The Dreamers Read online

  GILBERT ADAIR

  The Dreamers

  A Romance

  for Michael, Eva and Louis –

  any other actors would have been impostors

  THE DREAMERS

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Cinémathèque Française is located in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris

  ‘Have you seen the King?’

  Did Matthew love Théo and Isabelle?

  ‘Have you seen the King?’

  As the three of them walked down the path

  At a first glance the scene confronting them

  ‘Salut.’

  Jacques had shocking news

  Théo, who never read a newspaper

  The cinephiles had meanwhile dispersed

  On the slope descending from the esplanade

  They found a sheltered spot overlooking the scene

  From the metro station on the place de l’Odéon Matthew left his friends

  Sleep is a spirit

  Waiting

  He was still waiting

  It was half past three when Théo finally arrived

  Théo and Matthew, meanwhile, decided that they would take the metro

  On the place Saint-Germain-des-Prés a sword swallower was performing

  ‘Now!’ cried Théo

  Three abreast, they ran out of the Louvre

  On the horizon, as inescapable as the moon itself

  An unpleasant surprise was in store for them

  Like children who, in awe of its hunting horns

  In the place de l’Odéon

  Théo and Isabelle lived in a first-floor flat

  Isabelle entered the drawing room

  Dinner was a lugubrious affair

  From above, from somewhere in the ether

  Lighting a cigarette, beaming at Matthew

  Théo led Matthew to his own room

  It was now after midnight

  Later in the night, when the newsreel had long since run its course

  When he opened his eyes next morning

  Matthew had awoken into a state of semi-conscious malaise

  In the same bathroom

  Cleanliness is next to godliness

  ‘Here,’ said Théo

  Love is blind but not deaf

  It transpired that the flat did after all contain a wing of sorts

  It rained all day and the three friends stayed indoors

  Isabelle, for whom everything had to be given a name

  Let’s return to that first afternoon

  Walking back along the aisle

  Back at the hotel Matthew stuffed his belongings into a leather suitcase

  That evening Matthew dined with Théo and Isabelle

  The first few days were uneventful

  Isabelle was a subtle voyeur

  Most unexpectedly, though, from this raising of the stakes

  That evening no one tiptoed along the corridor

  Yet, for all that that first night together constituted a turning point

  During the two weeks that followed

  One evening, for the first time

  The Cinémathèque had been forgotten

  It was a spectacular Busby Berkeley production number

  So, amid all the laughter and steam

  Unhappiness may lie in our failing to obtain precisely the right sort of happiness

  Though these were becoming increasingly rare

  Hunger, though, began to rack their temples

  The world at large, meanwhile

  Then suddenly, like Peter Pan, the street flew in through the window

  They were not dead

  It was Théo who roused himself first

  It was at the corner of the street

  The carrefour was a wasteland

  An hour later, news having arrived that the CRS had turned off

  The absence of passers-by

  That same afternoon, to their surprise, the place Saint-Michel had been spared

  Paris was a carnival

  Théo was struck dumb

  As the café had become stuffy and overcrowded

  Leaving the bookshop

  It was exactly half past four when they arrived at the Drugstore

  By early evening, at half-past six, demonstrators converged

  Into this ravaged landscape

  Near the barricade behind which Théo, Isabelle and Matthew crouched

  Though, as we grow older

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The Cinémathèque Française is located in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris between the Trocadéro esplanade and the avenue Albert-de-Mun. The Mussolinian monumentality of the Palais de Chaillot in which it’s housed so impresses the cinephile visiting it for the first time that he rejoices in living in a country ready to accord such prestige to what tends elsewhere to be the least respected of the arts. Hence his disappointment when he discovers, on closer inspection, that the Cinémathèque itself occupies no more than one small wing of the whole edifice, arrived at, almost furtively, by a basement entrance tucked away out of sight.

  This entrance can be approached either from the esplanade, an enchanted plateau of lovers, guitarists, roller skaters, black souvenir vendors and tartan-frocked little girls chaperoned by their English or Portuguese nannies; or else along a curving garden path which, running parallel to the avenue Albert-de-Mun, affords one a glimpse, through illuminated shrubs, of the wrought-iron Mount Fuji of the Eiffel Tower. Whatever the approach, one ends by descending a flight of steps to the Cinémathèque’s foyer, whose intimidating austerity is relieved by a permanent display of kinetoscopes, praxinoscopes, shadowboxes, magic lanterns and other naïve and charming relics of the cinema’s prehistory.

  It used to happen that the garden would be invaded by cinephiles three times an evening, at six-thirty, eight-thirty and ten-thirty.

  The true fanatics, however, the so-called rats de Cinémathèque, who would arrive for the six-thirty performance and seldom leave before midnight, preferred not to fraternise with those less obsessive visitors to whom Chaillot meant no more than an inexpensive night out. For cinephilia, as it was practised here, in the very front row of the stalls, was a secret society, a cabal, a freemasonry. That front row remained the exclusive province of the rats, whose names ought to have been inscribed on their seats just as the names of Hollywood directors used to be stencilled on the backs of their collapsible canvas chairs, the Mr Ford or Mr Capra slightly obscured by the designee’s shoulder and upper arm as he turned his smiling, suntanned gaze towards the photographer.

