Thing Friday
a story inspired by Baudelaire's 'L'Horloge'
I. Pleasure
Undressing in front of his window, Lambert moves slowly. He removes his undershirt, then drops and steps out of his boxer shorts, which he kicks towards the wainscotting in pursuit of his tossed vest. He stretches and clenches his toes, naked in the square of dawn sunlight, as though to extract its warmth from the worn, striated rug.
He inhales, raising his arms to the front, and exhales, lowering them; he raises them to his sides. After holding this position for a moment, arms outstretched, he raises them further, over his head, and pushes the feeling of extension until he feels the tweaking hoist of his testicles every time his diaphragm is tensed.
Preliminary stretches complete, Lambert opens the window. He dallies in its frame surveying the courtyard and the closed shutters of lay-a-bed neighbours, before glancing down to the apartment of Lespès, who, as every morning, can be seen stretching, also naked, in front of his own open window. Lambert offers a friendly wave, to which his neighbour responds mid-squat, without adjusting his motion.
How Lambert admires the man: the consistency and control of his every move, his focus, the great big belly on him; the hanging dugs, the sagging rolls, the length of his distended scrotum.
One day,
he thinks,
I will be a man like him—
Without further sign or exchange, Lambert starts imitating.
He had adopted Lespès’ routine knowing nothing about him, not then, nor since, having spoken to him, only encountering the marvellous display one morning by chance, waking at what then would have been an unusual hour, and seeing his neighbour, at least twenty years his senior, in a position most would consider compromising. Throughout the day that followed, Lambert had not been able to stop thinking about the monumental body, the macabre marbling of Lespès’ varicose veins, the stretch marks that lined his swollen gut, the many clefts and folds of flesh into which Lambert’s mind was inexorably drawn; and how florid, how purple the old corpulent had seemed, and yet, at once, so pale. His eyes in particular seemed to bare no pigment, their voided, lucent globes rolled heavenward, catching a reflected beam of sunlight as he arched his head back in a more demanding pose.
In subsequent days, Lambert found himself drawn to his window again, observing discreetly, doing little more, initially, than checking his neighbour was there, before gradually coming to watch him, making his watching known, and finally starting to copy him. Whatever complicity the men have been able to establish occurred through this pattern of increasingly less-inhibited presence: in the window, in the window watching, in the window no longer clothed, in the window mimicking.
Lambert is yet to achieve what his old neighbour so naturally accomplishes, so far partaking only in the basic elements of the routine—squats and bends—yet to follow into his advanced contortions and écartements. But he is in no hurry. He trusts his training will progress at a natural rhythm, the one to which he has already succumbed, confident his body, when ready to push further, will take with grace to every gesture in its turn.
There is no sense that either man wants anything from the other, not in the kind of conscious way that leads to what one might call desire.
*
Fully erect, though with no intention of acting on it, Lambert repairs to the spare room. There, before releasing his guest from the ties binding them to the bedposts, Lambert takes a deep breath; how thick and heavy this morning’s fug is. Its richness further charges his arousal. The heat. The airlessness. The bodily smells. The excretions. How his throat and nostrils are coating with it, having settled from last night’s frenzy, its panic. Picking up his newest charm from the bedside table, he leans back against the door, against the gowns and robes, the ropes, straps and harnesses that hang there, and lauds himself for the world he has engendered, a universe manifest by the object in his hand.
Having taken the desired souvenir while his guest was indisposed, Lambert now lets them loose to remove their blindfold and recoil among the marred and knotty covers. He does not acknowledge them as he goes to open the curtains: the room must be aired out so that next time his concoction is unique. He opens the windows fully, though does not undo the padlock keeping the shutters closed. It will be a week at least before the room is fresh enough to welcome another guest.
Lambert leaves, tooth in hand, to shower and change, the door to the spare room open behind him, apartment at his visitor’s disposal. He has not, as he might have, were he a more considerate host, left out towels or a little note to explain that his guest can help themselves to breakfast—there is no food in the cupboards anyway, and were his guest to try to rummage around, they would discover that Lambert has locked every cabinet and drawer, as well as the door to his bedroom. With what his experience has taught him, however, he knows his guest won’t hang about, and so can head, lithe and fresh, into the Paris sunshine confident of a secure domain.
