William Boyd - Sweet Caress

‘Don’t you live near here?’ Charbonneau asked, abruptly.

‘Washington Square. A few blocks away.’

‘Would you show me your apartment?’

‘Why do you want to see it?’

‘I’d just like to see where you live, Amory. To fill out the picture, you know.’

So we wandered home and I showed him in. He prowled around and looked at my photographs for a while and then stuck his nose in my bedroom. I was pouring him a Scotch and water when he came up behind me, cupped my breasts and nuzzled my neck.

‘What the hell are you doing, Charbonneau?’ I said, angrily, wheeling round and pushing him away.

‘I think it’s time we got to know each other better.’

‘So, your sexual vacation is over?’

‘Yes. It seems to be. Back to work.’

He tried to grab me again but I snatched up the ice pick from the drinks table and thrust it out at him.

‘French novelist stabbed to death by English photographer,’ I said. ‘Stop this now!’

‘But I want you, Amory. And I think you want me.’

‘Why are you trying to spoil a beautiful friendship like this?’

He sagged. ‘I don’t want a “beautiful friendship”,’ he said, pleadingly. ‘I want something much more complicated and interesting than that. More dangerous. Now, if we can just go to your bedroom—’

‘No, Charbonneau! Non, merci. I’m in love with somebody else.’

‘Love. What does that have to do with anything?’ He picked up his Scotch and sat down, muttering irritatedly to himself. Then he apologised. He was tired, out of sorts, I was a pretty girl, his libido was alive and kicking once more.

‘Don’t be angry with me, Amory.’

‘I’m not angry. Just don’t do this again.’

‘I promise, I promise.’

The now familiar paradoxical aspect about the Charbonneau ‘pass’ and its conspicuous failure was that we became firmer friends as a result. Something had come out into the open and had been pointedly shooed away — but the fact that it had appeared changed our future encounters for the better. We now talked with a frankness and abandon as if we had actually been lovers. The air had been cleared in every way.

Cleve came back from his trip to the Orient. ‘I just don’t understand that world,’ he said, in a strange, baffled voice. ‘I can see what’s happening in front of my eyes in Shanghai or Tokyo but can’t analyse it. I might as well be on Mars or Neptune.’

He paused and looked at me. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘Much the better for seeing you, after all these years.’

We’d spent the afternoon making love in my apartment; now we were in the café of the Hotel Lafayette on University Place. I was drinking gin and orange, Cleve had an Americano. On the table next to us two old men were playing chequers. I lit a Pall Mall.

‘Did anything happen while I was away?’ he asked, aware of my mood — prickly, almost resentful.

‘Lots of things happened. The world didn’t stop turning, Cleve.’

‘You seem different, somehow.’

‘People can change in a couple of months. You haven’t seen me for a long while. Likewise.’

I looked down at the small lozenge-shaped tiles on the café floor: pale cream with a dirty magenta flower effect dotted regularly across the room. Cleve said something, softly.

‘What did you say? I didn’t catch it.’

‘I said, I love you, Amory. I want you to know that. That’s what being away from you has brought home to me.’

I looked at him and felt a huge weakness sweep through me as I stared at him across the table, this handsome, super-competent, confident man with his thin straight nose and thick wet-sand-coloured hair. I think I was a bit shocked because I never thought he would say it to me first. I was always certain, in my predictive fantasies about our life together, about this moment, that I would be the one to make the declaration and that he would respond. But no — he said it first.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You know I feel the same about you.’

He reached across the table and took my hand.

‘When I saw you that night — at your exhibition in that strange gallery — I knew something had happened to me.’

I felt emboldened. ‘And here we are,’ I said, ‘over two years later. Something happened to you, then — but something has to happen to us , now, Cleve, don’t you see?’ I said with deliberate emphasis.

‘I know,’ he said, frowning suddenly. ‘I know. I’ve not been fair.’ He signalled for another drink. ‘I want you to come to the house. I want you to meet Frances.’

‘Are you completely out of your—’

‘It’s her birthday next week. We’re having a big party. There’ll be a hundred people there. You just need to see for yourself. Meet her.’

‘Why do I feel a horrible sense of foreboding?’

‘If you come — everything will be a thousand times better. You’ll see.’ He smiled his wide smile, not showing his teeth. ‘We’re going to be together, Amory. Always. I can’t let you go.’

Who can tell about human instincts? Something fanciful in me wondered if Charbonneau’s sexual interest in me had subtly changed my comportment in the way I reacted to Cleve. It was rutting season and there was another bull-male wandering around the neighbourhood. I do believe that our Stone Age natures still function strongly in certain situations — particularly to do with sex and mutual attraction — and are felt at gut level, deep beneath the skin, far from the brain. Anyway, however I had played it, I felt stupidly happy remembering his last words: we’re going to be together, Amory. Always. I can’t let you go.

Charbonneau was being at his most provocative the next time we dined — at a very bad Midtown restaurant called P’tit Paris. As we consulted the menu he spent ten minutes denigrating the apostrophe.

‘Moody, petulant, selfish, spoilt,’ I said.

‘What’s that?’

‘You. I wish I had my camera,’ I said, trying to make him stop moaning. ‘I’d take a great photograph: “Angry Frenchman”.’

He wasn’t amused.

‘I’ve seen your photographs,’ he said.

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You think you’re an artist. I read your titles: “The boy with the ping-pong bat”, “The boy, running”.

‘Wrong,’ I said. ‘I think I’m a photographer, not an artist. I give my pictures titles so I can remember them — not to make them seem pretentious. But there are great artists who are photographers.’ I began to name them. ‘Stieglitz, Adams, Kertész, August Sander—’

‘It’s not an art ,’ he said, interrupting me, aggressively. ‘You point your machine. Click. It’s a mechanism.’ He took his fountain pen from his jacket pocket and proffered it to me. ‘Here’s my pen.’ He turned the menu over. ‘Here’s a piece of blank paper. Draw an “Angry Frenchman” and then we’ll discuss if it’s art or not.’

I wasn’t going to enter this argument on his terms.

‘But you have to admit there are great photographs,’ I said.

‘All right. . There are memorable photographs. Remarkable photographs.’

‘So, what makes them memorable or remarkable? What criteria do you use to judge them? To make that decision?’

‘I don’t think about it. I just know. Instinct.’

‘Then maybe you should think about it. You judge a great photo in the same way you judge a great painting or a film or a play or a novel or a statue. It’s art, mon ami. ’

‘Shall we get out of this shithole P’tit Paris and have a proper drink somewhere?’

‘I’ve got to have an early night,’ I said. ‘I’m going to a birthday party in Connecticut.’

Charbonneau looked at me shrewdly. I had told him too much in the past.