Geoff Dyer - Paris Trance

‘Comme exercice y’a pas mieux que la natation,’ said the physio. ‘Faut nager!’

‘Je déteste nager,’ said Luke.

But he did like the swimming costume that Nicole bought herself the day after his plaster came off. It was yellow, a one-piece, but so much of that piece had been left out that it looked, if such a thing were possible, like an all-in-one bikini. Nicole swam twice a week at the pool on Alphonse Baudin but this costume, she said, was only for best. Luke took a Polaroid of her wearing it, smiling, patting Spunk on the head, framed by a sky so blue it was impossible to tell that it was taken indoors, by the window in their apartment. This, Luke discovered, was one of the great features of Nicole’s apartment: the distinction between outdoors and indoors was not absolute — which is why, by the time he took that picture, Nicole was already slightly tanned. When the sky was clear it was possible to lie stretched out on the floor for an hour in the afternoon, bathed from head to foot in sun. As the summer approached so the length of time that the sun perched in the right place extended itself. Luke loved to watch her lying there, naked, her breasts rising and falling slightly, her hair streaming over the red cushion. Looking at her, it seemed to Luke, was a form of thinking.

On one occasion, as she dozed, he took down from the shelves the anatomy textbook that had belonged to her father. Photos showed the body stripped of successive layers: clothes, skin, fat, muscle. There was not a drop of blood to be seen, hardly even a hint of red or pink. Cuts and injuries revealed a pulsing arterial richness; these photos showed a world of uncured, brownish leather. Luke kept looking from the pages of the book to the naked woman lying asleep on the floor, then back to the book again. The photos became more explicit by the page. Every nook and cranny of the body was held up to impartial scrutiny. A foot, ankle ligaments (he winced), a shoulder, a shrivelled brown cock. It was like pornography taken to some numbing stage of total disclosure. By comparison pornographic or bodybuilding magazines seemed gentle and elusive as fairy tales. Everything was displayed, nothing was revealed. By the closing pages he was half expecting to see the soul itself revealed as a dark tumour-shaped lump or a resilient piece of gristle which, like the appendix, served no real medical function and could be disposed of as superfluous.

It was depressing, looking at this book, to think that this is what we all were and would become: a mass of dry, spongy material, nine tenths of which seemed dedicated to waste disposal. He looked at Nicole: her stomach growled. She was the only woman he had ever seen shit. Not seen her shit exactly, but at least been in the bathroom while she sat on the toilet, shitting. . Inside, as this book made plain, every man and woman was exactly the same as every other. There was nothing to choose between anyone. But there was Nicole, the woman he loved, lying on the floor.

He thought of The Man with the X-ray Eyes , with Ray Milland as the doctor trying to find a way of seeing through the skin of his patients to offer immediate and accurate diagnoses of their illnesses. He applied drops of chemical solution to his eyes and, at first, was able to see through a few sheets of paper. Then — the fun part — he was able to see through nurses’ dresses and underwear. The experiment got quickly out of control because he couldn’t control the duration or depth of penetration of his vision. After a while repeated, unregulated exposure to the X-ray solution caused Milland’s vision to be filled entirely by the ghastly viscera and skeletons he’d hoped only to glimpse in the course of his medical research. All the time his eyes were getting more and more bloodshot, like someone who’d been sleeping in gritty contact lenses for a month. God, his eyes looked sore. People and walls began to fade altogether. To control this creeping omniscience he wore sunglasses which had to get thicker and thicker and darker and darker. Eventually only dense lead sunglasses could prevent his peering through buildings. By the climax of the film the world was melting away and he was staring into a psychedelic infinity of colour.

Luke closed the book and looked again at Nicole, bathed in light, her flesh stretched perfectly over her hip bones. Her eyes flickered open, taking in the room, squinting in the light, seeing him.

‘What have you been doing?’ she said

‘Bending and straightening my leg eighty times.’

‘I had such deep sleep. Am I really awake? I can’t tell.’

‘You’re asleep.’

Nicole stretched and then lay with her eyes shut. They were still shut when she said, ‘How are you my Lukey? Happy?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Say why.’

‘Why I’m happy?’

‘Yes.’

‘I could list things, things that make me happy. You. Looking at you. Looking at you naked. Talking to you while looking at you naked.’

‘And what about other women?’

‘What about them?’

‘Do you ever look at other women?’

‘No.’

‘Do you ever want to?’

‘If I wanted to I would.’

‘So you never want to?’

‘Do you want me to answer absolutely truthfully?’

‘You’re an only child, remember? You don’t know how to lie.’

‘Never.’

Nicole stood up and walked to the fridge. ‘Would you like some water?’

‘No thank you.’ She took a bottle of faucet-filled Evian out of the fridge, opened it and took a sip.

‘What else makes you happy?’ She was standing with her back to the open fridge, naked, one arm propped on the door. Steam coiled round her.

‘Wearing my new T-shirt.’

‘That horrible one?’

‘Yes. What about you?’

‘What makes me happy?’

‘Yes.’ She put the bottle back and shut the fridge. Luke watched her cross the room and lie down again in the hot puddle of sun.

‘Knowing you. Knowing, not looking. You see the distinction?’

‘It is, so to speak, staring me in the face.’

‘I know you so well, Luke. I like that. That makes me happy. Suppose they cloned you, made another one of you, absolutely identical. I could draw up a list of a hundred or a thousand things that distinguished you from it.’

Is this what it means to love someone? To take pleasure in itemising the smallest things about them? Except the list is never definitive, never complete. Things have to be added to it constantly: things that have never been noticed before, new things that turn out to be essential things.

‘Let me qualify what I said about looking at you making me happy,’ said Luke. ‘I have X-ray eyes. It’s not just your outside that I had in mind. It’s your kidneys and liver and all those hidden bits of offal that make you work the way you do, that make you smell the way you do, that make you what you are.’

‘Is that why you’re always trying to get your fingers up my arse?’

‘Yes, that makes me happy too.’

‘It’s easy isn’t it, happiness?’

‘It’s all in the lubrication.’

‘Happiness is just the harmony between a person and the life they lead.’

‘That’s lovely. Is it you or someone else?’

‘Someone else.’

‘Who?’

‘I forget. Are you still bending and stretching your leg?’

‘No. Now I’m just chatting.’

‘I love chatting with you.’

‘Me too.’

‘Is it still all withered and feeble?’

‘My leg? Yes.’

‘Like your prick then.’

‘Yes, exactly.’

‘I’d like to make love.’

‘Me too.’

‘Tie me to the bed,’ she said.

Nicole had to work late the following evening. She and Pierre had just put the finishing touches to a proposal for a competition for an extension to a museum in Provence. Everyone else had left. It was hot. Pierre had taken off his tie, his shirt was unbuttoned at the neck. He went to the fridge and came back with a bottle of champagne. He opened it and poured two glasses.