Exposure (16 page)

In this way he spent all his energy.

 

Then, one evening a few weeks later, he came home to find Dan sitting on his suede sofa. 'All right? Howzit going?' Dan said. 'You must be Luke, I'm guessing.' He raised his hand like a warrior, coming in peace.

Implausibly, Dan and Arianne were drinking tea together. She had put biscuits on a plate—as if he were a visiting relative. His huge fingers pincered a chocolate Florentine. 'Dan's just dropped by,' Arianne explained. 'I saw him on the way out of drama class. He was passing—on his way to see someone. Weren't you, babe?'

Dan nodded and took a nibble of the biscuit.

'Right. I see,' Luke said, staring at her.

'So, have you had a good day,
dear?'
she asked him, in her nasal, American accent. She couldn't help satirizing their domesticity in front of other people. Must she do it in front of Dan, though? he thought.

Actually, he could not have begun to tell her what kind of a day he'd had. His desk now held his own bodyweight in unread paperwork. Paper was in his dreams—it pursued him down alleyways; thousands of pieces of paper snowstorming his imagination. He was on the run from it as soon as he woke, and his invaluable sportsman's calm was now monopolized by the need to conceal this from his colleagues. But faced with the unintelligible horror of finding Dan in his flat, he found the paper had all blown away. 'I had a pretty good day, thanks,' he said. 'How was yours?'

'Oh, Jon says I need to rethink my Shakespeare piece. My Miranda. My best fucking piece. I'm really disappointed in him as a teacher this term.' She smiled at him, half expectantly. Was he meant to reply?

'Right,' he said. 'I'm sorry about that.'

She picked up her teacup and drained it. Then she looked into her pack of cigarettes and found it was empty. She stuck out her bottom lip, crushing the packet. 'All gone. No fair,' she said, then smiled cleanly at both of them. One, then the other. 'So, Dan wants us to go out for supper.'

Luke put down his keys and looked at her, unable to think what to say.

Dan cleared his throat. 'Actually, I kind of meant I want you to come out for dinner
alone,
Arianne. No offence, man,' he said.

Dan looked at him, and then Arianne looked at him. Luke found her expression unreadable.

'Oh,' she said. 'Oh, right.'

Luke felt intense shock—he felt sweat break out, hairs stand on end and he returned her gaze like a lost, sweating zoo animal, behind glass.

'Yeah I thought we could go to Lanton's, babe,' Dan was saying. 'You know, with the cushions and all the incense and shit. You love that fucking place.'

She clapped her hands like a litde girl. 'Oh, yes, I do. I
love
Lanton's! They do the
yummiest
crème brûlée, Luke. Not too sweet, not too creamy. It comes all golden with sugar and you press your spoon on the top and it goes...
crack!
Just perfect.' She sighed, still turned towards Luke. Again her face gave away no emotion. In fact, had he ever seen such a blank face before? Surely this was a diagram of a face.

'Look, you're cool about this, aren't you, man?' Dan said. 'I mean, I haven't seen Arianne for, like, a month now. It's been pretty hard. You know what I'm saying?'

He stood up and walked round the room, his leather trousers creaking with the strain of accommodating his thighs.

'And I know she's been missing me too. Of course she has. You don't mind me saying that,' Dan assured him. 'It's, like, you just don't have a relationship with real feelings and it just
ends,'
he punched his right fist into the palm of his left hand with a horrible thwack, 'in
one day.'

Arianne sat down and crossed her legs. She had found more cigarettes in her pocket and she Ut one. They watched her blow out the smoke.

'You know what I'm saying, man,' Dan repeated. 'Right?'

'Yeah, I know what you're saying,' Luke said. His voice sounded weak.

'It's basically, like, I think maybe everything happened in a hurry here. OK? I mean, you have this accident, right? You feel,' he made quotation marks in the air with his fingers, like bunny ears on either side of his head, '"
bonded
" deeply ... But then, like, suddenly she's here
living
with you? Ask yourself if it really makes sense. I just want a little time to talk to her, OK?'

Arianne broke a biscuit in half, then left it untouched. It was impossible not to be aware of her blinking, breathing, observing. And it was impossible to misinterpret Dan. Luke gazed at Arianne who gazed back at him. Again: the diagram, the printout of unintelligible numbers in place of the human expression.

