Lurid & Cute (14 page)

delicate to maintain

And so while I continued my baroque investigations with Candy, I wanted to send messages to Romy so that she would feel loved and not abandoned by me – but of course I needed to do such things with assiduous care to prevent Candy from any discovery – and so I would rouse myself late at night, refusing the exhaustion, then enter the bathroom and with the rain around me or the small clouds being purple or black sit there with the iPad warm on my warm thighs, and type slow messages. It was like I was trying to construct a tunnel from my room to hers, like up above us were the usual pedestrians in the green sunlight while down below there I was, blindly tunnelling and making my presence felt. It was important that Romy should know that definitely I cared for her, that my desire for her was no idle lust or passing whim. The problem was that the more messages I sent the more I also thought that I was possibly in love with her and therefore I began to worry about how I might preserve our equilibrium, the perfect equilibrium in which no one endangers the other's safety. The equilibrium depended on only a certain kind of communication, and we were, I thought, in danger of disturbing it by these sudden moments of lyrical desperation.
Can this last?
she would write.
Can something last when it becomes so complicated? Do we even want that?
Or roughly words like that. And because always it's important to reassure people if they have done something that makes them vulnerable, such as offering you a worry or anxiety that's dependent on you, I would respond not with the utopian upbeatness I preferred but with similarly fervent observations, and so I would say:
Where are you, Romy, in this night? I look at this screen and want to see your face
– but the problem with this is that as soon as you do that, as soon as you write such sentences, in that tone, you are entering a new realm of trust and also desire. It's very difficult to control. So that the more I wanted Romy to be happy too, the more complicated and vast her happiness became, or at least it did so in my head. I had no way of knowing what exactly Romy was feeling because it was so difficult to talk in any way that was calm, where by calm I mean just watching the sports results on a sofa in the weekend afternoon. Instead our conversations always had this background of high drama. While at the same time the very secrecy this engendered was something I then felt I needed to compensate Candy for, even though I knew that she was not aware of it – for if, say, your husband is sometimes going to the bathroom softly at three in the morning, that's not so abnormal, it might only be because of his new hydration regime in order to help him with his gym sessions in the morning, so that such absence and secrecy did not seem like absence or secrecy at all. And yet I knew it was, and so I tried very hard to create a calm environment for her, complete with flowers, or small gestures like taking the car to the car wash.

examples of a larger philosophy

In the most grandiose classroom you have ever seen, complete with strip lights and graffitied benches, let's imagine me giving you a lecture on time and up there on the whiteboard is my final calculation. Listen up at the back there! Stop kissing, kids! On the whiteboard you would see me split time into three separate categories: the
necessary
, the
superfluous
, and the
almost necessary
. This is what I have learned from my reading. And I would say that if I had to pick just one, the most difficult category of them all is that final category of the
almost necessary
. That's what I was learning from this maintenance of my friends and other amoureuses. The necessary happens every day; the superfluous generally once – and if only the necessary and superfluous were what existed, then I think there would be no need for philosophy. But sadly there is also this extra category because the
almost necessary
is what should definitely happen, except it so rarely does, but then it does sometimes happen, after all. The
almost necessary
is what so rarely happens that eventually you become tired of even planning to do it, knowing as you do that you will almost definitely find a reason not to do it, and yet it can happen, after all, if you make a superhuman effort. Sometimes I wonder if all human character could be revealed in a person's relation to the
almost necessary
, not therefore the rare events like whom a person sleeps with, but instead the vaster everyday texture – like, if you do indeed sleep with someone, then how do you afterwards maintain their sense of self-worth with small messages and gifts? These are the constant problems of intention for everyone in existence – the people with their self-help encyclopedias doing turns down the boulevards with their children underneath the acacia trees and palmettos, the kids who inhabit the burger emporia and jobcentres and the maté dens – and they are really where the true metaphysics lies. If I ever write a treatise of philosophy, such smallness will I think be its major discovery.

of minuscule intentions

Just look at me! I no more found it easy to preserve my secret life with all its obligations than a courtier might have found it easy keeping up the exigencies of diplomacy at the palaces of Versailles. My skin seemed to be dying – each morning there was something new, whether eczema, psoriasis, small unexplained rashes, and also teeth complaints, hair ailments. And by this I think my body with its weeping and sadness was trying to communicate, like our terrified dog in the illuminated night, that while of course I did very much want to preserve everyone's happiness, at the same moment I could also see how possible it might be to hurt people and to avoid that hurt required immense effort and devotion. Nor was it only my inner circle to whom I thought I owed obligations. If I felt that I let down strangers it left me woebegone and ill at ease, even those who came momentarily to our door. There was one particular day, for instance, of sunlight and sunflowers, when a man came selling dusters and other items in a plastic bucket. In such a situation, when people make demands on me when I am not expecting them, my shyness is often a problem. And on this particular day I was preoccupied with various projects I was trying to maintain, so that as soon as I saw this fatboy with his dusters in their wrapper, and bi-tonal scourers for the ultimate kitchen, I said we would not be needing anything and closed the door on him which was, I admit it, a perhaps abrupt manner of behaving but then I did not want these items, and also if you're in a pensive state it's difficult to treat interruptions of any kind with the correct gravitas and respect. And so it was certainly possible that inadvertently I closed the door on him before he had finished his first sentence, which I regretted but also hoped that he understood, but instead what happened next, as I was walking to the stairs, was that he then pushed the vertical letter box open and through it I could see his face like in some horror close-up, and only one eye was visible but mostly I was looking at his mouth, which was screaming a sentence like:
Fuck you, four-eyes
, or something like that, I don't remember now the exact phrase he used and I think the reason I don't remember precisely is that I was very shocked. For I had meant him no harm at all. But if he had a grievance then I was sorry to have caused it, very much, and for a very long time I dwelled on this matter, and how I might have treated him better. But in my defence I might have argued that on that particular day I had been trying very hard to work, for more and more I was understanding that the true way I was letting Candy down was not in any of my deceptions, but rather in how I was subsisting in this state of total unemployment and lack of money. Many nights Candy would begin to cry, if for instance she was too tired to come out with me to some cocktail drive-in or to the stadia for racing dogs, or if I once again tried to convince her not to go to her early yoga but instead remain in bed with me. And I knew that in my inability to be productive I was only adding to the list of Candy's tasks, but also I had this sense that I could not go back to an office, not just yet, that on refusing to go to an office depended my happiness and therefore also Candy's. It was possible that a lot depended on my writings, like my monograph on philosophy – maybe several people's happiness, you never knew. I told myself that it might turn out to be a great help to many young people. Never work! That's at least an idea with a pedigree. Whether Candy minded or did not mind my lack of occupation was a very difficult subject for me, and was maybe all the more difficult because she did not ever ask, and by that very lack of asking I knew that it concerned her.

