The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (30 page)

‘He actually has some talent,’ my mother said, and hugged me.

Then Vincent stepped up into the ring and spoiled it all.

He fetched my mother’s skirt. He held it out to her. She took it. He brought her case. He picked up my mother’s shoes and placed them by her feet. He gathered the rakes.

My mother always hated to be organized by others, but when Vincent came on to the stage to take her away, she surprised me by being no longer angry with him.

‘I left all my stuff in the hotel bathroom,’ she said.

Vincent was so paranoid, not only about his wife. He lived in a world of secret agencies. VIA, DoS, conspiracy, misinformation, destabilization. Four days into the campaign he had my mother sleeping in a different hotel each night. ‘It’s all been packed,’ he said brusquely. ‘It’s moved already. Come on, you have to
sleep.
’

My maman walked obediently off into the wings and came back with her skirt on. She was the Kroon Princess again – conservative, trim. She was about to kiss me goodnight but then I saw her soften, change her mind.

‘Stand on the other side of the ring,’ she told me.

‘Felicity!’
Vincent said.

One can easily sympathize with Vincent’s agitation, but look at my mother – no matter what mistakes she may have made in raising me, you can never doubt her feelings for me. Now she was committed to making me an actor, she behaved as if each moment were precious.

‘I’m so sorry, mo-chou,’ she told Vincent.

Vincent looked at his wrist-watch and shook his head.

My mother looked at her own watch. ‘Roxanna,’ she said, ‘would you help us?’

The older I get, the more amazed I am by the number of people who spend their whole life waiting for a chance to jump on to a stage. Before my mother had finished speaking, Rox was inside the ring, kicking off her shoes, tugging down her skirt, fluffing her
hair, looking for a place to put her champagne glass.

Vincent went and sat on a Starbuck. My mother’s eyes never lost their focus on me. ‘Tristan,’ she said. ‘This is an acting exercise you can do without me. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘You can do it as often as you like. What I want you to do is move very slowly towards each other. I want you to look straight into each other’s eyes. When you reach a point where this makes you uncomfortable, I want you to stop and explore the feeling. Then, when you are ready, come on forward again. Roxanna, maybe it would work better if you could kneel too. Could you manage that?’

‘Sure,’ Roxanna said. She kneeled.

‘You’re wearing stockings. Take off your stockings.’

Roxanna stayed stubbornly kneeling.

‘You’ll wreck your stockings.’

But Rox had her ankles hid in sawdust. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘leave the stockings to me. OK?’

‘OK,’ my mother said.

As Rox and I edged across the ring towards each other I was, at first, aware of everyone. It was half past two in the morning. I could feel Vincent’s agitation, Wally’s happiness, my mother’s exhaustion.

Roxanna came towards me, smiling crookedly, holding her skirt in an odd little curtsy.

I looked at her eyes. I concentrated. I could feel her so personally. I felt myself being looked at. When I stopped, it was not from calculation.

‘Explore it,’ my mother’s voice said.

‘It’s like a pain,’ she said. ‘Get used to it. When you can stand it, come closer. I’m leaving now,’ she said.

I was now in the scary world of Roxanna’s eyes. It was like holding your hand in a flame. My ugliness was all around me. I was vile, on my own stage, in my own home.

I did not even hear Vincent and my mother leave. I did not see her walk out into the dangerous dark.

Roxanna had promised herself she was going to marry a rich man, and there was nothing on earth – not
Pigeon Patissy
, not sex, not
French champagne, not the tender feelings she had begun to engender in her breast towards Wally Paccione – nothing that would make her change her mind.

She was going to marry a rich man. She was going to meet him at an auction – it was all she had lived for for two years, and yet, after five minutes in the auction room, Roxanna believed that her plan had failed.

She stood in front of two flat lead figures – soldiers of the French Colonial Native Cavalry. She knew these figures from the catalogue, but now she hardly saw them. She was sick, disappointed, angry. She had spent two years of her life preparing for this, and the thing was: she was so damned stupid. She had bought a pig in a poke, a cul in a sac.

