The Dreamers (8 page)

Walking back along the aisle, he noticed an elderly woman leaving the confessional booth. After a moment of hesitation, he entered it in his turn.

‘Bless me, Father,’ he mumbled, ‘for I have sinned.’

The priest’s accent was Irish, his voice weary and sonorous.

‘How long is it since you’ve been to confession?’

‘You don’t understand, Father,’ said Matthew, impatient to be done with it. ‘I’ve
just
sinned. Right here in your church.’

‘Eh?’ said the dozy priest, who had abruptly snapped out of his torpor.

Back at the hotel Matthew stuffed his belongings into a leather suitcase. Then he paid his bill and had the receptionist ring for a taxi.

When his taxi stopped at traffic lights near the carrefour de l’Odéon, a fire engine went storming past, its siren wailing, its massive hosepiping coiled like braided hair, its scarlet-clad firemen clinging on for dear life like the Keystone Kops. Its appearance made him think of his bedroom in San Diego, of his parents’ house, of their neighbours’ houses all alike in having sprinklers on their lawns and beige-and-cream station wagons parked outside their open garage doors. For there is something cosy, unexpectedly conducive to nostalgia, about a fire engine.

He looked away again. The lights turned to green and the taxi drove off.

That evening Matthew dined with Théo and Isabelle in a seafood brasserie on the place Bienvenue in Montparnasse. It was his treat for having been invited to stay at the flat. They ordered a colossal platter of oysters,
mussels
,
crayfish, whelks, shrimp, crab and lobster, all nestling on a bed of crushed ice. Plying hammers,
pincers
and tongs, they left the plate as devastated as an archaeological dig.

It was a few minutes after midnight when they returned to the flat. The poet and his wife had already retired. Their plan was to set out for Trouville at the crack of dawn.

Not infrequently, when about to begin or end one of his books, the poet chose in this way to decamp to his summer house on the Normandy coast. And though, on earlier trips, when his children were children, his wife had remained in Paris, her presence was now required at his side, should ever, at some eternal twenty-past or twenty-to the inspirational hour, the capricious guardian angel of his Muse decline to alight on the
virgin
page.

The children, he insisted, could be trusted on their own. They were mature, intelligent beings. Besides, there was his sister, a maiden lady in her early sixties, to ensure that all was as it should be.

And, time and time again, he would be proved right. He and his wife would arrive back to find the flat in shipshape order, their offspring conscientiously
engaged on homework, translating Virgil or working out some mathematical puzzle involving pipes, wash basins and dripping taps.

Unguessed, undreamt of, was the metamorphosis which the flat and its occupants had meanwhile
undergone
. For each such departure of their parents would leave the two young people to their own devices. Many, various and wonderful were these devices, and both Théo and Isabelle, at least since their adolescence, would avail themselves of the physical and spiritual freedom vouchsafed them. Like gamblers who, deprived of their cards or dice, will bet on car
registration
numbers, on the speed at which raindrops slither down a window pane, on anything at all, they needed nothing but a mutual, unconditionally offered
complicity
to descend to their private shades.

Venturing into the world at large, they dipped their lights as a car will dip its headlamps when encountering another on a nocturnal highway. Thereafter, when once the door to the world had closed behind them, these same lights would blaze out brightly, blinding the naked eye.

What was to happen, then, was not a new occurrence; if their folly this time was more acute, it was maybe that
in Matthew they had at last found a child for their incestuous cradle.

The first few days were uneventful. Every morning, in the kitchen, they breakfasted on cold cereal, undaunted by the fragments of dried cornflakes with which the sides of their unrinsed bowls would become encrusted. Then Isabelle would accompany her brother on his mobylette to the lycée which both of them attended, while Matthew took the metro to his own school in the suburbs. Every evening, on their return, shedding
overcoats
, jackets and scarves over the hallway floor, they withdrew into the
quartier des enfants
and gave
themselves
up to the increasingly compulsive sessions of Home Movies, for which they had now started to keep a score.

