Accumulations
1
I first noticed him working at a bar in an arthouse cinema in Edinburgh. He was more confident in a particular way than I would expect in an environment that wasn’t averse to hiring attractive people. But these were individuals one might have expected to see working too in an art gallery, a bookshop or a museum. The confidence in him I would have described as cocky, while the type of assuredness I’d see in the gallery worker etc., would better be described as subdued: a quiet confidence against a louder determination. When Jason came over to clear a table of drinks, he would smile, banter a little, and, if they were women, young or older, he would flirt. When behind the bar, he would occasionally make a cocktail in this venue that offered only a Mojito and one or two others since they were rarely ordered, and would make it with the flamboyance of someone who believed pulling pints was too dull an activity to bring out his best qualities.
I didn’t pay much attention beyond noticing these gestures, and I was probably more intrigued by class than sex, more interested in observing in him a body language that, while it may not have been broadly class-oriented, it was narrowly so. A couple of years earlier I’d taken a lifelong learning film class, after my degree, and several of the students said they would never go to an art house cinema; they wouldn’t feel comfortable. It was after I mentioned the screening of a ‘70s classic, and they said they liked older films but would watch them at home. It would seem pretentious, they believed, to see them in a cinema, adding that they reckoned only pretentious places would screen them. But these were films they didn’t think pompous at all; only the environment in which they were being shown. All three students were about my age, but none of them had gone to university, and I tried to say that the opportunity to see a film they liked on a bigger screen and with a group of people would probably enhance the experience. They thought not — they would feel themselves watching the film, and that would ruin it. I asked one of them if he believed this was because he would feel out of place. He said it would be that, but also he reckoned everybody watching the film would be aware of watching it. He would feel inadequate, he supposed; those who usually go and see films there would feel superior, knowing they would be consumers of art. He believed that when someone watched it at home, they would have a more honest encounter.
I said I often saw older films in this cinema because it seemed easier to concentrate, not harder to do so. But it did leave me wondering whether the student had a point, and while he may have been stretching it to make claims about others’ responses to the film in the cinema, it at the very least revealed what was on his mind. The other two students concurred on every point he made, and when I asked them about whether they would see new, big Hollywood films in the cinema, they said of course, but this was different. They reckoned this was more like going to a music concert where everybody was there for the show, and you would lose yourself in the loudness, the action, the fun. I was pleased to hear that cinema wasn’t quite dying, but I guess their remarks proposed that older film was dead — it had become TV, and that is where it should stay. To resurrect the films and show them in the cinema was an opportunity for middle-class people to feel good about themselves. I asked about smaller new films, with subtitles. Why would they go to the cinema to read, a couple of them said. The third reckoned he would watch subtitles films sometimes, but at home. Why would you go to the cinema to read a book, he added.
During the discussion I wondered if any of them were amusing themselves at my expense, but their arguments were solid enough if you accepted the premise, and complicated enough to involve issues of class and questions of perception. It didn’t stop me going to the film house, of course, but it did make me more aware of others and what they expected from the encounter. It made me aware of a certain conversation I sometimes overheard. Remarks about the film not being amongst the director’s best, comments on the fluidity of the camerawork, the film’s skill at working in generic influences. What I noticed too when overhearing these chats was that almost nobody elaborated on the specifics of the director’s failings, nor on what they meant by fluid camerawork, or said much about the genre they were referencing. They were revealing that they knew a bit about the language in which film people might speak. But the content of the conversation with my fellow students had been of far greater substance, and partly why it stayed in my mind years later.
2
Perhaps Jason shared with some of these students a similar body language, but with a specific confidence, one that I might now call insouciant diffidence; someone who could work in an art house bar because he believed that, while he may not have been much interested in looking at films with much precision, his ability to look at women in a given way gave him all the assurance he needed. While my friends would have been going to the film house cafe with all the insecurities of people there to watch films that they believed weren’t made for them, or at least in such an environment, he was a barman whose confidence rested on his ability to pull a pint and shoot the breeze, to draw a woman’s attention and to offer a glance as if it were a gaze. That was the insouciance. Yet I saw also the diffident in his body language during the film festival. I watched him in contrast to a couple of actors who were no better-looking than he was, and yet their movements were entitled and smooth, moving through the spaces they occupied with no sense of apprehension. To many, there would have been no difference between him and the actors, but I saw it was as if the actors were in a sprint with no obstacles, while the barman was as though overcoming barely perceptible hurdles. The actors were both privately educated, had appeared in films and television since their late teens, and both had relatives in the industry. They were in a group of about eight people on the evening I saw them, and while they weren’t loud, they were insistently drawing attention to the table. It was probably after a film premiere, and no member of the public came over and asked for their autograph. But now and again others who were also probably up from London, and were publicists or actors, directors or critics for the major papers, came over and said a few words, maybe proposing they could all meet up later.
Next to these actors and their friends, the publicists and the critics, Jason didn’t seem so confident, but perhaps that wouldn’t quite be right either. He was no longer insouciant, that was true, but maybe he wasn’t quite diffident either, and that I perceived diffidence only because I had witnessed a limitation to his self-assurance. I might now read it as a class assertion that would appear as the opposite of diffidence, but only if we view this type of assertiveness on the part of the wealthier classes commenting on it. The actors and their friends may have seen a young man who wasn’t quite of their world, and in witnessing it, just as Jason was showing it, they would read insecurity, and that was close to how I am sure I read it at the time. But then I wasn’t paying quite as close attention as I am now proposing I gave. I offer images from memory intermingling with comments made both by my partner and his partner - a partner he saw only for three months, and this was not long after he left the film house. I had no opportunity to see him again at work after Olivia had told me what Anna said about him, and though he was working in a cafe elsewhere in town, I believed that to visit the cafe and observe him at work there would have been somehow a violation of his privacy, when of course,if any violation had taken place, it lay in Anna speaking to Olivia, who had then spoken to me
3
I suppose I am now giving him more attention than I would have then, because I had assumed Jason’s life was no more than of anecdotal interest. It was a story to tell in the pub he himself might have been working in — it didn’t quite need close attention; it didn’t have the power of retrospective analysis. Yet here I am, trying to provide it.
