Al's Well Read online

  “I’ll have to call you back.”

  “They just walk into the room?”

  “On the button.”

  “Oh, you English. So goddamn inhibited! You know, right, you can’t call me back?”

  “I do know, yes.”

  “You think they’ll be gone in half-an-hour?”

  “Oh, certainly, I’d think.”

  “If I call you back in half-an-hour, will you have thought of some real dirty things to say to me?”

  “I’ll give it my very best shot.”

  “That wasn’t one of them, right?”

  “Right.”

  “What do you say in England? ‘Toodle-oo?’”

  “Not a lot recently.”

  “Toodle-oo.”

  “Pip-pip.”

  +++

  “Michael’s best friend? Was I? I don’t know about that. That’s a phrase I tend to associate with children. Does one have ‘best friends’ over the age of twenty? He was a good friend of mine, Michael. That certainly. There were, I suspect, things he confided in me that he had told no-one else. He didn’t, I don’t think, find the company of men easy.

  “Do you think … Would you mind awfully if we did the photos first, sort of thing? It’s silly, I know. An old man’s vanity, if you will, but I’m desperately camera shy. And not, between you and me, just camera shy, shy generally. I know I don’t give that impression. Nevertheless … What we’ve got to talk about, you and I … Well, the gatepost’s fine, of course, but – if it’s all the same to you – I’d really rather not the photographer. Nothing personal, old chap. Rien de … Oh, you understand, that’s good.

  “It’s Sheridan Gillett, by the way: double ‘l’, double ‘t’, but with no ‘e’ at the end. Only your letter to me, it did have an ‘e’ at the end.

  “Okay, all done?

  “We’ll just adjourn inside then, shall we? No, no, after you. Please after you. There, now. Where was I? Oh yes.

  “His eye didn’t rove, Michael’s, so much as gallivant. Even when Eva was alive. And a year or so after she died, there was a period when he thought a long-term affair was one which saw the week out. Not that he was bed-hopping, not exactly. I’m no psychiatrist, of course. But it was all, I suspect, entwined in the grief process or whatever. And thus probably entirely predictable.

  “I’m talking now … what? … two or three years after she’d died. Looking on it with hindsight, I think probably he was still trying to find her. Eva, I mean. Just as soon as he realised that the present ‘amour’ was not Eva, Mike, his eye started to rove – started, sorry, to gallivant – for the next Eva-alike. It wasn’t that he was after, I don’t think, another wife, another partner, not even another lover (not what we’d understand by any of those words), it was that he was after a clone, a doppelganger sort of thing, another Eva.

  “The irony was, of course, that even if he had met that person – even if, for goodness’ sake, Eva had returned to life and he’d met her – he would still have rejected her. Because it was not even Eva that he was searching for, but an Eva of his fantasy, an Eva which was no more Eva than Princess Diana was Cinderella.

  “He talked to me about his girl-friends. Not about his conquests, not in that sort of way. He wasn’t a scalp-on-the-bedpost-notcher. Almost to the contrary. For a man, he was almost reticent about that aspect of his life. I mean, all that locker-room banter, the stag-party fantasies … that just wasn’t Michael.

  “He wasn’t a sex junkie, but a love one. Michael with a woman … Well, first off, he’d need to convince himself it wasn’t just her body he was after. And then, that this was it: the big one. The relationship, the partner who would escort him off this mortal coil.

  “At one level, of course he was in love with love. But, as with Eva, it wasn’t with ‘love’ that he was in love, but with the fantasy of love. There was a part of this fifty plus man still five years’ old – as, I suspect, there’d been a part of the five-year-old Michael who was already fifty. I suppose all of us are paradoxical to a degree. But, in Michael’s case, paradox seemed to be almost the cornerstone of his personality.

  “He loved women – I mean, really loved them.

  “No.

  “Wrong. Thinking about it.

  “No, it wasn’t women that Michael loved, but Woman. Of course. And not Woman the gender, but Woman the ideal. Woman that embodied, oh I don’t know, Eve and the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa and Fanny Hill – Carmen, too, and Cleopatra … the myth of Woman, not her reality.

