Lust. Geoff Ryman

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СКАЧАТЬ bow tie, blue with mirrors and a blue eye where the knot should be. He didn’t move, transfixed.

      ‘Hello,’ Michel said to him.

      The old man’s face quavered like a flower in a breeze. Someone else out of balance. ‘It’s a miracle,’ the man insisted, as if someone had contradicted him.

      Michael felt careless. ‘It is,’ he agreed.

      ‘It really is him,’ the old man said, in the hushed voice of someone visiting Chartres.

      ‘They’re both Romanian,’ said Michael. ‘Family resemblance.’ He realized he knew the old man from somewhere. Some old actor; some old impresario.

      Very suddenly the old man wilted. He seemed to sink from the knees, and Michael had to catch him. There were further steps, a spiral staircase up to another floor. The old man shifted awkwardly like a collapsing ironing board. Michael lowered him down to sit on the steps. The old man took out an embroidered handkerchief.

      ‘Do you want some water?’ Michael asked.

      ‘Please,’ said the old man.

      The turbaned bartender already had a glass of water ready. ‘Is your friend OK?’ he asked, American, concerned.

      ‘I don’t know. I think so,’ said Michael.

      The old man was sweaty, his elegance outraged. He mopped his brow. Elegance was what he had left.

      He took the water and sipped it, and sighed. ‘You keep thinking, you can just turn a corner, and you’ll find us all there, like we were.’ His rumpled old eyes suddenly went clear as if made out of glass. ‘Beautiful and at the height of our powers. Like all of you now. Tuh. It seems more real to me than this.’ He held up his hands. They were blue and crisp in patches and looked like melted candles. Eighty? Michael thought. Ninety?

      The old eyes strayed back to Johnny. Johnny was standing tall, and still and distant, forgetful of himself. He was staring at the fig tree behind the glass wall.

      ‘Did you know him?’ Michael asked. ‘I mean, the real one?’

      The old man shook his head, without moving his eyes. ‘Oh no. No. But I wanted to. People of my generation, you know we had never seen anything like it. For only a very few years, he was … It. A sensation. People don’t remember that now.’

      He closed his eyes and shuddered. ‘The past is a chasm it’s as well not to look down,’ he said.

      Michael sat next to him on the steps. ‘How old were you then?’

      The old man’s eyes looked as if they ached. ‘I was twenty-two when I saw the first of his films. Of course in those days you thought you were the only one in the world, and so you dreamed. You know what I mean, I don’t have to spell it out. You lived in dreams, because you knew that you were a good person, or good enough, but you wanted things that everyone else said were evil. It was difficult. You ended up loving dreams.’

      He shivered, gathering himself up. ‘You’ve been very kind,’ he said, and offered a hand. ‘I’m so sorry to have a been a nuisance. I used not to be. But age hits you, you know.’

      ‘Perhaps you’d like to meet him. His name is Johnny.’

      A pause for about a beat. ‘It won’t embarrass him?’

      ‘I think you’ll find he is beyond embarrassment.’

      Michael helped him stand up. The old man rose with a sudden fluidity that hinted at what he had been when young. ‘The terrible thing,’ he said, casually, as if making a general observation, ‘is that we feel more as we get older. Not less. The heart really ought to diminish along with everything else. Don’t you think?’

      His eyes were ice-blue and not at all weak. At one time those eyes would have presided, gone flinty with the hard bargaining and constant politicking of putting on a show. He would have been cagey, cunning, enthusiastic, wise and probably indelibly handsome in an etiolated London theatrical way.

      Without meaning to, Michael sketched with his own hands and eyes how the old man would have moved. In the joints of his hips, he embodied the way the old man moved now. Michael felt the bargain he had made with ageing, with the death of colleagues, the death of his world. Michael had seen that bargain collapse, because of him, because of the miracle.

      Michael was moved by pity. He suddenly felt that something might be in his power. I know I can make them do what I want. Can I make them do it when I’m not there? With someone else? He stopped the old man and asked, in a low voice, ‘Do you know this place?’

      ‘Oh. Zoltan? He exhibits me as a piece of camp history, but it is good to receive invitations.’

      ‘I mean, do you know if there’s a bedroom. You can go there.’

      The old face went limp, flesh as confused and blank as his understanding.

      ‘I mean,’ said Michael, ‘you and he could go there.’

      ‘What an extraordinary thing.’

      Michael felt a full heart. Full of victory perhaps in part and also guilt for hurting Phil, but full of what … abundance, too. These episodes, wherever they came from, were an abundance, a superabundance that ached to be shared.

      I create them, Michael thought. I make them. He told Johnny what he wanted him to do.

      Tarzan turned and climbed the steps, perhaps without even knowing why. Michael hoisted the old man around and helped him up the steps. Outside the bedroom door, the old man turned still in disbelief, and Michael had to give him a gentle shove. Then Michael stood guard. He sat on the top step, looking over a party at which he did not belong. He wished that he smoked. At least smoking would have occupied his hands.

      Someone dragged open the big glass doors to clear the air, and the party moved out into the sheltered garden. Suddenly you could hear air move in trees.

      He gave them twenty minutes.

      Then the old man blurted out of the bedroom doorway like a coltish teenager. His glass tie was askew; his smile was wet and broad. It was a grin. He looked foxed, as if a shaft of God-light had blazed its way back into his life.

      Michael had time to feel happy for him.

      Then he saw Tarzan’s face. Tarzan was innocent no longer.

      His face had curdled with disgust and outrage. His look said to Michael: I want to kill you.

      He gave one animal growl and then hurled himself over the banister of the landing. People screamed. Tarzan landed catlike on his four padded feet. Then he jumped up onto the bar, bounded over the heads of the people.

      Don’t hurt anyone! Michael commanded.

      Tarzan jumped up into the fig tree, and gave one long backward yodel, the Tarzan cry. He scampered up the branches. The main trunk bent under his weight, then sprang back and he leapt up and over the brick wall. It was as if he were suspended for just one moment, against the stars.

      Then he sank from view. Everyone in the room applauded.

      Michael СКАЧАТЬ