Live; live; live

by Jonathan Buckley

  She inspected the row of cards stuck to the wall beside the window: stonework from Chartres, Autun, Moissac, Rouen, Reims, et cetera. ‘Why do you like these so much?’ she asked. The answer would be of interest to her, it seemed, but I answered too fully. To these artists, I explained, the essence of a person was not something that could be captured by replicating the features of the face. They represented the ideal, not the anecdotal.

  Erin considered the face of Jeremiah. ‘You know about the heads that Callum made?’ she asked. I did not know; she seemed pleased to have an opportunity to educate me.

  In Callum’s workshop, when Lucas had first been allowed to visit it, photos of half a dozen small stone heads had been pinned to a wall. They looked like museum pieces, but in fact each one was an original, created by Callum, carved in the style of a very specific place, at a very specific time. As Lucas put it, said Erin, it was as though Callum had attuned himself to the spirit of each locality, and expressed that spirit perfectly. They were heads of saints or kings, Erin thought. She was not sure of the dates or localities, but it was something like Paris, a thousand years ago, and somewhere else in France a hundred years after that, and somewhere else some time after that. They were all medieval, definitely. To the untrained eye the heads were very similar, Lucas had said, but you could see the differences when Callum pointed them out. The way the beards were carved was crucial, as Erin recalled.

  The heads had been stolen. ‘The thief must have thought they were old,’ said Erin, now looking out of the window again. She stayed at the window for a while, as if looking at a place where she had lived many years ago. Then she asked: ‘Why didn’t you stick with teaching?’

  ‘Because it turned out I was a terrible teacher,’ I replied.

  ‘How so?’ she asked, still not facing me.

  ‘No patience,’ I said. ‘No authority.’

  Erin now turned. With a look of doubt, she said: ‘Really?’ She smiled, and at that moment a complication of our relationship became imminent, which is why, suddenly, she said she should be going.

  •

  A week or so before the kiss, walking past one of the South Street cafés, I saw Erin sitting at a table outside, with the ultra-blonde Polish waitress from Greenwood’s restaurant. The conversation seemed to be confidential and intense; their hands were touching. I was on the opposite side of the road, and passed by unnoticed. When I returned, they were still talking – or rather, Erin was still listening. It was obvious that Erin had given whatever advice she could, and was no longer wholly engaged. When she saw me, she smiled. As before, I was on the pavement opposite. I was ready to be invited to cross. But the friend, though she had noticed the smile, could not be interrupted; the point she was making had to be elaborated, with urgency. It was not possible to bring another person into the conversation. So I raised a hand, discreetly, showing that I would not approach. At this point the friend looked down, to rummage for something in her bag, and Erin glanced in my direction, and produced an unusual gesture: first she touched a fingertip to her face, just below the outside edge of an eye; then she pointed the same finger in my direction; and then, with a grin, she cocked an eyebrow. It was as if she were reminding me of some agreement that we had made, but I did not know what she meant.

  •

  Act 2, Scene 2 of Parsifal. Kundry – having related to Parsifal the story of his mother’s languishing and death, for which Parsifal now blames himself – kisses the remorseful young man, thereby, as she says, bestowing his mother’s love upon him: als Muttersegens letzten Gruss / der Liebe – ersten Kuss! (‘as the last token of a mother’s blessing / the first kiss of love’). Parsifal, the pure fool, does not react well. ‘Die Wunde!’ he cries, ‘Die Wunde!’ – ‘The wound! The wound!’ Suddenly he is experiencing the agony of Amfortas, king of the knights of the Grail, who is in constant pain from a wound that will not heal. Though the injury was inflicted by a spear (the Lance of Longinus, the Holy Spear itself, no less), the kiss of Kundry enables Parsifal, in his spasm of empathetic suffering, to understand the true source of the king’s torment: it is a spiritual anguish, an unbearable guilt caused by the sin that the seductive Kundry led him to commit. It’s all the woman’s fault, as usual. Kundry is the vehicle of temptation, the agent of corruption.

