Thing of the Moment

by Bruno Noble

  Sebastian tore a packet of breadsticks open, offered me one and perused the menu.

  ‘The aubergine parmigiana for my friend,’ he said in German to the sullen waiter, ‘and, for me, the Wiener schnitzel without the vegetables but with the spaghetti vongole instead.’ He smiled sheepishly and raised his eyebrows as though to say, Yes, I know, a strange combination.

  The waiter perked up at this and began to look positively pleased, as though having just remembered a piece of good news. ‘That’s not possible,’ he said. ‘The schnitzel comes with vegetables.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ said Sebastian, ‘but I’d like to have it with the spaghetti vongole.’

  The waiter stared intently at the menu. ‘I’m sorry, you can’t,’ he said finally.

  ‘Oh, I see the problem,’ said Sebastian. ‘I’m happy to pay for both, of course.’ He closed the menu and placed it on the table as though to signify that that was sorted.

  The waiter, however, didn’t seem to think so. He tapped his order pad with his pencil and shook his head and tugged on his moustache, as though genuinely apologetic. ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated, ‘but that’s just not possible. You have to make your mind up between the two.’

  ‘Ah, we have a problem!’ Sebastian looked at me with raised eyebrows and wide eyes.

  Then, turning to the waiter with an uplifted finger as though suddenly possessed with an original thought, Sebastian quietly requested to see the restaurant manager, a tired, greasy, uninterested man who emerged from behind a curtain as if bored with performing in the same play every evening and with whom Sebastian repeated the conversation he’d had with the waiter. They looked at each other, the fat, near-bald, moustachioed manager and the thin, curly-haired moustachioed waiter, as though quite willing to help but bewildered by the complexity of the request.

  The manager shrugged and held his hands out, palms up. The waiter rolled his eyes and scratched his head with his pen. I brought my hand to my mouth to hide a smile – they were Joe and Tony to our Lady and Tramp!

  Sebastian stood, smiling too, maybe stimulated by my giggles as much as by the absurdity of our situation. ‘Thank you, gentlemen. This is for the breadsticks.’ He placed some coins on the table. ‘Have you ever wondered why your restaurant is empty?’

  ‘It’s late,’ said the manager.

  ‘It’s a Monday night,’ said the waiter.

  We walked back to the hotel in a lighter rain and ordered food from the room service menu that we ate in the hotel’s empty bar.

  ‘Do you know what I love about Italy?’ Sebastian asked rhetorically as we chewed our club sandwiches. ‘There, when I order the same, an escalope with spaghetti vongole, they exclaim, ‘Sei pazzo! You cray-zy!’ and then they make it for me anyway, even if it’s not on the menu. I could never live in this country. Did I surprise you by getting up and leaving?’

  I thought for a bit. ‘No.’

  ‘So you thought that consistent with my behaviour? With what you know about me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He laughed. ‘We’re always making choices. Even then, I quite consciously thought that I could either simply choose one of the dishes on offer or make my point and leave. On another night, or even five minutes earlier or five minutes later, I could have chosen to stay.’ He wiped his hands on his napkin. ‘Sorry for not consulting you, though.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right. You really don’t have to apologise.’ But it was nice of you to, I wanted to add.

  It was late, the bar was gloomy, I was tired and we had some client meetings to attend to in the morning. We parted in the corridor that led to our rooms, each, electronic room key in hand, saying goodnight to the other, stepping into our rooms and shutting the door behind us. I removed my shoes, sat on the end of the bed, removed my stockings and, tugging my skirt from above the knee to the tops of my thighs, considered my outstretched legs. What did Sebastian think of them, if he thought of them at all? Why had there been no question of a nightcap, no possibility of his requesting entry to my hotel room or inviting me to his, no chance of a knock on the door? Was it professionalism, consideration or a lack of interest in me?