II. The Now
In the street, Lambert would pass for no one. He is not tall or robust—not magnificent in the way that Lespés is, grotesquely—yet neither is he short or notably feeble. He is a man of averages, of characterless autonomy, the pressing question less how might one describe him than whether he manages to give this impression by chance or willingly contrived anonymity.
In any moment he is not being witnessed, Lambert likes to think he does not exist. This is no less true when surrounded by a crowd, as he is now, strolling through the brocante at Edgar Quinet, than when he is alone in his apartment with the shutters closed, whether in the company of a blindfolded guest or not.
He is ambivalent about being seen, however, and does not hide from sight. Whether he suspects he is, or is paranoid about, being observed, as we are now observing him, is something I have yet to determine—even with my inside line on fate—, but feel compelled to note that Lambert is not far from the truth in believing that if we were not here to witness him, he would not exist.
He is losing his hair, I can tell you that about him, which is mousy, his complexion pale, and does nothing to mitigate its loss, appearing, indeed, in his customary button-down and khaki slacks not to make any effort regarding style or how he presents himself—unless you have concluded that dressing so blandly is a decision he studiously makes.
There is no clear source for the pleasure Lambert takes in this notion of his non-existence. It is not a reaction to a slight or embarrassment, a having found himself at the brutal end of wanton and unconscionable cruelty or excruciating focus. No one incident established his tastes or mores; he has suffered no heartbreak or set-back that has left him opposed to, disgusted with, or cowering from the world. He does not try to evade or conceal—his banality notwithstanding—, though can sometimes be caught, if one pays attention, smirking at the thought that he probably should, that by being out and about in the world, he is getting away with something.
They have no idea what I am,
he thinks,
and imagine I am one of them.
*
Sauntering between stands, Lambert is drawn to a table on which there is a box displaying antique glass eyes in a variety of different colours. The seller seems something of a specialist in the optical, hawking Snellen charts, old pairs of spectacles, assorted lenses, and other curios—medical diagrams, engravings, knick-knacks, and vintage editions of Bataille—all ocular. For the pleasure of feeling it in his hand, he picks a glass eye out and rolls it in his palm, weighing it. He considers adding it to his own collection of souvenirs. It lacks heft though, he decides. He is imagining what it might feel like on his tongue, pushed against his cheek, making it bulge to the point of ache or staring back at him from the anus of a ligatured guest. He senses the vendor watching him.
Not weighty enough,
he says aloud, going on to specify, interiorly, that the problem is not the weight but its lack of charge, the absence of the kind of density—kinetic, solemn, gravitational—in the objects he likes to collect.
Too rhetorical,
he tells the vendor.
With his wares perhaps having a tendency to attract a more eccentric kind of customer, the seller accepts this equanimously, allowing Lambert to wander off without pressing him for further explanation.
*
A miniature tenor saxophone in a red-velour-lined case. Candlesticks. A table of antique, deadlock keys, the locks to which they belonged long abandoned or lost. Vinyl. Racks of clothes. Pairs and pairs of boots and shoes. Cases of cheaply made children’s books and hardcover comic book annuals. Porcelain powder boxes and glass ashtrays of every design and dimension. Wooden objets d’art—all sourced, or so the hand-written sign claims—from Afrique noire. Boxes of loose and assorted toys; plastic junk. Magazines and mass-market paperbacks; VHS cassettes, CDs. Surgical instruments: DISPLAY ONLY. Wooden wine boxes full of vintage postcards. Old signage. Old posters. Old photographs. A ménagerie of ornamental animals, farmyard and exotic. Glassware, crockery, knives and forks.
Lambert isn’t looking at anything at all. There is a comfort to browsing, an equivalent nothing to going unseen, especially wanting for nothing, sated by the previous evening’s exertions. His gourmand eye slowly scans the trestles along the boulevard, their disarray and chaos, open always to possibility—but how gaudy and cheap their goods all seem, how empty and unnourishing, how exhausted.
