The Fabrications

by Baret Magarian

  As the film drew to its end Oscar’s thoughts led him away from Najette and he began to consider all that had happened in the last few weeks. Events appeared vague and indistinct and he couldn’t properly recall the order in which they had happened. At last everything boiled down to one fear, one realization:

  What the hell was he going to say on television?

  On their way to a cafe he told her about the meeting with Ryan Rees.

  Inside the place they decided on – more out of necessity than anything else – there was a withdrawn atmosphere, despite extravagant prints on the walls and luxurious seats and tables, their surfaces as reflective as mirrors. The handful of men scattered here and there were nursing hangovers, their faces as pale as their coffees were black. A piano sat in a corner, looking like it hadn’t been touched in years.

  They found a spot to themselves and she ordered profiteroles, an act that immediately, in the context of the general desolation, acquired the bright ring of health.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘soon the words you speak will make you famous. You’ll be important. Will you desert me when the photographers cling to you like pigeons?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘That’s just as well. Though I might have to desert you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She ignored his question and said, ‘Oscar, if you’re going to be paid just to open your mouth on this discussion program, you’d better make sure what comes out is good. Do you plan to represent the voice of the common man? That won’t do, since you aren’t particularly common.’

  ‘Nothing so ambitious; I’m just going to contribute to a discussion about love.’

  ‘And what do you know about love?’

  There was a slight pause.

  ‘Well...I’m not ready yet. I have to get my ideas down on paper first.’

  ‘Well, I won’t press you.’

  ‘Do you think it’s stupid?’

  ‘Of course not. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I had the impression you wanted to be a painter. That, if you remember, was why you started modeling.’

  ‘I haven’t got the talent; I’ve come to see that.’

  He thought about how Bloch’s story had mythologized him as a great painter: could it be this part of the fiction would not find its real-life counterpart, that he would never paint again? Could it be that the story’s capacity for doing good in his life was all used up?

  ‘You know, Nicholas offered to exhibit my work the day I met him. But I told him I had nothing to give him. I want to have an effect on people. I can’t do it with canvasses and paint. Perhaps you can. In fact, I know you can. That red nude on the sofa, both versions, were magnificent. You should try and mount a show as soon as you can. Why don’t you ask Nicholas? Or is that a bad idea?’

  There was another pause in the conversation, during which the profiteroles arrived.

  ‘Have you been to the Earl Gallery yet?’ she asked, a hint of tension creeping into her voice, tenuous but undeniable.

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact. I was quite struck by the show there. Nick Naidirem. Have you heard of him? He’s really very good.’

  ‘Very good?’

  ‘Very good, sometimes more than very.’

  ‘Oscar, do you know what my second name is?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Do you suddenly feel the desire to tell me?’

  ‘It’s Meridian.’

  ‘That’s nice. Unusual.’

  ‘Can you tell me what Meridian is spelt backwards?’

  ‘It’s...N...A...I...D...I...’

  He stopped short, shocked.

  ‘It’s...God...it’s Naidirem.’

  Her smile of affirmation made him dizzy momentarily, as the truth prized its way into his brain.

  ‘They were your paintings?! What about the signatures?’ He suddenly remembered there weren’t any since she always signed her canvasses on the back. ‘What’s this all about? Why are you exhibiting under that name?’

  ‘I needed there to be some distance between me and the public.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s...the truth is...I don’t...Nicholas only agreed to the exhibition...he was getting his stupid revenge...’

  ‘I don’t understand...’

  ‘No, I didn’t think you would.’

  She lit a cigarette.

  ‘I used to beg him to take on my work. He never did because he was jealous of me. He said so a number of times. He’d pretend he was joking but he meant it really. He said as an excuse that my paintings were too grand, too garish for his modest little gallery. But then, later he agreed to exhibit my work on one condition.’

  ‘That you used a different name?’

