But I’m digressing, as I do more frequently these days. My memory, like my concentration, seems to be disintegrating like wet toilet paper.
“We should get started,” I said to Passion. “Would the bedroom be all right?”
“Sure. Do you want to take a shower first?”
I left her in the living room and went into the bathroom and undressed and turned on the shower and got under the hot water. I was quite excited. The evening, painted crimson now by the wine, had a compelling, adventurous quality to it. I don’t know how long I was under the shower. I know that afterwards, dripping wet, I tried to take a pee and stood there, God knows how long, staring into the toilet bowl, thinking about God knows what.
I came out in my dressing gown, a floor-length bath towel affair that Emma had bought me for Christmas. Taking the candle in hand, I led Passion rather unsteadily into my bedroom. I turned down the bed, the top sheet, dropped the bathrobe to the floor and lay down on my stomach. I heard the sound of shoes being removed, then a brush of material, and when I looked over my shoulder I saw that she had removed her shirt and was wearing a white brassiere and jeans.
“You might as well get the works,” she said.
“I’ve never been with a black woman before.”
I heard her laugh. “I wouldn’t exactly call this being with a black woman.” She put her hands on my back.
“You have a beautiful touch,” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
“No, really.”
“Good. I’m glad.”
“Can I roll over?”
“It’s your house.”
“Can you take that off?”
She undid her brassiere and her breasts with their large dark nipples came free. She put her hands on her hips. “Do you want me to do your chest?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“And then your legs?”
“Sure.”
“And then we’ll see what happens.”
She didn’t cover her mouth.
“You’re quite beautiful,” I said.
“And I can’t believe you’re sixty years old.”
“I’m not.”
“You told me you were.”
“I’m fifty-four.”
“Why do you tell people you’re sixty?”
“I like the sound of it.”
“Do you want me to do your legs now?”
“Yes.”
“Tops, or bottoms?”
“Tops please.” My voice wobbled.
“Like that?”
“Yes, that’s great.”
“They feel a bit tight.”
“They are.”
It was silent for a while.
“You should open them up a bit.”
I shifted position.
“How’s that?” she said.
“Fabulous.” I covered my eyes.
“Don’t go to sleep on me.”
“Don’t worry.”
After a while she said, “Do you have any cream?”
“Ah, no.”
“My hands are dry.”
“That’s all right.”
She stopped for a second, spat into her palm and put her hand back on me. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “Is that all right?”
“That’s fine.”
“You’re sure? Some guys are squeamish.”
“Shhh.”
“My, my,” she said after a moment, and sat back. “My, my.”
I opened my eyes. She sat motionless, her hands open like a surgeon waiting for his gloves to be put on.
“Are you feeling all right?”
“Fine,” I said, “lovely.”
“Do you have any Kleenex?”
I pointed her down the hall. In a little while I heard the door close; that distinct rattle of the toilet-paper roller rolling over; the toilet flushing; then a sound I couldn’t place immediately, a sort of clank. A few moments later she returned, quite comfortable, it seemed, to meander about my house half naked, which rather flattered me.
“Would you care to go out and get something to eat?” I asked.
“Are you hungry or something? You’re supposed to be sleepy and relaxed.”
“I’m not, though. I’m famished.”
She hesitated. “I didn’t bring any money.”
“It’ll be my treat. But what about your friend?”
“I don’t have a friend coming. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t a pervert.”
Feeling more wide awake than I had for months, as if I could blister paint on a wall just by looking at it, I got up and got dressed.
“Oh,” I said as we were leaving, “your bag.”
“I’ll get it when I come back.”
It was after eleven by now. The floodlights had long since been turned off on the skating rink, but there were still a couple of kids out there, soaring around in the dark, and you could hear the sound of their skates hacking into the ice in short, excited strokes. Passion, wearing an imitation red leather coat with a fur collar, walked with her head down, her hands in her pockets. It seemed as if the sound of our footsteps made us both self-conscious, but I realize now that there were other things on her mind. At the foot of my street we turned left and passed a half-dozen shops, a record store, a small grocery, an upscale soap store, a travel bureau. She stopped to look at the ticket prices in the window but quickly moved out of the light when I caught up to her. I picked a dark restaurant and we went in. It was Thursday night, late, and we got a good table near the front.