'Why?' he said stupidly. 'What do you want to say to her?'

'I think we understand each other,' Dan said.

Some
sign of emotion?
Any
reaction to this? Luke stared, imploring her from behind his paralysed face. She stubbed out her cigarette neatly and squeaked her finger on a dirty spot on her shoe.

'So Arianne and me are going out for dinner, then,' Dan said.

It occurred to Luke that he was repeatedly asserting this so as to provoke either himself or Arianne to contradict him. Barely perceptibly, he pushed back his shoulders.

'OK? Because I just want to take her out to a nice restaurant for a nice dinner so we can
talk,
which we haven't been free to do with this whole
situation
.' He drew out his hand across the room, implicating the furniture, the walls. He looked morally sickened.

And Luke had nothing to say to him. He had never felt more ashamed and frightened. He knew he would not be able to defend himself physically against this huge, steroid-boosted man—and any comment he might make would be seen as provocation. He would be knocked out in front of Arianne—like Andy Jones. He would be humiliated in front of her. At a loss, he simply observed.

'It's a
nice
restaurant. We'll have a
nice
dinner, a litde wine—and Arianne and I will do some talking...' Dan said, still trying his luck. Luke appreciated that the technique had probably been learnt from experience: it was so hard to know what she really thought. He had obviously judged her attachment to other admirers by seeing if she cried when he knocked them out.

Both men waited. And then suddenly, by one of her miracles of physical communication, some slight relaxation of her posture, Arianne let it be known that she had no intention of standing up, of walking out of the door, of going to Lanton's with Dan. Luke saw this and, trembling, put down the briefcase he was still ridiculously holding. He walked to the front door and opened it, praying he had not misread the sign.

He heard something muttered, then creaking and then footsteps. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the huge mass of black leather coat arrive beside him. It paused—for several lifetimes—and then, with a strong, salty smell of cowhide, it passed him by.

When Luke clicked the door shut and turned round, Arianne was taking off her skirt. He was too tired to try to understand what had happened. He accepted the odd, staged quality of her kisses feeling he did not deserve them.

'I can't believe the nerve of that guy,' she said, but she appeared distracted, rather than outraged. 'You're so wonderful, Luke,' she told him, but it did not sound convincing.

Was this her first flawed performance? Surely she knew he had been a coward, he thought.

There was an unnerving calm and then she threw her knickers on to the coffee-table and pushed him down on to his knees. He put his face between her legs and felt lost. After a while he moved away and was about to pull her down on to the rug beside him when he saw that tears were coming down her face. 'Arianne? What's wrong?'

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I'm not good enough for you. You shouldn't let me do this to you.' She pushed his hands off her legs and ran away into the bathroom, slamming and locking the door.

 

At a club later that week, he came back from the dance-floor to find her with a tequila shot in her hand, licking salt off his friend Joe's neck. Joe had not seen him approaching the table and Arianne made no signal to him, although she had seen Luke clearly. Joe held out the lime between his teeth and she knocked back the tequila and bit into it, watching his eyes catch sight of Luke as her teeth sank into the fruit. He pulled back, leaving it in her mouth, and she spat it across the table.

'Hey,
Luke!'
Joe said, standing up. 'Come and—come and have a shot.'

'No, thanks.'

'OK, then,' Joe said. 'Fair enough. I think I might just go and see where Sam is, then. All right.' He squeezed Luke's arm lightly as he passed.

Luke watched him go. 'What were you doing?' he said.

Arianne held up the empty glass and waved it at him, 'Tequeeeela shots.' She laughed drunkenly, through her nose. Her voice was slurring, her face was flushed. She looked incredibly beautiful—as if she had just had sex.'
You know,
Luke—salt, shot of tequila, bite of lime?'

'Licking it off his
neck,
though?'

'What, Joe?'

'Taking the lime out of his
mouth?
Yes,
Joe!

'Joe?' She shrugged. 'He wanted me to and he bought the drinks, so I thought why not?'

'Because he
bought the drinks?'

'Oh, what are you fucking saying, Luke?'

'Nothing.'

'Yes, you are.'

'No, Arianne. I'm not.'

