Love in a Blue Time (3 page)

Bergman, Fellini, Ozu, Wilder, Cassavetes, Rosi, Renoir: the radiance! Often Roy would rise at five in the morning to suck the essential vitamin of poetry in front of the video. A few minutes of
Amarcord,
in which Fellini’s whole life was present, could give him perspective all day. Certain sequences he examined scores of times, studying the writing, acting, lighting and camera movements. In commercials he was able to replicate certain shots or the tone of entire scenes. ‘Bit more Bergman?’ he’d say. ‘Or do you fancy some Fellini here?’

In New York he went to see
Hearts
Of
Darkness,
the documentary about Coppola’s making of
Apocalypse
Now.
He was becoming aware of what he wouldn’t do now: parachute from a plane or fight in a war or revolution; travel across Indonesia with a backpack; go to bed with three women at once, or even two; learn Russian, or even French, properly; or be taught the principles of architecture. But for days he craved remarkable and noble schemes on which everything was risked.

What would they be? For most of his adult life he’d striven to keep up with the latest thing in cinema, music, literature and even the theatre, ensuring that no one mentioned an event without his having heard of it. But now he had lost the thread and didn’t mind. What he wanted was to extend himself. He tormented himself with his own mediocrity. And he saw that, apart from dreams, the most imaginative activity most people allowed themselves was sexual fantasy. To live what you did – somehow – was surely the point.

In his garden in the mornings, he began to write, laying
out the scenes on index cards on the grass, as if he were playing patience. The concentration was difficult. He was unused to such a sustained effort of dreaming, particularly when the outcome was distant, uncertain and not immediately convertible into a cheque or interest from colleagues. Why not begin next year?

After a few days’ persistence his mind focused and began to run in unstrained motion. In these moments – reminded of himself even as he got lost in what he was doing – the questions he had asked about life, its meaning and direction, if any, about how best to live, could receive only one reply. To be here now, doing this.

That was done. He was in a hurry to begin shooting. Private satisfactions were immaterial. The film had to make money. When he was growing up, the media wasn’t considered a bright boy’s beat. Like pop, television was disparaged. But it had turned out to be the jackpot. Compared to his contemporaries at school, he had prospered. Yet the way things were getting set up at home he had to achieve until he expired. He and Clara would live well: nannies, expensive schools, holidays, dinner parties, clothes. After setting off in the grand style, how could you retreat to less without anguish?

All morning his mind had whirled. Finally he phoned Clara, She’d been sick, and had come downstairs to discover Jimmy asleep on the floor amid the night’s debris, wrapped in the tablecloth and the curtains, which had become detached from the rail. He had pissed in a pint glass and placed it on the table.

To Roy’s surprise she was amused. She had, it was true, always liked Jimmy, who flirted with her. But he couldn’t imagine her wanting him in her house. She wasn’t a cool or loose hippie. She taught at a university and could be formidable. Most things could interest her, though, and she was able to make others interested. She was enthusiastic and took pleasure in being alive, always a boon in others, Roy
felt. Like Roy, she adored gossip. The misfortunes and vanity of others gave them pleasure. But it was still a mostly cerebral and calculating intelligence that she had. She lacked Jimmy’s preferred kind of sentimental self-observation. It had been her clarity that had attracted Roy, at a time when they were both concerned with advancement.

Cheered by her friendliness towards Jimmy, Roy wanted to be with him today.

Jimmy came out of the bathroom in Roy’s bathrobe and sat at the table with scrambled eggs, the newspaper, his cigarettes and ‘Let It Bleed’ on loud. Roy was reminded of their time at university, when, after a party, they would stay up all night and the next morning sit in a pub garden, or take LSD and walk along the river to the bridge at Hammersmith, which Jimmy, afraid of heights, would have to run across with his eyes closed.

Roy read his paper while surreptitiously watching Jimmy eat, drink and move about the room as if he’d inhabited it for years. He was amazed by the lengthy periods between minor tasks that Jimmy spent staring into space, as if each action set off another train of memory, regret and speculation. Then Jimmy would search his pockets for phone numbers and shuffle them repeatedly. Finally, Jimmy licked his plate and gave a satisfied burp. When Roy had brushed the crumbs from the floor, he decided to give Jimmy a little start.

