Size-wise

He’s going to look at a flat, either today or tomorrow. I think it’s tomorrow. He’s not very excited about it because the flat’s only ten meters away from where he currently lives. “That doesn’t matter,” I said, “it’s nice where you live. It’s my favorite part, I think.” It is my favorite part, where he lives. It’s close to a very hospitable yoga studio, which I almost always go to whenever I am in the city, and there are lots of nice coffee places and little galleries nearby, none of which I’ve ever been to, but they are pleasant to walk past—they make a pleasant change from the fields, silage heaps, and hedgerows I ordinarily walk past. I’ve walked past the cafés and galleries near where he lives and glanced in through their picture-perfect windows many times, occasionally vowing to come back somewhen or other and go in while concurrently knowing full well that I never will. It’s a nice idea, but the reality is, the moment I step into these sorts of hangouts and ateliers I immediately wish I hadn’t because of the flinty effusiveness I’m invariably met with, which lets me know I am now partaking in something that is infinitely cool but also no big deal, because surely everything these days is very cool, isn’t that just the way life is now, and I feel obliged to move and talk in a commensurably upbeat yet aloof manner in order to make being there, however briefly, as frictionless as possible. An innocuous-enough maneuver I suppose, and one I can more or less pull off; doing so, however, frequently leaves me feeling peculiarly craven. It’s just not fun anymore, corroborating. Walk on by. I have never been to his apartment, but even before we kissed I somehow had a sense of where it is. I knew he lived somewhere near the yoga studio I go to, and I remember thinking how lucky he was, to live in that part of town, because I like that part of town very much, it is the part of town I’d like to live in, if I lived in that city. Someone mentioned ages ago that people occasionally go back to his flat after being in the bar and carry on drinking there, back at his flat, “sometimes until around four in the morning,” they said. They asked me if I’d ever been back to his flat for one of these after-hours drinking sessions and I said no, I had not. The question surprised me; I barely knew him then. Not that that matters a great deal, I suppose. I’d been to the bar everyone goes to many times, and if I’d stayed until closing time I could have tagged along I expect, but I don’t drink anywhere near as much as I used to, and anyway I wouldn’t be able to understand what anyone was talking about, would I? At that time of the morning, with a lot of drink taken, you can’t expect people to say very much in English if English isn’t their first language.

I like to think of him going to see the flat. Any flat. I like to think of him entering a building. Going from a fairly bright street into a fairly dark lobby and up the rounding stairs. I like to imagine him going up the stairs with his left hand moving lightly up along the narrow wooden rail which has worn down over the years so that here and there small flathead nails stick up out of the smooth wood ever so slightly. He’d notice that. His hand would notice that, and he'd enjoy the sensation of registering each individual nail head as he went on up the stairs. Coming into contact with the little nail heads would introduce an unexpected note of familiarity to the situation, a feeling that would surely escalate, nail by nail, as he went on up the stairs—it could well have been his hand, couldn’t it, that over the years had worn away the old oak rail, and it might well be his hand, mightn’t it, that goes on acknowledging each revealed nail head, day after day—and up and up he’d go, buoyed along by this unforeseen feeling of involvement, which is surely an intimation, an intimation that he belongs here, essentially. Yes, indeed, alighting upon those slightly askew nail heads with his fingertips would certainly put a spring in his step, sending him on his way up the many flights of stairs with a sure and spry foot, which is just as well because the flat no doubt is all the way up on the fourth floor, on the fourth floor at the very least, because the flats get smaller the further you go up, don’t they, and it’ll be a smaller flat, I expect, that he’ll be going to see. Unless he’s got lucky, and he might get lucky. He thought his luck was in when he went to see a flat a few weeks ago: “A very beautiful building,” he said, “and in the best part of the city.” “Was it beside a canal?” I said. “Yes,” he said, “it was right next to the canal, and, size-wise, it was,” he said, “more square meters” than the flat he currently lives in. “But the thing was,” he said, “it was over two floors, and there was nowhere,” he said, “to put a bookcase, or a table, because of a spiral staircase that took up all of the space in the lower room, leaving no space at all,” he said, “for a bookcase, or even a table for that matter,” and as he went on talking about it I could see him in this room with a staircase like a corkscrew boring right through the center of it and I could feel how twisted up that must have made him feel, because you would be exasperated, wouldn’t you, after seeing it from the outside. Seeing it from the outside of course you’d think your luck was in. A very beautiful building, that’s what he’d said, so of course something rather grand would unlatch in your imagination—parquet floors and double doors, mille-feuille cornices and avuncular architraves, large windows with undulant glass panes, exposed clean-as-a-pin pipework perhaps, high ceilings and canal views most definitely, and space, plenty of space for bookcases and desks and tables—two or three bookcases probably—that’s what would be materializing in your head, and up the stairs you’d go, really feeling you are about to enter something pretty special, the answer really, then, all too soon, one realizes it is not that and nothing has altered, one is still where one was and in fact it’s not even as nice as where one already is, and the spiral staircase goes up but really it goes down, plummets down into you like a corkscrew, screwing you up, the whole thing just screws you up really, and I can see him, looking around, turning, in all directions, away from the corkscrew, I can see him in a spin, his eyes bouncing from wall to wall and ricocheting across the impinged floor space, and I can feel him getting exasperated, because it’s not enough, there’s not nearly enough room in here for a bookcase, or even for a table, so why was this presented to him as an option, who, exactly, imagined that this would be a viable place for him to live, why is he here, what is he supposed to do, what do they think he is going to say? 

