Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi Page 6

  They bounded up the gangplank, greeted by a crew member in an all-white sailor's outfit.

  ‘Permission to come aboard, sir?’ Laura asked, throwing in a salute for good measure. She had gauged their entrance perfectly. The party was not juston a boat; it had a nautical theme as well. Guests, as they stepped aboard, were asked to remove their shoes but, in compensation, were issued with white officers’ hats.

  ‘It suits you,’ Jeff told Laura.

  ‘You too, cap'n,’ she said. Their host, Herr Hofman, stood to attention, welcoming them aboard. With his beard and German accent, he looked like the commander of a U-boat. It was easy to imagine him, eyes pressed to the periscope, firing torpedoes into the merchant convoy and not being at all scrupulous about picking up survivors. Not that there was anything cramped and oily about this vessel. It was exactly what one wanted from a boat: Roman Abramovich on the cheap, but still superbly expensive. You could imagine – something about this boat was making Jeff think in terms of movie scenarios – being out on the Caribbean or the Mediterranean with a load of overweight gangstas and hookers in bikinis, being served Cristal and, after a lunch of some endangered species of freshly-caught fish, unlimited quantities of top-quality cocaine. Much nicer, tonight, though, when all the people aboard were part of the international art crowd, intellectuals, artists, connoisseurs and appreciators of the fine things in life – which meant, basically, that everyone wanted to drink champagne and snort coke. It was a relief to be spared the tedium of the fish course. A relief, too, to be within a few feet of dry land so that they could jump ship whenever they wanted. James was a quite charming man in that his conversation consisted, almost entirely, of telling Laura and Jeff what a pleasure it was to have them aboard. He could not talk to them for long, however: there were other guests he had to welcome aboard, other people who had done him the honour of coming to his little party.

  Kitted out, camply, in the white uniform of a naval rating, a tanned waiter offered Jeff and Laura champagne. Glasses in hand, they went below deck – if that was the term – and into the lounge. Even in this relatively spacious boat, Jeff had to stoop through the doors. A few people were dancing to down-tempo music.

  A pleasing side-effect of taking drugs is that once you have had some you access, as if by magic, the drugscene. You go out looking for magic mushrooms, spend an hour stooped over in a field, eat the few you eventually find, and suddenly, obviously, they're all around, pleading to be picked. It was the same here. Still animated from the line they'd had at the previous party, Jeff and Laura were chatting again with their host, in the lounge, when he asked, quietly, if they would like to join him in the bedroom for ‘a little cocaine.’ There were four or five people already in there, sprawled on the white bed or in chairs, talking, drinking, wearing their naval hats. James ushered them in and shut the door carefully behind him. At the foot of the bed was a mirror with a small amount of powder that he arranged into three lines, two of which were ample for Laura and Jeff. Politely they left the biggest for James, but this, evidently, was insufficient for a man of his considerable appetite. He quickly supplemented it with another fatter and longer one. As soon as he had snorted this, James said again what a great pleasure it was to have them aboard but, if they would excuse him, he felt he should attend to his other guests. With that he stood up and left the room, shutting the door carefully behind him. Wow, Jeff was thinking to himself, this is not just the drug scene, this is theyacht scene. I'm part of the drug-yacht scene! And what a great scene it was to be part of. It was so great that he was unsure whether he wanted to stay here in the bedroom, be in the lounge dancing, or up on deck enjoying the heat of the maritime night. Laura was more decisive. She touched his hand and suggested they re-join the party. They smiled goodbye to the other people in the bedroom and stepped outside, shutting the door behind them as James had done.

  They went up on deck. San Marco sparkled across the dark water. The boat swayed only slightly. James came towards them, smiling, his arm around the shoulder of a man wearing a white cowboy shirt (with black trimmings) and dark jeans – an outfit that looked frankly out of place in this nautical context. James must have been buzzing with cocaine, but the only apparent effect it had was to make him still more formal and correct in his bearing.

