The Escape: A Novel

by Adam Thirlwell

  The difficult task is to improvise the seventeenth time. Or even, say, the second. It might have seemed so incandescent, one’s impromptu smearing of chocolate mousse on the palpitating body of a woman – there where her flesh is most exposed. But if the next time one again moves doggedly to the refrigerator, then the prone and lovely woman will experience in her soul a tiny qualm.

  The true libertines are the geniuses at repetition. Not the artists of the one-off, the improvised. Everyone can improvise. The true talent is in the persistence.

  8

  He woke up, to discover Zinka leaving.

  He had drifted into what seemed like the deepest night of sleep, but which was in fact only a small moment; he had hardly closed his eyes. He looked down: his shrunken penis was sticky as an orchid bud.

  —I have to go, she said.

  —You could stay here with me, he said. Why not?

  —I can’t stay here, she said. I have to go home.

  —But you can’t let him make you, said Haffner.

  —No one’s making me, said Zinka.

  Haffner looked woebegone. He felt worse than woebegone: he felt as if everything was over. Yet for a brief moment he had felt so utterly reborn. But then, who was Haffner kidding? How could a man be born, when he was old? What schlub was ever allowed the victory of a second chance?

  —I mean, she said. Look at you. Look at me.

  It was just a moment, she said. It wasn’t love.

  But, thought Haffner, he loved her. This seemed plausible. The speed of it was nothing for Haffner. It simply overwhelmed him with the evidence.

  He knew, however, that he had thought that he had never thought like this before on previous occasions. The repetition, he had to admit, tended to produce a comical effect. So what was true? The feeling of uniqueness, or the feeling of a repeat?

  And me, I do not know. Two answers seem possible, and only one can be true. Maybe Haffner was right to feel that he was always stuck in a repeat. He had always thought, every time he fell in love, that it had no precedent in the past. Just as a perplexed critic looks at a barbaric work of art, which seems to come from nowhere. And this was precisely why he repeated himself. He recognised nothing, because he forgot so much. And since he forgot so much, he always repeated himself. He always believed he was in love, when it was perhaps just another brief moment of desire. On the other hand, maybe the opposite was also possible. Every time he said he was in love, it was true. Every woman Haffner had loved had been unique. But he forgot so much, so lavishly. And the more he forgot, the more he tended to see each story as the same. Whereas, perhaps, no story was the same.

  It is all a problem of perspective.

  But whatever. Haffner, in however baffling a mess he found himself, was sure of this: the desire was nothing to do with Haffner. It wasn’t a whim; it wasn’t capricious. How could it be capricious if it was a compulsion? So maybe nothing was an imbroglio of one’s own making. Maybe nothing was Haffner’s fault. A new goddess appeared – that was all. And he surrendered.

  9

  Abandoned, Haffner began to argue with Zinka about the faithlessness of woman. He was aware that this was the opposite of what he had argued, a few hours earlier, to Frau Tummel: when he complained about the faithfulness of women. He was aware that he was beginning to resemble a character in the farces he had watched with Livia, in the 1960s, on Shaftesbury Avenue, the era when Haffner could still happily go to the theatre without being disappointed in the quality. But then, maybe this was fine. What else was farce but the way of understanding how quick one’s ideas were, how soon their showers passed?

  After all: this was why he liked Zinka. It was why he had loved Livia: he was always in search of the one who would leave him.

  It had always been Haffner who was the one to leave. No one else. First Livia had destroyed this illusion of Haffner. But he had been able still to preserve one place of hope: that in the one-night stands, the brief affairs, it was always Haffner who left, cold-hearted.

  Now even this was not true. Now that it was happening to him he was enraged by the injustice of it. Could a person simply choose whether or not they would have sex with someone else? Surely, if you had done it once, you had an obligation to continue for ever?

  Although, as Zinka tenderly kissed him on the forehead, and left his room – not looking back at Haffner, naked on the bed – he could not conceal from himself the thought that this new incarnation did possess a certain logic. Maybe, thought Haffner, in a haze of contradiction, it was possible to love someone without wanting them: not to be tired with the need for possession. It didn’t seem so unlikely. To want to inhabit the mind and body of someone else. For desire may involve possession. But also it might mean the opposite desire: to be possessed.

