But Isabelle quickly put an end to that. Had the Sphinx given Oedipus a clue?
Théo was forced to concede defeat.
‘Beyond the Forest,’ said Isabelle. ‘Directed by King Vidor. 1949.’ Then: ‘Forfeit.’
‘Okay. How much?’
‘Not this time,’ she replied, still imitating Bette Davis. ‘This time I want to be paid in kind.’
‘How do you mean, paid in kind?’
Isabelle lowered her movie-star glasses down the bridge of her nose.
‘I dare you to do now, in front of us, what I’ve watched you do’ – she removed the glasses altogether and waved them in the direction of the oval portrait of Gene Tierney – ‘in front of her.’
This challenge – mystifying to Matthew, who could none the less sense the hovering play of strange new shadows about the room – was met with a silence so absolute it was more than capable of holding its own amidst all manner of extraneous, earthbound sounds. In vain Trenet’s voice attempted to interrupt it.
Ce soir c’est une chanson d ‘automne
Devant la maison qui frissonne
Et je pense aux jours lointains.
Que reste-t-il de nos amours?
Que reste-t-il de ces bons jours?
Une photo, vieille photo
Da ma jeunesse.
Glancing first at Matthew, Théo then turned once more to his sister, his mouth disfigured by a hard ball of sullenness.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh yes you do, my pet,’ Isabelle continued suavely. ‘Only, voilà, you didn’t know I knew. Those afternoons when you come home from school and you bolt your door and the bedsprings start to jangle – good grief, do you fancy I’m too thick to guess what’s going on? Besides, your bed is directly opposite the keyhole.’
Bonheurs fanés, cheveux aux vents,
Baisers volés, rêves mouvants,
Que reste-t-il de tout cela?
Dîtes-le-moi.
Un p’tit village, un vieux clocher …
‘Forfeit,’ Isabelle repeated calmly.
‘I won’t do it.’
‘Won’t do it?’
‘You wouldn’t.’
Isabelle grinned. Looking up at the portrait, she said, ‘Gene Tierney isn’t my type.’
‘What a bitch you are. A bitch and a sadist.’
‘No, I’m a Sadian. Not quite the same thing.’ She yawned. ‘Are you going to pay the forfeit or chicken out – which, you realise, will mean the end of the game?’
Théo’s eyes took in each of them in turn – Isabelle, Matthew, the oval portrait.
‘Very well, Isa. The game must go on.’
He spoke in the voice of an actor who receives a fateful telegram just as the curtain is about to rise on some smart drawing-room comedy.
Matthew had never found himself closer to detesting Isabelle than at this instant. He detested her for having exacted from Théo, from his friend, a humiliating covenant of whose precise nature he remained as yet in ignorance but which already evoked uneasy memories of indignities inflicted by leering Boy Scouts in tents pitched in lonely glades.
Yet we are most merciless when we discover our own baseness, our own wretched hypocrisies, reflected in another’s, and the dread which swept over him, a dread encompassing not only Théo’s but his own future on this island, this planet, in this first-floor flat off the place de l’Odéon, was coupled with an almost uncontrollable exhilaration.
Théo stood up and took off his sweater. Unbuttoning his shirt, he drew it back over his shoulder-blades. His chest was hairless except for a single dark wisp which sprang from his navel like a mountain stream before plunging underground beneath his trouser belt. Unbuckling the belt, he let his corduroy jeans crumple to his feet. Then, bending forward, he jerked them free.
Whereupon, Isabelle clapped her hands over her eyes and shrieked, ‘No, no! For the love of God, no!’
Matthew was astonished. Was she having second thoughts? Did she realise that Théo had outsmarted her by calling her bluff?
Hardly. For, peeking gingerly through her interlocked fingers as through two slats in a blind, she shuddered.
‘How often have I told you never to take your trousers off before your socks! Look at yourself, you half-wit, you’ve got navy blue socks on. They give you that ghastly truncated look when you’re naked. Take them off at once.’
