Exposure Page 12

  'God, you two have been in your own little world, haven't you?' she said. 'You're missed, you know. I'm not being all preachy, but friends are important.'

  'Yes, I know,' Luke said. He felt close to tears. What a wonderful, peaceful, simple thing friendship was. He couldn't believe how much he had undervalued it these past weeks.

  'You are OK, aren't you, babe?' Jessica asked him. 'You look all sad and tired. Do I need to worry?'

  'Oh, God, I'm fine. I'm just—I'm just feeling so much, these days. You know what I mean?'

  'I think so,' she told him. This was so unlike him that she wondered if Arianne had got him doing too much coke. She considered Luke to be incredibly restrained and English, really—like his mother. She couldn't account for this outburst. 'Babe, you'd always call me if you needed anything, wouldn't you?'

  He studied her gentle, intelligent, forgiving face. 'You're so fantastic, Jess,' he said.

  When they said goodbye, he and Jessica hugged each other for a long time. She whispered, 'That's a very highly strung girl you're involved with.'

  'Yes, I know,' he said. 'It's a bit difficult sometimes. But love's supposed to be sort of demanding, isn't it? And I mean just look at her.'

  She didn't look at Arianne but smiled at him and although he smiled back, she couldn't help but be struck by the gloomy incomprehension in his eyes. He seemed mystified by this girl. 'Oh, Luke, do be careful. You must remember to look after yourself. You're no good to her if you don't.'

  'No, you're absolutely right. And I am,' he assured her.

  Arianne was silent on the way home. She had accused him of ignoring her at dinner. She had hissed at him in the hallway. The way her tiny ponytail bounced as she trotted down Ludo's stairs ahead of him was the most frightening thing Luke had ever seen. And now that they sat in the back seat of a mini-cab, he watched the streedights running over her closed eyes and her beautiful, passive face in increasing panic. When they got back she went straight to the bathroom and locked the door.

  This was the first time she had shown a desire for privacy. Luke sat in the kitchen, listening resentfully to the water pouring over her body. He was astonished by how jealous it made him feel. He actually considered turning on the cold tap to see if the water would blast out hot on her, making her jump out, breaking up the lovers' tryst. Then he thought he must be going mad and he laughed and massaged his temples and poured himself a large gin and tonic. Was he jealous of water?

  But he felt uneasy until he heard the shower stop and the door open. She came into the kitchen, naked, a white towel wrapped round her hair. The heat came off her skin and she smelt of shampoo and body cream. She paused by the fruit bowl and rolled a grape between her fingers.

  'Arianne?' he said.

  She rolled the grape down her arm and flicked it from her elbow into the palm of her hand again. Her actions were all this precise. What on earth were her thoughts like? She was supple, glowing from the shower.

  'Look, I'm really sorry,' he said—though he was not at all sure what he had done wrong. Surely she didn't think he was interested in Jessica.

  'I don't know your friends, Luke.'

  'You know Ludo and ... well, you know Jess.'

  'It's not being a gentleman to leave a woman alone in that way. It's not manly.'

  He couldn't understand what she meant. She had been sitting between his friends James and Joe, who were both great fun and Joe had plainly thought she was stunning, which always pleased her. But he had not been 'manly' in some way. He took her word for it and was appalled. 'I'm so sorry,' he said. 'I won't let it happen again.'

  She put the grape into her mouth. 'OK.'

  'I really am, Arianne. I never want to upset you.'

  'It's OK. Stop apologizing. I'm a bitch. Forget it all.'

  'But I've hurt you.'

  'No, you haven't. I'm just—I'm just crazy.' She covered her face with both hands. 'Ugh—just don't listen to anything I say! I'm horrible and you're lovely. I'm an evil bitch and you're a good, honest man. And now we're going to go to bed and I'll do anything you want, OK? Anything. I don't even care if it hurts. In fact, I want it to hurt.'

  He stood up, a little uncertainly, and held her in his arms. He kissed her for a moment, and the kiss contained the full, singing force of a last-minute reprieve, a note delivered to the executioner. Then she swivelled round and leant over the kitchen table, turned her head back and smiled broadly at him as her hands gripped the aluminium legs.

