Joel wasn’t sure which one of them that last bit was addressed to and didn’t dare ask, but the ass jibe was to do with the fact that, on the back pocket of every pair of jeans he owned, there was a blue-black patch where his pen had leaked.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God!” Christa muttered. Then, shielding her mouth and pointing mock discreetly to the other end of the room: “I have to go talk to this really rich hedge fund guy I invited in a moment of utter recklessness. Sorry.”
“Hey, that’s okay,” Joel said. “Good luck.”
“Thanks, sweetie.” Christa trotted off, her piled-up curls wobbling like a tinfoil crown.
Joel waited a beat, then another one. “Nice to meet you,” he said, clunking the bottom of her beer can with his. “Cheers.”
“Oh, cheers,” she said, and clunked him back, the movement causing her to sway a little. That was when he realised she was really kind of drunk. A slow blink confirmed it and she was focused slightly to one side of him. An easy smile came from her, one that seemed meant for nothing and no one. Joel wished he could be wherever she was.
She swapped the beer into her other hand and extended the free one towards him. This hand was small and grubby, the nails bitten right down to stubs, not the elegant, manicured one he’d expected, and he gave it a small squeeze. She was wearing a large ring made from a glass eye set in silver, a very realistic blue eye, the same colour as her own. Her fingers were wet from the beer can so he wiped his own hand on the back of his jeans.
Feeling his notebook there, he pulled it out and waved it at her. “Say, do you have an idea for a poem?”
“A what?”
The gallery was rammed by now and noisy. He raised his voice. “A po-em.”
“A poem?”
She looked dubiously at him. What had Christa told her, exactly? He was going to need his whole arsenal. “Yeah, I’m a — I write poetry. I ask people for ideas, a sort of test for myself, y’know? Adding a random element into the mix. Push me out of my comfort zone.” Did he sound like a dick? He had to hold his nerve.
She nodded seriously, giving it a moment’s swaying thought. “Poem, poem, poem — I got you, okay, yeah, the tiramisu in Caffe Reggio.”
He pretended not to hear her, cupping his hand over his ear so she’d have to lean in closer, which she did, steadying herself with a hand on his shoulder. She smelled of old-fashioned flowers; roses and maybe orange blossom.
“The tiramisu in — ”
“In Caffe Reggio, yeah, I got it.” He took his pen out and wrote it down. “Is it good? I’ve never had it.”
“You’ve never? Okay, you, me, tomorrow, Caffe Reggio?” He noticed a teasing, ironical flutter around her mouth that seemed to push through the drunkenness, which might have been wearing off, he wasn’t sure, and feared she was on to him and his schtik.
With one stroke she pulled the gooey, ink-covered biro from between his fingers, disarming him, and proceeded to write her number on the back of his hand. She’d shucked off her red leather jacket and was holding it in the crook of one elbow. The unblinking eye on her ring finger fixed him with its cerulean blue stare. She was pressing hard and it hurt, but Joel couldn’t say anything because his heart was in his mouth. He had to get all this down.
Handing the pen back she said, “You know, if you used pencil you wouldn’t have such a laundry problem. That is, unless you like drawing attention to your ass.”
Before his voice returned, and before he could do anything to prevent it, she turned and pushed her way into the throng. He’d always thought no one would ever guess that about him, but she had.
He wandered around after that, weaving slowly through the packed gallery, unable to get a grip on what had just happened. No matter how it might play out, it felt like the beginning of something. Christ, the things he could write about her, let alone anything she might suggest.
He downed some more beer to moisten his dry, scared mouth. He’d stopped looking for anyone he might know, didn’t care either way. The DJ had started up with nothing too heavy; a deep house groove, old-school soulful voice over chunky bass. He was suddenly desperate for another smoke. It might help him decide whether to stay or go.
Once outside, he looked at his hand where she’d written on him, and saw there was only a number. She’d only written her number, not her name. Christa had told him it, hadn’t she? Unbelievably, he couldn’t remember it. How the fuck could he call if he didn’t know her name?
