Pravda Page 18

  "I'm going to have a drink, Chloe. I think ... something white and chilled. What would you like?"

  "Apple juice first. I am thirsty. But bring me a glass of wine as well." She smiled a smile that began sincerely but became false as she caught herself evincing impromptu sweetness and belatedly tried to capitalize—to witness that subtle transformation alone, Nicholas thought, worth the one thousand euros he paid her to be his model. Oh sweet Jesus, the hours he had spent covertly watching people as they so vigorously sought to disguise themselves, while their every expression and mannerism bellowed out the giveaways. It was almost funny. Just a shame there was nobody with whom to share the joke. Not anymore. He put down his brush and rag.

  The drawing room was pleasingly Alessandro-less as he entered, and his irritation was further alleviated. The Italian was away in London, pursuing his ambitions in musicals: some audition for some piece of terrible shit based on the terrible shit of some terrible shit's life in a shitty and terrible rock band. The evening's rubber might even be enjoyable—untainted by moping, melodrama, or huff. Nicholas almost smiled as he entered the kitchen: Alessandro could not sing, could not dance, could not act, could not even mime ... and yet, like more or less everyone under thirty-five he met these days, he firmly believed he had talent, a precious and precarious gift that needed sensitive nurturing in order to blossom into the hardy rose of genius. Dear God, who was telling the young all these lies about themselves? The poor fools had no chance. Their serfish heads so filled with false promise and misleading encouragement, their eyes wide with Hermès and Prada.

  You are peasants, my friends, of peasant stock and loamy soul, only lately freed from your bonds—muck and ignorance cling to your every desperate venture. Desist. Relax. Go easy awhile. Ease into your emancipation. For I tell you this: the democracy you live by, this freedom, these rights, they are so many cruel jokes being played on you by your old rulers as they snigger and snort behind their latest disguises. They're only pretending you are equal, for their amusement. They want to see you struggling with it all—too fat, too thin, crazed on exercise, crazed on junk food, bewildered and belittled, arms full of ghastly designer shopping (Cambodian tat, I'm afraid) from the pages of their ghastly magazines. It's a cruel, cruel joke. And alas, those values you are so proud of, they're no such thing; they're but a confection of silly little sayings they smuggled in with primetime so that you could be mocked all the more for repeating them. They have you running in all the wrong directions again, my friends; they've set you off on the wrong track as surely as they ever did when they called themselves your bishops and your barons. You must hope for more insightful leaders or plan for another revolution. The world is yours awhile yet, if you would only seize it back. Oh yes—and you, my dear, dear, Alessandro, please try to understand: your gorgeous arse is your one and only card. You have nothing else. So be sure to use it well when Herr Direktor turns his gaze on you, my darling boy.

  And yet, Nicholas reflected as he took out two clean glasses, who could blame Alessandro and the millions like him? What was the desire for celebrity but an age-old ache for some kind of externally verifiable significance? Testimony from somewhere other than the self—relief, reassurance, reinforcements—even if the testimony was a vapid and quick-vanishing lie. He bent for the Tokay, which he had been keeping in the fridge for the evening's bridge but which now struck him as far too good to share with anyone but Chloe.

  She had that particular female shape to her inner thighs which caused that certain little triangle of space to form between the tops of her legs when she stood up straight, as now, framed in the far doorway of the drawing room, shirt undone, naked otherwise; that certain space, just beneath.

  Sexual chaos—that was the only way to describe it, the whole of Nicholas's life from the age of sixteen. One long rolling, roiling, rollicking sea of sexual chaos; magnificent, frightening, awful, sickening, mettle-testing, perilous, heartbreaking, audacious, and glorious by turn. No, his was not the common journey. But, as he had always religiously maintained, who, on their deathbed, actually wished to say (with a satisfied sigh to ceiling and gathered loved ones), "Ah, mine was the common journey—excellent."

  The odyssey began in earnest in a grand but threadbare hotel room (that would never recover from the loss of the empire) when he was barely seventeen. He'd enjoyed a three o'clock lid-full of his mother's secret scotch, and as ever, he was supposed to be studying quietly, waiting for the rest of his family to return, preparing himself to follow in his father's footsteps straight into Cambridge (classics) and the Overseas Service. It was Easter, Max was back from Moscow and in London for the week (some reprimand or other), his mother was God knows where, and his little sister was out spending the money he had stolen from his father's wallet precisely for the purpose of sending her out.

  Antonia Grey, his little sister's friend, however, was very much in ... In his mother and father's bed, to be dogmatically factual about it: freshly undressed, sixteen, and giving it the full actressy adolescent treatment. But not for Nicholas's direct benefit. No no no: he'd already had quite enough of the straight stuff from Miss Grey, his first model. ("Toni, I think we should try something. You know we can't paint it unless we see it, unless we experience it ... so will you, if I promise to stay quiet?") No. Instead, his sister's friend was faking her way through her second orgasm of the session with Stephen or Jonathan or Benjamin or whatever his name was, captain of rugby or boats or some such. Young Nicholas Glover, meanwhile, captain of nothing but fucking, was stationed in the walk-in wardrobe, looking on from the darkness behind his mother's favorite evening gown with the kind of unqualified attention more befitting a newly fledged heart surgeon taking final instruction from the senior consultant.

