Transit(31)

He must have been desperate, she said with a smile.

They arrived every month in big embossed hardback folders, and he would place each one next to its unread predecessor until the set occupied a whole bookshelf. Her mother, to Jane’s knowledge, had never opened one of these folders: the only person who looked at them was Jane herself, sitting alone in the kitchen in the afternoons after school, when her mother was in her painting studio and her father, having left and remarried and moved away, was no longer there. For a long time she had wondered why he hadn’t taken the handsome and prestigious volumes – whose arrival and interment he had treated as a matter of great ceremony – with him when he went. In those days she hadn’t been allowed to touch them, but now they stood dusty and forlorn on their shelf in the filthy kitchen: she understood they had been abandoned. She would sit and turn the pages, studying the lurid pictures of flan and Beef Wellington and potatoes dauphinoise, the colours alarming and bewilderingly unreal, the graininess of the photographs suggestive of some history that had either never occurred or that she somehow had missed, she wasn’t sure which. Sometimes a hand was visible in the photographs, appearing to execute a culinary manoeuvre: it was a white hand, small and clean and sexless, with scrubbed, well-clipped nails. It touched things without leaving a mark on them, or being marked in return: it remained clean, unbesmirched, even as it gutted a fish or skinned a tomato. When he touched her wrist the photojournalist’s hand, strangely, had reminded her of it.

The Englishman had observed that suggestive gesture, and after another half an hour or so got up to leave.

I’m getting the feeling you two don’t want any more chaperoning, he said nastily, baring his yellow teeth. He edged out from around the table, jostling it so that the cutlery clattered and the wine sloshed in its glasses. He looked her directly in the eye. Good luck, he said.

After that the photojournalist had paid the bill and the two of them had gone out into the dark, warm city. He suggested they try to find a bar. It was so late by now that this search proved fruitless – neither of them knew Paris well enough – and became, instead, a directionless walk. They walked close together, their arms sometimes touching. She felt his immanence, the fullness of his attention: they seemed to be walking towards some agreement, something inevitable, without ever quite reaching it. At one point he stopped, grasping her elbow and halting her in the darkness of a side street, but it was only so that he could retie his shoelace. She began to gain awareness, self-consciousness: she wondered how the seduction, which earlier had seemed a certainty, would occur. She realised, suddenly, that he was quite old, probably twice her age; at one point she noticed him slip a small mint in his mouth, as though he feared being found off-putting. His excitement was palpable yet beneath it there was something fixed and immovable, some barrier she wasn’t sure how to penetrate. Finally, after two hours of walking and talking, they found that they were standing outside their hotel. He talked in a bumbling way for another ten minutes or so in the lobby; then he drily kissed her cheek, said goodnight, and went to bed.

She had gone to her room and lain staring at the ceiling in a state of high, thrumming alertness. Then, as she had already told me, she got up in the dawn and walked through the city again alone.

I asked her what the photojournalist had talked about, on their walk.

His wife, she said. About how intelligent she was. And how talented.

At some point he had told her that he and his wife had separated for a period. She had asked him why. He said it was because of work: the wife had got an important promotion which took her to the other side of the country, and he had things he wanted to do here, in Europe. They had lived apart for two years, each pursuing different projects. At the end of that time they had come together again, in their home in Wyoming. She asked him, boldly, if there had been infidelity. He denied it. Vociferously, she added.

I knew then, she said, that he was a liar, that for all his reportage and his honesty he was determined to keep himself untouched, to take without giving, to hoard himself like a greedy child. I knew, she said, that he wanted to sleep with me, had considered it thoroughly, and decided – from experience, I’ve no doubt, she said – that it was too much of a risk.

I asked her why she had felt such excitement, after this deflating encounter.

I don’t know, she said. I think it was the feeling of being admired. She was silent for a while, gazing towards the window, her face lifted. Admired, she went on, by someone more important than me. I don’t know why, she said. It excited me. It always excites me. Even though, she said, you could say I don’t get anything out of it.

She looked at her watch: it was late; she ought to go, and leave me in peace. She took her bag and stood up amid the dust sheets.

I said she should think about our conversation, and about whether anything had been said that might provide her with an opening. I said I felt sure it would become clear soon enough.

Thank you, she said, shaking my hand lightly with her slender fingers. I could tell she didn’t believe me.

We went out into the hall and I opened the door for her. The neighbours from the flat below were standing outside on the pavement in the grey afternoon, shabby in their coats. At the sound of the door they turned to look, their faces grim and suspicious, and Jane returned their look imperiously. I imagined her in the dusk of a Paris garden, untouched in her white dress, an object thirsting if not for interpretation then for the fulfilment at least of an admiring human gaze, like a painting hanging on a wall, waiting.