  ‘Would you allow me to present to you Mr Troy Montana?’ Jeff half expected James to click his heels as he made this introduction. (He was prevented from doing so, presumably, by the fact that he was wearing deck shoes.) Not that there was anything uptight about him. No, he seemed thoroughly at ease. It was just that his ease manifested itself in courtesy of a kind rarely seen these days, especially among those wired on coke. Was this the very summit of Euro-sophistication? Or perhaps – and it may have amounted to the same thing – he was one of these people (Jeff had encountered them occasionally before) who took cocaine torelax. Mr Montana, whose outfit matched his name if not his surroundings, was clutching a bottle of champagne. He refilled Jeff's glass, which had emptied itself with inexplicable rapidity. Spotting the opportunity for a belated witticism, Jeff asked, ‘So, Troy, were you invited, or did you just sneak aboard on your wooden horse?’

  As soon as he said this, Jeff worried that it had come out sounding rude rather than witty. Difficult to tell. Everything was becoming a bit smeary at the edges. He had to make sure that it didn't get smeary in the middle as well. Troy didn't laugh, but he didn't take offence either. Perhaps he'd not even heard. From his repeated sniffing, he had evidently been enjoying James's hospitality, and was in no mood to listen. He was a curator. Next weekend he was going to Documenta and, the following weekend, to Art Basel – or vice-versa. From where Jeff was standing – on a yacht, in Venice – this was a fantastic prospect: two more weekends exactly like the one he was currently in the midst of. Yes, please. He had to ask Troy to remind him of the name of his gallery, then forgot it again the moment he had been reminded. Jeff was in danger of forgetting everything as soon as it was said, even when he was the person saying it. Not that it mattered. Troy was proposing that they went to see what was happening below deck.

  The music on the sound system was heavier, funkier, than before. Laura said she needed a glass of water. As they were stepping towards the galley, James summoned them into the bedroom again. It was the same scene as before, with dimmer lights. As James began chopping out more lines, Laura said that they should use some of her own stash, but he waved the suggestion aside.

  ‘No,’ he said, as soon as he had snorted up a line. ‘It is my pleasure. Please.’ He really was an advert, James, for the civilizing effects of cocaine. Laura helped herself to another nose-full and Jeff followed suit, motivated by a hunger that had already been thoroughly assuaged. James introduced them to some of the other people in the room, including a couple sitting in a chair, who, until that moment, had been kissing passionately. They did not appear to resent the interruption. Jeff saluted them both and shook hands with one or two other people in the immediate vicinity. Unconsciously, he was aping James's style of extreme formality. It actually made conversation easier, leaving him free to concentrate on howincredibly high he was feeling. Except, as soon as he did that, he had a great urge to start blahing on about howincredibly high he was feeling and jumping round like Diego Maradona in his Neapolitan pomp. His heart was beating wildly, his legs felt trembly, but, in James's presence, he felt a compulsion to behave as if he had just enjoyed the benefits of a complimentary healing session at an exclusive spa on the Pacific coast of America. Through the door the music was audible as a deep, but not intrusive, thump. There was the sound of laughter, all around, talk in several languages. He made room for Laura on the bed. Her cap was tipped back on her head. The couple who had been kissing earlier were kissing again. There was a knock at the door and a young woman of uncertain nationality came in and curled up next to James. The vibe was poised midway between the relaxed, sleep-over atmosphere that you got with a bunch of strangers on Ecstasy in an uncharacteristically well-upholstere
d chill-out space and the franker physicality of the early stages of what might turn into some kind of sex party. Either way, Jeff was too amped to find out what might happen next. He and Laura stepped outside, where half a dozen people were dancing, including cowboy Troy. The music was louder than before. Laura's eyes were shining. Her bare feet moved lightly over the colourful, Oriental rug that demarcated the dance floor. More people joined in and soon a nice little dance party was happening.

