‘How
weird
,’ she said, taking off her glasses. She looked pleased to see him, he thought.
‘What?’
‘You won’t believe it.’
‘Oh I’m sure I will. I’m one of those people who believe anything.’
‘I set my alarm clock for eight fifteen—’
‘No!’
‘—I woke up and looked at the clock – eight fifteen – and turned off the alarm before it could go off. I forced myself to get up straight away. It was dark, very quiet. I showered and got dressed. Then I looked at the clock: six thirty. When I’d set the alarm I’d left it showing the time that I wanted it to go off at. It was only by turning off the alarm that I had revealed the real time. And so, having woken myself up and got up, I then got back into bed and tried to sleep. Then, an hour and a half later, I had to get up again. So all through the morning I was thinking to myself that this would always be remembered as The Day I Got Up Twice.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘There’s more. I met Jean-Paul for a coffee.’ Alex was both galled and relieved: galled to hear his name, relieved that they had evidently not spent last night together. ‘He went in and ordered the coffees. Then, a little later, I went in, ordered two more, and paid for all four. Only to discover that Jean-Paul had already paid for the first two. Effectively I had paid for them twice. Suddenly it seemed that this was not only The Day I Got Up Twice, this was The Day Everything Happened Twice.’
‘And then you bumped into me twice.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Tell it me again.’
‘I set my alarm clock for eight fifteen . . .’
Alex pointed at her shopping bag. ‘What did you buy?’
She hauled a shoe from her shopping bag: an ankle-length boot actually: black, with elasticated sides.
‘And you bought two of them. A Pair. Effectively you bought the same boot twice as well. They look great,’ said Alex. ‘Would you like a coffee? I mean, shall we go for a coffee?’
She glanced at her watch. Alex found himself thinking,
she is the kind of woman who wears a watch
.
‘I really haven’t got time. I’m late.’
‘Right, yes, right,’ said Alex, wind emptying from his sails. ‘I’m kind of in a hurry myself.’ She looked at him. ‘Well no, I’m not actually, but I know the feeling. There have been occasions when I have been. In a hurry, I mean. Perhaps I could call you. If you wanted to go out one evening. As opposed to just bumping into each other.’
‘You mean we could
arrange
to bump into each other?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’d like that.’
‘Would you? I mean, great. And, incredibly, I have a pen.’
‘Four four, six oh, six two, four three.’
‘OK.’
‘Call me. OK. Ciao.’ With that she was hurrying across the street, waving, cars snarling around her.
He timed his call carefully. To have telephoned the next day would have appeared over-eager; the following week too casual. So he called after three days – exactly, as Sara calculated, when someone romantically inclined would do so. At the first attempt he got an answering machine: her voice, in French and English, with no music and, encouragingly, no mention of a flat-mate or live-in lover. Abiding by the manly notion that if you leave a message and she doesn’t call back then you have used up one of a very limited number of message-lives he hung up without speaking. He called back an hour later and this time – convinced suddenly that she was in her apartment, screening calls and guessing who was calling and hanging up like this – he left an agnostic message, asking her to call him. As soon as he put the phone down a tepid despair overcame him: the ball was out of his court now, he was no longer an active agent in his own life. Torn between staying in and waiting for her call (intolerable) and going out and missing her call (equally intolerable), he spent the next hour preparing to go out.
As it happened, Sara
was
in when Alex left his message. She was in the shower, didn’t hear the phone, and when she got out didn’t even glance at the answering machine. She only noticed the blinking red light later, when Jean-Paul rang. As soon as she hung up she played back Alex’s message, twice, trying, second time around, to assess the coded intent behind its abbreviated form: ‘Hi Sara, it’s Alex. I would love to bump into you one night, if you’re free. Give me a call if you can. Bye. Oh, my number is . . .’ The crude innuendo of ‘bump into you’ was probably accidental, the tone might have been matter-of-fact, but this – especially, coming as it did, three days after she had given him her number – was certainly a romantically loaded call, one of the few, in recent months, she was pleased to receive. She called back immediately. He was about to go out – as he had been for the last hour – but resisted the temptation to snatch up the phone on the first ring. If I pick it up now, he reasoned, it will be my mum. If I wait one more ring . . . it’ll still be my mum.
