Anaïs, one afternoon
I was sipping a daiquiri, responding to an email in a lobby bar.
You appeared. You seemed nervous. You looked fresh and tidy though, the way you used to look just before going away to meet one of your lovers. You ran a hand through your hair, like you used to when I told you a major deadline was approaching, I was taking leave, or anything personal. Like in my interview, maybe. They said you were nonchalant and distant but your secretary of 13 years said you were shy.
“I didn’t expect you to come. I was surprised when they said you were here…”
“Well. It seemed like a dare at the end. And I can’t refuse a dare.” Don't tell people! Don't ever tell them that! I yell at myself. In that moment you had the mixed fortune of entering my aspergersy little world. Curiosity had couriered me into this theatre of the decedent absurd. I wasn’t sure why I was there really. I had consciously distracted myself to avoid thinking about it. I just had to know I guess. I was curious.
The first few hours were strange but nice. We talked. You told me stories, things about your left-field schooling, how its habitués had emerged into the world and become uber-successful or killed themselves, how smart your kids were, all that stuff. It was interesting to watch. We did an odd dance around the skirting of the situation.
You discussed where we should eat. I lay on the bed in a Vietnamese silk dress. You extended your hand to pull me up to leave. I think it was the second time we had ever touched.
I saw you in various lights, shades of undress. You became oddly beautiful and a darkness fell about your beauty, a lightness about your flaws. You would not have thought twice about it all, I think.
We had dinner. I gave you, as a joke, a laminated list of food combinations produced by my medicine man – those that will kill you and those advised by the witch doctor in a cacophony of hocus pocus that will cause ‘dizziness, sickness or madness.’ It was given to me by a chap on the broken streets of which I was now a limbo denizen. It listed combinations such as “dragon fruit and chicken eggs” and “mutton intestines and marinated tea leaves”.
That night we went for a swim. My legs were wrapped around you but I stayed shy, chaste and guarded and you gave me gentlemanly space. It all fell away, as you had known, I think. “Take your underwear off” you suggested.
“No” I said.
At the end I realized that I was not really equipped to deal with it all. You wear a wedding ring like a casual grin. Wedding rings remind me of security, a place of familiarity which I am not in, for one reason or another. I have never been able to do it, despite a few engagements over the years, blood diamonds and memories stuffed away in a drawer somewhere.
It sort of messed me up. You didn’t mean anything by it. You could not have known how fragile I was. Warped and Broken Princess who thought she had gotten it together, FINALLY, in the anti-promise land, reborn in a space of ironic sanity. Now Princess Third World, her keeper, far away and alone in his boring new town. I was only ever one bloody mary away from total ruin. I did not belong safely in your idea of fun.
Here in this warped place I breathe in smoke and look at the vaguely glowing lights across the road from the Joy House, the waxing monsoon sheds her luscious tears of sorority around me and I am struggling. A lady hangs out washing and waves at me.
I think you knew what you were doing and maybe she is just a stupid and curious wh*re with her aspirational and inchoate constitution, ideals about goodness and how people work. Maybe you are a just a good person looking for fun. She must now pull through and be the woman who can survive this place and find her way across the skies to a civilized world where she will start over, again.
One bloody mary away. I have no realistic sense of how obvious this is to others. I am still trying to deal with the basics, like ants in my coffee. “Civilized beasts” Mariam Jo would to say to me. “They rise to the surface, announce themselves, unlike several of God’s creatures which wait at the bottom until you discover them.”
“So how did you meet?” your friend asked conversationally by the pool, as you slide your hand down my back, the way the others do their own wh*res.
I feel horror and curiosity. You do not respond immediately as though for the first time something has touched your boundaries and you see a certain stamp affixed. You think about it, move your bright blue eyes around and decide. You don’t care and tell them. Your friend raises his eyebrows and divests a contorted laugh that says “different to the last one” I think. I really wouldn’t know.
They don’t treat me as cheap and nasty, your friends. They are all lovely chaps. All that really matters is who looks at who in the mirror though. I see a brunette who has bothered to brush her hair and I don’t want to see much more. Your friends disappear in different directions and we see one of them in the elevator later that night with a thin and lovely Thai woman in a tight red dress and red lipstick. We joke about breakfast. I wonder how many of us there are in the hotel.
I have a lot of fun with you. I like you outside of the office, as I always have, in a different space. You are sexy and cool and interesting.
In the mid-morning I look around the blue skies and sparkly pool in my bathrobe, smell the oils on my skin from the massage and I am mostly happy but for the first time I am aware that in this country everyone has a price. Mine was the satisfaction of curiosity. I should be so happy and relaxed, I think I am in that moment, but I suddenly I am less fond of this city that I have always loved, here in the Land of Freedom, where I have been coming since I was an eager young pup.
“Do it again sometime?” you murmured in my ear as we said goodbye at breakfast on that last of the last mornings, a different friend looking away politely but also sporting a raised eyebrow. Your hands run along my waist for a minute and you slip something in my pocket, an obscure email address. In the moment it is genuinely something I want. “The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery."
In the cold light of day the answer is no, not for all the right reasons, but for the simple fact that I am not equipped to manage it internally. I am 6 months out of a place for sick people, ambitious but on a fractured journey at best.
It makes me think of Anaïs’s warped legacy. I hate my own stupidity and for falling into the Anaïs paradigm, which I always knew I would at some stage. I realize I am angry at myself and I take it out in a Catholic guilt email to you, which I immediately regret. I want to take it all back, go to a magical place where I am the innocent I profess to be. I take the rest out on my body in private with blades, drugs, Vivaldi and the other bespoke tools I have picked up along the way, my easier simpler way.
“I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."
I think of the Shangri-La in my head where I can rewind, a place where I will live, clean and safe, join The Lover, unencumbered by secrets and wrongs. Anger is not a safe place for me. The cuts always heal but they leave gruesome scars, each one with its story ansd they take ages to fade. Sometimes people ask. More often they don't. “The secret of joy is the mastery of pain” she wrote. "I postpone death by living, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing."
I like him as a person. He is fundamentally good there was always something interesting there despite the hard working chronic f*ck up that I was. I find secrets really hard to sit with and when you tell one person you may as well tell the world. The only place where they are safe are in The Rooms, of which there are none in this place. I chase a memory of The Rooms, places where people are bound by anonymity and can tell the truth.
On some days I see rodents, mango smoothies and possibilities. I am either in or Im out. "Half measures availed us nothing". We didn’t count on communication being so difficult.
Incidentally, I did not get the salad dressing through customs. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” My favourite of Vivaldi's four seasons has always been winter but I want to learn to love spring.