These were blissful days for Matthew, who would sometimes, on his way back from school, travel by metro no further than Denfert-Rochereau. From there, with a springing step, he would walk the remaining
distance
to the flat, titillating himself with the prospect of spending yet another evening in the company of his beloved mentors and tormentors.

Inevitably, though, things couldn’t last too long as
they were. For this is how a drug works. It ensnares its victim with the finesse of a card-sharp, letting the future addict win a few hands before moving in for the kill. Théo and Isabelle were born addicts, addicts to whose cravings the cinema and each other were the sole opiates ever to have presented themselves. And Matthew – who, had he not left San Diego, would doubtless have married some childhood sweetheart, some winsome flirt, all patience, gratitude and guile – Matthew had once and for all pledged himself to their unstable
fortunes
.

The first phase of Home Movies, its prehistory, was therefore of fairly short duration, and it wasn’t long before Isabelle, exasperated by having to wait for chance to strike unbidden, decided to force the issue.

One afternoon, wearing white overalls, an
improvised
white turban and a pair of white-rimmed dark glasses, like some thirties Hollywood actress snapped in a relaxed pose on the veranda of her Bel Air mansion, she looked into Théo’s bedroom, where he and Matthew were reading aloud to each other from back numbers of
Cahiers du Cinéma
. Her beady eyes registered the mounting clutter of books, magazines, underclothes, half-consumed sandwiches and peanut shells. Smiling
to herself, she took a cigarette and tapped one end of it against the pack with clipped, staccato violence. Then, with an ostentatious puff, chewing the remark in the corner of her mouth as though it were a wad of bubble gum, she spat out, ‘What a dump!’

Without raising his eyes from the page, Théo
mechanically
called back, ‘Liz Taylor in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
.’

Isabelle beamed in triumph.

‘Wrong!’

‘I am not!’

‘Yes you are!’

‘In the opening scene of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
–’

Realising his mistake, he broke off.

‘Oh, I get it. She’s imitating someone else, isn’t she? Bette Davis?’

‘In what, brother dear?’

‘God, I should know this. Is it a film I’ve seen?’

‘We saw it together.’

‘We did?’

He thought hard.

‘Give me a clue.’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Be a sport. The director’s name.’

‘No.’

‘Just the director’s name.’

‘No.’

‘The number of words in the title.’

‘I said no.’

‘The number of words in the title? Is that asking so much?’ He started to wheedle. ‘
S’il
te plaît
, Isa,
s’il te plaît
.’

‘No.’

‘The first letter of the first word.’

‘God, you’re pathetic,’ Isabelle said with a sneer. ‘Isn’t he pathetic, Matthew? Don’t you think he’s pathetic?’

‘Matthew!’ Théo cried. ‘I bet you know!’

But Isabelle quickly put an end to that. Had the Sphinx given Oedipus a clue?

Théo was forced to concede defeat.

‘
Beyond the Forest
,’ said Isabelle. ‘Directed by King Vidor. 1949.’ Then: ‘Forfeit.’

‘Okay. How much?’

‘Not this time,’ she replied, still imitating Bette Davis. ‘This time I want to be paid in kind.’

‘How do you mean, paid in kind?’

Isabelle lowered her movie-star glasses down the bridge of her nose.

‘I dare you to do now, in front of us, what I’ve watched you do’ – she removed the glasses altogether and waved them in the direction of the oval portrait of Gene Tierney – ‘in front of her.’

This challenge – mystifying to Matthew, who could none the less sense the hovering play of strange new shadows about the room – was met with a silence so absolute it was more than capable of holding its own amidst all manner of extraneous, earthbound sounds. In vain Trenet’s voice attempted to interrupt it.

Glancing first at Matthew, Théo then turned once more to his sister, his mouth disfigured by a hard ball of
sullenness
.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh yes you do, my pet,’ Isabelle continued suavely.
‘Only,
voilà
, you didn’t know I knew. Those afternoons when you come home from school and you bolt your door and the bedsprings start to jangle – good grief, do you fancy I’m too thick to guess what’s going on? Besides, your bed is directly opposite the keyhole.’

