Kurt squeezed László’s hand; László squeezed back. He was never entirely comfortable with this way of walking, and he reserved it for those moments of especial tenderness when something more than mere proximity was required. It was not that he was ashamed of Kurt. On the contrary, he was often joyfully incredulous that such a sweet-tempered young man should agree to stay with him. But László was a homosexual who retained a certain abstract disapproval of his tribe. In San Francisco, during his tenure at the Théâtre Artaud, he had been appalled at some of the things he had seen, men using each other much as dogs use table legs, a corrupt and worthless version of the Dionysian. In truth he had never really thought of himself as queer or Gay. A mariposa. A fruit. His case, he believed, was much simpler. There had in his life been certain people, beginning with Peter, whom he had needed, and who happened to be men. He did not want to make a vocation of it, to go on marches, wear badges. And anyway, he was from a time and a place where the notion of ‘coming out’ had been utterly unimaginable. Homosexuality was illegal in Hungary until years after he had left. His parents might have stood it – they were doctors, liberals, readers – but the Party would have destroyed him. Two men in a bed in the act of adoring each other was as subversive as a secret printing press, and it had not been much easier when he came to France – except in the theatre, of course, where nobody cared what you got up to, or who.
But tonight he wanted to think of the past he shared with Kurt Engelbrecht, rather than the one he possessed alone, and where, increasingly, he felt himself a ghost among ghosts, a wanderer in the Fields of Asphodel. At the apartment on rue Delambre he threw open the windows, lit the candles and fetched a bottle of Sambuca from the drinks cabinet beside the bookshelf in the dining room. He filled two small glasses, added a coffee bean to each, and with his lighter heated the surface of the liquor until it ignited with ghostly blue flames. He passed one of these entertaining glasses to Kurt. ‘Venice,’ he said.
‘Venice,’ replied Kurt, grinning.
‘La Fenice e des Artistes.’
‘Murano.’
‘San Michele.’
‘The Cittadi Vittorio…’
‘Ah!’
They had not done this for a while, this resuming of those ten or dozen stories that constituted the official history of their intimacy. As always, it began with Venice, and the morning they woke in their hotel to find the city furled in freakish snow, and had sat, wrapped in blankets, watching it for hours, wonder-struck as ten-year-olds.
Then Seville – the Triana district at 4 a.m. Footsore, irritable, hopelessly lost, wandering into a riverside bar to hear cante hondo, the crowd smoking as though in a trance, the singer, a middle-aged man in a dark suit at the far end of the bar, delivering his song in spasms of grief, ecstasies.
‘Next?’
Vienna. A melancholy hour at the grave of László’s mother, followed by a difficult, somewhat comical weekend with Kurt’s parents, kindly people only a few years older than László, who had addressed him during his entire stay as ‘Herr Professor’, preferring to think – could they really have believed it? – that his interest in their son was exclusively pedagogical.
And the holiday in New York with László’s brother, János, a divorced optometrist with an apartment full of prize-winning schnauzers. It had been Kurt’s first visit to America and they had driven from the airport in a yellow cab at dusk, rocking on bad roads through canyons of electrified tower blocks, Kurt almost in tears at the romance of so much light…
Evenings at the theatre. Nights on the town. Weekends in the country. Do you remember? A history with very few of the pages glued together, though each time they played the game, each occasion inspired by some unvoiced disquiet, the recollections were reworked a little as the line between memory and imagination became subtler, or just unimportant. It nearly always worked, and if not, well, there was the sambuca to make up the difference. This, thought László, was entirely the point of such drinks.
It was ten-thirty by the time he let his eyes open to the daylight. Kurt was long since up, the duvet on his side thrown back as if he had leaped from the bed. László slouched to the bathroom. He felt excited and slightly ill, his cock half erect, a persistent buzzing in his left ear, a taste of alcohol and fire on his tongue. He stood under the shower and coughed for a while, trying to clear his lungs, then shaved, catching the scrawn of his throat and emerging into the kitchen thirty minutes later with three scraps of toilet paper stuck to his skin by the adhesion of his own blood.
Leaning by the stove he ate a croissant beurre, a painkiller, a vitamin pill, then dressed himself in grey slacks and a linen shirt and went down into the street feeling like a Hemingway character, some old boxer ennobled by weakness, hauling himself into the ring for a last big fight. The day was for settling things, and it was in this spirit he intended to have his talk with Franklin Wylie, though quite what he could say to him that would be of any use he was not at all sure. Something to shame, something to encourage. It was impossible, or at least unacceptable, that all their years of friendship should end in silence, a dull glare of mutual incomprehension.
He caught the Metro from Montparnasse Bienvenue, changed at Sebastapol and arrived at Parmentier shortly before noon. At the greengrocer’s on the corner of Rue Jacquard he bought a large bag of cherries, then walked to the rue du Deguerry and tapped in the code to the outer door, but as he crossed the vestibule to the stairs, Madame Barbossa spied him from her office and flagged him down. She had met him on many occasions, knew he was ‘like family’ with the Wylies, and revered him as a man of culture whose name might be found in the newspapers from time to time, though she had no practical idea of what he did. She told him that Monsieur Wylie had gone out early, eight o’clock, just as she herself was coming in. Madame Wylie had left two hours later to have lunch with her mother at the old folks’ place in Epinay.
‘I should have called,’ said László, though he was surprised; it was almost always safe to assume Franklin would be at home at this time of the day, working or mooching, sleeping even. He offered the gardienne a cherry. She was looking at him as if he might, handled in the right way, reveal some item of scandal, something she could add to her collection of Wylie stories. Something to amaze a neighbour.
‘The spare key?’ asked László. He was not averse to a little gossip, but this was not the occasion for it. ‘I’ll put the cherries in the fridge so they can be enjoyed cold.’
‘As you like, monsieur.’
She fetched the key from her office. László wheezed his way to the fourth floor and let himself in. It was an old apartment, and little had been altered since the Wylies had bought it in ’78 or ’79, choosing it for its high ceilings, the pretty church across the street, the flood of the evening sun. The walls in the hallway formed a little gallery, densely hung. There were things by Franklin there, but most of the pictures were the work of dead friends, including a Phillip Guston, and even a Beuys sketch of what looked like a severed head, Orpheus perhaps, ‘his gory visage’ floating down the Hebrus.
He moved into the kitchen, where pans and skillets hung in rows from butcher’s hooks. It was the scene of many fine suppers together in the past. Laurence was a first-class cook; she was also a tidy woman, even a meticulous one, for whom the kitchen was a serious space, a place to be respected, so it was surprising and unnerving to see in the middle of the room a bottle of red wine left where it had fallen or been dropped or, God knows, thrown. A starburst of glass, the wine pooled in the hollows of the tiles and spattered on to skirting boards and cupboards. The record of an impact, very exact.