The PowerBook (4 page)

‘Can’t you understand that?’

‘Yes.’

‘But?’

I didn’t answer. I had heard these arguments before. I had used them myself. They tell some truth, but not all the truth, and the truth they deny is a truth about the heart. The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests.

The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world.

‘There’s something wrong.’

‘With what I say?’

‘With the sweet reasonableness of it all.’

‘You want me to storm out with nothing but a tapestry and a pair of candlesticks?’

‘I wasn’t thinking about your luggage.’

‘A friend I knew did just that. Took nothing else and left.’

‘I admire her.’

‘You are an absolutist then.’

‘What’s one of those?’

‘All or nothing.’

‘What else is there?’

‘The middle ground. Ever been there?’

‘I’ve seen it on the map.’

‘You should take a trip.’

‘And when I get there I can go round and round in circles like everyone else.’

‘What have I done to deserve this?’

‘You’re the one who talked about risk and freedom and structure without cladding.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning you just want what everybody wants—everything.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Nothing—but you have to pay for it yourself.’

‘So I want to have my cake and eat it?’

‘That’s understandable, given your history.’

She laughed and took my arm, holding me to her.

‘I like you.’

‘Why?’

‘You want to fight.’

‘The world is my boxing ring.’

‘Do you have to fight everyone?’

‘Only the enemy.’

‘Is it that simple?’

‘You can be so subtle you just tie yourself up in knots.’

‘You can be so simple you just go nine rounds with yourself.’

‘Well yes, I do, often.’

‘What for?’

‘To stay on my toes.’

‘You should relax.’

‘I look silly in an armchair.’

‘What do you look like in bed?’

I was so surprised I said nothing. Then, on the bridge, not caring about anyone else, she leaned forward and kissed me. A soft open kiss.

‘This is a bad idea.’

‘Why?’

‘You are married to one person, in Paris with another, and we’re late for supper.’

‘You only live once.’

‘You can live as many times as you like at your own expense.’

‘So you won’t buy me supper then?’

She was laughing. She laughed at my discomfort, at my seriousness. That’s how I remember her, laughing at me, on a wooden bridge in Paris.

She had been laughing that afternoon when we were caught in the rain at Les Halles. I had been out on my own, looking for a particular shop where I could buy a snare. I didn’t realise it would be set for me.

The shop—Exterminateur des Animaux Nuisibles—has been in the old meat market since the 1920s, and its wood and glass shopfront, and its high-polished counter, have never changed. The customer can brood over the cockroach chart and buy a
nasse
or a
piège
that will kill almost anything. The shopkeepers serve with the solemnity of bank clerks. Their business is hushed and discreet. Your purchase is wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. When I was there, a man in a
brown overall was testing a mousetrap with a piece of Roquefort.

As I came out, you sprang at me, laughing, and caught my arm to drag me away. You said something about a string quartet in the Metro. The rain was coming down in slices. A beggar with a shredded umbrella wanted a franc.

We ran.

We ran past a group of men—button-down shirts, cardigans, cigarettes—sheltering under an awning while the rain pelted off the canvas and onto the tips of their shoes.

We ran through the scattering shoppers, through the boys on bicycles, through the wicker chairs hurled indoors by the barman.

We ran through the jump-course of fake Louis Vuitton luggage, vanishing under a tarpaulin to the yells of the African sellers. We ran straight for the steaming Metro and into a cascade of Vivaldi.

Four kids—and kids is all they were—had set up their music stands and opened their instrument cases, and they played without hesitation, passionately, blocking the entrances and exits, and nobody cared because the music was stronger than
either the need to go home or the flooded afternoon.

You were delighted. Your hair dripped onto your shoulders and your mouth was slightly open. Your face was flushed from the running and the rain. I thought you were lovely, and I smiled too, at the pleasure of it, and at the chance.

I had planned my afternoon. Chance had changed it. Is chance the snare or what breaks the snare?

We caught a train to the Louvre. You wanted to come up through the great glass pyramid. You said it was like being reborn. You said it made you feel like an Egyptian Princess, and for a moment I thought I knew you, by the waters at Karnak, and I caught the scent of your herb-anointed bandages, and the smell of your fear, as they carried you into the darkness from which there can be no return.

But there you were, running up the staircase, round and round, from the basement of yourself, free at last, and as you burst into the steel and glass of the pyramid, the sun came out, turning the puddles into ten thousand mirrors that shone on the glass as if to furnace it.

Nothing is solid. Nothing is fixed. These are images that time changes and that change time, just as the sun and the rain play on the surface of things.

‘Champagne?’

You pointed to the Café Marly, and we walked across to a glittering table. A waiter in a white jacket brushed the raindrops off the marble surface, and flared his nostrils at us with that hotel-trade mixture of servility and disgust.

