He’s a drunk now, he laughs. Fixed almost permanently to the bar stool. No one else sits on his stool, and if a stray yachtee or tourist tries to, the old boys warn them off. ‘I should be holding it down right now,’ Harry says, looking over his shoulder with mock concern at the empty stool and the two other old boys on theirs. ‘They’ll be worried about me.’ But he settles in the chair, tells me he almost died eight times. ‘Three plane crashes, a puff adder bite, a car crash, cerebral malaria twice. Oh, and some woman stabbed me.’
‘Some woman?’ I say.
‘Wife.’
‘How many wives have you had?’
‘My own? Or other men’s?’ He gives me a wolfish grin. ‘Eight. Eight wives. Of my own. Two more than Henry the Eighth and I didn’t kill even one.’
I imagine the young incarnation of Harry — the other face he once had. The blackberry-dark eyes and straight nose, even if he wasn’t handsome, he’d have been a buccaneer.
He’s studying me right back. ‘What an arsehole,’ he says.
‘Who?’
‘The arsehole who left you.’
I sip the Coke. ‘How do you know he left me?’
‘Gloria mentioned you were divorced,’ he winks. ‘With a certain relish.’
‘Why do you assume he’s an arsehole?’
‘The way you are.’
‘And how am I?’
‘Scooped out.’
I’m very careful not to look at him but out at the evening, the swifts in the sky, the dark mass of the sea.
Harry, however, continues to look at me.
‘I never left a woman,’ he says, and this return to jauntiness is for me, I sense, to bring me back. Whatever his physical disrepair, Harry is a sensitive man.
‘Eight wives and you didn’t leave one of them?’ I say, jaunty too.
‘Oh, I made it impossible for them to stay.’
‘How?’
‘Drinking, whoring, wandering.’
‘Why did you keep getting married?’
‘I loved the words. The promise, the hope. That I could be a husband.’
‘And what is a husband?’
Harry takes his beer. ‘We’re going to drink properly, then?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Drink, talk about love.’
‘Is that the proper way?’
‘What else do you talk about when you drink? Politics?’ He offers me his hand.
Insects swarm under the security lights outside the club. We get in his old Land Cruiser with one very weak headlight. There are rust holes in the floor. ‘Watch your foot.’
He drives into town, the main road above the port, parks on the street, and leads me into Le Club Casa Chica.
It is very dark and loud in here, so I feel muffled and semi-blind, and I think this is the purpose of a nightclub, to hobble senses: to obscure, to mute, to subdue, render hostage the self that discerns.
People know Harry, wave their arms, call out his name. I can’t hear, but I see their lips move. Harry old friend; Harry, me matie. I notice the women in here are exceptionally sylphlike, narrow-hipped and long-limbed. Harry slides into a booth, taps the space beside him and I think this is for me. But a slinky, bony girl materializes in seconds, melting over him. I sit opposite. A waitress with shining red lips brings drinks with paper umbrellas.
‘Sugar,’ Harry puts his arm around the girl. ‘This is my friend, Pilgrim.’
I extend a hand, and as Sugar takes it I notice her exquisite, impractical manicure and the hugeness of her hands. Sugar is, of course, a man. They are all men. Harry winks, holds up his drink.
‘I assume the arsehole wears suits.’
‘What?’ I say as if I can’t hear him, but I can, I’m just not sure I want this to go any further. He leans in, repeats, ‘The ex wears suits.’
‘Very nice suits.’
‘He’s a lawyer.’
I’m taken aback. ‘How did you know?’
He laughs, ‘I have many years of experience with a wide variety of arseholes. The suit narrows the field to professional arseholes. I think to myself: an arsehole who wears a suit; so not a pilot or a doctor, both really very chronic arseholes. The suits are nice, you said. A successful arsehole. An arsehole who dumps his beautiful wife in a crummy way; therefore an arrogant, self-righteous, selfish arsehole. A born arsehole, not a circumstantial arsehole. Because, let’s face it, we can all be arseholes if we get stuck at Customs, if another man is fucking our wife. An investment banker? Real estate tycoon? No, not quite right. Something he represented, something you were looking for. You liked his goodness, what he stood for. Conclusion: had to be a lawyer. Probably a defence lawyer, death penalty cases something like that.’
Sugar makes a sad, sympathetic face, though her makeup looks like a Kabuki mask. ‘Men. Why we always choose the ones who are shits?’
‘But he’s someone else’s arsehole now,’ Harry says, leaning across the table. ‘You see that, don’t you, pet?’ Then he shifts back, lets Sugar take his hand in her large, decorative paw and lead him to the dance floor. I order another cocktail, sweet and overbearing like comfort food, and watch them, Sugar oozing and gyrating and Harry surprisingly able to follow the beat.
Harry’s got it a little bit wrong: I didn’t fall in love with Tom because of his goodness. I never examined him, never drew the chart of Tom. Shoulder of goodness, hock of deceit, the fine brain. I saw the brilliant whole, without considering the parts, the atoms, that made Tom, Tom.
Under the spinning disco ball, I realize his otherness was absolute. On that summer day on the edge of Lac Léman, I see myself letting go of his hand. And Elise stepping up to him. He looked at me across the distance, asking me to come back. He didn’t want to talk to her. But I turned and kept walking, and maybe what he was seeing was not Elise staying, but me walking away.
Geneva, April 18
The Rue Saint-Léger was a street of children. Families burst out of high wooden doors, prams, dogs, nannies, children whirling like pinwheels. I waited at a discreet distance, pretending to do the International Herald Tribune crossword. I looked as if I belonged.
Elise came out of No. 41, the baby in a harness across her chest. Her hair was tied up carelessly, her face bare. She wore sloppy jeans and a man’s sweater — one of Tom’s, a gift I’d given him years ago. She crossed the street, into the park.
The trees were lovely, the buds just emerging: an entire summer compressed like silk scarves in a magician’s pocket. It was a warm day, though the sun was dulled by the muslin of high clouds. Elise walked toward the pond, and from the bag over her shoulder, pulled out a loaf of bread to feed the ducks. Perhaps she might fling the baby into the water, perhaps she was a lunatic. But she simply fed the ducks and kissed her baby’s head.
‘Pilgrim?’
I turned.
‘What are you doing here?’
He was standing on the path, having come into the park behind me. He was carrying a box from a bakery, containing, I supposed, sandwiches for him and Elise.
I looked away, my face scalded.
He took my arm. ‘Come, come with me.’ He glanced toward Elise, but she hadn’t seen us. Once outside the park, he led me into a café. In his impeccable French he ordered two coffees.