  In his bedroom, Haffner was translated.

  There was no reason, therefore, to be angry at Zinka. There was no reason to be proud. So what if she had left him? She entranced him precisely because she had never belonged to him at all.

  Just as no one, thought Haffner, would belong to him again.

  Or to put it in a way more familiar to Haffner, in the words of a great comedian . . . One day, this comedian, tired but happy, was walking down some street in Manhattan with his producer. The day’s filming had gone well. Now they were off to some diner for a much needed salt beef sandwich, a much needed latke. Or whatever. As they sauntered down the street, two nuns, in wimples and solid shoes, walked towards them. And, solicitously, the great comedian took them aside, and very gently reminded them that he did apologise but they were in the wrong place. They had made a mistake. They weren’t in this sketch.

  In exactly the same way, what Haffner needed was the voice of a comedian, gently reminding him that now, regretfully, in the matter of Haffner, life was through.

  Haffner, my hero, had outlived himself.

  PART FIVE

  Haffner Harmonic

  1

  The next morning – as the sun rose over the conifers, gilding the distant snows – Haffner woke up, raised his aching face and saw his battered suitcase: wrapped in creased and blotched cellophane, swaddled in blue adhesive tape, slashed by a diagonal tear which, according to the man who had delivered it – reception told him – could not be explained, and for which the airline admitted no responsibility.

  In another era, perhaps Haffner would have instituted various legal battles. He would have written to the chairman and demanded compensation: donations to his designated charities. But not now. Haffner was no longer so proud of his property. He only felt a warm relief, as he abandoned his golfing trousers and tracksuits, and replaced the image in the mirror with a more familiar Haffner, in his brown tweed suit, his checked twill shirt, a muted tie: the handkerchief which Cesare had bought him in the Milan arcades stuffed with elegant negligence in his pocket.

  Then he put on his glasses, and was fearful at his suddenly precise reflection. A livid stain was spreading across one cheek. A gummed splinter gelled in the tear duct of his right eye.

  The reflection, however, perturbed him less than the pain within. His body seemed exhausted: he was shivering, worried Haffner, and his pulse was erratic. He felt for his clammy forehead: it seemed hot.

  His first step, thought Haffner, in the life of this renovated, broken-down version of Haffner, should be breakfast. Then he should find Benjamin, and admit that perhaps Benji had been right all along. Though would he still believe that for a brief hour Haffner had been successful? Perhaps not, thought Haffner: perhaps not.

  The dining room, by now, at this late stage of the morning, was empty. Haffner moved slowly along its buffet: with its sacks of grains and cereals, the contraption – which resembled no toaster Haffner had seen – for toasting bread, from which each slice emerged with its black insignia: a franking machine. All of these Haffner ignored. He took a croissant from some imitation of the rustic panier, and poured himself a coffee from the dregs of three silver Thermoses.

  Haffner felt sick.
>
  With flakes of croissant caught in the fibres of his tie, Haffner wandered out into the hotel’s lounge: where the windows looked on to the mountains: their blues and greens and mauves. The absolute blue of the sky. It suddenly made sense to bespectacled Haffner now: this perfect view. He made for the bookshelves, but Haffner, whose flesh was sad, had read all the books he could. Humming to himself, he moved on to the miniature but eclectic collection of CDs – on a shelf, beside a book of mountain views, and a guidebook to the mountain walks, in French, from four years ago. And Anne of Green Gables in Spanish, and Volumes I and II of the History of Nottingham from the 1930s – but not the crowning Volume III.

  Without expecting much, Haffner ejected someone else’s CD featuring the classics of reggae from the 1970s, slid his own random choice into the waiting machine, and pressed play.

  And Haffner discovered that he was in the orchestra stalls at the opera house.