Her new dress was black with thin shoe-string straps and a camisole top. Her stockings were seamed. She had a small clutch bag. Her hair had been cut, coloured, permed. She had spent every penny of the 650 dollars for this moment, but when she walked into the wide echoing room, she was very disappointed to be the most dramatic person in it.

The auction room was filled with nerds, wimps, frumps, stooped men with leather patches on tweed coats, women with string bags.

She had not allowed for this, had not even considered the question of the husband’s face, body, personality. She had not thought of sex. She had thought it was frivolous, unimportant, but now, as she walked around the exhibits with her annotated catalogue, she began to panic.

A calmer personality might have thought that she should wait a minute or an hour, to see what other fish might enter the trap, but a calmer personality would not be in the place Roxanna was now in, would not have married Reade, torched the house, travelled to Chemin Rouge, accepted a proposal of marriage from Wally Paccione and then rejected it next morning.

Her hands were damp. She could feel sweat between her shoulder blades. She looked at the lead figures and thought she would like to melt them, see them droop and bend, see the red paint drown and burn inside the bubbling metal.

When she felt the attentions of the collector next to her a shiver of irritation passed up her spine and into her hair. She felt him move around her, stand on one side of her, then the other. He was a guy.
He was doing the guy-things that her entrance had encouraged him to do, but Roxanna was not attracted to these nerds.

‘So what do you think?’ the man asked. He spoke English with a Voorstandish accent, but she did not look at him. She could feel him at her side, in her space – short, tweedy.

‘Think of what?’ she said. She was so pissed off.

‘The Hilperts,’ he said.

He meant the figures.

‘Don’t look like bloody Hilperts to me,’ Roxanna said.

She had seen few Hilperts in life, but many in photographs, and when she looked at these two figures in the harsh neon light the precision of the colour and the details of the moulding confused her.

‘The curator says they’re Hilperts.’

‘Bully for him.’

‘What do you think they are?’

She looked at him more closely. He was wearing tweed, it is true, but not in that nerdy way. He was wearing very precise cuffed corduroy trousers and soft Italian slip-ons. He was, in short, the image of a rich man on a Saturday. Also, now she looked at him, she saw he was actually good-looking – he had chiselled lips and intense, dangerous, blue eyes. He was looking at her, up and down, but subtly at least. ‘It says here’ – he held up his catalogue – ’that they’re “bloody” Hilperts.’

Roxanna felt herself blushing.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I was angry about something.’

‘You think it’s not Hilpert?’

And then she saw: it was working, it was really working, even though she used a swear word, it was happening like the book promised it would. Nothing in her life had ever worked out, but here she was, talking with a rich man. She knew stuff he didn’t know. He was looking at her tits.

‘What year did Herichsen start business?’ she asked him.

‘Your calendar?’ he said. ‘240.’

She knew it was 236. She did not want to show him up. She knew the answers. She knew the questions. She felt everything, her destiny, at her fingertips.

‘It’s very detailed,’ the man said. ‘There’s that – the detailing on the musket.’

‘I didn’t mean that. I mean – there was no native cavalry until after the native wars. And the native wars did not end until 249, and then they put a few survivors in a uniform.’ Reade would have died to see her answer. He knew her, or thought he knew her, back in Jonestown High School: never knew the answers, purple lipstick, black eyeshadow. Bad Girl, Fast Girl, I’ll-cut-your-fucking-face-Girl.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked her. He was cute. His accent was cute. He had the suggestion of a smile, a wonderful cool, almost scary blue about his eyes.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Then they shipped them off to fight in Europe, and they died.’

‘So,’ he said, ‘that’s very bloody astute.’

Roxanna giggled.

The collector smiled.

She liked him, she liked him anyway. She wanted to touch his mouth with her fingers.

‘Could I buy you lunch?’ he said.

And it was done. They had met.

When, exactly three hours later, she went with him to his hotel, she guessed it was too fast, that you should not conduct this sort of relationship like that. She knew a lot about him, but. His mother was a waitress. His daddy was missing. He grew up in a little town where they used poisonous snakes to prove their faith in God. He was very high up in a bank. If you sat in his office you could look across at the Skyscraper Cathedral, and down to the Bleskran. He was not married. He was funny and kind of wild. She thought: whatever happens, happens.

