It was a late Friday afternoon and my desk assistant had requested my permission to get an early start to her long weekend, so it was I who walked down the emptying dealing room to Sebastian. We had addressed the outstanding points of business and were rocking back in new office chairs, admiring the two new large monitor screens that had replaced his six old small ones, when he asked me what my plans were for the weekend. They were vague and included shopping on Saturday and, on Sunday, brunch with new Japanese acquaintances.
‘I was thinking of seeing the Francis Bacon retrospective at the Tate,’ I said.
‘So was I!’ he exclaimed. ‘Do you mind if I join you?’
One speaks of a circle of friends; I had circles of them that I had initially, inadvertently, but then quite deliberately managed to keep separate. To my mind’s eye I was the centre circle of a Venn diagram that overlapped with five other, alternately shrinking and growing circles that only occasionally touched. I was at the very heart of this universe, the one solid star; the others pulsed strongly or weakly, depending whose company I sought. Since my move, I had lost touch with former neighbours. Since my promotion, I had gone out less with Sharon and her friends and more with City contacts and their spouses. Since my cruelty to David, we saw each other only occasionally.
Sebastian and I met at the Tate and paid our way into the Bacon exhibition where we spent an hour, not conversing much, before he followed me out of the exhibition space, out of the museum, down the museum steps and onto the embankment overlooking the Thames. He was exhilarated as much by the exhibition as by what I think he sensed was my response to it. He was breathless from having run across the wide and busy four-lane road in pursuit of me. ‘What is it?’ he repeated.
The sky was blue grey, the sluggish river brown, sandwiched, at low tide, between wide strips of mucky taupe and, on the opposite bank, ochres and brick reds. Further downriver, Battersea Park’s trees’ saffron- and mustard-coloured leaves completed Bacon’s palette that had followed me out of the museum and into the street in a dizzying, colour-leaking amalgam of the in- and outdoors. Bacon’s paintings had been blows to my stomach and heart. And it was more than the rushing regression to my parents’ butchers’ shop stimulated by Bacon’s sides of meat and meat-like sitters. A mirror to the human condition, Bacon shouted, here we are, but flesh and bone and all alone. Nothing had prepared me for this, not even Autumn Cannibalism, the frame of which was so defined that one looked at it as though through a window, at a remove. Bacon’s colours spilled gently off their canvasses and formed puddles around my feet and legs, then pools I swam, saw and breathed through and, now, as I leant on the embankment wall, brushed my field of vision with hues and blushes that tinged the external world while singeing the internal one. Anti-religious – areligious – they yet spoke in a devotional language, in a pontifical voice, of nihilism, at worst and starkest, or, at best, of solipsism. I gripped a handrail and looked down at the exposed muddy bank, as Sebastian exclaimed, ‘Yes! Yes!’ He was ecstatic. ‘Not even “existence precedes essence”. Existence. Just that. Nothing else. Peel back the flesh to reveal meat and bone. Scream; no one will hear you.’ It was as though everything I had believed was made paint, everything I had sensed made flesh in paint, everything I had thought taken to its logical extension, to its reductivist conclusion; this was the point to which my proud independence had taken me. The glacial thrill of this affirmation of ‘I’, desolate and solitary though it may be, dominated other considerations and emotions.
The irony of two solipsists communing in their physiological and aesthetic responses to Bacon’s paintings was not lost on me: we were as close to each other then, as we revelled in the bleakest of revelations, as we had ever been. Two people happy together in the profound recognition of their fundamental, ultimate solitude; the happiness of the loneliest of life’s long-distance runners. It was for this reason, I think, that I allowed Sebastian to accompany me back to my apartment, although I recall neither inviting him nor his asking to escort me home.
