The Dreamers

by Gilbert Adair

  That evening no one tiptoed along the corridor of the quartier des enfants. If someone had, if Théo’s bedroom door had been left ajar and the bedside lamp left lit, this is what he would have seen: Théo, Isabelle and Matthew asleep together, the beast with three backs.

  Yet, for all that that first night together constituted a turning point in the equilibrium of the flat, it didn’t bring Home Movies to an end. On the contrary, it inaugurated a whole new period of the game. They were now to play it as obsessively, as monotonously, as a shipwrecked mariner plays noughts-and-crosses on the sand, as a convict devises chess end-games with shadows and breadcrumbs. Except that, unknown to them, they were not players at all but pawns, pawns moved from square to square by the real player of the game, who loomed over the board like Fantômas over Paris.

  During the two weeks that followed, the sky released sheets of such stinging rain that the trio were obliged to remain almost permanently indoors.

  At first Théo continued to make his regular excursions to the sixteenth arrondissement, circling the Palais de Chaillot without dismounting from his mobylette then returning to the flat with the baguette of bread or carton of milk he had purportedly gone to fetch. Before too long, however, even these trips were phased out. The mobylette rusted in the damp hallway.

  Clocks wound down and were never rewound. Beds remained unmade, crockery unwashed, curtains drawn. Gradually, the hour of the day, then the day of the week, then the very month of the year, lost its meaning. Weekends came and went unobserved. Saturdays and Sundays – which are, in the well-ordered lives of average, upright citizens, the shining face cards of the social calendar’s deck – became harder to tell apart from the faceless number cards of the working week, until the only marker of passing time was a visit to a luxury supermarket in the neighbourhood.

  These raids – for such, in essence, they were – left Matthew as panic-stricken as when he’d had to race through the Louvre. While he would fill his trolley with staples, his companions breezily stuffed the pockets and linings of their coats with lobsters, truffles and caviar, mangoes, foie gras, peaches and, on one memorable occasion, a jeroboam of champagne which Théo tucked down the roomy front of his corduroy jeans. The supermarket’s exits became for Matthew as nerve-racking as an airport customs hall.

  Meanwhile, the cheques which the poet had left for his children lay uncashed on the mantelpiece.

  Marooned on this island not two hundred yards from the church of Saint-Sulpice and the Théâtre de l’Odéon, the three young people behaved as any shipwrecked mariners might have done. Once past the initial stage of frantically scanning the horizon for signs of civilisation, of reconnoitring the Palais de Chaillot and even deigning to attend a class or two, they started to resign themselves to what they could all see was destined to be a lengthy sojourn.

  When not pilfering delicacies from the supermarket, they would cook and eat whatever foodstuffs were still to be found in the refrigerator. These eccentric decoctions, indiscriminate blendings of sweet and sour, cold and hot, meat and fish, Isabelle served up at table from the saucepans in which she had prepared them. And if either of the men of the house shied from a lukewarm fondue accompanied by an ice-cold compote of broccoli and prunes or an inexplicably mustardy ratatouille, she would declare with a flourish, ‘Just eat it as if you’re in some exotic country you’ve never visited before and this is the national dish.’

  It was Isabelle who held the outside world at bay. It was she who, forging her mother’s handwriting, wrote a letter to the headmaster of the school she and Théo attended, announcing that both of them were bedridden with viral hepatitis. It was she, too, who accepted to be interviewed by the aunt commissioned by their parents to occupy herself in their absence with their children’s welfare.

  This excellent lady, who assumed her function of chaperone no more than dutifully, had astounded her family nearly twenty years before by exchanging a violin for a nightclub – which is to say, she had sold the Stradivarius she had inherited from her grandfather, a celebrated Polish virtuoso, in order to purchase a half-share in Le Nègre Bleu, a smoky cabaret off the Champs-Elysées. Overwhelmed by invoices, Department of Health regulations and a squabbling staff of hysterical young men, she was delighted to learn from her niece that she and her brother were eating healthily, doing well at school and in bed by eleven.