  ‘Right. He made a slight concession, that the surname could be an anagram of mine. I can’t get a dealer – apparently I’m too oldfashioned. I couldn’t get an exhibition anywhere. I was desperate, so I agreed. I certainly didn’t want to rent out some gallery, tiny and cramped, for pots of money. I know the Earl gets reviewed – whatever else you can say about him, Nicholas is well connected – and the place pulls in the punters. In fact, I ended up getting a rave review in the SGJ. They said I had feminine finesse. Well, at least they got one thing right.’

  ‘What a disgusting thing to do, to rob you of the glory. People have a right to know it’s you.’

  ‘Oh well. Who cares, in a way...if people get to see the paintings, get some pleasure out of it, does it really matter? They come, they go, as do all the piss-artists. I think of it as my nom-de-plume, you see. That comforts me. By the way, Nicholas would never have made you such a generous offer – have offered you a show – unless he had something nasty to gain by it. He probably thought it would kill me if he offered you – a stranger – an exhibition, when I’d been his girlfriend and he hadn’t given me one. He probably also reckoned it would cripple our relationship, whatever its status. His thinking is so bloody crude.’

  These further revelations knocked a large dent in his skull, and it took him a moment or two to recover. He couldn’t believe how mendacious Nicholas had been, though he realized Najette’s explanation made perfect sense. Why should Nicholas have been so generous in making that offer all those weeks ago? Only to employ him as a pawn in his battle against Najette.

  ‘It’s so strange...that they were your paintings. At the time I just wasn’t making the connection.’

  ‘That’s disappointing. I was hoping you knew me better than that.’

  ‘Know your work better, you mean?’

  ‘I am my work, my work is me. And if you couldn’t see me through the screen of a false name...I’m suddenly sad.’

  Oscar tried to recall the shape of that afternoon in the gallery, the delight the paintings had spread in his mind, and tried to gauge the nature of his reactions to them. They had cast a spell over him, but could he really have been expected to know that it was her work? Maybe. But after all, he had only seen two of her paintings before his visit to the gallery. Feeling both moved and disturbed, he tried to sustain a healing silence.

  Finally he said in a low voice, ‘Why does Nicholas hate you so much?’

  ‘I don’t think he does hate me. Not really. He’s scared of me; he knows I have something he’s always wanted. He’s tried to persuade himself he has it too. With Turkish cigarettes and cultivated eccentricities and refined words, he can be a bohemian. But deep down he knows he’s just affectation without a shred of talent. When we were together he admired me and resented me in equal measure. He could have helped me, but he didn’t because it would have been another nail in his coffin. When I broke with him, he knew it was because I’d seen through him, realized how hollow he really was. In a way it makes perfect sense that he should have agreed to exhibit my work on the condition that it wasn’t my name that was used. He was giving me what I wanted and at the same time qualifying it with what I loathed: a lie. But I went along with it. What else was I going to do?’

  She paused and took a deep breath and it seemed as if she was
on the verge of some great confession, then she lightened slightly and resumed.

  ‘Oscar, so now to us...you have to be patient with me; I need everything andante. I’m tricky, you see. It all has to come out at the right time, perfect, like a soufflé.’

  Oscar registered this with tentative joy because the words seemed to announce the possibility of intimacy between them, but he was not sure if he had heard them right. He wanted to ask her to repeat what she had just said but to have done so would have destroyed all the subtlety he knew she was straining for. Besides this, her words had sprung from a specific moment, and the realizations that had been forming in Najette’s mind during it. That moment was already past.

  She understood the meaning of his slightly baffled look but chose to ignore it and started at last on her profiteroles.

  ‘You can’t imagine the joy contained in this plate. I never want it to end. Perhaps that’s my problem; whenever I see perfection I want to bottle it up. Why do I ask the impossible from God? Is it that I think he has a special ear for me, and me alone, and that I’m his favorite? In another life I think I’d be nailing butterflies to wood, not painting them.’

