Adam Thirlwell - The Escape

After Haffner had located the key — with its tasselled mane — Zinka immediately made for Haffner's bathroom. She went in, slammed the door. From within the bathroom, then came the sound of running water.

Haffner sat on the edge of the bed; took off his shoes; discovered the Lives of the Caesars , in paperback, underneath the scalloped valance; placed the book on the bedside table, beside his edition of Gibbon; and he sighed.

Three eras, he decided, marked any possible grandeur he might have ever had, the eras when he was most true to himself: there was the war; then the glorious 1970s; and maybe, he considered, now. At this coda to his life — as if his life had been extended, in a moment of grace, just slightly too long.

Zinka had a mole on her left cheek, tusked with twin hairs. It was the same mole, with the same tusks of hair, as the one which had belonged to a girl whom Haffner had met when the war in North Africa was over. This was 1942, or thereabouts. The regiment had gone to Bone, a lovely little place. And there it was, somehow, that he had met a lovely Jewish family who gave two or three of them a dinner. Haffner often wondered what happened to those nice people in North Africa, after the war was over. He always remembered the girl, with the darkest skin Haffner had ever seen, playing 'Invitation to the Waltz' on the piano. The next day the family arranged for them to be called up to read a portion of the Torah at the synagogue.

An echo in the bathroom, Zinka asked him if he wanted to come in.

He didn't think that this was his right — this openness which women so often displayed towards him. He never felt so confident as that. It was why the women loved him: his inherent modesty. He knew that this was happening by a grace which was beyond him.

Joyful, as he stepped into the bathroom, on stockinged feet, he paused at his window — where the sky was now one single shade of red, like a colour sample.

And Haffner was transported.

For just as the sky was now a painting of paint, to Haffner's distracted eyes, so he remembered how, in 1973, he had seen an exhibition of pure colour: at MoMA in New York. The exhibition was of paintings which were simply called Colors . The trip, on this Sunday afternoon, was Livia's idea. Haffner, always eager to discover new maps of his cultural ignorance, happily agreed.

Thin slabs of colour were laid next to each other: like in a paint catalogue. There seemed no genius, thought Haffner, no sublime. It was the absence of hyperbole — but precisely at this point Haffner found himself warming to this painting. Yes, this — so Haffner once told me — was the only art which he had ever liked. Livia had expected him to act with his normal grumpy chutzpah in the face of the masterpieces of modernism. But Haffner was transfixed. He was transfigured.

Long after Livia had left him for the cafeteria, where she sat with a filter coffee and three shrugs of sugar, Haffner still stood there, gazing into colour.

Such freedom! Although Haffner also enjoyed trying to trace the patterns in the grid — trying to work out if the repetitions of the yellow or the red could be predicted. He wasn't sure they could. So he let his eyes go endless.

Livia had disliked this abstract art: this most abstract of abstract art. It seemed emotionless, she thought. It was cold. This was what she told Haffner in the leather nook of a banquette at the Plaza, in the Oak Room. It had nothing to do with the real world. And Haffner had discovered a tirade within himself: that what the fuck did she care about the real world; that as far as Haffner was concerned there was no such thing as the real world; that this painting — to which, he reminded her, she herself had taken him, it wasn't Haffner's idea — this painting was as real as anything else; that in fact it seemed to Haffner an accurate portrayal of the real world in its clarity, its order; that quite frankly he saw little difference between the world which Livia called real and the world of colour in the grid on a wall at MoMA.

In the colours, Haffner found something he loved. He didn't understand it. But he knew that he admired it. This world beyond the world: where everything was pure.

There in her bath, Zinka was a vision of bubbles. Haffner knew the word for this. It was a fantasia. The vision of Walt Disney, the master of cartoons.

From the costume of her bubbles, Zinka said that first he must blindfold himself. Haffner queried this. Yes, she said. If he wanted to stay. He could take that stocking from over there. Haffner looked: a sliver of black pantyhose was slumped under her dress. He looked back at her. She nodded. That was the condition, she said.

These were the trials, thought Haffner. He was happy with the trials. Yes, for pleasure, Haffner could undergo anything.

With clumsy hands, Haffner tied the stocking limply over his eyes: a robber baron. But Haffner didn't care. He could still see: cloudy, in black and white. The peep shows of his maturity.

Haffner transformed by lust! Haffner crowned with the head of an ass!

If Haffner wanted, she said, he could now come and help to wash her. Would he like that? If he wanted, he could take that sponge and wash her back. Just so long as he was careful.

The fragrances from the water overtook Haffner. He stood over her. He wished he could have seen more. There her outline was, like the coyest vision of Hollywood, submerged by infinite foam. Her hair was done up in a hazy bun. One hand was leaning over the rim of the bath. She was looking up at him.

She told him to tighten the stocking. Haffner obeyed.

Then he took off his jacket, pushed the cuffs of his sweatshirt up — a bad imitation of his father, whose billowing sleeves were always secured with two silver bands, like the neat cuffs for napkins. He took a sponge, and dunked it: then expressed the water in warm rivulets over the curve of her back, with its peeling patches of foam.

An incubus, Haffner hunkered over Zinka. Perhaps this was another image which Haffner thought he should have minded. Haffner, however, never minded the embarrassments in his pursuit of pleasure. The embarrassments were just the acknowledged debt one owed.

Just below the disintegrating level of foam, he could see — through the thin blindfold — the momentary beginning of Zinka's breasts. He could see the side of her left breast, but the slope was something else. Pretending not to look, he tried to notice as much as he could: to preserve it for the playground of his memory, while Zinka told him that he was being very kind. He was quite the gentleman.

Haffner wondered how long he could maintain a courtly conversation with a woman while blindfolded with her stocking. Its scent was odd: a mixture of must and shoe leather and the faintest last echo of her perfume.

Yes really, she said. He was a civilised man, and she liked that.

She flattered him. As Haffner had been flattered all his life, by the women. The women loved to flatter him: they loved to exercise his ego. He was cosseted. Not every woman, obviously. Not, most importantly, Livia. But the women Haffner went for in his secret life, his private life, were images of his mother. They told him how wonderful he was. They wrapped presents for him, surprises. On his sixtieth birthday, a woman for whom Haffner had only the most vestigial of passions privately presented him with a giant trunk of presents: sixty, each wrapped inside the other. A present of presents for the birthday boy. But maybe Livia had praised him like this, at the beginning. Maybe she simply got tired of his demands for flattery: or simply realised the untruth of all her praise — the practised way in which he enticed her with his vulnerability.