  The kiss with Erin, it occurred to me, some time afterwards, was like the kiss in Parsifal, albeit with the roles reversed; and less ridiculous. The similarity was in the abruptness of what happened.

  Lucas was away. I had told her that I was going to watch a film that evening. We watched it together. There was no wine; none of the accessories of seduction; no seduction was intended. The kiss arose from the evening, and was initiated by both of us, in the same instant; we had come to the moment in which it was necessary. I put a palm to her cheek, she put a palm to mine, and we kissed; the kiss went on. It cannot be described; it said everything that had not been said. But then it was as though she had been struck by fear, by panic, in the depths of it. Almost breathless, she fell back. Her eyes were not seeing me. ‘I can’t’, she said, to herself more than to me, dazed. A pause, then she said it again, quietly: ‘I can’t.’ This time the words were spoken with disappointment and a muted kind of wonderment, as though she had unaccountably failed at something for which she had thought herself prepared. The third time, the tone was one of apology. I did not try to persuade her, and she did not attempt to explain. There was no need to apologise, I told her. I took the hand she offered, and held it for a minute. Again she apologised, and I assured her that I understood. She kissed me on the brow; then, having said nothing more, she went home. I knew what it had meant. I would wait.

  •

  When Lucas invited me over, a week or so after the kiss, I did not hesitate. There was some guilt, naturally, but it was moderate, and a minor element when I thought about what had happened. A truth had been allowed expression.

  I was surprised, however, by how easy it was to conduct myself as if there were no reason why I should not be entirely at ease. Lucas opened the door to me. We shook hands, as always. In the way he looked at me, and spoke, nothing was different; and nothing in my manner was different either, or so I felt. We went into the living room, to the board. Erin was there, in the corner chair, reading a magazine. Her greeting was airy, neighbourly. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ she announced, rising; on her way out, she exchanged smiles with Lucas. No observer of that scene would have detected any tension.

  During the game, though, there were moments at which I wondered what he knew or suspected. Once or twice, considering a move, I was aware that I, rather than the position, was being scrutinised. Glancing up abruptly, I saw Lucas’s gaze dip quickly to the board; I thought I saw the vanishing of a smile. It was possible, I told myself, that he was amused by how long I was taking to commit myself to a move; perhaps my decision-making, rarely rapid, was slower this afternoon than usual. And when the game was over, Lucas asked me: ‘So, how are you?’ The question was part of the routine, but this time the tone, as I heard it, was the tone with which he had asked the same question in the weeks immediately following the death of my mother. His manner, briefly, was again that of a counsellor. ‘I’m fine,’ I answered, and Lucas gave me a quick checking look, as one might look at a switch to verify that it was off. My answer seemed to be sufficient; no more questions were asked.

  Then Lucas needed to go up to the office, to check his emails; a new client was in the throes of a crisis, he explained. He would be back in ten minutes, he said, as Erin entered the room. ‘Coffee?’ she suggested. She looked me in the eye, and smiled, all with perfectly frank friendliness, under the gaze of Lucas.

  I followed her, and now there were signs of some agitation. She found things with which to busy herself, in various parts of the kitchen. Apparently it was necessary for her to keep her back turned to me. Only when I said that we should talk did she stop. She regarded me, frowning, and paused, in such a way that
I anticipated a response of some subtlety. But all she said was: ‘No.’ It was said quietly, unemphatically, as one might answer a simple question of fact.

  ‘Not now, not here,’ I said. ‘But soon. We do have to talk.’

  With narrowed eyes she examined my face, as though the meaning of these phrases was unclear. ‘No. We don’t,’ she said, and here I saw a flash of distress, like a reflection glimpsed in the sudden opening of a mirrored door. She was denying herself as much as she was denying me.

  The staircase creaked as Lucas came back down; it was not a ridiculous notion, I later thought, that Lucas had deliberately produced that sound, to signal the end of the time that he had permitted Erin and me for whatever conversation might be necessary. Hearing it, Erin called out to him, with a question that did not have to be asked at that moment; she called out to him as a wife would, as she had never done before.

