Lurid & Cute (10 page)

whose structure reveals a universal sadness

And sure, I said to Wyman, my most spiritual friend, as we smoked some preliminary chemicals in preparation for a night out, later on in this account, when I was nostalgic for such simple worries, I know that in human history the majority of sadness belongs to the dependent women. I know that the breakdowns have always been those of the bedridden woman – leaving the lunch table in hysterics, then setting up church bazaars and everyone pitying them. I totally know this but also now, I tried to argue, I knew what they knew. Me too I was the victim of my economic circumstances! I was like the heroine in the telenovelas. I was the woman cheating on her husband with her black gardener, and taking Valium or other pills while reading horoscopes in the tabloids. I don't mean those examples are the only other examples of sadness in human history. In the annals of the Song Dynasty I'm sure there were husbands and wives who were also perplexed by their leisure time. I just mean that when you have this vastness at your disposal then it's only natural to feel let's say a little hopeless or unhappy even if, having said that, I can do the next part of the interview myself, as something like:
But then what do you expect, kid, when you leave your place of employment?
I know this is the one-dollar question.
You also wanted meetings with your PA? You wanted to make art, sure, but also have a heavy schedule of appointments?
Sure, I understood. But still, it was upsetting. Life! I wanted life! And really, was this so unusual? More and more I was convinced that the most urgent task, in every megalopolis, was how to use your time – how, in other words, will you reveal it as grander than it seems? It's so easy to know what Beauty looks like in a statue or a painting, but what does it look like in a life? Me, I ask this question all the time and at least that's an occupation like any other. Lethargy, I think, is a difficult accusation. For surely it's possible to argue that the Zen master in his padded cell is doing more work than you. And if it is, well, sometimes so was I. I was very busy with my reflections –

the lost art of happiness

– like in particular one conversation with my friend Tiffany, who taught at the university, when she berated me for even hinting at the wish for other lives.
You ask for this and then you hate us for it? Is that it?
This was basically Tiffany's argument.
You want to be looked after and have this wife who brings home the roubles and rupees and then it makes you also feel aggrieved?
Well, maybe, snooks, she was basically adding, as she looked at me in scorn, you could just grow up for a moment. I totally did see the justice of how she was arguing but also I really did not, for the values by which she seemed to be judging were both unimpeachable and not my own. In many ways I feel let down by my friends. It's like that film which Tiffany loves, where the black and white people begin an affair and then go back to their husbands and wives. Why, she once said to me, when I was not at all talking about this, should a possible future happiness be worth more than the present happiness of two people? And I wanted to assert that I really could not understand it. About happiness I am often wrong but at least I would like to believe it is the only question. You want what, she then added – a life without regret, is that it?

ME

If I have a regret, it's that coffee with condensed milk in the Vietnamese way is not something you can have every day, because it really does fuck up your diet goals. If I have a regret then that would be it.

TIFFANY

Is like you're tyrannised, boo, by this fear of missing out.

She said it with this heavy wistfulness, as if just looking at me from far away and out of reach, an hauteur which I liked to think was possibly unjustified. In my defence I could imagine surely another perspective. I mean:
lowdown, clumsy, sly, underhanded
– can these not be values too, if happiness is at stake? And perhaps, OK, I therefore conceded to Wyman, my kind of listless paralysed atmosphere more usually happens in dictatorships and other totalitarian states, that's where moods like mine tend to breed most colourfully, among the presidential palacios and tear gas and lampadas – but I would say that paralysed states can also happen in a number of other guises … There can be this sense of unreality, I said, while Wyman nodded – although he may not have been concentrating, it's never easy to tell with anyone in any conversation – if things have just come to a gentle halt, like at the quietest country train station in the humid afternoon. Wyman, can you not feel this too? I'm only drawing a parallel, but I think in many ways my plight is similar to a lawyer or accountant from a bankrupt state who leaves everything to come and run a grocery store in a giant and clean city. The new identity is a shock, definitely, and in some ways a humiliation, but also it means that as you walk through the streets you do feel that you are walking in disguise, with all the hidden powers that a disguise might confer. You suddenly see meaning leaking everywhere – the way you might come back to some glamorous hotel in the late morning to see the used towels and sheets in formless damp piles in the otherwise perfect corridors.