Only when I withdrew my front door key from my handbag did I think that this was the first time he was entering my home. Timidly, I asked him to follow my example and to replace his shoes with guest slippers. My dislike of outdoor shoes and of naked or even socked feet in the house was greater than my embarrassment at asking visitors to wear guest slippers. He complied quickly, politely, masking, I feared, a smirk by bending his head to untie his shoelaces. I couldn’t help but look at my apartment through his eyes and knew that despite the concessions I had made to a Western way of life, it would seem not quite Western to him. He followed me to the living room, past the kitchen that effectively divided the living and sleeping quarters. Not materialist, disliking clutter, unwilling to pay for a cleaner, I lived simply and comfortably; my only extravagance, outside of the clothes I wore for work, were books and some videos: I had bookshelves along a whole wall that would, one day, I was sure, be filled. Dozens of postcards I had bought in museum shops filled the spaces on them. Sebastian looked at the books appreciatively before following me into the kitchen where I made tea and where he picked up the smallest of the cookie-cutter men and lifted him to his eye before replacing him on the tiled window sill behind the mixer tap, giving me a knowing look.
‘Nice view,’ he said, and we stood, as the tea brewed, Sebastian in front of one three-quarter-length sash window and me in front of the other, looking out over the common where any of the joggers and the dog-walkers and the children and their parents looking up would have seen two people, each framed by their window, alone together. He nodded appreciatively out of the window. ‘I can see why you chose this flat.’
No, not for the view, though I didn’t say as much. Unremarked by Sebastian, dozens of telephone cables and wires streamed to and from a junction point on the outside wall below my window. Positioned there, I could close my eyes and travel all the way to Japan, to Sangenjaya, to home, entering, like a breath of air, my old bedroom, my old bed. I had noticed the ugly assemblage of wires and cables immediately and they had acted as my visual madeleine so immediately and profoundly that I wondered if I hadn’t, at some subconscious level, been looking for just this as a feature of a new apartment. I hadn’t taken in a word of what the estate agent had said subsequently.
We sat with my low glass table between us and I found comfort in the act of pouring him tea, my body registering the familiarity of the action, of my knees-together posture and my elbows-close-to-body movements. His eyes wandered around my sitting room, lingering on my books and videos. He looked around me to take the measure of me. And rightly so, I thought. Every book is a brick in the building I have become and every film a feature. My parents and the culture I was born into may have laid the foundations but the interior and exterior are mine.
Relaxed, on home ground, I thought this would be the time to press my advantage. The unfamiliarity of his presence here, in my home, the strangeness of the space he filled on my low sofa provoked me to forget my manners as host and to pose the question I had intended to ask him for some time. Taller than me, he appeared even bigger in my flat than he did elsewhere. I placed my cup and saucer on the table, tugged at my skirt and smoothed it over my knees and woollen stockings; I had thought them on the just-fashionable side of neutral, but now feared they might seem school-girly to him. ‘So, you have seen my apartment and now you know everything about me,’ I said coquettishly. ‘But I know nothing about you.’ The change from small talk was abrupt.
Sebastian just raised his eyebrows at me.
‘Well?’ I hoped he would see I was smiling.
‘Can one really know anyone?’ He seemed unsure of what I expected from him.
I declined to indulge in an abstract, intellectual discussion and made it personal. ‘Are you married?’
I surprised him.
‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ To have brought him home and asked him, in the privacy of my domestic setting, these questions so unexpectedly in such a forthright way rattled him, I could see. ‘Where do you live? Who do you live with? Do you have children? Siblings? Are your parents still alive? Do you believe in God? You see, I know nothing about you.’
‘Mie, if I had been married, I would have mentioned it by now.’ He narrowed his eyes.
I had upset him. I had become emotional. He said nothing and I heard myself say, ‘I’m sorry for the interrogation!’ I hoped I had communicated the exclamation mark at the end of my statement, my attempt at levity. I felt like weeping and the anger I felt at wanting to weep compounded the perturbation I had brought upon myself.
‘That’s okay.’ He too put his cup and saucer down. I made for the teapot but he shook his head. Where we had been reclining on our respective sofas, we were now both leaning forward across the battlefield of a coffee table and he spoke earnestly. ‘You never asked. Any of these questions. You never asked once.’
‘You never volunteered any of it.’
‘You never volunteered anything, either.’
‘You never asked.’
‘I never asked because I respected your culture. And you. You didn’t open the door, never once, so I never tried to kick it down.’
‘You never even knocked. I couldn’t ask because you were my superior. In the bank. And you never showed interest in people or in me. Only in ideas or in paintings or in books.’ My voice tailed off as I recognised the injustice of my comments and the sentiment they betrayed.