Olivia first mentioned Jason when Anna said she was thinking of going out with a friend’s flatmate, but she had reservations. Anna hadn’t seen this friend in several months, and went round to the apartment this friend shared with four others. Anna knew all the other flatmates and said hello to a couple of them as they popped into the kitchen/living space, and made a tea before disappearing into their room. But when the newest flatmate came in, he lingered, and Anna was happy that he did so as her friend introduced them to each other. He talked about the cafe he recently started working in, and of other places where he’d worked. He said he’d spent quite a few months in the film house, a place he never quite felt was for him, as he didn’t watch many films and, when he did, they never had subtitles. She laughed when he said this, and it wasn’t because he was joking. She knew he was serious, but in the manner of the phrasing, she believed he was someone her own age who said what he thought, when most of the men she knew in their mid-twenties often seemed to say what they reckoned others wanted to hear. Throughout the hour he sat and talked to Anna and her friend, he was both approachable and resistant, saying at one moment that he and Anna should go for a drink, and added that he hoped she didn’t expect to do so in the film house bar. This wasn’t because he worked there and he didn’t want to go back to the scene of the crime. In fact, he sometimes did go back and all the better so a crime could be committed - a couple of the girls still working there would give him free pints when he came in. No, he said - he didn’t want her to think he was a guy who would sit in the bar like numerous others who liked a drink, but couldn’t be bothered to see all those subtitled films. The bar made the money to subsidise films people didn’t want to see. But there they were, all these people, sitting in the bar like they were going to see them. He didn’t like pretentiousness, he said. But he liked hypocrisy even less - and so if they went for a drink, it would be a proper bar, with no impression that the drink was anything other than a drink and not some precursor to a fancy arty event. And no gallery openings either, he insisted, now half-joking. He didn’t want to stand with a glass of wine in his hand pretending to appreciate a work of art when all he cared to appreciate was the glass of wine he imbibed. He would sometimes do that, Anna said. Throw in bigger words than he might usually use, all the better to register a moment of contempt. He could use swear words with warmth and, I suspected, words like insouciant diffidence with abrasion.
After he left, saying he was starting his shift in fifteen minutes, the friend said she was a little wary of taking him as a flatmate: someone she knew said he’d been kicked out of his previous place because, a couple of times a week, he would take a person back to the apartment, sleep with them, and they would leave the next morning. It wasn’t the morality of it — people can do what they like. It was the awkwardness and the risk of theft. There would be a complete stranger in the flat around twice a week who could potentially steal something, at worst, and at best, someone who might appear in the kitchen in the morning and make a coffee before either going back to Jason’s bed or leaving the apartment. Imagine, Anna mused to Olivia, finding yourself evicted because you have screwed too many people. She offered it with horror and amusement, and Olivia could see that this anecdote probably made Jason more appealing to Anna rather than less.
4
I met Olivia around the same time I first saw Jason working in the bar. She was in the third year of an environmental science degree, and I had recently dropped out of a PhD when I took on more hours teaching English as a foreign language, and found in my spare time I preferred reading novels for pleasure rather than theory for application. The PhD may have been on literature, but it meant using only three novels by a writer I always liked, and applying to his work numerous theorists, many of whom I didn’t. I realised I liked reading novels, but I didn’t feel much of a need to bolster the novels’ significance with theoretical embellishments. It was like giving a perfectly acceptable building useless ornamentation. Maybe with different thinkers I’d have realised that one wasn’t adding pointless features, but recognising the importance of foundations, yet it was probably a combination of my ignorance and my advisors’ preoccupations imposed upon me that made me drop out, and I never did go back to it. I had time which I wouldn’t have had six months earlier, and with it I went out often, to clubs, to bars, to see films and to venture into second-hand bookshops. I felt happily cultural after two years trying to be studiously academic, and I didn’t doubt which one suited my personality. I met Olivia in a second-hand bookshop. She and the assistant were chatting about a book I knew well and never quite regarded, and it seemed they had the same problems with it. I probably wouldn’t have said anything if they had been discussing it positively, even if I too happened to like it. It was that all three of us disliked it for similar reasons that gave me the chance to join their conversation. After we all talked for ten minutes, the assistant said she should get some work done, and Olivia kept talking for a further ten minutes and I said perhaps we could continue the conversation in the cafe across the street, feeling that it was a little rude standing there without buying anything, no matter if it might have seemed doubly forward to indicate we should go for a coffee. There I was, intruding on a conversation and then augmenting the pushiness with an invite. It wasn’t really my personality at all, but it appeared that giving up on the PhD created, at least temporarily, a desire to engage with others without caring so much how I was perceived.
In the cafe we talked until it closed at 6 (we arrived at 330), and during that time an initial and no doubt instant attraction was abetted by a comfortable feeling of familiarity as I said to her I’d dropped out of my doctorate. She spoke about the initial pressures placed upon her to go into medicine. Were it not for her older bother, she might not have been able to persuade her parents to let her study the less august and probably unremunerative subject she chose. Her brother was five years older, and he said they would already have one doctor in the house; no need for a second. He loved what he did, could name all the bones in the body and the function of all the organs, could easily memorise both the Latin and the English terms for various conditions, and was made to be a doctor. She wasn’t, so they let her study environmental science. Olivia was a child of parents who never went to university but did well anyway (her father was in finance), and who sent Olivia and her brother to private school with the assumption they would go educationally further than the father and mother’s own comprehensive school backgrounds allowed. She discussed her inability to fit in at private school, with most of the others coming from families where private education wasn’t a financial sacrifice, on their parents’ part, but a necessary pedagogical continuation. I came from a family where private school was likely and university inevitable, and going back several generations. Olivia supposed we didn’t have much in common; the common was what we didn’t share, as she punned on being a commoner.
