“Nah, Camilla,” she says to me, “money, money, money isn’t everything.”
I make to hand her a bill and can clearly see she doesn’t think 50 euros is a whole lot, but the bill disappears into her clothing. She’s dark and could easily be a gypsy. Now my husband starts getting bored, he gets up and saunters over to a group of girls at a table, among them the Romanian bartender, who’s studying mathematics, she’s the one he’d like to chat with. He takes an interest in Romania’s standard of living, differences and similarities before and after Ceausescu. It makes me a bit insecure that my husband talks to other women; “Nun, mein Schatz,” says my darling, “let him do it anyway, that’s how it goes now and then, everyone needs to.” “Mmm.” Then I ask her if she has a boyfriend. Yes, but she doesn’t sound enthusiastic. I ask whether it’s hard to have a love relationship when you’re a prostitute. She takes a deep breath and says something about orgasms, she’s about to deliver a lecture on various types of orgasms, or the absence of orgasms, when some clients arrive, three short Chinese, and she has to run. I feel abandoned. She wraps herself around them. I get up and go over to my husband and the women at the round table.
“This’ll cost,” I say to him. “This is an expensive conversation you’re having.”
“No,” he says, “this is the staff table. And I’m talking to the bartender.”
“Trust me,” I say, “it’s going to cost. It’s like riding in four taxis at once.”
“Bull,” he says, “we’re talking about Romania.”
“Bull,” say the girls.
“Then we’re agreed,” I say, “we’re agreed that I’m paranoid.”
I join the little circle, which consists of:
1. The mulatto girl, 24 and skeptical
2. A fair-haired woman who introduces herself as an alcoholic
3. One with short hair and a small face that she’s just had lifted
4. The bartender
“Mein Schatz,” my darling says when she catches sight of me (the Chinese are about to leave) and climbs onto a stool behind me and flings her arms around me. “Camilla and the horse,” she says to the others, pointing at my husband and me. Then she wags a finger in the air in front of her nose and corrects herself: “Prince Charles,” she says, pointing at my husband.
I pay a suitable compliment to the mulatto girl’s performance and then ask her: “Would you like to buy him? He’s a little old, but he’s good.”
She hasn’t yet managed to reply when the alcoholic leans across the table and introduces herself again as an alcoholic. I tell her that she is highly talented and very beautiful and encourage her to stop drinking and feel good about herself. I show her how I pat myself on the shoulder every day, unfortunately I can’t remember what this maneuver is called, but it works (with each passing day I am more and more at peace with myself), I got it from an article in Reader’s Digest. I make her promise not to go back to drinking the next morning, I start seeing myself as a sort of barfoot doctor, walking from bar to bar, I order champagne for the whole table to celebrate the alcoholic’s decision, and my darling kisses me, her tongue is very pointy, mine is very dry, this will be expensive, and I tell them that my love life with my husband is like a looong German porno film, he is a stud-boy, he’s cracking up, I’m totally cracking up too, one of my darling’s breasts has fallen out of her blouse and her skirt has twisted halfway around, she’s on the verge of cracking up too but she strokes me and strokes me, now she wants to go home, so I slap her but not really hard.
“She hit me,” my darling says, astonished.
“It’s on account of love,” says the one with the small face, “I prefer men, but once in a while I have a woman.”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I say, it’s dawn and I ask what it would cost for her to stay just one more hour, oh please-please-pretty-please but she lives faaar out in the suburbs. I picture my darling alone in the subway, alone on the suburban train. I want to buy more champagne for her, for everyone.
We have to leave now, the club is closing, it’s seven o’clock, I have a husband who fucks like a stallion, I weep, and “Oooh,” they coo at the sight of the tears: “It’s true love,” I give the alcoholic a final admonition, now she’s got to manage without her coach, because now Camilla and the horse are leaving, “No no wait: Prince Charles,” my horse is my crutch on this piercingly bright morning; it’s suddenly the last summer ever.
I wish I were Žižek. Žižek can get everything to hang together, if I were Žižek then right now I would be lying in a Punic bordello and having a fucking match with Houellebecq, the hookers wouldn’t be trafficked, merely glob-al-ized neigh-bors at sex-u-al la-bors—can’t you hear that as sung by Gregorian monks, or maybe a castrato: global-ized neigh-bors at sex-u-al la-bors.
Aaah, that very human, that all too Žižekian urge toward coherence where there is none. What is it that I can’t get to hang together? My memory? My love life? We’ll have to examine all this more closely.
I miss my Romanian darling. I never found out her name. My husband says: if you want to see her again you’d better hurry back there, these people move around a lot. By which he means that she may already be working at a different club, in a different city; or that so many people have glided through her hands that she’s forgotten me, or stands a good chance of soon doing so.
“These people move around a lot”: the statement surprised me. As if he were in possession of experience I didn’t know about—and now he was lifting a corner of the curtain.
At first I couldn’t remember her either. I mean: I couldn’t picture her. And I couldn’t really remember what had happened.
First of all, when I woke up a little later that day after only a couple of hours’ sleep (we left the club at seven o’clock and stepped out into a morning whose light was like a needle, I weeping over my lost love, over parting as such, over life’s brevity) and with a terrible hangover, or sooner, still drunk perhaps—first of all I found in my purse her address and phone number, which I’d forced out of her and which she’d handed me with a shrug (maybe they were fake), and I quickly tore the note into tiny shreds and flushed them down the toilet so as not to be tempted to contact her. A memory arrives, on Platform Cortex, as somber as a freight train. One loss hauls the thought of another along with it. One loss opens the door for another that opens the tear ducts. Even as a child I always feared the worst. I was secretly in love with a boy in my class and wrote him love letters that weren’t intended for his eyes, never never, my love was hopeless, I wrote the letters (well, they weren’t exactly Shakespeare, were they) because he felt closer and closer as I wrote them, while I was communicating, while I put his name and mine together inside a heart. Out of fear that these letters might nonetheless fall into his hands, or into anyone’s hands, for that matter, immediately after writing them I tore them into shreds and threw them into the toilet. No sooner had I flushed them down than the nightmare began. I imagined him coming into his bathroom many kilometers away from mine, only to find, backed up into his toilet—my ripped-up letters, which he would immediately fish out of the water, dry out, and paste together. After which he would throw his head back and laugh, and I would switch schools. A fatal flaw in the sewage system was to blame for this horror: his pipes and mine were connected! The next time I burned my love letter. The breeze caught a few scorched flakes and blew them out the window. After that I took to daydreaming and in this way avoided leaving any evidence. Now the memory is departing from Platform Cortex, do not cross the tracks. And take care to secure your valuables.