He thinks about the molar he extracted. How alone it decorates his dresser, placed there, once rinsed, for him to admire, its glint of filling, its roots extending rigid, like competing turgid pricks. How unique it is: charged object. His only desire now is to be back in its presence. To look at it there against the dark stain of the wood, see it doubled in the dresser top mirror, and see himself there, a dream of power: to believe he had brought the object into being, tabula rasa. To imagine what else he is able to bring forth. Surely his guest will have fled by now. He turns on his heel and starts for way home.
III. Time
If you would like to know more about how Lambert developed, no particular incident, event or experience—as I have said— that could be flagged as traumatic or picked out as inciting having aroused his proclivities, allow me to enlighten you:
Growing up south of the capital, his childhood was solitary if not lonely. He had quickly become accustomed to relative isolation, being an only child and bearing none of the characteristics that might have made him popular at school: he was neither good-looking nor sporty, and was not gifted artistically, unable to act, play an instrument or carry a tune, and seeming to lack the imaginative functions which might have pushed him towards other creative outlets. Academically, he was below average. He wasn’t, however, entirely friendless, being briefly, particularly close with the set of twins, one boy one girl, who lived next door, though who, being Catholic and wealthy, went to a different, private school.
At weekends and in the holidays, they would play in the château grounds and woodlands of Parc de Sceaux, or would spend hours in extended fantasies from their base of operations in the Wendy house in the De-Lestoille twins’ back garden. In these games, Lambert’s role was a supporting one, the action directed by the brother—being ever so slightly older—while the sister played second-in-command. Lambert responded well to orders, secure providing fodder to imagined antagonists or taking on that responsibility himself, with never any yen for improvisation. Often the De-Lestoille girl would be rescued from him by her brother, and he might be made to walk the plank or be shot standing against the Wendy house wall or, even, on one frightful occasion that left him with rope burn along his jaw, hanged. Lambert never complained about his fate. He liked not to think, and be told what he was for. At her brother’s instruction, Lambert had shared his first kiss with the De-Lestoille girl—his second, soon to follow, on her command, providing the boy with his.
After a few short years, the twins themselves no longer interested in spending time together, Lambert was cast aside. By the time he would have noticed, however, Lambert was too absorbed in his own interests to care. When not playing with the twins—and indeed when he was but had been banished from their playhouse, excluded from their intense, aloof complicity, or had simply wandered off—Lambert had been developing his gift for spotting the unusual, and finding objects on the ground. In the woodland, such might include owl pellets, the bones of small mammals and shotgun casings. He started to think of himself as a collector, coming gradually always to be on the look-out for things to add to the shoebox kept under his bed. Initially, he was not discerning, happy to pick up bottle caps or discarded lighters, lost pieces of clothing, shards of pottery and weathered glass. With time, though, his tastes refined, and he would weigh the objects he came across in his hand, assessing their charge, his gathering having bent towards some inarticulable end.
He maintained this habit throughout his adolescence and his studies, carried over when he moved into Paris. Old objects were discarded, and new objects acquired. He learned that the things he found could lose the charge he had initially felt, and could be replaced. Urban and scholarly items, things forgotten in the lecture halls or picked up from under tables in student bars, replaced the natural, woodland things. He started regularly visiting vide greniers and brocantes.
When he met friends to play tarot, he would sometimes offer the winners of their games one of the curios from his collection, which they would accept with bemusement, their source or apparent value never explained. Lambert enjoyed witnessing his fellow-players’ perturbation, and even more so their attempts to offer thanks and act pleased with their prizes, especially when the object in question had long ceased to mean anything to him. He enjoyed the power with which his awarding imbued them, and saw how easily he could sacralise even the most tawdry thing.
Moving in with woman who would briefly be his wife was the next step in Lambert’s development. She had a terrarium with geckos and another with a bearded dragon; together they then bought a snake. Lambert took to preserving the reptiles’ shed skins, delighted with the rediscovery of the charged objects nature could offer up. He decorated their tanks with other items from his collection. When one of the geckos died, in secret, he boiled the flesh from its bones.
