Wonderland (9 page)

“What was it like?” asked Lila on one of these afternoons, holding his right hand.

“You know how it is when you get the wind knocked out of you?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Like that. Kind of like that.”

“But then your breath comes back,” I said, holding his left hand, which was smooth and cool.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Can’t say it has.”

But I knew that already. It was obvious. He was still waiting. His good leg trembled. Nothing about him looked right. He wasn’t a very big man, and without his grand, animating spirit, his slightness showed—his slender wrists, his delicate Adam’s apple. You could see when he swallowed, and he seemed to swallow a lot. I don’t think it was the physical shattering that put the fear in him. I don’t even think it was our mother’s leaving him. I think it was the knowledge, hurled into him with such overwhelming force, that the spirit could be separated from the body. From that time forward, he began guarding his spirit closely, but in the way of a man who wasn’t entirely sure where his spirit was or who might have stolen it. He became suspicious, prickly. For a while he drank a lot. He has never gone back to Rome.

I
FIRST MET
Simon in London. The tail end, as it were, of the European part of the
Whale
tour, the last stop. Closing night. It had all gotten big, bigger than anyone had imagined it could; we didn’t understand it; we tilted together giddily through the days and nights. I was so sieved, so ruined, so skinny, that I felt as if all available light could pass through me, a sensation that was as exalting as it was terrifying. A sound made of sand, built on sand. Why did everyone love it so? After the show, a crowd surged into my dressing room and down the corridor. I was in the middle of it all, chilly and dank in the tiny white camisole that was, by then, sweat-stained, road-weary; I’d been wearing it nearly every night for weeks. It had grown loose on me as I thinned. The stitching on the left side was coming undone, but no one could see that from the audience. I was superstitious about the camisole’s luck-bringing properties and sometimes slept in it. My fingertips were callused, my hands ached, my shoulders hurt all the time. The bridge on my guitar was coming as loose as the camisole, the strings were shredded. Racing toward some light that kept just eluding me, I had gone up, and up. Someone put a cigarette in my mouth, and though I didn’t really smoke, I sucked in its sooty heat, halfway thinking it might warm me up or feed me. When had I last eaten?

A short man pushed through a thicket of pale young bearded men with earrings to shake my hand. “That was incredible. You are extraordinary. I am Simon.” I thought he must be from a record company somewhere, with his graying hair, in that bespoke white shirt with the onyx cufflinks, the cream-colored suit jacket.

“Nice to meet you.”

“I have to ask you,” he said, “I must ask you—”

“Anna!” cried Ingrid, my opener, caught in the arms of the pale young bearded men like a flapping kite in a tree. “Darling, darling. Oh, my darling.”

“Do you want to just give me your card? This is insanity right now.”

“My card? No, no. I’m a friend of Nils.” Nils was our bass player. I could never remember what Nils’s original nationality had been—Swedish? Norwegian? International Rich? Something that ovaled his
i
’s. Nils died not long after that tour in a drunken car accident, going through the windshield at a hundred miles an hour. Simon put his warm hand rather firmly on my bare arm. His gaze was restless; his sharp, swarthy face looked as if someone had run a hand over it before it was finished, pushing his nose to one side, tilting his eyes down at the corners. His hair was slicked back off his forehead and curled just below his collar. He looked to me like a jumble of visible aspiration; if a price tag had been dangling from his shirt collar, I wouldn’t have been surprised. He didn’t belong in that crowd at all. He wore expensive-looking laceless shoes with a thick heel; I wondered why short men think that helps. “Do you know the music of Janáček?” His accent was unplaceable to me, polyglot.

“No,” I said. “What?” I dragged on the sooty cigarette. Nils was swanning in his glory across the room, barrel-chested, his broad face flushed, laughing, like Count Himself; the crowd thickened, got louder; we were all exhausted, exhilarated, in love and hate with one another. We knew we would all be together forever. We had found the deep water. We were like one continuous body. Ingrid finally got free of the branches of the pale bearded young men and kissed me, hugged me, spilling the champagne I was trying to guzzle, desperately thirsty, both hot and cold at once. I hadn’t slept in three nights, because I knew we were almost there and I didn’t want to miss it. I had to stay awake to catch the peak, like the moment of a full eclipse. “Who?” My musical education was as patchy as the rest of my education. Across the room, Nils pointed over people’s heads toward the door, eager for the afterparty.