‘What are you going to do today?’

‘Do? In what sense?’

‘In the sense of … to do something.’

Jimmy laughed.

Roy went on, ‘Maybe you should think of looking for work. The structure might do you good.’

‘Structure?’

Jimmy raised himself to talk. There was a beer can from the previous night beside the sofa; he swigged from it and
then spat out, having forgotten he’d used it as an ashtray. He fetched another beer from the fridge and resumed his position.

Jimmy said, ‘What sort of work is it that you’re talking about here?’

‘Paying work. You must have heard of it. You do something all day –’

‘Usually something you don’t like to do –’

‘Whatever. Though you might like it.’ Jimmy snorted. ‘And at the end of the week they give you money with which you can buy things, instead of having to scrounge them.’

This idea forced Jimmy back in his seat. ‘You used to revere the surrealists.’

‘Shooting into a crowd! Yes, I adored it when –’

‘D’you think they’d have done anything but kill themselves laughing at the idea of salaried work? You know it’s serfdom.’

Roy lay down on the floor and giggled. Jimmy’s views had become almost a novelty to Roy. Listening to him reminded Roy of the pleasures of failure, a satisfaction he considered to be unjustly unappreciated now he had time to think about it. In the republic of accumulation and accountancy there was no doubt Jimmy was a failure artist of ability. To enlarge a talent to disappoint, it was no good creeping into a corner and dying dismally. It was essential to raise, repeatedly, hope and expectation in both the gullible and the knowing, and then to shatter them. Jimmy was intelligent, alertly bright-eyed, convincing. With him there was always the possibility of things working out. It was an achievement, therefore, after a calculated build-up, to bring off a resounding fuck-up. Fortunately Jimmy would always, on the big occasion, let you down: hopelessness, impotence, disaster, all manner of wretchedness – he could bring them on like a regular nightmare.

Not that it hadn’t cost him. It took resolution, organisation,
and a measure of creativity to drink hard day and night; to insult friends and strangers; to go to parties uninvited and attempt to have sex with teenage girls; to borrow money and never pay it back; to lie, make feeble excuses, be evasive, shifty and selfish. He had had many advantages to overcome. But finally, after years of application, he had made a success, indeed a triumph, of failure.

Jimmy said, ‘The rich love the poor to work, and the harder the better. It keeps them out of trouble while they’re ripped off. Everyone knows that.’ He picked up a porn magazine,
Peaches,
and flipped through the pages. ‘You don’t think I’m going to fall for that shit, do you?’

Roy’s eyes felt heavy. He was falling asleep in the morning! To wake himself up he paced the carpet and strained to recall the virtues of employment.

‘Jimmy, there’s something I don’t understand about this.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t you ever wake up possessed by a feeling of things not done? Of time and possibility lost, wasted? And failure … failure in most things – that could be overcome. Don’t you?’

Jimmy said, ‘That’s different. Of mundane work you know nothing. The worst jobs are impossible to get. You’ve lived for years in the enclosed world of the privileged with no idea what it’s like outside. But the real work you mention, I tell you, every damn morning I wake up and feel time rushing past me. And it’s not even light. Loneliness … fear. My heart vibrates.’

‘Yes! and don’t you think, this is a new morning, maybe this day I can redeem the past? Today something real might be done?’

‘Sometimes I do think that,’ Jimmy said. ‘But most of the time … to tell you the truth, Roy, I know nothing will get done. Nothing, because that time is past.’

When the beer was gone they went out, putting their arms around one another. On the corner of Roy’s street was a rough
pub with benches outside, where many local men gathered between March and September, usually wearing just shorts. They’d clamber from their basements at half past ten and by eleven they’d be in place, chewing a piece of bread with their beer, smoking dope and shouting above the traffic. Their women, who passed by in groups, pushing prams laden with shopping, were both angrier and more vital.

One time Roy walked past and heard Springsteen’s hypodermic cry ‘Hungry Heart’ blaring from inside. He’d lingered apprehensively: surely the song would rouse the men to some sudden recklessness, the desire to move or hunt down experience? But they merely mouthed the words.

He thought of the books which had spoken to him as a teenager and how concerned they were with young men fleeing home and domesticity, to hurl themselves at different boundaries. But where had it led except to self-destruction and madness? And how could you do that kind of thing now? Where could you run?

