Beautiful World, Where Are You(48)

and neck were red. It is a lot, she said. He ran his hand down her side affectionately.

Mm, he said. But it doesn’t hurt, does it? Still with her eyes held shut she replied: I think it did hurt a little bit the first time. He was touching her breast softly. The first time we were together? he said. You didn’t tell me. She shook her head, frowning as if with concentration. No, she said, but I didn’t want you to stop, it was nice. It makes me feel very full. He licked his upper lip, still watching her. Ah, I love making you feel like that, he said. She opened her eyes and looked at him. He put his hands on her hips and pulled her down a little, gently, until he was all the way inside her. She drew in one long breath and then nodded, still looking at him. For a couple of minutes they fucked and said nothing. She shut her eyes tightly and he asked again if she was okay. Do you find it really intense, she said. He was looking up at her with an open expression on his face. Yeah, he said. I don’t think you could have looked better when you were a teenager than you do now, by the way. You look unbelievable now. And I have one more thought about it. A lot of what’s so sexy about you is the way you talk, and the little things you do. And I bet you couldn’t behave so nicely when you were younger, could you? And even if you could, not to be soft about it, but I’d still rather have you the way you are. Her breath was ragged then and she reached for his hand, which he gave to her. I’m coming, she said. She was holding his hand very tight. Quietly he said: Look at me for a second. She looked at him. Her mouth was open and she was crying out, her chest and neck pink. He looked back at her, and he was breathing hard. Finally she lay down against his chest, her knees drawn up around him. He ran his hand down over her spine. A minute went by, then five minutes. Here, don’t fall asleep like that, he said. Let’s lie down properly. She rubbed her eye with the back of her hand, and got up off him. He rearranged his clothes while she lay down naked on the mattress beside

him. Then he took her hand and kissed it. That was alright, he said, wasn’t it? She nestled her head back on the pillow and laughed. I didn’t know you used to live in London, she said. He smiled to himself, still holding her hand. There’s a lot you don’t know about me, he said. She rolled her shoulders luxuriously against the bedsheets.

Tell me everything, she said.





18


Friend of my heart! Sorry for the delay – I write to you from Paris, having just arrived here from London, where I had to go and pick up an award. They never tire of giving me awards, do they? It’s a shame I’ve tired so quickly of receiving them, or my life would be endless fun. Anyway, I miss you. I was sitting in the Musée d’Orsay this morning looking at sweet little Marcel Proust’s portrait, and wishing John Singer Sargent had painted him instead. He’s quite ugly in the painting, but despite this unfortunate fact (and I do mean despite!) something in his eyes reminded me of you.

Probably just the glow of brilliance. ‘Perhaps indeed there exists but a single intelligence, in which everyone in the world participates, towards which each of us from the position of his own separate body turns his eyes, as in a theatre where, if everyone has his own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a single stage.’ Reading those words I feel terribly happy – to think that I might share an intelligence with you.

On the top floor of the museum today, I noticed there were several portraits of Berthe Morisot, all painted by Edouard Manet. In every painting Morisot looks a little bit different, so it’s hard to imagine how she really looked – how she combined each different shade of her likeness into one full and recognisable human face. I searched for a photograph afterwards and was surprised by the solidity of her features, which in Manet’s work often look cloudy or delicate. In one of the paintings she’s handsome, dark, statuesque in a white dress; she sits on a balcony alongside two other figures, her forearm relaxed against the parapet, her hand holding a closed fan; she’s looking away, almost frowning, her face is complex and expressive, she’s deep in thought. In another painting she’s soft-featured, pretty, gazing out at the viewer in a tall black hat and black shawl, her gaze at once uncertain and revealing. She was the model Manet painted more

often than any other, more often than his own wife. But when I look at the paintings I don’t always recognise her as beautiful right away. Her beauty is something I have to search for, requiring some interpretive work, some intellectual or abstract work, and maybe that’s what Manet found so fascinating about it – but then again maybe not. For six years Morisot came to his studio, chaperoned by her mother, and he painted her, always clothed. Several of her own paintings hang in the museum too. Two girls sharing a park bench in the Bois de Boulogne, one in a white dress, wearing a broad straw hat, bending her head forward over her lap, maybe she’s reading, the other girl in a dark dress, her long fair hair tied back with a black ribbon, showing to the viewer her white neck and ear. Behind them all the lush vague greenery of the public park. But Morisot never painted Manet. Six years after she met him, and apparently at his suggestion, she married his brother. He painted her just once more, wedding ring glittering dark on her delicate hand, and then never again. Don’t you think that’s a love story? It reminds me of you and Simon. And to give myself away even further, I duly add: thank God he has no brothers!

The problem with museums like the d’Orsay, by the way and just totally incidentally, is that there’s far too much art, so that no matter how well you plan your route or how noble your intentions, you will always find yourself walking irritably past priceless works of profound genius looking for the bathrooms. And you feel slightly cheapened afterwards, like you’ve let yourself down – at least I do. I bet you never look for the bathrooms in museums, Eileen. I bet as soon as you enter the hallowed halls of Europe’s great galleries, you simply leave such corporeal practicalities behind you – if indeed they ever plague you in the first place. One doesn’t think of you as a corporeal