Exposure

by Talitha Stevenson

  'They do not,' Ludo said.

  'Yes, they do.'

  'What are you saying? Are you implying that we're spoilt rich kids with a limited social circle? So what? You went to public school too, darling.'

  'I had a scholarship,' she said, winking,'so it really doesn't count.'

  'Did you? I never knew that,' Luke said. He wished he could find Jessica attractive, but she was too plain for him. She was such a cool, clever girl. 'What are you doing hanging out with us? You should be at the Socialist Workers' meeting or something.'

  'Oh, shut up.'

  'Drinking beer. With actual poor people!

  'Here, have a beautifully rolled joint, Ludo,' she said.

  'Bless you. You are a highly accomplished young lady and will one day make someone a lovely wife.'

  'Yeah, right.' She snorted contemptuously.

  Arianne propped her leg on the sofa and held out her glass to Ludo. 'I hate snobs. My dad's a fucking snob.' She pulled her face into a frantic caricature.' "Why don't you go out for dinner with the Honourable Fuckwit, darling?" I can't respect it. It's such a bullshit attitude. He's always pimping me, that bastard.'

  'Pimping your daughter sounds like a bullshit attitude,' Jessica said. 'Jesus!

  Ludo pointed the champagne bottle at Arianne as if it was a microphone—or a gun. 'Hang on just one second there, Miss Tate. Have you, of your own free will, ever been out with a man who was not stinking rich?'

  Jessica giggled and Arianne looked at her. For a second, Luke wondered if there was hostility between them. He thought Jessica might be jealous of the prettier girl.

  But then Arianne did her breathy laughter, her Sunday-morning-in-bed laughter—she seemed to have no other kind. 'OK, so you got me there,' she said.

  'Oh, that is so fucking outrageous,' Jessica gasped, 'I assumed he was poking!'

  'I know. It is outrageous. I'm just not independent like you.'

  'Independent? What do you mean? You know I'm not rich.'

  'I don't mean in that way. I mean in the important ways.'

  This natural revelation of her vulnerability was disarming. The beautiful girl, so honest about her failings, was hard to resist. Jessica wondered if she knew it.

  Arianne shrugged. 'Look, rich boys have this kind of authority that makes you ... I don't know, it makes you feel safe!

  'Yes, it comes of being waited on, always getting the best table. A gold watch for Christmas, a ski-trip, a new car. It's totally superficial,' Jessica said. 'No offence, guys.'

  Luke wanted to tell her he wasn't given money by his parents any more.

  'Look, I know it's bullshit. Like anything, I suppose it fools you if you want it to, for as long as it can,' she said.

  Without question, Arianne was the main character in the room. The recklessness of her honesty made for compelling viewing. She risked her dignity in a way that was beyond the nerve of the others, beyond their sense of style. She pulled off high-dive spectaculars and emerged from the water absolutely herself.

  'Yes, it's all fascinating, of course, darling,' Ludo said, 'but what about that brute Dan, though? I mean, really. Really.'

  'Dan? He's a poppet.' She looked away, embarrassed for a moment by her own insincerity, because she and Dan had exchanged thirty-six angry text messages that day. He exhausted her. She didn't find him sexy any more and had to grit her teeth when he forced himself inside her. He had made a fool of himself because of her and she had already decided it was time to move on.

  Ludo sighed. 'Arianne, Dan is a meat-head who completely misunderstands everything you say. It's impossible to have a conversation with him about anything other than protein shakes or the best way to target your abs. He's not mixing in our gene pool.'

  '"Safe", though? That's what I want to talk about,' Jessica said. 'He couldn't protect you today, could he? What does "safe" mean, for fuck's sake? Don't you get bored with your meat-head?'

  'Oh, I've asked her this before. She says boredom is better than fear.'

  'That's crazy! Boredom is total alienation from what's going on around you. It's as lonely and frightening as it gets,' Jessica said. 'It must be awful to be with someone who bores you. I could never go to bed with someone who bored me. It would be less emotionally significant than masturbation.'

  'Jesus, Jessica,' Ludo said.

  She blew out a mouthful of smoke. 'What?'