  “But with Petrova it was different. (Trove, I’m sure you know, is just the abbreviation of Petrova. Michael always called her Trove. He enjoyed the association it had with ‘treasure’. Fond though I was of her, for the same reason, I tended always to call her Petrova. And it was fond of her that I was, not in any way enamoured. I think I saw her for what she was. Which wasn’t unpleasant, but equally wasn’t flawless.)

  “It’s hard to explain, to quantify how it was different – for Mike, I mean, with Petrova –, but it was. Different. There was a recognition that it was fantasy, I think. I think, on both their sides. By which I mean, I think he recognised that for her too part of his attraction was the fantasy of him, that (because she was married) there was no real possibility of a real ‘them’. And that therefore their only reality – the only reality within which ‘they’ could exist – was in fantasy. It validated the fantasy, almost. It made the fantasy real. It grounded it.

  “He wasn’t even happy about it, not to begin with, Michael, the whole affair. He was … What was he? … Confused, I’d say. Perhaps even bewildered. ‘Bewitched, bothered and bewildered’, even – like the song. But not in a happy, up-tempo, song-like way. In a … More in the way, now I think about it, of the words rather than the music. There’s nothing too jolly, is there, about being bewitched or bothered or bewildered?

  “None of us could have guessed, though, what would happen. We wouldn’t even have come close. As another friend of mine is fond of saying: ‘The only thing we can know for certain about our future is that it will never be how we imagine it.’

  “My predictions for their future couldn’t have been wronger. For one thing, my first prediction was that there wasn’t one, a future. I mean, how much wronger can you get?”

  +++

  Maison d’arrêt de Toulouse-Seysses, 28th February 06

  Dear Dad:

  You’ve got to get me out of here, Dad. You’ve no idea what it’s like. You still buddies with Congressman Henson? Couldn’t you call him, Dad? He must be able to apply some kind of pressure on someone who can apply some kind of pressure on someone here. The consul has been to see me. But he was useless, Dad. Hopeless.

  Dad, you owe me. I’ve never referred before to our ‘marker’, but now I’m calling it in. Dad, help me. PLEASE.

  Your loving son – Al

  +++

  “They gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you talk?”

  “Is it possible, Trove, to see you before Sunday?”

  “No.”

  “Just see you, I’m talking about.”

  “You’re ‘just see’ing me on Sunday.”

  “I’d also like to ‘just see’ you too before then.”

  “Still no.”

  “Right.”

  “Don’t be difficult.”

  “I just thought …”

  “It’s not possible, Mike.”

  “Right.”

  “This is another compliment.”

  “Okay.”

  “If I could see you before Sunday, Mike, I would see you before Sunday.”

  “Right.”

  “If it’d been possible – is what I’m saying – I’d have arranged up front to see you before next Sunday.”

  “I understand.”

  “You’re stiff-upper-lipping on me, Mike.”

  “It’s not the upper lip that’s stiff.”

  “This is British dirty talk, right?”

  “I’m not to
o practised, I’m afraid. We tend not to talk too dirty, us Brits.”

  “What a waste, Mike, of a sexy accent.”

  “It’s always other people who have accents.”

  “When I need homilies, hon, I’ll go to a book of quotations.”

  “Here’s another homily, I’m afraid. Even a homely homily, Trove.”

  “Homely homily?”

  “An extremely homely homily.”

  “Jeez!”

  “There are speakers, Trove, and there are doers.”

  “‘Barefoot in the Park’, right?”

  “If you say so.”

  “I know I’m right.”

  “Whilst some talk dirty, others do dirty.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “It was watchers and doers. Now I think about it. ‘Barefoot in the Park’. Watchers and doers. ‘The doers do whilst the watchers watch the doers do.’ Something like that.”

  “Right.”

  “So, you do dirty, huh?”

  “Better than I talk it.”

  “Would that be, as in do the dirty?”

  “You’re playing with words, Trove.”

  “Only for want of anything else to play with.”

  “I’ll see you on Sunday.”

  “You got to go?”

  “I got to go.”

  “Okay.”

  “See you Sunday.”

  “Bye.”

  +++

  I didn’t have to go at all. Well, I did, actually, but not for ‘I’ve got to go’ reasons. I suddenly knew (that was the truth of it), I suddenly knew – suddenly, as in the ‘suddenly’ of from one second to another – I had to break it off. Whatever ‘it’ was. I had to break it off, in fact, before it even became ‘it’.

