I was giggling. ‘I’m no saint, only a scribbler with an interest, sometimes, in how people use one another. I don’t feel entitled to another go at life on the basis of my “nobility”.’
‘You’re creative, contrary and articulate,’ he said. ‘And, in my opinion, you’ve only just started to develop as an artist.’
‘Jesus, and I thought I’d had my say.’
‘You deserve to evolve. Meet me tomorrow morning.’ As he picked up his plate and glass from the floor, the two observing women, who had not lost patience, began to flutter. ‘We’ll take it further then.’
He touched me on the arm, named a place and got up.
‘What’s the rush?’ I said. ‘Can’t we meet in a few days?’
‘There is the security aspect,’ he said. ‘But I also believe the best decisions are taken immediately.’
‘I believe that too,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know about this.’
‘Dream on it,’ he said. ‘You’ve heard enough for one evening. It would be too much for anyone to take in. See you tomorrow. It’s getting late. I really want to dance. I can dance all night, without stimulants.’
He pressed my hand, looked into my eyes as if we already had an understanding, and walked away.
The conversation had ended abruptly but not impolitely. Perhaps he had said all there was to say for the moment. He had certainly left me wanting to know more. Hadn’t I, like everyone else, often thought of how I’d live had I known all that I know now? But wasn’t it a ridiculous idea? If anything made life and feeling possible, it was transience.
I watched Ralph join a group of drama students, his ‘contemporaries’. Like him, presumably, but unlike me, they didn’t think of their own death every day.
I got up and briefly talked to my friends — the old fucks with watery eyes; some of them quite shrunken, their best work long done — finished my drink, and said goodbye to the host.
At the door, when I looked back, Ralph was dancing with a group of young people among whom were the two women who’d been watching him. Walking through the house, I saw the kids I’d met at the front door sitting at a long table drinking, playing with one another’s hair. I was sure I could hear someone saying they preferred the book to the film, or was it the film to the book? Suddenly, I longed for a new world, one in which no one compared the book to the film, or vice versa. Ever.
In order to think, I walked home, but this time I didn’t feel tired. As I went I was aware of groups of young men and women hanging around the streets. The boys, in long coats and hoods that concealed most of their faces, made me think of figures from The Seventh Seal. They made me recall my best friend’s painful death, two months before.
‘It won’t be the same without me around,’ he had said. We had known each other since university. He was a bad alcoholic and fuck-up. ‘Look at your life and all you’ve done. I’ve wasted my life.’
‘I don’t know what waste means.’
‘Oh, I know what it is now,’ he had said. ‘The inability to take pleasure in oneself or others. Cheerio.’
The chess pieces of my life were being removed one by one. My friend’s death had taken me by surprise; I had believed he would never give up his suffering. The end of my life was approaching, too; there was a lot I was already unable to do, soon there would be more. I’d been alive a long time but my life, like most lives, seemed to have happened too quickly, when I was not ready.
The shouts of the street kids, their incomprehensibly hip vocabulary and threatening presence reminded me of how much the needs of the young terrify the old. Maybe it would be interesting to know what they felt. I’m sure they would be willing to talk. But there was no way, until now, that I could actually have ‘had’ their feelings.
At home, I looked at myself in the mirror. Margot had said that with my rotund stomach, veiny, spindly legs and left-leaning posture I was beginning to resemble my father just before his death. Did that matter? What did I think a younger body would bring me? More love? Even I knew that that wasn’t what I required as much as the ability to love more.
I waited up for my wife, watched her undress and followed her instruction to sit in the bathroom as she bathed by candle-light, attending to her account of the day and — the highlight for me — who had annoyed her the most. She and I also liked to discuss our chocolate indulgences and bodies: which part of which of us, for example, seemed full of ice-cream and was expanding. Various diets and possible types of exercise were always popular between us. She liked to accuse me of not being ‘toned’, of being, in fact, ‘mush’, but threatened murder and suicide if I mentioned any of her body parts without reverence. As I looked at her with her hair up, wearing a dressing gown and examining and cleaning her face in the mirror, I wondered how many more such ordinary nights we would have together.
A few minutes after getting into bed, she was slipping into sleep. I resented her ability to drop off. Although sleeping had come to seem more luxurious, I hadn’t got any better at it. I guess children and older adults fear the separation from consciousness, as though it’ll never return. If anyone asked me, I said that consciousness was the thing I liked most about life. But who doesn’t need a rest from it now and again?
Lying beside Margot, chatting and sleeping, was exceptional every night. To be well married you have to have a penchant for the intricacies of intimacy and larval change: to be interested, for instance, in people dreaming together. If the personality is a spider’s web, you will want to know every thread. Otherwise, after forty, when the colour begins to drain from the world, it’s either retirement or reinvention. Pleasures no longer come to you, but there are pickings to be had if you can learn to scavenge for them.
Later, unusually — it had been a long time — she woke me up to make love, which I did happily, telling her that I’d always loved her, and reminiscing, as we often did, about how we met and got together. These were our favourite stories, always the same and also slightly different so that I listened out for a new feeling or aspect.
For the rest of the night I was awake, walking about the house, wondering.
2
The following morning there was no question of not meeting Ralph at the coffee shop he’d suggested. At the same time I didn’t believe he’d show up; perhaps that was my wish. He had made me think so hard, the scope of my everyday life seemed so mundane and I had become so excited about this possible adventure and future that I was already beginning to feel afraid.
He arrived on a bicycle, wearing few clothes, and told me he’d stayed up late dancing, woken up early, exercised and studied a ‘dramatic text’ before coming here. It was common, he said, that people living a ‘second’ life, like people on a second marriage, took what they did more seriously. Each moment seemed even more precious. There was no doubt he looked fit, well and ready to be interested in things.
I found myself studying his face. How should I put it? If the body is a picture of the mind, his body was like a map of a place that didn’t exist. What I wanted was to see his original face, before he was reborn. Otherwise it was like speaking on the phone to someone you’d never met, trying to guess what they were really like.
But it was me, not him, we were there for, and he was businesslike, as I guessed he must have been in his former life. He went through everything as though reading from a clipboard in his mind. After two hours we shook hands, and I returned home.