Читать книгу Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers - Antonia Quirke - Страница 31

Perhaps it was the result of a slight difficulty in adjusting from one reality to another, but when one Saturday I saw one of the production assistants at the radio station reveal a Quaid-cobbled stomach as he changed his shirt, I determined to doorstep him in an effectively cinematic fashion, which is to say like Sean Young in No Way Out or Ellen Barkin in Sea of Love, that is, in nothing but a fake fur coat and a pair of heels, thinking keep it snappy, keep it flirty, keep it The Big Easy, as I rode the tube to his flat on the Edgware Road inside which Tom, the Quaid-cobbled production assistant, asked me why I had such a guilty look on my face, to which I had no reply other than to attempt to shrug the coat to the floor, struggling with the buttons in an un-Sean Youngian fluster which nonetheless carried enough weight of intent to make him, maladroit himself, lurch towards me and sort of accidentally knock me to the floor, where, after rather a while of polite tussling, he scrabbled for a condom and put it on, tentatively, like he was potting a cactus, and, once inside me, became oddly static, allowing me to observe his beautiful silky hair (of a paler, more delicate red than Jim's, hard to describe) and wonder, with steadily diminishing enthusiasm, whether he were doing some sort of tantric sex on me, a semi-debacle which I amended a week later with a twenty-year-old trainee chef who had curls like James Frain and who, to my horror, turned out to be fifteen in the morning (that skin, I knew it!), an offence which I assume, perhaps overconfidently, the police will regard as having happened a long time ago etc. etc. should they ever read this or subpoena my diary of the time, which records that I attempted to remedy, and then – what do you know – remedied the child-chef-non-semi-debacle over the following few days with several other legal (take note, police!) men, the last of whom was an ethical banker with a garland of rose-tattoos around his neck, just low enough to be invisible under a T-shirt, with whom I enjoyed a lovely fortnight before his tetchy tutting at Walter Matthau's casual, rather gentle sexism in The Odd Couple drove a wedge between us, leaving me with nothing to show from the fling except an American acquaintance of his called Ilana, from New Jersey, a chestnut-bright young woman simultaneously hard and soft like all the great movie stars, with whom I felt I was going to be permanent friends, and who in fact set me up with a Canadian who lived alone, bald as Kurtz, in a condemned house on Plimsoll Road in Arsenal which he had decorated with the most staggering murals of Ganesh and Shiva and Vishnu and other gods whose names he must have told me but I have since forgotten, and who comforted me the day I was diagnosed with cervical cancer by making me watch In the Heat of the Night, which did indeed help keep my spirits up until I received a call from the hospital two days later informing me that they had mixed up their smear tests and I wasn't going to die after all – a relief which had the paradoxical effect of somehow sundering me from the Canadian and propelling me into a, no doubt, easily explicable series of one-night stands over the next ten days, as England rolled past their opponents in the European Championships on a growing wave of belief that this time, finally, they were going to prevail, and I found myself considering the question of promiscuity and wondering about the motives of the promiscuous, maybe 50 per cent of whom are Don Juans, mere number-crunchers, and maybe two-thirds of whom are sex-addicts and maybe nine-tenths of whom are frightened of commitment, and for maybe four-fifths of whom promiscuity is an index of their unhappiness, and wondering what proportion simply liked a lot of people, could simply be marked down as slow learners, could be thought of as just needing lots of lovers, lots of lessons, before they understood about their own capacity to absorb other people, such as the apple-picker from Somerset whom I attempted to console after Gazza had stretched to make that Sistine Chapel contact with the ball in front of the gaping German goal (which he would never, never do, freeze-framed forever in memory a millimetre from redemption) and who had been so thoroughly consoled he broke, that very night, into his estranged father's house in Greenwich where we lived an idyllic life for three weeks before the police, called by a neighbour, arrested us, sending me on my way that afternoon with no charge against my name but with a note from the apple-picker in my hand which read, ‘Good luck with everything and, well, just don't put people off by making too great a display of yourself and by overdoing things’ which, although with hindsight I can see that he was on to something, royally pissed me off at the time: so much so that it was rather self-consciously in defiance of this advice that I went out and overdid things a bit, thinking it's not me that's doing this, it's the movies as I learned about the absolutely crucial importance of beryllium to the Russian economy, and what it was that banks did exactly in the bed of a precious metals dealer, and just how hard it was to be an amateur boxer in London if you were from Paris, and that blue Y-fronts are acceptable underwear among Brazilians, and that being an officer in the British Army does not preclude a high intelligence, and even softness, and that ‘good in bed’ is pretty much a meaningless and vicious term imposed upon life by a public discourse that revels in encouraging neurosis, and that the anxiety I felt in the company of a dimple-chinned Sinn Fein man (whose smoke-and-mirrors face seemed to incarnate all the shape-shifting of his political life) with whom I conducted a stop-start affair at this time was different from the kind of nervousness I had felt around Jim, because Jim's violence was social and unconcealed whereas the Sinn Fein man's was something altogether more unreadable, so that I felt, when I was with him, like William Hurt faced with the opaque obelisk of Lee Marvin in Gorky Park, to the extent that even though I idolised him, I would come over with a fit of the vapours like Michelle Pfeiffer's Madame de Tourvel in Dangerous Liaisons whenever he undressed me, causing the affair to fizzle out, and I thought, about that time, how incorrect it was that the promiscuous should be thought of as jaded where they were really innocent, that they were not so much fools slow to understand the fact that human variety is far from infinite, that the exploration should be in oneself rather than of others, but a different kind of fool, happy in the illusion that human variety was infinite – having said all of which, and despite the fact that I was hardly Catherine M. (and doubtless sixteen-year-old readers will at this point be asking themselves, ‘Where's this promiscuous patch she keeps talking about?’), I must have been feeling a slight lesion of identity, a slight blurring of definition, a slightly stretched kind of feeling, because when a man with curly hair and a long nose asked me who I was one night in a bar, I surprised myself by saying, and almost meaning, ‘Oh, just some girl.’