Roy’s preferred local was a low-ceilinged place with a semicircular oak bar. Beyond, it was long and deep, broken up by booths, comers and turns. Men sat alone, reading, staring, talking to themselves, as if modelling for a picture entitled ‘The Afternoon Drinkers’. There was a comfortable aimlessness; in here nothing had to happen.

Jimmy raised his glass. Roy saw that his hand trembled, and that his skin looked bruised and discoloured, the knuckles raw, fingers bitten.

‘By the way, how was Clara this morning?’

‘That was her, right?’ said Jimmy.

‘Yeah.’

‘She’s big outfront but looking great. A bit like Jean Shrimpton.’

‘You told her that?’

Jimmy nodded.

Roy said, ‘That’s what did the trick. You’ll be in with her for a couple of days now.’

‘Still fuck her?’

‘When I can’t help myself,’ said Roy. ‘You’d think she’d appreciate the interest but instead she says that lying beside me is like sleeping next to a bag of rubbish that hasn’t been collected for a fortnight.’

‘She’s lucky to have you,’ said Jimmy.

‘Me?’

‘Oh yes. And she knows it too. Still, thank Christ there’s plenty of pussy back on stream now that that Aids frenzy has worn off.’

Roy said, ‘All the same, it’s easy to underestimate how casual and reassuring married love can be. You can talk about other things while you’re doing it. It isn’t athletic. You can drift. It’s an amicable way of confirming that everything is all right.’

‘I’ve never had that,’ said Jimmy.

‘You’re not likely to, either.’

‘Thanks.’

After a time Jimmy said, ‘Did I mention there was a phone call this morning. Someone’s office. Tuesday?’

‘Tuesday?’

‘Or was it Wednesday?’

‘Munday!’

‘Munday? Yeah, maybe it was … one of those early days.’

Roy grasped him by the back of the neck and vibrated him a little. ‘Tell me what he said.’

Jimmy said, ‘Gone. Everything vaporises into eternity – all thoughts and conversations.’

‘Not this one.’

Jimmy sniggered, ‘The person said he’s in the air. Or was. And he’s popping round for a drink.’

‘When?’

‘I think it was … today.’

‘Christ,’ said Roy. ‘Finish your pint.’

‘A quick one, I think, to improve our temper.’

‘Get up. This is the big one. It’s my film, man.’

‘Film? When’s it on?’

‘Couple of years.’

‘What? Where’s the hurry? How can you think in those kinda time distances?’

Roy held Jimmy’s glass to his lips. ‘Drink.’

Munday might, Roy knew, swing by for a few minutes and treat Roy as if he were a mere employee; or he might hang out for five hours, discussing politics, books, life.

Munday embodied his age, particularly in his puritanism. He was surrounded by girls; he was rich and in the film business; everywhere there were decadent opportunities. But work was his only vice, with the emphasis on negotiating contracts. His greatest pleasure was to roar, after concluding a deal: ‘Course, if you’d persisted, or had a better agent, I’d have paid far more.’

He did like cocaine. He didn’t like to be offered it, for this might suggest he took it, which he didn’t, since it was passé. He did, nevertheless, like to notice a few lines laid accidentally out on the table, into which he might dip his nose in passing.

Cocaine would surely help things go better. As Roy guided Jimmy back, he considered the problem. There was a man – Upton Turner – who was that rare thing, a fairly reliable dealer who made home visits and occasionally arrived on the stated day. Roy had been so grateful for this – and his need so urgent – that when Turner had visited in the past, Roy had inquired after his health and family, giving Turner, he was afraid, the misapprehension that he was a person as well as a vendor. He had become a nuisance. The last time Roy phoned him, Turner had flung the phone to one side, screaming that the cops were at the door and he was ‘lookin’ at twenty years!’ As Roy listened, Turner was dumping thousands of pounds worth of powder down the toilet, only to discover that the person at the door was a neighbour who wanted to borrow a shovel.

Despite Turner’s instability, Roy called him. Turner said he’d come round. At once Munday’s office then rang.

‘He’s coming to you,’ they said. ‘Don’t go anywhere.’

‘But when?’ Roy whined.

‘Expect him in the near future,’ the cool girl replied, and added, with a giggle, ‘This century, definitely.’