Scowling at his sister, Théo tugged off his socks. After a pause, he began to remove his white underpants, rolling rather than drawing them over his sexual organs the way a woman will roll back a nylon stocking before inserting her foot in its sheath and smoothing it out along her leg with the flat of her hand. Then he flipped them about his ankles and stood before them, knees together, shivering slightly, like some arrowless Sebastian.
Now that he was free of the grubby chrysalis of his own clothes, the transformation was as startling as with those raggedy street urchins of Fez or Tangiers who, once on the beach, moult into the finery of their nakedness.
He stood for a second or two contemplating his penis. It was almost erect. His testicles looked as heavy as gourds.
He knelt on the bed beneath the oval portrait. His eyes captivated by the mask of imperturbability with which the actress requited their gaze, he started to massage himself. Paced by the rhythm of the bedsprings, which reverberated through the room like the pistons of an express train carrying him closer and closer to his goal, his hand went faster and faster, instinctively rediscovering its old familiar pulsation. It was as though his livid member were steering his hand’s movements, not vice versa, as though he wouldn’t have been capable of unprising his fingers from it even had he wished to, the way, for a single frightful moment, one’s fingers stick fast to the scalding handle of a saucepan. And when the climax arrived, the jet of sperm that his penis discharged, sperm glistening, so it appeared to Matthew, with tiny, pearly scintillae of light, hovered in the air for a split second, arrested in flight, like a fountain that all of a sudden freezes over, producing, at the snap of one’s fingers against the sparkling little pinnacle of ice that it has become, a high, pure, silvery musical note.
Then, brusquely, all was damp stickiness, matted hair on the thighs, the faint, sweetish odour of fish paste.
Théo lay back on the bed, panting, propped up on one side, his hands aligned along the ridge of his spine, in the posture of an opium smoker. In the bird’s nest of his crotch the mother bird once more placidly nursed her two eggs.
Isabelle was a subtle voyeur. She liked to spy on voyeurs. Behind her dark glasses, while Théo masturbated, her eyes had nervously darted to and fro, from her brother to Matthew and back again. Now, the performance over, those eyes had become indecipherable. Only a flutter of eyelashes could be discerned behind their shades, as of moths in the night.
As for Matthew, who had watched the scene without saying a word, his body could no more lie about his feelings than he himself could. His cheeks were inflamed, his hands shook, his crotch felt like a clenched fist between his thighs. He wondered how he could ever face Théo again.
*
Most unexpectedly, though, from this raising of the stakes there followed a truce, an armistice, one that was to see them through the following two days. Whether because nothing that any of them said or did would conjure up a matching gesture in some classic film or, more likely, because it impressed them all as equally unimaginable either to advance or retreat, the cry of ‘What film?’ or ‘Name a film’ ceased for a while to echo through the flat.
Matthew knew that the matter hadn’t ended, couldn’t end, there. To be sure, Théo had clothed himself again without fuss and afterwards acted as though nothing had occurred to occasion any change of policy. But it was precisely because, for Matthew, something had changed, permanently changed, that his friend’s supernatural composure struck him as so suspect.
Clouds drifted across the ceiling. In this new atmosphere of vigilance and expectancy, the quartier des enfants swayed to and fro,
suspended in a cage. And yet, as before, and at the same hour, on that night and the one after it, Matthew would tiptoe out of his bedroom and along the corridor to Théo’s. There, on cue, as though also on purpose, the door had been left ajar, the bedside lamp left on. There he would silently take in the spectacle of brother and sister, their limbs intertwined, one leg visible above the covers, the other’s outline just discernible beneath them, like a swan and its reflection on the surface of a lake.
*
The game was resumed on the second afternoon after that on which Théo had paid his forfeit in kind. They were as usual in the quartier des enfants, where Théo, standing at the window, was dreamily following the progress of a tall vertical shadow that slowly traversed it.
Suddenly, just as it formed an X with the pane’s crossbar, he clutched at his breast and collapsed on to the carpet.
‘Ahhhhh!’ he cried. ‘They got me!’
Writhing, he tore at his clothes.
‘The pain! The agony! Oh Jesus, I’m done for!’
Isabelle finally looked up from her novel.