  'Just ... what you said...' he told her. For a second he felt a flash of insecurity—as if a photograph had been taken when he wasn't expecting it. He wondered if she would have gone out with him anyway—if he had found her pretty enough to ask. He studied her face and thought maybe she had lost weight and the features were standing out more. Then he picked up the cover of a CD, worried that after his last comment everyone would think he was a prude in bed, which, in fact, he was.

  'You're such a romantic, Jessica,' Arianne said.

  'OK. That is definitely not something I've been called before.' She filled Arianne's glass and they smiled at each other.

  'Do you really want to sit on the floor? Come and sit up here, if you like.' Jessica got up and Arianne patted the sofa beside her. When she sat down, Arianne lay back across her lap. 'Is that OK?'

  'Yes. Yes, it's fine,' Jessica said quietly.

  For a while, the music from the film filled the room. The two boys had been used to these faintly erotic displays of female solidarity at university. But somehow this was not like the usual titillating performance of hair-plaiting and neck rubs. Conspicuously absent was the standard repertoire of mmms and oh-yeses plainly designed to convey erotic promise to the men in the room. Here instead were two women who liked each other and were engaged in some kind of private understanding. Both boys tried to think of a way to interrupt it, but could not.

  Arianne lit another cigarette and blew out the smoke above her head. The litde cloud that hung over them added to their separateness: it located them in their own atmosphere. Ludo took off the hat and dressing-gown and poured some champagne into a glass.

  Luke watched Jessica move a little to accommodate Arianne's shoulder. He felt more lost and unsure of himself and more excited than he ever had in his life. He could feel his phone going in his pocket and he knew it would be Lucy again. Nothing in the world would have made him answer it now. His intense curiosity about Arianne was tinged with horror, deep fear of what she might tell him and of just how unreachable she might turn out to be. She was plainly beyond his usual small-talk, and yet her brand of spontaneous heady intimacy was alarmingly foreign to him. He felt himself at a loss for the right words, the right approach to conversation. He wanted to ask her something about herself, but instead he said, 'Arianne, you seem to have a seriously low opinion of men.'

  She held out her hand to Ludo for the bottle of champagne. 'The doctor said not to drink, didn't she? Did she? Are we worried?'

  'No, we're not worried. We've all done far worse and survived. Hey—what's the matter with us men, though? Why the low opinion?' Ludo said.

  'Oh, I'm just a silly billy,' Arianne giggled. Then she smiled softly at Luke and held his gaze for a second, 'so never mind what I think.'

  It was an end of all conversation, but it seemed to Luke that it had been cut short, that he had been fobbed off in some way and was expected not to notice. He felt indignant, but he was also sufficiently concerned that he might not have understood a single thing this girl had said to stay quiet. Instead, he hoped he looked as good in his red T-shirt as Lucy always said, and with the light from the TV noticeably modelling his biceps, he suspected he probably did.

  They all concentrated on smoking joints and watching the trite happy ending of the film. Luke handed out the boxes of Chinese takeaway, some plates and cutlery and the room was filled with the smell of hot and sour soup and fried noodles. They listened to Ludo crunching the cashew nuts in his sauce. The couple in the film had their child. The father stood holding the newborn baby by the window of the hospital, gazing down on the frenzy of New York. It was autu
mn. The music was strong, passionate, resolved.

  By three a.m. they had all fallen asleep—except Luke. He was feeling uneasy. He got up and walked around his flat, leaving the others sprawled on sofa cushions and beanbags, the blue planet of the TV flickering over them.

  First he went into his kitchen and opened the fridge. He took a long look at all the jars and beautiful packages, the things he threw out and repurchased regularly. He never ate in but he liked to have a full fridge. He liked it full of tropical fruit, papaya, pineapple, kiwi, and exotic continental deli items, gravadlax, caper-berries, and Serrano ham. He adored that collective expensive smell.

  What he looked for unconsciously when he opened the door of his fridge was travel, or rather transportation of a more intimate kind. His fridge contained the essence of his aspirations—props from the photographic images that arrived in his mind when he wondered about his lifestyle and whether he fulfilled its criteria. His fridge helped him arrive at himself.

