‘Oh, Jesus.’
I had never known purer rapture. She took the lead, the most experienced one.
‘Now, now!’
*
Her bed, the two of us lying on it with eyes open, looking at the different shades of blue coloring the room, and wondering aloud why most of them had no distinct name of their own but referred to something else of that color — sky blue, cobalt blue. The blues with Antwerp and Prussia in their names.
‘They have codes,’ I said. ‘Color codes. BI58CC. C378NB.’
‘Cold,’ she said.
‘Exactly,’ I said.
I slipped off, into sleep, my face nestled against her throat.
‘Ludwig?’
‘Hmm.’
‘Forget it. Go to sleep.’
The room was dark when I awoke. From the sounds around me I figured it was still evening, not night. A television, cars. She was lying with her back to me, her hand on my pelvis. I slid out of bed; when I came back from the toilet she was lying on her back, looking at me.
‘Are you as hungry as I am?’
Outside — the amazement that everything had gone on the way it always did, as though we were standing on a still point, a stone in the stream — there we stood and there went everything. I thought: heaven, that can’t be anything except this day, and then forever.
We ate at a Tibetan restaurant close to her house, photographs of monasteries on the walls. Cold, hard mountain landscapes. Boulders hung with colorful pennants. I ordered something with black-eyed peas and rice, she had something with pumpkin. The food arrived with surprising speed, in ceramic bowls.
‘It’s easy to be a vegetarian here,’ she said. ‘This city is keyed to vegetarians. But the rest of the country. .’
There were things running through my mind. Questions.
‘Would you rather be alone, later on?’ I asked. ‘I mean, I have another place I can sleep.’
She leaned across the table.
‘What do you think, Ludwig? I’m not finished with you that easily.’
I’d expected a different answer, poignant phrases. I caught a glimpse of love as a conspiracy, the attractiveness of it. How quickly you became attached to someone whom you hadn’t even known existed that same morning. I thought about my mother’s omen, In fact, you don’t really need anyone anymore, the contrast with this assenting little predator.
In her bed that night as well, in the soft, flickering glow of the metropolis, her body was a loud affirmation of life — chasms and heavens opened up to me at the same time, we climbed and fell, before my eyes floated visions of Schultz at the edge of his abyss, he and his woman, embracing each other in their fall.
‘Goddamn it, Ludwig!’
It had been a long time since I’d seen her so angry.
‘Where were you? What have you been up to?’
‘The same as you, actually,’ I mumbled, but she wasn’t taken with the joke.
‘I didn’t sleep a wink all night. This is one thing too many for me right now, do you hear me? I need my sleep. Where were you?’
I shrugged.
‘A girl?’
Sarah had dropped me off at the hotel. We kissed through the open window, she had driven on to her work — at the UCLA cafeteria. Trays full of food, trays full of garbage. Sometimes she thought: this will all be shit soon. She described her work as a maddeningly endless series of removals.
My mother asked, ‘Who is it?’
‘Someone I met.’
‘That’s fairly obvious. Please, Ludwig.’
I ordered a double espresso with a side of warm milk.
‘Have you had breakfast yet? Order whatever you like, they have lovely things here.’
I was brimming with sensational memories. An invincibility that I owed to her. I’d never known that love was like this.
‘I think we need to establish a few rules,’ my mother said. ‘I don’t want this anymore. I want to know where you are.’
I struck out like a serpent.
‘You were gone for a whole month without letting me know where you were.’
‘And this constant lashing out of yours, we need to talk about that too, I consider it. .’
‘Consider it talked about. Period. So much for the family business. And now, what are you going to do today? Who are you going to get naked with today? In exchange for ten thousand dollars?’
‘Ludwig. .’
She smiled helplessly at the girl who put my cup down in front of me.
‘I don’t know why you came here,’ she said a little later. ‘Just to make me feel rotten? If so, you would have been better off staying in England. This way all we’re doing is getting in each other’s hair.’
‘Do you want me to go away? I can do that. No problem, really.’
The hopelessness — there was no way out. I knew she was right; I was a punitive element and nothing more. Whenever I saw her I wanted to vent my hatred, to torture her. I never missed an opportunity to vomit my gall all over her. The war of words was one I would always win, but the battle against the reality in which she moved and breathed, that never. Once she was out of sight, the rage made way for feelings of loss.
‘I’d like to know what your plans are. Ludwig?’
I tried to summon up Sarah, sarahsarahsarah, but she eluded me. One future had made way for another. Lightness for gravity. My mother may not have known it, but she needed me in that life of leaping-before-she-looked. One checkpoint in the course of the entire day. Our lives were two hands, one filled with uncertainty, the other with which we held each other tight. Or I held her, that was more like it. The lame leading the blind.
‘So you either accept it, or. .’
‘Or? Or what?’
Quietly now.
‘Or then I really want you to go back to England. You can apply at the conservatory, I know they would accept you.’
Her oldest dream concerning me: her son, the concert pianist, the old music temples of Europe. The straight world of culture at last. Caesarion, the fusion of the sex symbol and the artist, beauty and creation. Just as the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra was supposed to have been the union of both their talents, their genius. But what did the historians have to say about Caesarion? Not much, according to the Alexandrian Cavafy: Behold, you came with your vague charm./ In history only a few lines/ are found about you,/ and so I molded you more freely in my mind.
Caesarion had only one striking talent in fact, and that was for hitting upon the wrong moment. When Alexandria was besieged by Octavian and the city seemed about to fall, Cleopatra sent her son to India at the head of a caravan laden with riches. But for reasons known to no-one, he tried to return to the city where his mother had already committed suicide; the primal tale of the queen and the serpent, how she clutched it to her breast. She died along with her maidservants Iras and Charmion. En route to Alexandria, Caesarion — aged seventeen — was murdered, probably by Octavian’s henchmen.
A dismal footnote to the story of his parents.
My mother herself had failed at the conservatory, yet it would be overly cheap psychology to assert that I was meant to mend her broken dreams. In any case, though, she was unrealistic in her estimation of my talent. Middling. She had never accepted that, not back then, not now either. That was painful to me, for it meant that whatever I did she would always see it as something unworthy of me, while in fact it was the best I could do.
‘The Royal Academy of Music, I’m sure they’ll have you.’
‘About as likely as you someday playing Mary Poppins on Broadway.’