Outside the shop, a small elderly man in a trench coat and black beret stops us. He takes my hand in his. He tells us we look so well together, so happy, he wanted to stop and say; he squeezes my hand and tells me he can’t think when he saw so radiant a smile.
‘Piss off,’ you say as he moves out of earshot, but your grin is irrepressible. Your chest swells. You cock your head slightly, awaiting tacit acknowledgement that you are indeed responsible for the purported radiance of my smile. But you have your principles. You won’t have us turned into an old man’s grainy monochrome. You won’t have us consigned to a perfect moment, already gone.
We count bashed cars – every fourth, we estimate. Sideswiped. One after the other. Why can’t the French drive? For that matter, you inquire, why can’t they walk? It’s a fair question. People keep knocking into you. On the Metro. At street corners. At the weekend market on Ile St Louis. As we eat glazed raspberry tarts on the Champs Élysées. On top of the Arc de Triomphe in face-flattening winds. ‘And do they say, pardonnez-moi?’ you ask. ‘Noooo. Do they say, excuse me please for being a rude mother-fucker? No, I say. Non!’ You laugh but your indigestion is sharp again. We find a pharmacy, the second time since we have arrived.
It’s when the pain is easing that we spot Picasso, circa 1965, emerging from the Metro on the Champs-Élysées. ‘Regardes!’ you say.
I dab at my leaking eyes and squint into the wind. ‘Mais oui,’ I breathe. ‘Monsieur Picasso lui-même.’
We are inspired by this chance encounter with celebrity and take it as a sign. We rush down the stairs to the Metro and jump, on faith, on to a train. We arrive at Place de la Concorde – several changes and over two hours later. We don’t have a sense of direction between us.
Under a marquis adjunct at the Jeu de Paume, the queue for tickets is long but restrained. This is Paris. Everyone shuffles forward with an elegant ennui. You self-medicate with a cigar and try not to fidget. I reach for my drops and tip my head back. There, there,’ you say, patting my back as my eyes stream. ‘Don’t cry.’ People turn in the queue. You take my face between your hands. You wipe away my artificial tears. You look me in the eye, imploringly. ‘I told you, we can’t. Not in public.’
We walk at last into the ponderous hush of the temple. Exhibition-goers, with half-moon glasses and po-faces, scrutinize the dirty art of the man. ‘Picasso: érotique.’ We laugh. From the belly.
Because it seems counter the spirit of the work not to go tee-hee; not to point. Not to think, yes. Doesn’t the work itself extol irreverence? Doesn’t it say stop fretting? Here, at least, in your own skin, stop fretting. Here, if nowhere else. And I remind you of your bravura at the old Tate – chasing me up the stone steps, barking and biting my bottom while a group of Japanese young people looked on, startled. You laugh, shy at the memory of your own antics but rather pleased I have not forgotten.
I love the drawing of the standing woman with the blue mackerel suspended between her legs, its long, fishy tongue tickling the dark opening of her. You are amused by the drawings of Gauguin and Degas at the brothel and peep-show: the artist as puny, smutty voyeur. Above all, we love the minotaurs. Especially ‘Minotaure caressant du mufle la main d’une femme endormie.’ I can see him still: the terrific bulk of his head; the pubic wooliness of the fur around his horns; the hump of muscle at his back (the same as yours in bed next to me); the wild dashes of hair at the base of his back and under his arm; the horned awkwardness of his feet; his tender crouch over the sleeping woman; his inability not to touch her sleeping face.
You tell me you’ve had trouble with horn recently.
The horn?’ I say, casually.
‘No. Horn.’
I look at my nails. ‘Really…?’ I will not yet concede interest. Here, here on our holiday, everything fabulous must also be made true.
You fold your arms across your chest. ‘Horn can be the unfortunate by-product of an untreated fungal infection.’
My face tells you you’ll need to do better than that.
