The Dreamers (6 page)

From above, from somewhere in the ether, the
checkered
tablecloth resembled nothing so much as a chessboard. Fate was marshalling its pawns, buttressing its defences, plotting its lines of attack. But such an
engagement
can dispense with the convention of alternating black and white squares. It’s a game that can be played in the desert, on the ocean. The motif of the tablecloth was merely a private joke for the cognoscenti.

Lighting a cigarette, beaming at Matthew, Isabelle said simply, ‘Well!’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Come, come, little man. Why have you never dazzled us with these philosophical speculations of yours? Papa was awfully impressed.’

‘Papa’s full of shit,’ said Théo, morosely picking his teeth.

‘I liked him. I liked them both,’ said Matthew. ‘I thought they were both really nice people.’

Isabelle, as usual, had a theory. ‘Other people’s
parents
are always nicer than our own,’ she said, tipping ash into the cup of her palm. ‘Yet, for some reason,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘our own grandparents are always nicer than other people’s.’

Matthew gazed at her.

‘You know, I never thought of that before. But it’s true, it’s absolutely true.’

‘You’re sweet,’ said Isabelle with a smile that was transformed halfway into a yawn, ‘and I’m for bed. Night night.’

Removing her flat slip-on shoes as she made the round of the table, she kissed Théo first then, without any hesitation, Matthew.

‘By the way,’ she said, half in, half out of the door, ‘are you staying?’

‘If you’ll have me.’

‘Goody.’

Théo led Matthew to his own room. The bed was unmade. An upright piano stood in one corner. The
bookshelves
were stuffed with film histories, directors'
monographs
and ghosted autobiographies of Hollywood stars. On the walls were pinned photographs of actors and actresses: Marlon Brando leaning with cool pantherine nonchalance against a bulbous motorcycle; Marilyn
Monroe
standing astride a New York subway grating, her white dress billowing around her thighs like the petals of a fabulous orchid; Marlene Dietrich, the snowy grain of
whose flawless complexion could not be distinguished from that of the photograph itself. Piled up on a divan near the door were copies of
Cahiers du Cinéma
. And over Théo's bed – and, by virtue of having been framed by a professional frame-maker, accorded a more elevated prominence than the other pin-ups – was a small oval portrait. It was of Gene Tierney in a still from
Laura
.

Though he had been impatient to know this room about which he had so often fantasised, Matthew was assailed by a sensation of
déjà vu
, by the obscure conviction not only that he had been here before but that something had taken place here of import to him. It took him an instant to locate the source of his malaise. What was this unmade bed, what were these piled-up
Cahiers du Cinéma
, these pin-ups and this oval portrait but,
mysteriously
transposed, the unmade bed, piled-up board games, college pennant and beautiful faces spread out in profile over the carpet of his best friend's bedroom in San Diego?

It was now after midnight. Plainly, Théo had been
hoping
to talk shop. He had been looking forward to
discussing
movies late into the night, lounging on the bed, perhaps smoking a joint.

But Matthew wished to be alone, free to replay, in slow motion, the film of the day’s events. So he barely responded to Théo’s queries. A naïve actor, he yawned in a conspicuously studied manner, trusting that his friend would take the hint.

At last, reluctantly giving in, Théo accompanied him to the flat’s spare room, spare above all in the sense that it was furnished elegantly and starkly, with its parquet flooring, its three straight-backed chairs, its narrow cot and, above the cot, exactly where the portrait of
Laura
hung in Théo’s own bedroom, a framed reproduction of Delacroix’s
La Liberté guidant le peuple
. A snapshot of Rita Hayworth had been scotch-taped over the face of the voluptuously bare-breasted
personification
of Liberty.

Left to himself, Matthew lazily undressed and started threading through his mind’s projector the unedited newsreel footage he would screen for himself that night. Details already stood out like individual frames scanned by an editor as he holds a strip of celluloid up to the light – Watteau’s
Gilles
in the Louvre, the kisses exchanged outside, the shell and shot of battle on the esplanade. Furiously, he tried to banish these fragments from his inner eye. He would not be satisfied with an
assortment of highlights. Everything had to unfold in the correct order, at the correct speed.

