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Still, they stayed a while longer. From
somewhere in the house came the muted strains of an Italian popular song.
Espinoza asked whether she knew Archimboldi, whether she had ever seen him in
person while her husband was alive. Mrs. Bubis said she had and then, under her
breath, she sang the song's final chorus. Her Italian, according to the two
friends, was very good.

"What is Archimboldi like?"
asked Espinoza.

"Very tall," said Mrs. Bubis,
"very tall, a man of truly great height. If he'd been born in this day and
age he likely would have played basketball."

Although by the way she said it,
Archimboldi might as well have been a dwarf. In the taxi back to the hotel the
two friends thought about Grosz and about Mrs. Bubis's cruel, crystalline laugh
and about the impression left by that house full of photographs, where
nevertheless the photograph of the only writer they cared about was missing.
And although neither wanted to admit it, both believed (or sensed) that the
flash of insight granted to them in the red-light district was more important
than any revelation they might have scented as the guests of Mrs. Bubis.

In a word, and bluntly: as they walked
around Sankt Pauli, it came to Pelletier and Espinoza that the search for
Archimboldi could never fill their lives. They could read him, they could study
him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him,
partly because Archimboldi was always far away, partly because the deeper they
went into his work, the more it devoured its explorers. In a word: in Sankt
Pauli and later at Mrs. Bubis's house, hung with photographs of the late Mr.
Bubis and his writers, Pelletier and Espinoza understood that what they wanted
to make was love, not war.

That afternoon, and without indulging in
any confidences beyond the strictly necessary—confidences in general, or maybe
abstract, terms— they shared another taxi to the airport, and as they waited
for their planes they talked about love, about the need for love. Pelletier was
the first to go. When Espinoza was left alone (his flight was an hour later),
his thoughts turned to Liz Norton and his real chances of wooing her. He
imagined her and then he imagined himself, side by side, sharing an apartment
in
Madrid
,
going to the supermarket, both of them working in the German department. He
imagined his office and her office, separated by a wall, and nights in
Madrid
next to her,
eating with friends at good restaurants, and, back at home, an enormous
bathtub, an enormous bed.

But Pelletier got there first. Three days
after the meeting with Archimboldi's publisher, he showed up in London
unannounced, and after telling Liz Norton the latest news, he invited her to
dinner at a restaurant in Hammersmith that a colleague in the Russian
department had recommended, where they ate goulash and chickpea puree with
beets and fish macerated in lemon with yogurt, a dinner with candles and
violins and real Russian waiters and Irish waiters disguised as Russians, all
of it excessive from any point of view, and somewhat rustic and dubious from a
gastronomic point of view, and they had vodka with their dinner and a bottle of
Bordeaux, and the whole meal cost Pelletier an arm and a leg, but it was worth
it because then Norton invited him home, officially to discuss Archimboldi and
the few things that Mrs. Bubis had revealed, including, of course, the critic
Schleiermacher's contemptuous appraisal of Archimboldi's first book, and then
both of them started to laugh and Pelletier kissed Norton on the lips, with
great tact, and she kissed him back much more ardently, thanks possibly to the
dinner and the vodka and the Bordeaux, but Pelletier thought it showed promise,
and then they went to bed and screwed for an hour until Norton fell asleep.

 

That night, while Liz Norton was sleeping,
Pelletier remembered a long-ago afternoon when he and Espinoza had watched a
horror film in a room at a German hotel.

The film was Japanese, and in one of the
early scenes there were two teenage girls. One was telling a story. The story
was about a boy spending his holidays in
Kobe
who wanted to go out to play with friends at the same time that his favorite TV
show was on. So the boy found a video-cassette and set the machine to record
the show and went outside. The problem was that the boy was from
Tokyo
and in
Tokyo
his show
was on Channel 34, whereas in
Kobe
,
Channel 34 is blank, a channel on which all you see is snow.