Swamped with a real fear that he could screw this up he threw his half-smoked cigarette down and plunged back in to locate Christa, to ask her the name of the girl she’d introduced him to, maybe the name of his future, when he was arrested — there was no other word for it — by a large painting, a nude, of her.
What was he looking at? A wide, angular face drawn in pale lilac wash that darkened across her shoulders becoming a deep violet at her breasts. Two blank ovals of bright blue for eyes. Her light green knees were raised to cover her stomach, her legs fading at the ankles, all the way to nothing where the feet should have been. Hands were apricot laid over pink, and fingernails, barely there in reality, were here vivid streaks of dripped red. On one of her fingers another blank blue oval made the glass eye ring that glared as provocatively from the canvas as the real one, before.
The overall thinness of the pigment washed out the strange, unreal, colours until they all but dissolved, or emerged like stains. Her freely open, lilac-grey mouth seemed to want to say something about joy, or about life — Joel wasn’t certain. He only hoped he’d get the chance to find out.
He spotted a label beside the painting and leaned in to read it:
Self-Portrait: Sophie #1
So, she was a painter, and a good one — as much as he could tell. He couldn’t do this. It was too much. He should just rub her number off his hand right there and then and that would be the end of any ideas he might have about them, or the future.
Instead, he reached back into his pocket for his notebook and pen, embarrassed now by his ridiculous, ink-stained ass that he immediately resolved to change. He’d throw away all his fucking jeans and buy some new ones, and some pencils too, like she suggested.
Despite himself, despite his concerns, he copied the number into his book, underlining it twice, couldn’t risk its erasure from his body, and, above it, scribbled Sophie #1, before tossing the ink-blocked biro away.
As he jammed the notebook back into his stupid pocket, he became aware of some kind of commotion above the hubbub of what was by now a fully-fledged art happening. He felt a space opening up behind and turned to meet it.
The crowd was bubbling, swelling, in his direction, cameras flashing round the edges.
There was Christa, leading some young, good-looking guy, round by the elbow, in triumph. It was him they were all taking pictures of. Had Christa worked some magic, got someone famous to come to the show and parade around? She was going to make it, he could tell.
They came to a stop beside Joel, right in front of Sophie #1, and Christa made this sweeping arm gesture, really like a magician whose escape from a submerged, padlocked trunk generates a collective gasp. “And this,” she said to her trophy companion, “is the star of the show. Don’t you think?”
Christa hadn’t seen Joel standing there, and Sophie was nowhere around, he noticed. She was missing her big moment.
Joel stared at the guy, who regarded the painting with a gentle grin. He wasn’t just good-looking, he was kind of astonishing. His skin shone under the gallery’s dimmed lights and dark, loose curls formed this definite — what? — aura, or something, around his angular, equine features, his face as dreamily gorgeous as Sophie’s was.
Joel immediately visualised her and this guy together; a perfect couple of demi-gods. He’d be hard pressed to choose between them.
He felt crushed, wanted to smash his own, horrible face in, and to do it in front of her self-portrait hanging right here in front of him.
It was definitely time to
leave, go home and sleep it all off, wake up to a different day full of potential and possible fresh starts. Or he could stay, see how it all panned out? He didn’t know what to do.
J-P, Liverpool — 2008
“Talk me through it,” J-P said, rinsing the coffee cups. “What’s on your mind at this point?”
“So,” Marius sighed, “I’m wandering the streets of Paris, all antsy because the Academy won’t let me in and the Salon won’t show my work and — ”
“Not wandering,” J-P said, turning to face him. “Stalking. You’re the lone wolf, remember? You could be a mad man or a genius, or both, and they can’t handle it. You frighten and confuse people, so they laugh at you.”
“I remember. And I’m pissed at Émile.”
“At him, at the world. You’re angry, underneath, at what he’s become since he moved to Paris. You know all this, Marius.”
