A Separation(33)

When I finally did sit down in front of the machine—a familiar object, I had seen it daily when we were living together—I was reminded of how abrupt and unnatural death always is, at least as we experience it: always an interruption, always things that are left unfinished. This was manifested in Christopher’s laptop, the desktop was covered in an intricate mosaic of files and documents, there were at least a hundred different and sometimes oddly named folders—other people’s work, internet. You name a folder without thinking, there are obvious names for some—accounts, articles—but others have the quality of junk drawers, you hardly remember their contents, you never imagine that one day someone else would be rummaging through them.

And yet I was now doing precisely this. In amongst the junk drawers, as I hunted for the documents that Isabella and the agent and the editor all insisted were there—a partial manuscript, nearly complete, which unbeknownst to me Christopher had promised to deliver within the next six months, a deadline that passed shortly after his death, an uncanny affirmation of a lie I had told Isabella, about Christopher’s work and the near completion of his book, a lie that had somehow come true or at the very least been reiterated by Christopher himself—I found other things. Things that presumably Christopher would never have wished for me to see: for example, a folder filled with pornographic pictures he had downloaded from the Internet.

On the surface there was nothing too painful to discover, he did not have a penchant for a particularly violent kind of fetish porn, nor was he collecting gay erotica or visiting sites called Black Beauties or Hot Asian Anal. I had heard such stories, which in the end were stories about a single realization, the understanding that you had never fulfilled or even addressed the secret desire, the most vividly imagined fantasies, of your partner. That you had never been, on some level, what he or she had been looking for, your partner’s mind always elsewhere or making do, something that cast the record of your sexual encounters into a paltry and humiliating light, he had always been trying not to see you, not as you actually were.

There was nothing like that. And yet I remained tense, I clicked on maybe four or five JPEGs before I closed the folder, heart pounding. The images were not even particularly lewd, given that they were pornographic, nor were they especially personal—pornography proves the generalized nature of desire, it appeared that Christopher had the same desires as many other men, a predilection for threesomes, blow jobs, that sort of thing. Several of the files I opened contained images of two women, but it was hardly very shocking, on the contrary, it was a predilection I already knew firsthand.

Most of the images were meant to look like what in England had once been called Readers’ Wives—that is to say, amateur photographs of ordinary people—but which had now become the predominant aesthetic of Internet pornography. The quality of the photographs was poor, the lighting was harsh and unflattering, the setting had the crude luxury particular to the suburbs, large living rooms furnished with pleather sofas and glass-and-steel furniture. And the girls, while pretty, could hardly be mistaken for ordinary porn stars, they wore very little makeup and there was no visible enhancement to their figures.

Still, they were clearly at ease in front of the camera. They behaved as if they were professionals, that was a function of the age we lived in, people took photographs of themselves all day long, in every act and situation, eating their breakfast, sitting on the train, standing in front of the mirror. The effect was not a new candidness or verisimilitude to the photographs that proliferated—on our phones, computers, on the Internet—but rather the opposite: the artifice of photography had infiltrated our daily lives. We pose all the time, even when we are not being photographed at all.

Two of the photographs—neither professional nor amateur but something in between—featured a woman who was stark naked except for a pair of knee-high sports socks. I would not have thought that socks were especially Christopher’s thing, but the girl was young and attractive. In one photograph, she sat on the edge of a chair with her legs wide apart, she had thrown her head back and her mouth was open, as if she were in a state of ecstasy. In the second photograph, she cupped her breasts with both hands while leaning forward, her mouth was still open but in a manner that was more pragmatic, there was only one thing really to do with such a mouth, and that was to put something in it.

Both poses had been replicated thousands or possibly millions of times, the Internet was overflowing with pictures of women in those exact positions, even their facial expressions would be identical—but I knew that was no impediment to stimulation and arousal, in general one doesn’t worry too much about clichés when in the grips of or seeking excitation. Christopher must have masturbated to these images—what else was pornography for, why else would he have taken the trouble to download these images, if not for reliable titillation?

But perhaps it was not so obvious or forlorn a scenario as that, Christopher hunched before the computer, his face illuminated by the light of the screen. Perhaps these images had led to arousal that was then fulfilled with a living, breathing partner, a woman or perhaps two, waiting in the bedroom or maybe looking at the computer with him, at one point, it might even have been me. A woman with whom he would then proceed: the pornographic image still fixed in his imagination, a supplement to the living and breathing body, which in itself was no longer enough, the live sex that followed always something of a disappointment compared to the limitless promise of the pornographic fantasy, the boundlessness of the Internet.