All right, then, I said, at least now there'll be something we won't be able to talk about, I like that.
Oh, I should shut up.
A little girl was yelling in the courtyard, calling her mother, who of course didn't hear her or didn't want to, and I envied the little girl, perhaps because she was born here and therefore didn't have to leave, or for her desperate and innocent stubbornness, with which she refused to accept being ignored; her high-pitched shouts became more and more hysterical and nerve-racking, then stopped as suddenly as if somebody had strangled her, and only a bouncing ball could be heard.
He sat down at his desk and I knew I mustn't look at him anymore, for he was getting ready to speak, and if I looked he might not.
I picked up my pen and found the last word of my manuscript; it was on page 542, which is where I'd have to continue.
He hit a few keys; in the silence we decidedly missed the little girl's screams, I had to wait until he typed a few more lines when, just as I'd expected, he began to fill the silence, speaking softly, saying we had two months left, and I couldn't possibly be serious about not going home.
I kept staring at the image evoked by the two last words on the paper— "empty stage" — and asked him why he was so damn defensive, what was he afraid of? a question that of course couldn't hide the fact that I could not or would not give him a straightforward answer.
He'll keep in mind what I just said, he continued, as one who'd finally hit upon tangible proof of my true intentions, won't forget it and will try to live with it.
With malicious pleasure we eyed each other from across the shaft of sunlight separating us; he was smiling triumphantly at having exposed me, and I borrowed some of his smile.
Then I'll come back, I said, without being in the least sarcastic, because I didn't want to let him off the hook.
I'd find the apartment empty, then, since I should know by now he had no intention of staying in it.
Idle fancies, I said, how could he possibly leave this place?
Maybe he wasn't as much of a coward as I thought he was.
So he had been making plans for a nice little future, except not with me.
To be frank, he had been planning something; he was going to vanish before my departure, so I'd have to leave without saying goodbye.
A wonderful idea, I said — maybe it was his smile, flashing ever more sharply from his eyes with every spoken word, or maybe it was the fear or joy evoked by this smiling emotion bordering on hatred, but I found myself laughing out loud and saying, Congratulations.
Thanks.
Grinning, we looked into each other's eyes, distorted by grinning, a look that we couldn't escape, so ugly we couldn't make it worse either.
It was odd that he didn't seem ugly and distorted to me as much as I did to myself, seeing myself with his eyes.
There was nothing remarkable about this moment, hour, or day, it was like all the others we'd spent together, except this was the first time we had put into carefully chosen words what we had been looking for ever since that evening when, led there by fate, we wound up sitting next to each other at the opera, although what we felt as so extraordinary that evening kept on presenting and formulating itself always as if for the first time; perhaps one might say that what we were looking for in each other was the ultimate in feeling at home, and every word and gesture seemed to be a form of new discovery in the course of our search, but we couldn't possibly find what we were looking for, because the true home of our longing was the search itself.
It was as though we were trying to deepen and somehow make permanent an already extreme emotion, a bond which can and does exist between two human beings but with which there is not much more that can be done, and perhaps the reason was, as he once had tried to explain, that we were both men, and the law of the sexes may be stronger than those of individual personalities; at the time I wasn't ready to consider or accept this, if only because I felt the freedom of my individuality was at stake, my selfhood.
That first moment encompassed all our subsequent moments, which is to say that in all that followed something of that first moment persisted.
As he stood with his French friend in the dimly lit lobby of the opera house, in the midst of the milling theatergoers on the stairs, I felt I knew him, and knew him from long ago, not just him but everything about him: not just his well-cut suit, his loosely knotted tie, his tiepin, but also his casually dressed friend, and even the relationship that so clearly bound them together, although at the time I had only the vaguest notion of what a love relation between two men might be like; yet the sense of familiarity gave the meeting a quick lightness, an inexplicable closeness we feel only when everything seems so natural that we ask no questions, just let down our guard and don't even know what is happening to us.
When he slipped out of Thea's embrace, which his friend obviously found too effusive and not at all to his liking, we shook each other's hand, not any differently than any two people would in such circumstances; I told him my name and he told me his, while I heard his friend introducing himself to Frau Kühnert and Thea — in the manner of a tough guy, giving only his double first name, Pierre-Max — repeating it twice in succession; only much later did I find out that his family name was Dulac.
After that handshake we didn't pay much attention to each other, yet the inner compulsion of our feelings so shaped the situation that while walking up the red-carpeted gleaming white staircase — I was conversing with his friend and he was chatting with Frau Kühnert and Thea — we seemed to be steering each other with our shoulders; though our bodies did not touch, from that moment on they became inseparable, they wanted to stay close to each other, that's how they proceeded up those stairs, our bodies doing their job so assuredly that we didn't have to pay special attention to our closeness, which was neither surprising nor controllable, setting itself immediately on the right course, with aims and possibilities of its own — about which, as it turned out later, only I had certain misgivings — so he was free to go on chatting without having to look at me, and I didn't have to look at him either, because by then I had gained so much confidence from being close to his body and to its fragrance that I could also converse freely with the young Frenchman walking on my left.
But I wouldn't call this a collusive or complicitous feeling, being much darker and deeper; to use an analogy, I'd say it was as if one was arriving in the present after a quick journey from one's own faraway past, and the present is as improbable and dreamlike as a city that at the moment of arrival one moves about in dazed — no, the meeting had none of the excited cheerfulness and joy peculiar to erotically charged little conspiracies, unless it was the much deeper joy of a long-awaited homecoming.
Actually, what made the moment special for me, and perhaps that's the reason I remember it so well, was the stir Thea created, being a well-known and celebrated personality who attracted the audience's curiosity, which was extended to us as well in the form of furtive, sidelong glances, everybody being eager to see, to know, in whose company and with what sort of men the famous actress was making her appearance here, and we, four very different non-celebrities, must have seemed rather unusual, almost scandalous in this formal, overdisciplined setting.
Thea was onstage here, too, playing the offstage role of famous and notorious actress; and let it be said to her credit that with the most economical means she managed to pretend she noticed none of the eager, respectful, sometimes envious and contemptuous glances, since she devoted all her attention to Melchior — behold, this is the man! she declared by her gesture as she leaned lightly on Melchior's arm, rewarding him with almost the same adoring look she was getting from her admirers, and adjusting her own face — bony, Oriental-looking, no makeup — to look just as pretty as her audiences were used to and always expected to see, of course looking for some protection as she gazed with those narrowed, impishly smiling eyes into his, protection to help her stay incognito — make it so she wouldn't have to look anywhere else! no, she didn't want to mind her steps, she'd go anywhere she was led — though all along she was leading him, in her long, tight black skirt slit to her knees, her dainty spike-heeled shoes, her slightly translucent lead-gray silk blouse, more fragile and vulnerable, altogether more shy and modest-looking than she was in any of her other roles.