Adam Thirlwell - Lurid & Cute

— It’s me, she said. — Is this a good time?

— Uh-huh, I said.

— Are you busy right now?

— Where are you? I said.

— Here, she said.

— What kind of here? I said.

— Downstairs, she said.

I put the phone down. And then I paused, while I waited for the elevator to ascend, and in that pause I was partly looking out at the balcony of my apartment, where I had hung a birdcage I had bought the other morning in the bird market, and my new backpack, or listening to a fly scribble its noise zigzaggingly all over the room, but also I was perhaps at last having the kind of moment where I did understand what had happened to me, or was still happening. I had in some way definitively aged. It was the time sadness you get in a plane when you realise that not only are the air hostesses on your transatlantic flight in no way comparable to the lissom pin-ups of your imagination, but that in fact they once were precisely those selfsame lissom pin-ups, but now time has passed and they are still up here, in the air, serving mini muffins and miniature wine, but simply older, with wedding rings, and a more refined idea of sarcasm, and everything has changed without anyone understanding how, or why. I could not say that I was happy Candy was here. In some way it felt like a test or torture and I did not know if I could bear it. And then there she was, in my doorway.

where he sees his wife for a final time

Of the many exquisite aspects of Candy’s beauty, the aspect that struck me now, as it had often, obviously, struck me, was the very long length of her legs. There you all are, I often wanted to say to the world, when I was out with my wife, you look at Candy, you look at the grandeur and the beauty of her legs and then you think: But only a man with a humdinger, a baseball bat against his thighs, like something resembling an aubergine or pumpkin, no not pumpkin, a baseball bat , could satisfy a woman with legs as long as that. Her legs are these things of supple delicate extensive beauty that therefore lend themselves to imagining them in various angular poses, kinked around your thighs, or upright and resting on your shoulders, and when I saw them again I had such desire for her I could not think, because I could only think about the way those legs became her hips, and the soft skin between her legs and how it would go wet if I just touched it, as if something had dissolved. I watched her while she observed my bare apartment, with my single beloved backpack, and also magazines and books and cigarettes, because lately I had taken up smoking, a habit Candy had always disliked and so I had rarely done it, or at least not professionally.

— You’re smoking now? she said.

— I didn’t ask you here, I said.

— OK, she said.

Then I walked towards her, I think just to be closer, and she watched me walking, and then when I was beside her at the window she leaned towards me and too late I realised she only intended to hug me — for after all we are very different in our heights, where I am small, she is tall, where I am cherubic, she is elegant and lithe — and so regretfully I felt my lips meet hers. She kissed me very softly on the lips and I felt like the women are said to have felt in previous eras, the way you are kissed and feel like you are swooning. The lighting in the room suddenly felt wrong. The lighting was yellow because it was twilight but before I thought to improve it her phone rang.

— Yeah I’ll call you later, she said.

— Who was that? I said.

— How long have you been here? she said.

— How long? I said.

— And why are you limping? she said.

— Limping? I said.

— Yes, limping, she said.

— It’s a long story, I replied.

It was definitely difficult to talk to her. And that in itself was part of my new knowledge, that something irrevocable had happened, but not just that — that something in the past had definitively happened, because of what was happening right now.

& understands his transformation

Most stories are like the story of the man who threw away a date stone and then there started up behind him a muscular spirit, saying, Get up that I can kill you, just as you killed my son . And when the man said, How did I slay your son? the spirit simply replied: When you threw away the date stone it hit my son, who was passing by at the time, on the chest, and he died. There is no help for you. You have to die . And so he kills the putz, without mercy. I mean, most stories seem to begin with chance, with just a djinn appearing, and then they end up being destiny. I say destiny, but what I really mean is total unfairness and people being beaten to a pulp whether they deserve that fate or not. Because here’s how I see the present situation. The universe is a total psychopath and bully, with paws and boxing gloves and whatever other trinkets it finds most useful for beating people into pulp. It is out of control, totally. It is a bully and I am its slave and that leads to different kinds of knowledge. One of which, for instance, might be that whereas you might prefer it that one thing follows another very normally, in fact it’s like how a friend of mine once described it — that if a dog bites a little boy and gives him rabies, the illusion of a universal cause and effect is maintained, and order exists, and everyone feels happy. But if, on the other hand, the boy instead turns into a dog himself, by which I mean, if the story has some inexplicable transformation or hole in it, then the world is uncontrollable — and that scenario is in fact while improbable also much more likely — like all of our affections, our inability to live up to our own standards, and our undeserved misfortunes. And when that happens, and you have a story with a hole in it, then that hole transforms your story into a myth. So that the obvious $1,000,000,000 question, in my opinion, is therefore something like this: is there really any normal story in this world at all? Isn’t everything at some point, if you make the frames go slow enough, going to reveal itself as mythological?

only when everything is over

— Are you avoiding me? she said. — Is it me you’re running away from?

— I’m not running away, I said. — I’m just. I’m… You want something to eat? I said.

Then Candy kissed me again and this time it was real. It was in no way what I expected but also if it was happening I did not want at all to resist. I pushed off her leather jacket and she wriggled her wrists out and then let it splash on the floor, and she had a white vest on through which you could see the outline of her nipples — because Candy hardly ever wore a bra, she didn’t need to, and this was something always I had found so erotic about her — and something about this sight made me terribly sad, it was so definite and also so elusive.

— Are you with someone? she said.

— No, I said.

— And you? I said.

Then I realised I did not want to know, at the precise moment when I also realised that she was not going to answer.

— I didn’t hurt you deliberately, I said.

— I don’t care, she said.

Then she sat down in a chair, in this pose of complete elegance and sureness, with her long legs angular beneath her, just ever so slightly gawkily, and I did not know what was happening.

— Come to the window, I said. — Look at the streets.

— No, she said. — Come here.

But I didn’t want to do that. I was suddenly too sad.

— You know, I said, — you once said to me that we should maybe get together when we were sixty.

— I didn’t mean it, she said. — I was being nice.

— How was that nice, I said, — if you didn’t mean it?