  As he recalled later, he'd had thoughts even then that more conventional creatures might eschew. Thoughts along the lines of I like that she's faking, I love that she's faking, I like the way they look together, man and woman, woman and man, I love the way they look together, I like the geometry of their combining and recombining limbs, I love the movement, the struggle, the ache, the sound (ancient, ancient), their skin, the smell ... the honest reality. I love the unequivocal reality of this.

  And of course after a few minutes he'd had to slip out of the closet and join in ... And Antino, to her credit, was almost okay with it. Almost. She caught sight of Nicholas from atop her charge as he tiptoed through her peripheral vision, and her wide eyes said, Oh. My. God. What are you doing? But they did not ask him to stop—not necessarily, not definitively, not so that he felt he should actually stop. On the other hand, as his fingers slid around her rocking torso and made their clever play with her girlish young breasts, and as the narrow eyes of Steve Jon Ben opened from their boyish pleasure to bear witness to this development, there occurred the most almighty eruption. A second for Ben Jon Steve to apprehend and process the undeniable evidence and then—you fucking bastard—the captain of boats, rugby, and so on exploded in a triple frenzy of orgasm, rage, and shame.

  And it was this more than anything else, this precise moment, that Nicholas remembered forever. Because (over the folded angel's wings of Antonia's fragile shoulders) Benjamin Jonathan Stephen's face was the most absorbing thing he had ever seen: anger, jealousy, belligerence, shock, righteous affront, guilty aggression, childish embarrassment, manly shame—all of them flying across his otherwise even features, one after another, like so many kamikazes. It was this precise moment that Nicholas remembered forever, because the involuntary movement of their nakedness was so powerfully enthralling: Ben Jon Steve's beautiful young body bucking up (stomach muscles proud as Coldstream Guards) and shoving itself with such rude and sudden surprise into rearing Antonia, and she (half winded, half ecstasized) crying out involuntarily, her nails digging into a bare and blushing boyish chest. It was this precise moment that he remembered forever, because in those three astounding seconds, satirical Nicholas realized that he had seen more kinetic humanity than most people would manage i
n their entire lives.

  For seven dedicated years after this it was flat-out sex—a game of volume and frequency in which he balanced his requirements for deviation with the overwhelming need to get as much as possible of any sort.

  Then came the mercy of beautiful, dark, endlessly enchanting Masha and the only years of his respite. In the early thick of his marriage, he thought he might move on, he thought he might be past the worst, he thought he might be just as others were—the oats proverbially sown (wild, wild, wild) and the ensuing happy reconciliation to a life of monogamy and fulfillment in other areas. (What were they, these much-vaunted other areas?) And certainly Masha's influence was strong. The more so perhaps when they had only each other, totally without money, two exiles in Paris, talking late into the night, stealing food, he painting, she writing her pamphlets, hurrying through the awakening streets together, fervently believing that no other man and woman in the whole history of men and women had ever made love with such pure intensity as they.

  And then the deal was done. And with it came the children and London and Highgate and domestication in its truest sense. The change was shocking and absolute. Within a fortnight the man was no longer a man but a servant—at the beck and call of the infant-rearing righteousness of his wife and every cry or whim of the two helpless infants themselves. Desire's flame began to sputter, the eye to cheat upon the heart.

  Even so, Nicholas continued to steer through the gathering swell by the red star of his remarkable wife. And for a while longer he thought that perhaps he might make it, that what interested him most of all in life was trying to understand the exact shape and weight of other people's inner selves, the architecture of their spirit. Perhaps Masha herself led him to this conclusion. Certainly they agreed that this was the nub of things. This was what fascinated them. Perhaps they could march together into their middle age with this in common. Man, woman, children: the old happiness formula. After all, it was true. A certain very particular form of honesty did obsess Nicholas—just as it did Masha. Not a person's honesty in the prosaic sense of telling the truth about this or that, but rather that a person should inhabit his or her humanity truthfully, fully, with commitment. This was the quality that they both sought out and responded to in other people. As he moved into his mid-thirties, Nicholas found that what he wanted to do (more and more with each passing year) was duck beneath the usual farragoes of "I do this" or "I do that" and get as quickly as possible to the quick ... Yes, but. Yes, but. Yes, but. What sort of human being are you? What do you really think, feel, want, fear, like? How is life for you? Any insight? Any new thoughts? Any new feelings? Any feelings at all?

  And, curiously, he became very good at eliciting due response, charming some and offending others in roughly equal measure. But he found no name for this preoccupation. Neither medical nor social. Neither did he find an occupation—a job—that required such abilities. (That his bloody father must have been in counterintelligence struck him around this time with the renewed force of sudden certainty; what else could you do with this particular skill set? Oh, it was all in the genes—here was the proof; his own existence seemed to be entirely about counterintelligence.)

  Such inquiries did not save him, though. They merely led him back to the same path by another, longer route. For sometime in his mid-thirties he realized that merely asking people these questions was not enough. Partly because they lied, but mostly because the revelation of this kind of detailed truth (had he not always secretly believed?) was to be found only ... in bed.