  And I knew I had to do it because even the prospect of that was breaking my heart.

  Chapter 3

  “I was plucking petals off of a flower. Kind of dumb, you’re right. Oh, you didn’t need to say anything, I could see it in your eyes. In your what-kind-of-a-sad-woman-is-this? eyes. Everyone’s eyes are expressive. Yours, though, yours are … I was going to say ‘Expressionist’, but then I thought, shoot, I really don’t know what ‘Expressionist’ means.

  “I’d thought about a dahlia. But dahlias are kinda expensive, you know. Real expensive, in fact, just right at that moment. And, God knows why, but there don’t seem to be too many daisies round these parts. Not the kind, ‘least, you make daisy-chains from. So, I got a bunch of those, you know, big daisies, you know the ones I mean, the bedraggled big ones. That, right, look a bit like dahlias. Haggled the man down from three euros to one euro fifty. It was three a bunch and I only wanted one, for Christ’s sake. Jeez!

  “Oh, I wasn’t plucking for ‘he-loves-me; he-loves-me-not’ reasons. I knew he didn’t love me. There was no question about that. Nor I him. Well, he did love me. ‘Course he did. And I loved him. But loved each other as friends. Good friends, ‘course, bosom buddies, in fact. Friends that’d do anything for each other sort of deal, that’d always be there for each other. And I do mean ‘always’. But friends all the same. Not love in the weak-at-the-knees kind of way. Weak-at-the-knees? Weak-in-the-head, more like.

  “It wasn’t even ‘he-likes-me; he-likes-me-not’. I never doubted he liked me. But I knew something in him had changed. He wasn’t looking at me in the same way. Eyes again, you see? See, I always notice eyes. I can always hear what eyes are trying to tell me.

  “I’ve always wondered, childhood sweethearts, that kind of deal … I mean, you hear about it, don’t you, all the time? Kids who’ve grown up next door to each other, gone out together, that whole scene. There has to be a time, doesn’t there? – a moment, it has to be –, not when they start looking at each other in a different way, but when they realise they’re looking another way at that person. And when that other person is looking differently at them.

  “I guess something like that’s also got to happen with incest. I mean, there has to be that one moment, doesn’t there? That defining moment, I guess it is. Shit! So sorry. Wandering again. Off the point. Again.

  “What was I talking about? Dahlia, that’s it, the dahlia. No, the daisy. Jeez, my frigging brain. The daisy. Dai-sy. Yeah. No, like I said, it wasn’t any of those ‘does-he; doesn’t-he?’ sort of things. It was much more ‘do-I; don’t I?’.

  “Specifically, do I turn up on Sunday? Or don’t I?”

  “Sunday, see, I thought of as the point-of-no-return. Oh, I know what I said. It was just to see him again. Sort out the details, all that. But I figured if I turned up on Sunday, I might as well book the hotel room in advance, come dressed in the negligée. I’ve never been a teaser. Not even in my teens. I could never stand it. I hated it when I saw my friends at it. I was accused of it once. Unfairly, I might add. I’d rather have been accused, I don’t know, of murder or something. Certainly of bank-robbery. God, the times when I was younger I’ve ended up in bed with someone just because I thought I’d passed the point of tease return! It was a kind of self-inflicted date-rape, now I think about it. Shit, yes, thinking about it, that’s exactly what it was.

  “It’s the folly of youth, I guess.”

  “No.”

  “Folly of youth be damned! Know what it is, the folly of youth? The folly of youth is that youth thinks their screw-ups are the folly of youth. Youth thinks that you get doddery and you get wrinkles and you get wise all at the same time. All as a matter of aging course, as a law of Nature or something, nothing you can do about it sort of deal. And you may get wrinkles, and you certainly get doddery, but wise …?

  “My aging has taught me squat. Really – ‘cept, maybe, how to get cranky and intolerant of the youth that think their follies are the follies of youth. Meanwhile, back at the point … Sorry, you’re quite right to frown at me like that. Sorry.