So you begin again. The truth is, fungus is a funny thing. No, not funny. Stealthy. It creeps up on you – all too literally. What then? I’ll tell you what then. Infection breaks out. No problem, you think. The foot grows new skin to cover the infected area. Only it’s still there. Below. While you might think you smell it, you don’t see it – and that’s your undoing. You persuade yourself it’s gone. Over. Adios, amigo. But what happens? The bastard fungi break through again. Another layer grows for cover. So you get one layer after another after another, because you always think something will go away in the end, don’t you, if you wait it out, if you stare evil down. But, all the time, unknown to anyone, those layers are compacting, little by little, because you’re walking on them all the time – am I right? – pressing them into something less than human, something that no pumice stone will stand up to. God knows I tried, God knows I did, and Jesus himself wept with it and all the angels and all the self-flagellating, hair-shirted, strap-me-to-a-wheel-and-pierce-me saints. But it’s too late. Too late. Which is a hard-won wisdom. Because already, already, there at the bottom of your Marks & Spencer’s size-seven-to-ten, eighty-denier sock, you’ve got a god-damned, skip-along- with-Pan hoof in the making.’
I want to clap.
You confess it took several trips to the foot clinic to render you human again. I make the sign of the cross in the air before you, and the horn-footed demon in you is released. Absolved. Free, like us, to grab an overpriced cup of museum coffee and a tough croissant.
Later, back in our shabby room, we curl close for a nap but can’t sleep. Picasso, the dirty bugger, has left us brimming with too much life. We’re fertile. Rampant. Tender. We negotiate your sensitive stomach, and sleep at last, wrapped in each other’s scent.
The next day – Versailles. Rain and monumental stone. We succumb to the tour. I wish we hadn’t. You open a door marked ENTRÉE INTERDITE and are given a sharply whispered warning by the guide. You blush in spite of yourself.
Outside, you pose for photographs, serious, aristocratic. You cock your chin like an Empire Man in front of fountains, statuary and boxed hedges. You speak mock French behind a group of Latvian tourists. You are overcome by sudden courtliness and get down on one knee in the middle of a pebbled path. ‘I want you to know,’ you say.
‘Know what?’ I say, checking the schedule for trains back.
‘That I will go down on my knees for you.’ You grin briefly, but behind the performance is something else. You don’t jump again to your feet. You stay there, shifting on your knee, staring up at me from the middle of the path. ‘I want you to know.’
I smile at my middle-aged lover. ‘Beautiful man,’ I mouth.
The sun is going down. The wind is sharpening. We retrace our steps over the cobbles and through the gate. ‘Will I ever be here again?’ he says.
‘I don’t know,’ I say, determinedly offhand. ‘Will you?’ There is no audience. I will not allow melodrama.
Brighton 2003
The Old Ship. Room 222. We open the door to the novelty of twin beds and NO SMOKING. I manage to heave up the begrudging sash, shift the breakfast table, and position the chair by the window so you can exhale smokily into the evening beyond.
It is cool for August. The sea is already dark, choppy. The helter-skelter at the end of the pier stands bright, a crazy, candy-striped monument to chaos. The lights of the prom are faint, tremulous, in the twilight. In the other direction, the West Pier is beautiful, ramshackle, degenerate. You can’t stop looking.
Before the final op, the one that would sever the nerve from your liver and deaden, at long last, some of the pain, you were warned there were risks. There was a chance they might snip the wrong nerve. On top of everything else, you could end up unable even to walk. You could be in a wheelchair for the rest of your days.
Which were few.
But that wasn’t it. ‘Impotent,’ you said. ‘It could make me impotent.’
We’d last made lov
e in January, in the euphoria of your supposed all-clear. Months ago now – for sex no longer seemed relevant. Yet you weren’t worrying about the actual mechanics of desire. ‘I don’t want to lose it,’ you said, your eyes filling. ‘My libido.’
You didn’t want to stop wanting.
Outside the Old Ship, night rolls in with the tide, and the seafront throbs with basslines that spill from open-top cars. From the window I watch a spiky huddle of lads on the bike path across the street. They’re whistling and calling across traffic to three girls in dark tans and micro skirts. Eggs-on-legs, we used to call them fondly. Tonight they’re on their way to the Escape or the Beach or the Honeyclub. In the dark of our room, you let your clothes fall from you and disappear below a thin blanket.
I close the window and draw the drapes. For a time, I watch TV with the sound off. When I ease myself into the narrowness of your bed, I am afraid I will bruise you. The hump of muscle at your back is gone. Your big chest is little more than the hull of your ribs. In the dark, you turn on to your side, hiding yourself.