  So I understood that Erin was raising a palisade around herself and Lucas. For the time being, she was enclosing the relationship, in obedience to a principle of loyalty. It was what duty demanded, not love. This was admirable, as of course she knew. I would have to wait; I saw this confirmed in the last glance Erin gave me, as Lucas opened the door.

  •

  In the months that followed the kiss, it was never mentioned by either of us. There was nothing more to be said, because what had been said by the kiss was true. Only when Lucas had gone did Erin talk about the guilt. She had always felt this guilt, she said, but now she felt it more strongly than ever. With Lucas dead, she could no longer appease her guilt by subservience. His spirit can see everything, she may believe. I do not doubt that the guilt is real; what I doubt is the cause of it. ‘But nothing happened,’ I reassured her. We both knew, however, that this was not the case.

  •

  The kiss – or the evening of the kiss – can be thought of as a seed; it might lie in dry soil for many years, then grow.

  •

  Pietro Bembo, the most loquacious proponent of platonic love, committed adultery with Lucrezia Borgia; and had three children, at least; and was a cardinal.

  •

  One night, in the small hours, a downpour arrived in advance of the forecast hour. I was on West Street. Sudden and extraordinary quantities of water, and thrilling noise. Above my head, the fabric of the umbrella roared. Rain from a broken gutter made a clacking racket on the pavement. The leaves of the nearby elm were seething. There was so much to hear. Taking down the umbrella, I closed my eyes. The scene was composed in sound – without seeing, I could sense the distance to the tree, the volume of its foliage. I could hear the location of the bus shelter. The rain drummed on its roof and on the roof of a van parked close by, and the roof of a car; each timbre was different. My clothes were becoming saturated, but the experience was pleasurable – thinking nothing, fully present. A gush of tyres, moving through standing water, gave a rich satisfaction. Without traffic, the tarmac and rain produced a thick white noise. I relished it. The sound from a storm drain was a gargle. Elsewhere, spattering. A hiss, a droning. Perhaps ten yards away, the rainwater running over an obstruction was making a sound that was like a small catarrhal cough. My skin, the limit of my substance, was alive with coldness, with water; this body occupied this space, amid all these sounds.

  A week later, I was unwell. My sneeze is even more ridiculous than most – an explosive squeak, as if someone has stamped, with all force, on a punctured rubber ball. At the kerb, sneezing, I staggered back a half-step, and a voice behind me said: ‘Bless.’ Erin, blinking in amazement at the noise. ‘That’s what comes of getting soaked,’ she said. On the night of the storm, she had seen me on West Street. My first thought: if she had seen me standing by the bus stop, with the umbrella down, I would have looked like a mad person. But she had seen me a little later, crossing the road. ‘You looked like you’d come out of the sea,’ she said. Next thought: how had Erin seen me? Nobody else had been walking on West Street; she must have driven past. Lucas was away. So where had she been, at that hour? Erin looked closely at me – at my eyes, rather than into them, as if examining a minor wound. ‘You should not be out in public,’ she said. ‘You do not look good.’ A second sneeze; Erin sprang back, as if from a firecracker, and laughed, alarmed. I remember the look she gave me on leaving: as if she were several years older than me, and hoped that a lesson had been learned.

  •

  For a short time there was a nightingale in one of the gardens nearby, and one evening – a warm night in June – the bird was singing strongly, and we paused the conversation to listen. The sky was a spectacle: a bright moon, almost full, occluded by small clouds. That was what Erin was watching, when I glanced at her and saw her put a fingertip quickly to the edge of an eye, to stem a tear, it seemed. It is possible that the scene, with the accompaniment of the nightingale, was enough in itself; or a memory had arisen. But earlier, soon after the nightingale had begun to sing, something unusual had occurred. Erin was listening to the song, then Lucas started to speak and Erin interrupted him, cuttingly, with: ‘Quiet.’ And Lucas obeyed, not jokingly; the rebuke made him turn away from her. Never before had I heard her speak to him in this way, but it seemed, from his reaction, that this was not an aberration. She did not apologise in any way for her sharpness, and the mood of the evening was soon restored; Lucas was re-established in his authority. But there was another observation, a glimpse, later, as I was getting ready to leave. Erin got up from the table and went into the house, and I saw Lucas look towards the doorway through which she had just passed. It was the look, it seemed, of someone whose love was greater than the love he was receiving; and in that moment, I remember, I felt sorry for him, and ashamed. A year later, Kit was born.

