Exposure (10 page)

'No—I know. I mean. It was just a figure of ... I just—I thought I saw you somewhere before, that's all. Not
met.
Just
saw...
'

He stood up and searched around for the Rizla Jessica needed, feeling his own heartbeat swelling through him as if it was actually distorting his shape. When he felt able to turn round again, he saw she was smiling obscurely, pulling an invisible hair off her sweater.

Jessica laughed to fill the awkward gap. 'So,' she said, 'maybe we'll all go to Chile with you, Ludo. Probably fewer black holes there—what with all the sunshine.'

Jessica felt sorry for Luke, who often embarrassed himself in front of girls. There was no need for him to be nervous—she imagined he was exactly what most women were after: he was tall and friendly; he had the broad shoulders and so on. At any rate, he was the best-looking guy she knew. He was phenomenally insecure about his intellect, though. Sadly, this was understandable, given the brilliant, neurotic sister and the closed-off tragic dad, who dismissed all his son's observations as trifling and spoilt.

Why did he do that? Why give your child privileges only to hate him for accepting them when they were all he knew? Jessica felt she had rarely seen anyone more at war with himself than Mr Langford, who appeared constantly to be in a state of adoration and loathing of his own wealth. He luxuriated—sometimes almost vulgarly, which made her like him—in his fine clothes, his good wine, but when he was challenged by the predictably left-wing outspokenness of his daughter, he was prone to moments of searing shame. The daughter plainly knew this and she was the one member of the family who could exert power over her father's mood if she chose to. This game of chess was beyond Luke, who seemed only to have a relationship with his mother. Mrs Langford was a lovely, intuitive person who, like too many women of that generation in Jessica's opinion, devalued her worth altogether by presenting herself with an apology, as if she was a consolation prize for those who weren't lucky enough to win the attention of her husband.

'Oh, all right,' Ludo told her, 'girls can come to Chile too. At least now you're talking sense. Hey, Luke, doesn't Davina's mother have a house out there?'

'Davina's mother? Where?'

'In
Chile!

'OK, OK. Can I ask you people something?'Jessica said. 'How come everyone you know has, like, five houses?' She licked the Rizla and raised her eyebrows.

'They do not,' Ludo said.

'Yes, they do.'

'What are you saying? Are you implying that we're spoilt rich kids with a limited social circle? So what? You went to public school too, darling.'

'I had a scholarship,' she said, winking,'so it really doesn't count.'

'Did you? I never knew that,' Luke said. He wished he could find Jessica attractive, but she was too plain for him. She was such a cool, clever girl. 'What are you doing hanging out with us? You should be at the Socialist Workers' meeting or something.'

'Oh, shut up.'

'Drinking beer. With
actual poor people!

'Here, have a beautifully rolled joint, Ludo,' she said.

'Bless you. You are a highly accomplished young lady and will one day make someone a lovely wife.'

'Yeah, right.' She snorted contemptuously.

Arianne propped her leg on the sofa and held out her glass to Ludo. 'I hate snobs. My dad's a fucking snob.' She pulled her face into a frantic caricature.' "Why don't you go out for dinner with the Honourable Fuckwit, darling?" I can't respect it. It's such a bullshit attitude. He's always pimping me, that bastard.'

'Pimping your daughter sounds like a bullshit attitude,' Jessica said.
'Jesus!

Ludo pointed the champagne bottle at Arianne as if it was a microphone—or a gun. 'Hang on just one second there, Miss Tate. Have you, of your own free will, ever been out with a man who was not stinking rich?'

Jessica giggled and Arianne looked at her. For a second, Luke wondered if there was hostility between them. He thought Jessica might be jealous of the prettier girl.

But then Arianne did her breathy laughter, her Sunday-morning-in-bed laughter—she seemed to have no other kind. 'OK, so you got me there,' she said.

'Oh, that is
so
fucking outrageous,' Jessica gasped, 'I assumed he was poking!'

'I know. It is outrageous. I'm just not independent like you.'

'Independent? What do you mean? You know I'm not rich.'

'I don't mean in that way. I mean in the important ways.'

This natural revelation of her vulnerability was disarming. The beautiful girl, so honest about her failings, was hard to resist. Jessica wondered if she knew it.

