MiMi, Xeno and Pauline were on their way to the Roundhouse.
The building had been a tram shed and now it was a theatre and music venue.
Xeno had been persuaded to stay.
“What’s got into Leo?” he said as the car moved past London Zoo. “He’s like a bear with a sore ass.”
“He’s meshugener,” said Pauline.
“What’s meshugener?”
“He’s crazy! He’s got his own way all his life so he can’t control his emotions, desires, rages, affects. He’s a typical Alpha Male. They don’t grow up, they just get meaner.”
“It’s the baby,” said MiMi. “He didn’t want another child.”
“He’ll be fine,” said Pauline. “Leo’s got a good heart.”
“He doesn’t love me anymore.”
Xeno and Pauline looked at MiMi. Then they both started to talk at once.
Ofcoursehelovesyouheworshipsyouhecan’tgetenoughofyouyouhavebeenthemakingofhimheknowsthathislifewouldbeemptywithoutyouareyoufeelingdepressedthat’snormalbeforebirthIknowheisn’tthatattentivebuthewatchesyoureverymove.
“I think he’s having an affair.”
Xeno and Pauline were silent.
“When I met Leo,” said MiMi, “he was all swagger and poise. He wanted to impress me with his car, his restaurants, his black American Express after-hours entry to museums and art galleries. He thought I’d like that. We went to the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay when they were closed. He hired us a private guide. Leo wanted to get up close to the Mona Lisa and L’Origine du monde.”
“A supermodel and a porn star,” said Xeno. “That’s Leo.”
“He bought postcards of them both and sat looking at them in the car on the way back to his hotel. ‘The most famous woman in the world,’ he said, ‘after the Madonna, but nobody knows what she looks like.’ Then he sat with L’Origine du monde.
“I said, ‘It’s just porn. She has no head. No identity.’ He became intense. He said, ‘It was painted as porn but it explains porn. These two images put together explain why men find women so threatening. The world comes out of your body and…’ (he was waving the Mona Lisa at me) ‘we have no idea what’s in your head. Do you know how frightening that is?’ ”
“Leo said that?”
“Yes. And he told me how when his mother left his father, she came to say goodbye and he didn’t know why she was leaving, and she said he was too young to understand, and he said, ‘I’m a grown man now and I still don’t understand.’ ”
“And then?”
“And then he tore the postcards in two and threw them out of the car window.”
“Why did you never tell me this?”
“But why do you think he’s having an affair?” said Pauline.
“Leo is possessive but he is afraid of being close to anyone. He would push me away by seeing someone else.”
Or he would just push you…thought Xeno, but he didn’t say it.
MiMi was onstage with the sound guy.
“Xeno!” said Pauline. “Get over here; I need to talk to you.”
“What’s the matter, Pauline?”
“I’m uneasy. There’s an old saying—where there’s trouble there’s more trouble. MiMi’s right. Leo’s been acting crazy for weeks. Has he said anything to you? About the baby? About MiMi?”
“No. He’s just more annoying than usual, but he’s my friend so I forget about it. You know me—if there’s trouble I go sideways.”
“You think he’s seeing someone?”
Xeno shook his head. “The opposite. I don’t think he’s seeing anyone; that’s the problem. He’s blind in his own world—I thought it was about work. He disconnects—right?”
“Yes, he’s great at the disconnect. But there’s more to this. Xeno—why are you leaving?”
“I have things to do. My son needs me. But, if I am honest, yeah, I feel like I’ve outstayed my welcome.”
“You’re family.”
“You’re Jewish.”
“So indulge me and be one big, happy family. It’s a fantasy but it’s a good one.”
“I have to go Monday latest.”
“MiMi needs a friend. And Leo is pretty unstable.”
“We’re all unstable. Leo is like a cartoon of somebody who’s unstable, that’s all.”
“Leo is like a cartoon of somebody who’s unstable who turns out to be himself.”
Leo was lying on the white sofa in his white office watching the planes take off. He was thinking of that Superman movie where Lois Lane is dead in her car and Superman reverses time by flying round the earth so fast that he shifts the axis and time goes backwards. The dam doesn’t burst. Lois Lane doesn’t die.
How can I make MiMi not die?
MiMi’s not dead—she’s about to give birth.
In my mind she’s dead.
Who gives a fuck about your mind?
Me. I need peace of mind.
And Leo was thinking back and back. His bank had relocated him back to England. He had asked MiMi to come with him, to marry him, and she had said no. He left. He didn’t call her. She didn’t call him.
