Lovers and Liars Trilogy (29 page)

When Pascal touched her, she did not speak. He put his arms around her and pressed her tight against his chest. The tumult and confusion intensified. Her whole body was shaking. Her arms locked around his neck.

He could still hear the noise when he led her away. It pursued them down the streets. She stumbled, and he led on, walking blindly: When they were three blocks, four, five, from the scene of the car bomb, he could still hear the turmoil in his head.

His room was over a bar, not far from the harbor. Outside, Pascal hesitated, uncertain, confused. The girl was clasping his arm. It was painfully hot in the street. He led her into the shade of the doorway: Something was happening, something was happening, and he could not identify what it was. Uncertainly, he touched her face, then her throat. She looked at him. He helped her to the stairs. She stumbled as they went up.

When they were in his room, it seemed very silent, very empty, very white. The louvers were closed, and their shadows striped the floor. The air felt urgent. He pressed her back against the door and kissed her mouth. She caught at his hands in a frantic way and drew them under her shirt, against her bare breasts. Neither of them spoke. He had never felt desire so intense.

Her hands were fumbling at his jeans, trying to unfasten them. She moaned a little. Lifting her shirt, he bent his head and kissed her breasts. She clasped his hand tight and drew it down inside her shorts; her cunt was wet.

She pulled him down to the floor, still kissing him. Her hair spread out across the floorboards. They fucked on the floor, still half-dressed. He came with his mouth on her mouth, his hands on her breasts. She gave a cry that sounded triumphant. He kissed her, then held her, then kissed her again. Her eyes were astonishing, the room was astonishing, the world was astonishing. Pascal, who never slept with women while in a war zone, looked at his changed life.

Back in France, between wars, there was a long trail of women; he liked women, who sometimes accused him of using them, and he liked sex. Like most people, he had experienced good sex, bad sex, memorable sex, indifferent sex—but this, he had never experienced this.

He stared down at the girl in bewilderment. From the distance came the rattle of machine-gun fire. The air in the room was stifling; both their bodies were slick with sweat. He looked down at her. He felt exultant, on the edge of some danger. He could feel the patterns of the world moving, altering, aligning themselves. They began to make perfect sense, perfect shape.

This and this and this and this. The long, slow attitudes of lovemaking. He bent his head and kissed her breasts. He hardened inside her, and without withdrawing began to fuck again. He felt a determination, or absolute determination, to make her come. She was not, he thought, very experienced, but Pascal was; he was moved by her clumsiness, her awkward timing, her innocence of technique.

“Like this,” he said. “Like this. No, more slowly. Don’t fight me. Yes, yes…” And slowly, stroke after stroke, it became sweet. Pascal forgot the tricks of pleasure, and the ways in which the correct touch, or word, or rhythm could make pleasure increase. He pushed into some oblivion, a dark place, and she went with him. It was frantic, then calm; first a kind of war, then a kind of peace. He reached across, found a pillow, raised her up on it, thrust deeper. When she came, she shuddered against him. Pascal was close to climax himself, but he forced himself to wait. He watched her abandonment move like waves of light across her face. She closed those astonishing eyes and arched her throat. He put his arm under her neck and brought her mouth up to his. He could feel her cunt pulse, and when he came he felt he came forever. Lying beside her, becoming calmer, he thought:
I do not know her name.
He began to stroke her hair, he clasped her hands. He kissed and licked the salt on her thighs, and her belly, and her breasts. There was blood on her thighs. She tasted of iron, and sweat and sex. He kissed her thighs, touched her, then drew her up. He held her close and met her eyes. It felt like drowning. He could feel the waters closing in above his head. He showed her his hand, which was sticky and wet with blood.

“You should have told me,” he said. “I didn’t understand it was the first time.”

“Would it have made a difference?”

“No.” He hesitated, then admitted the truth. “Nothing would have made any difference. Not once we were in this room.”

“Before that,” she said. “On the stairs. I knew then. I knew in the street…”

“So did I.”

“I’m glad.” There was a triumphant candor in her face. “Today you showed me two things. Death and this. I’m glad, glad, glad you did that…” She broke off, then frowned. “I thought I hated you,” she went on. “At the hotel. I thought I hated you then. But I didn’t. Just the opposite.” She raised her eyes to his with a childlike directness. “Is it always like that? like this?”

