Vertigo

SUMMER STORY

It’s the dry point of the year, and I’ve been waiting for an answer for some time.

No one’s doing anything. There are not enough people left in town to eat all the fruit in the supermarkets. It piles up, 2/3 price, then 1/2 price, then finally returns to the back room on tall steel trollies.

The night I slept with him, it rained. He wore a shirt that, although we’d only met a couple of times before, I felt was unusual for him. He wore a jacket with a mend on the elbow that spiraled in concentric circles. Then in the morning he looked not as he had looked the night before, but as he had the other times we’d met, and he smelled slightly of cigarettes and furniture polish.

In bed he asked whether I wanted to do what I was doing every time I did it. As if he couldn’t tell without, as though he’d checked himself and remembered some rule. And he laughed small and inward each time I said something to him, each time he said something to me. At the end he said, wow, like someone smacking his lips after a meal.

The next morning I told him I have children. And he said, oh, and he asked me their names, and that was all the mention of them, though the mention of them had been waiting, not insistently, all that time.

The river is at a high point now though the weather is finally hot.

D took me walking by the river. There are women it is dangerous to talk to. D is one. You try to tell them something and they start telling you a story about yourself. Before you know it you are pinned, can’t move. I wanted to tell D everything, including about him, but I didn’t. Feeling the wet air suspended all around me, I closed myself down like windows before a storm. Afterwards, I’m glad I did.

I heard he was having a party. He arranged to meet me twice but cancelled both times. When he sent a message saying he could not meet me, his tense slipped. He said he’d really wanted to see me again. I’d feared it was too true. There’d been a point at which he’d wanted to see me, but it wasn’t now.

He has invited my friend to his party, but not me, the friend of whom I said that I wondered that he didn’t like her, not me: she is prettier. And he said, oh the British and their blondes.

He is not British. He is from elsewhere. His party is for a holiday from elsewhere. I thought he was not the sort to celebrate, but it seems he is. I haven’t heard from him for a week, haven’t seen him for almost a month now. My blonde friend, who is not British, will ask whether he will see me at the weekend. I will find out what is happening — perhaps. And maybe we will meet next week.

He is having another party. This time he has asked me. I’m wary. It was a general invite sent out to friends. The email came only an hour ago: there has been an age of strategy since then. How to reply?

I don’t. But I go.

On my way to the party I expose myself to the point between work and social in which nothing can happen. The libraries have closed; the cafés have closed. The bars are open, but I don’t feel like drinking; the restaurants are open but I don’t feel like eating — and I don’t want to spend the money. Should I have a cocktail before the party, for courage? Or would I arrive with too much of its evidence on my lips, in my cheeks? Should I walk the streets (if it is not raining)? Could I read, write, in the corner of one of the big café-like bars, inconspicuously enough? Could I shift time from this moment to add to other times, times spent — speculatively — with him? With all the time I have, I could learn a language, I could read a book, I could write a book.

In the end I walk nowhere and the wind gets up and the rain starts and it is still too early to go to his party. It is colder than I thought it would be. I didn’t know it could be so cold on a warm day.

I get drunk at the party. He doesn’t talk to me. I go into the bedroom and his clothes explode from the wardrobe, violent with dry-cleaning bags. He’ll be elsewhere soon. I know he doesn’t mean to stay. Already, he’s been gone a while.

Oh, there were nice times that summer, but they were attached to the wrong people: dashing through the rain with B, with whom I didn’t want a relationship, although he did. He took my bracelet and said he could smell my perfume there, a medieval love token. I thought this over-elaborate but the sun shone and the rain at the same time and there were puddles that looked deep and reflected the sunwashed sky.

But that was in July when it rained. Now it’s hot enough to stand outside pubs at night and although there are not enough people in town to eat all the fruit in the supermarkets, there are sometimes still parties.

It never hurts to ask (that’s what he said to me). That’s not true. Sometimes it hurts to ask.

The difficulty is working out the right point in time. As he still hasn’t answered my emails I have waited for him in various places hoping he might turn up.

Finally I saw him last night at a party and he ignored me until at last he took me aside and said he was sort of seeing someone else, and I said, s’okay and he shrugged and said, that’s how it goes, and I shrugged and said, that’s how it goes. And when he said it he was quite close to me and he was wearing the jacket he’d worn when we met with the mend at the elbow, and suddenly I felt I could reach out and grab the mend and pull him toward me and kiss him but that wasn’t possible any more, even though I’d come to the party hoping he would be there and hoping it might have been. And I was wearing the jacket I had on when we met, and when we met it had been draped around my shoulders and every time you kissed me it had fallen off one shoulder and you’d reached your arm around me to pull it back on.

For tonight’s party, I’d put a temporary tattoo of a spider on my wrist because I’d thought it would be fun.

Over by the windows, L was talking with his work junior, M, and he said, you’re my Dalston homegirl, and she snarled, yeah man, because she wasn’t: she was just younger than him and a woman and not white.

Then L said, make me a rollie, M.

And she rolled one for him, thin and black.

It was not a fun party.

We don’t talk now but sometimes I still like to see whether you are online. I can see when you’re there because next to your name on my screen there’s the little green light. I have the same green light. It says, available.

At least I didn’t create a fuss, make a scene. At least I didn’t leave inelegantly.

Elegance is a function of failure. The elegant always know what it is to have failed. There is no need for elegance in success: success itself is enough. But elegance in failure is essential.

I left quietly and walked over the bridge to the station and it was not raining and nobody knew I had gone.