By the time we parted, it seemed inevitable that we would swap numbers and arrange to meet again, and by the end of the following week we had become a couple. Olivia wasn’t so interested in films and had no interest in nightclubs, but we did go to every second-hand bookshop in Edinburgh, and covered the city by foot, visiting various galleries and numerous cafes, and occasionally the outskirts of it by bike, going to Cramond, the Pentlands, Portobello, Musselburgh, as well as a couple of places known for art outside the city. We were so often in each other’s company that we saw almost none of our friends during this six-week period that coincided with a serendipitous spring. If the idea of seeing other people carries the tone of a collapsed relationship, when all has been exhausted, and common interests have dissolved, we offered it early on and meant no more by it than that we should introduce each other to our broader social life. The first friend of Olivia’s I met was Anna.
5
Anna may have been the same age as Olivia, may have been privately educated as well, and studied on the same course. But if Olivia had told me she was three years older, I wouldn’t have been surprised and, if she had been in her late twenties, as I was, I wouldn’t have been astonished. While Olivia’s chat was littered with phrases including like and you know, and didn’t always finish her sentences, as if looking for approval to do so, Anna’s sentences were clear and sharp, and she had a way of questioning people, looking directly at them as she asked, in a way that suggested an interrogation, albeit mild and pleasant. She was taller and more elegant than Olivia, but I don’t think it was inevitable bias that led me to believe Olivia was prettier. There was a shrewdness in Anna’s face that gave it not just the maturity she possessed, but a burgeoning hardness as well. I might have been thinking this not because I wanted Olivia to have qualities over Anna, but even more to try and defend my own immaturity and seeing, in Anna’s authoritative personality, less my own inability to grow up than Anna’s likelihood of growing old. I suspect I would grow old without growing up.
Olivia had known her since the first year of their degree, and while Anna had always seemed more adult than any of the other students, it was a ten-week affair she had during that summer which gave her a sexual authority that before seemed announced but not quite pronounced. She didn’t tell Olivia about it until it was over. But when she returned at the beginning of her fourth year, Olivia said she appeared different, as though she was harbouring a knowledge people would usually accumulate over years. Anna looked like she’d accumulated it over a summer. Anna said, quite simply, that she was carrying the air of a woman who’d been sexually satisfied almost every day for months. She didn’t say much more that evening in a pub where Olivia, Anna and other friends gathered to catch up on their summer encounters. While some talked of summer jobs and summer affairs, of preparing for the new term or commenting on precisely how they got their tan, Anna said very little except in that direct remark to Olivia. In company, Anna could be talkative or quiet, but never quite animated, and Olivia said she had never seen her showing an excess of enthusiasm, which was common enough amongst people she knew and to which she herself might not have been impervious. The girls would talk as if enthused by others rather than anything intrinsic, and Anna was sometimes passionate, but there would be intensity to her feeling, as if it belonged to her and perhaps to the person she was talking to, but couldn’t be generalised to include a large group. When she talked, Anna had little difficulty commanding people’s attention, and sometimes even interrupted the flow of an inane conversation, suggesting they ought to discuss a subject of greater gravity. Instead of seeing her as rude, others usually apologised, and the subject was changed, even if without the weight Anna might have wished.
6
A few days later, Olivia met with Anna for a coffee and asked her about what she briefly remarked upon, and Anna, who was always open about her love life and believed others should be also, said, as Olivia knew, a couple of years earlier her parents bought a holiday home in a village in the south of France, not so far from Perpignan. This year, was only meant to stay for two weeks, as the house still required a little work; her parents needed to return to the UK for their jobs since they both still worked full time, and Anna was going to take a cafe job in her home town since she didn’t think she could be alone for months. It was a village where she knew no one and where her French was good enough to order things and offer pleasantries, but not for any considered conversation. Yet halfway through their stay, the person who had been working on the house the previous two summers in the family’s absence came to see the remaining work that needed to be done, and Anna reckoned while it wasn’t so bold as immediate attraction, it was vaguer and more intriguing. When he came the following day, she sensed it was because he wanted to see her more than to look at the house. As he arrived this time, he said he forgot to check a couple of parts he might need, and she was alone — her parents were picking up items from the supermarket in Narbonne. She didn’t at all feel threatened by this older man’s presence as he talked fluently in English and, when she asked him why, after studying German, French and English literature, he became a handyman, he told her his story.
He said that while he passed his degree without too much difficulty, he then failed the exam he required to teach in a university. His uncle was a joiner, and during holidays, when at school and then at university, he helped him with various jobs, partly because he liked the work and benefited from the money, but especially because he enjoyed his uncle’s company. While his parents were pushy and expectant, his uncle was relaxed and constructive, as if what he gave to building with his hands was the attitude he expressed in other areas as well. His mother and father worked with their minds, not their hands, and he came to believe that most people should be working with their hands, though the world increasingly demanded that we work with our heads. Most of us need to make things instead of thinking things, he said. While he initially regretted failing that exam and, for a couple of years, saw himself as a failure, after that he believed he was a different kind of success. He noticed many people whose houses he was working on were fidgety and demanding, seeing in them minds too much at work and hands too idle. He never needed that much money, and if a person became too difficult to work for, he threatened to walk away from the job, or did so. In more recent years, he usually only worked on renovation projects, from the initial stage to the final result, hiring people as he needed them. Anna’s parents’ place was one such project.
Anna said to Olivia, when people talk about their lives, it can seem vague, but it was as though every word he spoke was evident in the house they were occupying. She recalled, as he talked, the ruin that her parents had bought while holidaying nearby. They came to look at the house, and her father insisted on its potential while her mother was skeptical, well aware her dad was given to oblivious hope as her mother was given to rueful disparagement, letting her father know of the various failures that had come from his sanguinity. But there Anna was, sitting in the house that Jacques built, and laughing to herself at the phrase from a nursery rhyme she would have assumed Jacques didn’t know, and thinking too that perhaps he had saved her parents’ marriage. She remembered her mother saying several times to her dad that if this venture failed, she would leave him. By the time her parents arrived back, not long after Jacques had gone, she knew she was going to stay, and told them she wished to improve her French and would look for a job in the village. If there weren't any, she hoped to find one in the town they had just returned from.
