I now know for certain that Selina Street isn’t fucking Alec Llewellyn, or not for the time being anyway. The more I think about it, the more I persuade myself that I’ve misjudged little Selina. She’s faithful to me, that Selina. True, she behaves like someone who is unfaithful to me all the time. She behaves like someone who is hyperunfaithful. But she behaves like that because she knows I like it. (Why do I like it? I do, clearly, don’t I. Then why don’t I like it?) Selina, she just does it to please me. If she were really being unfaithful, she wouldn’t behave like that, now would she. She would behave like someone who wasn’t being unfaithful, and nobody could accuse her of behaving like that. How very cheering.
Hell, it’s all good news.
‘Yeah?’ I’d said warily, expecting Lorne or Meadowbrook or Frank the Phone.
‘John? Ella Llewellyn here. I’ve rung you because there’s something I think you ought to know. Bad news, I’m afraid.’
Oh, come on, Ella, no need to take that tone with me. I fucked you once — on the stairs, remember? — when Alec blacked out in the kitchen that time. ‘Hi, Ella. Okay, tell me,’ I said, and I stiffened myself for the worst.
‘Alec’s in prison. Brixton, on remand. He had it coming. He just wanted me to tell you.’
Bad news? Bad? No, these are excellent tidings in their own right. Well before Selina’s sly face had a chance to invade my mind screen, I felt a gulp of innocent, bright-eyed pleasure that my best and oldest pal was in such serious trouble. Mm, it’s so nice when one of your peers goes down. You know the feeling? A real buzz, isn’t it. Don’t be ashamed, if you can.possibly help it. Now Alec can’t get away, he can’t escape, translate, burst clear. He can’t go up there, with them. He must stay down here, with me. He must stay down here, further down, deeper, much deeper.
The present rendezvous had been riding high on my chart of dreads. How is that? How can a quiet lunch with a beautiful and intelligent girl, in a licensed restaurant, be the cause of dread? Go ask it on the mountain. (I had dreaded the other meetings with her too, hadn’t I. Yes I had.) But in the end it soothed me. Only when you are soothed do you realize how much you needed soothing. I was going insane. I was dying. That was what I was doing, dying.
Before we talked about the phantom dinner party we talked about aesthetics. Or rather Martina did. Aesthetics is a topic I have previously discussed only with my cosmetic dentist, Mrs McGilchrist (as in ‘the aesthetics are going to cost you on this one’), and with the odd deluded lighting-cameraman who might have his views about the aesthetics of a Bulky Bar dissolve, a Rumpburger close-up, a Zaparama zoom. Martina talked about aesthetics more generally. She talked about perception, representation and truth. She talked about the vulnerability of a figure unknowingly watched — the difference between a portrait and an unposed study. The analogous distinction in fiction would be that between the conscious and the reluctant narrator—the sad, the unwitting narrator. Why do we feel protective when we watch the loved one who is unaware of being watched? Why does the heart hurt when it sees the unattended pair of shoes? Or the loved one asleep? Perhaps the dead body of the loved one expresses all the pathos of this absence, the helplessness of being watched, and not knowing… Actors are paid to pretend that they are unaware of being watched, but they of course rely on the collusion of the watcher, and nearly always get it. There are unpaid actors too (I thought): it’s them you really have to watch.
I sat cocked on the brink of my seat. I could follow her drift for seconds at a time, until the half-gratified sense of effort — or my awareness of watching myself — intervened, and scattered my thoughts. I felt tense. How tense? Maybe not that tense… We were lunching at an emeried chalet off Bank Street in the West Village — licensed, sure, but with a suspicion of health food, of careful eating, of macrobiotics and longevity. Waiters of both sexes eerily serviced the wooden nooks. There went Hansel. There went Gretel. They moved in white like doctors and nurses. The food they brought you was administered as medicine, as elixir. Their grub was of the very healthiest — not like that shit they make you eat uptown. I craved liquor but survived on frequent tureens of white wine. Martina contented herself with a pot of tea, and held her cup with both hands, as girls are bound to do, the fingers spread for all the warmth. When she ate, she dipped her head into each mouthful, her eyes on mine: round, dark, clean.