Arianne shrugged. 'Look, rich boys have this kind of
authority
that makes you ... I don't know, it makes you feel
safe!

'Yes, it comes of being
waited
on, always getting the best
table.
A gold watch for Christmas, a ski-trip, a new car. It's totally superficial,' Jessica said. 'No offence, guys.'

Luke wanted to tell her he wasn't given money by his parents any more.

'Look, I know it's bullshit. Like anything, I suppose it fools you if you want it to, for as long as it can,' she said.

Without question, Arianne was the main character in the room. The recklessness of her honesty made for compelling viewing. She risked her dignity in a way that was beyond the nerve of the others, beyond their sense of style. She pulled off high-dive spectaculars and emerged from the water absolutely herself.

'Yes, it's all fascinating, of course, darling,' Ludo said, 'but what about that brute Dan, though? I mean, really.
Really
.'

'Dan? He's a poppet.' She looked away, embarrassed for a moment by her own insincerity, because she and Dan had exchanged thirty-six angry text messages that day. He exhausted her. She didn't find him sexy any more and had to grit her teeth when he forced himself inside her. He had made a fool of himself because of her and she had already decided it was time to move on.

Ludo sighed. 'Arianne, Dan is a meat-head who completely misunderstands everything you say. It's impossible to have a conversation with him about anything other than protein shakes or the best way to target your abs. He's
not
mixing in our gene pool.'

'"Safe",
though? That's what I want to talk about,' Jessica said. 'He couldn't protect you today, could he? What does "safe" mean, for fuck's sake? Don't you get bored with your meat-head?'

'Oh, I've asked her this before. She says boredom is better than fear.'

'That's
crazy!
Boredom is total alienation from what's going on around you. It's as lonely and frightening as it gets,' Jessica said. 'It must be awful to be with someone who bores you. I could never go to bed with someone who bored me. It would be less emotionally significant than
masturbation.'

'Jesus, Jessica,' Ludo said.

She blew out a mouthful of smoke. 'What?'

'Just ... what you said...' he told her. For a second he felt a flash of insecurity—as if a photograph had been taken when he wasn't expecting it. He wondered if she would have gone out with him anyway—if he had found her pretty enough to ask. He studied her face and thought maybe she had lost weight and the features were standing out more. Then he picked up the cover of a CD, worried that after his last comment everyone would think he was a prude in bed, which, in fact, he was.

'You're such a romantic, Jessica,' Arianne said.

'OK. That is definitely
not
something I've been called before.' She filled Arianne's glass and they smiled at each other.

'Do you really want to sit on the floor? Come and sit up here, if you like.' Jessica got up and Arianne patted the sofa beside her. When she sat down, Arianne lay back across her lap. 'Is that OK?'

'Yes. Yes, it's fine,' Jessica said quietly.

For a while, the music from the film filled the room. The two boys had been used to these faintly erotic displays of female solidarity at university. But somehow this was not like the usual titillating performance of hair-plaiting and neck rubs. Conspicuously absent was the standard repertoire of mmms and oh-yeses plainly designed to convey erotic promise to the men in the room. Here instead were two women who liked each other and were engaged in some kind of private understanding. Both boys tried to think of a way to interrupt it, but could not.

Arianne lit another cigarette and blew out the smoke above her head. The litde cloud that hung over them added to their separateness: it located them in their own atmosphere. Ludo took off the hat and dressing-gown and poured some champagne into a glass.

Luke watched Jessica move a little to accommodate Arianne's shoulder. He felt more lost and unsure of himself and more excited than he ever had in his life. He could feel his phone going in his pocket and he knew it would be Lucy again. Nothing in the world would have made him answer it now. His intense curiosity about Arianne was tinged with horror, deep fear of what she might tell him and of just how unreachable she might turn out to be. She was plainly beyond his usual small-talk, and yet her brand of spontaneous heady intimacy was alarmingly foreign to him. He felt himself at a loss for the right words, the right
approach
to conversation. He wanted to ask her something about herself, but instead he said, 'Arianne, you seem to have a seriously low opinion of men.'