  2

  As he gazed in the darkness, while fairies disported themselves on stage, Haffner was distracted by the surprise which had persisted, throughout the ballet’s first half, at the smallness of Pfeffer’s shilling tip to the cloakroom attendant in Rules, where they had eaten their theatre supper. In Haffner’s opinion, no largesse was too much for the everyday retainers. So Pfeffer baffled him. But then Pfeffer often baffled him. Beside him, in the darkness, Pfeffer was holding opera glasses to his eyebrows like some marine instrument. They seemed to be directed at the mechanics of the flies.

  Their respective wives were watching the ballet intently.

  Haffner tried to settle into his velvet chair. He had accepted patiently this proposed outing, to celebrate Livia’s birthday, to the Royal Ballet. It hadn’t fit Haffner’s idea of entertainment. But when he saw Bottom shrugging away his sorrow with a neat bend of his legs, Haffner began to enjoy himself. These people had humour, after all. While Livia watched beside him, on edge, transported – plucking at the plush velvet with her fingernails.

  This theme recurred in Haffner’s life. Twenty years later, in the living room of his daughter’s house, he heard Benjamin trying to sight-read the same melodies: the cover of the score was worn like blotting paper. And in Benji’s clumsy chords, Haffner rediscovered the sad emotion he had felt for the actor playing Bottom – the pirouettes, the tender holds! – in his massive ass’s head. The sadness seemed to make sense to him now.

  For what else was it as you lumbered across a room, towards the body of a woman, the prong of your penis straining to beat you in the race to touch her? It was farcical, always.

  In the lounge of the hotel there was a curved bar made of vertical strips of pine, a collection of sofas, a box of board games. Into one sofa sank Haffner, as he played to himself, in the morning, the nocturne from Mendelssohn’s ballet.

  The horns, softly, their own echo, lay on the bed of the violins.

  And as they did so, Haffner made a loop, descending from the childhood of Benji, back through Livia’s birthday, to where this theme had first emerged. It was Haffner’s theme tune. His first ever delicate kiss had occurred to this accompaniment, the music played with the film he had watched at the Ionic Picture Theatre, after which Hazel had allowed him to kiss her cheek.

  In the window, outside, on the hotel veranda, he could see a woman emptying her rucksack – polyester in primary colours – of its crumbs, its lost cellophane wrappers from drinks straws, its crumpled tickets, its creased promotional leaflets to the most inauthentic restaurants.

  Haffner contemplated the peaceful scene. There was no one in the lounge. Only Haffner. Everyone else was out walking, or swimming, or lying beside the pools. Or being cured of whatever they wanted to be cured of. But Haffner, instead, was lost in his persistent sense of floating, unattached.

  Yes, checked Haffner, as if feeling in a pocket for his passport, the feeling was still there. Haffner was free.

  3

  As the soft nocturne continued, Haffner mooched among the CDs. He rejected showtunes from the movies; he rejected a selection of fados from the backstreets of Lisbon. And then, to his excitement, he found the Cole Porter songbook, as sung by Ella Fitzgerald.

  If Haffner had an ideal musical form, it was the wordless harmonies of Duke Ellington’s scat. But if there had to be words, then he wanted them to be Cole Porter’s, with Ella’s accent. She sang the songs so precisely, so simply. She confessed to her audience, as she had confessed to Haffner, that time in Ronnie Scott’s, that ev’ry time they said goodbye, she died a little. And now, as he read the liner notes, he noticed the weird old-fashioned elision. Ev’ry! He’d only noticed the poetic quality of Cole Porter’s title now, after – what was it? Sixty years? He rather liked it.

  He was in the mood for preserving outmoded things.

  —Benjamin! said Haffner, delighted.

  Benjamin paused, and pointed a finger at his cheek, like a tearful harlequin.

  —You’ve got a huge bruise on your cheek, said Benji.

  Haffner asked him if he knew this one. Benjamin repeated his sentence; Haffner repeated his. Benjamin replied that no, not really. It was kind of not what he listened to, really. Then he should listen, said Haffner, raising a hand. As for the bruise – as for the bruise: the bruise was nothing, said Haffner.