And he collected the things his wife shed too: hair, toe nail clippings, an occasional item of stained or soiled clothing, pieces of jewellery or keepsakes she would assume had been mislaid. At no point did she ever learn of his collecting.
Then Lambert began to withdraw, both from his wife and the few friends he had, his obsession with his objects ever more demanding. He had started trying to combine them, taking the things he would find and creating fetishes from them, outfitting cast-iron soldiers in reptile skin, stuffing empty matchboxes with clumps of hair and dust bunnies and gems prised from costume jewellery; he would smash up objects and reassemble them. He had thought that these combinations and accretions, the reconstitutions, would deepen the objects’ charge, but very soon understood it was not the case. Having already been disappointed by his failure to incorporate his own bodily disjecta into the charms he was trying to make, he quickly realised that collage was more prone to sapping the power of a given object, even those from his collection that he thought to be most potent, than enhancing or evolving it. As a consequence of his experiments, seeing they resulted only in diminishment, and applying the pattern uncovered to the grander scale of his current and aspired to existence, Lambert decided he would leave his wife.
*
Once his marriage was over, there were only the tarot games providing any regular, social human contact, but very soon they faltered too. “I’ve got a thing,” became his refrain:
I can’t that day. I’ve got a thing,
or:
Week after, no, I’ve got something on
most often:
Friday? I’ve got a thing Friday.
The greatest and most valuable objects conceivable, his years of experimenting had left him conclude, would not be those he found, picked up second- or god-knows-how-many-hand, they would not be mere amalgamations, ham-fisted attempts to graft one charged item onto another, no child he might have been persuaded to conceive, but rather things which were unique, without precedent: not items with a power solely recognised by him but those only afforded their power through him, by Lambert himself, objects his attention alone discerned, his taste, eye, his sense of weightiness, and which only he was capable of retrieving, but which did not—could not—come from him.
By then, he had started bringing guests into his home.
IV. Chance
Lambert is sitting at a café he frequents observing the vendors dismantle their market stalls in Place Jacques-Demy. He had once considered post-market detritus richly providential, unbought fruit and vegetables, more often than not rejected thanks to deformity or rot, and the off-cuts from the fish and meat sellers, supplying no small number of objects from which he once might have attempted to assemble a fetish. He thinks back on those days with amusement,
How immature I was.
He ashes his cigarette, careful to observe the patterns left by its ashing. In his mature years, he is no less observant than he ever was, not having let—much to his credit, one would have to agree—the refine- and development of his practices leave him either complacent or jaded. He has retained his interpretative inkling toward depraved and perverse potential, keeping him within touching distance of the grotesque and the divine.
As he sits there watching sinewy men hoist their plyboard storefronts on top of their vans and fold away their trestles, counting up their takes, Lambert becomes conscious of a peculiar customer stepping onto the terrasse and taking a seat behind him. They are peculiar to him in that Lambert cannot tell whether they are a man or a woman: they are wearing dark-blue bootcut jeans with a high waist and visible brass buttoning, a Breton stripe long-sleeve t-shirt, tucked in, and are carrying a tote and a woman’s purse. Their outfit, to him, says female, but their build, he concludes, with his knowledge of how people’s figures are formed, skews male. There is nothing in how their face is arranged to tip him off either way. What is most peculiar, however, to Lambert, is their haircut: with their masculine figure and feminine attire, they are wearing their hair in a severe black bob, fringe high and blunt, it’s colour—unquestionably, he thinks—a dye job, so deep, dark and uniform it is. He finds he is immediately aroused: this figure, this person, in their get-up, is charged.
Since first catching sight of Lespès in his window, Lambert had realised that a person, an individual in and of themselves, might be, or become through mutual observation—or, indeed, under one-another’s hand—the manner of charged presence, one of sublime intensity, that proximity to which he had dreamt of for so long. Such would be a manner of deity that might, finally, assure his existence, and bring him out into the living world from his ossuary of notice and collection; a god unique to him and his capacity for recognition, his wonder at their emergence and his devotion to their worship: someone to make an object out of him.
