One evening Pierre pushed back his chair, took off his glasses, stretched his arms upwards and outwards to relieve – and signal the end of – the accumulated stress of eight hours of hard work, and suggested a drink.
‘I’m sorry. I have to go home.’
‘To your boyfriend? What’s his name?’
‘Luke.’
‘Luke, yes. How is his ankle?’
‘He moans and groans but he is getting better, I think . . .’
‘It must be frustrating, physically,’ said Pierre. ‘For him, I mean.’
‘He wishes he could play football.’
‘I’m sure. Oh well, another time maybe.’
‘Yes, for sure.’ Nicole gathered up her things and put her jacket on. ‘Au revoir Pierre.’
‘Au revoir Nicole.’ He watched her leave, noticing about her the same things that Luke had noticed.
The weather became warmer, the days longer. One particular Sunday, Sahra declared, was The Day That Was The First Sunday of Spring, the first day when it was warm enough to sit comfortably in the sun on a café terrace. The four friends met at the Café Bastille but the terrace was jam-packed so they went to the Kanterbrau which was also packed. All cafés with terraces were packed so they went back to the Bastille and waited for fifteen minutes before a table became available. It would have been an even longer wait if Luke had not had his crutches.
People were crowded together as tightly and neatly as an audience at a cinema but here they were both audience and subject; in watching everyone else they were watching themselves. Everyone had a part to play and everyone played the same part. In these circumstances, sunglasses – looked at, looked through – came into their own. Implicit in the idea of sitting on the café terrace was both question (‘It’s nice sitting here isn’t it?’) and response (‘Yes, lovely’) and all conversations were more or less elaborate versions of this basic call-and-response of reflexive affirmation: ‘What better place to be in the world than here at this café?’ ‘Nowhere, this is perfect.’ The friends sat together, playing their part, letting the sun warm them. It grew hot. Nicole took off her cardigan. Her arms were thin, pale.
‘I’ve developed a liking for olives,’ said Alex.
‘I hate them,’ said Luke.
‘I’ve always liked them,’ said Sahra who wanted to write down the recipe of a meal that Luke had cooked for everyone a few nights previously. Nicole thought she had a pen and began looking in her bag.
‘Oh no,’ said Luke. ‘Every time I see Nicole looking in her bag like that I get tense. Implicit in the idea of rummaging is not finding, and implicit in not finding is losing: usually something of great importance, i.e. belonging to me. Oh how I used to love my property.’
‘Used to?’
‘I’ve had to renounce it as a condition of being with Nicole. Now all the things I most love are Nicole’s. That is to say they
were
mine once and either she’s broken or lost them, or has come to have absolute ownership of them.’
It was true. The surprising thing was that he had come to love Nicole’s infuriating disregard for her – and his – things. Every time he saw her wearing a favourite dress – the blue one, for example, with the knotted halter neck that he had bought in a sale at the shop next to a place where they had eaten minestrone soup one lunch-time in November – was, potentially, the last. There was no telling how or when she was going to ruin or lose it.
After dredging the depths of her bag Nicole triumphantly held a pencil aloft. It was broken, unfortunately, prompting another bout of rummaging. This time she came up with a pencil sharpener, shaped like a jet whose cockpit gradually filled up with shavings from the pencil. Sahra wrote down the recipe. They ordered another round of coffees. Alex took off his sweater and said how greatly the discovery of fabric conditioner had improved his life. Luke also took off his sweater, revealing a T-shirt of which he was immensely proud. Across the front, in red letters, was written: try burning this flag, asshole. Sahra loved it too. Nicole was unsure. Alex asked him to put his sweater back on. Miles walked by, laden down with shopping from the market. Luke called out, waved. Miles called back that he couldn’t stop: ‘omelettes to make, wine to drink’. A young woman distributed green pieces of paper which demonstrated the deaf and dumb alphabet. She returned a few minutes later, smiling, silent, and picked them up again. A waiter, carrying a full tray of drinks, tripped over Luke’s crutches. He looked like he was about to go flying but managed, somehow, to stay on his feet
and
keep the tray level. It was an heroic, awe-inspiring performance, applauded warmly by all who witnessed it, especially Luke. The phone box opposite was out of order. One person after another went in, tried to call, and came out looking disappointed and, surrounded as they were by the many people using mobile phones, anachronistic. Trees were coming into leaf. The traffic lights went about their business.