“Never, in my experience,” Pascal said.

Later, considerably later, they left the hot little room and went out into the cool of evening streets. They walked by the harbor and watched the fishermen prepare their nets. They ate dinner by the harbor and watched darkness fall, and the city behind them become a place of shadows and moving lights. They talked. Pascal could remember, afterward, how they talked, but never what they said. He felt a sense of absolute communication; he sat watching her and wanting her across the table. He thought: How strange, so this is how it happens—without warning. This is how love feels, this is what it’s like. They had to touch each other, across the table, by the harbor, walking back through the streets. He had to clasp her hand, stroke her arm; in the dark, at a street corner, desire mounting, he had to kiss her mouth, open her blouse, kiss her breasts.

They fucked again then, with a desperate urgency, in the darkness against the wall of an Arab tenement, her legs locked around his waist. They went back to his room, and still he wanted her. At three in the morning he took her back to the Hotel Ledoyen, he still could not leave her. He went up to her room. They talked, made love, talked: They had to be careful, she said, they had to be quiet. It was an expensive hotel, but the partition walls were thin.

He remembered her father then, but her father was quickly dismissed.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” she said, and a shadow passed across her face. She clasped Pascal’s hand tightly. “He never cares where I go or what I do. Anyway, I’m eighteen now. It has nothing to do with him.”

And so it went on, day after day, night after night. It never once occurred to Pascal that she might have lied, or misled him. It was impossible: When he looked at her, when he touched her, he doubted nothing. Her eyes mirrored the love and need in his. When he looked into them, he saw only truth, a perfect mirror image of the love he himself felt. It filled him with desire, and with a measureless contentment.

Day after day, night after night, week after week. They had no sense of time, time now could expand or contract A day together passed in a second, an hour apart felt like a century. When Pascal held her he felt he held the future: There was the rest of their lives in his arms. Sometimes, he could see, she looked ahead and feared; sometimes she would share his blithe optimism, but at other times she would doubt. The summer was passing. Her father would not let her remain in Beirut forever. He was already planning his own return to the States.

“He’ll make me go back to England,” she said.

Pascal clasped her in his arms. That was out of the question, he replied. “No,” he said. “We’ll go back to France. We can be married in France. I want you to meet my mother, my friends. I want you to see my village. It’s very beautiful. It’s in the south, in the hills. My father is buried there, in the little graveyard by the church. We could marry in the church, then drink wine in the cafés, dance in the square. Darling, I want you to see my home, to see Provence. …”

He could see all these events and these places as he spoke of them, and he thought she could see them too. They would light her eyes and transfigure her face. But then, a few hours later, or a few days later, he would see that belief drain away, and a curious sadness return to her face.

Once or twice he wondered if there could be some difficulty, or some doubt which she refused to express, but whenever he questioned her, she would deny this. He could not understand how she could seem to hesitate, or fear, when for him their future was so vivid and so inevitable. Perhaps, he thought, she doubted him, doubted his love for her? He found that idea unbearable. Waking once, seeing her standing by the shutters, her lovely body striped with dawn light, her face sad and thoughtful, he felt his heart contract. He must have used the wrong words—words were the problem: They were too small, too inexact.

“Darling, don’t be sad. We’ll find a way,” he said, and drew her back to bed. When she was there, in his arms, he spelled it out for her as exactly as he could. He told her again that he loved her and always would.

“This cannot change.” He caught her to him. “If it could, then nothing has any meaning, nothing.” He touched the tiny earring she wore, then bent and kissed it. “You should have let me buy the ring,” he said. “I wanted to buy the ring. I wanted you to wear it I don’t care about ceremonies, pieces of paper, priests. When we marry, it will alter nothing. You are already my wife.”

She believed him then, he was certain. He could see belief, blinding, in her face. That blindness, of joy and desire, and love, they both shared—later he came to understand that. It made the rest of the world recede. It never occurred to him, nor—he thought—to her, that others were less blind, that they might talk.