It is a different pull than Lambert would feel when looking for a guest, whether he encountered them in bars, cruising, or on the apps. He was catholic in his tastes, prioritising only the sense of charge he discovered in how a person looked, their photos, the way they moved or even how they texted. He had quickly learned that the collection of valuable artefacts had no bearing on whether or not he was attracted to the person he brought back to his apartment—though admittedly some manner of sexual complicity generally made the processes of retrieval all the easier. But his interest was purely extractive, a potential he sensed in the magnetism a guest expressed, a premonition he would find something within them he could take for himself. It was not the same thing with Lespès, nor was it with the androgyne on the terrasse.
They have ordered an espresso, and are now, too, smoking a long, thin cigarette. They appear entirely unaware that there is anybody else in the café, nor are they in the least bit interested in the comings-and-goings of passers-by or the dismantling of the market, which, though Lambert is no longer watching intently, his attention having been co-opted by their arrival, still makes him turn his head with every heavy clank, slam or drop that resounds from across the square. The customer seems oblivious to it—or too haughty to care—, not giving the slightest flinch or reaction to anything going on around them. Lambert cannot quite settle on the manner of their remove, making them all the more fascinating.
The longer he sits there in their thrall, the faster his pulse grows. He becomes aware of a flush spreading up his neck and beads of sweat forming on his brow. It is as though the charge he recognises is exerting a barometric pressure, no longer merely a sense of attraction, some abstract aura, but physically manifest in sensation, in Lambert’s breath quickening and his temples starting to throb. He knows that he must speak to them, and in usual circumstances would not be shy to make an approach—he is practised enough—, but he finds he can’t lift himself out of his chair. Were he to try to stand, he thinks, he would topple sideways and collapse, all the blood having rushed to his head. He goes to take a drag of his cigarette but realises it has gone out. Only once re-lit, and having taken a shaky, shallow puff, does he notice that his nose is bleeding, the filter and his fingers all covered with his blood. He reaches for the handkerchief in his back pocket, but too late to save his shirt. Rarely in his life has he felt so ashamed, never as conspicuous as he now feels.
V. Virtue
That night Lambert dreams of the De-Lestoille twins, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, identical, no more than ten years old. He is watching them through the window of a Wendy house set in an immense, long garden bordered by Italian poplars. It is dusk and the siblings are playing house, the girl preparing dishes at an imaginary stove and bringing them to her brother, who is sitting at the table.
The girl lays out the last of the dishes and kisses her brother on the cheek, requesting one from him in return before she takes her seat. Lambert turns away as her request is met, and notices his shirt is covered in blood. He is bleeding heavily from the mouth.
He hurriedly tries to remove it; he doesn’t want them to see. He knows they know he’s watching. He shuts his eyes, and rests his head against the window pane.
Inside, the room is dark; Lambert is naked and his mouth is no longer bleeding. The children are sitting outside on the lawn, the sky is golden, dawn or dusk, grass streaked with the shadows of the poplars; a third figure is directing them to kiss one another. They are laughing.
Lambert sees them stand. They push their chairs in under the table, and the husband, a grown man, takes the dirty plates to the sideboard,
Don’t worry about it. Leave them for the morning.
He cannot tell from where the voice is coming, its tones neither masculine nor feminine. He presses his ear to the glass in the hope of hearing more, and the unlocked window slowly opens. Lambert climbs inside. He knows they must have gone upstairs, he can hear people moving around above him.
There is one lit room at the end of the corridor, the only door left open. Lambert hears giggling. He creeps along the wall and peeks beyond the jamb. He sees the girl with her hands inside her brother, pulling open his stomach just under the sternum. Both of the children are gayly laughing. When the hole is big enough she clambers in.