And after he came back in, when he sat
down in front of the TV and started the player, instead of his favorite show he
saw a white-faced woman telling him he was going to die.

And that was all.

And then the phone rang and the boy
answered and he heard the same woman's voice asking him did he think it was a
joke. A day later they found him in the yard, dead.

And the first girl told the second girl
this story, and the whole time she was talking it looked like she was about to
crack up. The second girl was obviously scared. But the first girl, the one who
was telling the story, looked like she was about to roll on the floor laughing.

And then, remembered Pelletier, Espinoza
said the first girl was a two-bit psychopath and the second girl was a silly
bitch, and the film could have been good if the second girl, instead of staring
openmouthed and looking horrified, had told the first one to shut up. And not
gently, not politely, instead she should have told the girl: "Shut up, you
cunt, what's so funny? does it turn you on telling the story of a dead boy?
does it make you come telling the story of a dead boy, you imaginary-dick-sucking
bitch?"

And so on, in the same vein. And Pelletier
remembered that Espinoza spoke so vehemently, he even did the voice the second
girl should have used and the way she should have stood, that he thought it
best to turn off the TV and take him to the bar for a drink before they went
back to their rooms. And he also remembered that he felt tenderness toward
Espinoza at that moment, a tenderness that brought back adolescence, adventures
fiercely shared, and small-town afternoons.

 

That week, Liz Norton's home phone rang
three or four times every afternoon and her cell phone rang two or three times
every morning. The calls were from Pelletier and Espinoza, and although both
produced elaborate Archimboldian pretexts, the pretexts were exhausted in a
minute and the two professors proceeded to say what was really on their minds.

Pelletier talked about his colleagues in
the German department, about a young Swiss poet and professor who was badgering
him for a scholarship, about the sky in
Paris
(shades of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Banville), about the cars at dusk, their
lights already on, heading home. Espinoza talked about his library, where he
arranged his books in the strictest solitude, about the distant drums that he
sometimes heard coming from a neighboring apartment that seemed to be home to a
group of African musicians, about the neighborhoods of Madrid, Lavapies,
Malasana, and about the area around the Gran Via, where you could go for a walk
at any time of night.

During this period, both Espinoza and
Pelletier completely forgot about Morini. Only Norton called him now and then,
carrying on the same conversations as ever.

In his way, Morini had vanished from
sight.

Soon Pelletier got used to traveling to
London
whenever he wanted,
though it must be emphasized that in terms of proximity and ready modes of
transportation, he had it easiest.

These visits lasted only a single night.
Pelletier would arrive just after nine, meeting Norton at ten at a restaurant
where he had made reservations from
Paris
,
and by one they were in bed.

Liz Norton was a passionate lover,
although her passion was of limited duration. Not having much imagination of
her own, she abandoned herself to any game her lover suggested, without ever
taking the initiative, or thinking she ought to. These sessions rarely lasted
more than three hours, a fact that occasionally saddened Pelletier, who would
gladly have screwed till daybreak.

After the sexual act, and this was what
frustrated Pelletier most, Norton preferred to talk about academic matters
rather than to look frankly at what was developing between them. To Pelletier,
Norton's coldness seemed a particularly feminine mode of self-protection.
Hoping to get through to her, one night he decided to tell her the story of his
own sentimental adventures. He drew up a long list of women he had known and
exposed them to her frosty or indifferent gaze. She seemed unimpressed and
showed no desire to repay his confession with one of her own.

In the mornings, after he called a cab,
Pelletier slipped soundlessly into his clothes so as not to wake her and headed
for the airport. Before he left he would spend a few seconds watching her,
sprawled on the sheets, and sometimes he felt so full of love he could have
burst into tears.