  A smartly dressed man walked out of a door marked PRIVATE and sidled up to the piano, his movements jagged and reptilian. But as soon as he started to play his body became engulfed in calm, as if a sedative was calmly feeding into his body via the keyboard. A Chopin waltz was unwinding; and its cadences summoned up the specter of loss. The music was not so much played as summoned, an impression confirmed by the pianist’s now trance-like state. Najette glanced over, then said softly, ‘I didn’t spot the piano. It’s easy, isn’t it, to miss what’s in front of your nose?’

  He felt the remark applied to his own perceptions, or lack of them, so he tried to make small talk in order to avoid any possible clash between them.

  ‘Do you play?’

  She said nothing and assessed the state of the other customers. The remaining men were continuing their descent into mental twilight. A little way down someone was being forced into a dinner jacket.

  The music dislodged the sadness that had settled at the bottom of her mind. It floated to the surface and stirred lazily. She looked around and tried to disregard how the music revealed the fragility of everything, of life. Her circling gaze came to rest on Oscar. Inquiry widened his eyes, defiance curved his lips. Coming now as it did in the midst of her escalating feelings of loss and the music’s pathos, Oscar’s face embodied life. Fearful of that life’s extinction, she craned her neck toward him and studied the still unclouded features which placed him apart from the dispossessed men around them. He watched as her eyes locked onto his, eyes that startled him with the intensity of their gaze, eyes that turned her face into a center of magnetizing beauty by finally shedding their veils.

  She kissed him fiercely.

  II

  A KITE TORN BY THORNS

  9

  The sun was setting, casting streets and buildings in a magical haze. Earlier it had rained, and the trees still held droplets of water which, from time to time, were released by sudden breezes, gently dousing those walking under their branches. It was growing quiet, and the evening’s progress altered the texture of consciousness. People coming home from work looked forward to the balm of food and alcohol, and the rejuvenation of night.

  Daniel Bloch had just been on the telephone with Barny Crane, his agent, who wanted to know if there was any sign of a new book. Bloch told him it was out of the question, that he was only writing fragments of an autobiographical nature, not meant for public consumption. Barny played along, suspecting he had just caught him at a bad moment, assuming Bloch was exercising that capriciousness he had come to expect before the genesis of a new novel.

  And now, while London wound down like a gigantic spring, he stretched his tired body out on his pink double bed, propped himself up, and arranged the half dozen pillows and cushions around him until he felt comfortable and secure. Only then did he begin writing words on the thick wad of sheets next to him.

  Autumns and summers and winters have come and gone and I’m still here. Oscar is young; he has his life in front of him. I am past the zenith, the peak shrouded in snow.

  I wish I could recall the past more clearly. How did I fill each day? One day I woke up and found I was an adult; suddenly I’d been thrust onto the milling stage. Have I embraced the responsibilities of being a man; have I advanced onto the battlefield in full regalia; have I, one of those about to die, saluted my maker? God is still up to his old tricks, a foolish old man muttering as he pulls rabbits out of his hat, while a building topples here, a love dies there.

  Talking of love, I ache to see her again. But she’s three-thousand miles away, she’s no longer in the neighborhood, as it were. We left each other like segments of an old rug coming apart at the seams. She was a lovely tapestry crowded with mysterious figures, indecipherable hieroglyphs, but I failed to be an adequate Egyptologist, venturing into subterranean caverns with my flaming torch. She was rich, it’s true, but her riches made me poor.

  To see Natalie with a child was wonderful. An unfeigned sincerity spilled out when she was with a child, when she could leave aside that Amazonian womanliness, complete with underwear, stilettos like daggers and industrial strength eau de cologne. I never quite felt at ease amidst her various splendors. She seemed to have been born with a silver make-up case in her mouth since she was always pampering her features and readjusting the contours of her face, a protean face that make-up made more protean. She had a soul of rare expressiveness: she was a free spirit, and I ended up paying for that freedom.