  •

  ‘Well, that was quite something, last night,’ Erin remarked, two or three days after my terminal argument with Miriam. Smiling, she raised an eyebrow in enquiry. It had been a high-volume altercation, with door-slamming and breakages; a window had been left open, I discovered after it was over.

  ‘It won’t happen again,’ I said, as though to a neighbour who had lodged a complaint.

  Erin nodded; she had assumed as much.

  ‘She needed a bit more drama in her life,’ I explained, with the shrug of a useless specimen.

  ‘I can imagine.’

  One Saturday morning, coming back to the house, we had met Erin in the street – the only meeting of the three. Throughout the conversation, Miriam’s eyes were doing a lot of covert examination. When Erin touched my arm with a finger, the gesture was noted, I saw. Erin was making the new girlfriend welcome; the questions all came from Erin. Answering, Miriam detailed our plans for the weekend; it seemed that things that we had discussed as possibilities had now been decided. As we parted, Erin gave me a semi-second glance: it intrigued her, pleased her, amused her, that I had taken on the challenge of this woman. In the glance there was also, I am sure, an allusion to what had happened with the kiss; a confirmation that it could now be put aside, if not forgotten.

  As soon as we were out of earshot, Miriam laughed: I had under-described my neighbour, she told me. It had struck the dark and aggressive and substantial Miriam – as it had struck Erin, I knew – that each might be seen as the converse of the other. The contrast in appearance was almost absurd, as though a point were being made. What followed was not quite an argument; it was an episode of friction, ending with an exit from the room. ‘I need to calm down,’ Miriam stated, addressing herself from a distance. Half an hour later she returned, from the shower, transfigured, wearing a towel as a small sarong; the glory of the body of Miriam.

  No relationship of hers had ever lasted more than half a year, she had told me, at the outset. This was not to be regarded as failure; she was not in any sense unfulfilled. After a few months the voltage dropped too much for her. It was not just the intensity of the sex that made those early months the best of life – it was the unruliness, and the ac
celeration of getting to know the lover. She never wanted to know everything about anybody; life was much too short for marriage.

  Miriam knew what Erin had been thinking when they were talking. ‘“This girl is just not his type” – that’s what she was thinking,’ said Miriam, who had no patience with any talk of types. ‘I’m not that type of person’ was a sentence that made her want to scream. It reduced the complexity of the whole individual to a caption. When she was in her teens, and teachers kept singling her out as a disruptive element, her parents forced her to undergo the attentions of a psychologist. Now she had an ineradicable loathing of psychology and its classifications. ‘Who knows why people do what they do?’ she would ask. ‘The point is, they do it. That’s all we need to know.’ And once, sounding like Lucas, she reminded me that electrons were not entities that existed in themselves – they existed as charges, as relationships. It should be the same with people, Miriam argued. Only in relationships do we fully exist; every relationship changes us; but the charge can never be of prolonged duration.

  Erin, in the aftermath of Miriam’s departure, said nothing about types, though she did tell me that Miriam might have been what I ‘needed’ – another word to temporarily put a distance between us. ‘You seemed to be having a good time,’ she said. ‘She was attractive.’

  I agreed.

  ‘Great figure.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘And not a pushover.’

  ‘Very much not,’ I said, with a ruefulness that was chiefly for effect.

  ‘You shouldn’t be in that house on your own,’ said Erin.

  She seemed more disappointed at Miriam’s leaving than I was, as did Lucas. With Miriam, I confessed to him, I had never left the shallows.