  Together they listened to Ella Fitzgerald explain to her silent audience how ev’ry time they said goodbye, she wondered why the gods above her thought so little of her that they allowed her lover to go. And then, once more, the strings came in, a trampoline for her voice.

  —I’m not sure I like it, said Benji.

  —How can you not like it, said Haffner, when it’s true?

  He had always loved this song for the frankness of its melancholy: its admission of being defeated by love. Perhaps this was the real America of Haffner – not so much the happy improvisation, as the stoic openness about pain. The acceptance of vulnerability was what moved Haffner now. He loved the Ella of this song, just as he had been charmed by his meetings with the innovative businessmen in the early seventies: the gunslingers, the white sharks. Sometimes, he had dealings with James Ling: the man who regarded the portfolio as a work of art, providing an escape from real life, and all its attendant risks. With his theory that one could diminish the risk of disaster by betting on everything. Patiently, over the years, Haffner had listened to their jargon – derivatives, risk arbitrage, hedge funds – all of them trying to pretend that these new ideas could diminish risk. And Haffner had listened to them, unconvinced – amazed by their ability to invent the idea of the rational bubble. So frank an oxymoron! So fragile a hope!

  But Benjamin, this morning, was euphoric with optimism.

  —Have you fixed things? Because I think I’m going to go back, said Benjamin.

  —To bed? queried Haffner.

  —Home, said Benjamin.

  —To that summer school? said Haffner, looking down the song titles.

  Benjamin said nothing.

  —But this one, said Haffner to himself, is the real marvel.

  —No, said Benjamin. I’m going back to her.

  At this point, Haffner noticed something.

  —You’re in the same clothes as last night, said Haffner. You brought nothing else?

  —I’m in the same clothes, said Benjamin. And then he grinned. To which Haffner offered a happily sceptical eyebrow.

  —When did you arrive? said Haffner. Yesterday? I’ve hardly seen you.

  Haffner had converted him. The legend of Haffner had now created the legend of Benji. For this would always be Benji’s great story: the story of how he abandoned the practice of his religion, having slept with two girls in one week: in Tel Aviv, and then an Alpine spa town. Even if Haffner, in the mountains, had a finale all of his own. His story was all about the dismantling of his legend: the sudden zest for abandonment.

  And, sultry in the mountainous morning, Ella began again to sing Cole Porter’s classic: ‘Begin the Beguine’.

  —You’re going to leave your school?
asked Haffner.

  —But have you fixed things? said Benji. I won’t go if you still need me.

  And Haffner considered this.

  —No, he said.

  —You haven’t fixed things? said Benji.

  —I don’t need you, said Haffner.

  —But no, began Benji.

  —You ever heard of Artie Shaw? said Haffner, holding up the liner notes. Eight wives. Now let me tell you something, old boy.

  But before he could continue Benjamin’s education in the art of jazz, before he could continue to praise Benji for his liberation, before he could go on to explain that in fact uxorious panache wasn’t what had made Artie Shaw remarkable – that in fact Artie Shaw’s talent was his extension of the clarinet’s upper range – there was an interruption.

  4

  Frau Tummel, clasping Herr Tummel’s hand – like exhausted Olympic victors – appeared at the door of the hotel lounge. Like the overcrowded lounge at the end of a Parisian farce, an English murder mystery. Behind the Tummels, there was a man who was wearing his name pinned to his chest.

  —He is here, announced Frau Tummel.

  —Who? said Haffner.

  —You, said Herr Tummel and Frau Tummel, in concert.

  He had at least, thought Haffner, brought them back together. If this was the only good he had accomplished in this spa town, it wasn’t nothing. Surely someone should acknowledge that?

  The man with his name on his chest was the manager of the hotel. It was a pleasure to meet him, said Haffner, welcoming him with a handshake. This handshake was declined with a gentle cough, a gentle incline of the head.

  Benjamin busied himself with the neat arrangement of a pile of magazines, dating from two years ago, concerning the niceties of couture.