Transit(27)

‘You’re like a teenager,’ he said.

He kissed me for a long time. Other than that remark, no one said anything. There were no explanations or endearments. I became aware of my musty, damp clothes and my tangled hair. When our bodies eventually came apart I moved away and twisted the door handle and opened the door a few inches. He stepped back; he seemed to be grinning. In the bright darkness he was a silhouette filled with white light.

Goodnight, I said.

I went inside and closed the door.





The student’s name was Jane. She was sitting on the sofa, apparently not noticing that it – and everything else in the room – was covered with white dust sheets.

Thank you, she said, accepting a cup of tea and placing it carefully on the floor beside her.

She was a tall, slim, narrow-bodied woman with surprisingly generous firm breasts that her tight turquoise sweater accentuated. She smoothed her lime-green pencil skirt frequently over her thighs. She wore no make-up: her bare, lined face with its neat features was like the face of a worried child. Her pale hair was piled on top of her head in a way that revealed the elegance of her long neck.

She was grateful, she said, that I’d agreed to work with her – she’d had a suspicion they would try to palm her off on someone else. Last term she’d had a novelist who kept trying to make her rewrite the endings of other people’s books. The term before that it had been a memoirist whose own life had so preoccupied him that he never actually managed to attend one of their meetings. He would sometimes call her from Italy, where he kept going to see his girlfriend, giving her exercises to do over the phone. He always wanted her to write about sex: perhaps it was just a subject that happened to be on his mind at the time.

The thing is, she said, I know what I want to write about. She paused and sipped her tea. I just don’t know how to write it.

Outside the sitting-room windows the afternoon sky was a motionless grey blank. Occasionally sounds came from the street, the slamming of a car door or a fragment of passing conversation.

I said it wasn’t always a question of knowing how.

She arched her eyebrows, which had been plucked into fine, dark, perfectly drawn curves.

Then what is it a question of? she said.

The material, she went on, which she’d been collecting for the past four or five years, had by now grown into a set of notes more than 300,000 words long: she was keen to start the actual writing. It concerned the life of the American painter Marsden Hartley, someone surprisingly few people here had heard of, though in the States his work could be found hanging in most of the major galleries and museums. I asked whether she had been there to look at them.

I’m not that interested in the paintings, she said, after a pause.

She had seen, she went on, some of his work in Paris: there had been a retrospective there. She had happened to be passing and saw one of the posters outside. The image they’d used had caused her immediately to enter the gallery and purchase a ticket for the exhibition. It was early in the morning – the gallery had only just opened – and no one else was there. She had walked alone around the five or six large rooms of paintings. When she came out, she had undergone a complete personal revolution.

She fell silent again. She sipped her tea with an air of equanimity, as though in the confident belief that I would not be able to resist asking her to continue and tell me precisely what had caused the personal revolution to occur. I could hear the neighbours moving about downstairs beneath our feet. There were occasional thumps that sounded like doors being opened and shut, and the rise and fall of voices.

I asked her what she had been doing in Paris and she said that she had gone there for a few days to teach a course. She was a professional photographer, and she was often asked to teach on short courses. She did it for the money, but also because these trips away from home sometimes proved to be staging posts, even if she didn’t see it at the time. They gave her a distance on her own life: it became something she could see, instead of being immersed in it as she usually was, though she didn’t particularly enjoy the teaching itself. The students were generally so demanding and self-obsessed that afterwards she felt completely drained. At the beginning she would feel she was giving them something, something good, something that might change their lives – the drained feeling felt at first like a virtuous kind of exhaustion. But as she was successively emptied over the four or five days of the course, something else would start to happen. She would begin to view them – the students – with greater objectivity; their need for her started to look like something less discriminating, more parasitical. She felt duped by them into believing herself to be generous, tireless, inspiring, when in fact she was just a self-sacrificing victim. It was this feeling that often brought her to a position of clarity about her own life. She would start to give them less and herself more: by draining her, they created in her a new capacity for selfishness. As the course drew to a close she would often have started to care for herself differently, more tenderly, as if she were a child; she would begin to feel the first stirrings of self-love. It was while in this state that she had walked past the gallery and seen the reproduction of Marsden Hartley’s painting on the poster.

There had been a man, she added, teaching with her on the course; an older man – she had a susceptibility for them – who was a well-known photojournalist and whose work she admired. There had been something between them from the start, an electricity, though he was married and lived in America. She had just broken up with her partner of two years, someone who knew her with sufficient thoroughness that his demolition of her character in their final arguments could not fail to undermine her opinion of herself; she clung to the photojournalist’s attention as if it were a life raft. He was a man of intelligence – or at least a reputation for it – and power: his notice of her acted as a counterweight to her ex-boyfriend’s contempt. On the last night they had walked together around Paris until three o’clock in the morning. She had barely slept: such was her arousal and excitement that she had got up early and walked some more, all through the deserted city in the dawn, walked and walked until the poster had caused her to stop.