‘Hello.’
‘Is that Alex?’ It was
her
!
‘
Yes?’
‘It’s Sara. I got your message.’
‘Oh hi! How you doing?’
‘Hi. How are you?’
‘I’m fine. How are you?’
‘I’m fine.’ There was a pause. Then Sara said, ‘We can have another round of that if you like.’
‘No, no,’ laughed Alex. ‘I think I’m ready to move on to the next phase of our conversation . . . Well, um, would you like to go out one night?’
‘Yes, of course.’
Alex had devoted considerable thought to the issue to be addressed next, namely
which
night. Friday and Saturday were too charged: if she did have a boyfriend they would be ruled out, and even if she didn’t have a boyfriend and was free there was no point squandering these nights on a first date. Sunday and Monday had no charge at all: they were non-nights: they would both be preoccupied with thoughts of bringing the evening to an end and going home, separately, and watching an hour of TV before sleeping. With any luck she would be free on Wednesday or Thursday.
‘What about Wednesday?’
‘Wednesday is no good.’
‘You don’t have a dance class by any chance do you?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Oh nothing,’ he said, adapting what Luke had repeated to him. ‘It’s just that, like all men, I’ve spent a lot of my life meeting women after classes. Dance, Spanish, Self-defence . . .’
‘So you spend your life meeting women?’
‘Well, trying to. But they’re always in classes. I sometimes think it would be nice if someone could meet
me
after something.’
‘It will happen.’
‘Really? Could it even happen after work on Thursday?’
‘It certainly could. What would you like to do?’
‘Shall we meet at the Petit Centre?’
‘Oh let’s not meet there. What about the Café Pause on rue de Charonne? Do you know that?’ She was sounding impatient, eager to get off the phone. Alex wondered if he’d irritated her.
‘Yes. Let’s meet there. Then we can have dinner. OK?’
‘At what time?’
‘Eight?
‘OK.’
‘Ciao.’
‘Ciao.’
Alex was waiting for Sara when she arrived: more handsome than she remembered, hair even shorter (he’d had it cut the day before), sitting at the bar. She was wearing a black polo neck, check slacks and the boots she had bought when they had met on rue de la Roquette. She angled her cheek for him to kiss. It was chilly outside, her face felt cold. He had on the shirt he had been wearing at Steve’s dinner and a black jacket.
‘I have a present for you,’ he said and handed over a rolled-up poster, battered slightly at the corners.
‘What is it?’
‘Have a look.’
She unrolled the poster. It was huge, for a film:
Shadows
by Cassavetes.
‘Do you like it?’
‘Very much. Thank you.’
He asked what she wanted to drink. She said red wine and began rolling up the poster. Here we are, she thought, as he went up to the bar, here we are on the boring outskirts, the suburbs – the parts that are always the same – of . . . Of what? Seduction? Incompatibility? Friendship? (Who needs it?) She liked him, as far as she knew him at all, was attracted to him, but in a sense the whole evening was taking place in a kind of anticipated retrospect. Its purpose was to find out what it led to, if it would lead to anything. They were on a date.
Which made it all the more surprising that, two sips into her wine, they were joined by Alex’s friend – the one he’d been with that night in the Petit Centre – and his girlfriend. For a moment Sara thought they had turned up by chance but, as Alex introduced them and began arranging more chairs round the table, she saw that it was to be a group evening. She was disoriented, a little disappointed. How would he have felt if she’d invited friends along? Had she misunderstood the situation entirely?
No. Only Alex’s handling of it. It was precisely because they were on a date that Alex had asked Nicole and Luke along. What Sara had felt only faintly, momentarily, as she arrived – that sense of first date as preliminary survey – Alex experienced with something akin to dread. He hated the serve and volley, the I-say-something-you-say-something-back of the one-to-one. The problem, as he saw it, was that, unless you got mugged or sprained an ankle, the typical formula for a first date – drinks, conversation, dinner – was designed for an exchange of histories but offered no opportunity to begin racking up some shared history. Dinner together involved two people cocooned separately in a vacuum of expectations and desires. Whereas this format – four friends having dinner – meant that, from the word go, they were caught up in events, in one another’s lives. They were gathered round a table, they all had drinks. Alex said how pleased he was to meet Nicole, said he had only seen her through the fence at passage Thiéré.