‘Forfeit,’ Isabelle repeated calmly.

‘I won’t do it.’

‘Won’t do it?’

‘You wouldn’t.’

Isabelle grinned. Looking up at the portrait, she said, ‘Gene Tierney isn’t my type.’

‘What a bitch you are. A bitch and a sadist.’

‘No, I’m a Sadian. Not quite the same thing.’ She yawned. ‘Are you going to pay the forfeit or chicken out – which, you realise, will mean the end of the game?’

Théo’s eyes took in each of them in turn – Isabelle, Matthew, the oval portrait.

‘Very well, Isa. The game must go on.’

He spoke in the voice of an actor who receives a
fateful
telegram just as the curtain is about to rise on some smart drawing-room comedy.

Matthew had never found himself closer to detesting Isabelle than at this instant. He detested her for having exacted from Théo, from his friend, a humiliating covenant of whose precise nature he remained as yet in ignorance but which already evoked uneasy memories of indignities inflicted by leering Boy Scouts in tents pitched in lonely glades.

Yet we are most merciless when we discover our own baseness, our own wretched hypocrisies, reflected in another’s, and the dread which swept over him, a dread encompassing not only Théo’s but his own future on this island, this planet, in this first-floor flat off the place de l’Odéon, was coupled with an almost uncontrollable exhilaration.

Théo stood up and took off his sweater. Unbuttoning his shirt, he drew it back over his shoulder-blades. His chest was hairless except for a single dark wisp which sprang from his navel like a mountain stream before plunging underground beneath his trouser belt. Unbuckling the belt, he let his corduroy jeans crumple
to his feet. Then, bending forward, he jerked them free.

Whereupon, Isabelle clapped her hands over her eyes and shrieked, ‘No, no! For the love of God, no!’

Matthew was astonished. Was she having second thoughts? Did she realise that Théo had outsmarted her by calling her bluff?

Hardly. For, peeking gingerly through her interlocked fingers as through two slats in a blind, she shuddered.

‘How often have I told you never to take your trousers off before your socks! Look at yourself, you half-wit, you’ve got navy blue socks on. They give you that ghastly truncated look when you’re naked. Take them off at once.’

Scowling at his sister, Théo tugged off his socks. After a pause, he began to remove his white underpants, rolling rather than drawing them over his sexual organs the way a woman will roll back a nylon stocking before inserting her foot in its sheath and smoothing it out along her leg with the flat of her hand. Then he flipped them about his ankles and stood before them, knees together, shivering slightly, like some arrowless
Sebastian
.

Now that he was free of the grubby chrysalis of his own clothes, the transformation was as startling as with
those raggedy street urchins of Fez or Tangiers who, once on the beach, moult into the finery of their
nakedness
.

He stood for a second or two contemplating his penis. It was almost erect. His testicles looked as heavy as gourds.

He knelt on the bed beneath the oval portrait. His eyes captivated by the mask of imperturbability with which the actress requited their gaze, he started to
massage
himself. Paced by the rhythm of the bedsprings, which reverberated through the room like the pistons of an express train carrying him closer and closer to his goal, his hand went faster and faster, instinctively
rediscovering
its old familiar pulsation. It was as though his livid member were steering his hand’s movements, not vice versa, as though he wouldn’t have been capable of unprising his fingers from it even had he wished to, the way, for a single frightful moment, one’s fingers stick fast to the scalding handle of a saucepan. And when the climax arrived, the jet of sperm that his penis
discharged
, sperm glistening, so it appeared to Matthew, with tiny, pearly scintillae of light, hovered in the air for a split second, arrested in flight, like a fountain that all of a sudden freezes over, producing, at the snap of one’s
fingers against the sparkling little pinnacle of ice that it has become, a high, pure, silvery musical note.

Then, brusquely, all was damp stickiness, matted hair on the thighs, the faint, sweetish odour of fish paste.

Théo lay back on the bed, panting, propped up on one side, his hands aligned along the ridge of his spine, in the posture of an opium smoker. In the bird’s nest of his crotch the mother bird once more placidly nursed her two eggs.