*
Lambert has concluded that he has no choice other than to return to the café every day in the hopes of seeing the androgyne. Though not on name terms with the staff, he is too much of a regular to reveal the intensity of his interest by inquiring if any of them has seen someone of the person’s description or if they otherwise have any information about them. It would not be hard to single them out, he is sure, but he cannot bring himself to put words to how they look; he would not know how to describe their charge, and in failing there, has found the clarity of their image in his head has started fading. Was it female features and a masculine form or the inverse? He can recall their clothes and haircut, but such surface details seem irrelevant. What he wants is to be able to describe their face, describe their body, and he has not managed to do that, even to himself.
The day he had seen them, once home, he had worked himself up into a state of arousal with little more than the thought of finding himself in their presence again, but stalled when willing his fantasies towards the more concrete. The need to satisfy his lust insisting, he could not picture, in his mind, their body or face.
Getting up from his sofa, he went to find the molar, the souvenir taken from his most recent guest, and clasped it in his fist as he masturbated slowly, hoping it might hold some residual power. His efforts however were half-hearted. He knew that the charge of an object could not be transferred, and indeed any left would be exhausted by attempts to parlay what remained onto a new, and in being so, more potent object. Still, having nothing left to lose, he didn’t mind sacrificing the tooth, and with it several other, older fetishes.
If only,
he thought, when finally giving up,
I had managed to take something from them, anything at all. I could have asked for a tissue or to borrow their lighter, at least to tide me over until getting something better!
And so he went back, and goes back, at the same hour he had been there the first time, and for three days stays hopeful that the androgyne will return, and after three days his hope wanes but his visits increase, and he admonishes himself for not realising sooner that he would have been better off spending all day there than trying to out-manœuvre fate—always arriving at the same hour, sitting at the same table, telling himself that if he orders the same drink or does not check his phone or does not smoke more than one cigarette, he will have replicated conditions perfectly—as though thinking he could play it out strategically.
Market days have come and gone. He has never been as devoted in his life to the new routine he has set about, an act of presence he considers of the highest virtue, and not one that will be without its rewards.
Six days into his extended vigil, Lespès enters the café and sits at the bar.
VI. Repentance
For the first time in a long time, Lambert feels a melancholy at having no one in his life, no friend to whom to say, when they ask him to join them for a game of cards:
Sorry, I can’t. I’ve got a thing Friday.
Even if he were only ever to refer to it obliquely, never specifying his plans or making any efforts to convince the one inviting him he was doing more than fobbing them off, he would like to defray some of the excitement he can feel building up inside him. Since Lespès made him the offer, he has been unable to think of anything else, inscrutable as the offer was. Indeed, even if he were to have the closest of close friends, he would not have been able to say much more than that his neighbour had invited him over, and he wasn’t sure for what. A dinner, it being Friday evening, struck him has as the most logical reason, but the old man hadn’t said that. Indeed he had not said much.
When he came in, hoisting himself onto a seat at the counter which was clearly his customary spot, Lambert was in state of shock. He had been so transfixed on the androgyne appearing, attempting to will their arrival into being, that he hadn’t been prepared to see Lespès materialise before him. What was more, he had never seen his neighbour clothed, nor moving through a peopled space, so although there could be no mistaking who the corpulent was, there was something uncanny in his presentation. He moved far more slowly than Lambert would have expected, only knowing him from his vigorous routine, and seemed far less certain on his feet, huffing and grimacing taking his place. He was so much more human, so much less divine.
Once he had recovered from the shock, however, all thoughts of anybody else left Lambert’s mind. It was not difficult for him to convince himself that this encounter with Lespès was, in fact, the true point of it all: the chance appearance of a character who upended his habits, his usual way of being in the world, compelling him to inhabit it in a way he had not for years—a harbinger, indeed, of a confrontation yet to come—leading to his days of vigil, and now this, Lespès’ unexpected arrival. Surely it was no coincidence.