“Yeah, I know it. I know it. I’m just nervous is all.” Marius got up and went to the window, opened the blinds. “I wish we were in your real life actual Paris, France,” he murmured.
“That’s all well and good,” J-P said, drying his hands, “but even with the increased budget your golden presence on set has granted us, we still couldn’t afford that. Anyway, no one will be able to tell the difference. You tell people it’s Paris and Paris is what they see. It’s called the magic of cinema, dummy. Besides,” J-P said, slinking behind Marius to put his arms around his waist, “you just want a trip to Paris. I’m sure that’s why you agreed to do the movie. If only they’d told you we were using Liverpool when you signed the contract.”
“You got that right,” said Marius, softly. “What other reason would there be for doing this pile of pretentious shit?” He turned and snatched at J-P’s hands. “Apart from working with cinema’s bright new hope.”
“Oh, is that what I am…?”
“M-hm…”
They kissed and Marius pushed J-P’s hand down inside his trousers and widened his stance to allow J-P to feel around inside. He began to unbutton himself.
J-P spoke into their kiss: “Hey, hey, hey. There is the small matter of the day’s schedule to get through. And did you forget you opened the blinds.”
Marius pulled back with an uneasy grin and sat back down on the couch. “I’m going to do my meditation, get myself ready.”
“Sure. Of course.
When Marius closed his eyes, J-P continued clearing away the plates, the food, the coffee maker. “You’re going to be great, Marius,” he called over his shoulder.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Marius murmured.
“Did I tell you how perfect you are yet today?”
“Shhhhh…”
It was six months into their relationship when Marius had been invited to New York to take part in an improvised piece of theatre. Every night, a different performer starred in the two-hander, alongside the guy who’d devised it. Word of its inventive brilliance spread and stage legends and movie icons were queueing up to be in it. Though Marius was neither of these, he got his agent to lobby for the chance, his participation potentially bringing in a different kind of audience.
J-P had lied to Betsy when he invited her to the show with him, claiming this was the only night he could get tickets. “Are you kidding me?” she’d exclaimed when he called her. “I’m amazed you could get seats at all.” When they took their places along with the rest of the excited audience, they’d seen Marius waiting on the front row, eyes closed, meditating, looking just as he did right now, on the sofa in J-P’s trailer.
What if Marius was terrible? He had talent but it was curbed by the work he’d been offered so far. They’d expounded at length to each other about their aspirations to work with serious, thoughtful scripts, their shared ambitions to create ground-breaking, innovative work, combined with a desire to be hugely rich and successful, but J-P was seeing Marius put all that to the test while having to pretend they weren’t lovers.
The lights had gone down and Marius was introduced, first as himself and then in his role as an ordinary audience member being called to participate in a stage hypnotist’s act. The guy playing the hypnotist fed lines of dialogue to Marius through an earpiece, or spoke to him directly, telling Marius exactly what to say and do. All the machinery of the theatrical process was exposed and there was no room for suspension of disbelief, and yet it happened. Despite the workings being totally visible, J-P was convinced he was seeing what he was told he was seeing. They all felt it.
The story involved the suicide of a young man, the son of Marius’ character, and had real emotional punch. The hypnotist was the son’s secret lover, his partner, a fact revealed to the audience early on. These two men — connected by their love for the same person who’d felt unable to carry on living — were meeting for the first time, on stage.
At one point, Marius was fed a monologue line by line, and, as soon as the words were given to him, before he’d had time to process them, he’d started to cry. “I wasn’t acting,” he told J-P later, in bed. “It was like I was experiencing the actual situation, the real emotions, as myself, while being someone else — not playing it, but transformed into this ordinary guy, grieving for the son who’d killed himself.”
It was then Marius told him the story of the boy in his school, who killed himself. He was bullied for being bookish, unavoidably femme, and not only in school either. “He’d come to class sometimes with marks and bruises on him, and we all knew why. His dad was a bastard. I tried to get my own parents to take him in, but they refused.”
