Читать книгу The Supreme Orchestra - David Turgeon - Страница 7

At that very moment, a woman emerged from that very airport. Back from a symposium in the Mediterranean, she greeted the brown snow under the taxis’ tailpipes with a scowl. The sky was hesitating between shades of grey; a cold wet wind forced its way into the gaps of her hastily fastened coat. She hailed a car. The driver helped stow two heavy bags in the trunk, then they merged onto the spaghetti-tangle of highway where the usual thousands of cars collectively idled.

It would be hard to say how old this woman was. Without her cap, the chalky hair crowning a pinkish face that wrinkled slightly in the corners provided less an answer than a new set of hypotheses. There was nothing particularly feminine about her appearance: her no-nonsense mouth, strong cheekbones, and cropped hair could all have belonged to a man. We might flesh out this portrait by mentioning her voice, by turns shrill and gruff; her movements, frequently brusque; or her stature, short. All we can say for sure was that her first name was Simone. Her surname is another story for another time. The taxi, cleaving for better or for worse to the congested highways, covered several kilometres of exurban sprawl before reaching a winding road that bisected fields as if cut out by a child’s scissors. It continued to a hamlet of no more than half a dozen homes. Simone bade the driver stop at a white specimen with pretty green trim and dormer windows.

The driveway was unshovelled but a light was on inside. When Simone finally set her two heavy suitcases down in the hall, snow covered her pants up to the knee. A radio warbled in the living room. The smell of tobacco floated in the air.

‘Faya?’ Simone ventured.

No answer. Already Simone had taken off her boots, hung up her coat, shaken out her pants, and carried her suitcase to her room. She badly wanted a hot bath.

‘I’m home,’ she said again, still eliciting no response.

Simone’s bed was unmade. An overflowing ashtray shared the nightstand with a pile of open magazines and splayed sociology books. Articles of clothing were strewn in the vicinity of a dirtyclothes hamper. The heater spared no expense. An open closet door revealed a standing mirror in which Simone caught sight of her exhausted face.

She undressed, put on a robe whose sleeves she saw peeking out from under the bed, and finally located two slippers before heading back down to the main floor where she tried once again to make herself heard by Faya, who clearly hadn’t gone outside since Simone had left town. She found her in the bathtub.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Faya.

‘I need a bath,’ Simone stated. ‘Do you think you could?’

‘Get out? In this cold? No way.’

‘The heat’s on full-blast,’ Simone observed. ‘I asked you not to touch the thermostat. And you’re going to shrivel up like a raisin.’

‘Like a raisin! Shrivelled up like a raisin!’ Faya sang, vaguely in tune with the melody on the radio still crackling in the distance.

‘We’ll make a fire,’ Simone offered.

‘Five minutes!’ Faya pleaded. ‘Five measly minutes. Please!’

‘Okay, I’ll come back in five,’ Simone conceded.

‘And leave me the robe,’ Faya stipulated.

Simone headed to the living room for a wait certain to exceed five minutes. Night fell. There was wood to be fetched from outside. A pack of cigarettes, not Simone’s, but she helped herself. It wasn’t that Faya’s presence irked her. And yet … And yet …

Simone fell for her models more often than she cared to admit. Men and women both passed through her studio door, where her discretion built a trust she promised herself never to betray. Step by step she proceeded, from preliminary sketches to studies of faces, hands, and feet; then, as her subjects laid themselves barer and barer, she set their bodies down in oil pastel on yellow paper while her dulcet mezzo and easy charm set them at ease.

After more than fair warning, Simone invited her models to take part in scenes of a more intimate nature and immodest, concupiscent bent. At times like these, she loved the way the bodies got away from her, forgetful of the artist’s presence, in tête-à-tête or single-handed pleasures. Simone was fond of difficult things; all this lubricious movement she undertook to fix on paper at breakneck speed, with patiently observed sketches for a scaffold.

Not until later, labouring over a final drawing, did Simone conceive for her models an amorous affection that plunged her into that sweetest of dilemmas. This feeling, when it came at all, did so only days later after she had studied her drawings at length to select the best, remembering only then the physical presence of the people who inspired her, and dropping into a curious carnal reverie that, more often than not, remained private. It didn’t have that much to do with the success or failure of the drawings – not always anyway. She felt desire for women and for men without distinction, and sometimes also for the couples they formed rather than individual members thereof.

And sometimes, never quite fortuitously, this desire gave rise to an actual love affair, though rarely one that lasted more than a day or two. Sometimes she had to reluctantly put an end to it: no matter how lovely they were, Simone didn’t like her affairs to drag on. And then there was Faya.

Faya. Simone couldn’t say whether what she felt was love, but it was intense, vexatious, and difficult to extirpate, compounded by the fact that the object of this feeling seemed in no rush to end her tenancy in this home she had moved into over a month ago and now occupied as if it were ever thus and Simone were the interloper.

‘Faya, you have to go,’ Simone said, too quietly for Faya to hear.

Night kept on falling. Faya was running the hot water again and Simone was readying to storm the tub when the phone rang, as telephones do.

‘It’s Alban,’ announced Alban Wouters. ‘I heard you’d be back tonight. I sold another drawing three days ago. No, a new client, never seen him before. Otherwise the gallery’s strangely quiet these days. What about you?’ Simone told Alban about the unsurprising symposium, some agreeable new acquaintances. And the sea, one never tired of the sea. ‘I wonder what I’m doing back here, in the cold,’ she said, half-joking. ‘Spring is just around the corner,’ the gallery owner informed her. ‘And how’s Faya?’ The conversation stumbled on and then Faya appeared in the living room like a genie from a bottle, her skin gleaming, a trail of steam in her wake.

‘I have to go,’ Simone notified Alban, before returning the black handset to its cradle.

‘You promised me a fire,’ Faya said.

‘Fire, fire,’ Simone said. ‘Go ahead and make it yourself if you’re in such a rush.’

‘No, no,’ said Faya, throwing on the bearskin that bedecked the couch. ‘I’ll wait for you.’