Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

I walked forward on my own across the gleaming floor into the twenty-first century, looking for Christopher, Christopher, the love of my life, Christopher who was looking for me.

After the fireworks ended my energy ebbed. The champagne had undermined vast tracts of my brain; at a certain moment, the whole subsided, gaiety crumbled, I wanted to escape. I had a nagging sense of sadness; it was childish to bother about a mere ritual, but how had I managed to miss the moment? How had we failed to live it together? It seemed like an omen, or a proof of something. The twenty-first century had started badly. I wanted to go home, though the hotel wasn’t home, I wanted to sleep and wake up different, I wanted to abandon the attempt to be happy and try again in another life.

But Christopher wanted to look in on Isaac, Christopher who never suggested visits to his son and avoided them whenever he could. I said I’d take a cab back to the flat alone, but it soon became clear, when we got back to the mainland, that no one was going anywhere except on foot.

‘Come with me, Alex. He’d like to see you. He’s done what he said he would; he’s made it.’

We were only four blocks from Isaac’s penthouse apartment, but just this one time I wasn’t ready to face it.

‘It’s you he loves. You’re his father. Go.’

‘Things change, Alexandra. He loves you now.’

And for some reason, probably the champagne, I remember my eyes filling with tears, though I’d known for a long time that Isaac had grown to love me; the fact of Chris saying it, his father saying it, seemed to me inexpressibly moving, as if he was saying I was… motherly, but by that stage why did it matter to me, when I’d more or less abandoned hope of Chris and of mothering? Whatever the reason, the tears welled up, and the extraordinary scene on the waterfront all round us of thousands of people jostling and swaying, screaming and singing, kissing and dancing, black and yellow and pink and brown, all the wonderful colours of flesh, very young and very old, people with sequinned Versace dresses and people in rages and carrier-bags, yes even the derelicts, cheering and fighting — blurred into a swelling river of colours, I hugged my husband, I entered the river. I no longer knew where the edges were, my sadness spilled into a larger feeling which felt like love; for Chris, for Isaac? For life, as well, and for myself.

‘Of course I’ll come. I felt tired for a moment.’

So we went together to call on Isaac. There was an English voice on the entryphone. A tall young man answered the door. Strikingly tall, strikingly handsome. Perhaps it was the friend, the English painter. Isaac had warned me he was beautiful. The voices of the others floated down the stairs, happy voices, slightly tipsy.

‘Hi,’ he said, ‘I’m Benjamin. Happy Millennium. Good to meet you.’

He took my hand, and held on to it. Why are all the best-looking men homosexual? I remember thinking as he smiled at me in the merciless light of the lobby. I wished that my skin were as perfect as his. Marvellous eyes, very large, deep brown. The pupils seemed to widen as he looked at me. Luminous, black. He pulled me inside.

Isaac lasted until April, to the doctors’ astonishment. There was one last rally in the first week of February when Benjamin began to draw him; Isaac insisted he be propped up on pillows, and his heavy skull strained up like an eagle. Talking was too much of an effort by then, but Benjamin talked to him about painting and I sat and listened by the side of the bed. At the end of one visit Isaac wrote me a note: Munch. The Dance of Life. Book?

At last, at last I could get him something. I felt as if he had given me a present. I wanted to hug him tight as I left, but remembered his fragility. Instead I put my arms round him — it was so easy to put my arms right round him, lifting him from the pillows like an egg-shell — and kissed him gently on the lips, though it was teeth that my lips encountered. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it — a virus would have killed him — but I felt too full of life to do harm. As I straightened and turned I found Benjamin looking at me with peculiar intensity. I’d realised by then that he wasn’t homosexual. I saw he was falling in love with me. I went out to a bookstore and came straight back with a mammoth biography of Edvard Munch that contained a double-spread print of ‘The Dance of Life’, terribly excited and pleased with myself, but Benjamin had left and Isaac was asleep.

Next day Chris decided to come with me; I couldn’t dissuade him. The book lay there still wrapped in its pale tissue paper. Isaac had relapsed. He stared at me as if I were the Reaper come to fetch him, but then I realised he was staring straight through me. It was a relief when his eyelids closed. We sat by his bed for almost an hour in the stony silence he inspired in us. Then Benjamin arrived to join the congregation; our eyes slid uneasily over each other, Chris’s eyes, my eyes, Benjamin’s eyes, a nervous ballet of fear and desire. Isaac showed no sign of waking. The room was becoming intolerably stuffy.

Benjamin suggested that Chris and I might like to go out and get a coffee. Chris declined; he would sit with his son. ‘Maybe you and I could go then,’ I said to Benjamin, breathing hard, that familiar, that wonderful, forgotten little tremor beginning in my stomach as I said the words, not looking at the boy, then looking at him, his golden skin, his magnificent eyes, all of him saying ‘yes’ — whereas Chris and I only said ‘no’ to each other, no baby, no hope, no fun.

In the coffee-bar Benjamin told me he loved me, as I had known he would. He said two things which went straight to my heart.

‘You’re so beautiful, Alexandra. Your hair, your eyes, your skin, the way you move in that room, where there isn’t any room to move gracefully with all the shit Isaac has to have, but you manage it, you’re lithe as a cat, I’m mad to paint you, will you let me, please —’ So that was one thing; I could still be beautiful. Fifty years old, but still fit to be painted.

There was something more important, though. Benjamin thought me sweet and kind. ‘I can’t believe that someone so good-looking is so gentle and maternal, too. You’re a wonderful woman, Alexandra.’

It was balm to my wounds. Oil on the waters. Oil on the waters of old regrets. Marvellous to be thought good by someone, marvellous, enlivening to be praised. I needed praise; I have never had enough.

Even Chris was too depressed to praise me any more (why should he praise me? I made him unhappy). Our love-making was dogged by the shadow of failure. Recently he had had difficulty coming; he found it depressing, but what about me? It’s insulting to a woman when a man doesn’t come… worse, Chris knew that I felt that way, so now when he did come I suspected he was faking. I had never thought sex could abandon us; but if it did, if it had… I might look elsewhere, if he forced me to. I looked, and Benjamin looked back.

March was already baking hot, the hottest spring for the last five years. In Isaac’s room the air-conditioning rushed and so did the rise and fall of his breathing; he’d refused to go into hospital — he wanted to stay with his plants and his pictures. He no longer talked, but his eyes opened. I wondered if he noticed what was happening, how often my visits coincided with Benjamin’s, how our eyes swerved together across the room above the top of the surgical masks we sporadically wore to protect him from colds… it was rather a joke, wearing that mask, after Benjamin told me it made me seem like a woman in a harem.

Maybe death makes life seem more acute. That must be part of the point of it, to frighten and excite the living. The first time we fucked was extraordinary.