  It would have been hard to say at that stage which was the expression and which the reality of his love—sex or emotion. His mind and body were inextricable. Emotion characterized sex and sex reiterated emotion. There was no sense of release from either. Afterwards he lay beside her, thinking and feeling, feeling and thinking in the tangled sheets.

  It seemed natural to him to assume responsibility for all Arianne's practical concerns. He felt it was the least—while fearing it was the most—that he could do. He guaranteed a loan for her from her bank, which had been sceptical about the financial reliability of hopeful young actresses. 'You're my guardian angel,' she said, 'aren't you, baby?' and Luke knew he had never felt more pride.

  He made sure the local deli delivered all her favourite food: plain yoghurt and bran sticks, double chocolate fudge ice-cream and vodka; apples—green, not red ever, he had made this fatal error once—and butter and honey and crumpets. It was all wildly inconsistent.

  'I think it balances me,' she explained. 'Maybe not. Anyway, who cares?'

  He adored watching her eat—anything, really, but particularly crumpets. She spontaneously toasted them in the middle of the night after a bubble bath. She sat on the window-seat in her knickers. Her mouth shone with butter and she let him lick the drips of warm, buttery honey off her bare legs, giggling at him. 'Oh, Luke—it tickles!'

  'Sorry, darling. Should I stop?'

  'No, no. You can carry on—"darling",' she teased, with the rest of the crumpet stuffed into her mouth.

  He paid for cabs to take her to her drama class and to bring her back home again. They were booked in advance. She did not walk anywhere if she could help it. The swelling had gone down on her foot, but she still limped heavily. She refused to see a doctor, saying she was sure it was healing perfectly normally. Did he think there was something wrong with her, she wanted to know, that she was somehow too incompetent to get better without some man in a white coat? It was sexism!

  'Look, you don't have to carry me if you don't want to—if that's what this is really about,' she said. 'But you'll just have to allow extra time when we go out or whatever, because you know I can't do anything quickly, Luke. Not with the pain.'

  He felt terrible. She always wondered what people's words were 'really about'. She had no faith in the literal. She expected lies and subtext.

  'Hey, don't be silly, darling. I'm just worried about you, that's all. I love carrying you up the stairs. It's romantic.'

  She smiled at him—a sad, unconvinced smile.

  He castigated himself. What had he been thinking? Again he had let her down with his mundane nagging about doctors. He deserved the flash of fear, the shock of anxiety her words 'allow extra time' had sent through him.

  What 'extra time'? he thought. Already he was spending it all on her. He had no time to work, less time than ever to see his friends. She demanded everything of him. And when she looked away sadly, beyond what he was already doing, he followed her gaze to a wasteland of his own inadequacy. He must not give her reason to doubt he could cope, not for one second.

  In this way he spent all his energy.

  Then, one evening a few weeks later, he came home to find Dan sitting on his suede sofa. 'All right? Howzit going?' Dan said. 'You must be Luke, I'm guessing.' He raised his hand like a warrior, coming in peace.

  Implausibly, Dan and Arianne were drinking tea together. She had put biscuits on a plate—as if he were a visiting relative. His huge fingers pincered a chocolate Florentine. 'Dan's just dropped by,' Arian
ne explained. 'I saw him on the way out of drama class. He was passing—on his way to see someone. Weren't you, babe?'

  Dan nodded and took a nibble of the biscuit.

  'Right. I see,' Luke said, staring at her.

  'So, have you had a good day, dear?' she asked him, in her nasal, American accent. She couldn't help satirizing their domesticity in front of other people. Must she do it in front of Dan, though? he thought.

  Actually, he could not have begun to tell her what kind of a day he'd had. His desk now held his own bodyweight in unread paperwork. Paper was in his dreams—it pursued him down alleyways; thousands of pieces of paper snowstorming his imagination. He was on the run from it as soon as he woke, and his invaluable sportsman's calm was now monopolized by the need to conceal this from his colleagues. But faced with the unintelligible horror of finding Dan in his flat, he found the paper had all blown away. 'I had a pretty good day, thanks,' he said. 'How was yours?'