Ignoring Ingrid’s many-armed enthusiasm, Simon stepped close enough that I could catch the scent of starch in his shirt. “Let me send you some. It’s quite delicate, I think you would like it.” Eye to eye as we were, too-tall woman and too-short man, I felt an unnamable sensation envelop us, as if a hood had been thrown over us both at once. That mouth, I wondered, was it pursed selfishly or thoughtfully? Simon’s eyes were so dark. He looked like a hawk to me: light, vigilant, a hunter. Something flickered between us, like the flicker of a fan.

“I want
roast pig,
” said Ingrid. “Roasted pig!”

“I—” I said, and then the crowd parted us, or maybe it united us. It was one of those nights. The party moved on and on, from bar to flat to club, Simon bobbing on its tide, continually catching my eye with his restless hawk’s eye. One for the road, I thought. One more unnamed street, one more, one more, one more time. When we left the last afterparty together, me wearing his cream-colored jacket, which fit me perfectly, I thought that it was all down to the energy of closing night, the knowledge coming in and the knowledge going out, the last hours in the bubble, the mixture of exhausted exhilaration and the faint beginnings, already, of post-tour dread, though I didn’t know what that was yet, what darkness was waiting for me after it was all over. Standing in front of the apartment building where I was staying, he kept looking over at me as if trying to gauge something, see something, so I kissed him to let him know that it was all right. I had to bend my head. He made a sound, tugged at my belt loops, seeking something else in the kiss than what I had given, hard. I fumbled for the keys.

The flat—it belonged to an actress someone knew—smelled of cold woodsmoke from the small fireplace. We lay on the bed crosswise, undoing each other’s clothes. Without his glasses, Simon looked younger, wide-eyed, and slightly dangerous, smarter than he looked with his glasses on. He pressed his mouth firmly to my bared belly, unlacing the shredding camisole to get at my breast, his wedding ring stiffening my nipple. He looked up into my face. “Anna,” he said, as if we had known one another in the past and were now reuniting. “Anna.” His sharp face, his tenacity, the keenness of his wide-eyed gaze: a hungry creature, like me. He kicked his laceless shoes to the floor. The unbuttoning, the unzipping, the unlacing, his dick hard in my hand, and then he was inside me, very fast. I almost made him pause, and then I didn’t. He was not heavy, not oversized in any way, but dense, as if his molecules were packed more closely together than those of other people. His skin was hot and surprisingly soft. There was a little fat around his waist, the slight fat of a married man who nevertheless goes to the gym. I put my hands on his ass.

“Jesus,” he said, closing his eyes. His need was so raw, so unguarded, that it was shocking. “You feel like heaven,” he said, “my God.” I wrapped myself around him. The fan flickered open involuntarily, called to save him from whatever was hunting him. We outran it, for the moment, together. His skin was so warm. Then we stayed entwined, breathing, his strong hands in my hair, cradling the back of my head, his hawk face in my neck. “Anna,” he said. “Anna. Anna.”

“Who are you?” I said a bit later. We were lying in that ridiculous cliché of a bed, like something out of Colette, or a bad movie version of Colette, brass with big brass knobs on the bedposts, sheets edged in eyelet lace. I had my feet propped against one of the fat brass rails, my head on his knees, looking at him. I smelled of sweat and sex. My arms were bruised from the way I held the guitar to thump it the particular way I did; my thighs were bruised from where the guitar thumped me back every night. Everything ached; making all that sound, trying to get it to bend right, was manual labor. A long, zigzaggy scratch on my arm was beginning to hurt. How did I get that? I wondered what everyone was doing at the party. I touched my pointy tooth-stump with my tongue.

He stroked my face. “I’m an architect. Strange, why is that the first thing I say, in bed with a beautiful woman? My
credentials.
” He smiled. “Lebanese. Forty-one.” He paused. “Married. Two children.” Simon wound a strand of my dirty, too-long, ragged hair around his fingers. I hadn’t had a haircut, also from superstition, since the tour started. “What a beautiful shade of red. Like a fox.”

“Are you saying I’m a fox?”

“More like a gazelle. Maybe, onstage, a wild swan—” He had a light, clear lilt in his voice, the rhythm of a different place, several different places at once.