— If you want to show me something, she would say, — I'm here, cookie.

And I am ashamed to say that I was irritable at such suggestions, only because the less I could produce the more such questions made me feel inadequate and insecure. So that eventually the question was never asked, and Candy would go to work while I sat there making coffee and regarding sadly with a heavy heart the dog. In the hair salon I quizzed my cutter about the possible thinning of my hair. She seemed to be cool about it, but then it's easy not to be anxious about the anxieties of others, I would say that is one talent possessed by every being on the planet, including the deadbeat algae and the less sensitive snails. Whereas for me, anxiety was my general medium. I was the connoisseur of failing your high ideals. Certainly I was often wrong, but at least I was always right about why I might be wrong. No one can say I have any illusions about myself. But also I think that if you become too easily preoccupied with the small impossibilities, like what to eat or how to get up on time, you never get to see the major impossibilities, and that's a shame. It's why whenever anyone attacks me for my drive for perfection and its seeming hypocrisy I think they are missing the point. Because of course one cannot be the perfect vegetarian or timetabler, although also you should try – but that's no reason not to understand that on the grander scale, like love, it's always going to be impossible to live right at all. Even if there is no other way of living. It tended to exasperate those around me.

MY MOTHER

Why do you always make such jokes?

ME

I think I'm sweet.

MY MOTHER

Snooks, you are. It's just that no one thinks this.

ME

But shouldn't they?

MY FATHER

He is a clown.

MY MOTHER

But if he wants to be, so let him!

MY FATHER

I'm not so sure.

That was our suburb cross talk that gets the extra name of conversation. But I think my mother was right. For my mother I wanted to be the all-powerful conquistador.

to increase such multiple worlds

It was always very caring, the ideal I tried to preserve. So that if I was even in bed while Candy undressed, and sending a small message to Romy, which happened rarely, but did sometimes have to happen if Romy wanted an immediate reassurance, then as much as I lied to Candy about whom I was texting, I also lied to Romy about where I was – since Romy was no monster of depravity, she liked Candy very much, and if I had told her that I was reclining in the same room as Candy, among the pillows, writing violent gorgeous things to her, then Romy would have been upset, and with good reason. So that while the moralist may well want to argue that the reason lying is wrong is for its corruption, the way it turns other people into fictions without them realising, or, to be more precise, transforms the people to whom you are talking into ghosts and simulacrums, I think it's also possible to hazard the possibility that this very ghostliness is something beautiful and to be treasured. Suddenly the world is all macaws and garish. And even if for that ideal I have had to suffer terrible things, still, it's not without its beauty, or seduction.

 

DIARY ENTRIES

for which his model is Hiro

Meanwhile Hiro was into so many tricks and schemes that I could not keep up. He'd come back late at night with recondite brands of cigarette, from various maritime countries, and tell me how tomorrow he couldn't see me because he'd made a friend who had potentially upsetting medical tests the next day and needed his support, and while I applauded his public spirit I had this twinge of maybe slightly feeling jealous, like thinking why should
this
other person get the attention and not me? Why should the illnesses of this other person be so regarded? I wanted Hiro always. To be a sidekick is no fun if the original maestro is unavailable, and there you sit all alone with your breadsticks in the chequered light of the trattoria. Perhaps such loneliness was also because I was having other problems with my phone: someone would call, and when I would answer there was no one there. I know this happens often but still, it was unnerving in the circumstances. Naturally in such an atmosphere I wanted
joie de vivre
very much, and Hiro was my model. I wanted to follow him in his obscure explorations. If it meant that we found ourselves in pleasure spots and night dives, it implied no seediness or exploitation of those less fortunate, but only a way of trying to spend time without becoming bored, and a possibly laudable wish to talk to people one might usually ignore. Through the night roved Hiro, and I wanted to keep him company. Definitely I was also slightly worried for him, and wanted to protect him. I was all solicitude. He was in one of those manic phases where sleep seemed to him an inconvenience, and if you do not want to go to sleep and also do not want to sit at home, in the silent bedrooms of suburbia, then the kind of place you have to enter gets seedier as the night goes on. It's impossible to avoid, so that it was only natural that one night after wandering from place to place we might be sitting side by side in towelling robes, conversing with almost naked girls. And always it's important to enlarge your perspectives, to make the background and the foreground less separate from each other. That's a basic moral law.