'Bullshit.'

'What's bullshit?'

'You have no right to make that insinuation. You think you're so
superior,
don't you?'

Hadn't he once said this to Lucy? Lucy, with her infinitely greater, cleaner love for him, when he was only able to muster a soiled kind of fondness for her? He pushed away the thought and its implications with horror,
'No,
Arianne.'

'Yes. You think I'm a little slut.
Slut whore slut.
You think I'm just a bitch who should be shot and tossed on to a rubbish heap.'

He had heard her talk this way before. Long monologues of horrifying insults to herself. She could become quite hysterical. 'Please, darling. Don't do this,' he said softly.

Jessica, who was sitting at the other end of the table, said something about really needing to dance and stood up. Luke gazed away after her as she left. Just then it seemed that her presence had constituted the last vestige of civilization. He could see Ludo on the stage, spraying people with a bottle of champagne. His friends were all in another world and their joy was nightmarish. He wanted to cover his head.

Love had made his mind and body inextricable, and now jealousy and hate had forced them apart just as effectively. If his body had genuinely reflected his mind, the paramedics would have come through the crowd with defibrillators, shouting, 'Stand clear!', shooting thousands of volts through his heart to start it up again. A small group would have stood by, marvelling at his survival.

But instead he smiled and sat down beside Arianne, out of grim necessity, out of the overwhelming fear of making things even worse. 'Hey, come on,' he said, 'I want you to have a good time. Let's not argue. OK?
OK,
darling?' He kissed her cheek.

He had recently begun to appreciate how free, in relative terms, he had always been to show his emotions in the past—as a child, a teenager. He remembered his father telling him to pull himself together when a schoolfriend chose to ask the other member of their gang of three to go on holiday with him and his family. This betrayal had occurred on his sister's birthday and Luke was meant to be changing for a big family supper. For some reason he had been alone with his father, who had said, 'It's rotten luck, but there'll be other holidays and you've simply got to pull yourself together for Mummy and Sophie, Luke.'

'You don't
understand,
Dad,' he shouted, throwing his hockey-stick across the kitchen in helpless grief.

'I
do
understand, Luke,' his father said. 'It's very tough thinking you're missing out and feeling as if someone else has all the luck when you deserve it as much as they do. You just have to cope sometimes. So, come on, buck up.' Luke had run away up the stairs, choking and sobbing at this insult to his emotions, this soul-destroying, eat-your-greens advice.

'You just have to cope sometimes.' It chilled the heart.

He put his arm round Arianne and squeezed her shoulder. He remembered the day his aunt Suzannah had come by to tell his mother that their father had died. They had talked privately for a while and when Suzannah left, wearing big dark glasses, his mother had gone out into the garden with her gloves and her sunhat. She said she was just going to weed the border because it was in a wretched, terrible state. She smiled at them as they sat at the lunch table reading the Sunday papers, and shut the door behind her.

They had all assumed she was fine until they got hungry at around eight and realized there was no smell of cooking. It turned out she was still outside, on her hands and knees, weeding. They all observed her sadly through the window and wondered what to do. Luke remembered that his father had gone out for her with a glass of whisky in his hand, and from the kitchen window he and Sophie watched them hugging each other in the half-light. When she came in, she said, 'I am so sorry. I completely lost track of the time. You're all starving, aren't you?'

But his father wouldn't let her cook. He took them out for supper that night and held her hand all the way through. They went to the Holland Park Brasserie—her favourite fish restaurant.

In the club toilets, a little later, Luke found himself crying at the thought of the tenderness that was sometimes there between his parents. They seemed to go for long periods in which his father didn't really notice his mother's presence, but then suddenly they would silence him and his sister with a litde display of enduring love. He found himself thinking about Lucy and wondering how she was, what it had been like to get that final email from him, with its logical explanation:

 

It's simplest just to do it this way, Lucy, because you know there'll only be a dreadful scene if we meet up. You know you wanted to get married and I just wasn't heading that way and neither of us could understand it, really, because you're so lovely, Luce. But I think I've worked it all out now. And the reason I'm so sure is because I've found what everyone's looking for: when it just 'feels right'. I know you'll think I'm a wanker, but I think this is for the best, in the long term, for both of us.