7
Her parents said if she could find a job before they were due to leave in four days’ time, she could stay; otherwise she would get on the plane with them. The village had a baker, a butcher, a hairdresser, a mini-market, a cafe that also sold pizzas, and a pub that doubled up as a restaurant. It was in the cafe that she managed to secure three shifts a week, as they were looking for an extra member of staff, now that the tourist season was about to enter July. She also put up adverts in the windows of the supermarket and the bakery offering English tuition. She found two students, and with the money from the cafe she had enough cash for her needs and even bought a bike she used cycling off for her assignations in Jacques’ hut, about two miles from the village. It was an old Shepard’s cottage, made of stone, and with a red-tiled roof. He described it as a semi-conversion, with water but no electricity, a fireplace and an outside toilet. When she first saw it, Anna assumed it wasn’t his permanent home; more a retreat from whatever domestic arrangement he had. She knew Jacques had a daughter, but never quite found out if he was still in a relationship with the child’s mother; only that while he spoke often about his daughter, he spoke about her mother hardly at all. She didn’t feel it was her place to pry, though he answered questions when she asked. She knew theirs was a summer affair, and that she had no inclination to move to this village, nor the town nearby, or even the south of France. She may idly have daydreamed about moving to Paris after her degree, and Jacques joining her there, but it was a reverie in her mind; never a thought expressed or a plan with any hint of enactment.
Jacques made the few minor changes to the house, and when he was finished with a particular task. he would knock on her door and say that was the bathroom tap fixed, a plug fitted or a floorboard stabilised. He offered it in the mock tones of a 19th-century labourer to the lady of the house, but of course Anna had no money of her own, and Jacques had chosen his status in the world, not the one society designated him. The combination of mock deference, and the awareness Anna had that Jacques was his own man gave the sex much of its excitement, though she reckoned it wouldn’t have required any form of role-playing to be as glorious as it was. This wasn’t because he’d had numerous lovers - maybe no more than eight or ten, and all had been girlfriends ranging from a few months to a few years. He would say he wasn’t much of a lover-boy, in reference to a classic film he knew that Anna hadn’t seen, and it was one of about a dozen they watched when he stayed over at the house. They slept in her narrow bed, and when she proposed they sleep in the only room with a double — her parents’ — he said he didn’t think it would be appropriate. Can you imagine what Freud would say? It is bad enough Anna was sleeping with a man old enough to be her father; but to do so in her parents’ bed, too? Again, the tone was jokey, and she guessed that Jacques wanted to keep it so, as though the relationship could only end comfortably if he could retain a facetious tone to the affair. This didn’t stop him being tender, sensitive and considerate, but it did stop him making any sincere declarations of love.
Whether making love in her parents’ place or at Jacques’ hut, cycling up the hill and along a narrow, rocky path that she always thought would puncture her tyres, Anna would look forward to it but without much frustration. The sex was so satisfying that it seemed to linger in her body, awaiting no more than its augmentation. She didn’t even think of Jacques much of the time, as if he occupied a place in her flesh that could leave her mind free to think of numerous other things, including the various books she read as she went through various environmental thinkers whose work she’d only read in article form up till then. She worked her three five hour shifts a week in the cafe, and offered a total of four hours of tuition to her two students. She smiled, saying that this explained what Olivia saw as a new level of maturity: good sex with an older man, and most labours.
8
As Anna told her about Jacques and the village, the bike and the cafe, the tuition and the hut, Olivia wondered if Anna’s summer could have been so contented knowing that she would soon be parting from this man, someone throughout the time she was there that she knew so little about and who would have had other lovers, and most especially the mother of his child. Olivia believed she would have been jealous and fretful, fearful of the future, and so keen for the summer not to end that she wouldn’t have quite enjoyed it as it was unfolding. Yet when she heard Anna talk, saw the serenity she projected, Olivia could only admit this was reflecting her own anxieties and said nothing about Anna’s state.
I knew Olivia could get anxious over anything from an upcoming exam to my parents’ visiting the city; from ordering at a restaurant, to worrying about a dental appointment. Most of these are reasonable fears, but Olivia both accumulated them and promptly alleviated them. She felt immense relief after the dental appointment, once she had ordered food, when she finished the exam (even more than when she discovered she’d passed it), and didn’t worry at all after meeting my parents. She had what I might call anticipatory anxiety, but very little retrospective anxiety. She rarely worried about how she could have answered the questions better in the exam, or how she might have behaved a little differently with my parents. She wasn’t a dweller; she was an anticipator, and when she told me about Anna’s summer, I think she did so partly to draw out differences between her and her friend, even if Anna seemed neither given to dwelling fretfully nor was anxiously expectant. As for me, I guess I was more of a fretful dweller. But perhaps I alleviated this curse through often doing so in projecting my thoughts onto others, musing over situations long since passed, and giving them a new perspective. It left Olivia and me both neurotic and mutually irritating without being annoying in the same way. I tolerated her fears of the future; she accepted my focus on the events of the past. If we stayed together for as long as we did, it might have rested on this mutual tolerance.
We both saw in Anna the anomalous: someone neither of us could quite understand, and we believed that when she started seeing this person from the friend’s flat, she hadn’t so much met her match as that their paths had inevitably crossed. It felt like a crosscut in a romantic comedy, but of a certain type: a film about two overly confident characters who discover aspects of their personality they didn’t understand until they met each other. It didn’t quite turn out that way, and yet I think they both did learn something from the relationship.
Initially Anna didn’t say anything about her and her new partner’s sex life. Instead, she described how good a dancer he was, how much energy he had, and how he had perhaps the most compact, perfect body she’d ever held in her arms. She had never embraced someone where it felt so right, as though their bodies were in perfect union, like jigsaw pieces meeting their immediate neighbour. When a couple of weeks after Anna and this man started dating, Olivia met him. She admitted to me he was handsome and possessed a quality that meant she couldn’t stop looking at him. As if assuming jealousy, she quickly added that it wasn’t the handsomeness, especially, that made her say this. It was more a restlessness that meant someone wouldn’t be able to ignore a person so constantly in motion, even when relatively still. It made sense, she thought, that he worked in bars and cafes, as people should be employed less based on their educational qualifications and their class background than on their dispositional energies. She could easily imagine him at work, chatting to customers, clearing a table in seconds, and taking several orders all but at once. She thought he could be equally effective working in finance; she noticed similar energy in her father. It is the ability, she supposed, to do several things simultaneously. Her dad always accused her of doing things slowly; she insisted she did things methodically, carefully — one thing at a time. He said she wouldn’t get very far in the city; she said the economy might not have crashed if they had all been more rigorous. It was a low blow, and he matched it with a lower one: it was this careless father that was paying for her education.