This boy, Marius said, had swallowed a bottle of his mom’s sleeping pills, then must have changed his mind because he called an ambulance himself. “He told the operator, ‘I’ve done something stupid’,” Marius said, tearfully. The paramedics had got there quick enough but he died on the way to the hospital. “If I thought he really wanted to die, J-P, I’d be okay with it, respect his choice. But he didn’t want to die at all. He must have been so scared.” He’d cried uncontrollably then, a full-on release, and J-P held onto him until he fell asleep.
For J-P, the other transformation that night, a revelation really, was that Marius became the fully living person J-P knew now and was in a serious relationship with, the guy he loved and who, he was pretty sure, loved him. Of course he was not the Marius in those magazines, chatting shit on E! at film premieres, glinting in the popping flashes, not flinching once as paparazzi and fans bayed, “Marius! Marius! Marius!”
Stupidly, it had taken J-P that long for him to know Marius as the desperately searching, intelligent, funny, lonely, lovely man he was, and he’d seen all this when Marius was pretending to be someone else.
Betsy called him early the next morning, while Marius was still sleeping. “Listen, don’t freak out at what I’m about to say. I think we should screen test Marius Woolf for the part of Cézanne.”
He’d heard Betsy out as he padded into the kitchen and began to make his coffee. Both she and Su Lin, the casting director, would expect him to protest, J-P knew, and Betsy’s suggestion was genuinely shocking. He liked the idea of them working together, seeing him every day, but he could give him a minor role and they’d still have that. He’d never really considered Marius could play Paul.
J-P duly ranted half-heartedly down the phone, banging dishes around the sink for special effect, until Betsy mentioned the possibility of the very tight-bordering-on-the-impossible budget doubling if Marius was brought on board in the leading role. “It’s a risk,” she told him, “but maybe one we can’t afford not to take.” J-P had allowed her to puncture his own performance so that he could in turn allow Betsy to mollify him by granting certain concessions about the final edit along the way, until they reached a satisfactory agreement.
Marius had finally surfaced about midday and, before anything else, J-P said, “Check your messages.”
It was Marius who decided they shouldn’t see each other for the next two weeks, until after the screen test. “I really want this gig, baby. You ge
t that, don’t you? For me. For us.”
They focused on the mutual benefit to their careers being dangled in front of them — the credibility Marius craved and the breakthrough J-P wanted, while maintaining some level of independence. But who knew what it might mean for their burgeoning relationship?
Marius had done his research, talked intelligently about Cézanne’s early life and his work, though he’d only taken a mild interest during the previous weeks when J-P had lectured him about the film’s subject. Just the night before the start of their temporary separation, they’d gone out for dinner and created a bit of a scene.
“Okay, I’ll admit I’ve had my doubts,” Marius admitted, “but now I can see the project’s potential and what it is you’re trying to do with it. The title’s a sticking point for me though. Can’t you change it?”
“No I fucking well can’t!” J-P cried. He was nervous too and had drunk two and a half glasses of wine, fast, on an empty stomach.
Cut to the other diners turning round to stare at the young guy in those movies they couldn’t remember the names of, who must be brainstorming about a new script idea or something.
“For your information,” J-P went on, “Astonishing Paris refers to Cézanne’s famous pronouncement that he will astonish Paris with an apple. He’s going to make the still life the centre of his artistic endeavours, alter people’s perception of the world by painting apples that are more true than an apple — and not because they’re a — a photo-realistic reproduction, but the opposite. They’ll draw attention to the fact that they aren’t apples, while still being the most appley apples imaginable. He’s going to shake people so violently they’ll see things differently, the way he wants.”
Marius had nodded throughout, and simply said, “Yeah, I remember all this. You told me already.”
“Well, I want my movie to do the same,” J-P said, downing more wine. “No biopic made after this will follow the same rules as before, and any that do will be obsolete. I’ll change film, like Cézanne changed painting.”
Shadow Is a Colour as Light Is Page 8