‘Don’t forget finance, economics and the odd film,’ he added gently.
An image came to me of the back room, the prep room, of my parents’ shop when, on a Saturday evening, it had been scrubbed clean and disinfected and all the knives had been put away and the unsold meat returned to its rightful store room. The overhead electric light would bathe the walls of the room in an anaemic blue hue, but the floor stayed a pinkish gray. The room would seem devoid of life, with no indication of the activity, the endeavour, the humour or the anger, the normal range of human emotions and animal body parts that had filled it only hours earlier. The room would seem dead, as though past exhaustion or in suspension.
It took me all of my effort and my hands on my knees to force myself up, to stand. In lieu of the speech I was no longer capable of, I described abstract patterns in the air with my hands that communicated the fact, or so I intended, that I no longer had the energy for this. Deliberately, focusing on each small step, I entered my bedroom in which the setting sun’s rays, interrupted by the light brume of the lace curtains, gave the room a subaqueous quality and only increased my sense of wading through a substance thicker than air. I stepped out of my slippers and lay down on the far side of my double bed. I looked at him, beyond the sunlit motes of dust above me, leaning against the doorjamb looking at me, and fell asleep.
When I awoke Sebastian was lying next to me, he too on his back and awake. Direct sunlight, brokered by the naked branches of oaks and beeches and by my drawn lace curtains, caressed the far wall as it edged towards the ceiling, so low was the sun. When I turned to look at him, he turned and looked at me.
‘How long have I been asleep?’
‘Twenty, maybe thirty minutes.’
‘Is that all?’ My sleep had rejuvenated me. I lifted a hand to push my hair from my eyes and allowed it, relaxed fingers splayed, to fall in the direction of his. I felt the back of his hand with mine, those long blond fine hairs, the backs of his fingers with mine that interlaced cautiously, delicately. ‘The hand of friendship.’
‘Friendship,’ he said, giving no indication that he had noticed the slight, the raising of a barely imperceptible barrier. Then, ‘So, you want to know more about me. Is this a good time to start?’
‘It’s a good place to start but as to the time…’ I sat up. ‘Please excuse me.’ I was relieved to have a good reason to extricate my hand from his before we reached the embarrassing position of wondering what to do with them next. Leaving my bathroom only once the sound of the cistern refilling had ceased, I sat cross-legged on my bed.
Sebastian placed his hands on his stomach, stared at the ceiling and spoke. ‘When I meet someone, at a party – wherever – I never ask them what they do for a living. Knowing what they do, what their profession is, only gives you the illusion of knowing them but, actually, you see them less, you see them through a veil, you bring to them your preconception of what a lawyer, banker, baker is; what that person really is, that becomes harder to grasp. So, of all the questions you asked, the only one that, if answered, would tell you anything about me, is the God one, to which the only honest answer I can give is, I don’t understand the question.
‘If I had to believe in anything, it would be in something like a life force – Spinoza called it conatus, the inner drive of every being to persist in its existence, but let’s call it Life. Life wants only to persist through time, to survive, and we all – people, gorillas, crocodiles, amoebae, spiders, ants, birds, fish, germs – are Life’s multiplications of its chances of continuance. Species are just rolls of the dice. Life is indifferent about which survives. Life doesn’t care that the dinosaurs have died; there will be dead ends, blind alleys, but evolution will open other paths. Environmental destruction? Life doesn’t care. Organisms that feed on carbon dioxide and higher temperatures will thrive. Ants and ivy may take over the world – well, that’s Life. May humans become extinct, destroy themselves? Yes. Is that necessarily a bad thing? No, not from Life’s perspective: more than any other species we have destroyed more species and so closed more doors, blocked more ends than any species before us. Every species seeks to protect itself and to propagate itself according to Life’s programme. What’s interesting about our species is that we, perhaps more than any other, have developed the fiction of the self in order to do so. We believe this little collection of cells that is us – you, me – to be important, worthy of protection and propagation and so, at the individual level, by maximising our own chance of survival, we do the same for our species’. Therefore, nothing matters. We, all we people, are one. We, all we species, are one. This is what I believe – what I really feel to be true.’
‘Nothing matters.’