Olivia would often do this — reveal details of her life parenthetically, as if she could only confess if it weren’t central to the conversation. If she didn’t multitask in most aspects of her life, this might have been one area where she did so. She said nothing more about that argument with her father, but I knew their relationship was loving and fraught, and if it looks like I should have used a different coordinating conjunction there, this would be to misconstrue an important aspect of their relationship. Attachment and antagonism were closely linked, and Olivia supposed they managed to offend each other without hating each other. She was much more worried by her mother’s critical remarks than her father’s — it wasn’t in her character to criticise, so when she did, Olivia knew it was much more justifiable.
As I asked her more about Anna’s new boyfriend, I wasn’t in any doubt this was the same person whom I’d noticed before in the film house bar. I asked a few more questions, and these seemed to confirm it. I wondered how the affair would evolve, with no woman I knew more than Anna possessing abundant sexual confidence, and no man more than this former film house barman with apparently more amorous experience at such a young age..
9
I never did get to meet Jason, and this wasn’t only because his affair with Anna lasted only four months; it was also that Anna never at all became our friend, only Olivia’s. I would see her occasionally, but often for a few minutes as Olivia would be having a coffee with Anna, and I’d come along as they were finishing up, or Olivia and I had been together, and I would walk with her to the cafe, say hello to Anna and leave them to natter. There was no reason why Jason and I should become friends, and while we knew of couples we would meet for dinner or for a film, for a drink or to sit in the Meadows, Anna and her boyfriend at the time never became one of these couples.
When Olivia told me they had parted, I first assumed Jason had cheated on Anna and, even if Anna wouldn’t have been devastated by this, her pride would have forced her to conclude the affair. I couldn’t imagine Anna cheating on him, but I did wonder if as the summer approached, she was thinking of returning to the south of France again and renewing her affair with the French handyman who was so good in bed. Olivia said that I was completely wrong about the first assumption (that Jason had cheated on her) and only tangentially right in the second.
Jason just wasn’t very good in bed, Anna had to admit. He was without doubt attractive, possessed a body that you wanted to look at and touch, eyes that could flirt with you at twenty yards, and a backside you could watch walk into the sunset - a cowboy butt, Anna had said. Anna said she thought about all these qualities as if trying to compensate for the dissatisfaction she felt every time they made love. With Jacques, she disappeared into the moment, hardly thinking of his body, firm for his age but showing signs of its years in the roughness of his skin, the burgeoning looseness of the flesh around his waist. Yet during the act, they both seemed ageless. Sex with Jason sometimes felt like mutual narcissism; their young bodies intertwined in perfect shades and tones. She had laughed as she said this, aware of the arrogance of her claim, but also trying to insist on the emptiness of the endeavour, as she said, that for all Jason’s physical qualities, he was a very bad lover. I knew, as Anna said this to Olivia, she would risk, in speaking of her own numerous experiences, making Olivia feel insecure about hers — apart from a boyfriend she dated for six months in her final year at school, and a one night stand while on a holiday with friends on a Greek island, I was her only other lover. My own experiences had been more plentiful, but hardly could compete with the mastery of Jacques, or the numerics of Jason. I was never at any risk of getting thrown out of a flat for promiscuity.
Anna said at first she thought it wasn’t sexually working because of alcohol. The first few occasions they slept together, they were both quite drunk, and while this made her lingeringly amorous, it seemed to make Jason hastily lustful -as if he wanted to quicken the deed all the better to sleep soundly. On those first occasions she needed to leave early, so she didn’t have the opportunity to see if the sex would have been different in the morning under the influence of sobriety. But then one morning she didn’t need to take off early, and the sex was no more extended. The next evening, he came to her place, and they watched a film in her room on the laptop, neither of them drinking. They had sex, and it lasted only a few minutes. Jason wasn’t at all impotent, but for the purposes of Anna’s pleasure he might have been. She’d had other lovers who were unable to sustain an erection, were prompt in achieving orgasm, and useless when it came to finding her clitoris. But none of them had a reputation as a great lover; none of them was so sexually prolific they had to look for alternative accommodation.
What could she say to this cut-price Casanova, this diminished Don Juan, this anticlimactic Byron? She didn’t want to be cruel, but just as men often receive much reverence for their womanising, it isn’t it only just that they should be ridiculed when they fall short of that reputation? She wouldn’t have mocked or undermined those other lovers who were clumsy or insecure, diffident or premature. And yet of course she shouldn’t undermine Jason either. Though the temptation was there. It was more that his mating seemed a little brutal and unequivocally selfish, and she wasn’t only thinking this because of Jacques. It was true that a couple of people she had slept with between Jacques and Jason were disappointing, but that didn’t surprise her. This did. It was as if Jason didn’t want to make love with a woman, but make war. Yet this wasn’t about choking, spitting or slapping, or any other misogynistic and surely in some instances criminal moments of sexual desire by men who thought this was what women really wanted, when all it really reflected was their own projections. This might sound odd, she said, but it seemed almost as if Jason was in a class war rather than a war of the sexes.
10
Olivia didn’t see Anna for a few weeks, but in the interim we both saw Jason even if he didn’t seem to see us. We were sitting outside at a Stockbridge cafe. The traffic trundled along the cobbled streets, but the acoustic nuisance was tolerated because of the sun’s warmth. We were seated next to each other, looking out onto the road, and offered the occasional word but mainly observed the numerous passersby on their way up to the city centre or beyond, or returning from it. Sometimes we said a few words about someone’s walk or dress sense, never cruelly, occasionally bafflingly, sometimes admiringly. Then I noticed someone across the street who was the person from the film house bar, and asked Olivia if that was Jason. She confirmed it was. He seemed preoccupied and in a hurry, and his body language was not quite as I remembered it. I asked if she was sure it was him; she was certain. She saw the face and had no doubts; I saw the body passing through space and had a moment of uncertainty. But yes, only the oblivious rush made me think otherwise. I had always seen him confidently aware of his presence and aware of others. But I only ever saw him at work.