— Leaking? said Wyman.

— It began with the orgy, I said.

— The orgy? said Wyman.

— I never told you about the orgy? I said.

— Apparently no, said Wyman.

— So settle down, I said. — You got a beer? Ensconce yourself.

 

THE ORGY

a pastel atmosphere interrupted by a party

Gently it began like every other party, with ice cream and accordions and dubstep and whatever other accessory people felt would make them happy. From the corner of the room I observed with Candy some psychedelic band. If I did have any feelings of foreboding, like some extra sense that even now the black mamba was descending on me with its gooey fangs, those feelings were just unwinding out of sight – like those backdrops of lakes and fields in the ancient brothels that some viejo would wind by hand to give the loving couple the illusion of a wagon-lit.

— Hey, there's Epstein, said Candy.

— Epstein? I said.

— Hey, that's Romy, said Candy.

— Romy? I said.

— I told you, said Candy.

— Told me what? I said.

Of course I should have expected it, given how small the cast list is. Everyone in this account is a friend, really. I know them all. It's like a group portrait or maybe more precisely a self-portrait with models. That's how picayune this picaresque is and I think it's also the most truthful. Because it's not so strange, this smallness of cast list. Everyone in general knows everyone you know, or at least in this landscape it can seem so.

in which melancholy revelations occur

And therefore I should not have been so amazed to see Romy engaged in amorous and intimate conversation with some beatnik schlub called Epstein, a beatnik schlub I knew as one of Candy's friends from her days out of university in anarchist study groups. It was just, it was still a shock, after all, because I only had a very short time in which to cope with the knowledge impressed on me by their general pose and vibe that in some way they were a couple or at least loosely together – but that is often how a social existence works, that very quickly you are forced to absorb distressing information. Yes, there Romy was, talking biopolitics or some other chic topic with Epstein, of all our beatnik friends the most beatnik, who was currently dressed in some exaggerated cardigan, while Romy herself was in her usual outsize glasses and boxing boots. For Romy had this thing that she was one of those people whose erotic allure is not in doubt but also not part of the immediate effect, like she went to such lengths to disguise her beauty – the dark blondeness of her hair, the way she had soft freckles all over her face, as if a tracing had been laid over her skin – that it now occurs to me if perhaps such a disguise was in fact a grander form of vanity, all along. Each of her efforts to disguise her beauty only served to make it more poignant. Like her hair would be just secured with a felt-tip pen in a lazed-out bun, it was that kind of drawly thing. She waved me over because she wanted to say hello and so I wandered to her, leaving Candy to investigate the range of drinks available, while feeling a little frustrated at myself because evidently, even though I was trying not to show it, a question or enquiry was still there in my gaze, because Epstein immediately began as if he needed to explain things:

— Yeah so we've been seeing each other for a while now, he said.

I wanted very much to look at Romy but I knew that was not allowed, for that would indicate too quickly a manic need for explanation, and in public I had no right to such explanation, although also I knew that if I were not to look at her at all then it would be in some way a sign as well, for this is how life is, you emit a sign by either doing or not doing something, there is no neutral space.

— I hear, said Epstein, — you helped this lady out.

— How so? I said, or somesuch dumbass phrase.

— When she had that thing, he said. — It's cool you could be there for her. In the hospital.

— Oh, yeah, I said.

— I called him that morning, said Romy.

— Naturally you had to get back to Candy, said Epstein.

— Naturally, I said.