  Isabella

  Mornings. Movement, mutterings, a draught that sweeps my exposed back fleetingly, shadows and light perceived in red and white through my still-shut eyes. Apologies or excuses, thanks, endearments and goodbyes dimly heard. My hand out of the duvet and raised above my shoulder in farewell. I will never see him again. Already I have forgotten him. Money and a business card left on my bedside table. A used condom and tissues in the wastepaper basket. Alone in bed, I concentrate on filling my body as precisely as possible.

  Sharon

  My bank work was routine, automatic, as was my smile and good cheer. I had watched nearly everyone I knew there move on over the years, either gaining promotion or being headhunted, and had never achieved the quality of relationship with my new colleagues that I had had with my old ones. Jonathan had had a health scare and returned from a long absence for treatment thinner, sadder and quieter. Mr Self had fought against premature hair loss and lost. My annual review with them was an awkward one. Mr Self presented me with a glass globe paperweight and pressed me on my professional aspirations, as though torn between losing me and yet desperate for me to have some career development. I was formally promoted to a newly created post of desk assistant manager in recognition of the leadership I had shown and of the mentoring I had given new desk assistants, and I was given an above-inflation rate pay rise.

  ‘Well done!’ said Mie, when she heard the news from Jonathan. ‘Does this call for a celebratory drink?’

  I was so pleased and so confounded at the prospect of going out with Mie after work for the first time in years that my strangled reply was inaudible.

  ‘I know, it’s been a long time,’ she said.

  We revisited The George, which seemed populated by ghosts of a past life and lacked the atmosphere and promise of a decade ago when we had crowded the high, small tables with Adam Johnson and David but, of course, it was we that had changed.

  We sat on bar stools on either side of the tall tables and watched the ice melt slowly in our G and Ts. I took in Mie’s dress, her successful businesswoman’s attire, and thought, She’s got it, now.

  ‘Have you kept in touch with Adam?’ I asked above the loud music.

  ‘No, not really. Well, we meet occasionally for lunch.’

  ‘And David? Do you see him a lot?’

  ‘No!’ Mie sat back with a sudden look of distaste.

  ‘Oh, I thought you were still friends? That you’d remained friends? Despite… you know.’

  Mie pouted and shrugged as though to say that they might have, but no longer were.

  ‘What happened there then?’ I persisted.

  ‘Nothing.’ Mie met my look unblinkingly as she drank and crunched an ice cube. ‘Are you still dancing at that club?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Discomfited by the direct question, I reached for my glass and took a long swig. I assumed it to be a reproach for my having broached the subject of David, Mie’s way of telling me that the topic was not up for discussion.

  Mie said nothing.

  ‘It’s good exercise,’ I added, in weak justification.

  ‘It seems to be,’ said Mie, in what I took as a compliment.

  ‘Mie,’ I said, ‘do you ever look back at, you know, your life or certain events and, while recognising that they happened to you, not really feel that they did? As though all along, behind you, there are just a series of people who were you or looked like you, but there’s no continuity of you?’

  ‘No. I never think that,’ said Mie decisively.

  I considered her enviously.

  There was a finality to our evening together – the sense that it was the last time we’d share a drink and a private conversation was overwhelming. It was as though she had invited me out not to renew a tired friendship but to meet one last obligation, and to draw a line that ran from Putney through
Clapham all the way to the City and along the aisle between her desk and mine.

  Already, in the present, I was looking back as though through a series of windows that each presented a different scene, distinct tableaux of past lives into which she and I happened to have ventured: brief, framed moments in which we had coincided. While Mie remained resolutely unchanged behind the façade of her new wardrobe, constantly and recognisably Mie in each image, I had no notion of existing for myself for more than two or three seconds at a time. The only factor that contributed to any sense of continuity, however ironically, was the thought that this notion was familiar to me. While Mie glided serenely and purposefully across a bridge, in that way she had of walking by moving her legs from below the knees only, I advanced hesitantly from one stepping stone to the next, unable to ascertain whether, if the far bank were to be reached, it would be me who would reach it.

  Mie had depressed me and shaken my confidence. A little ashamed of my fragility and wanting a friend’s non-judgmental warm arms around me, that night I crashed at Gaia’s.