  He ran his fingers over the buttons on the microwave as he walked towards the centrepiece of the kitchen, the eight-burner gas hob, which he had never turned on. Not even to light a cigarette. He had bought it because of the fabulous dinner-party photograph in the brochure. He had seen himself in there, flame-grilling lamb, laughing girls in the background holding oversized glasses of Cab Sauv. But there was never the time: time to shop, to call people, to reschedule because of unforeseen circumstances.

  What did he spend all his time doing? Working, travelling across the city, absorbing the delays and the jams and the cancellations into the tension he stored between his shoulder-blades. He checked email; he missed calls and listened to messages on his mobile phone. There were friends he had not seen for a year.

  Only two years before, days had seemed long, resilient to failures of planning, flirtatiously responsive to unplanned gestures. Time had been mysterious and plentiful, a natural resource. He had splashed around in it. But now it seemed to be an idea in his own mind. He himself decided its properties, its texture; whether he experienced it in the surreal little jerks of phone calls and meetings, as office quanta, or in undulating lunar stretches in front of his computer at the weekend, his mouth chewing fuel when his alarm reminded it to. This was a new sense of responsibility, of artistic control. But he did not want time to feel like art, he wanted it to feel like science.

  He studied the dates on a couple of jars of cornichons, some sun-dried tomatoes, olives stuffed with almonds. They were beautiful glass jars: fantastic packaging. He threw them into the big, cylindrical silver bin, feeling blasphemous.

  He went into his bedroom and opened his wardrobe. He looked at the racks of shoes he never wore, the casualwear he was never casual enough for. If he was honest, all he really made use of was the row of work shirts neatly ironed by his cleaning lady. And yet he regularly ordered sweatshirts and chunky sweaters online—like posthumously acquired souvenirs of his leisurely early twenties. Just three years before he had not needed to plan a four-day skitrip six months in advance. He would have crammed those chunky sweaters into an overnight bag, chucked in some Rizla, a bottle of vodka—and then off.

  Now the days passed quickly between lifting off the duvet and folding the duvet over himself again. He was beginning to see why people wanted a family. You could want a family solely because it was something that wouldn't go off or go out of fashion before you had time to notice it.

  He ran his hands over the shelf of T-shirts and pulled out one that he had worn during his gap-year. It had a picture of a spliff on the front. He remembered standing under the clock at Waterloo, while he waited for his father to collect him, holding his surfboard, vowing never to shave off his beard, never to get stuck in a normal job. Ludo laughed about this lost idealism, but he, like most of his friends, was still embarrassed to have proved so ordinary, and quickly changed the subject if ever it came up.

  But he did not really think for a moment that he could have acted differently. How else could you afford to live in London, be a member of a good gym, have a decent car? He wondered why his sister, Sophie, still dreamt of going back to India, to the places she had visited at eighteen. Surely they would not be the same now. Backpacking was dirty, European hotels were nice; these were axioms of adult reasoning.

  But he had still not shaken off the belief that Sophie's excellent grades, her grade-eight violin and piano, meant she had a firmer grip on reality than he did. Where he suspected her of sentimentality or nostalgia, he found his judgement encroached on by a sense that he might simply have missed the point. She was always saying that to him, after all: 'You're missing the point, Lulu. You're not hearing what I'm telling you. You hear cliches.'

  Normally, having remembered this crushing observation, he would have been tempted to brood, but just then his mind could not stay still: it felt pursued and aggravated. He slapped his hand against his forehead and wondered if he had ever actually felt physical desire before, because this, what he felt now, was close to humiliating. Again and again he thought of going into the sitting room, waking Arianne and offering her his car, his salary, anything, if she would let him take off her clothes—just her jeans, even — and run his mouth up between her legs. It didn't matter if she did anything to him really—not right away. First he just wanted to kneel down in front of the sofa with the weight of those beautiful legs over his shoulders, those thighs cushioning his cheeks, his lips and tongue lost to her taste and smell—and to watch her face, to watch what he could do to her face.

  But why on earth would she let him? And why had he never wanted to do this to Lucy?

  He looked at the T-shirt in his hands, unsure how long it had been since he had touched it. Two years? We don't have time to touch the things we own, he thought. And then he felt close to tears.