Absurdly, he crossed himself in front of Delacroix’s
Liberté
, recited a dutiful prayer and, wearing only his underpants, climbed into bed. In the semi-darkness he made out the whisper-soft rustle of the curtains at the other end of the room. He closed his eyes. He watched the curtains part. The film began.

Later in the night, when the newsreel had long since run its course, he woke up. At first he had no notion where he was. Then he remembered. Then, as well, he was dismayed to realise that he was awake because he had to go to the lavatory and that Théo had forgotten to show him where it was.

He hurriedly slipped his clothes on and stepped into the corridor. But he had lost his bearings. He was
incapable
of figuring out the topography of a flat that was a beehive of cells. The first corridor led off into another at a right angle. A door on the left stood ajar. Stealthily, he pushed it open and peered inside. A bathtub, a washstand, towel racks. He switched on the light, walked in and drew the lock behind him.

This bathroom, unfortunately, turned out to be only a
bathroom, not a lavatory. But months of living in a
miserably
underfurnished Left Bank hotel room had made going to the washstand almost instinctive for Matthew. He turned the cold tap on, raised himself on tiptoe and urinated into the basin.

Back in the corridor he retraced his steps. The air in the house had turned to stone. Straight ahead was a doorway underlined by a narrow filament of light. He padded soundlessly towards it. With a final glance at the corridor, he opened the door.

It was Théo’s room, not his own. A pink bedside lamp, left on, threw a pallid spotlight over the bed. What did he see? Théo and Isabelle.

Isabelle was a Balthus. Sprawled out asleep on the bed, half under the covers, half on top, her whole body askew in a pose of rapturous lassitude, her dishevelled head cast back on its pillow, a strand of hair grazing her lips, she was wearing a plain white vest and white panties and looked about fourteen years old.

Beside her, Théo lay naked. He too slept, one leg under the covers, the other free, like Harlequin in
parti-coloured
pantaloons, the left leg dark, the right one light. He lay on his back, his ankle dangling over the end of the bed, his head resting on the palms of his
hands, like that of someone stretched out in a field. Two curly shadows were visible in the cups of his armpits; the third, that which in the male body forms the apex of an inverted triangle, was concealed by the bedclothes where one exposed thigh emerged from beneath them.

What made them such an extraordinary sight was that the limbs of one seemed also to belong to the other.

For a long, long time Matthew stood stock still on the threshold of the room, transfixed not by the
entanglement
of bodies in a motor accident but by the enigma of the Androgyne.

Then at last he softly closed the door and tiptoed away.

When he opened his eyes next morning after a fretful night, it was to see Isabelle, as though ready to pounce, crouched on his bedclothes, on all fours, peering into his face. Over her shoulders she had on an old-fashioned woollen dressing gown of a dark maroon hue with, on its sleeves and lapels, corded braiding as convoluted as that which loops the loop on the uniforms of operetta hussars. Just a flash of pastel-pale thigh intimated that, underneath the robe, she was still wearing the plain white vest and panties of the night before.

Matthew had no idea how long she had been
crouching
in front of him. Nor did she give him time to put the question to her, for she immediately raised her
forefinger
to his lips and, in a hypnotist’s voice, whispered, ‘Don’t speak. I command it.’

Her tongue protruding, her hand unshaking, half schoolgirl, half surgeon, Isabelle inserted her finger into the soft crevice at the corner of his left eye and slowly excavated the brittle stalactite of sleep that was lodged there. After she had subjected it to a thorough examination on the tip of her finger, she flicked it off, then drew another scabby, yellowish fragment from the right one. If, on her finger, these two incrustations looked quite minute, it felt to Matthew as though a pair of dice had been extracted from his eyes.

When the operation was complete she gracefully slid back into a kneeling posture.

‘Good morning!’

Matthew eased himself up on to his pillow. He
continued
to shield himself with the bedclothes as he was wearing only his underpants.

‘What was that all about?’

‘Why, my little Matthew,’ she replied, ‘I was removing the sleep from your eyes. You have beautiful eyes, you
know. Théo lets me do his every morning but I wasn’t going to pass up the chance of a second helping.’

