Little black stones. Of course he was lonely.
So I am lonely, and he is lonely. Not parting yet, just moving apart.
And we’ve only been together five years… how little life there is in us.
Christopher. Do you remember? When we lived together, there was so much life. For twenty years we honeymooned.
We loved each other till the day we parted. Some small mad part of me loves him still…
If I weren’t a realist I’d love him still, but time and the world have left us behind.
Hotel Magdalena, Guayaramerín. Another town, another hotel, so near the banks of the Mamore river that we hear the frogs singing all night long. I hear them, at any rate, because I can’t sleep. Benjy is sleeping youthfully.
All the hotels start to blur together, and all the names of South American towns. This one at least means nothing to me. When this dream began, long ago in New York, when I pored over the maps that Benjy brought me, I saw so many towns called Esperanza, so many called Concepción, others promising us Exaltación… at the time I was jubilant, I thought it was a sign, but now I see it was just their joke.
I think of memory like toothache, or the pain in a long-ago broken bone where the join is not quite effortless; a small piece lost, a connection gone. Days of departure ache the most, because they were the days when Chris and I felt closest…
Leaving somewhere and moving on, leaving behind the brief new friendships, proving yet again that only he and I mattered, a unit of two against the world. Drawing an arc into emptiness as the plane sheered away from the things we knew and straight up into a cloudless sky. Disappearing into a blank silver screen. Then we made pictures, beautiful pictures…
Alex and Chris in Poreč, in Istra, where so many things were a shade of gold, the glittering mosaics in the basilica, the orange roofs, the apricot juice we drank ice-cold in a tiny cafe as soon as we got off the train, the sweet tawny Prošek wine we had later as the light turned gold for the end of the day; Alex and Chris in Buenos Aires, in evening dress and gangster shades; Alex and Chris in Bermuda, where everything seemed painted white, the roofs of the houses, the powdery sands, the languorous tail of a tropic bird he said reminded him of me; Alex and Chris posing in Cairo, drinking gin slings in the setting sun, the light blazing pink through the rims of the glasses…
Everything was so bright, so light. An adventure film, an artifice. We enjoyed each other and enjoyed ourselves and didn’t think about much else…
(Nothing could be that simple, surely? Of course it can, of course it was.)
Now the world seems suddenly all too real. Dirt and squalor and flies and disease. The desperate need that drives me on. My changing body, my lessening blood. Things going wrong, things that have gone.
Why must things change? I ask myself, lying in the dark beside my lover, the smooth-skinned lamb I no longer love, and he moans gently and turns towards me, dumbly trying to clutch my hand, and I ease away, trying not to wake him, because if he wakes he’ll want to talk and there’s nothing left to talk about.
I no longer want him here, and that’s that.
— In the morning I’ll have to see us in the mirror, another mirror, another hotel, I’ll be fifty-five, he’ll be thirty and eager, nothing we’ve said can be erased, the sun will photograph the skin of my arm, a map of microscopic rifts and valleys, and we’ll quarrel mildly and go down to breakfast, an older woman and her sulky young lover…
But tonight, in the dark, I can lie and dream.
I can fly back through time.
That first departure. The true beginning.
Try to remember, Alexandra.
12. Christopher: Venice, 2005
I loved to make her come with my mouth. I loved to make her come in any of the dozen ways I made her come, but with my mouth, with my mouth, oh god… my lips are dry at the thought of it.
I loved her smell. She was never shy, whether she had washed or not, because she knew I loved her smell, because I loved her completely, her piss, her shit, when we shared a bathroom, the rank smell of her sex when I knelt above her in the hot countries we travelled through. Her sweat was delicious, a red-head’s sweat, peppery, musky, animal. She gave herself to me, when we were together, completely, totally. You must understand, it was why I loved her, the way she melted when we made love, she no longer talked, she no longer bullied, she opened herself and became a life where I could be entirely happy, she opened herself and took me in.
— I loved to make her come with my mouth. That seaweed smell and her skin on my face, I can feel it still, her silky skin, the salt-wet smoothness so carefully folded between the rough curls of her long lips which I teased her she’d played with too much as a girl, and the landscape would change as my tongue glanced over it, the little peak would grow and yearn and harden under my gentle tongue, but she always wanted me inside as well, I loved the way she’d cry ‘Please, inside’, my tongue always had to push deep inside her, deep inside and then back again to the swollen ridge which probed for me like an answering tongue… and then less gentle, firmer, surer, now I could feel she was moving with me as the trembling began in her inner thighs and her buttocks tightened under my fingers and then her hands would be clutching my hair, pulling my head against her need, and all of her would tense like a bow as she started to sigh and hold her breath and her body suddenly went haywire as small electric shocks shot everywhere, convulsing, shuddering across her, and the deep cries came, those wonderful cries which were wrenched from her as her thighs locked round me and I held her, I had her, we held each other, loud rough cries, she had lost herself.
Till the cries became purts and sighs again. Deep soft childish sighs of release. And sometimes she would fall dead asleep, so deep that she’d wake and remember nothing… so I’d have to make her come again. I thought it would always happen again.
I loved it so.
Oh we loved each other.
Travel meant sex, for us. We went away so we could make love.
It was problematic at home with the children; we weren’t naturally quiet lovers, and though the house was big the kids got everywhere. Feet would come padding up the stairs just when we had slipped away together and her cool fingertips slid under my balls.
‘Dad? Do you know where the dictionary is?’
‘Alex! Have you moved my red shoes?’
It was as if they knew. And although it’s stupid, for we were married, after all, we’d freeze, and I at least felt guilty — Alex was never a great one for guilt. I wonder if she ever feels guilty now, when she thinks of the ruin of so many lives?
‘It’s your dictionary, you find it.’
‘I put your bloody shoes away!’
I didn’t want to upset the children, I never wanted to upset the children. We’d wait till bedtime, watching each other. But in the middle of the night, when we were finally alone, the house seemed nerve-wrackingly quiet, as if it and the kids were listening; the bed creaked; the clock ticked. I could manage to come with the quietest of sighs but Alex was never very piano and I used to clamp my mouth over hers, those beautiful, dark, exaggerated lips with the full lower curve which seemed so right for the thrilling low octaves her voice did best. She came contralto too — on the rare occasions when I didn’t muffle her, or when our chaperones could be bribed to go out.