She held out her hand to Ludo for the bottle of champagne. 'The doctor said not to drink, didn't she? Did she? Are we worried?'

'No, we're not worried. We've all done far worse and survived. Hey—what's the matter with us men, though? Why the low opinion?' Ludo said.

'Oh, I'm just a silly billy,' Arianne giggled. Then she smiled softly at Luke and held his gaze for a second, 'so never mind what I think.'

It was an end of all conversation, but it seemed to Luke that it had been cut short, that he had been fobbed off in some way and was expected not to notice. He felt indignant, but he was also sufficiently concerned that he might not have understood a single thing this girl had said to stay quiet. Instead, he hoped he looked as good in his red T-shirt as Lucy always said, and with the light from the TV noticeably modelling his biceps, he suspected he probably did.

They all concentrated on smoking joints and watching the trite happy ending of the film. Luke handed out the boxes of Chinese takeaway, some plates and cutlery and the room was filled with the smell of hot and sour soup and fried noodles. They listened to Ludo crunching the cashew nuts in his sauce. The couple in the film had their child. The father stood holding the newborn baby by the window of the hospital, gazing down on the frenzy of New York. It was autumn. The music was strong, passionate, resolved.

By three a.m. they had all fallen asleep—except Luke. He was feeling uneasy. He got up and walked around his flat, leaving the others sprawled on sofa cushions and beanbags, the blue planet of the TV flickering over them.

First he went into his kitchen and opened the fridge. He took a long look at all the jars and beautiful packages, the things he threw out and repurchased regularly. He never ate in but he liked to have a full fridge. He liked it full of tropical fruit, papaya, pineapple, kiwi, and exotic continental deli items, gravadlax, caper-berries, and Serrano ham. He adored that collective expensive smell.

What he looked for unconsciously when he opened the door of his fridge was travel, or rather transportation of a more intimate kind. His fridge contained the essence of his aspirations—props from the photographic images that arrived in his mind when he wondered about his lifestyle and whether he fulfilled its criteria. His fridge helped him arrive at himself.

He ran his fingers over the buttons on the microwave as he walked towards the centrepiece of the kitchen, the eight-burner gas hob, which he had never turned on. Not even to light a cigarette. He had bought it because of the fabulous dinner-party photograph in the brochure. He had seen himself in there, flame-grilling lamb, laughing girls in the background holding oversized glasses of Cab Sauv. But there was never the time: time to shop, to call people, to reschedule because of unforeseen circumstances.

What did he spend all his time doing? Working, travelling across the city, absorbing the delays and the jams and the cancellations into the tension he stored between his shoulder-blades. He checked email; he missed calls and listened to messages on his mobile phone. There were friends he had not seen for a year.

Only two years before, days had seemed long, resilient to failures of planning, flirtatiously responsive to unplanned gestures. Time had been mysterious and plentiful, a natural resource. He had splashed around in it. But now it seemed to be an idea in his own mind. He himself decided its properties, its texture; whether he experienced it in the surreal little jerks of phone calls and meetings, as office quanta, or in undulating lunar stretches in front of his computer at the weekend, his mouth chewing fuel when his alarm reminded it to. This was a new sense of responsibility, of artistic control. But he did not want time to feel like art, he wanted it to feel like science.

He studied the dates on a couple of jars of cornichons, some sun-dried tomatoes, olives stuffed with almonds. They were beautiful glass jars: fantastic packaging. He threw them into the big, cylindrical silver bin, feeling blasphemous.

He went into his bedroom and opened his wardrobe. He looked at the racks of shoes he never wore, the casualwear he was never casual enough for. If he was honest, all he really made use of was the row of work shirts neatly ironed by his cleaning lady. And yet he regularly ordered sweatshirts and chunky sweaters online—like posthumously acquired souvenirs of his leisurely early twenties. Just three years before he had not needed to plan a four-day skitrip six months in advance. He would have crammed those chunky sweaters into an overnight bag, chucked in some Rizla, a bottle of vodka—and then off.

Now the days passed quickly between lifting off the duvet and folding the duvet over himself again. He was beginning to see why people wanted a family. You could want a family solely because it was something that wouldn't go off or go out of fashion before you had time to notice it.