The Dreamers (10 page)

One evening, for the first time, Matthew spoke to his friends of his family, his past, his life before the rue de l’Odéon.

‘It was two years ago,’ he said, ‘when my dad came home from Vietnam. He’d lost his right arm. So when we were driving out to the airfield to collect him, we were kind of bracing ourselves, you know, wondering what he was going to look like without it. We all stood there, waiting for him to come off the plane. And
suddenly
there he was, in his uniform, his buttons shining in the sun. And he looked okay, he looked absolutely fine. His empty sleeve was tucked inside the pocket, the way they do it, and it just made him look sort of casual.
So when he stepped on to the runway we all went
forward
to greet him. And my mom kissed him and hugged him and she was crying, kind of both happy and sad at the same time. Then my two sisters hugged him. Then it was my turn.’

He paused.

‘I was sixteen years old. I hadn’t hugged my dad in years. We didn’t have any real father-and-son thing between us. I guess I was embarrassed at his being in the service, being in Vietnam. Also, I think he thought I was gay. Anyway, there we were, the two of us, and I didn’t know how to handle it. I mean, physically. I just didn’t know how to hug him. And it wasn’t because he’d lost an arm. I would have felt the same whatever. But I could see that’s what he was thinking. And I saw how much it hurt him, how much it humiliated him.’

‘What did you do?’ Théo asked.

‘We shook hands. He held out his left hand and I shook it with my left hand. Then he turned away to talk to somebody else. And that was that. It’s strange, though. Because it was only when he lost his arm that I really started to love my father. He would look so
vulnerable
trying to wash his face or read the newspaper or tie his shoelaces with one hand. It was as though losing
an arm had made him a complete human being. But I’d blown it. I had my chance and I blew it.’

The Cinémathèque had been forgotten. They had a
Cinémathèque
of their own, a Cinémathèque in flesh and blood. Which meant that the game was no longer played merely whenever the inclination seized them. While they read during the day, or played cards, or fumbled one another, the curtain would rise on Home Movies night after night, at six-thirty, eight-thirty and ten-thirty, with matinees on Sunday. The
quartier des enfants
– which was, with routine detours to the kitchen, what the flat had been reduced to – became an echo chamber through which phrases known to every cinephile in the world would waft like smoke rings.

Costumes were improvised, performances rehearsed, scenes that hadn't worked the first time were dropped from the programme.

Rummaging through a wardrobe in the spare room, Matthew unearthed an ancient overcoat that the poet had worn week after week during one of the appalling winters of the Occupation. Its moth-eaten fur looked as though it had been woven out of the pubic hair of a thousand Filipino houseboys.

He threw it over his shoulders. Then, finishing off his costume with one of the cardboard boxes in which Théo stored his collection of
Cahiers du Cinéma
, on one side of which he scribbled a set of simian features, snipping out a pair of holes for the eyes, he made a sensational
appearance
at the bedroom door in the guise of an ape.

‘What film?'

Théo and Isabelle cried out, ‘
King Kong! Godzilla! The Phantom of the Rue Morgue!
'

Matthew shook his ape's head. His arms dangling at his hips, his back arched, he staggered to the record player in front of which, to the voice of Charles Trenet, he started to dance an obscene shimmy inside the fur skin and the cardboard mask. Then he removed the head. His face was rouged, his eyelashes caked with kohl, his hair powdered with flour. He slowly eased himself out of the coat, underneath which he was naked. Naked, he continued to dance.

Only then did Théo get it. ‘Marlene Dietrich in
Blonde Venus!
'

Whereupon, after just a few seconds had elapsed, it became Isabelle's turn to ask ‘What film?'

Caught off guard, looking blankly at her and at each other, the two boys shook their heads.

‘
A Night at the Opera
.'

When they continued to express bafflement, she pointed at Matthew's circumcised penis.

‘Look! Groucho's cigar – Chico's hat – Harpo's hair!'

They collapsed in laughter.

On another occasion Théo happened across a
horsewhip
that had been stowed inside the flat's lumber room beneath a set of tennis racquets and a complete edition of the Comtesse de Ségur. Draping his body in a sheet, locking the bathroom window and turning on the hot water tap full blast, so that the atmosphere was as humid as that of a Turkish hammam, he spun the whip shoulder-high about his head, like Mastroianni in
Fellini
's
8½
, while Isabelle and Matthew, nearly invisible in the vapours of steam, scampered in and out of the
blistering
bathtub to avoid being nicked on the ankles, elbows and buttocks.

With the fleetness of foot of those scene-shifters who soundlessly rearrange the decor of our dreams, one
setting
would dovetail into the next. The bath, almost
overflowing
, would become Cleopatra's from the film by DeMille. For want of asses' milk a couple of bottles of the cows' brand were used, the contents of which Matthew poured into the tub, Isabelle opening her legs
as wide as scissor blades to receive between them, as in an advertisement for Cadbury's chocolate, the two confluent streams of opaline liquid.

No longer the bedroom's antechamber, a haven for some temporary fugitive from the game, the bathroom now served as an alternative arena for their activities. The tub was big enough to accommodate all of them at once, provided that Matthew sat in the middle to enable Théo and Isabelle, at either end, to encircle his waist with their matchingly long legs, the water-wrinkled toes of the one stretching as far as the armpits of the other. And when Théo pulled down over his ears a
canary-coloured
Stetson hat which he had been given as a child, a hat once far too large for his head, now far too small, Isabelle and Matthew called out together before he'd even had time to ask them who in what film.

‘Dean Martin in
Some Came Running
!'