  'Hey? Is it making you feel funny, too?' Arianne said. She was leaning on the wall by the doorway. 'The painkillers are making me feel funny. Maybe it's because of the champagne. She said not to drink, didn't she—the doctor?'

  He imagined she had caught him looking through her clothes, rather than his own, and hurriedly put back the incriminating T-shirt. 'What is it? Do you feel sick?' he said.

  'Sick? No—no. Not that kind of funny...' It was never 'that kind of funny' with her. She could profoundly understate herself at the least expected moment. She used words associated with mild physical sensation to describe deep emotional change.

  'Does your head hurt?'

  'No ... not that kind of funny at all. No, it was just ... I dreamt I saw God.' She walked over to his bed and climbed on to it.

  He felt this intimate contact in his own body. 'That—that's pretty full on,' he said.

  She pulled a pillow half-way down the mattress and rested her head on it. But almost immediately she sat up again, drawing her legs under her with a jolt. 'I'll tell you about it if you like. Want to know about God?'

  'Um—OK.'

  'Well, it was the whole "bright light" thing people talk about,' she said. 'You know? On talk-shows or whatever, where people say things like that.'

  He nodded.

  'But it wasn't a nice "bright light". It was this burning, devouring light like a nuclear explosion and I knew if I looked I'd go blind. It was like my skin would blister from the exposure. You'd get cancer instantly if you got near it—your cells would all die. It was like being killed with light—only I knew I was already dying or I wouldn't be allowed to see it.' She looked at him, horrified. 'It makes no sense,' she said.

  Then she started smiling and shaking her head as if she couldn't believe how silly she was—and then she burst into tears. They were long sobs, painful to listen to. She covered her face and he went over and put his arms round her—instinctively at first, feeling only a desire to stop a girl crying. 'Hey, hey—you're not dying. Nothing's going to kill you,' he said.

  'I just get so scared ...'

  'I know, I know...' he said. He knew.

  'So incredibly scared.'

  'Yes, I know, I know... H
ey, I know, I know...'

  But his words quickly became a meaningless repetition, their delicate sincerity heavied out by lust. Moments later he found himself kissing her salty mouth—or was she kissing his?

  Her ribcage jerked with her sharp, convulsive breaths. Again, according to the artist's design, her body was a kind of conundrum. The adult muscular legs were at war with the fragility of her upper body. Physically, Arianne seemed to be rising above herself, leaving the earthly legs behind, becoming less worldly with every inch she grew towards the sky.

  A police car passed under the window, its siren going, and Luke wished it would be quiet, just shut up, in case it broke the spell and she told him to get off. At that very moment she pulled away from him and looked him fiercely in the eye.

  With a plummeting heart, he began to prepare an apology. But the next thing he knew she was undoing her shirt, pushing his fingers softly into her bra and whispering, 'So, are you going to make me feel better, Luke?'

  Perhaps suffering always precedes style, both in its origins within a personality and in each of its subsequent manifestations. Without pain behind it, strength of personality has no depth, no poignant darkness by which it is thrown into luminous relief.

  Luke had never known anyone so desolate or so powerful by turns. Nor had he ever been subject to an aesthetic instinct by which, occasionally, even his own dominance seemed somehow to have been requested. Having raised a sceptical eyebrow at him, Arianne suddenly became a feast of softness and pliancy: she let the strap of her bra submit to his fingers in one joyous burst and he remembered nectarines, which Sophie had picked for them all as a surprise in Portugal. She had come running in from the garden in her sundress, giggling, her skirt full of something, and sent three million nectarines bouncing and rolling all over the lunch table.

  With amazement he looked down at the pile of clothes and then at the hot expanse of femininity, a full-bodied and slightly terrifying responsibility, in his arms.

  Arianne sat up smiling gently and turned him over. Her face lowered towards him until it was all dark and smelt only of her perfume and her sweat and the wine on her breath. She brought about a total eclipse—then she popped his jeans undone with a practised flick. Her hot palms pressed his wrists back into the duvet, and Luke thought quite clearly that this, right now, was all the French girls in Cap d'Antibes that he could possibly ever have wanted.