I rub your shoulders and back and shins, as if you are a child who can’t get off to sleep. ‘Shall I go now?’ I whisper. ‘Let you sleep?’
‘No…’ I can hardly hear you.
So I press my breasts and stomach to your back, my thighs to the back of your thighs, and we lie close and still. Because I am damned if you will die feeling already dead.
It is late the next morning when I haul back the dark weight of the drapes. Even in the blast of sudden light, you do not wake. It will be after one before I can get you to sit up in bed. ‘Do you want to go back?’ I say. ‘I can get the car.’
‘No,’ you insist, groggily. ‘Brighton.’ Each word is a triumph of concentration. ‘Brighton. Our… dirty… weekend.’
I run the bath. You hang on to my neck as I lower you in. I wash your back. You tip your head, and I rub Old Ship shampoo into your ever wild head of hair; hair that not even the chemo could touch. I soap up your chest and stomach, and you yield to the massage, enjoying for these few minutes the pleasures of the flesh.
It takes me over an hour to dress you, and though I don’t understand it as I labour over you, your legs have already started to stiffen and swell with death. Your shoes and socks no longer fit. You mumble instructions. ‘Push. Push.’ And, even as I do, you fall back on to the bed into sleep, unconsciousness pulling at you like a riptide.
By three, we make it out of the room and down to the ground floor – our destination, the Old Ship brasserie. ‘Our brasserie,’ you pronounce as you collapse into a leather armchair, groping for the Hamlets in your shirt pocket.
You slurp cold, sugary tea. The contents of your cup spill into your saucer and over your shirt. I watch the cigar in your hand, collecting it quickly each time it falls to the floor.
Through the window beside us, all of life – bronzed workmen, face-painted children, pregnant mums, old men in motorized chairs, boys on the make, girls in bikini tops, small bridesmaids in lilac dresses, a couple in matching wetsuits, another couple, raw-faced with anger, bemused tourists and a man bearing a wet dog in his arms – through the window, all of life passes.
The afternoon I drive you home – the afternoon before the morning you will yield at last to the coma – you walk me, gripping the handrail, to the bottom of your long flight of stairs and hold fast to my hand as you see me on my way. Upstairs your daughter waits with your cup of tea and horde of painkillers.
‘You and me,’ you slur.
‘You and me,’ I say, pressing your hand, kissing your neck.
‘You’ve got that long drive,’ you say.
I struggle with the latch on the Yale lock and pull the door open. ‘I’ll pop a CD in.’ I hover at the threshold, not moving. It is impossible to pull away. Yet to stay, to not return to my flat as usual, to sleep in the place I soon will – on your attic floor near your sickbed – would be to tell you that you are about to die. And you, putting too much faith in my instinct, would believe me and begin to die. I can’t risk it.
‘We’ll talk tonight?’ You sway like a happy drunk.
‘Same time,’ I say.
‘Listen,’ you say.
‘I’m listening,’ I say.
‘You’re the only woman’ – you have to pause to breathe – ‘you’re the only woman I’m going to god-damn die wanting,’ and you smile.
Because you’ve managed it. You still want: me, me wanting you, a good smoke, a new book, long views, chance encounters, life – reckless and beloved – life on the hoof
You kiss me.
‘Horn,’ you mumble.
‘You and those feet of yours…’
‘No,’ you say, feigning exasperation. ‘Horn.’ Your eyelids flutter. I can smell the residue of the heroin as it exits your pores. ‘The horn.’
These days, you’re searching for a title – any title you haven’t read yet – among the stacks of your books in someone’s garage, as if you’re in bad need of distraction. Or I’m meeting you at Arrivals. It was a long journey back. You’re stumbling through the double doors, rumpled in the linen suit I chose for your laying-out. You’re gamely clutching your stitched-up groin, so happy to see me when you thought you were a goner. We hug, holding on, and something eases at last within both of us. Or you have a new mobile phone. You’re waving it at me. ‘See,’ you’re telling me. ‘See. I can get you on this thing now.’