As she walked into the elevator in the Ritz she wished Reade could see her.

Reade would have been frightened to walk into a hotel like this. She too, once. But she read a book and here she was. She was in a daze, and only once – the moment she entered Room 2302 – did she feel a crackle of anger, out of nowhere: the unfairness of it, that there were women who lived every day of their lives in places like this.

Wealth was not like she had imagined – no dark panelling, no gilt – all these different pearl greys, dove greys, this velvety, almost colourless luxury with its single big bed, crisply turned down, and its antique writing desk and the big bathroom with its phials and
canisters and silk kimonos, and this wide, deep anger lay glowing beneath a silky sheet of pleasure and gave her that dangerous ecstatic feeling she knew she should not encourage in herself.

‘Would you like an Aqua?’ Gabe asked her now.

Eficans never used the word. It was as exotic and beautiful to her ears as a glass angel.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said in the breathless little voice which she had learned from Irma.

He went to the bar and she sat at the writing desk. Probably it was called a bureau, something unexpected. She ran her hand over the leather desk top. She thought: there are people who do this every day of their lives.

He brought her the drink. She took it without looking at it, half giddy with what she had done.

‘I have to go soon,’ she said.

He smiled at her.

He was not very much taller than she was, but he had a broad strong body and a handsome olive-skinned face with a neat, short haircut and a cute grin which showed the edge of one slightly (only slightly) crooked tooth and made his eyes crease up. He was forty, maybe forty-five.

She tried to sip her drink slowly, but something inside her made her gulp at it. She squeezed her eyes shut against the bubbles. When she opened them he was smiling at her and she knew he thought she was cute.

‘Tell me more about your job in the bank,’ he said.

‘You’re the one who’s got the job in the bank.’

‘I know.’

‘Then I can’t talk about it.’

‘But I love the way you talk,’ he said. ‘Talk to me about anything.’

She loved the way
he
talked. She liked the bright, clean confidence of his voice and that three-showers-a-day smell, all soap and steam and light spicy after-shave.

It made her giddy, gave her that feeling, made her laugh more than she might have otherwise, and when he came behind her and put his hand on her thin straps she curled her shoulders up and let the straps slip down over her soft white shoulders, and she turned and bowed her head a little and pulled up her hair to let him see the tattooed dove she had hidden on her neck.

He did not go away. Indeed, he kissed her there, and made a little moan in her ear, and in a moment that 450-dollar dress was on the floor like a great black bloom fallen on to the soft grey carpet and he was telling her he was crazy about her lopsided smile.

Now the dress lay on the floor as if it were nothing better than a pair of shucked-off overalls. She should hang it up. She should say, well, honey, you’re just going to have to
wait
. But he already had his jacket and trousers lying there beside the dress and if she was going to insist she would have to stand up and walk across the room in her pants and bra and she didn’t want him lying there and looking at her. She was prettiest when closest, so she left the dress where it had fallen, but it stayed in the corner of her mind, this big black worry which had cost her all her capital.

She just wanted to hold him against her, feel herself sort of folded into his chest, but whenever she reached for him he was not where he had been – his face was in her stomach, at her knees for Chrissake.

Now he was at her ankles. She blushed bright red and tugged away.

‘No.’

‘Babe,’ he said reproachfully.

‘Let go.’ Her ankles were like meat, fat, pork-chop, ugly.

But he took a hold of them, against her will. That really pissed her and she suddenly felt that sort of distance – she just
watched
him as he kissed them. He was kneeling on the floor and kissing her ankles, taking off his wrist-watch while he did it.

‘Please don’t.’

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Babe, please.’

‘I hate my ankles.’ Her voice caught on the word. She hated to have to say it out loud.

Gabe ran his tongue between her toes.

She felt the tears run down her face before she even knew she was crying. It just came out of her as if she were a thing, a sponge, soaked with too much moisture.