And then…
And then he had asked Xeno to go and find her.
Xeno got off the Eurostar at Paris Nord and took the Metro, line 4, as far as Cité. Then he walked past the Préfecture de Police and crossed the Seine. Notre Dame was on his left. The bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, was just ahead. He had worked there one summer—sleeping among the stacks of books on one of the flea-bitten beds.
As he crossed the road he could see the irascible owner, George Whitman, sitting on an ancient red moped, and talking to MiMi.
George liked pretty girls. He was in his eighties now and his daughter was twenty-something, which told you a lot about George. And he loved books and writers. Men who weren’t writers usually had a bad time with George. Xeno had been no exception.
Xeno went over. George scowled. “Who are you?”
Xeno held out his hand. “Hello, Mr. Whitman—it’s Xeno. I used to work here…I…”
“Xeno? What kind of a name is that?” said George. “Never heard of you.”
“This is a friend of mine,” said MiMi.
George nodded and started the moped. The exhaust blasted fumes and smoke round the tourists.
“Tell your friend to help you mind the store while I go out for an hour,” said George. “Don’t lose too much money.”
“Hello, Xeno,” said MiMi. “Welcome to Paris.”
MiMi went into the store to sit behind the till that faced the front door. “I often mind the store for him.”
“Don’t people recognise you?”
“They think it’s somebody who looks like me. And I do look like me.”
Xeno wandered among the books while MiMi charmed the American tourists into buying two of everything.
“I want to invent a game that’s like a bookshop,” said Xeno. “Layers, levels, poetry as well as plot. A chance to get lost and to find yourself again. Would you work with me on that? I need a woman.”
“Why?”
“You see things differently.”
“I’m not interested in gaming.”
“That’s why I need your help. I’ll make time circular—like the Mayan calendar; each level of the game will be a time frame—specific but porous, so you may be observed from another level—and you may be aware of another level. It may be that you can operate simultaneously on different levels—I don’t know yet. I know it’s about what’s missing.”
“What’s that?”
“You tell me. What’s missing?”
MiMi looked sad. She didn’t answer. Then she said, “Is Leo backing you?”
“Yes…MiMi, you know why I’m here. Leo loves you.”
“So much so that he didn’t call me for a year?”
“Did you call him?”
MiMi was silent.
George returned in a bad temper, carrying a new cat. Then he told everybody to get out of his store while the cat settled in. Americans and book-lovers alike were bundled onto the streets while George noisily locked the door.
“Isn’t this bad for business?” asked Xeno.
“Only time I don’t lose money is when we are closed. Then nobody can steal the books.”
SLAM.
MiMi and Xeno were outside the shop. She was laughing. She took his hand.
“All we need now is a lobster,” she said.
“To eat?”
“To walk with us. You know about Gérard de Nerval?”
Xeno didn’t.
“You would love him. He is one of my favourite French poets. He had a lobster he kept as a pet and took for walks along the Seine on a leash.”
“What happened to him?”
“The lobster?”
“The poet.”
And Xeno put his arm around her shoulders for a second.
MiMi said, “It was the nineteenth century. Before Haussmann knocked down the slums and alleys and corners of old Paris. It was a medieval city. Gérard de Nerval lived in a building like mine—a seventeenth-century building of small rooms and small windows round a tiny rear courtyard. The square of sky like a lid.
“He had fallen in love with a woman of the lower classes and he was ashamed of himself. One night he had a dream that an angel, vast and majestique, had fallen into the courtyard. Folding his wings as he fell, the angel was trapped. Feathers drifted through the windows into the dark apartments. An old woman began to stuff a pillow.
“If the angel tried to escape by opening his wings, then the buildings would collapse. But if the angel didn’t open his wings he would die.
“Some days later Gérard de Nerval hanged himself in the basement from a street grating. A man on the street, walking by, looked down and saw him swinging there, in darkness and alone.”
“That’s a terrible story,” said Xeno.
“But what do you do,” said MiMi, “if to be free you demolish everything around you?”
“But if you don’t, you die?” said Xeno.
“Yes. If you don’t, you die.”
It was August. The banks of the Seine had been transformed into a seaside fantasy, part plage, part stalls of street food and pop-up bars. The weather was hot. People were easy.
Xeno said, “About Leo…” MiMi nodded and squeezed his hand, part reassurance, part understanding.