  Little by little, Matthew was granted access to the intimate secrets of his friends. A yellowing photograph, for example, torn from an old Paris-Match and squirrelled away by Isabelle inside a tattered copy of the novel by Gide that is titled, precisely, Isabelle, of one of the Kennedy sons, in profile, aged fourteen, just after he had been gored in the neck by a bull at Pamplona, and who was blessed, according to her, blood and all, with ‘the handsomest face in the world’.

  ‘We hide our blood,’ she said, ‘when we ought to flaunt it. Blood is beautiful, as beautiful as a precious stone.’

  Théo let him examine a page of manuscript that he had stolen from his father’s desk and seriously hoped to sell one day for a small fortune. Of the two-hundred-odd words in the poet’s handwriting only seven hadn’t been crossed out. They were seven words, moreover, that had served as the foundation stone of one of his most frequently anthologised poems.

  Isabelle showed Matthew a phial of sleeping pills that she had stockpiled over several months on the pretext of one feigned insomnia or another. These were intended for her eventual suicide, should it ever come to that.

  ‘They’re my return ticket,’ she said. ‘There are born suicides and born non-suicides. The former don’t necessarily kill themselves, the latter sometimes do. I belong to the first category, you to the second.’

  ‘I will never kill myself,’ Matthew said bluntly. ‘I believe, I truly believe, that if you kill yourself you go to Hell.’

  Matthew, too, had betrayed his ultimate secret, the avenue Hoche.

  ‘It’s because you’re already in Hell that you kill yourself,’ said Isabelle.

  ‘That’s witty,’ replied Matthew, ‘but Jesus was wittier. Let me put it this way. I’ll never kill myself because I love you.’

  ‘You say that but you may not always love me.’

  ‘I will always love you.’

  ‘I wonder. If amour didn’t rhyme with toujours, maybe we’d never have thought of equating love with eternity.’

  *

  Matthew and Isabelle often spoke of incest, of physical love between a brother and sister.

  He asked her one day how Théo and she had come to be together the way they were.

  ‘Théo and me? It was,’ she replied simply, ‘love at first sight.’

  ‘What would you do if your parents found out?’

  ‘It must never happen.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. But what if it did happen?’

  ‘It must never happen.’

  ‘But just let’s suppose, for the sake of the argument, that your parents really did find out. What would you do then?’

  Isabelle reflected for a moment.

  ‘It must never, never happen.’

  There was a pause before Matthew spoke again.

  ‘I suppose, when a mother and father sleep together, you could call that a kind of incest.’

  Isabelle burst out laughing.

  ‘Matthew, darling, you’re one of a kind!’

  One evening, for the first time, Matthew spoke to his friends of his family, his past, his life before the rue de l’Odéon.

  ‘It was two years ago,’ he said, ‘when my dad came home from Vietnam. He’d lost his right arm. So when we were driving out to the airfield to collect him, we were kind of bracing ourselves, you know, wondering what he was going to look like without it. We all stood there, waiting for him to come off the plane. And suddenly there he was, in his uniform, his buttons shining in the sun. And he looked okay, he looked absolutely fine. His empty sleeve was tucked inside the pocket, the way they do it, and it just made him look sort of casual. So when he stepped on to the
runway we all went forward to greet him. And my mom kissed him and hugged him and she was crying, kind of both happy and sad at the same time. Then my two sisters hugged him. Then it was my turn.’

  He paused.

  ‘I was sixteen years old. I hadn’t hugged my dad in years. We didn’t have any real father-and-son thing between us. I guess I was embarrassed at his being in the service, being in Vietnam. Also, I think he thought I was gay. Anyway, there we were, the two of us, and I didn’t know how to handle it. I mean, physically. I just didn’t know how to hug him. And it wasn’t because he’d lost an arm. I would have felt the same whatever. But I could see that’s what he was thinking. And I saw how much it hurt him, how much it humiliated him.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Théo asked.