‘
Deux coupes de champagne.
’

He nodded his head as though he were snapping it shut. Around us, underneath the statues of dead Frenchmen, teenagers shoved postcards into their backpacks and drank Coke from the bottle. The sun was sharp. Everybody was happy. I was happy with the lightness of being in a foreign city and the relief from identity it brings. I stretched out my legs. I stretched out my mind. My mind reached forward into the unlimited space it can occupy when I loose it from its kennel.

The waiter returned with his silver tray and put down the two flutes with a little click. You raised your glass.

‘Well, what shall we drink to?’

‘Chance.’

‘Here’s to Chance.’

‘Now you choose.’

She paused and thought a moment then smiled.

‘All right. Harold Bloom.’

‘Harold Bloom?’

‘For his translation of the Jewish blessing. I guess you’re not Jewish?’

I shook my head. She raised her glass again.

‘More life into a time without boundaries.’

Then something like a raindrop was in her eye.

The evening was cooling. She and I had walked without speaking, back over the Pont Neuf, to a little triangle of grass and birch trees set on all sides with small restaurants. I like to eat here. Someone once called it ‘the sex of Paris’.

I was angry with myself. The afternoon had been an anticipation—I don’t know what for—I do know what for, but I would have been glad and disappointed if nothing had started to happen. If we had gone to the restaurant as planned, and the
rest had stayed as a memory whose truthfulness is not in the detail.

The trouble is that in imagination anything can be perfect. Downloaded into real life, it was messy. She was messy. I was messy. I blamed myself. I had wanted to be caught.

We slowed down. She spoke.

‘You’re angry with me.’

‘This is the place—Paul’s.’

‘I said too much too soon.’

‘The décor hasn’t changed since the 1930s.’

‘I don’t hold you cheap.’

‘The women who serve wear white aprons and won’t speak English.’

‘I just want to hold you.’

She took me in her arms and I was so angry I could have struck her, and at the bottom of my anger, conducting it, was a copper coil of desire.

‘And I want to kiss you.’

A man was exercising two Dalmatians under the trees. Spots ran in front of my eyes.

‘Kiss you here and here.’

The man threw them two red tennis balls and the dogs ran for the balls and fetched them back—black and white and red, black and white and red.

This feels like a grainy movie—the black dresses and white aprons of the matrons moving inside the lighted window of Paul’s. Your black jeans and white shirt. The night wrapping round you like a sweater. Your arms wrapped round me. Two Dalmatians.

Yes, this is black and white. The outlines are clear. I must turn away. Why don’t I?

In my mouth there is a red ball of desire.

‘These tiny hairs on your neck …’

Fetch. My heart returns to me what I turn away. I am my own master but not always master of myself. This woman wants to be …

‘Your lover.’

We went inside. I ordered artichoke vinaigrette and slices of duck with
haricots verts.
You had pea soup and smoked eel. I could have done with several bottles of wine, but settled for a Paris goblet, at one gulp, from the house carafe.

You tore up the bread with nervous fingers.

‘Where were we?’

‘It’s not where I want to be.’

‘It didn’t feel like that when I held you.’

‘No, you’re right.’

‘Well then?’

She has beautiful hands, I thought, watching her origami the baguette. Beautiful hands—deft, light, practical, practised. Mine was not the first body and it wouldn’t be the last. She popped the bread into her mouth.

‘Where shall I start?’ I said, ready with my defence.

‘Not at the beginning,’ she said, feeding me crumbs.

‘Why not?’

‘We both know the usual reasons, the unwritten rules. No need to repeat them.’

‘You really don’t care, do you?’

‘About you? Yes.’

‘About the mess this will make.’

‘I’m not a Virgo.’

‘I am.’

‘Oh God, just my luck. I bet you’re obsessed with the laundry.’

‘I am, as it happens.’

‘Oh yes, I had a Virgo once. He could never leave the washing machine alone. Day and night, wash, wash, wash. I used to call him Lady Macbeth.’

‘What are you going to call me?’

‘I’ll think of something.’

The artichoke arrived and I began to peel it away, fold by fold, layer by layer, dipping it. There is no secret about eating artichoke, or what the act resembles. Nothing else gives itself up so satisfyingly towards its centre. Nothing else promises and rewards. The tiny hairs are part of the pleasure.

What should I have eaten? Beetroot, I suppose.

A friend once warned me never to consider taking as a lover anyone who disliked either artichokes
or champagne. That was good advice, but better advice might have been never to order artichokes or champagne with someone who should not be your lover.

At least I had chosen plain red wine.

And then I remembered the afternoon.

She looked at me, smiling, her lips glossy with oil.

‘What are you thinking about?’