Infidelities by Kirsty Gunn Page A

sitting in the most vulgar way possible, with my legs wide open so that everyone could see right up my skirt), began all those years ago when Clare was a young woman at the LSE and studying semiotics with a woman who I will call X, who is a leader in her field, the author of seminal texts about meaning and perception, language and the body, ‘high, high theory’ as Clare put it. ‘These were impenetrable books,’ she said, ‘that I desperately wanted to read and understand because I fancied her rotten.’ She stopped for a second, then laughed out loud. ‘For me,’ she said, ‘the books, the reading … It was all about sex and love and feelings and wanting her to fancy me and not the world of words, of ideas, at all!’ She laughed again, showing her teeth. ‘I just wanted to kiss her! Nothing to do with books! And I felt like a fraud because I was supposed to be understanding all this theory and learning from it. Signs and the Signified. I was supposed to be her student and she my tutor – and I felt like a charlatan, an impostor, because really it wasn’t about what she was teaching me. It was about bodies and sex.’
    ‘Wow,’ I said. She’d given such a clear definition of things.
Writing and the Body
– that was a book I’d read and found very influential at university, myself, by Gabriel Josipovici, and it covered the same kind of ground. ‘I see exactly why you’re telling me this off the back of what we said about
Melancholia
,’ I said. I think I said that then. Because we were having, Clare and I, that particular deliciousfeeling you sometimes get when talking with someone, about the conversation actually being about several things at once – the primary subject having been about that film, and how it had caused both of us to express quite opposing views, and then this other very different, narratively oriented conversation that had come out of that, all about bodies versus language and what had happened to Clare with a glamorous older woman when she was a student. And what had happened? I was interested, you see, in finding out more on that subject of whether or not the feelings that coursed through any response to anything, whether a film by Lars Von Trier or the story Clare was presenting now, might have value and be of interest.
    I was sitting there, as my husband told me later, with my legs wide open and thinking about that – while all the time holding fast to all my ideals about the real artist being someone with a unifying vision, the kind of person, in other words, who wouldn’t need to rely on the famous bits from
Tristan and Isolde
– the bits that everybody loves anyhow – to make the audience believe that what had been created was meaningful and somehow righteous, in the aesthetic sense, well made and fit for purpose, beautiful that way.
    And there was Clare, just the opposite, who’d told me on a previous occasion that – and she was adamant that she was not being post-modern at all – she always cried in the bit of the film of
Mary Poppins
when the old crippled woman comes out into the twilight and Mary Poppins sings ‘Feed the Birds’ to her. So yes. We were different, sheand I. We were different, all right, and I was intrigued, I was coming to realise, over the course of our discussion, by the rigidity of my own views that seemed so dull, somehow, me sitting there in my black tights and my high heeled black shoes, my short black skirt – what a trip! – next to this free and open-minded intellectual with her pink gums and white teeth and a story to tell …That had a river in it, she went on, and a bridge, and the cold air of midwinter on her exposed skin, on her throat and face and, when her shirt was unbuttoned, on her breasts, a story braced with coldness, December in London, a chill wind coming off the Thames, the ‘freezing’ and ‘exciting’ qualities of the day.
    For there she was in the story, too, wild and free. Fancying the pants off this