  ‘We shook hands. He held out his left hand and I shook it with my left hand. Then he turned away to talk to somebody else. And that was that. It’s strange, though. Because it was only when he lost his arm that I really started to love my father. He would look so vulnerable trying to wash his face or read the newspaper or tie his shoelaces with one hand. It was as though losing an arm had made him a complete human being. But I’d blown it. I had my chance and I blew it.’

  The Cinémathèque had been forgotten. They had a Cinémathèque of their own, a Cinémathèque in flesh and blood. Which meant that the game was no longer played merely whenever the inclination seized them. While they read during the day, or played cards, or fumbled one another, the curtain would rise on Home Movies night after night, at six-thirty, eight-thirty and ten-thirty, with matinees on Sunday. The quartier des enfants – which was, with routine detours to the kitchen, what the flat had been reduced to – became an echo chamber through which phrases known to every cinephile in the world would waft like smoke rings.

  Garance! Garance!

  You know how to whistle, don’t you?

  I can walk, Calvero, I can walk!

  It was Beauty that killed the Beast.

  Vous avez épousé une grue.

  Marcello! Marcello!

  It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lil.

  Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima.

  Bizarre? Moi, j’ai dit bizarre? Comme c’est bizarre.

  Ich kann nichts dafür! Ich kann nichts dafür!

  Round up the usual suspects.

  Yoo hoo! Mr Powell!

  Well, nobody’s perfect.

  Pauvre Gaspard!

  Où finit le théâtre? Où commence la vie?

  Costumes were improvised, performances rehearsed, scenes that hadn’t worked the first time were dropped from the programme.

  Rummaging through a wardrobe in the spare room, Matthew unearthed an ancient overcoat that the poet had worn week after week during one of the appalling winters of the Occupation. Its moth-eaten fur looked as though it had been woven out of the pubic hair of a thousand Filipino houseboys.

  He threw it over his shoulders. Then, finishing off his costume with one of the cardboard boxes in which Théo stored his collection of Cahiers du Cinéma, on one side of which he scribbled a set of simian features, snipping out a pair of holes for the eyes, he made a sensational appearance at the bedroom door in the guise of an ape.

  ‘What film?’

  Théo and Isabelle cried out, ‘King Kong! Godzilla! The Phantom of the Rue Morgue!’

  Matthew shook his ape’s head. His arms dangling at his hips, his back arched, he staggered to the record player in front of which, to the voice of Charles Trenet, he started to dance an obscene shimmy inside the fur skin and the cardboard mask. Then he removed the head. His face was rouged, his eyelashes caked with kohl, his hair powdered with flour. He slowly eased himself out of the coat, underneath which he was naked. Naked, he continued to dance.

  Only then did Théo get it. ‘Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus!’

  Whereupon, after just a few seconds had elapsed, it became Isabelle’s turn to ask ‘What film?’

  Caught off guard, looking blankly at her and at each other, the two boys shook their heads.

  ‘A Night at the Opera.’

  When they continued to express bafflement, she pointed at Matthew’s circumcised penis.

  ‘Look! Groucho’s cigar – Chico’s hat – Harpo’s hair!’

  They collapsed in laughter.

  On another occasion Théo happened across a horsewhip that had been stowed inside the flat’s lumber room beneath a set of tennis racquets and a complete edition of the Comtesse de Ségur. Draping his body in a sheet, locking the bathroom window and turning on the hot water tap full blast, so that the atmosphere was as humid as that of a Turkish hammam, he spun the whip shoulder-high about his head, like Mastroianni in Fellini’s 8½, while Isabelle and Matthew, nearly invisible in the vapours of steam, scampered in and out of the blistering bathtub to avoid being nicked on the ankles, elbows and buttocks.

  With the fleetness of foot of those scene-shifters who soundlessly rearrange the decor of our dreams, one setting would dovetail into the next. The bath, almost overflowing, would become Cleopatra’s from the film by DeMille. For want of asses’ milk a couple of bottles of the cows’ brand were used, the contents of which Matthew poured into the tub, Isabelle opening her legs as wide as scissor blades to receive between them, as in an advertisement for Cadbury’s chocolate, the two confluent streams of opaline liquid.

