Geoff Dyer - Paris Trance

Grey boulders of snow lay piled up outside the gates of the park. Inside, the statues were rigid with cold. Having endured the blaze of summer they now waited out the brittle agony of winter. The trees were dark as iron. The sky was grey, heavy. Apart from that, as far as the statues were concerned, nothing had changed. Not even the old woman who sat there with her sign: ‘DITES MOI’. She was wearing a coat, wrapped up in a scarf, sitting in the same place she had occupied all summer, carved out of a silence as extreme as that of the statues around her. Luke ignored her and, repeating his habit of the previous summer, went to the cinema.

The film was an adaptation of Homo Faber , a book Luke had heard of but never read. It began in Athens airport, in 1957, and then flashed back a few months to another airport, in Central America. The plane crashes and Faber finds himself stranded in Mexico. He gets back to New York and then decides to take a boat to Europe.

During the ocean-crossing Faber finds himself falling for a young woman called Sabeth. He watches her play Ping-Pong, and then he joins in, not because he wants to play but because he wants to participate in the act of watching her. When he is not watching her he is filming her with a super-8 camera, as if he were already anticipating remembered happiness. Every moment is a promise — of how it will seem on film, in retrospect, when it has passed. She tells him that his name, Faber, means forger of his own fate. From Paris they drive down through France and Italy. They become lovers, they travel on to Greece. Faber films her with his little camera, too fascinated by watching her speak to listen to what she says.

Words have nothing to do with happiness, they can only frame it. Happiness is a question of colours: the blue of the sea, yellow fields of rape, her hair against the sky.

In Greece Sabeth suffers a terrible accident. ‘What was the use of looking?’ Faber asks himself when he hears that Sabeth has died as a result of this accident. ‘There was nothing more to see.’ He is back at Athens airport and the film is back where it began. ‘I wished I’d never existed,’ says Faber, pale, devastated.

On the day of Nicole’s return, still haunted by the film, Luke woke early. How was he going to survive until she came? The minutes were sweating by. He could hardly breathe. He had cut his nails down to the quick and put clean sheets on the bed. It took the will-power of a saint not to masturbate. He turned up at the station early and found that the train would be an hour late. He drank a shitty café au lait at one of the station bars, enjoying the commotion of departure and arrival, the rapid flick-a-flick of the departure board, the potential for robbery and harm suggested by the hundreds of strangers milling around in a place designed with getaway in mind. There was a sense of the whole of Europe converging here, on this station, and Luke at this moment felt that he too was in the precarious centre of something: of his life, of the life he had dreamed of. No, not the life he had dreamed of: the life he had willed, the life he had achieved. An unshaven man next to him lit up a cigarette. Luke left his coffee and headed to the platform.

The train curved into view, ground to a halt. The doors opened. Passengers began spilling out of the carriages, lugging their bags, embracing relatives, hurrying for taxis. Then he saw her. She was wearing a new coat, black. Her hair was long, loose, her skin pale. She looked tired, drawn. She walked down the platform, unhurried as always. She saw him. They were smiling, waving, then kissing. He breathed in the smell of her skin, her hair. He took her bag and they walked to the Métro.

‘How was Belgrade?’

‘It was like Belgrade.’

‘And your mother, how was she?’

‘She is happy. I showed her a photograph of you. She thinks you are handsome but immature.’

‘Which picture?’

‘The one of you when you were a boy, in the cowboy hat.’

‘It doesn’t do me justice.’

Sitting next to Nicole on the Métro Luke saw his Walkman in one of the side pockets of her bag.

‘Incredible,’ he said. ‘I’d resigned myself to never seeing this again.’ To his surprise it showed no obvious sign of damage. He checked there was a cassette and pushed the headphones into his ears. ‘How was it?’

‘Fine.’

He pressed Play. Nothing happened. He tried again.

‘The batteries must be flat,’ said Nicole.

Luke spent the rest of the journey wondering what he most wanted to do when they got back to the apartment: make love immediately or check that his Walkman was working properly.

As soon as they arrived home Nicole ran a bath and undressed.

Luke knelt in front of her, his face in her pubic hair. ‘Let me lick you before you get in the bath,’ he said.

‘I’ve been on a train for ages. I need to wash.’

‘No, before you wash.’

‘I’m embarrassed. Is not too much?’

‘No, it’s beautiful.’ She raised one leg, put her foot on the edge of the bath. He squatted so that he was almost under her, pushed his tongue as far into her as he could. She reached down and held his head with both hands, pressing his face against her.

Nicole lay in the bath, reading her mail. Before Christmas she had applied for a job in an architect’s office and in this batch of mail was a letter asking her to come for an interview on the twelfth—

‘Tomorrow!’ she exclaimed. ‘Luke!’

‘Yes!’ He was in the other room, hunting for batteries.

‘I’ve got an interview for that job at the architect’s. Tomorrow.’

‘Good timing!’ He put new batteries in the Walkman and went into the bathroom. ‘The moment of truth,’ he said, sitting, cautiously, on the toilet seat (it had never been fixed). Even with new batteries the Walkman did not work. Nicole stood up in the bath, began drying herself with a white towel.

‘I’ll take it back to the shop,’ said Luke. ‘I hope Alex and Sahra have the receipt. It must have been faulty.’

‘Yes,’ said Nicole, walking, naked, into the other room. ‘Though I did get honey in it.’

In the morning she got up, showered and dressed while Luke lay in bed, watching her and her reflection in the mirror. He was always hoping that the mirror would begin to ghost but for months now it had worked completely normally.

‘You know, I could spend my life watching you get dressed and undressed. However many times I see you naked I can never get over the shock of actually seeing you with no clothes on. And then, when I see you getting dressed again, when I see your pubic hair disappear into your knickers, when I see your breasts covered by your bra and your back by a blouse. Or when I see your legs going into your jeans. .’

‘Yes?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I was going to say. It’s a simple thing but complex. Without clothes you’re naked. With them, you’re not. On the floor your clothes are just clothes, then when you put them on they’re part of you.’

‘That’s profound Luke.’

‘Maybe all I mean is I love watching you get dressed.’

‘I like you watching me.’

‘But you don’t watch me in the same way, do you?’

‘I’ve never been fast enough. You’re dressed in less than ten seconds. Also watching’s not the same as noticing. You don’t need to watch to notice. Men watch, women notice.’

‘Good distinction. Did you notice that I jerked off into your knickers while you were away?’

‘I hope you washed them afterwards. How do I look?’ She was wearing her smartest suit, green, shoes with slight heels.

‘You always look beautiful.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Though naturally I would prefer stockings to tights.’