“Are you sure you want to sit here?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “This is my favourite table.”
“Your wife or something’s not going to walk by?”
“I don’t have a wife.”
“You’re an exception.”
“To what?”
“To all the people who go in that place.” She looked at the menu. “What can I have?”
“Anything you want. How about you?”
“What about me?” She was looking at the menu, but she was waiting for the next question.
“Are you married?”
“Not really.”
“Does he know what you do?”
“What do you mean, what I do?”
“You know, the sex trade?”
It was a stupid thing to have said. She put down the menu. “I don’t work in the sex trade.”
“Of course you do. There’s nothing wrong with it. You just do.”
“So you’re saying I’m a whore.”
“Good heavens, no.”
But she was right. I could feel the alcohol awakening a kind of careless aggression, and I suddenly remembered a foolish quarrel I had had with Emma in Thailand. It was about childbirth, about who had the more profound understanding of the experience, a woman who’d never had a child or a male doctor who had delivered hundreds of babies. Lord! It started during a blood red sunset, too gorgeous to express, and went on until after dark. What I remember is not who said what but rather a glimpse I got of Emma during it—as a sort of foul-tempered little sprite with a vindictive streak.
The memory of that evening is, of course, hopelessly compromised by alcohol, but after she’d moved out, when I waited second by second for her to telephone, when she knew I was waiting, I sometimes had the distinct feeling that it gave her pleasure not to call, to look at the telephone by her arm and not pick it up. On those few occasions when she did see me—emaciated and wild-eyed, so frightened of her I could barely string a sentence together—I had the feeling that she rather enjoyed her debilitating effect on me. Perhaps she was just a nasty little cunt after all and in her absence I had forgotten that.
Anyway, that evening on the beach in Thailand, she set something off in me. I was indifferent to the subject of childbirth, but something in her manner made me want to squash her in the debate, and I persisted so long that she rose and stormed away. Later, crawling into bed, I was still annoyed, so was she, but in the morning I felt a short,
sick sensation when I awoke and remembered the whole foolish affair. What happens to those bad moments? Does sex wipe them away, like that damp cloth on the blackboard? Or do they remain in the heart, one added upon another, a tiff over the dishes here, a disagreement about bullfighting there, an accumulation of nicks and cuts until one morning she looks across the breakfast table and, like Anna Karenina, finds your ears too large or the crunching of your toast repulsive?
A month before she left, we were having lunch in the kitchen. I was hungry and I greedily gobbled up my tuna sandwich.
“I don’t want to make you self-conscious,” she said, “but you’re making a great deal of noise with that sandwich.”
She said it politely but in tones that alarmed me at some level. I apologized, but I remember thinking, Hmm, this is new, this has never happened before. One wonders a million things in one’s day, so I didn’t give it special weight, but I did wonder, fleetingly, does she not love me any more? Has she only now noticed this? Or has she only now decided to mention it? Perhaps I was indeed making an intolerable racket, but whatever the reason, something new had happened, I felt sure of that. And even though I didn’t think about the incident for months, not until well after she was gone, I have occasionally entertained the private thought that the day things really ended with us was not the day of the gently clinking coat hangers in the cupboard but the day with the tuna sandwich. And now, a few years beyond all of it, I’m not at all sure I was wrong.
“I should eat something,” I said to Passion. “I’m getting drunk.”
It’s snobbish to say we had a good time, but we did. A student from my Surrealist course came over and said hello and on the way out introduced his youthful mother. That my pupils might have parents younger than me seemed not so much haunting as vaguely implausible, and as they left the restaurant, watching them go, I again had that flat, unemotional recognition that my life was over.