‘Michel Piccoli in
Le Mépris
!'

They were both right.

It was a spectacular Busby Berkeley production number dreamed up by the two young men which constituted the game’s masterpiece.

Théo had always had a weakness for the exploding
stars, revolving water lilies and exquisitely garlanded wheels on which that Grand Inquisitor, that
Torquemada
of choreographers, had broken so many scantily attired butterflies. This, he announced, would be their most ambitious presentation to date, a real
morceau de bravoure
.

Untroubled by how their conduct might strike some unknown, uninvited observer stumbling on their
intimacy
, tickled at the same time by the absurdity of it all, he and Matthew fetched a gilt mirror from above the drawing-room fireplace, another from the master
bathroom
, and set them upright against opposite walls in Théo’s bedroom.

Exceptionally, Isabelle was barred from attending these preliminaries. But when the rehearsals were over, and everything made ready, she had one of the
straight-backed
chairs drawn forward for her, as for a parent at an improvised concert got up by her children.

The film comprised two scenes.

In the first, Théo and Matthew appeared before her as Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. They wore, respectively, a cadet’s faded khaki uniform and peaked cap, several sizes too small, and a yellow taffeta dress and cloche hat, both of which had belonged to the children’s
grandparents. Standing side by side, Théo to the right, Matthew to the left, they began to perform a double striptease. Théo set the ball in motion by untying the ribbon on Matthew’s dress, then darted behind him and reappeared on his left so that Matthew, in turn, could unbuckle Théo’s belt, whereupon he too would dart round Théo, but this time in front of him – and so it went, from accessories to clothes proper, from clothes to underclothes, with such deftness that Isabelle had the impression of a stage-length line-up of chorus boys and girls weaving in and out of one another, each of them removing a single item of clothing from the next until all of them had been stripped bare.

It was then that they launched into ‘By a Waterfall’. Stretched out on the floor, their legs apart, the tips of their toes just touching, their bodies mirrored to infinity, and singing the song as well as they knew how, in spite of forgetting most of the words, they started to
masturbate
in time with each other. Their penises grew harder and harder, more and more erect, until it seemed as though they too, like their toes, would meet in the
middle
. At last, arriving at the refrain, with its little falsetto trill, they ejaculated at exactly the same instant, their energies so channelled into their sexual organs that in
the fury of the moment the proportions of reality became surrealistically inverted and each was tempted to believe, naked on the floor, that he had been
metamorphosed
into a giant phallus on whose throbbing vein there stood, bolt upright, a purple-complexioned homunculus spitting gobs of sperm from its tight, lipless mouth.

Applauding madly, Isabelle cried, ‘Encore!’, a request with which neither of the two performers was able to comply.

So, amid all the laughter and steam, the Trenet record, the unwound clocks, the veiled curtains, the teasing and banter, the dewy, mildewy glamour of a
swimming-pool
in whose stagnant atmosphere the flat was bathed, the days passed, jubilant and implacable, days divided by nights as two frames of a film are divided by a black strip.

In her mother’s name and handwriting, Isabelle
dispatched
a second letter to the school headmaster, regretfully anticipating a protracted convalescence for her brother and herself, and she and Théo took turns at
telephoning
their parents in Trouville. The poet, it transpired, had come down with a plaguey flu, most
probably something he had caught from his own sickly inspiration. The return to Paris would have to be delayed.

Matthew, too, spun a web of mendacity. He sent off several letters to his anxious mother and father. Since these letters weren’t as informative as before, he was glad to announce that he’d been able to move out of his hotel and into an apartment belonging to a famous French author, whose children, as luck would have it, were not only his age but shared his interests.

This unforeseen turn of events thrilled his parents, impressed that their painfully shy son had broken out of his shell and got in with the right sort of people.

The cheques on the mantelpiece had long since
disappeared
under a mounting pile of books, magazines and comic strip albums, then been forgotten about. Matthew had an overdrawn bank balance provisioned only every other month by a cheque from San Diego. Raiding the supermarket had thus ceased to be a luxury and become a necessity. Unfortunately, the store’s detective had been alerted to the trio’s presence; and though they
counter-attacked
by setting up diversions and planting decoys, and once noisily rampaged through the store bearing about their persons only those articles they were
prepared
to pay for, with the idea of instigating an
intervention
on the detective’s part and pleading outraged innocence after a fruitless search had been conducted, they were soon compelled to acknowledge that the
halcyon
era of lobster and caviar had drawn to a close.

The kitchen sink was a graveyard of dirty dishes. Shirts, pullovers and jeans boasted an amazing
spectrum
of stains. Underpants disgustedly rejected days before as beyond redemption were picked up off the carpet, yanked from underneath sofas and armchairs, judged the best of a bad lot and pressed into further service. And because Théo’s ragged sheets kept coming loose and catching between the toes of their bare feet, obliging one or other of them to rise in the early hours of the morning and tuck them back under the mattress, they eventually decided to decamp to Isabelle’s room.

If this had so far remained off-limits to them, it was out of respect on Isabelle’s part for a bourgeois ideal of apple-pie orderliness. Like certain demented
housewives
who polish and scrub their front parlours to a
hallucinatory
sheen, so that no one ever dare set foot inside them, she insisted that her bedroom remain
untrespassed
-on by the others ‘in case a visitor calls’. Besides which, it had been convenient for her, whenever
occurred one of their ferocious squabbles, to storm out of Théo’s room into her own and, biting into an apple as though it were her brother’s thigh, bury herself in one of the locked-room murder mysteries on which she doted.