Sometimes too, in my mind’s eye, I see us, the ghosts of us, still there, en route to Monsieur’s hotel. They’re peeking in windows along the way. They’re turning a map right side up and upside down. Her eyes are streaming in the wind, and the map won’t stay still. They cross the boulevard, zigzagging through traffic. ‘C’mon!’ he’s shouting. He’s got her by the hand. The street can’t be far. They take the next corner, walking straight into the stiff gust that’s blowing off the Seine. They’re laughing as the breath is knocked out of them.
The Knowledge of Penises
That night, she felt all hole. Not legs and breasts and shoulders but, suddenly, all hole.
He felt her hands leaving him, her body shifting unexpectedly below his. He smelled the spiciness of her sweat as she reached into the big night of their bed; heard the familiar knock of her wedding ring against the pine headboard. Then: the pale flash of her inner arms in the darkness, and, quietly, so he had to strain to hear, ‘Hold me down.’
She wanted to feel him tap her, the source within her. She wanted him to find the deep wishing well of her. But theirs was a different vocabulary – soft-lipped, deep-hearted, tender as palms, clean as his wide, white brow – and her words stained the air between them like sour breath.
In the small rented cottage, on her own, Nina finds herself thinking about the knowledge of penises.
In the back of her mind, she sketches them as primitive life forms: single-celled creatures who live, blind and unpigmented, in the pools of caves, sluggishly longing for transformation. She invests these penises with a slow, hesitant inner life and a flaccid intelligence, but with it an acute sensitivity to, an almost penitential longing for, change. For motion. And this moves her, deeply.
At other times, Nina’s penises are tall and totem-like, rising above her like the dark, three-foot, slope-headed shadows the candelabra in her sitting room casts on to the whitewashed walls. Occasionally, she looks up from her book and thinks on the puzzle of them: how they seem to threaten and protect at the same time.
These are the penises, Nina tells herself, that, behind their single blind eyes, know the secret of change: they are tall and rigid with need. They’re monuments to it.
Nina knows no one else thinks about the knowledge of penises. Except Tom. Tom is the son of her friend Marion. He is three years old. Twice a week, Nina and Marion spoon their worries into coffee cups and sip on them slowly.
Nina says, Tell him you get the mattress and he can have the bed frame.’
‘Are you kidding? I can’t get my scan pictures of Tom, let alon
e our mattress.’ She looks up, her eyes straining against the tears. ‘You’re lucky, the way you and Mark can still talk.’
Nina doesn’t feel lucky. These days, she feels unreal. Insubstantial.
Tom shouts from upstairs where he is building Lego towers. ‘I’m going for a wee, Mummy!’
‘Okay, Tom, but mind the toilet seat, all right?’ Marion tilts her head and, with one ear, listens for trouble. ‘It fell the other day and almost came down on his willie. He sort of rests it on the rim when he goes, and the seat’s heavy, mahogany or something, and I said, “You be careful, Tom, or you’ll lose it, you will.” So he takes the matter very seriously now.’ She dips a biscuit into her cup and looks at it pensively. ‘You know, I miss the dining-room table even more than the bed. Six matching chairs. It was ever such a nice set. Pete got it at an auction. Distressed wood.’ She turns to Nina, suddenly grinning like a schoolgirl. ‘Least, that was his story. I should ring him and say, “Oy, Pete, give over. How the fuck did you manage to distress even fucking wood?” ’
‘All done, Mummy!’
Marion springs guiltily to her feet and shouts up the stairs. ‘Good boy, Tom! Wash your hands now.’ She gives Nina a wicked glance. ‘Castration averted. The future of the race is safe.’
Nina feels invisible next to Marion and her brutish ex and her single-motherhoodom and her girlish vulnerability. She and Mark are both such nice people, no one wants to know. And she doesn’t really want anyone to know: that the hole within her is getting bigger and bigger.
‘Hi, Tom,’ she says. Tom has come down the stairs with a box of Lego and no underpants on. Marion laughs. ‘Forget something?’
‘No,’ he says defiantly.
She makes a face of mock surprise at Nina. ‘That’s me told.’
He spills a torrent of Lego on to the carpet between Nina’s feet and prances before her like a kid goat on hind legs.
Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction Page 7