La Table à Manger. À la recherche du temps perdu
What is time, anyway?’ asked Augustine. The past is gone, the future’s not yet here and the present is a bullet whizzing past your head. A loud crack, then nothing else. Bewildered, he poured a cup of tea. À la recherche du temps perdu. Here and now, it seems, occupy no space. No sooner had he said it than it wasn’t what he’d said it was. A fugitive moment.
‘… and the figurehead with golden tits
Arching our way, it never anchors; it’s
No sooner present than it turns to past …’
So how to catch time in the act? All he had was this photograph he’d been staring at all morning. But was it even her? It was unbridled, beautiful, carnal, so he hoped it was; but with only shadows to go on, he couldn’t be sure. Moments like that had actually happened, he knew, he remembered. But what if she didn’t? What if she remembered something else or nothing at all? It’d be her inchoate myth against his, your Honour.
‘… Right to the last
We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong.’
Still, if he pushed his thumb through the membrane of time, made a little hole, stuck the picture in it; wouldn’t that become history? Couldn’t truth be made by planting evidence? And people passing by would see how she gazed down at him, how lovely it must have been. And he’d smile and say yes; yes it was.
‘Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.’
When love dies it leaves stains on the floorboards. It wasn’t what he expected. As he ghosted round the old rooms, now largely empty, it was the distances between things that fascinated his nerves; the visceral understanding of a body in space. How many two-step bounds up the stairs, the rattle and tug of a handle, how a door responds to a hip, not a hand. The few things that had changed, imposters, elbowing aside the original impulse they didn’t understand. ‘Not like that,’ he wanted to say, touching some small thing, ‘Like this.’ And what lingered in unnoticed corners, the sudden blaze of a scribbled note (forgotten, capitalized, with lower-case a’s) was the innocence of untroubled hope, before doubt set in. A joyous shot at how things ought to be. The quantum difference, perhaps, between camera-shake and a life out-of-focus. Somewhere before the slow road to the end, we choose our pain. What needn’t happen, does.
And he remembered her back when she sat at the end of the bed, the tender weight of her breast where it met her body, vulnerable now in the impartial morning light, as if mulling its own culpability in the night’s misdemeanors. They tiptoed around the borrowed rooms, found cold clothes, the stuff familiar people do. But they had been friends before, though falling, tighter and tighter, through a narrowing tunnel towards this inexorable collar of light. And now, eight hours later, they were only friends again, maybe less. Should he brush his teeth beside her? If she peed with him there, was that the start of something, the banishing of regret? Later, on the train, he took her picture and she smiled, but not yesterday’s smile, not last night’s from before the fall. They would never see that again. And much later he remembered that in each person there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love; all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures.
In the dream he came into the room and she was there, sitting on the counter, smiling, quietly holding court; so he did the right thing, stayed where he was, tried to fashion an attitude of purpose from the thick air. But as he hesitated, she called his name, in a way that seemed to say ‘well, here we are’. So he went to her through the crowd, quicker than he’d imagined; and when he got there she kissed him gently, as if the years had not intervened, held his careful embrace. And then they were alone, pocketed in the cove of each other’s presence, and she was smiling and conspiratorial and he dodged her eyes and she kissed him again. The forgotten dialect of the heart. And here was a supernova of relief, spreading, purgative, brighter than the sun, that seared and vaporized each plaintive knot of scar tissue as it moved. As if, in some way, love had returned, not as the imposter Mephistopheles, making promises he cannot keep, but as truth, unhooded. That in the poise and generosity of her coup de grâce, nothing in Love became her like the leaving it.
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