‘Luke said you were the one that kicked the ball at my head that day.’
‘No, that was that yob Matthias. I was the one that kicked the ball over that way so he could talk to you.’
‘What! It was deliberate?’
‘Of course. Didn’t you know?’
‘No. Is that true Luke?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Luke, not displeased at having his cunning revealed.
‘What about you?’ Sara said to Alex when he had told her the story. ‘Were you waiting for me on rue de la Roquette the other day?’
‘He’s always waiting on rue de la Roquette,’ said Luke. ‘Stalking his prey.’
Thinking it best to move the conversation on, Nicole asked Sara where she lived. As soon as Sara had told them Luke plunged into a diatribe about a café he happened to have been to on that street, a fucking awful place where the barman . . . Alex didn’t need to listen: he saw straight away that Luke was wired up on his behalf, so desperate to make sure that the evening was a success, to speed through the preliminaries of getting to know each other, that he was quite happy to serve as pace-maker. Mouthing off like this was actually part of being good company. Let Sara think him a fool, an egocentric, loud-mouthed idiot, anything just to speed things along, to generate the energy the evening needed. He was still in mid-rant when Nicole placed her hand on Sara’s and said,
‘Take no notice. He likes to think he’s all the Ms: mean and moody, but he’s actually all the Ns: nice and normal.’
‘I’m sure he has hidden shallows,’ said Sara. She was hungry. They were all hungry but deciding where to eat took them into another round of drinks. Several places were proposed and rejected. Alex wanted to go to a Vietnamese place around the corner.
‘Is it cheap?’ said Sara.
‘Oh yes,’ said Alex. ‘If we’re being absolutely frank, I don’t do expensive.’
‘I appreciate your telling me.’
‘I’ve always thought it a shame that miserliness is not considered a more attractive quality in a man.’
‘It is pretty low on the list.’
‘You mean there is something lower? That’s reassuring.’
‘Well, there’s a whole bunch of things. All clustered at the bottom together.’
‘What are the others?’
‘I wouldn’t know where to start. What about you Nicole?’ said Sara. ‘What are some of the thousands of unattractive qualities in a man?’
‘Men with hubbies.’
‘
Hubbies
?’
‘Have I got the word wrong?’
‘Possibly. It depends.’
‘You know, like something he does all the time. Like making aeroplanes or collecting stamps, or—’
‘Ah
ho
bbies!’
‘Don’t you think it depends on the hubby, though?’ said Luke. ‘Alex, for example, has lots of hubbies and some of them are quite harmless, even potentially endearing.’
‘Have you, Alex?’
‘Oh don’t get him started on his hubbies. We’ll be here all night. What else though? What are the other unattractive qualities in a man?’
‘Men who bite their finger-nails.’
‘He’s a compulsive nail-biter,’ said Luke.
‘Pot bellies.’
‘He’s got one of those too.’
‘Hairy backs.’
‘It’s like you’re
describing
him,’ said Luke.
‘Stained underpants,’ said Sara.
‘Now you’re getting really personal.’
‘Men who look in their handkerchiefs after they’ve blown their nose,’ said Nicole.
‘Oh come on. It might not be nice but it’s not gender specific.’
‘Also, how many men do you know who have handkerchiefs these days? This is the age of the tissue.’
‘Men who can’t dance.’
‘Men who put their socks on before their trousers.’
‘Men who smoke.’ Luke shot Alex a
what did I tell you?
glance.
‘And women who smoke,’ he said.
‘Smoking generally.’
‘Men dancing badly and smoking in their socks and stained underpants.’
‘Yes.’
‘Men who can’t cook.’
‘I’m a brilliant cook,’ said Luke.
‘Men who boast.’
‘
English
men,’ said Nicole and Sara together.
‘What about attractive qualities? What do women
like
in a man? I think that’s the kind of angle Alex and I are more interested in.’
‘Defnitely,’ said Alex.
‘Seriously?’ said Sara.
‘Of course.’
‘Broad shoulders,’ said Nicole, putting her arm around Luke’s thin shoulders.
‘Strength.’
‘Kindness.’