Flesh: A Novel

They have something to eat at a café near the police station. Or at least István does, still in his stale Tom Ford suit from the night before, his own odors starting to overpower the lingering scent of the Cartier perfume that he uses these days.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

Roddy doesn’t say anything.

It’s eight o’clock in the morning and they’re facing each other across a Formica table.

The café they’re in seems to be a survivor from an earlier age. It feels like nothing has changed in there since about 1983, including the food. The plate that’s put in front of István a few minutes later has on it two fried eggs, two grayish sausages, two triangular hash browns, two slices of toast, also triangular, and a small puddle of slightly congealed baked beans.

Roddy isn’t eating. He just sits there holding his coffee, which is still too hot for him to drink, and looking out through the glass front of the place at the pale gray side of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, which is across the street from where they’re sitting.

“What happened?” he finally asks.

István finishes spreading butter onto his toast.

He struggles to explain what happened.

He tries though.

He feels that he owes Roddy some kind of explanation, or at least an honest attempt at an explanation, having phoned him at six in the morning and summoned him to Charing Cross Police Station.

The paperwork and other formalities took over an hour and then they walked out into the cold January dawn and István said he was hungry.

“I know a place,” Roddy despondently told him.

“All right,” István said, lighting a cigarette.

“Just over there,” Roddy said.

István nodded, hugging himself in his thin suit.

They walked in silence along the Strand.

Some Romanian builders and a sad-looking middle-aged man in a leather jacket who might even be asleep are the only other customers in the café.

Roddy himself has a tousled, unshaven appearance, having had to dress and leave his house in a hurry. To see him like that makes him look somehow unfamiliar, almost like a stranger.

He listens while István tries to explain what happened. The way he describes it, he was subjected to intolerable provocation. That’s what he stresses. The provocation.

“He said we were stealing from him—that just isn’t true.”

“Why didn’t you just ignore it, then?” Roddy asks.

“I don’t know,” István says. It’s something that he asked himself many times during the long, sleepless night that he spent in the police station. “It would have looked like I accepted what he was saying. And some of the things he said after that.”

“Like what?”

“Like… I don’t want to… He said some horrible things.”

Roddy waits for him to tell him what Thomas said.

István finds himself unable to do that.

The words, when he opens his mouth to say them, seem too painful and humiliating to say out loud.

Even so, his own actions are hard for him to understand.

The violence with which he threw himself on Thomas and knocked him to the floor.

He finds it hard to believe that he did that now.

Roddy is still waiting for him to say something.

Instead he just sits there with tears in his eyes.

Perhaps embarrassed, Roddy looks away again, and after wiping his eyes on a paper napkin, István finishes his breakfast.

It takes a few minutes and then he asks the other question that’s been on his mind all night. “Is it possible to keep this quiet?”

“It happened in a room full of journalists,” Roddy says. “It’s already all over the internet.”

István’s face is expressionless as he takes that in.

There’s another long silence.

“So where does this leave us?” he asks.

Roddy sighs. “Honestly?” he says. “I think we’re finished.”

They share a taxi as far as Cheyne Walk and then Roddy takes it on to Fulham, or wherever it is that he lives.

István lets himself into the house.

There’s no sign of Helen.

His mother tells him that she hasn’t seen her since yesterday.

“She hasn’t been home?” he asks.

“I don’t think so.”

He tells her what happened at the Gagosian gallery, and that he spent the night in a police station.

Then he takes a Xanax and sleeps until the middle of the afternoon.

There’s still no sign of Helen.

While he’s in the shower, though, a message arrives from her friend the artist saying that she’s with her. That’s all the message says. Helen is with me.

He doesn’t answer it. He gets dressed and leaves the house and walks across the Albert Bridge.

After about ten minutes he arrives at Jacob’s school, where some other parents are already standing outside.

He joins them and waits for his son to appear.