  Hitherto unformulated suspicions now crystallized into a firm conviction: that in order truly to understand the essence of another human being, it was necessary to make love. Because sex was the only vantage from which to view the whole truth, all at once. The central act of coition was the only time that body, mind, spirit came out and showed themselves all together.

  The vows gave way.

  And now he went at it as if in a frenzy. Men, women, husbands, wives. He had money. He had no job. He had time. Masha was at work on the paper all day long. Masha was on the night shift. Masha didn't mind if he stayed away for the odd weekend with friends.

  There were years of rush and flurry. There were years of danger and caution. And there were years of relative stability—a steady uncomplaining mistress for eighteen months, a fond youth up between university terms on whom to squander the money his father sent, a bored sub-Bovary of a wife desperate to feel the prickle and blush of romance again, a needy American dancer, a famous actor stuck in a bad run and a worse marriage. There were even one or two professionals with whom Nicholas struck up sexual friendships. A beautiful Chilean man whose dark eyes occasioned the only lines of poetry his soul ever permitted to the page. A plump little Estonian whom he visited for three years, taking her books and teaching her English via Russian between the epic mania of their lovemaking. But there was never any peace.

  Indeed, since he had left the city more than three decades ago, these last few years, living on the river back here in Paris, were the closest to contentment that Nicholas had come. And, a little to his own surprise (aside from Alessandro), Chloe Martin was the only person Nicholas had slept with for the past eighteen months.

  Thus his journey so far.

  "Nearly, very nearly." Chloe's coy finger traveled the short distance between their sweating bodies, parted his lips, passed between his crooked teeth, and so was greeted warmly by the object of its target. "As close as it has ever been."

  And he let himself lie back, his heart calming beneath the white hairs of his narrow chest. Her intention was sincerely to pay him a compliment, but of course she could not be aware of the true grotesqueness of his complaint. Nicholas had heard this kind of thing many times before—the it's-not-work-with-you assurances from all the professionals, the best-lover avowals from all the lovers, and the when-you-use-your-tongue declarations from all the wives of his friends that he had taken great care to satisfy well and truly by way of compensating them for the unforgivable ordinariness (sexual, mental, spiritual) of their variously defeated husbands—had heard it so many times, in so many beds, and in so many states of mind that he had long ago decided that he, and he alone, would be the judge of whether or not any of it was really, empirically true. An extra dimension of his madness, this: that he trusted nobody but himself as the true pleasure-level arbiter of any encounter—not only on his own account, but on behalf of his sexual partners as well. Not without reason, though, as always with madness, as always with Nicholas. Not without reason. For the fact was that he knew exactly how close she had been—knew it through every soft fingertip he had touched her with, could hear it trapped like stifled song in the deep well of her breathing, could smell it rising like rare musk in her pores, could taste it in the salt-shiver of her skin, could see it in the pleasure-ache of her face, the dig of her heels, the clench of her womanly fist.

  And actually, she was not lying.

  But not there.

  Not quite there.

  What a woman. He couldn't paint her. And he couldn't make her come. Someone to hang on to, for certain.

  "Let's drink more." Irritation vanquished, mind at ease, he reached across and plucked the wine from the bucket of thinning ice.

  "What are we listening to today?" she asked, stretching lazily for her glass.

  "Mozart, Marriage of Figaro."

  He poured—the angles awkward, since neither of them could be bothered to sit up straight. "And this bit?"

  "This is the duet between the Count and Susanna. Crudel! Perche finora farmi languir cosi?" "It's beautiful."

  He replaced the bottle and settled himself. He liked to look at her every way—and sometimes, as now, her body changed back again into that of artist's model: laid out beside him, propped on her elbow, face close and glowing, freckled shoulders and that hip jutting heavenward. Pure artistic provocation.

  "Yes, it is beautiful." He took a refreshing draft. "But it's also a lie."

  "What do you mean? Why is
it a lie?"

  "Because despite all the glory of that angelic voice, I'm afraid that Susanna—she's the one singing—has absolutely no intention of meeting the poor Count—that's him—even though she is right now promising repeatedly that she will. The plan is for the Countess to disguise herself as Susanna and take her place at the rendezvous. So all Susanna is doing is luring the Count into their trap—and making sure that he pays off Figaro's debts along the way. I'm afraid her part in the whole exquisite duet is a lie—from start to finish."

  Chloe shook her head. "The most beautiful music we have—a lie."

  "Yes. And all the honest toil in the world not worth a single bar."

  He noticed that Chloe sipped her wine like a fish—lips pursed in an unselfconscious pout. And he realized that in twenty minutes he would have to make love to her again as a direct result of this observation.

  She narrowed her eyes, but playfully. "Have you always been a liar, Nicholas?"

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "Because it is the only way to get myself into situations like this."

  "Is it?"

  "Yes. Honest men have very little fun in life. It's a well-known fact." His lips parted in a rare smile.

  "And women like lies?"

  "Men, women. Everyone wants to be seduced. Even the coldest blood will warm to a little solicitation."

  "And seduction is always lies?"