“So all of this is just for me. Jesus, Elanore, I knew you were rich, but…”
“Don’t be like that, Gustav. I’m not trying to impress you or depress you or whatever. It was just the way it came out.”
He poured more of the wine, wondering as he did so exactly what trick it was that allowed them to share it.
“So, you’re still painting?”
“Yep.”
“I haven’t seen much of your work about.”
“I do it for private clients,” Gustav said. “Mostly.”
He glared at Elanore, daring her to challenge his statement. Of course, if he really was painting and selling, he’d have some credit. And if he had credit, he wouldn’t be living in that dreadful tenement she’d tracked him down to. He’d have paid for all the necessary treatments to stop himself becoming the frail old man he so nearly was. I can help, you know, Gustav could hear Elanore saying, because he’d heard her say it so many times before. I don’t need all this wealth. So let me give you just a little help. Give me that chance… But what she actually said was even worse.
“Are you recording yourself, Gus?” Elanore asked. “Do you have a librarian?”
Now, he thought, now is the time to walk out. Pull this whole thing down and go back into the street—the foreal street. And forget.
“Did you know,” he said instead, “that the word reality once actually meant foreal—not the projections and the simulations, but proper actuality. But then along came virtual reality, and of course, when the next generation of products was developed, the illusion was so much better that you could walk right into it instead of having to put on goggles and a suit. So they had to think of an improved phrase, a super-word for the purposes of marketing. And someone must have said, Why don’t we just call it reality?”
“You don’t have to be hurtful, Gus. There’s no rule written down that says we can’t get on.”
“I thought that that was exactly the problem. It’s in my head, and it was probably there in yours before you died. Now it’s…” He’d have said more. But he was suddenly, stupidly, near to tears.
“What exactly are you doing these days, Gus?” she asked as he cleared his throat and pretended it was the wine that he’d choked on. “What are you painting at the moment?”
“I’m working on a series,” he was surprised to hear himself saying. “It’s a sort of a journey-piece. A sequence of paintings which begin here in Paris and then…” He swallowed. “…bright, dark colors…” A nerve began to leap beside his eye. Something seemed to touch him, but was too faint to be heard or felt or seen.
“Sounds good, Gus,” Elanore said, leaning toward him across the table. And Elanore smelled of Elanore, the way she always did. Her pale skin was freckled from the sunlight of whatever warm and virtual place she was living. Across her cheeks and her upper lip, threaded gold, lay the down that he’d brushed so many times with his the tips of his fingers. “I can tell from that look in your eyes that you’re into a really good phase…
After that, things went better. They shared a second bottle of vin ordinaire. They made a little mountain of the butts of her Disc Bleu in the ashtray. This ghost—she really was like Elanore. Gustav didn’t even object to her taking his hand across the table. There was a kind of abandon in all of this—new ideas mixed with old memories. And he understood more clearly now what Van Gogh had meant about this cafe being a place where you could ruin yourself, or go mad or commit a crime.
The few other diners faded. The virtual waiters, their aprons a single assured grey-white stroke of the palette knife, started to tip the chairs against the tables. The aromas of the Left Bank’s ever-unreliable sewers began to override those of cigarettes and people and horse dung and wine. At least, Gustav thought, that was still foreal…
“I suppose quite a lot of the others have died by now,” Gustav said. “All that facile gang you seem to so fondly remember.”
“People still change, you know. Just because we’ve passed on, doesn’t mean we can’t change.”
By now, he was in a mellow enough mood just to nod at that. And how have you changed, Elanore? he wondered. After so long, what flicker of the electrons made you decide to come to me now?
“You’re obviously doing well.”
“I am…” She nodded, as if the idea surprised her. “I mean, I didn’t expect—”
“—And you look—”
“—And you, Gus, what I said about you being—”
“—That project of mine—”
“—I know, I—”
They stopped and gazed at each other. Then they both smiled, and the moment seemed to hold, warm and frozen, as if from a scene within a painting. It was almost…
“Well…” Elanore broke the illusion first as she began to fumble in the small sequined purse she had on her lap. Eventually, she produced a handkerchief and blew delicately on her nose. Gustav tried not to grind his teeth—although this was exactly the kind of affectation he detested about ghosts. He guessed, anyway, from the changed look on her face, that she knew what he was thinking. “I suppose that’s it, then, isn’t it, Gus? We’ve met—we’ve spent the evening together without arguing. Almost like old times.”
“Nothing will ever be like old times.”
“No…” Her eyes glinted, and he thought for a moment that she was going to become angry—goaded at last into something like the Elanore of old. But she just smiled. “Nothing ever will be like old times. That’s the problem, isn’t it? Nothing ever was, or ever will be… ”
Elanore clipped her purse shut again. Elanore stood up. Gustav saw her hesitate as she considered bending down to kiss him farewell, then decided that he would just regard that as another affront, another slap in the face.
Elanore turned and walked away from Gustav, fading into the chiaroscuro swirls of lamplight and grey.
Elanore, as if Gustav needed reminding, had been alive when he’d first met her. In fact, he’d never known anyone who was more so. Of course, the age difference between them was always huge—she’d already been past a hundred by then, and he was barely forty—but they’d agreed on that first day that they met, and on many days after, that there was a corner in time around which the old eventually turned to rejoin the young.
In another age, and although she always laughingly denied it, Gustav always suspected that Elanore would have had her sagging breasts implanted with silicone, the wrinkles stretched back from her face, her heart replaced by a throbbing steel simulacrum. But she was lucky enough to exist at a time when effective anti-aging treatments were finally available. As a post-centarian, wise and rich and moderately, pleasantly, famous, Elanore was probably more fresh and beautiful than she’d been at any other era in her life. Gustav had met her at a party beside a Russian lake—guests wandering amid dunes of snow. Foreal had been a fashionable option then; although for Gustav, the grounds of this pillared ice-crystalled palace that Catherine the Great’s Scottish favorite Charles Cameron had built seemed far too gorgeous to be entirely true. But it was true—foreal, actual, concrete, genuine, unvirtual—and such knowledge was what had driven him then. That, and the huge impossibility of ever really managing to convey any of it as a painter. That, and the absolute certainty that he would try.