‘What shall we do next?’ said Alex.
‘Sit here some more,’ said Sahra.
‘We could ride the 29,’ said Luke. ‘That is, we
could
ride the 29 if it wasn’t a Sunday.’
‘When are we going to start shooting the movie Luke?’
‘
Route 29
? Today would have been perfect but the frigging 29 doesn’t run on a Sunday.’
‘Plus there is the small obstacle of not having a camera,’ said Sahra.
‘A mere detail,’ said Luke. They sat just looking for a while. At each other and the people going by, looking at the people who were sitting down, looking.
‘What about
seeing
a film?’ said Luke. ‘As opposed to making one.’
‘In this weather? Crazy.’
‘A searing indictment of racism, that’s what I’m in the mood for. Or maybe a film noir where people are always turning up their collars against the rain and throwing cigarettes into gutters.’
‘Or throwing away the murder weapon.’
‘A great trope, that.’
‘They’re all lovely tropes.’
‘Some are horrible,’ said Sahra. ‘I hate the laugh that turns into a deranged cackle.’
‘I hate that too,’ said Nicole.
‘Me too.’
‘And me.’
‘I like the Styrofoam cups that the cops drink coffee out of on a stake-out. Sitting in a car, eating burgers and drinking out of Styrofoam cups.’
‘Tossing the Styrofoam cups out of the window and squealing the car round when the dealer – “It’s him!” – finally shows.’
‘Or drinking out of them in the overworked precinct. A place where the phones are always ringing.’
‘Hookers being brought in.’
‘Handcuffed Chicanos.’
‘The phones always ringing.’
‘Desks crowded with papers and Styrofoam cups.’
‘The Styrofoam cup is crucial. It’s easier to knock over when you’re rummaging through your papers on your over-worked desk. The spilled coffee adds to the chaos.’
‘Also to throw it in the bin in the corridor as a way of emphasising a point. Walking along a corridor, tie askew, on your way to interview—’
‘Q and A.’
‘Right. The shooter—’
‘The perp.’
‘Right again. Shoulder holster revealed. Tie askew, drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup, draining the last drops and throwing it in the bin.’
‘Maybe we
should
go to a film,’ said Alex. ‘Could you pass me
Pariscope
, please Sahra?’
An hour later they were in the cinema, watching a film from the pre-Styrofoam era:
The Man With the X-ray Eyes.
‘A parable,’ claimed Alex afterwards, ‘if ever there was one.’
A month after trashing his ankle – a month of shoving knitting needles down the cast to ease the itching which doing so exacerbated – Luke had the plaster removed. He was shocked when he saw his leg, amazed at how withered, white and useless it had become. The physio instructed him in exercises to build up the muscles in his legs and to restore movement in his ankle.
‘Comme exercice y’a pas mieux que la natation,’ said the physio. ‘Faut nager!’
‘Je déteste nager,’ said Luke.
But he
did
like the swimming costume that Nicole bought herself the day after his plaster came off. It was yellow, a one-piece, but so much of that piece had been left out that it looked, if such a thing were possible, like an all-in-one bikini. Nicole swam twice a week at the pool on Alphonse Baudin but this costume, she said, was only for best. Luke took a Polaroid of her wearing it, smiling, patting Spunk on the head, framed by a sky so blue it was impossible to tell that it was taken indoors, by the window in their apartment. This, Luke discovered, was one of the great features of Nicole’s apartment: the distinction between outdoors and indoors was not absolute – which is why, by the time he took that picture, Nicole was already slightly tanned. When the sky was clear it was possible to lie stretched out on the floor for an hour in the afternoon, bathed from head to foot in sun. As the summer approached so the length of time that the sun perched in the right place extended itself. Luke loved to watch her lying there, naked, her breasts rising and falling slightly, her hair streaming over the red cushion. Looking at her, it seemed to Luke, was a form of thinking.