  Dancing freed Jeff from the state of serial distraction to which coke made him prone, but eventually, after another glass of champagne and several conversations (of which he could not recall a single word), he was on deck again, crowded with people drinking and talking. He leaned on the rail, looking back at the light-rimmed horizon, as though taking his watch on the bridge of a destroyer. A woman in a sparkly green dress was standing next to him. They smiled, but did not speak. The black water was splashed with light, reflected stars. A speedboat powered by, causing the yacht to rise up and rock in its wake. The night was thick with heat. Unlike grass, cocaine did not enhance – or even lend itself to – the lyricism of the moment. Still, he was thinking to himself over and over, if this is not my idea of a good time I don't know what is. I am having an unbelievably fantastic time, he said to himself. I am having the time of my fucking life! The last six or however many hours it was were like a concentrated version of everything he had ever wanted from life. What more could one want? The thing about this life is that you just don't know what's going to turn up, what's going to come your way. Christ, he had arrived at the Tom Hanks philosophy of life, partForrest Gump and partCast Away. It was exciting, coke, but it didn't give you much in the way of profound thoughts, he thought. The thing about Tom Hanks was that all his films, not all of them but the quintessential ones, were about wanting to get back home.Saving Private Ryan, Cast Away and – this was the one that elevated the point to the level of universal truth –Apollo 13. And that was their shortcoming, because life, at its best, was about wanting never to go home, even if that meant spinning off into outer space. Having said that, perhaps it was time to go, to go back to the hotel. But he didn't want to go yet. He was still having a good time, still having the time of his life, or at least he thought he was. Maybe he did want to go. Maybe, although he was still having a good time, or thinking he was having a good time, he was ready to have a different good time. Still feeling high, he was conscious of not feeling as high as he'd felt a short while earlier, when he'd been feeling far higher than he wanted to feel, a feeling whose passing he somewhat regretted. He recognized these post-euphoric symptoms of cocaine, every impulse turning instantly into its opposite. The thing was not to have any thoughts at all, not to fall into the kind of wired-up reverie that made you feel like a dog chewing its tail. How did people ever become addicted to cocaine? He wasn't sure he evenliked it – though not liking something did not necessarily mean one did not want more of it. He ran that sentence through his head again, untying the tangle of nots. He held up his glass of champagne and looked through it at San Marco, bubbling away greenly like an underwater city. He took a big gulp and turned round. He leant on the rail, tilted his cap back on his head like some swilled-out rummy in a Hemingway story. James, he saw, had emerged from the bedroom, was mingling agreeably with his guests again. Laura too, talking to a guy of about his age, wearing a pale linen jacket. She spotted him and walked over.

  ‘Let me tell you about linen,’ she said. ‘After a certain age, it makes a man look ten years younger. Up until that age, it makes him look ten years older.’ It was an excellent point, but Jeff was struggling, slightly, with the complexities of the arithmetic involved. He made a mental inventory of his wardrobe, relieved to discover that, as far as he could remember, he didn't own a single item of linen. This bit of stocktaking may have taken longer than he realized. Laura was saying, ‘I'm wondering if it's time to leave.’

  ‘What time is it? Oh, you don't have a watch either.’

  ‘It's three,’ she said. ‘I just asked someone.’

  ‘Three! How did it get to be so late? Let's go.’

  ‘D'you want to?’

  ‘I don't know. Do you?’

  ‘I'd like to stayand go.’

  They decided to go, even though they didn't know if they wanted to. They found James, who thanked them for coming to his little drinks party. Laura handed back her cap but James said they should both keep them as souvenirs. So they descended the gangplank and walked along the quay like two sailor buddies on shore leave, looking for fights, hookers, tattoos.

  Jeff's arm was around Laura's shoulder. The moon was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it was the wrong time of the month. Its absence now made him conscious of its non-appearance earlier in the day, at the Biennale.

  ‘You know what was lacking in the Arsenale today?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Photographs of the moon, of space. That's what I love more than anything. Pictures from the NASA archive. The Apollo programme. Extra-Vehicular Activity. Space walks. The Lunar Module. Earthrise. The blue of earth against the infinite black of space.’