Perhaps one reason for his preoccupation was that he was no longer with Anna. Olivia met her again a few days after the sighting, and Anna said a couple of weeks earlier she had ended the relationship. She sat Jason down and said the sex wasn’t working. At first, he was defensive, talked about his experience, and said that others seemed satisfied. Anna knew that most of these encounters were brief, and the last time he’d been in a relationship of any length was when he was nineteen. She didn’t say to him that while he may have believed he was accumulating conquests, and loving and leaving them, without much loving and very prompt leaving, maybe they were as happy as he was that the liaison had been brief. He said he accepted Anna’s decision to break up, and he wasn’t inclined to beg; he’d already been humiliated enough.
A while later he contacted her again, and the day we saw him was the day he’d seen Anna. He would have been returning home after meeting her in a town centre cafe. When they met, he didn’t say he wanted to try again, didn’t want to ask for her forgiveness and promise to be a better lover. Anna insisted he wasn’t necessarily a bad lover, but she couldn’t deny he was at least a selfish one. He said he wouldn’t deny he was the latter, but did explain there may have been a reason for it. He hadn’t told anybody this before, and that might have been the problem: he was determined to hide a reality and promote his ego. The last few years of his life had been a success from this perspective, but perhaps was beginning to feel rather like a failure. He offered it in the mixed register Anna knew he would sometimes adopt (including that first meeting in the flat), but this time with rueful irony over assertive cleverness, and added that he was happy in his body but not always so at ease in his mind. He said what he was telling her now wasn’t at all an attempt to win her back; his telling was predicated on accepting they had parted, and he didn’t think what he was going to say would hurt her since she wanted the split. She asked if he was sure he wanted to tell her, as Anna insisted that while she respected people’s secrets, she also liked to share with close friends aspects of her partner’s lives if they impacted on hers. Jason reckoned she could tell who she liked. It wasn’t so shameful, and maybe far less so than being deemed a poor lover. If he could, he would maybe now like to speak about it with everybody he had slept with.
11
He said the person he was with between seventeen and nineteen was a special passion. Before it, he was inexperienced and so was she, but between them they learned how to please each other and to trust each other, and he believed they would be together for the rest of their lives. This might have been the naive thoughts of teenagers, but it was one friends of theirs shared in the context of the people they were dating. They were seen as the couple who would stay together while all the others would spend years figuring out who they were and what they wanted. Anna knew Jason was a good footballer, but he hadn’t told her that he turned professional at eighteen and was effectively retired six months later with a broken ankle. It took many months to recover, and perhaps a club more patient than the one he was with, or if he had been a brilliant player instead of merely a very good one, would have kept him on. But they let him go, and when he couldn’t find another club, though his injury was no longer a problem, he lost confidence. He was also seen as injury-prone, and who would have risked taking on a player who, in his first professional season, had missed more than half of it?
At the same time, his girlfriend started university, and while everyone saw her future as a lawyer, he would have been equally remunerated as a footballer. Their professions may have been very different, but not their salaries. No longer a professional footballer, he didn’t know how he could earn more than a basic salary, and that had become the case ever since. Anna asked him if he really believed his girlfriend left him because he would have been unlikely to earn as much as she. He admitted no, that would be to misrepresent her. Yet his realisation that he probably wouldn’t meant he lost more than his faith in his footballing skills. She left for a variety of reasons, but she did leave during the second year of her law degree for someone who was in his final year, and not so long after Jason’s ankle had recovered. He then had to recover from a broken heart that took a lot longer to heal.
Anna didn’t doubt it, supposed it was still healing, and that he’d been putting sex into a splint ever since, never quite trusting his emotions enough to please anybody in the act but himself. Anna then asked him an odd question: did he usually pursue middle-class girls like herself? She wasn’t quite sure what motivated this query, but saw in his expression that it wasn’t irrelevant. He replied not exclusively, yet her question seemed to imply that his sexual conquests weren’t merely or even especially desirous but vengeful, and she was reminded of a story by an Edinburgh writer. In it, a man with a small penis takes off his clothes while the woman waits for him in bed. Seeing the size of his member, she laughs and asks who he thinks he is going to please with that. He replies, himself. In the story, the male character seeks pleasure, not revenge; Jason’s penis wasn’t small, but he seemed vengeful. He might not have been laughed at before getting into bed, but he might have felt undermined long before the encounter, and justified the selfishness of his performance on that basis. These were thoughts that came to Anna after the discussion, and she might not have expressed them even if they’d occurred to her during the meeting. She may have been a little too open with sharing information with friends about her lovers, but she was discreet in her way when with them. For example, Jason never knew anything about Jacques; he didn’t know that she had a summer of deep sexual pleasure that made her encounters with Jason seem all the more coitally shallow. As she spoke to Olivia about some of these things, Anna said she wondered if after speaking about his first love, Jason would now change the way he had sex with women. She hoped that though she was younger than Jason, and Jacques had been much older than her, perhaps she might in her way have allowed Jason to grow as a lover.
12
When Olivia spoke to me about what Anna had said, and reiterated about growing as a lover, I thought it was a triter phrase than I believed Anna would have allowed, but something in what she said rankled more than the phrasing. There was little reason for Olivia to speak to me about Anna’s love affairs. I didn’t know of any other friends’ amorous life, and I couldn’t convince myself she had told me about Anna’s because I said I remembered Jason from working in the film house bar. After all, Olivia told me all about Jacques, and I certainly had never met him before. I might just have assumed Olivia was telling me because Anna had told her, and Anna was the only friend Olivia had who was so frank about her sexual life. That would seem plausible, but it didn’t feel instinctively true, as I found myself wondering about my own behaviour in bed. I was a more experienced lover than Olivia, but what does that mean, and more especially so after a man with more sexual encounters than most, with so many that he was expelled from a given property for his promiscuity, was deemed by Anna a poor one? It made experience seem an inadequate barometer of amatory prowess.