  'Oh, Jon says I need to rethink my Shakespeare piece. My Miranda. My best fucking piece. I'm really disappointed in him as a teacher this term.' She smiled at him, half expectantly. Was he meant to reply?

  'Right,' he said. 'I'm sorry about that.'

  She picked up her teacup and drained it. Then she looked into her pack of cigarettes and found it was empty. She stuck out her bottom lip, crushing the packet. 'All gone. No fair,' she said, then smiled cleanly at both of them. One, then the other. 'So, Dan wants us to go out for supper.'

  Luke put down his keys and looked at her, unable to think what to say.

  Dan cleared his throat. 'Actually, I kind of meant I want you to come out for dinner alone, Arianne. No offence, man,' he said.

  Dan looked at him, and then Arianne looked at him. Luke found her expression unreadable.

  'Oh,' she said. 'Oh, right.'

  Luke felt intense shock—he felt sweat break out, hairs stand on end and he returned her gaze like a lost, sweating zoo animal, behind glass.

  'Yeah I thought we could go to Lanton's, babe,' Dan was saying. 'You know, with the cushions and all the incense and shit. You love that fucking place.'

  She clapped her hands like a litde girl. 'Oh, yes, I do. I love Lanton's! They do the yummiest crème brûlée, Luke. Not too sweet, not too creamy. It comes all golden with sugar and you press your spoon on the top and it goes... crack! Just perfect.' She sighed, still turned towards Luke. Again her face gave away no emotion. In fact, had he ever seen such a blank face before? Surely this was a diagram of a face.

  'Look, you're cool about this, aren't you, man?' Dan said. 'I mean, I haven't seen Arianne for, like, a month now. It's been pretty hard. You know what I'm saying?'

  He stood up and walked round the room, his leather trousers creaking with the strain of accommodating his thighs.

  'And I know she's been missing me too. Of course she has. You don't mind me saying that,' Dan assured him. 'It's, like, you just don't have a relationship with real feelings and it just ends,' he punched his right fist into the palm of his left hand with a horrible thwack, 'in one day.'

  Arianne sat down and crossed her legs. She had found more cigarettes in her pocket and she Ut one. They watched her blow out the smoke.

  'You know what I'm saying, man,' Dan repeated. 'Right?'

  'Yeah, I know what you're saying,' Luke said. His voice sounded weak.

  'It's basically, like, I think maybe everything happened in a hurry here. OK? I mean, you have this accident, right? You feel,' he made quotation marks in the air with his fingers, like bunny ears on either side of his head, '"bonded" deeply ... But then, like, suddenly she's here living with you? Ask yourself if it really makes sense. I just want a little time to talk to her, OK?'

  Arianne broke a biscuit in half, then left it untouched. It was impossible not to be aware of her blinking, breathing, observing. And it was impossible to misinterpret Dan. Luke gazed at Arianne who gazed back at him. Again: the diagram, the printout of unintelligible numbers in place of the human expression.

  'Why?' he said stupidly. 'What do you want to say to her?'

  'I think we understand each other,' Dan said.

  Some sign of emotion? Any reaction to this? Luke stared, imploring her from behind his paralysed face. She stubbed out her cigarette neatly and squeaked her finger on a dirty spot on her shoe.

  'So Arianne and me are going out for dinner, then,' Dan said.

  It occurred to Luke that he was repeatedly asserting this so as to provoke either himself or Arianne to contradict him. Barely perceptibly, he pushed back his shoulders.

  'OK? Because I just want to take her out to a nice restaurant for a nice dinner so we can talk, which we haven't been free to do with this whole situation.' He drew out his hand across the room, implicating the furniture, the walls. He looked morally sickened.

  And Luke had nothing to say to him. He had never felt more ashamed and frightened. He knew he would not be able to defend himself physically against this huge, steroid-boosted man—and any comment he might make would be seen as provocation. He would be knocked out in front of Arianne—like Andy Jones. He would be humiliated in front of her. At a loss, he simply observed.

  'It's a nice restaurant. We'll have a nice dinner, a litde wine—and Arianne and I will do some talking...' Dan said, still trying his luck. Luke appreciated that the technique had probably been learnt from experience: it was so hard to know what she really thought. He had obviously judged her attachment to other admirers by seeing if she cried when he knocked them out.