  “Meanwhile, like I said, back at the point … Which was? Oh, yes. One of very few things I have learnt … learnt on my journey to decrepitude … is to pull back way before I’m ever in a position where I think a man might even think I’m teasing. Know what I’m saying? ‘Course you do. Any woman over fifteen knows what I’m saying. Lawyers, I take it, do have sex lives. It’s not all of it vicarious, I hope, getting your jollies third-degreeing others about their sex lives. God, I hope, honey, that’s not how it is. You’re smiling. I’ll take that as a good sign. Now you’re blushing. A lawyer blush? That has to be a first.

  “Where was I? Point of no return, right. I reckoned that was Sunday.

  “If I turned up on Sunday, metaphorically speaking, I had to do so with my knickers … God, I love that word ‘knickers’ … with my knickers off. I’d organised myself a meeting for later on that same Sunday. Don’t ask me why. It seemed like a good idea at the time, a sensible idea. A kind of ‘just in case’ idea. In case of what, I didn’t know. I suppose, if you’re free-falling from thirty thousand feet any shred of cloth provides some kind of comfort. I mean, a handkerchief may not be a parachute, but it is … something … a bit of cloth you can hold above your head.

  “Know what, though? As I sat shredding that poor daisy, what I realised, I realised, my knickers, they were already off.

  “And I was … well, I guess the only way to put it, is: I was leaking.”

  +++

  “No, you’re wrong: Petrova wasn’t exerting any pressure. Quite the contrary. Any pressure that was being applied was being applied by Michael on Michael.

  “He called me every day that week. And every day, he was excited, and excitable. Quick to anger. On the Saturday – the Saturday before the Sunday I’m talking about – he phoned again. I told you he was paradoxical. Having been excited all week, now he was calm … icy calm. Disconcertingly calm, even. So calm I knew he was involved in a tempest. I didn’t know what about. Of passion, it could have been. Or guilt. Or a hundred other emotions, or a cocktail of them. Maybe of all the emotions there are.

  “Michael would get very angry over little things – the sl
ights of petty officials, surliness in hotels, at airports. But when momentous things were happening to him, he became measured, almost ponderous. How can I explain this? If a gust of wind, for instance, turned his umbrella inside out, he’d throw a fit. Caught in a hurricane, however, like as not he’d start quoting Shelley or Keats or whoever it was wrote, ‘Ode to the West Wind’.

  “He was going to stop it, he told me. Calmly. The whole thing was ridiculous, absurd. He’d known her for years, he told me. She’d played Eliza to his Professor Higgins, Anna to his King of Siam. They belonged, both of them, to the local amdram: the ‘Toulouse Troupers’, they’re rather naffly called. They’d even had the occasional stage-kiss together. ‘Shadowlands’, I think was one play he mentioned. He mentioned a couple of others.

  “He enjoyed her company. He loved her company. The fling they’d have would last for what? A few weeks? Perhaps even a few months. And it would erode, maybe even erase, the friendship of a decade.

  “He was clear. Cool, calm and collected. Certain. He’d try to spare her feelings. But a small hurt now would prevent a giant hurt later. It was a vaccination: a pinprick to obviate a catastrophe.

  “And then he started to talk about something else entirely. His son, I think. That’s right. Not even about his soon-to-be grandchild. (He was, as you probably know, going back to England so that he could enjoy with his soon-to-be grandchild the relationship he felt he’d never had with his son.) Of all things, he talked about his son’s new job. His son worked freelance, for God’s sake. So a new job wasn’t something new or newsworthy. It was a ruse, no more. It was telling me that the jack of Trove was firmly back in its box, and that therefore life could go on. And should go on. Normal service had been resumed.

  “It was a long chat. Over half-an-hour I’d think. And we spoke about Trove for … maybe five minutes. Perhaps even less. His tone invited no discussion, you see. He wasn’t seeking advice, that tone told you. He was imparting knowledge of a decision. ‘Course that tone always has about it the ring of ‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much’. But it’s difficult, even knowing that, to override it.

  “It’s the teenage girl, isn’t it?, who’s decided to dye her hair blue, or the adolescent fifty-year-old determined to buy a sports’ car. They know they can be talked out of it, there’s a part of them which even wants to be talked out of it, so they bark it at you in such a way that they can’t be. It’s almost as if your silence or your reticence is their permission to go ahead – as if, in other words, your lack of sanction is their sanction. An absurd language, English, no? Is there any other where the same word is its own antonym?