Alan Glynn - The Dark Fields aka Limitless

Later, I’d go to sets at Sweet Basil and the Village Vanguard and start chatting with people at adjoining tables, and while my extensive knowledge of jazz usually ensured that I came out ahead in any conversation, it would also sometimes get people’s backs up. It’s not that I was being obnoxious, exactly, I wasn’t, but I engaged with everyone, and in a very focused way, on whatever level, about whatever subject, squeezing each encounter for its last possible drop of what might be on offer – intrigue, conflict, tedium, trivia, gossip… it didn’t matter. Most people I came across weren’t used to this, and some even found it quite unnerving.

Increasingly, too, I was aware of the effect I was having on certain women I met – or sometimes not even met but just saw… across a few tables, or a crowded room. There appeared to be this curious, wide-eyed attraction that I couldn’t really account for, but which led to some intimate, revealing conversations, and occasionally, too – because I was unsure of the parameters here – some fairly fraught ones. Then one time, during a Dale Noonan gig at Sweet Basil, this pale, thirtyish redhead I’d noticed came over between numbers and sat at my table. She smiled, but didn’t say anything. I smiled back and didn’t say anything either. I summoned a waiter and was about to ask her what she’d like to drink when she shook her head slightly and said, ‘ Non .’

I paused, and then asked the waiter for the check. As we were leaving, with the frenetic Dale Noonan just starting up again, I saw her glancing back at the table she’d originally been sitting at. I glanced back as well. Another woman and a man were at the table, looking towards us, perhaps gesturing uncertainly, and in this fleeting tableau of body language I thought I detected a rising sense of alarm, maybe even of panic. But as soon as we got outside, the red-haired woman took me by the arm, almost pushing me along the street, and said, ‘Oh my God’ – in a very strong French accent – ‘that screaming brass shit, I couldn’t stand it any longer.’ Then she laughed and squeezed my arm, drawing me towards her, as though we’d known each other for years.

Her name was Chantal and she was here on vacation, from Paris, with her sister and brother-in-law. I tried to speak to her in French, not very successfully, which seemed to charm her no end, and after about twenty minutes I felt as though I had known her for years. As we walked along Fifth Avenue towards the Flatiron Building, I gave her the 23 Skidoo spiel, tales of cops shooing away young men who used to gather on Twenty-third Street to see passing women’s skirts billowing up in the gusts of wind. These gusts were caused by the narrow angle at the building’s northern end, an explanation which then degenerated into a lecture on wind-bracing and early skyscraper construction, just what you’d imagine a girl in such circumstances would want, but I somehow managed – apparently – to make talk of K-trusses and wall-girders interesting, funny, compelling even. At Twenty-third Street she stood in front of the Flatiron Building herself, waiting for something to happen, but there was barely a breeze that evening and about the only thing detectable in the folds of her long navy skirt was a gentle rippling movement. She seemed disappointed and looked as if she was about to stamp her foot.

I took her by the hand and we walked on.

When we got as far as Twenty-ninth Street, on Fifth Avenue, we turned right. A moment later she told me that we’d arrived at her hotel. She said that she and her sister had been shopping all day, and that that would explain the bags and boxes and tissue paper and new shoes and belts and accessories strewn about the place. When I looked slightly puzzled, she sighed and said I wasn’t to mind the mess up in her room.

The next morning we had breakfast in a local diner, and after that we spent a few hours at the Met. Since Chantal had another week left in New York, we agreed to meet again, and again – and, inevitably, again. We spent one entire twenty-four hour period together locked in her hotel room, during which time, among other things, I took French lessons. I think she was amazed at how much of the language I managed to learn, and how quickly, because by the time of our last encounter, in a Moroccan restaurant in Tribeca, we were speaking almost exclusively in French.

Chantal told me that she loved me and was prepared to give up everything in order to come and live with me in Manhattan. She’d give up her flat in Bastille, her job with a foreign aid agency, her whole Parisian life . I really enjoyed being with Chantal, and hated the thought of her leaving, but I had to talk her out of this. Never having had it so easy in a relationship, I didn’t want to push my luck. But I also didn’t see how our relationship could plausibly be sustained in the wider context of my burgeoning MDT habit. In any case, the way we’d met had been fairly unreal – an unreality which had been further compounded by the personal details I’d given her about myself. I’d told her that I was an investment analyst devising a new market forecasting strategy based on complexity theory. I’d also told her that the reason I hadn’t taken her to see my apartment on Riverside Drive was because I was married – unhappily, of course. The parting scene was difficult, but it was nevertheless nice to be told – through tears, and in French – that I would live for ever in her heart.

There were a couple of other encounters, too. One morning I went to my friend Dean’s place on Sullivan Street to pick up a book, and as I was leaving the building I got talking to a young woman who lived on the second floor. According to the bullet-point profile of his neighbours Dean had once reeled off, she was a single-white-female computer-programmer, twenty-six, non-smoker, interested in nineteenth-century American art. We’d passed each other on the stairs a few times before, but in the way of things in New York City apartment buildings, what with alienation and paranoia, not to mention endemic rudeness, we’d completely ignored each other. This time I smiled at her and said, ‘Hi. Great day.’ She looked startled, studied me for a nanosecond or two, and then replied, ‘If you’re Bill Gates. Or Naomi Campbell.’

‘Well, maybe,’ I said, pausing to lean back against the wall, casually, ‘but hey, if things are that bad, can I buy you a drink?’

She looked at her watch and said, ‘A drink ? It’s ten-thirty in the morning – what are you, the crown prince of Toyland?’

I laughed. ‘I might be.’

She was holding an A & P shopping bag in her left hand and under her right arm she had a large hardcover volume, lodged tightly so it wouldn’t slip. I nodded at the book.

‘What are you reading?’

She released a long sigh, as if to say, Fellah, I’m busy, OK… maybe some other time . The sigh then tapered off and she said, wearily, ‘Thomas Cole. The works of Thomas Cole.’

‘ View from Mount Holyoke ,’ I said automatically. ‘ Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm – The Oxbow .’ It was as much as I could do to resist continuing with, ‘Eighteen thirty-six. Oil on Canvas, fifty-one-and-a-half inches by seventy-six inches.’

She furrowed her eyebrows and looked at me for a moment. Then she lowered the shopping bag and put it down at her feet. She eased the large book out from under her arm, held it awkwardly and started flicking through it.

‘Yeah,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘ The Oxbow – that’s the one. I’m doing this…’ She continued flicking distractedly through the book. ‘I’m doing this paper for a course I’m taking on Cole and… yeah,’ she looked up at me, ‘ The Oxbow .’