On one occasion, as she dozed, he took down from the shelves the anatomy textbook that had belonged to her father. Photos showed the body stripped of successive layers: clothes, skin, fat, muscle. There was not a drop of blood to be seen, hardly even a hint of red or pink. Cuts and injuries revealed a pulsing arterial richness; these photos showed a world of uncured, brownish leather. Luke kept looking from the pages of the book to the naked woman lying asleep on the floor, then back to the book again. The photos became more explicit by the page. Every nook and cranny of the body was held up to impartial scrutiny. A foot, ankle ligaments (he winced), a shoulder, a shrivelled brown cock. It was like pornography taken to some numbing stage of total disclosure. By comparison pornographic or bodybuilding magazines seemed gentle and elusive as fairy tales. Everything was displayed, nothing was revealed. By the closing pages he was half expecting to see the soul itself revealed as a dark tumour-shaped lump or a resilient piece of gristle which, like the appendix, served no real medical function and could be disposed of as superfluous.
It was depressing, looking at this book, to think that this is what we all were and would become: a mass of dry, spongy material, nine tenths of which seemed dedicated to waste disposal. He looked at Nicole: her stomach growled. She was the only woman he had ever seen shit. Not
seen
her shit exactly, but at least been in the bathroom
while
she sat on the toilet, shitting . . . Inside, as this book made plain, every man and woman was exactly the same as every other. There was nothing to choose between anyone. But there was Nicole, the woman he loved, lying on the floor.
He thought of
The Man with the X-ray Eyes
, with Ray Milland as the doctor trying to find a way of seeing through the skin of his patients to offer immediate and accurate diagnoses of their illnesses. He applied drops of chemical solution to his eyes and, at first, was able to see through a few sheets of paper. Then – the fun part – he was able to see through nurses’ dresses and underwear. The experiment got quickly out of control because he couldn’t control the duration or depth of penetration of his vision. After a while repeated, unregulated exposure to the X-ray solution caused Milland’s vision to be filled entirely by the ghastly viscera and skeletons he’d hoped only to glimpse in the course of his medical research. All the time his eyes were getting more and more bloodshot, like someone who’d been sleeping in gritty contact lenses for a month. God, his eyes looked sore. People and walls began to fade altogether. To control this creeping omniscience he wore sunglasses which had to get thicker and thicker and darker and darker. Eventually only dense lead sunglasses could prevent his peering through buildings. By the climax of the film the world was melting away and he was staring into a psychedelic infinity of colour.
Luke closed the book and looked again at Nicole, bathed in light, her flesh stretched perfectly over her hip bones. Her eyes flickered open, taking in the room, squinting in the light, seeing him.
‘What have you been doing?’ she said
‘Bending and straightening my leg eighty times.’
‘I had such deep sleep. Am I really awake? I can’t tell.’
‘You’re asleep.’
Nicole stretched and then lay with her eyes shut. They were still shut when she said, ‘How are you my Lukey? Happy?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Say why.’
‘Why I’m happy?’
‘Yes.’
‘I could list things, things that make me happy. You. Looking at you. Looking at you naked. Talking to you while looking at you naked.’
‘And what about other women?’
‘What about them?’
‘Do you ever look at other women?’
‘No.’
‘Do you ever want to?’
‘If I wanted to I would.’
‘So you never want to?’
‘Do you want me to answer absolutely truthfully?’
‘You’re an only child, remember? You don’t know how to lie.’
‘Never.’
Nicole stood up and walked to the fridge. ‘Would you like some water?’
‘No thank you.’ She took a bottle of faucet-filled Evian out of the fridge, opened it and took a sip.
‘What else makes you happy?’ She was standing with her back to the open fridge, naked, one arm propped on the door. Steam coiled round her.
‘Wearing my new T-shirt.’
‘That horrible one?’
‘Yes. What about you?’
‘What makes me happy?’
‘Yes.’ She put the bottle back and shut the fridge. Luke watched her cross the room and lie down again in the hot puddle of sun.
‘Knowing you. Knowing, not looking. You see the distinction?’
‘It is, so to speak, staring me in the face.’
‘I know you so well, Luke. I like that. That makes me happy. Suppose they cloned you, made another one of you, absolutely identical. I could draw up a list of a hundred or a thousand things that distinguished you from it.’
Is this what it means to love someone? To take pleasure in itemising the smallest things about them? Except the list is never definitive, never complete. Things have to be added to it constantly: things that have never been noticed before, new things that turn out to be essential things.