I found myself thinking also about those conversations I would have with the other students, about why they weren’t willing to go to the very film house where Jason worked and where I would often see films. Were they expressing their inadequacies or announcing their class feelings, and was it always easy to separate the two? I had thought at the time, and still believe now, that they were denying themselves a great chance to see films they loved on a screen that would emphasise the details in the image that, when we talked, they sometimes commented upon. These were films made for the cinema, and while of course many people would be watching them at home, and most of the experience could still be conveyed on the small screen, it seemed unfair to the filmmakers that they were refusing to view the work as it was originally intended. Yet they didn’t see it that way, of course — they said the original intention was not to sit in a room with other middle-class people watching a cultural artefact; it would have been to watch it with a mixed crowd, seeing it as a film they went to enjoy. Viewing it on TV forty years after it was made seemed more authentic to the original encounter.
I didn’t agree with them then, and still don’t. But their arguments possessed a soundness that was, in many ways, more valid than any I have heard when people insist films should be seen in the cinema. Those who offer the latter rarely invoke an individual viewer; only an ideal one. The students on the course insisted on their individuality, even if central to it may have been their class insecurity. And in his way did Jason not insist too on his singularity, enough for me to believe that he could become central to a story and not merely offered up as an anecdote? I had seen Jason as the good-looking and nonchalant barman, even if I also noticed a different quality to that insouciance than those actors who would assert their presence during the film festival. Discovering that this barman was the same person who would sleep with many women was no surprise, nor that he and Anna would get together. He would appear a successful type, but not quite worthy of singular characterisation. What made him so, to me, was the idea that all these notches on the bedpost could be seen as accumulated failures instead of successes, and that, from another perspective, one which seemed to be his, this wasn’t failure. It was vengeance. Or rather, a way of protecting himself against a loss that Anna would have seen as its accumulation, as he had encounter after encounter that still left him with the loss of his first love, without creating the opportunity for a new one to replace her. It was as though fling after fling made him feel more in control, yet at what cost? I don’t think Anna would have pretended to know; her purpose was only to tell him he was not making love; he was screwing people, and she would have been surprised if he was in the process capable of satisfying them. He certainly didn’t satisfy her. How much Anna said this to him; how much she said to Olivia, I couldn’t quite say. But Olivia believed Anna was obviously direct enough about it for Jason to reveal his teenage disappointment.
13
Olivia and I remained together for another nine months as I became more alert to her sexual needs than I may have been before that, and I might have perhaps partly believed it was because of Jason. I asked her if she told me about what Anna had told her, partly as a way of proposing that while I may have had more sexual experience than she, I yielded it with confidence, but not always with understanding. She explained that when in bed I was like a male tango dancer who thought it was his role to lead, and she supposed that while the idiom may propose it takes two to tango, she knew, from her brief involvement in the tango society after she started her degree, that may be so. But one person is usually in charge. She admitted she discussed this with Anna and, while I was initially annoyed, she added that while Anna may have been more explicit in discussing her affairs than any of her female friends, nevertheless men would be naive to assume women don’t often share aspects of their sex lives with others. Olivia said these weren’t criticisms of me; they were reservations about me. She wondered how much Jason might have benefited from those reservations by his numerous lovers, rather than waiting for Anna to offer them up as unequivocal criticism. Anna believed that with all his encounters, Jason hadn’t created the intimacy for such a conversation to be possible, and didn’t doubt that though Jason’s reputation may have been high amongst male friends, who would have seen him leave a bar with woman after woman, his reputation amongst women was probably very low indeed. But that is the question Anna supposed: some men are more interested in how they are seen in male peers’ eyes than in the presence of the person they are supposed to be making love with. At first, she believed this was so with Jason and went along, so to speak, for the ride: she saw in him other qualities that she liked, even if he might have been under the impression it was chiefly a sexual relationship. It was instead, for her, an observational one, as she often found herself watching this man whose appearance she found pleasing, whose movements attracted her and to whose humour she often responded. As far as she knew, he was faithful to her during their months together, and yet she believed that when it was over, it was over. While she didn’t doubt that if Jason were to see that he was taking revenge out on others because he never knew how to recover from his ex, he might be the sort of person she wished in the future she could meet, if she hadn’t already been the person who helped him confront that past. That was a complicated formulation, she admitted, and maybe an arrogant one. She joked that she had played her role; now maybe someone would soon benefit from it.
14
Olivia and I parted without much animosity. She finished her degree, and knew she would probably move away from Edinburgh. We talked a little about the flexibility of my own work as a language teacher, saying it was probable I could find employment wherever she decided to go, whether in the UK or beyond. But I didn’t wish to move, and I never sensed Olivia especially wanted me to go with her. It seemed we were made for each other spatially but not temporally - we were a couple in a given place that wouldn’t survive deracination. That wasn’t quite how we put it, and it comes as a formulation to me now only because I probably subconsciously wished to believe it as a way of accepting the loss, without quite accepting responsibility. Olivia and I agreed we wouldn’t be in contact, and the cleanness of the break seemed to be working, as I would dwell only for short periods on Olivia, and spend more time going out, drinking with friends, playing tennis, a bit of football and, yes, having the occasional encounter with women I may not have satisfied any more successfully than Jason. I wasn’t looking for love; I was looking for satisfaction, and I began to think that, while pleasure was mutual, satisfaction was solitary. At least I didn’t think I was taking out my revenge on anyone; merely seeing casual encounters as precisely that. I wasn’t in any great pain, neither physical nor mental; hadn’t suffered a broken bone ruining my career, or a loss of confidence before, during and after a breakup. Friends sometimes asked if I was alright, but they never needed to come round and sit in with me. Instead, we would go out, buy rounds, and if we went to mine, it was usually after a drinking session and our determination to continue it. I was doing this most weekends, while remaining sober all week.