  What else were these rats, these fanatics, these denizens of the night, but vampire bats wrapping themselves in the cloak of their own shadows?

  If they chose to sit so close to the screen, it was because they couldn’t tolerate not receiving a film’s images first, before they had had to clear the hurdles of each succeeding row, before they had been relayed back from row to row, from spectator to spectator, from eye to eye, until, defiled, second-hand, reduced to the dimensions of a postage-stamp and ignored by the double-backed love-makers in the last row of all, they returned with relief to their source, the projectionist’s cabin.

  Besides which, the screen really was a screen. It screened them from the world.

  ‘Have you seen the King?’

  Spring, with its tufts of crocuses and violets bursting forth from nowhere like a conjuror’s bouquet of tissuepaper flowers, had come that evening to the gardens of the Cinémathèque.

  It was twenty past six. Three adolescents emerged from the metro exit on to the place du Trocadéro and turned towards the path which ran parallel to the avenue Albert-de-Mun. The question had been posed by t
he tallest of the three. He was muscular and lean but held himself with a lopsided stoop that seemed inconsistent with his physique. Under his jumble-sale clothes one imagined delicately chiselled anklebones and subtle, shark’s-fin shoulder-blades. And these clothes of his – the patched corduroy jacket, the jeans whose creases tapered off into baggy nothingness below the knees, the leather sandals – he wore with the genius that Stendhal somewhere attributes to a lady alighting from her carriage. His name was Théo. He was seventeen.

  His sister Isabelle was an hour and a half his junior. She wore a cloche hat and a soft white fox boa which, every five minutes or so, she would sling over her shoulder as negligently as a prizefighter’s towel.

  But she was as far from the sort of mutton-headed misses for whom such accessories represented a fashion statement as would be two athletes running side by side, shoulder to shoulder, one of whom has lapped the other. Not since her childhood had she worn anything new. More precisely, she had never grown out of a childish infatuation with dolling herself up in her grandmother’s gowns. She had grown into these gowns and made them her own.

  The mutton-headed misses stared at her, wondering how she did it. The secret was: she didn’t do it with mirrors. Isabelle would say haughtily, ‘It’s vulgar to look at yourself in a mirror. A mirror is for looking at others in.’

  It wasn’t to his sister but to the young man walking beside her that Théo’s question had been addressed. Though at eighteen Matthew was the oldest of the three in age, he was the youngest in appearance. He was of a featherweight frailness of build and had never shaved in his life. In his crisp blue jeans, tight ‘skinny’ pullover and white sneakers, he appeared to walk on the tips of his toes without actually tiptoeing. His fingernails were bitten to the quick and he had a compulsive habit of flicking the end of his nose with his squat index finger.

  There was once a faun that came to a mountain pool but was incapable of drinking any water because it would turn aside, again and again, to reassure itself that no hostile presence lurked nearby. It finally died of thirst. Matthew might have been that faun. Even in repose, his eyes would glance sideways, warily.

  Matthew was an American, of Italian immigrant origin, from San Diego. He had never left home before. In Paris, where he was studying French, he felt as gauche as an alien from another planet. His friendship with Théo and Isabelle, a friendship which had matured in the white shadow of the Cinémathèque screen, he judged as a privilege of which he was undeserving and he lived in fear that his friends would eventually arrive at the same conclusion.

  He was also terrified that he hadn’t properly read the small print of their relationship. He forgot that true friendship is a contract in which there can be no small print.

  A lonely man thinks of nothing but friendship, just as a repressed man thinks of nothing but flesh. If Matthew had been granted a wish by a guardian angel, he would have requested a machine, one yet to be invented, permitting its owner to ascertain where each of his friends was at any given moment, what he was doing and with whom. He belonged to the race which loiters underneath a loved one’s window late at night and endeavours to decipher shadows flitting across the Venetian blind.

  Back in San Diego, before he arrived in Paris, his best friend had been a football player, a good-looking youth whose symmetrical features were marred by a broken nose. This best friend invited him to spend the night at his parents’ home. His room was in a state of undress. The bed was littered with dirty teeshirts and underpants. A Bob Dylan poster and a college pennant were pinned to the walls. A stack of board games was piled up in a corner. From the bottom drawer of a chest-of-drawers he took out a large buff envelope whose contents he spread over the carpet – creamy-textured photographs clipped from fashion and sports magazines and depicting young men, most of them in profile, all of them in various stages of déshabillé. Matthew, confused, believed that his friend was making a confession and that the same confession was now expected of him. So he admitted what he had not realised about himself until that very instant: that he too was aroused by male beauty, by naked boys with nipples like stars.