‘Not really. Not in the long run. And not even in the short run unless you want it to.’ Sebastian put one hand on my knee. ‘I haven’t upset you?’
I had been looking out of the window at the setting sun-lit clouds while he had been speaking, so that when I turned and looked down at him in the crepuscular room all I could make out immediately before me were the whites of his eyes floating above an indistinct, darker duvet. An emerging halo of ruffled fair hair restored structure to a face that returned my look with one of concern and, in part, I ungenerously thought, conceit.
‘If nothing really matters,’ he continued, ‘we can embrace hedonism and, well, just enjoy ourselves.’ Gently, enquiringly, he began stroking my stockinged knee; I saw rather than felt his action through my ribbed, thick woollen hose.
I caught his fingers and held them in mine before, my heart beating too fast to allow me to formulate an answer, I lifted his hand off my knee and placed it back with its twin on his stomach.
‘Or we can do as existentialists propose and create meaning, invest our actions with a purpose of our choosing – which doesn’t preclude simultaneously enjoying ourselves.’ Slowly raising his hand and extending his fingers he placed them oh so deliberately on my knee again. ‘In other words, we could take the fun very seriously.’
Unceremoniously, I raised both knees and clasped them so that his hand fell to the duvet. His citing a rehearsed philosophical position that I required time to consider compounded my discomfiture at having somehow allowed this situation to have developed. Sebastian, here, in my bedroom at dusk and with the upper hand. He, it would seem, knew what he wanted while I didn’t. I rested my chin on my knees and raised a finger when he made to resume his advances; I needed some time to think about what he had said. I responded to some of it with my body, essentially, viscerally, refuting from my very heart what he’d said about the fiction of self. I knew that not knowing what I wanted was not the same as knowing what I didn’t want. That my room was now in almost complete darkness and his features and mine too, I presumed, quite indiscernible gave me the required courage to talk candidly, and attenuated what physical attraction he possessed. I prepared myself to give the longest speech that he would ever hear me give.
‘Who am I? What do I think? Let me tell you something about Japanese women, some things I have heard Japanese women say.’ I began to list them and held one hand with outstretched fingers out before him.
‘Having a relationship can get in the way of one’s life.’ I bent my little finger down.
‘I don’t want a boyfriend. I don’t want to feel restrained.
‘Couples in the foreign films I watch stay together forever but, in Japan, love fades when you have children and they grow up.
‘Having a boyfriend is a hassle.’ Only my thumb remained outstretched.
‘Mie, hold on,’ he interrupted me. ‘Don’t start telling me who you are by telling me what other people think.’
‘Well, maybe I think in exactly the same way that they do.’
‘You don’t. Or you wouldn’t have said, maybe. Would you mind switching a light on? I don’t think I can do this in the dark.’
I switched my bedside lamp on, which brought a degree of warmth and benevolence to the room. We blinked in the soft light, two crabs exposed on a summer’s beach and content to forego shelter while the sun shone. Abashed, I was not so much uncomfortable for us to be revealed to each other together on my bed as embarrassed at how comfortable I felt. ‘I had this big speech prepared but then you interrupted me.’
‘Well, I’m sorry. Go on.’ He raised himself on his elbows. ‘Tell me what else you’ve heard Japanese women say.’
I said, ‘When I see happy couples at Christmas I wish they would die.’ I lowered my closed hand.
We looked at each other. The absurdity of that statement was greater than its misanthropy. I giggled and he chuckled. I convulsed as I snorted and I covered my mouth with my hand. He laughed expansively, chest out, head back and mouth open wide. Unbalanced, I fell onto him and allowed myself for a moment to rest my head on his chest, from which unusual angle the protrusion of his canines amidst his otherwise perfect teeth and the lush redness of his mouth confounded me. His arms flopped carelessly, caressingly around me. I saw myself a fly in a Venus flytrap, that scarlet-padded carnivorous plant that seems an aberration of nature, and I went rigid and opened my eyes wide to look up at him and he narrowed his to look down at me. His lower and upper eyelashes resembled the cilia that lace together when the trap shuts on its prey. We stopped laughing.