For a while they walked in silence.
Xeno liked holding hands with women he liked. He liked women. As long as they didn’t get too close. And they always did—or thought they did, or tried to. It was easier with men. The sex was simple, often anonymous. A dark stranger whose name (for the night) was love.
Xeno couldn’t manage too much nearness. He was solitary and introverted, with an enthusiasm that people mistook for sociability. He was interested in everything, attentive to people, genuinely kind, and entirely present when he was present. But he was never sorry to close the door at night or to be alone.
Leo had sent Xeno to ask MiMi to give him another chance.
“I’ll mess it up if I see her. You explain.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know! The long form of ‘I love you.’ ”
Leo gave Xeno a piece of paper in his bad handwriting. “This is the long form.”
Xeno looked at it. He nearly laughed, but his friend was so hangdog and anxious that he just nodded while he was reading.
“I’ve been working on it,” said Leo.
1) Can I live without you? Yes.
2) Do I want to? No.
3) Do I think about you often? Yes.
4) Do I miss you? Yes.
5) Do I think about you when I am with another woman? Yes.
6) Do I think that you are different to other women? Yes.
7) Do I think that I am different to other men? No.
8) Is it about sex? Yes.
9) Is it only about sex? No.
10) Have I felt like this before? Yes and no.
11) Have I felt like this since you? No.
12) Why do I want to marry you? I hate the idea of you marrying someone else.
13) You are beautiful.
So when they had walked awhile and stopped for water at a bar selling l’eau in fancy blue bottles, Xeno got out the piece of paper and gave it to MiMi. She started laughing. “No, listen,” said Xeno, “he’s awkward but he means it. This is his way of being sure.”
MiMi shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Then say yes,” said Xeno.
“Pourquoi?”
They walked on. They talked about life as flow. About nothingness. About illusion. About love as a theory marred by practice. About love as practice marred by theory. They talked about the impossibility of sex. Was sex different for men? With men? What did it feel like to fall in love? To fall out of love?
And why do we tomber? To fall?
“There’s a theory,” said Xeno, “the Gnostics started it as a rival to Christianity right back at the start: this world of ours was created Fallen, not by God, who is absent, but by a Lucifer-type figure. Some kind of dark angel. We didn’t sin, or fall from grace; it wasn’t our fault. We were born this way. Everything we do is falling. Even walking is a kind of controlled falling. But that’s not the same as failing. And if we know this—gnosis—the pain is easier to bear.”
“The pain of love?”
“What else is there? Love. Lack of love. Loss of love. I never bought into status and power—even fear of death—as independent drivers. The platform we stand on, or fall from, is love.”
“That is romantic for a man who never commits.”
“I like the idea,” said Xeno. “But I like the idea of living on the moon too. Sadly, it’s 293,000 miles away and has no water.”
“But you have come here to see me because you want me to marry Leo.”
“I’m just the messenger.”
They walked to a restaurant in a triangle where some boys were playing boules. A man was exercising two Dalmatians, throwing a red tennis ball. Black and white and red. Black and white and red. The evening was cooling.
They ordered artichokes and haddock. Xeno sat beside MiMi while she talked him through the menu.
“What about you?” MiMi asked Xeno.
“I’m moving to America—the gaming work is there.”
“But you’ll be around?”
“I’ll always be around.”
What would it be like if we didn’t have a body? If we communicated as spirits do? Then I wouldn’t notice the smile of you, the curve of you, the hair that falls into your eyes, your arms on the table, brown with faint hairs, the way you hook your boots on the bar of the chair, that my eyes are grey and yours are green, that your eyes are grey and mine are green, that you have a crooked mouth, that you are petite but your legs are long like a sentence I can’t finish, that your hands are sensitive, and the way you sit close to me to read the menu so that I can explain what things are in French, and I love your accent, the way you speak English, and never before has anyone said “ ’addock” the way you say it, and it is no longer a smoked fish but a word that sounds like (the word that comes to mind and is dismissed is love). Do you always leave your top button undone like that? Just one button? So that I can imagine your chest from the animal paw of hair that I can see? She’s not a blonde. No. I think her hair is naturally dark but I like the way she colours it in sections and the way she slips off her shoes under the table. Disconcerting, the way you look at me when we talk. What were we talking about?
She ordered a baba au rhum and the waiter brought the St. James rum in a bottle and plonked it on the table.
