womenâs magazines tell you that going out to a quiet, intimate dinner is an âopportunity to talk to your partnerâ. The last thing we wanted to do that night was talk to one another.
We parked high above the Rocks on Millerâs Point, under the plane trees and beside the historic sandstone terraces. Then we walked down the steep hill and under the stone archway beside the steep bank cut out of rock. Instinctively, we walked slightly apart, as if we did not quite know one another.
I wanted to have a cocktail in the coldly modern and impersonal harbourside Hilton, in the bland and soulless mezzanine bar full of cane chairs. There was a moment on this impersonal balcony when I thought our stratagem wouldnât work. I looked out over the black-and-white floor tiles and the long vases filled with bird of paradise stems. Frank seemed stilted, a little awkward, a little withdrawn. I felt separate from him. I didnât want to know his worries. To have solicited his confidences at that point would have been fatal. Empathy is fatal to sex. That kind of sex. Hotel sex.
Next we strolled down to a rowdy wine bar, almost next door to our destination. The bar was a better class of pick-up joint. There was beer on the floor; it was noisy. Here I had a moment of restlessness, an impulse to take control, to say âItâs noisy here, letâs go to the hotel,â but I resisted. I wanted to prolong the moment, to be passive, and floating, free of time. Free of my relentless schedule. It had to be a timeless moment. This is what being young is about, every moment is like every other moment, which is why sex is so good when youâre young. Itâs not true to say that it gets better as you get older. For childless narcissists, maybe, for everyone else it gets tired, gets fitted in . When youâre nineteen it expands to fill the time available; it swarms over everything, a haze over every page of every book, a certain kind of humid light in your dreams, a sense of possibility. Now, in our assignation, Frank and I had to make our sense of possibility, to artificially generate that haze.
In the bar I gazed out the window, beyond any of the bodies there. Through the red bubble-glass in the window I could see the quay, the red, bubbling water.
At last he took my elbow in a firm grip and looked in the direction of the door. It was a look that in another context might have been risible but it was right for this moment. I left my half-drunk glass of red wine â lipstick-rimmed, inconsequential, a token â behind on the table, a glass-topped table with puddles of beer slops and flecks of dried cappuccino froth. I liked the word, froth . Froth was a word for that moment. A carnal word. It suggested a prick off the leash. His. A frivolous, unaccountable cunt. Mine.
On another night I might have taken an interest in the waiter behind the bar â lean and dark, in an expensive white shirt and wearing that cool look of hostile distraction that young men assume behind bar counters â but not that night, that night I was looking nowhere special, looking only within my own body heat; an unfocused, erotic blindness.
We went up a narrow staircase painted grey and yellow to a small, discreet reception desk and then into the room. It was an old room with a high ceiling in panels of ornately moulded tin. I stood beneath the whirring ceiling-fan and the light breeze caught at my hair. The walls, and almost everything else in the room, were in shades of smoky pink, an insinuating pink, the colour of tumescence, except for the brass bed, in black and gold. There was an old iron fire-grate surrounded by mosaic tiles and on the mantel two vases stuffed with masses of fake smoky pink-and-white orchids, and between them a Picasso print of a barefoot girl, her back turned, stroking some weird headless animal, suggestive of a greyish-black dog, her hand resting on its phallic neck. A large cedar mirror opposite the
We parked high above the Rocks on Millerâs Point, under the plane trees and beside the historic sandstone terraces. Then we walked down the steep hill and under the stone archway beside the steep bank cut out of rock. Instinctively, we walked slightly apart, as if we did not quite know one another.
I wanted to have a cocktail in the coldly modern and impersonal harbourside Hilton, in the bland and soulless mezzanine bar full of cane chairs. There was a moment on this impersonal balcony when I thought our stratagem wouldnât work. I looked out over the black-and-white floor tiles and the long vases filled with bird of paradise stems. Frank seemed stilted, a little awkward, a little withdrawn. I felt separate from him. I didnât want to know his worries. To have solicited his confidences at that point would have been fatal. Empathy is fatal to sex. That kind of sex. Hotel sex.
Next we strolled down to a rowdy wine bar, almost next door to our destination. The bar was a better class of pick-up joint. There was beer on the floor; it was noisy. Here I had a moment of restlessness, an impulse to take control, to say âItâs noisy here, letâs go to the hotel,â but I resisted. I wanted to prolong the moment, to be passive, and floating, free of time. Free of my relentless schedule. It had to be a timeless moment. This is what being young is about, every moment is like every other moment, which is why sex is so good when youâre young. Itâs not true to say that it gets better as you get older. For childless narcissists, maybe, for everyone else it gets tired, gets fitted in . When youâre nineteen it expands to fill the time available; it swarms over everything, a haze over every page of every book, a certain kind of humid light in your dreams, a sense of possibility. Now, in our assignation, Frank and I had to make our sense of possibility, to artificially generate that haze.
In the bar I gazed out the window, beyond any of the bodies there. Through the red bubble-glass in the window I could see the quay, the red, bubbling water.
At last he took my elbow in a firm grip and looked in the direction of the door. It was a look that in another context might have been risible but it was right for this moment. I left my half-drunk glass of red wine â lipstick-rimmed, inconsequential, a token â behind on the table, a glass-topped table with puddles of beer slops and flecks of dried cappuccino froth. I liked the word, froth . Froth was a word for that moment. A carnal word. It suggested a prick off the leash. His. A frivolous, unaccountable cunt. Mine.
On another night I might have taken an interest in the waiter behind the bar â lean and dark, in an expensive white shirt and wearing that cool look of hostile distraction that young men assume behind bar counters â but not that night, that night I was looking nowhere special, looking only within my own body heat; an unfocused, erotic blindness.
We went up a narrow staircase painted grey and yellow to a small, discreet reception desk and then into the room. It was an old room with a high ceiling in panels of ornately moulded tin. I stood beneath the whirring ceiling-fan and the light breeze caught at my hair. The walls, and almost everything else in the room, were in shades of smoky pink, an insinuating pink, the colour of tumescence, except for the brass bed, in black and gold. There was an old iron fire-grate surrounded by mosaic tiles and on the mantel two vases stuffed with masses of fake smoky pink-and-white orchids, and between them a Picasso print of a barefoot girl, her back turned, stroking some weird headless animal, suggestive of a greyish-black dog, her hand resting on its phallic neck. A large cedar mirror opposite the
Similar Books