  It was a valid point even if, conversationally, it proved a void.

  They'd given no thought to how they were going to get back home, back to the mainland – if that's what it was called. At the Zitelle stop they consulted the timetable and, after much deliberation and concentration, worked out that a vaporetto was due in twenty minutes. Which meant, since walking was so nice, they could continue on to Redentore, the next stop. They walked on, their arms around each other, hips bumping occasionally together. The dark water lapped against the quay. A satellite passed overhead, silverly and quickly.

  A crowd of people was already waiting at Redentore when they arrived, followed, minutes later, by the vaporetto.

  They sat outside, at the front of the vaporetto. Another clear, calm night. The lagoon was flat, still, dark. The air, as the boat powered forward, was hot on their faces. It was like being on an open-air spaceship, surging through a sea of stars left reeling in its wake.

  In the morning they returned to the place where they'd eaten breakfast the day before, where Jeff had eaten breakfast on his first morning in the city.

  ‘I can't help it,’ he said, as they drew near. ‘I'm programmed to keep coming back to the same place. Ideally, in fact, to the same table. Which, I see now, is free!’

  They sat down. The sun bounced off the silver chairs and the cutlery. Jeff had spent ten minutes in the bathroom, sluicing out, excavating and blowing his nose in order to get it functioning again. And he had a headache. If he hadn't been so happy, he would have been feeling irritable from tiredness and a combination-hangover. (The kind of sleep you had after coke – if you were lucky enough to get to sleep – was devoid of any component of rest, as if the brain kept gurning away while it was notionally asleep.) Laura seemed fine, not even particularly tired – or at least she didn't look it. In a nice, wifely gesture she passed a newspaper for him to look at, but the print was too black and the paper too white.

  ‘So, what about Cap'n James?’ he asked. ‘About six months from rehab?’

  ‘Maybe so,’ said Laura. ‘Which means these are the best six months to know him.’ They ordered more water, more coffee, extra glasses of orange juice. Best of all, Laura produced aspirin from her trusty bag.

  After breakfast they crossed Accademia and walked to Laura's hotel so that she could change. He used the bathroom and then lay on the bed, watching her undress and dress, starting to feel better. She had put on a navy blue dress, a halter neck that left her long back almost bare.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘That would be putting it a bit strongly, but at some level I suppose the answer is yes.’ He got off the bed, slipped his feet into his sandals, followed her out of the door.

  There were a lot of Biennale-related things scattered around the city that neither of them had yet been to. Fortunately the one they most wanted to see, James Turrell'sRed Shift , was also the nearest
, by the Rialto. It was part of a larger exhibition, but they skipped the other stuff and joined the queue for the darkened room.

  At first it looked like just a red painted rectangle, luminous against a dull background. Then, as they sat down and watched, it changed – but so subtly that it was impossible to tell how or when it had changed. The red became a slightly different red, a bit darker or brighter or something. The shape remained the same but, as the colour altered, so the edges of the frame became less rigid. There was a pulse in the changing redness. The surface of the picture was completely flat and infinitely deep. They sat without speaking. Time melted away, registered only in terms of the light and colour changing, to purple, to a deeper purple, a purple that was almost blue and thenwas blue … They were perhaps ten feet away from the light but there was no distance. The colour, the light, touched them. The cycle was beginning again. They stood up and reached into the flat surface of the red, but there was nothing there. It was impossible to feel the back or the side of the light source. Their hands stretched out, suspended in the shifting red that was no longer quite red. It was an illusion, but because it was an illusion this did not mean it was less real than anything else, than things that were not illusory.

  They were disoriented when they stepped outside again. The red square of light was still pulsing in Atman's head as they boarded a vaporetto at Rialto. The fact that they didn't know where it was going changed the vaporetto from a bus to a cruise ship. Neither of them said anything about the Turrell.