‘What’s eating you?’ she asked, but incuriously, for form’s sake.
Théo immediately sat up again with a grin.
‘What film?’
For two days Isabelle had been waiting for him to turn the tables on her. The question still took her by surprise. She could only, stupidly, oblige him to repeat it.
‘Name a film, please, in which a cross marks the spot of a murder.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Why not?’
‘There must be lots of films.’
‘Then it shouldn’t be hard to name one. You too, Matthew.’
Matthew blanched. Here it was.
‘Me?’
‘There’s no rule says I can’t challenge both of you at once.’
‘But, Théo, I had nothing to do with what happened.’
‘Name a film,’ was Théo’s answer. ‘Or pay the forfeit.’
Vengeance, says a French proverb, is a dish best eaten cold. It was clear that Théo preferred his piping hot. A chacun son goût, as the French also say.
*
Matthew’s mind turned over and over to no purpose. If a hope remained to him of deliverance from the consequences of Théo’s challenge, consequences on which he dared not dwell, it lay simply in his citing a title. Isabelle, surely, was right. There must exist dozens of films in which a cross is shown to mark the spot of a murder; if not dozens, then a dozen, a half-dozen, three or four; there must at least be three or four.
But because of his fear of what would befall him in this accursed flat, it was no longer possible for him to pull his wits together. Had Théo merely asked him to name a film, any film at all, there too he might have drawn a blank.
Isabelle, meanwhile, had regained her composure. She offered no answer to the question posed her. Nor did she plead, as Théo had done, for some clue or hint. It was she, after all, who had introduced a new dimension into the game and she knew her brother, and she knew herself, too well to be deluded into supposing that either of them could revert to the childish stakes which had once satisfied them.
‘Time’s up,’ Théo finally said in a matter-of-fact tone.
‘The film?’ enquired Isabelle. It was a mere formality, but one that ought to be respected.
‘The film? Scarface. Howard Hawks. 1932.’
‘And the forfeit?’
‘Well now,’ declared Théo, sitting up straight. ‘I’m not a sadist, Isa, as you know. I’m not even a Sadian. I just want to see everyone happy, no one left out. So I’d like you and Matthew, my two dearest companions, to make love together in front of me.’
Isabelle closed her novel, though not before inserting a bookmark between the pages at which she’d been interrupted.
‘As you wish.’
‘Not in here, though. I don’t fancy sleeping in someone else’s revolting spunk. No offence, Matthew.’
While Matthew felt incapable of moving, Isabelle went on asking simple, practical questions as to what was expected of her.
‘Where then?’
‘In the spare room. In front of the Delacroix. Who knows,’ Théo proposed with a smile, ‘one reproduction may lead to another.’
‘You don’t mind if I undress here?’
‘Wherever you like.’
She stubbed out her cigarette in a brass ashtray, then walked over to the record-player and started to play the Trenet record yet again. Since the melody had become the game’s theme tune, it would have been unthinkable to pay a forfeit without its accompaniment.
She disrobed with no undue haste, as though for sleep. She neither stared ahead flauntingly at Théo and Matthew nor demurely averted her gaze from them. The one and only vestige of perversity in her performance was that she kept her dark glasses on throughout, removing them only at the end, as though only then displaying her eyes full frontally.
This young woman, who contrived to wear her grandmother’s outmoded garments as persuasively as a bird of paradise its improbable plumage, now appeared disembodied, detached from her own torso, which she exposed as dispassionately as though she were holding up for auction a painting of herself in the nude.
It was a fine, slender torso, all of whose folds, dips and hollows were irresistibly tempting to the finger’s inquisitive drill – the concavities of the shoulders, buttocks and knees, the shady indentations of the abdomen, the two paths that converge at that magic well deep in the fairy-tale forest of the pubis.
Standing in the puddle of her own clothes, she waited for Matthew to undress in his turn.
For him the moment had come at last, the moment so long dreaded, when he was to be hustled aboard the roller-coaster.