“No. It’s an expression. And those cheesy compliments, could you—you’re a friend of Nils?”

“Sorry. No compliments.” He pulled the covers to my shoulder, tucking me in. “Yes, an old friend from school. Do you think less of me that I’m married?”

“I don’t think anything of you. I don’t even know you.” What time was it? I still felt that inner thrum from fucking him, but I wanted to get up, go back to the party, join everyone I loved and hated so much. Instead, I felt the knots and scars on his knees, they felt like runners’ knees, ran my hand up the long muscles of his thigh. I felt on his thigh for the tether I imagined there. Like a falcon, I thought, more like a tethered falcon than a hawk. “Have you always lived in London?”

“I grew up in Lebanon. My parents sent me to school in Wales during the war, because I was . . . getting into trouble. Now I live in Switzerland. But I have a few projects here.”

“Switzerland. Wow. Do you feel at home there?”

“I don’t know where I would feel at home. Perhaps Beirut, but we can’t. We have children. To be exiled in Switzerland . . .” He shrugged. “I don’t mind.”

“Okay.” I was getting sleepy and I didn’t want to sleep, not yet. “A few projects, a few . . .”

He turned his head in the dark. “I have never done this. You don’t understand.”

“Mmmmm.”

“And who are you?”

I touched him. He was hard again. “You know who I am. You just saw me.”

He turned to kiss me and we began moving together, fast like before, but this time I met his urgency with my own, the last flame of the last night. Exhilarated and exhausted, I wanted to tell this man something, something only a man like him could understand, something the ambitious, snake-hipped drummers and bass players and demi-artists I’d been with before couldn’t possibly know, what it was to be alone and out here like this, in a kind of exile. This man—older, tethered, restless, hungry, heavy, warm—was an exile, too, always far from home. We made a mess of the ridiculous soft bed of brass and eyelet lace, like two thieves who had broken into a house and were now fucking in it. I wanted to tell him something about that, exile to exile, hunter to hunter, but at that moment I could show him only with my breasts, my knees, the force of my coming.

I could have said something afterward, but I told myself that I didn’t know this man. So instead I glanced around the floor, trying to read the large, sleek watch on top of his pants. “Those are great shoes,” I said.

“I bought them just today. To wear tonight. I thought they would be, you know,
hip.
”

I had never felt so famous.

“I have to go,” I said, sitting up before sleep could catch me.

I found the party, or what was left of it, in a private room in a Soho restaurant. Nils and Boxer, our drummer, were deep in discussion at one end of a long table scattered with champagne and wine bottles, the broken and cut and spilled remains of a feast, uncleared dishes, a stack of
Whale 2003
T-shirts neatly draped over the back of a chair, confetti, glitter, dirty espresso cups. An enormous oil painting of a flamingo ornamented the entire back wall of the room. The pink was hallucinogenic. The flamingo was three times as big as a real one would be. It looked like every album cover I had ever wanted to be. Nils had tied one of the
Whale 2003
T-shirts around his head, and he was explaining what appeared to be some of the finer points of
Das Kapital
to Boxer, who kept shaking his head over and over. “Ah, Jesus,” said Boxer in his thick Dublin accent. “Motherfuck.”

“Listen,” said Nils. “Listen. It’s the surplus value. Darling girl, where have you been? They’ve all gone to see if they can ride on the Eye.”

“Fucking that guy, your friend. The short one.” I yawned as I sat down with the other two under the hysterical, round-eyed gaze of the huge flamingo. “He was kind of intense.”

“Married,” said Nils. “Forever. They live in Zurich. Brrrr.” He shivered theatrically.

“Quoth the raven. Is he rich?” I ate an olive, then a red grape, then another, fatter olive.

Nils pulled on his ear. “His family is. Before I go completely deaf, I have to stop this, I’m getting too old for it all.” He lit a cigarette, winked. “Rust never sleeps.”

Boxer was still shaking his head. “I might weep, mate.”

Nils and I laughed. Boxer was a fantastic drummer and the opposite of an old soul. It was a brand-new world to him every day. I sometimes wondered if he was a little slow.

I ate a grape that seemed to have been soaked in red wine and cigarette ash. “Me, too. I’m so tired. What happened?” I said to Nils. “What just happened to us?”