It was very late when we came back up my street. I don’t quite remember the sequence of events after that. I know we had some cognac, after which Passion introduced a joint into the evening. She held it in her fingertips, like a piece of rare chocolate, and leaned her long neck forward to inhale it. Normally I stay away from that stuff, not for moral reasons but because it speeds up my brain to an intolerable level of negative introspection. But, muffled as it was by the blanket of alcohol, the groans and thrashings of my subconscious never made it to the surface.
I must have dozed off. I have a vague memory of the doorbell ringing, a taxi for Passion. I woke up at six o’clock in the morning on the chesterfield with a splitting headache, such a comic-strip hangover that I laughed giddily standing over the toilet bowl. I turned on the tap to help me, but the running water sounded like sneering English soccer fans. I looked in the mirror. My lips were caked with red wine. The flesh seemed swollen under my chin. The evening, which had seemed adventurous, now assumed a kind of frightening sordidness, as if I were en route to something from which I needed saving.
I opened the medicine cabinet, but I couldn’t find my codeine tablets, which was odd because I always left them in the same place. I checked on the floor, behind the toilet (bending over gave me the sensation of a large chunk of ice sliding forward inside my head); I even looked, inexplicably, in the bathtub. This was puzzling. I wandered into the kitchen and flipped through the cupboard beside the stove. I came across a near empty bottle of sleeping pills; I must have forgotten about it when I renewed my prescription. I shook a green capsule into my hand and went back to bed. I could hear a noise, a small clinking. It was the empty hangers in my cupboard, clinking together exactly as they had the night Emma left.
It came over me soon enough, the taste of bitter almonds, a sign the pill was seeping into my blood, seeping up into my brain. The headache receded and so did the sense of sin. I took a deeper breath. My body relaxed. The world’s dirty teeth loosened on my heart. I had not, after all, been privy to a sudden revolting aperçu of myself, as the bloated landlord of some discount store. No, I had simply drunk too much. Il ne faut pas s’y tromper. And yet, where a sleeping pill usually puts me out for four or five hours, this time I woke up an hour later, consciousness rising like a shark’s fin up, up through the dark water, breaking the surface. Yes, there was something wrong, I could feel it.
I lay in bed, my eyes still closed, running over the events of the evening: the phone call, the massage, the dinner, even the off-colour remark about the skin trade. What else? We’d talked about her boyfriend. Her boyfriend, the bank robber. How exotic it had seemed, me out in the world dining with a gangster’s girlfriend, a black one at that. A little piece of film noir that had unspooled itself in my head throughout the evening, during which, with each successive glass of wine, I had become more and more the angular leading man. I recalled with a slight shudder the encounter with my Surrealism student and his mother and the private pleasure I’d taken later in how I must seem to them, how surprised they must have been, talking and talking and talking about me afterwards. What an interesting fellow I was! One would have thought starchy, stiff, but there I was, a professor of French literature out on the town with a black woman, easy as can be. Even the waiters knew my name. Another half-litre, Professor Halloway? A man of the world.
How sordid it seemed now in this February light, a crow cawing down by the lake, the world so still, as if waiting for something, the sky pearl-coloured, the sun dull like polished silver, creeping through a crack in the venetian blinds. How odd that the sun would pick this very moment to sit at exactly the only place in the sky where it could break through the only break in my venetian blinds. But I was doing it again, delaying, putting off. What was it, what was the problem? What was bothering me?