  The best friend was revolted by this unsolicited disclosure. His parents had offered him a plastic surgery operation as an eighteenth-birthday present. What Matthew had taken for erotica was an anthology of sample noses. His heart beating madly, he sneaked back to his own home in the middle of the night.

  He determined never again to be caught in such a trap. Fortunately, the door of the closet out of which he had momentarily stepped proved to be a revolving one. Loath to reveal his own secret, the friend didn’t breathe a word of the indiscretion.

  Matthew began to masturbate – once, sometimes twice, a day. To prompt the climax he would conjure up images of leggy youths. Then, just as the dam was about to burst, he forced himself to think of girls instead. This abrupt volte-face grew into a habit. Like a child to whom a fairy-tale is read, his solitary orgasms no longer sanctioned the slightest deviation from the prearranged scenario and would ignominiously fizzle out if by mischance he omitted the climactic twist.

  There is fire and fire: the fire that burns and the fire that gives warmth, the fire that sets a forest ablaze and the fire that puts a cat to sleep. So is it with self-love. The member that once seemed one of the wonders of the world soon becomes as homely as an old slipper. Matthew and himself gradually ceased to excite each other.

  To revive his desire, he constructed a system out of the very gaffe that had caused his heart to beat. Like a good little Catholic, he would confess every week in the English church on the avenue Hoche.

  Confession was his vice. It inflamed him more to plead guilty to his petty squalours than it ever did to practise them. The dankness of the confessional nearly always gave him an erection. As for the necessary friction, it would be generated by the delicious discomfiture he felt at having to catalogue the number of times he had ‘touched himself’.

  For it’s easier to confess to murder than to masturbation. A murderer is guaranteed a respectful hearing. He makes the priest’s day.

  Did Matthew love Théo and Isabelle? In truth, what he had fallen in love with was some facet which was shared by both of them equally, something identical in them, even if as twins they were not identical, something which would dart to one face, then to the other, depending on an expression or a trick of the light or the angle at which a head was cocked.

  Naturally, he never spoke to either of the avenue Hoche. He would have died before confessing that he went to confession.

  ‘Have you seen the King?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I think so.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t remember it as anything special. It’s not a patch on the Borzage.’

  What Théo meant by ‘the King’ was Seventh Heaven, a melodrama made in the nineteen-thirties by a Hollywood film director named Henry King. The same story had been filmed before by another director, Frank Borzage, but it was King’s version they had come to see. During the month of March the Cinémathèque was programming a retrospective of his work.

  But why should they wish to see a film that, according to Matthew, was nothing special? Actually, it would no more have occurred to them to miss it than it would occur to the reader of a newspaper to cancel his order after an issue of unexciting news. They were not there to judge. They saw themselves, rather, as friends, or guests, of the white screen that would become, for ninety minutes or so, in the manner of an embassy, part of American soil.

  As the three of them walked down the path towards the Cinémathèque, they were talking shop: which is to say, cinema.

  The conversation of the rats was indescribable. Even Matthew, for whom such terms in English were normally reserved for Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Beethoven, succumbed to the cinephilic temptation to describe any half-decent film as sublime, any one better than that a chef-d’oeuvre. Yet there was something not quite plausible about the way in which the words would pass his lips. He couldn’t decide whether or not the
y ought to be picked up between the ironic pincers of quotation marks, just as someone unaccustomed to dining out will hesitate before an array of knives and forks. He failed to understand that words, like money, are subject to a fluctuating rate of exchange and that, at the Cinémathèque, the sublime and the chef-d’oeuvre had long since become overvalued currencies.

  Only those who have to translate ideas from one language into another will be sensitive to such nuances. For Théo and Isabelle the discrepancy never arose. Hence there was, to Matthew’s ears, something truly sublime about the ease with which they tossed these superlatives back and forth, rendering them as light as shuttlecocks.

  Dazzled, he was afraid he’d be left far behind, that beside their lyricism his own insipid enthusiasm would strike them as damning with faint praise. So he took to agreeing with them. He made it his role to be agreeable.

  If Isabelle was flattered by this attitude, she showed no sign of it.

  As a matter of fact, he was agreeing with some remark she had made as they approached the Cinémathèque entrance.

  ‘My little Matthew,’ Isabelle at once snapped back at him, ‘when two people agree, it means one of them is redundant.’

  His face clouded, but he knew he would have to go on agreeing with her. He was like the player who would rather fumble the ball on the winning side than score a goal for the losers.

  ‘I never thought of that before,’ he answered helplessly, ‘but of course you’re right.’

  She stared at him. ‘Oh God, you’re incurable.’

  ‘Stop teasing him,’ Théo chided her. ‘Can’t you see he hates it?’

  ‘Nonsense. He adores it. He’s a glutton – no, a gourmet – for punishment.’

  Matthew stared back at this terrible young woman whom he loved in his fashion.

  ‘You despise me, I know,’ he said.

  ‘Au contraire,’ she replied, ‘I think you’re awfully nice. We both do. You really are the nicest person we know. Isn’t he, Théo?’