An hour later Liz Norton's alarm would sound
and she'd jump out of bed. She'd take a shower, put water on to boil, drink tea
with milk, dry her hair, and launch a thorough inspection of her apartment as
if she were afraid that her nocturnal visitor had purloined some object of
value. The living room and bedroom were almost always a wreck, and that
bothered her. Impatiently, she would gather up the dirty glasses, empty the
ashtrays, change the sheets, put back the books that Pelletier had taken down
from the shelves and left on the floor, return the bottles to the rack in the
kitchen, and then get dressed and go to the university. If she had a meeting
with her department colleagues, she would go to the meeting, and if she didn't
have a meeting she would shut herself up in the library to work or read until
it was time for class.

One Saturday Espinoza told her that she
must come to
Madrid
, she would be his guest,
Madrid
at this time of
year was the most beautiful city in the world, and there was a Bacon
retrospective on, too, which wasn't to be missed.

"I'll be there tomorrow," said
Norton, which caught Espinoza off guard, since what his invitation had
expressed was more a wish than any real hope that she might accept.

The certain knowledge that she would
appear at his apartment the next day naturally sent Espinoza into a state of
growing excitement and rampant insecurity. And yet they had a wonderful Sunday
(Espinoza did everything in his power to assure they would), and that night
they went to bed together, listening for the sound of the drums next door but
hearing nothing, as if that day the African band had packed up for a tour of
other Spanish cities. Espinoza had so many questions to ask that when the time
came he didn't ask a single one. He didn't need to. Norton told him that she
and Pelletier were lovers, although she put it another way, using some more
ambiguous word, friends maybe, or maybe she said they'd been seeing each other,
or words to that effect.

Espinoza would have liked to ask how long
they'd been lovers, but all that came out was a sigh. Norton said she had many
friends, without specifying whether she meant friend-friends or lover-friends,
and always had ever since she was sixteen, when she made love for the first
time with a thirty-four-year-old, a failed

Pottery Lane

musician, and this was how
she saw things. Espinoza, who had never talked to a woman about love (or sex)
in German, the two of them naked in bed, wanted to know how exactly she
did
see things, because he wasn't quite
clear on that, but all he did was nod.

Then came the great surprise. Norton
looked him in the eye and asked whether he thought he knew her. Espinoza said
he wasn't sure, maybe in some ways he thought he did and in other ways he
didn't, but he felt great respect for her and admired her work as a scholar and
critic of the Archimboldian oeuvre. That was when Norton told him she'd been
married and was now divorced.

"I had no idea," said Espinoza.

"Well, it's true," said Norton.
"I'm a divorcee."

When Liz Norton flew back to
London
, Espinoza was left even more nervous than he'd been
during her two days in
Madrid
.
On the one hand, the encounter had been as successful as he could have hoped,
of that there was no doubt. In bed, especially, the two of them seemed to
understand each other, to be in sync, well matched, as if they'd known each
other for a long time, but when the sex was over and Norton was in the mood to
talk, everything changed. She entered a hypnotic state, as if she didn't have
any woman friend to turn to, thought Espinoza, who in his heart believed that
such confessions weren't intended for men's ears but should be heard by other
women: Norton talked about menstrual cycles, for example, and the moon and
black-and-white movies that turned without warning into horror films, which
thoroughly depressed Espinoza, to the extent that when she stopped talking it
took a superhuman effort for him to dress and go out for dinner or meet
friends, arm in arm with Norton, not to mention the business with Pelletier,
which when you really thought about it was chilling, and now who'll tell
Pelletier that I'm sleeping with Liz?, all of which unsettled Espinoza and,
when he was alone, gave him knots in his stomach and made him want to run to
the bathroom, just as Norton had explained happened to her (how could I have
let her tell me these things!) when she saw her ex-husband, six foot three and
not very stable, a danger to himself and others, somebody who might have been a
small-time thug or hooligan, the extent of his cultural education the old songs
he sang in the pub with his mates from childhood, a bastard who believed in
television and had the shrunken and shriveled soul of a religious
fundamentalist. To put it plainly, the worst husband a woman could inflict on
herself, no matter how you looked at it.