David Szalay - All That Man Is

‘No,’ she says. ‘Of course not.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

They are standing in the dark street. She says, ‘I don’t know.’

Leaving the question open, they start to walk towards his hotel. She is wearing his jacket over her dress — the temperature has dropped precipitously since they sat down to a meal that had turned extremely flirty.

For instance, the way he touched, at her invitation, the scar on her lip. (A spill from a moped had put it there, she told him, when she was fourteen.) The scar had started, at some point while they sat on the terrace of the Bar Samoëns, to mildly fixate him. It had distracted him throughout the early part of the meal.

He touched it lightly with his fingertip, and wondered out loud what it might be like to kiss it. And though she didn’t say, ‘Why don’t you try?’ he had had the feeling that she might have done if she’d had the nerve.

Instead she just looked at him, and he noticed how huge and earnest her hazel eyes were, and suggested they have a digestif .

That all took place in French. After the first half-litre of Mondeuse he had insisted on switching to French. And then he had had to explain why he spoke French so well — about how his father had lived in France when he was at school, and how he had spent all the school holidays there, in Paris or in the South. And she had asked him — with a sort of shining-eyed seriousness — whether he had had any homosexual experiences at boarding school in England, and he had said that no, he hadn’t. The idea that that was widespread was, he told her, a myth. And then she had volunteered a pretty vivid story about an experience of her own, once, with another woman, while he felt his mouth drying out and poured them some more wine.

What she hadn’t asked him was whether he was married or anything like that, and he had also avoided the subject.

She, it turned out, was a single mother. Her son’s father lived in Norway.

And so, after a second aquavit and a shared dessert, they found themselves outside under the stars.

Which they looked up at for a minute, standing there in the street, looking up between the dark eaves of the houses at the sky.

It did occur to him, since she was the one who had started it, that this was in fact practically an invitation to kiss her. (She was waiting there, with her face tilted upwards, shivering slightly.) And he did, with the wine and aquavit singing in his veins, sort of want to kiss her.

For a moment he felt that he was about to. And then he felt he wasn’t.

He looked at the dark street. The village was very quiet. She was still searching the sky.

He said, ‘You’re not going to drive , are you?’

He saw, as soon as he had said it, that the question would sound suggestive — that it would sound as if he actively wanted her to spend the night in the village.

She lowered her face to look at him tipsily, straight at him. ‘No, of course not.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘You don’t know?’

She shook her head.

Another moment: the wine and aquavit singing in his veins.

—

Without saying anything else, they started to walk towards his hotel.

So what are you going to do?

The question was one for him as well. It seemed pretty obvious, anyway, what she had in mind.

In the oppressive light of the lobby, though, the idea seemed silly. Somehow unpalatable. There was a short pause as they stood there.

‘I suppose we’d better get you a room,’ he heard himself say.

To which, after a moment’s hesitation, she just nodded.

And then he was at the desk, making the arrangements.

And now he is in his own room, sitting on the bed.

He pulls off his socks.

He is tired, that’s true.

Still.

Might’ve been nice.

There is a melancholy sense, as he takes off his socks, of opportunity lost.

He wasn’t willing to make any effort to make it happen. It was the prospect of effort , more than anything, of even a minimal amount of effort, that had made the whole idea seem unappealing as they stood in the lobby.

His friend Freddy would have put in the necessary effort. Obviously Freddy would have. Freddy, the last time they met, had told James proudly about how he had been playing the piano in a jazz quintet in Wales and after the show two members of the audience, a man and a woman, had asked him to join them for a drink. She was alright looking, Freddy said, so he had joined them, and they had had several drinks, and some lines of speed, and then they invited him to their place, where it was soon pretty obvious what they had in mind. Freddy was to fuck her while the husband watched, wanking. Thanks to the speed it went on for ever, Freddy said. It was daylight when he left.

The story was a bit pathetic actually, James thinks, screwing up his used socks.

Freddy was forty-five years old.

Eking out an existence playing the piano at weddings, in wine bars. Sleeping on people’s sofas.

‘Don’t you worry?’ James would say to him.

‘About what?’

‘About your life.’

‘What about it?’

James took a moment to frame a more precise question. Then he said, ‘Whatever. Nothing.’

Freddy was not as happy, not as entirely satisfied with his situation, as he made out. It wasn’t so much that he worried about being the cricket in the fable, exposed to the oncoming winter. (Though he was.) It was simpler than that. He wanted to be looked up to. He wanted status. When he was twenty-five, lurid sexual exploits did it for him — they won him that status among his envious peers. Now, not so much. They still felt flickers of envy on occasion, sure. They no longer wanted to be him though. He had no money, and the women he pulled these days were not, for the most part, very appealing.

James is staring at his own face in the mirror as he moves the whirring, whirling head of the Braun electric about inside his mouth.

His face has a dead-eyed flaccidity. A flushed indifference. He is looking at it as if it isn’t his own. He feels a definite distance between himself and the face in the mirror. The neon light — a bright lozenge on the wall — isn’t kind to it. He is drunk, slightly. Maybe more than slightly. That wasn’t supposed to happen. He silences the toothbrush, holds its head under the tap for a moment. Should’ve been here, thinking about what he plans to say to Noyer in the morning, not messing about with his PA.

It’s not a joke.

Life is not a fucking joke.

Cédric Noyer is a few years younger than James. There is something fogeyish about him though, something which finds visual expression in an incipient jowliness, a softening jawline, a dewlap of self-indulgence threatening his razor-scraped throat. He is wearing a Barbour. He is smoking a cigarette. Parked near him, where he stands in front of Les Chalets du Midi Apartments, is a mud-streaked Mitsubishi Pajero.

He is the owner, James knows, of much land in the area. His father was a farmer — and still is, in a way. He still keeps a small herd, and the family income is swollen with agricultural subsidies. The land is the main thing now, though. The fields in and around Samoëns and Morillon; and, from Cédric’s mother’s side, further up the valley in Sixt.

These apartments are the first development Cédric has undertaken himself. For many years, since the eighties, the family has been selling fields to developers — a hectare here, two hectares there — for prices that went steadily higher and higher. (The latest parcel, with planning permission, fetched well over a million euros.) It was Cédric, supported by his sister Marie-France, who pushed the idea of developing the land themselves — moving up the ‘value chain’, as he put it. He had learned the phrase at the École Supérieure de Commerce in Lyon. ‘I don’t just want to sell milk,’ he had said to his father, trying to put his ambition in terms the old man would understand. ‘I want to make cheese, lots of cheese.’