I retrieved my dressing gown from the floor, where it lay like an executed man, and went cautiously into the living room. At first I noticed nothing wrong. I looked around the room. A candle burnt down to the nub, the wax hardened on the hardwood table. Sloppy but fixable. A smell of stale cigarette smoke. Two wineglasses, one on its side but unbroken. No wine stains on the carpet, no cigarette burns on the tabletop. Nothing permanent. I had just bent over to right the wineglass when I noticed, on the table beside the couch, a clear circular spot the size of the bottom of a glass. A light film of dust covered the rest of the table. My house, largely because of the fireplace, was very dusty; it gummed up my computer mouse, my CD player, watered the eyes of allergic guests. Except for this round space. Because I was hungover, a kind of glue coated my thoughts and stuck them shapelessly together. For that reason it took me some minutes to understand what was going on. There had been something on that table, something with a round base. But what? I couldn’t remember, the way that sometimes, when pressed, you can’t remember your phone number or where you left your car. I stared at the table and then the whole sickening picture came into focus. A frosted glass statue of the Madonna, a foot tall and very pricey, was gone. I’d inherited it from my mother; it was the only thing of hers I’d kept. I looked on the floor beside the sofa, under it. And then I noticed the other things. A cigarette lighter, my gold pocket watch (which Emma had returned), a Mexican ashtray, all missing. A pewter flask from the sideboard, a delicate bracelet from a long-departed sleepover, all of it gone. I saw clearly now the image of Passion getting out of the taxi with that over-large handbag. It was black velveteen, with red markings like lightning on the side.
Then I remembered the clank I’d heard down the hall, the sound I couldn’t identify. Of course: it was the medicine cabinet opening, the glass door banging against its hinges. The bitch. She’d even swiped my codeine tablets.
C H A P T E R 9
Months passed and with them the winter. Buds popped on the trees, the air turned soft and you could smell the wet earth. I went to a conference in Toulouse, my old stomping ground. The town was almost unrecognizable to me. I looked for old cafés and they were gone. I tried to look up my old Spanish roommate, but I couldn’t even find the street I remembered he lived
on. Entire neighbourhoods seemed switched about.
I gave a paper on a new poem, allegedly by Rimbaud, which had recently turned up in a forgotten literary journal; there had been only one or two issues before it went under. After only one reading I was convinced it was a hoax; there was a kind of hothouse feel to it, the images too jammed together to suggest the effortless imagination of this young truant from the north country. In fact, on my second evening in Toulouse, I was having a drink after dinner when it came to me that there was something oddly familiar, not in the language but in the rhythm of the poem’s final rhyming couplet. I’d heard it somewhere before—and not in Rimbaud either. I stayed up much of the night flipping through Baudelaire, through all sorts of poets, anyone who might have had an influence on Rimbaud. By three that morning I came to the conclusion that Paul Verlaine, his lover, had written the poem as a parody and submitted it under his friend’s name. It was just the kind of thing those two might well have got up to one drunken afternoon.
I presented the paper the following day. It was greeted apathetically, as if I were a sort of spoilsport, except by Serrault, who was there to give a paper on “The Clown as Social Transgressor.” He agreed with me. Besides, he said, it was a second-rate poem anyway.
It was shortly after my return that I experienced a series of irritating bits of bad luck. It was not destiny fulfilling itself, nothing like that. Rather, it seemed like stubbing your toe two or three times on the same bedpost. Infuriating. I lost my Proust pencil, for example (for underlining the hardback version). Then I lost my wallet. Even after I’d cancelled my credit cards, I couldn’t seem to stop looking for it. In my shorts, in the back pocket of my blue suit, even in my shirts, as if you could possibly miss a falafel-sized wallet in the breast pocket of a shirt! I searched the clothes I’d worn the day before, the month before, I sniffed around my house, I looked in the African flower vase three, four, five times. It just went on and on, this crazy looking, as if I were some kind of mute animal that had lost its cub on the Serengeti. I looked and looked and looked, and I always ended up in a rage. I hurled the entire contents of my clothing cabinet onto the floor; sweaters, socks, towels, scarves I hadn’t seen in years, everything right there onto the floor. Including a pair of jeans that Emma had left behind. My, she had such a small waist. I laid the jeans out on my bed and for a second I stood there amidst the mess and the linen and the bundles of clothes and looked down at this set of jeans lying on the bed as if her body, her soul, had only seconds before soared from them. I lay down very carefully and I put my face in the crotch of the jeans. But they had been in the cupboard too long. She was gone.
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