  Isabella

  Sharon snuggled up to me, her body against mine cool. I grumbled, in protest as much as in welcome. She had taken to staying the night with Frederica and me (when, I suspected, her Aunt Wanda stayed at Pierre’s and she felt alone in their Putney home), sleeping in Frederica’s bed if it was empty and mine if it wasn’t.

  We dozed. At such times, I fantasised that it was possible to undergo an involuntary, inadvertent exchange of selves and bodies; I imagined my butterfly leaving me and alighting on Sharon, bearing my history with it, were she only to hold me tight enough.

  ‘Do you ever imagine,’ I asked, ‘that your’ – I sought the right word – ‘your soul, your psyche, could ever depart from your body and reside in someone else’s?’

  ‘No!’ was a murmur in my ear.

  ‘Never?’ I could sense her waking. ‘Not that if you held me tight, really tight, something, some essence, could pass from me to you and vice versa?’ I could feel her tense.

  ‘Like, sex, do you mean?’

  ‘No! The opposite, even. As though our bodies are incidental to us. Something like that.’

  ‘I think you mean like sex,’ persisted Sharon. ‘That’s the only way that what you said makes any sense to me. And not always.’

  I said nothing. I found it hard to explain, even though back to front and not face to face should have made it easier.

  ‘To be honest, there was this one time,’ said Sharon enigmatically. ‘All right,’ she continued, as though having made her mind up abruptly, ‘this one person.’ She rolled onto her back and was quiet a moment and then she took a breath. ‘And I never realised until it was too late.’

  ‘Sebastian, do you mean?’

  Sharon placed her hand on my exposed shoulder and squeezed.

  ‘He’s the only one whose name you’ve ever mentioned. Are you sure it’s too late?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t mean that he wouldn’t have me back if I worked at it. Just that the moment has gone. It’s as though, to me, we aren’t the people we once were, as though we’re reinvented each and every day and today’s people have chosen not to love each other.’ Her hand stayed warm on my shoulder, its pressure increasing as she sat up. ‘You asked me to send him to you!’ she said as if just remembering. ‘You know, I think you’d like him. And I think he’d like you. I should introduce you. Gift him to you.’ She giggled at the thought. ‘Would you like that?’

  My back still to her, I patted her hand in reply.

  Mie

  It was a late Friday afternoon and my desk assistant had requested my permission to get an early start to her long weekend, so it was I who walked down the emptying dealing room to Sebastian. We had addressed the outstanding points of business and were rocking back in new office chairs, admiring the two new large monitor screens that had replaced his six old small ones, when he asked me what my plans were for the weekend. They were vague and included shopping on Saturday and, on Sunday, brunch with new Japanese acquaintances.

  ‘I was thinking of seeing the Francis Bacon retrospective at the Tate,’ I said.

  ‘So was I!’ he exclaimed. ‘Do you mind if I join you?’

  One speaks of a circle of friends; I had circles of them that I had initially, inadvertently, but then quite deliberately managed to keep separate. To my mind’s eye I was the centre circle of a Venn diagram that overlapped with five other, alternately shrinking and growing circles that only occasionally touched. I was at the very heart of this universe, the one solid star; the others pulsed strongly or weakly, depending whose company I sought. Since my move, I had lost touch with former neighbours. Since my promotion, I had gone out less with Sharon and her friends and more with City contacts and their spouses. Since my cruelty to David, we saw each other only occasionally.

  Sebastian and I met at the Tate and paid our way into the Bacon exhibition where we spent an hour, not conversing much, before he followed me out of the exhibition space, out of the museum, down the museum steps and onto the embankment overlooking the Thames. He was exhilarated as much by the exhibition as by what I think he sensed was my response to it. He was breathless from having run across the wide and busy four-lane road in pursuit of me. ‘What is it?’ he repeated.