The desire he felt for both Théo and Isabelle struggled in vain against memories exploding inside his brain with the power of depth-charges, childhood tableaux of schoolboys dragged screaming behind playground lavatories, their testicles smeared with boot polish, their pubic hair shaved. Ridiculous as it would render him in the eyes of his friends, there was but one possibility to be entertained: flight.
He dashed edgeways to the door. But Théo, who until that instant had seemed as indolent as an odalisque, at once leapt to his feet and headed him off. Cornered, Matthew backed away.
A spell had been broken. Théo and Isabelle relaxed. Giggling, they began to close in on him.
‘Come, come, my little Matthew,’ cooed Isabelle, ‘you aren’t being very galant, you know. Is the prospect of making love to me so hateful?’
‘I’ve seen you!’ cried Matthew. ‘I’ve watched you, both of you!’
Théo started back.
‘What’s that you say?’
‘In bed together!’
‘Oho,’ said Théo, ‘our guest has been spying on us. Now that wasn’t a friendly thing to do. Especially when we’ve been so hospitable.’
‘What is it you’re afraid of?’ said Isabelle to Matthew. ‘That you haven’t any crack? I’ve always fancied that someone as nice and neat and clean as you might have no crack in his backside, just a smooth full moon of pink, baby-soft flesh. Is that it, Matthew? Is that what you don’t want us to see?’
‘No, no, no, please, Isabelle, please.’
They pounced on him. Taller, more muscular than he, Théo soon had him on the carpet. They pulled off his sneakers, his socks, his UCLA sweatshirt. In a frenzy he attempted to wriggle from their grasp. Tears sprang into his eyes. A helpless movement of his arm caused it to brush against Isabelle’s breasts. Yet, as patiently as though they were peeling the cheeks of an artichoke, as methodically as though they were subjecting him to the torture of a thousand cuts, they went about their executioners’ business, baring his hairless, slightly concave chest, his arms frosted with snow-white down, his slim, suntanned legs.
By now Matthew had ceased to offer resistance. Isabelle sitting astride his legs, his arms pinioned to the floor by Théo, he lay there weeping as young children weep, in a welter of
tears and snot. He was naked save for a pair of pale blue jockey shorts, which, with a flick of her wrists, Isabelle pulled to his feet and flung in a ball on the floor.
The first surprise was the whiteness of his crotch. Compared to his arms, his legs, his chest, to the perennially bronzed chest of the kind of American adolescent for whom the sun is as simple, daily and nourishing a source of energy as a glass of warm milk, his abdomen made them think of the patch on a wall where a painting has once hung.
His pubic hair was dark, silky and unfrizzy, like that of an Oriental. His testicles were two grey gooseberries. His penis, which was circumcised, was small, almost but not quite abnormally small, and so plump and round as to resemble, rather, a third testicle. Acharming thing which, no sooner had one set eyes on it, one felt like tenderly cupping between one’s palms like a throbbing little sparrow.
Which is just what Isabelle did. Before Matthew had time to voice a final appeal, she began moulding that penis with skilful hands, a potter’s hands, moulding it, sculpting it, glazing it, smoothing its wrinkles.
To Matthew, who had never known the sensation of an alien hand on his sexual organs, it felt as though he had just discovered an unexplored limb of his own. He drew in his breath. Something hard and tight within him, something that had long crucified his soul inside his body, had at last been set free.
When Théo released his arms, they instinctively wrapped themselves round Isabelle’s naked shoulders. She eased her body along his, squashing the penis that was now drolly curved like the arm of an Empire sofa and drawing from him another sharp intake of breath.
Their mouths edged closer, then their sexes.
There were still obstacles to be overcome. They were both virgins, Isabelle because she had never made love except to her brother, Matthew because he had never made love except to himself. Eventually, though, mouths and sexes clicked together at the same time, like adjacent buttons simultaneously buttoned on a shirt front.
While outside, below the bedroom window, could have been heard, had anyone been listening, an inexplicable patter of footfalls and a fanfare of police sirens, Matthew and Isabelle gave themselves up to the adorable gaucheries of love. Under Théo’s eyes, all at once opaque with self-awareness, they paid the forfeit.
The Dreamers Page 7