  No longer the bedroom’s antechamber, a haven for some temporary fugitive from the game, the bathroom now served as an alternative arena for their activities. The tub was big enough to accommodate all of them at once, provided that Matthew sat in the middle to enable Théo and Isabelle, at either end, to encircle his waist with their matchingly long legs, the water-wrinkled toes of the one stretching as far as the armpits of the other. And when Théo pulled down over his ears a canary-coloured Stetson hat which he had been given as a child, a hat once far too large for his head, now far too small, Isabelle and Matthew called out together before he’d even had time to ask them who in what film.

  ‘Dean Martin in Some Came Running!’

  ‘Michel Piccoli in Le Mépris!’

  They were both right.

  It was a spectacular Busby Berkeley production number dreamed up by the two young men which constituted the game’s masterpiece.

  Théo had always had a weakness for the exploding stars, revolving water lilies and exquisitely garlanded wheels on which that Grand Inquisitor, that Torquemada of choreographers, had broken so many scantily attired butterflies. This, he announced, would be their most ambitious presentation to date, a real morceau de bravoure.

  Untroubled by how their conduct might strike some unknown, uninvited observer stumbling on their intimacy, tickled at the same time by the absurdity of it all, he and Matthew fetched a gilt mirror from above the drawing-room fireplace, another from the master bathroom, and set them upright against opposite walls in Théo’s bedroom.

  Exceptionally, Isabelle was barred from attending these preliminaries. But when the rehearsals were over, and everything made ready, she had one of the straight-backed chairs drawn forward for her, as for a parent at an improvised concert got up by her children.

  The film comprised two scenes.

  In the first, Théo and Matthew appeared before her as Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. They wore, respectively, a cadet’s faded khaki uniform and peaked cap, several sizes too small, and a yellow taffeta dress and cloche hat, both of which had belonged to the children’s grandparents. Standing side by side, Théo to the right, Matthew to the left, they began to perform a double striptease. Théo set the ball in motion by untying the ribbon on Matthew’s dress, then darted behind him and reappeared on his left so that Matthew, in turn, could unbuckle Théo’s belt, whereupon he too would dart round Théo, but this time in front of him – and so it went, from accessories to clothes proper, from clothes to underclothes, with such deftness that Isabelle had the impression of a stage-length line-up of chorus boys and girls weaving in and out of one another, each of them removing a sin
gle item of clothing from the next until all of them had been stripped bare.

  It was then that they launched into ‘By a Waterfall’. Stretched out on the floor, their legs apart, the tips of their toes just touching, their bodies mirrored to infinity, and singing the song as well as they knew how, in spite of forgetting most of the words, they started to masturbate in time with each other. Their penises grew harder and harder, more and more erect, until it seemed as though they too, like their toes, would meet in the middle. At last, arriving at the refrain, with its little falsetto trill, they ejaculated at exactly the same instant, their energies so channelled into their sexual organs that in the fury of the moment the proportions of reality became surrealistically inverted and each was tempted to believe, naked on the floor, that he had been metamorphosed into a giant phallus on whose throbbing vein there stood, bolt upright, a purple-complexioned homunculus spitting gobs of sperm from its tight, lipless mouth.

  Applauding madly, Isabelle cried, ‘Encore!’, a request with which neither of the two performers was able to comply.

  So, amid all the laughter and steam, the Trenet record, the unwound clocks, the veiled curtains, the teasing and banter, the dewy, mildewy glamour of a swimming-pool in whose stagnant atmosphere the flat was bathed, the days passed, jubilant and implacable, days divided by nights as two frames of a film are divided by a black strip.

  In her mother’s name and handwriting, Isabelle dispatched a second letter to the school headmaster, regretfully anticipating a protracted convalescence for her brother and herself, and she and Théo took turns at telephoning their parents in Trouville. The poet, it transpired, had come down with a plaguey flu, most probably something he had caught from his own sickly inspiration. The return to Paris would have to be delayed.