The longer he sat as his table, however, and Lespès up at the bar, neither one approaching or as much as acknowledging the other, Lambert’s enchantment faltered. Quite unlike his earlier experience, the man gave off no charge; there had been no disturbance in the atmosphere as he shunted through the tables, no throb of aura raising Lambert’s blood pressure, no sense at all of the magnetism he had felt radiating from the androgyne. When an hour had passed, Lespès drinking two blanc-cassis, Lambert not having ordered anything, just fidgeting with his cigarettes, wary of going out to smoke in case he missed something or Lespès had disappeared when he got back, the old man stood, paid up in cash, and with his back to the banquette where Lambert was sitting, without turning or indicating that he knew that he was there, called out:
Ohé, Lambert. My place, this Friday at 6 o’clock. Three doors down. 282. Lespès.
*
There had been no question of Lambert ignoring the request—I say “request,” demand. In the intervening days, he had checked, despite having little doubt to what the instructions referred, that the man did indeed live three doors down from his own building and not three doors down from the bar in any of the possible directions. Once reassured, he began to consider, again for the first time in many years, just how he should present himself. He managed to book in for a haircut and a shave, and even decided to buy new clothes for the occasion: darker slacks and deep, rich burgundy shirt, the tone of which he found particularly pleasing, offsetting his pallor.
Dressed in his new get-up, he paced around his apartment like an excited inamorato for the half-an-hour leading up to the appointment. He had bought a bottle of wine, so as not to arrive empty-handed, but had also prepared Lespès another gift, one which, as he paced, he kept clamped in his fist. It was the object he had held onto the longest, the only one he still had from his childhood: a tiny porcelain cow from which the paint had long since rubbed. The charge of the item had long been exhausted too, but he had been unable to give it up. He had won it, the fève, from a slice of galette du rois he had been offered by the De-Lestoille twins. He can still remember their faces, his teeth clinking against it, when he rolled it on his tongue and spat it out into his palm: the brother’s anger, the sister’s jealousy, the attempts they had made to take it from him, the girl coquettish, the boy bolshy, and how proud he was to have held them off, how confident he was in the feeling he had that the charm was destined to be his.
As he climbs the stairs to Lespès’ apartment, Lambert considers how he might explain its significance, why he has to decided to give it to his host, what it might mean for Lespès to accept it. He could always, he has also thought, just deposit it somewhere in the apartment and take pleasure in knowing he had left a little bit of himself there. And why rush? There would be other meals wouldn’t there? Other opportunities to spend evenings together? Plenty of time to get to know one another, and to explain. Lambert was certain, after all, that Lespès would understand; Lespès was sure to get him like nobody ever had.
*
The door, when he reaches the third floor, is open, and Lespès responds heartily to his knock, from somewhere out-of-sight telling Lambert to enter. Lambert realises he has not given any thought to how Lespès’ apartment might look, beyond what of his bedroom he can make out when watching him do his daily routine. But there is little in the hallway to give anything away. The walls are white and bare, and there is none of the clutter piled along them that one might have expected: no shoes lined up, stacks of newspapers or books, no walking sticks or leaning umbrellas, no table on which to leave one’s keys. There is not even anywhere to hang his coat.
Come in, come in, leave your things,
he hears Lespès from afar.
Lambert tries the handle of a narrow, in-set door, in the hopes it might be a cloakroom, but finds that it is locked. He notices that the other doors leading off the corridor are all shut too, except for one, at the very end, which must be from where Lespès’ voice is coming. The old man appears, his head around it, the round of a mottled shoulder and heavy-hanging dug visible, naked, beyond the jamb,
Well? We’re waiting for you. Come along.
Lambert’s heart sinks at the mention of “we,” so distracted he barely registers the old man’s nudity—and is that now a second voice he hears? He cannot place it. Perhaps Lespès has the television on or is listening to the radio. Is it a man’s voice or a woman’s? He can hear the two of them talking, joking together, laughing. Something in the room is being prepared.
Are those the sounds of a table being set? Furniture being moved around? Implements being laid out?
As he approaches the end of the corridor, Lambert drops his coat, which has been dragging on the floor behind him, and with it the pale, little porcelain cow which skitters to a rest beside the wainscot. Finally, he turns into the open bedroom doorway, and sees us both, in all our glory, waiting for him there.