She said, “Sometimes I’m Hemingway: 11 a.m. a Chamberry kir with oysters. Later, for inspiration, a rum St. James. It’s a brute.”
Xeno sniffed it. Barbecue fuel. But he poured a shot anyway.
She drank her coffee. A couple walked by fighting about the dry-cleaning. You meet someone and you can’t wait to get your clothes off. A year later and you’re fighting about the dry-cleaning. The imperfections are built into the design.
But then, thought Xeno, beauty isn’t beauty because it’s perfect.
MiMi was sitting with her knees up, bare legs, her eyes like fireflies.
Xeno smiled: what was number 13 on Leo’s list? You are beautiful.
They had finished dinner and were about to walk away from the restaurant, when from a window across the sandy square that was a triangle someone started playing a Jackson Browne number, “Stay.”
Xeno began to dance. MiMi took both his hands. They were holding each other, smiling, dancing. “Stay…just a little bit longer.”
“Would you like a copy of Gérard de Nerval?” said MiMi. “I have one chez moi.”
They walked hand in hand back to the apartment on Saint-Julien le Pauvre.
The staircase was dark. Xeno ran his hand up the seventeenth-century iron banister that curved up the building as the narrow staircase rounded the landings like a recurring dream and the doors were closed onto other rooms.
MiMi opened the door into her apartment. The only light came from the street lamps outside. She hadn’t closed the long shutters. She went over to the window, standing framed in the window in her blue dress in the yellow light, like a Matisse cut-out of herself.
Xeno came and stood behind her. He didn’t shut the front door and he had such a quiet way of moving that she seemed not to hear him. He wondered what she was thinking.
He was directly behind her now. She smelled of limes and mint. She turned. She turned right into Xeno. Up against him. He put his arms round her and she rested her head on his chest.
For a moment they stood like that, then MiMi took his hand and led him to her bed—a big bateau lit in the back of the apartment. She lifted her hand and stroked the nape of his neck.
On the landing outside, the electric light, footsteps up the stairs, a woman’s heavy French accent complaining about the hot weather. A man grunting in response. The couple climbed slowly on past MiMi’s apartment, carrying their groceries, not even glancing in through the open door.
And then Xeno was walking swiftly down the stairs.
It was the night of the concert. The Roundhouse was filling up with guests at the tables.
Leo was wearing a T-shirt that said I AM THE ONE PER CENT.
“Take it off,” said Pauline.
Leo took it off. “You want me to be at the dinner stripped to the waist?”
“Grow up.”
Leo didn’t come to dinner. He seemed to disappear. In fact he was in the gallery above the tables and the stage, watching what he had paid for. The evening was going well. The silent auction had already raised over £50,000.
“Where the hell is he?” Pauline asked Xeno.
Leo sat in the shadows, waiting for MiMi to sing. She came on stage, with the quick confidence natural to her. When the applause had died down she made a speech, one hand on her eight-month about-to-be baby, about what it felt like to know that your baby is secure. That your child will have a future. That it is safe to be a mother. Safe to be a child. To give birth without fear. And she spoke as a woman, as the mother of a little boy, as the mother of a new life inside her. The miracle of life. And didn’t every woman having a baby want that baby to smile, to grow, to know what love is?
And then she sang. Three songs. They were wild for her. The clapping didn’t stop. Some guy in the audience shouted, “Five grand gets an encore.”
“Asshole,” said Leo up in the gallery. “You think you can buy my wife for five grand? You can’t buy one of her earrings for that.”
Leo looked down. Xeno had his elbows on the table, his face resting in his hands, his eyes on MiMi. She winked at him.
Leo tipped back in his chair. Fell. There was a crash. People looked up. MiMi glanced towards the gallery. She saw Leo. He saw her face, a millisecond register of confusion, anxiety and, what…fear?
But she was singing. She was a pro. She was singing to the end, and taking her applause and smiling. She raised her hand. Touched her belly. She left the stage.
Leo went down from the gallery, backstage, to where the dressing rooms were. He ran down the corridor. “MiMi!”
She came towards him. She was angry. “What are you doing? Everybody was looking for you. Why were you up in the gallery? Where have you been?”
Leo didn’t answer. He pulled her to him and kissed her roughly. She pushed him. “Ça suffit!”
“Stop it?”
“I’m going home. Cameron’s at the stage door.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Leo, what’s wrong?”
He nearly said, You don’t love me anymore. She nearly said, There’s someone else, isn’t there?
Instead she walked past him down the corridor.