The adamantine sense of immobility I must have communicated, my dissemination from every pore of the anticipation of an unwelcome advance (must have) led him to open his arms wide, theatrically, and to rest them by his side before saying in a voice that did little to hide his frustration and, even, anger, ‘Mie, do you know what you’re doing? You bring a horse to water but you don’t let him drink.’
He was right, of course.
I stood and walked to the window and looked out. I hadn’t put my slippers back on but considered it awkward to look for them so I stood there, my back to him but watching him closely in the window’s reflection. By changing focus, I could follow the red and white lights of the cars as they criss-crossed the common and traced patterns on the reflection of his face. The reflection of my ruffled hair clouded the sky in exaggerated imitation of the branches of the trees below it. I took satisfaction in the successful collimation of the tree branches with the common’s tangential roads much as I had, years ago, when aligning plane trails and telephone wires, confirmation that my intended course of action was the right one.
Sebastian sat up too. ‘Where do we go from here, Mie?’
My heart went out to him, not romantically, but sororally or maternally, as it would to a child for whom one had some responsibility or, at the very least, a deep reservoir of affection. I made a decision. ‘I know where you are going.’
‘Where?’ His tone, as his reflection gazed at mine, was defeatist and melancholy.
I had intended to add, ‘Home,’ but sympathy and remorse mixed with mischief led to me to say, ‘Why don’t you go and see Sharon?’
Sebastian sat up straight and wore an expression of extreme surprise. ‘What! Why on earth are you bringing her into this?’
I wasn’t sure how to answer him; I had regretted mentioning Sharon the moment I had spoken her name. Confused, I brought my face close to the window, so that my expression might be concealed from him, and watched a cyclist dismount from his bicycle in order to cross at a pedestrian crossing. The red light on his bicycle pulsed in time with my heart. I had brought Sharon into this either to enjoy the petty thrill of sharing her secret, or because I considered her guilty of attributing the drift of our friendship to my promotion and resented her for it. Or a mix of the two. I said, as if by way of explanation, ‘She can give you what you want. I’m sorry I misled you. But she can, you know.’ I turned from the window to look at him directly. ‘She’s a stripper, you see.’
Sebastian had stood, but sat immediately down on the bed again, keeping his eyes fixed on mine all the time. In them I read incomprehension, disbelief.
‘Or a lap dancer.’ That sounded weak. My confusion matched his, as I realised that I didn’t know the difference between the two and might have maligned Sharon. I gave him the name of her club, as though that would help him come to a clearer understanding of exactly what she was.
Sebastian’s blue eyes lost their focus, they seemed to lose their colour and swim in the middle distance as though an original thought preoccupied him. He had blanched and in the bleaching light of the bedside lamp he resembled an albino, his tightly pressed lips his darkest feature. Eventually, he nodded and felt for his discarded guest slippers on the floor. He put them soles together, held them in one hand and stood again. I sensed the extreme effort he expended to turn his attention from Sharon to me. ‘Mie,’ was all he said, looking at me dolefully, and shrugged his shoulders.
I smiled fixedly at him.
‘It’s so disappointing that, after all this time, you can know me so little.’ He waved the slippers in his hand half-heartedly at me. ‘Or do you have this idea that “all men are the same”? I mean, really, I wonder what I’ve done to deserve this.’ He smiled ruefully at me.
I gathered my slippers and followed him into the hall where I watched while he tied his shoelaces and shrugged his jacket on.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said and stood on tiptoe to kiss him on both cheeks. I understood his disappointment and frustration but felt no remorse at having been its cause; if anything, I was cross with him for having got this far with me. I opened the front door and stood by it.
‘Bye, Mie,’ he said resignedly, squeezing me by the shoulders.
I watched Sebastian descend the stairs, following his gradual effacement with each step, first his feet, his knees next, then his waist, his hand on the banister, his arm and shoulder, the mop of his hair last until he had disappeared entirely from view on the landing below. I heard the building’s front door open and shut and, ever so quietly, unaware of the time and not wanting to disturb my neighbours, I closed my apartment door behind me and went to the window to monitor his progress across the streetlamp-lit common. My reflection, however, given the nocturnal landscape and internal light source, once again dominated the view and I found myself looking at myself, standing slim and straight, hands by my side, appearing to all the world like a bold, capital I.