They went to a nearby café, he ordered champagne, the exaggerated gesture embarrassed them. He regaled them with anecdotes about well-known actors, both living and dead. He made them laugh and was even ironic without seeming affected. He listened too, when they dared voice their own reflections and feelings, and gave good advice without being didactic, as if he just wanted to share his experiences with them and his wonder at all the questions for which even he had not found answers. The next day they asked each other why he had bothered to spend a whole evening with them. Maybe he had simply been relaxing, taking a break from the role of peripatetic myth. Maybe he took pleasure in their enthusiasm because it reminded him of the deeper reasons he himself had had for going on, year after year, instead of resting on his laurels.
When the café closed only Lucca, her friend Miriam and Harry Wiener were left. They stood for a few moments on the pavement talking, while a waiter piled chairs on tables. Miriam unlocked her bicycle and kissed Lucca on the cheek, fairly demonstratively, she thought, as her friend waved and disappeared round the corner. But suddenly she was standing with the Gypsy King in front of a closed café after midnight, in a square on the edge of the city centre. He turned up his coat collar and offered her a cigarette. She accepted it without considering whether she wanted to smoke or not, and he lit his silver lighter, looking curiously at her, as if now the initiative rested with her alone.
Later she had to admit to herself that his simple and direct way of handling things was impressive. There was no longer any constraint about him. He asked if she was hungry. He had a flat he used for work in town, they could go along there and have a snack. He said this with suitable innocence and yet with a droll look she couldn’t help smiling at. She was tired, she said. But then the least he could do was drive her home! His car was a street or two away.
As they walked along the quiet side streets she wondered at their walking there together, she and Harry Wiener. He said he had wanted to see her on stage for a long time. He had seen photographs of her. They had interested him, the photos, she had a distinctive face. He looked at her. She didn’t need to be sorry about that! He spoke of photography, about how photographs reveal what we can never see with the naked eye because our eyes are always seeking a mirror of our ideas. How photography can reveal a reality that is otherwise inaccessible to us, how faces become visible in all their startling and fascinating strangeness. She had never thought about it like that before.
It was an old Mercedes cabriolet, silver-grey with a beige-coloured leather trim. She wondered if he might have chosen that colour because it matched his grey hair. Everything about Harry Wiener was tinged with silver. She sat with her hands between her thighs in the thin dress. Now and then he threw a glance at her knees in their black tights under the hem, beside his hand resting on the gear lever, but she felt it would be absurd to cover them. She listened to the hum of the motor and looked out at the illuminated town turning and turning around her. It seemed slightly foreign, the town, seen from his car. She told him where to turn off and asked him to stop a few doors from her own. He switched off the engine and turned towards her. Again she was astonished at his directness. He would like to kiss her, would she permit him? She smiled and shook her head. She was both very talented and very attractive, he said, and she was wrong if she thought the two things had nothing to do with each other.
After she got out she bent forward with another smile. He hoped they would meet again. She thanked him for the evening and slammed the door. His front lights threw a hard beam on the pavement slabs. The cats’ eyes on the bicycles leaning against the wall shone red, and her long shadow rose abruptly and swung over the façade as he passed. She caught a brief glimpse of his silhouette in the back window before he turned and was out of sight. Otto had gone to bed. She took off her shoes in the hall and undressed without switching on the light. She imagined Harry Wiener thinking of her while he drove through the town. A strange thought. She lay down close to Otto’s back, so they lay skin to skin beneath the duvet, pleased with herself.
In the morning Miriam called while Otto was in the bath. Had anything happened? Lucca was irritated. What did she mean, happened? Miriam laughed, that was obvious enough. Lucca protested, he had talked to the others just as much. Miriam laughed again. Lucca sat in an easy chair with a shiny, worn silk cover, pink flowers on a curry yellow background. They had found it in a skip. She was wearing one of Otto’s creased shirts, nothing else, she had just woken up. She pulled her legs up in the chair and looked at herself in the tall mirror leaning against the wall beside the bed. She held the phone between her chin and shoulder as she gathered her hair into a loose knot. It had grown long, half of it fell down again around her cheeks. Otto liked her to put her hair up that way, casually. Miriam talked about her boyfriend, she wanted to have a baby, he was not keen. She was afraid he didn’t love her any more. Lucca let her talk on. A child, that was almost impossible to imagine.
She looked at her legs. She had nice legs, they were long, and her thighs were narrow and firm. Her cunt was nice too. She had shaved it so only a little tuft was left. That was where the King of the Gypsies would have liked to make his way. It was comical to think of all the wiles he had made use of, with champagne and stories and sage advice drawn from the experience of a long life, all of it to no earthly use. Just because he had seen a picture of her and taken a fancy to such a young, talented cunt.
She spread her legs so they lay over the chair arm, listening to Miriam going on about the child she so much wanted. Now she looked like the front page of one of the porn magazines she sometimes saw Otto glance at sideways in the all-night kiosk. Imagine if the Gypsy King could see her now. He would go right out of his mind. Be jolted out of his old, flabby, wrinkled skin. It would almost have been worth letting him, just to be able to enjoy his crestfallen face afterwards. Was that all? Yes, your Majesty, that was the lot! She decided not to say anything to Otto. Even though she had been firm he might go on thinking about it all the same. Besides, it irritated her that she had stayed there listening to the Gypsy King and his profundities and allowed him to drive her home in his flash Mercedes.
When she had put down the receiver she rose and stood for a while in front of the mirror. She unbuttoned the shirt, she had lost weight, her stomach was perfectly flat. She didn’t want any child, for the time being she would keep her stomach to herself. Otto had turned off the shower, she could hear him swishing water down the drain with the rubber swabber. She pushed the duvet on to the floor and lay down on the bed with closed eyes. She felt the air from the open window on her face, stomach and thighs. Music wafted down from one of the other floors, a monotonous thumping bass rhythm. A dog barked down in the street.
Otto opened the door of the bathroom. In a moment he would be with her. It was a game. She would lie there without moving, and he would walk to and fro as if he were searching for something and had not even noticed her. He would let her wait, the room would grow silent, and in the silence she would be completely exposed to his gaze, unmoving, in an extremity of tension, trying to guess where on her body she would feel his first touch.