  I still recall the wooded walks. Sun-filled spaces where the dust from platitudes could settle. The confusions we have cultivated for time immemorial could be dispersed. Then we were alone. And there was time for she and I to stare into one another.

  But then the abyss...

  So dark down there; the well, from where water sprang and gushed and finally caused me to drown. Drown because sometimes I would be caught irretrievably inside her, losing my own sense of self.

  At other times her long locks were alien to me, strands from a body I regarded with indifference: Do I really know this person?

  At others still we were so close, closer still, closer and closer until I thought I had the key in my palm, but it clattered onto the cold ground and was sucked away and the chained door rattled.

  And we became ghosts once again. Diminuendo.

  She had a landscape for a body. And conjuring with it every night (and then not at all) made me perceive the wonder of being alive more than anything else ever managed to do.

  And once or twice, over breakfast, in the garden, under the stars, after sleep, it was sweet, so sweet I cannot name it.

  I must keep writing; I must get this out of my system. I want no interruptions this time; I want to say what has to be said.

  I am expecting my father tonight. I have no idea how this will turn out. I hope that we will be civil to each other. This would be something. Actually, it would be quite a lot.

  I am closing in on myself, I have declared a new mode of introspection, I no longer want to go out, I no longer want to negotiate with etiquette, I want merely to crawl into my shell and hibernate. Perhaps I should apply for Oscar’s old job . . .

  He leaned back on the pillows and undid the top button of his pyjama top. Images churned around in his mind. His eyes closed and his body turned automatically, forming a fetal position. He pushed away the sheets of foolscap, which spilled all over the floor, settling into fan shapes as if by design.

  He was standing on the roof of an impossibly tall building. The wind was whipping itself into a frenzy. As he looked around he could see he was all alone there. Beyond was a gigantic glass door through which people in carnivalesque costumes were visible, drinking and dancing. Then the scene changed and he was walking down a long, narrow corridor. At its end a shadowy figure was tucked away. Try as he might he couldn’t see its face. Then o
ther faces and bodies sprang up and pressed onto his body until he was being squeezed by a circular mass, a crowd exerting a monumental pressure. He felt his own body losing its form, becoming volatilized. His mind broke free and he was looking down from a spiritual, lofty plain, glimpsing himself still pressed between the others.

  Something from outside began to demand his attention and a signal led him back toward consciousness. His eyes snapped opened. Staring down at him was Oscar’s blank face. Bloch started up with a fright.

  ‘How...how did you get in?’ he stammered, as if to a hostile intruder.

  ‘The downstairs door was open. So was your front door. I’ve shut them both.’

  ‘I...I was sleeping.’

  ‘At this hour? You should be frolicking in the park. It’s a Mediterranean evening.’

  ‘Is it? I think I’m ill or something. Or else my mind’s gone to pot; I can feel bits of me rattling around my skull. I just had the strangest dream.’ He began rubbing his eyes vigorously.

  ‘Are you up to having a conversation?’

  Bloch nodded slowly. His eyes were bleached by fatigue. Oscar, sensing the weight bearing down on him, and in turn finding himself wading through sluggish waves, thought it might be a good idea to pick up the sheets of paper scattered over the floor, as if this would somehow energize them both. He did so and placed them on the side table next to the bed, noticing the growing pile of books under the table lamp: tattered volumes on Buddhism, Tantra, Plato. Prompted by a complimentary impulse, Bloch reached over for an ashtray to anchor the sheets with but he misjudged its weight. It fell and broke into three hearty pieces which went hopping across the floor. Oscar was about to retrieve them when Bloch bawled, ‘Leave it! Stop making such a fuss.’

  Oscar tried to cover up his discomfort by making small talk. As his lips moved, Bloch, who wasn’t listening to a word, noticed that Oscar’s skin glowed in a slightly synthetic manner; he looked waxy. Bloch buried his nose in the smell of his pillow.