asleep. It didn’t feel like it. Or else she was in a dream that, on waking, left her with the image of a rational world.
The phone rings and she knows it’s him.
‘Hey.’
It’s him.
There’s a splintering in her chest and she wonders if he’s saying hey because he’s forgotten her name. ‘Hey,’ she says in turn.
Trying not to shriek. So he wrote down her number. He didn’t take the Post-it note on the coffee pot, but he wrote down her number. Looked for some paper and a pencil, made the effort. No, she’s stupid, he must have put it straight into his phone.
He asks if he’s disturbing her. It’s not exactly polite small talk, at two in the morning. Questions, answers, possible strategies and responses—who cares: her chest is bursting with joy. ‘No, it’s fine.’ Her voice is husky.
‘Can I come by?’
‘Yes.’
There you go. That’s it. He hung up. She drank a glass of water.
Still today she rubs the recollection against her memory and it produces heat, redness. Flashes of joy. Once again, she can see herself, feel herself entering the waiting state, as if entering an effervescent sea. Blissfully waiting for him.
If he is coming from Topanga, she has almost an hour ahead of her. She must have slept a bit: in the mirror she has sleep residue on her eyelids and mouth. She brushes her hair but leaves it a bit messy. No make-up. ‘Straight out of bed.’ She’s naked under her dressing-gown. Too much. She puts on one of her French camisoles. She has a collection of them, simple, cotton—American women don’t realise how sexy camisoles are. But he is not American. What is a sexy woman for him? Jeans and a sweater, no shirt? The I-was-just-reading-quietly look. After all, she’s at home.
She boils the kettle. No, better to open some wine. The Saint-Émilion her father sent her last Christmas. She puts on a dab of perfume, wonder
s whether to take a shower. Did she perspire a bit during the phone call? But there are men who like body odour. In fact, she does, too. Music. The music she would have put on this evening if, instead of going to bed, she had been reading in the living room in her at-home outfit. What would he like? What woman listening to what music would he like?
No, he can take her as she is, dressing-gown and camisole. At two in the morning. She hesitates. Don’t light the candle. The situation couldn’t be clearer: no need to overdo it. Don’t wear a bra. A woman at home doesn’t wear a bra. Unless extreme measures are required. Her breasts are like those of a Japanese girl; she hopes he doesn’t mind. Kouhouesso. Really, what sort of a name is that. Kouhouesso Nwokam.
She’s so happy. So happy she’ll get to see him. He’s going to come. The certainty of it.
She’s ready.
She rearranges her bouquet of peonies, cuts the stems a little, changes the water. Cleans the coffee table while she’s at it.
She lies on the couch. She’s hot. He should be here by now. She gets up. Grabs her book. Lies down again. She tries to read. Perhaps he changed his mind. That would be terrible. Perhaps he was held up somewhere. Or gave up, because it was so late?
She sends him a text. No answer. She nods off briefly. Later, she knows she’s arrived at the edge of a cliff. At the tip of the waiting. The tip is embedded in her chest. She feels it, reddened by the flames. The edge of the cliff is a narrow wire, a metal blade. She is burning up. It’s almost four o’clock. She picks up her phone again, he definitely called, she didn’t dream it, it’s there on the screen. That short conversation. She puts his number into her contacts. Kouhouesso. Kouhouesso Nwokam.
It’s early afternoon in France. She would be out walking. In the streets of Paris. In the freedom of the streets of Paris. A simple little skirt and heels. No ties to anything, daydreaming. Right now in France, Rose is at work. Text to Rose. Reply: call later on Skype. But the buzz of her phone already makes her feel better. In her apartment perched at the top of Bel Air, she has not disappeared. She has not disintegrated somewhere between Europe and America. At the juncture of the two continents. Separated by two fault lines, one that slices through the Atlantic, the other that will one day sever California from the rest of the world.
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