  The sky was blue grey, the sluggish river brown, sandwiched, at low tide, between wide strips of mucky taupe and, on the opposite bank, ochres and brick reds. Further downriver, Battersea Park’s trees’ saffron- and mustard-coloured leaves completed Bacon’s palette that had followed me out of the museum and into the street in a dizzying, colour-leaking amalgam of the in- and outdoors. Bacon’s paintings had been blows to my stomach and heart. And it was more than the rushing regression to my parents’ butchers’ shop stimulated by Bacon’s sides of meat and meat-like sitters. A mirror to the human condition, Bacon shouted, here we are, but flesh and bone and all alone. Nothing had prepared me for this, not even Autumn Cannibalism, the frame of which was so defined that one looked at it as though through a window, at a remove. Bacon’s colours spilled gently off their canvasses and formed puddles around my feet and legs, then pools I swam, saw and breathed through and, now, as I leant on the embankment wall, brushed my field of vision with hues and blushes that tinged the external world while singeing the internal one. Anti-religious – areligious – they yet spoke in a devotional language, in a pontifical voice, of nihilism, at worst and starkest, or, at best, of solipsism. I gripped a handrail and looked down at the exposed muddy bank, as Sebastian exclaimed, ‘Yes! Yes!’ He was ecstatic. ‘Not even “existence precedes essence”. Existence. Just that. Nothing else. Peel back the flesh to reveal meat and bone. Scream; no one will hear you.’ It was as though everything I had believed was made paint, everything I had sensed made flesh in paint, everything I had thought taken to its logical extension, to its reductivist conclusion; this was the point to which my proud independence had taken me. The glacial thrill of this affirmation of ‘I’, desolate and solitary though it may be, dominated other considerations and emotions.

  The irony of two solipsists communing in their physiological and aesthetic responses to Bacon’s paintings was not lost on me: we were as close to each other then, as we revelled in the bleakest of revelations, as we had ever been. Two people happy together in the profound recognition of their fundamental, ultimate solitude; the happiness of the loneliest of life’s long-distance runners. It was for this reason, I think, that I allowed Sebastian to accompany me back to my apartment, although I recall neither inviting him nor his asking to escort me home.

  Only when I withdrew my front door key from my handbag did I think that this was the first time he was entering my home. Timidly, I asked him to follow my example and to replace his shoes with guest slippers. My dislike of outdoor shoes and of naked or even socked feet in the house was greater than my embarrassment at asking visitors to wear guest slippers. He complied quickly, politely, masking, I feared, a smirk by bending his head to untie his shoelaces. I c
ouldn’t help but look at my apartment through his eyes and knew that despite the concessions I had made to a Western way of life, it would seem not quite Western to him. He followed me to the living room, past the kitchen that effectively divided the living and sleeping quarters. Not materialist, disliking clutter, unwilling to pay for a cleaner, I lived simply and comfortably; my only extravagance, outside of the clothes I wore for work, were books and some videos: I had bookshelves along a whole wall that would, one day, I was sure, be filled. Dozens of postcards I had bought in museum shops filled the spaces on them. Sebastian looked at the books appreciatively before following me into the kitchen where I made tea and where he picked up the smallest of the cookie-cutter men and lifted him to his eye before replacing him on the tiled window sill behind the mixer tap, giving me a knowing look.

  ‘Nice view,’ he said, and we stood, as the tea brewed, Sebastian in front of one three-quarter-length sash window and me in front of the other, looking out over the common where any of the joggers and the dog-walkers and the children and their parents looking up would have seen two people, each framed by their window, alone together. He nodded appreciatively out of the window. ‘I can see why you chose this flat.’

  No, not for the view, though I didn’t say as much. Unremarked by Sebastian, dozens of telephone cables and wires streamed to and from a junction point on the outside wall below my window. Positioned there, I could close my eyes and travel all the way to Japan, to Sangenjaya, to home, entering, like a breath of air, my old bedroom, my old bed. I had noticed the ugly assemblage of wires and cables immediately and they had acted as my visual madeleine so immediately and profoundly that I wondered if I hadn’t, at some subconscious level, been looking for just this as a feature of a new apartment. I hadn’t taken in a word of what the estate agent had said subsequently.