Geoff Dyer - Paris Trance

‘I don’t know. You tell me.’

‘He’ll be exactly like my brother.’

‘And what’s your brother like?’

‘Dead.’

‘No!’

‘No, that was a lie. He’s a fat, idle pig,’ said Sahra. ‘Honestly, he’s like a greedy only child—’

‘Your brother’s an only child? Now we’re really getting to the crux of the matter.’

Sahra laughed. ‘I mean Luke. But they’re both oblivious to everything outside their own desires. It’s like he hasn’t been weaned. The world is just a breast to be sucked.’

‘How can you say that when he’s just cooked yet another incredible meal for us?’

‘Easily. The fact that he’s very generous doesn’t stop him being totally selfish.’ Alex kissed her. Whatever he thought of his friend it was always pleasing to hear him denounced like this. He was less keen on what came next.

‘Or maybe what’s going on is that you project your own desires on to him, that you like imagining you’re him.’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘Maybe it’s not Luke at all,’ said Sahra, slowly. ‘Maybe it’s Nicole. You worship Luke because you want to fuck Nicole.’

‘Very clever,’ said Alex, quickly. ‘I think it all comes down to you and this only-child brother of yours. How old were you, by the way, when you first sucked his pig-dick?’ Sahra punched him on the shoulder. ‘And while we’re on the subject of selfishness,’ Alex went on, ‘you are the most selfish sleeper I’ve ever shared a bed with.’

It was true. During her waking hours Sahra was considerate, thoughtful; asleep she sprawled, hogging the duvet and mattress as if he were not there. At first, forced into the chilly fringes of the bed, he lay awake, fascinated by the sea-change that came over her. Then it became a source of irritation. He started shoving her back into her half of the bed, tugging the duvet over his way, dragging her — as he hoped he would — out of the depths of her sleep.

‘You’re always waking me up,’ she whined.

‘You’re always taking the duvet,’ he whined back.

‘You’re always nagging me about the duvet.’

‘You’re always nagging me about leaving drawers and cupboards open.’

‘I nag you about the cupboards and drawers because I’m always hitting my head or knees on them.’

‘I nag you about the duvet because it’s always leaving me in the cold.’

‘Well that just goes to show doesn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘We both like nagging. It’s fun to nag.’

‘You’re right. What’s wrong with nagging?’ said Alex and they both settled back to sleep.

It may have been fun to nag but to be able to do so in several languages seemed, to Alex, an awesome achievement. Any pretensions to sophistication — a comprehensive knowledge of opera, say, or the capacity to discriminate between various recordings of Beethoven’s quartets — were nothing compared with the ability to chat with grocers and taxi- drivers in four or five languages. Sahra didn’t know the first thing about classical music — nor did Alex for that matter, nor Luke (Nicole did) — but her linguistic resourcefulness meant that she had even improved Alex’s hitherto strained relationship with his concierge. A Portuguese whose duties consisted, in the mornings, of looking miserable and, in the afternoons, of hanging out at a miserable bar with other miserable men, he had several times complained to Alex about petty infringements of the building’s non-existent rules. Since Sahra had begun chatting to him in Portuguese (which she did not even count as one of her languages) his behaviour had changed entirely; on one occasion he had even signed for a registered letter and brought it up to Alex later that day.

Alex admired and loved Sahra’s languages but what he loved more than anything were her habits : the way she folded her clothes away, the way she still used a pen that her father had given her ten years ago and still wore a hat (fluffy with coloured hoops that looked tartan from a distance) that she had been given for her seventh birthday. He liked to think of her when she was fifty, still wearing the same hat, using the same pen.

Alex was used to drawing up litanies of quirks like this. He was aware, likewise, that he and Sahra had grown close, that their relationship had evolved a pattern and rhythm of its own but the most important, the defining part of its development, was the invisible, unremarkable fact of their friendship.

Sahra was equally unaware of this — for precisely the opposite reason: she could not conceive of her lover not being a friend. To Sahra her lover was, above all else, a friend, her best friend. Alex came to realize this only negatively: he found himself thinking of Sahra as a friend rather than lover. They had known each other only a short time, they were in love, but something was missing. The first time they had gone to bed together they had said it would take time to get used to each other. Now they had got used to each other, but getting used to each other also meant getting used to there being something missing between them — and what was missing was so subtle that it was almost impossible to isolate or talk about. It wasn’t Sahra’s fault, it wasn’t Alex’s, but even in their moments of greatest arousal they were still there, still themselves. Sahra had had many lovers: was it always like this for her? Alex knew that it had not always been like this for him. Alex could talk to no one about this: to have talked to Luke would have been to have betrayed Sahra; the only person he could talk to was Sahra and he couldn’t talk to her. How did she feel? Was she feeling the same? He didn’t know. He didn’t know because she did not know how to ask him if he too felt as she did: namely that there wasn’t that perpetual flow of longing between them — that flow which anyone could sense passing between Luke and Nicole.

Who existed in a trance of longing, inhabited a state of constant wanting. Everything had been perfect from the first night they spent together. Neither of them knew why. It had just happened like that. And it continued happening like that.

‘There’s a bun for every burger,’ was the best explanation Nicole could come up with.

‘Where on earth did you pick up that expression?’

‘I heard it somewhere. I forget.’ She went on crunching her salad. Luke — who had finished his salad and loved reminiscing about their first date, their first night together — tried another tack.

‘Don’t you think it’s strange that we didn’t have safe sex that first night?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t you normally?’

‘I don’t normally sleep with people.’

‘How many men have you slept with?’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. It’s just a question that is there, waiting to be asked or not asked.’

‘But it’s not not being asked is it? You are asking.’

‘So. . How many?’

‘Three,’ she said, finishing her salad.

‘Three!’ Luke laughed. ‘You’re kidding. Is that including me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wow!’

‘Why you laugh?’

‘Because,’ he tittered, ‘it’s so few.’

‘And how many women have you slept with?’

‘More than three.’ Her face went blank with hurt. He put his arm around her, laughing still. He kissed her cheek, her ear.

‘Why you laugh?’

‘Because. . Well, I mean. How did you learn so much about sex?’

‘I didn’t learn anything. You think it’s like exams? You think you passed lots of exams?’

‘No. It’s lovely. You’re lovely.’

‘So how many?’

‘How many what?’

‘How many exams you have passed?’ Her English deteriorated quickly when she became angry.