I assumed Olivia had left the city, probably Anna as well, and Jason I expected to see at some moment or other, working in a bar or cafe, or seducing someone in one or the other. Yet when I did see him, a couple of months after Olivia and I parted, the person he seemed to be seducing was my own ex-girlfriend. It was a Saturday afternoon. I’d slept over at someone’s flat in Stockbridge the previous evening, and we walked for an hour, had a hungover brunch, and parted after it. We had exchanged fluids, but we didn’t exchange numbers. I lay in Inverleith park for an hour, absorbing the rays and half-sleeping. I woke dishevelled, but relieved I’d asked that morning to take a shower before we went out. My clothes might not have been clean, but my body didn’t smell. I walked along Raeburn Place, the pavement cluttered with shoppers, push chairs, and cafe tables that had been multiplied as everyone wanted a latte in the sun. At a table on the other side of the street, I saw Olivia and Anna, Jason and another man. I might have assumed that Jason and Anna were back together, but nothing in their body language suggested it, and she was sitting beside someone twice her age who I believed might have been Jacques. Jason and Olivia were seated next to each other. No gesture indicated they were a couple. I slowed my walk but remained, I hoped, unseen, as I mingled amongst the many on my side of the street and witnessed between Jason and Olivia a proximity that seemed to me more than friendship. While Anna and the man she was with showed a warm intimacy towards each other, I viewed in Olivia and Jason’s gestures the hesitancy of a burgeoning romance.
15
I never saw any of them again: perhaps this had been because Anna and Jacques had moved to France; perhaps Jason and Olivia were about to embark on a relationship, and had moved to a town or city where she would find work and he would be working in a bar, or a café, or perhaps he had found another way to make a living, if not a fortune. For a while after this sighting, I dwelt a lot on the situation, and couldn’t but wonder whether Jason had learned from Anna’s advice and had become a better lover, with Olivia soon to be or already the recipient of this improved performance. I vacillated between cynicism and poignancy, between missing Olivia more than I did after we parted, and realising how much of this world was nebulous, based on second-hand information, partial observation and speculation. Yet if I believe I have rescued all this from anecdote, it may rest on understanding lives other than our own. We may believe we are the centre of the world, and a certain branch of philosophy has made such a claim. But I sometimes think we often fail to understand ourselves, just as we cannot easily see ourselves. Yes, there are mirrors, just as there is what we take to be inner consciousness.
However, it is as if we have only so much access to our interiority; just as mirrors give us limited purview as we look into them. In some way I believe I understand Jason better than I comprehend myself, and this might be the paradox of the tale and the attempt to raise it above the anecdotal. It isn’t just the horrible irony of a girlfriend telling me about a friend’s relationship with a man who proved to be sexually inadequate, and may have resolved that inadequacy with my ex the beneficiary of it. Even more, I feel, it is out of the stories I have heard, the observations I have made over the years, and that started with the casual musing of a person in the film house bar, to seeing him sitting in a cafe years later next to my girlfriend, that I have witnessed another man’s life as I will never be able to witness my own. I am reminded of a comment a star made when receiving a lifetime achievement award. He said he knew a great supporting actor once, whose wife claimed he was soon to die, and he wanted this actor to write an obituary for him. The star wrote the obituary and feared the worst, but the actor didn’t pass away. Months went by. Still, he was alive. The star eventually asked about the actor’s health, and his wife insisted he was doing just fine. He asked the star and others to write obituaries for him so he knew what others thought of him while he was still living. The star said this was how he felt winning a lifetime achievement award as others came up on stage, talking about his person and his career.
The actor was, for some, too young to win such an award (he was under sixty), and Jason was still in his twenties. And of course he didn’t know what I knew: hadn’t seen the confidence with which he moved, nor the hesitations he expressed when compared to the greater certainty actors showed when occupying the same bar. He wouldn’t have known that I knew what he had told Anna, who had told Olivia, and he may not have known that one reason why Anna may have been so bold in speaking to him about his sexual performance was because of the older lover she had been with, and who may well have been the man Jason was meeting as he sat with Olivia and Anna in the cafe I noticed them in. All our lives accumulate perceptions and remarks from others, and most of them we will never know very much about. For all the people who have looked us in the eye as we have held a conversation with them, how many others have noticed us at a distance or out of our sight? How many who have passed us on the street and have made a barely conscious observation - that we smell nicely or badly; our haircut is successful or disastrous; our shoes something they’d aspire to wear or would be determined to avoid.
This is something we can all think about idly, but seeing Jason and Olivia sitting in such proximity that day made it feel both hurtful and eerie. I sensed at the time, while the hurt was stronger as I was convinced of an affair developing between Olivia and Jason, that the eeriness would take far longer to recover from. Jason may have accumulated lovers only to discover that, while the men who saw him leave the bar with various women might have been looking on appreciatively, and those who evicted him from the flat disapprovingly, his lovers may have been consistently disappointed. All of them (machismo admirers, umbraged flatmates, and frustrated lovers) might have all had something to say - but don’t people have something to say about all of us? Yet for whatever reason, this feeling that everyone is talking about us rarely leads to paranoia, and, as I saw Jason sitting at the cafe, he didn’t seem paranoid at all.
However, for a long time afterwards I felt as if a variation of that state: as if so aware that people were talking about others, observing others, then why wouldn’t they be doing the same with me? It was as though Olivia leaving, and sitting there with Jason, made the accumulated backwash of Jason’s sexual inadequacies seem potentially weak next to my own. Olivia may or may not have left me for a man who had numerous qualities, as well as one he needed to improve upon, but what did I have? I didn’t quite know, as the time with Olivia, the flings, and then the solitude I would settle into for a long period afterwards, made me feel simultaneously very alone, and also a particular type - perhaps an upper middle class version of Jason, and with neither the looks nor the wit to distinguish myself, no matter how distinguished rather than common I might have been deemed to be.
I was often reminded during this time of my remarks to my fellow students on the adult education class, and could no longer see myself as someone who had listened carefully and judged their arguments with consideration. I believed that I did, but I suspect what they witnessed was someone with a voice that couldn’t eradicate its condescension, and would have been more at home in the film house than he was in that classroom, where he might have been the only one to extend his vowels. Many, I suppose, feel class shame as a reflection of their relative poverty. I started to feel it from a position of privileged assumption that I couldn’t squirm out of. I haven’t been to the film house for a long time now. While I still watch many films, and while I find them ever more fascinating as artefacts that capture worlds of human existence in sounds and images, I am not so sure when I will see again, in an art house setting, these classics to which I feel so close.
© Tony McKibbin