‘What a strange thing to want to do.’

‘You think so?’ said Isabelle, leaping to the floor. ‘Didn’t you enjoy it?’

‘Was I supposed to?’

‘Naturally,’ she answered. Then, clapping her hands, ‘Up, up, up! The house is alive and awaits Monsieur’s pleasure.’

Manoeuvring the train of her robe, she lingered in the room, picking up objects at random and weighing them in her two hands, as though rediscovering some long-unvisited haunt of her childhood years.

Matthew didn’t move a muscle. He watched her, fascinated, from under the covers.

Finally, she turned to face him.

‘What are you waiting for?’

‘Isabelle, please, I’m not dressed.’

She smiled at him, raised her eyebrows as though to say ‘So what?’ and continued to glide around the room, flitting from the bed to one of the straight-backed chairs, from the chair to a Biedermeier chest-of-drawers, from the chest-of-drawers to Delacroix’s
Liberté
, dusting each of them lightly with her fingertips or else lovingly
stroking it with the palm of her hand.

Suddenly, at the height of this gala performance, she fired a question at Matthew.

‘Who in what film?’

Without a second’s hesitation he answered, ‘Garbo in
Queen Christina
. The scene where she bids farewell to the room in which she made love to John Gilbert.’

‘In the future, in my memory,’ croaked Isabelle, imitating the accent of the Swedish actress, ‘I shall live a great deal in this room.’

High-kicking a bare leg behind her from under the trailing robe, she opened the bedroom door and called back to him, ‘The bathroom’s at the end of the corridor, then first on the left. We’ve got a private wing to ourselves, you know. If you aren’t there in one minute, we’re coming to get you.’

The door slammed shut.

Matthew had awoken into a state of semi-conscious malaise, one that Isabelle’s intrusion had not given him time to identify. Now he traced it to its source. She had just said that she and Théo had ‘a private wing to
ourselves
’. Did she mean a wing of the flat? Could that be why brother and sister slept together in perfect
impunity
,
a Romeo and Juliet star-crossed not because they belonged to two families but to a single one? But
couldn
’t it simply have been solace that Isabelle had sought in her brother’s arms, solace from loneliness or insomnia? Couldn’t he, Matthew, have misinterpreted the ecstatic demeanour of her body cast every which way, her hands, her feet, those lovely far-flung extremities of hers, connected each to each, like the stars of a
constellation
on an astrological chart, by milky white limbs in disarray?

In the same bathroom into which he had stumbled the night before he found Théo and Isabelle. They were both in their underclothes. Théo was shaving with an electric razor, while Isabelle sat on the edge of the bathtub
clipping
her toenails.

Cleanliness is next to godliness as a swimming-pool may be located next door to a church. Innocuous as this little vignette was, it filled Matthew’s nostrils with the ambiguous aroma of all the swimming-pools he had ever known.

As a boy, he’d had such a fondness for public pools that he eventually developed into a better, faster,
stronger swimmer than either he or anyone else could have predicted of one so frail.

It wasn’t really the pools themselves to which he had felt drawn, though he liked to watch their youthful,
virile
divers, like those delightful statues which earn their living as caryatids or fountains, plunge into the water with the heavy grace of torpedos then furiously set about cutting it into strips like so many pairs of scissors. Rather, it was what took place backstage that had
excited
his scarcely developed senses. There, with a jolt, he had discovered a cocktail of soap and sperm and sweat, as lithe young men, millionaires of beauty, dandies of nudity, gold medallists in vigour, poise and assurance, would stroll to and fro among squalid cubicles,
exhibiting
their bodies like mannequins, in the poses of
mannequins
, in the pose of Botticelli’s Venus or Boucher’s Miss O’Murphy, on the rosy cheeks of whose bottom one would so like to lay a resounding slap. Nor was it unusual to glimpse, cross-legged, a carelessly draped towel revealing just the skylight of his body, an
adolescent
Narcissus
in flagrante delicto
with himself, his pose and grimaces making one think of a Samurai at the height of hara-kiri.