I really did need to examine him further but also I needed to examine Romy, too, and it was difficult, this way of being, to be as insouciant as possible. I was trying to work out if this meant that she had been with Epstein even when we woke up in that hotel, and then afterwards, throughout all the correspondence and assignations of our tense and no more consummated affair – although of course she had no obligation to tell me, just as I had no right to assume that she would not be seeing anyone else at all. But in retrospect it therefore coloured the whole imbroglio and I did not know how I felt, in the way you might feel if you send a naked photo of yourself to a boy and then discover later that you sent it just as his girlfriend arrived for a night in with pizza and raki. Even if the present moment was pleasure, when it turns out to have been based on false assumptions that pleasure will just disappear whenever you think about it in your memory.

that prove the endlessness of receding selves

But then, this was just the universal problem. A person is a little sequence or bundle and you never see all of their aspects. With those you love, however, it's especially unnerving because they at least are the ones where you decide you do want to know them all, even if really it is impossible, and it makes people act quite strangely or unforgivably, or perhaps more precisely makes you realise how strangely people do act, all the time, it's just that it's only those you love who are scrutinised with the appropriate attention. And yet also I realised that if I was feeling this sense of estrangement and receding selves, as in some funhouse mirror, then Epstein was surely feeling it more. If he could have spoken to me in a private booth I knew how he would have been feeling. He would have wanted to subject me to an inquisition.
Where were you that night? What did you do? How can I trust you?
When of course he couldn't trust me and he knew that very well. He was suddenly discovering that he couldn't trust anyone, or at least he was perhaps not discovering this fact for the first time in his life, since he was surely old enough for this knowledge to have been forced on him at least once or twice before, but perhaps he had thought that with Romy never again would this sadness of hidden selves be revealed to him, but here however he now was, and I thought I could observe a certain exhaustion in his eyes at having to once again accept this difficult knowledge – and it made me sad. I mean, I was sad to be present at his moment of disillusion, or more precisely I was sad to be the agent of such disillusion, since mostly I think illusions are to be cherished and adored. But since always I am keen to be as noble as possible, when Epstein was telling me how grateful he was I did not pause, I accepted his praise as graciously as possible. These are the ways in which one has to behave to one's friends and acquaintances. I did it quickly, though, because I did doubt my ability to continue such a comedy indefinitely. Then I excused myself very gently and went back to my beloved wife.

& the dangers of every party

Everyone goes to a lot of parties, which must mean that mostly no one thinks there is anything wrong with that. Whereas of course the motives for ever leaving a house and entering society are often flawed or even dangerous – such as the desire to sleep with someone else, or to complete a sociological survey, like see inside a house or meet people you might never usually meet in the course of an average day, which was why I could sometimes be found in the houses of my richer friends, at their birthday parties in restaurants or salons with cinema producers and gallerists, even if the next day I would feel guilty and ashamed for my sudden love of social climbing, but also other seemingly minuscule motives like boredom or the request of a friend, because even such seemingly innocuous motives begged the basic question – that really you should not be having friends at all, you should only be accessing your own solitude and delinquency, and never leaving the seclusion of your room. How blithely do we enter these parties! Because it really is dangerous, to enter society, especially when you think of the possible danger to your various attachments. Everyone thinks that there is only one person in the world for them, this is how they are told to operate, and I suppose in general it works very well, whereas of course the truth is that there are many people whom you could find as charming as possible, not just sadly scattered at distant points around the globe but on every street you walk down, it's probably true of nearly everyone you have a conversation with – which is therefore why those couples who talk with wonder about the extraordinary sequences of chance events that unbelievably have brought them together are sadly comically wrong, I mean they are not taking into account how many people they could have fallen in love with at the same time, or before that, or could in the future, too. Perhaps people know this, after all. Perhaps that's why so few conversations do ever happen, we try very hard to avoid ever reaching the point of conversation with another person, usually contenting ourselves with a quick greeting and negotiation, and also why if indeed a conversation does occur it has to be so guarded with politesse and business skills, with indirection and guarded thoughts – precisely to avoid knowing the other person at all and therefore inevitably falling in love.