We went into the house, Rick and I. I locked the door but left the windows open; I like the night breezes, and the desert winds are always beautifully scented. I accuse Rick of being a romantic, but I pride myself on knowing my own proclivities. Yes, I am a romantic, and perhaps a patriot, too, if I were honest with myself.
I went to the decanter on the table. “Brandy?”
“No, nothing, thanks.” He was looking at my painting, the one hung on that long, pale wall that forms one side of my sitting room. The painting, might I add, that I’d been silly enough to have shipped all the way to Casablanca. Ah, well. Perhaps it is harder to part with treasured objects than we like to admit, and North Africa just now is an arid place, in beauty as well as climate.
“Do you like it?” I asked.
“Does it matter?” He moved close to it, then back, as I have seen people do in museums when they aren’t certain what their reaction to a piece of art should be. “What’s it supposed to be?”
I suppressed a smile. Really, he’s a dear man and I wouldn’t change him for the world. “What’s it look like?”
“What’s it supposed to look like?”
“My dear Ricky, it is a painting by Degouve, and I like it very much. To me it looks like some houses in the nighttime. It reminds me of where I grew up.” Trying to explain the visceral and emotional appeal of visual art to him was like trying to force a sausage through the eye of a needle. And I mean that in the nicest possible way…
“Worth anything?”
Now I did laugh aloud. “I don’t know. Perhaps. It’s worth something to me, if that matters.”
He offered me a cigarette, lit it for me. “Louis, I don’t get you. On the one hand, you’re…” He grinned. “Well, what you are–”
“Oh, do stop,” I protested, “My house boy might hear you.” I sat down on the sofa but didn’t bother to turn on any lights. The faint illumination from the sky was enough.
“You’re what you are, and yet you’re not.” He sat down beside me, his weight making a pleasant dent in the cushions. Dammit, I was lonely.
I hate being lonely. I have always imagined my solitude well-chosen, a respite from the outside world with all its pains and pressures. Perhaps chosen solitude is necessarily pleasant, but loneliness…loneliness is something else, entirely. “Ricky, are you going to tell me about Miss Lund?”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Ah.”
He shot me a sharp look that even the darkness couldn’t hide. “You can ‘ah’ all you like,” he said.
“Meaning, of course, that it’s none of my business.” I raised my eyebrow at him. “Mmm. Keep your damned mystique then, if you like. Who do you think you are, anyway? You’re like a brooding bedouin out of some romantic story, riding across the desert on a fine Arab charger.”
“Florid,” he smirked, “but it’ll play. Do go on.”
“Are you lonely?” I blurted. “I mean, are you lonely like I am?”
His face froze; I’d overstepped myself, said too much. Now he would get up and leave and there would be awkward explanations, apologies, a world of embarrassment on both sides. Why hadn’t I just left well enough alone?
“Louis,” he asked, and his voice was quieter than I had ever heard it, “are you lonely?”
His hand cupped the back of my neck–but how? I hadn’t even seen him move. We were sitting face-to-face and gazing at one another, suddenly without the familiar solace of words. “Yes,” I whispered miserably. “Yes, Rick, I am very lonely.”
His thumb stroked my jaw; his expression was meditative. “So am I,” he said. “I think it’s the desert. I think the desert makes you lonely.”
[...]
I will confess, all this is very confusing. I woke up this morning and came downstairs and he was up and dressed and pouring coffee in the kitchen. I had gotten into bed and fallen immediately down some strange rabbit hole of a dream, and knew nothing until the smell of fresh coffee woke me. “Did you make this?” I asked.
“Sure,” he replied.
“Is it poisoned?”
“Now Louis, why would I want to poison you?”
I’m no coward; I believe in jumping in where angels fear to step. “After my confession last night, I should think you’d want to punch me in the face.” I carefully didn’t look at him. I kept my gaze on the dark liquid in my cup.
When the silence threatened to swallow the room, I raised my eyes. He was smiling. He reached out and laid a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I can keep a secret.”
“What secret?” I scoffed. But I was relieved.
I realise I have hung the wrong picture. I should have hung something more prophetic, something full of bleakness and dangerous emotion, like Simeon Solomon’s Love in Autumn.
I should have done that.