Talk, however, they did. And one night, when Gini was at her hotel and he was returning late, around three in the morning, from seeing Arab contacts he used in West Beirut, he entered that small room by the harbor and found Sam Hunter sitting on a chair behind the door. Pascal did not see him at first. He was staring into the room beyond. The room had been trashed.

There were very few possessions in the room, and there was very little furniture, but what there was had been smashed. The shutters were open, and in the moonlight, in that strange, eerie, cold white light, Pascal could see how effectively someone had done this work.

The single lamp, a chair, a table, lay broken in pieces. Film coiled across the floor. Pascal’s spare cameras lay smashed in fragments. His photographs, his precious photographs, covered the floor like fallen leaves. They were crumpled, slashed, ripped. In the center of the room the bed had been stripped. The sheets, stained with the evidence of the previous night’s lovemaking, had been laid out on the floor, as if made ready for some inspection by the police.

As Pascal entered the room, and stopped, staring at this destruction, Hunter rose out of the darkness by the door and lurched to his feet.

He reeked of liquor. Pascal could smell the bourbon at four feet. Hunter wasted no time on preliminaries. He swung a punch at Pascal’s head, missed, almost fell over, then righted himself. He propped himself against the wall. The moonlight caught his face, a wet blur of rage.

“You fucking bastard,” he said. “You goddamned fucking son of a bitch. You’ve been screwing my daughter. She’s fifteen fucking years old. She’s still at fucking school. Jesus Christ, you bastard. I’ll kill you for this.”

He came at Pascal again, fists windmilling. Pascal stood absolutely still. He thought:
fifteen
—and one of the random blows connected. Hunter was a big man, a heavy man, and though he was drunk, there was force behind the blow. It struck the side of Pascal’s head, and Pascal reeled back.

The anger then, swelled by sudden pain, made his mind blank. He looked at the sheets, and the torn photographs, this desecration both of Gini and of his work. It took thirty seconds, if that; then he swung around and hit Hunter back.

It was, after that, an unequal contest. Hunter was the heavier of the two, and the slower. Pascal was lithe, strong, young, and fit. Hunter had once boxed for Harvard, but Pascal had grown up in a small village, where no one used the Queensberry rules. He smashed his fist blindly into Hunter’s face, punched him low in the stomach. Hunter attempted to grapple with him. He grunted, made a grab, lurched against Pascal with his full weight Pascal hit him again; Hunter grabbed his throat.

Pascal punched him hard in the neck, then kicked him in the ribs. Hunter made a choking noise, and slumped. He fell to his knees and crouched there, breathing heavily. Blood was smeared across his face. He levered himself slowly to his feet, then lurched to the door. He stood there, breathing heavily, dropping blood on his Brooks Brothers shirt.

“You piece of shit,” he said at last. “You motherfucker. Just wait. I’ll get you for this.”

And, of course, he did. Pascal saw Gini just one more time, the following morning, at the Hotel Ledoyen. Her father was present throughout the interview, and the circumstances of that interview Pascal had no wish to recall even now, twelve years later. It lasted half an hour. By noon Gini was on a plane, under escort from Hunter, leaving Beirut.

A day later, his commissions began to dry up.
The New York Tunes
cabled, then
The Washington Post,
then
Time.
For two years after that, Pascal sold not one single photograph to any major outlet in America. He neither forgot nor forgave Hunter for this. He felt, for Hunter and for those Hunter could influence, the deepest and most bitter contempt. It was from this period of his life, as he knew, that he truly began to take risks. Adrenaline sickness, perhaps, but Pascal believed the condition went deeper than that. In war zones it was easier to take good pictures if you did not care whether you died or lived. It was from that date that the myths about him really began: That Pascal was indifferent to danger and its possible outcome was something his friends and rivals refused to accept. They glamorized his ennui, Pascal thought. While he endured two years, three, of this withering state, they claimed—wrongly—that it was excitement that motivated him, a death wish.

Pascal knew that to be untrue. During this period there was a void at the heart of both his personal and his professional life. Both the seductions of work, and of women, left him cold. He used women to provide brief sexual satisfaction; he used men, women, and children ruthlessly to get the pictures he needed. He moved on, to the next assignment, the next woman, untouched.