  Both men waited. And then suddenly, by one of her miracles of physical communication, some slight relaxation of her posture, Arianne let it be known that she had no intention of standing up, of walking out of the door, of going to Lanton's with Dan. Luke saw this and, trembling, put down the briefcase he was still ridiculously holding. He walked to the front door and opened it, praying he had not misread the sign.

  He heard something muttered, then creaking and then footsteps. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the huge mass of black leather coat arrive beside him. It paused—for several lifetimes—and then, with a strong, salty smell of cowhide, it passed him by.

  When Luke clicked the door shut and turned round, Arianne was taking off her skirt. He was too tired to try to understand what had happened. He accepted the odd, staged quality of her kisses feeling he did not deserve them.

  'I can't believe the nerve of that guy,' she said, but she appeared distracted, rather than outraged. 'You're so wonderful, Luke,' she told him, but it did not sound convincing.

  Was this her first flawed performance? Surely she knew he had been a coward, he thought.

  There was an unnerving calm and then she threw her knickers on to the coffee-table and pushed him down on to his knees. He put his face between her legs and felt lost. After a while he moved away and was about to pull her down on to the rug beside him when he saw that tears were coming down her face. 'Arianne? What's wrong?'

  'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I'm not good enough for you. You shouldn't let me do this to you.' She pushed his hands off her legs and ran away into the bathroom, slamming and locking the door.

  At a club later that week, he came back from the dance-floor to find her with a tequila shot in her hand, licking salt off his friend Joe's neck. Joe had not seen him approaching the table and Arianne made no signal to him, although she had seen Luke clearly. Joe held out the lime between his teeth and she knocked back the tequila and bit into it, watching his eyes catch sight of Luke as her teeth sank into the fruit. He pulled back, leaving it in her mouth, and she spat it across the table.

  'Hey, Luke!' Joe said, standing up. 'Come and—come and have a shot.'

  'No, thanks.'

  'OK, then,' Joe said. 'Fair enough. I think I might just go and see where Sam is, then. All right.' He squeezed Luke's arm lightly as he passed.

  Luke watched him go. 'What were you doing?' he said.

  Arianne held up the empty glass and waved it at him, 'Tequeeeela shots.' She laughed drunkenly, throug
h her nose. Her voice was slurring, her face was flushed. She looked incredibly beautiful—as if she had just had sex.' You know, Luke—salt, shot of tequila, bite of lime?'

  'Licking it off his neck, though?'

  'What, Joe?'

  'Taking the lime out of his mouth? Yes, Joe!

  'Joe?' She shrugged. 'He wanted me to and he bought the drinks, so I thought why not?'

  'Because he bought the drinks?'

  'Oh, what are you fucking saying, Luke?'

  'Nothing.'

  'Yes, you are.'

  'No, Arianne. I'm not.'

  'Bullshit.'

  'What's bullshit?'

  'You have no right to make that insinuation. You think you're so superior, don't you?'

  Hadn't he once said this to Lucy? Lucy, with her infinitely greater, cleaner love for him, when he was only able to muster a soiled kind of fondness for her? He pushed away the thought and its implications with horror, 'No, Arianne.'

  'Yes. You think I'm a little slut. Slut whore slut. You think I'm just a bitch who should be shot and tossed on to a rubbish heap.'

  He had heard her talk this way before. Long monologues of horrifying insults to herself. She could become quite hysterical. 'Please, darling. Don't do this,' he said softly.

  Jessica, who was sitting at the other end of the table, said something about really needing to dance and stood up. Luke gazed away after her as she left. Just then it seemed that her presence had constituted the last vestige of civilization. He could see Ludo on the stage, spraying people with a bottle of champagne. His friends were all in another world and their joy was nightmarish. He wanted to cover his head.

  Love had made his mind and body inextricable, and now jealousy and hate had forced them apart just as effectively. If his body had genuinely reflected his mind, the paramedics would have come through the crowd with defibrillators, shouting, 'Stand clear!', shooting thousands of volts through his heart to start it up again. A small group would have stood by, marvelling at his survival.