I wonder what he did say to them. I wonder if he said anything about the bookcase and the desk. He’d have to have said something, wouldn’t he? He’d have been put on the spot. After being thrown off balance by the inexplicability of being there at all, he’d be put on the spot—he might, in all likelihood, given the incommodious setup of the place, feel absolutely cornered, in which case the easiest thing to say would be that he’d think about it. I doubt he said he’d think about it though—he doesn’t like discord one bit, but I think he can stand his ground, so I doubt he said he’d think about it if he wasn’t going to think about it, and he wasn’t going to think about it, was he? He’d be anxious to put an end to the whole business, to not have it dwell upon his mind another minute. Because it doesn’t make sense and carrying on as if it does is downright offensive. I don’t see the other person, the agent or whoever it is, breezily showing him the impractical flat. Only him. He’s wearing his mac. He’s moving a lot, to begin with. Turning around, turning around, looking for something. For more space, for an explanation, for a reasonable way out of this confounding situation. It doesn’t make any sense. Then he stops moving; there is nothing more. This is it. He feels a bit affronted, it doesn’t make any sense. “I’ll think about it” and out the door, back down all those stairs, brushing against the mottled stairwell wall as if to avoid colliding with himself coming up all those stairs so jauntily, just five minutes ago. He probably went to a bar then—not the bar but another bar, another bar many of the old-timers go to, earlier in the evening, usually. I’ve been to this other bar too, so I can imagine him in there with his elbows on the counter and his hand, the right one, moving on and off a small glass of beer, and after a while someone says to him, “What’s that on your sleeve? What have you been up to?” Would they reach over then and rub at his sleeve? I doubt it, and I doubt he’d brush the dust off himself either. He wouldn’t want to get into it, would he, so he’d ignore the questions and leave the dust. He wouldn’t want to get into it there and then. Later, perhaps. Later, when he’s been back in his own place, and his own milieu has reasserted itself. Not now, while he’s still floundering in a sort of wretched limbo.  

It was a few days later when he mentioned it to me. I commiserated with him and said, “Yes, it does sound a bit ridiculous, I’d be vexed and disappointed too.” “I’m better off where I am,” he said. “It sounds like it,” I said. And then he said about another possibility: “It’s just ten meters away,” he said, so he had more of an idea of the layout for that one because “it’s very similar” to his own flat, he said, except that it’s quite a bit bigger, he’s pretty sure of it, “bigger in a proper way,” he said. Even so, it’s so close to where he’s already living “it’s difficult to get excited about it,” he said. “But it’s nice where you live,” I said, and he said about getting a place on the canal and how much nicer that would be and I said do they often come up then and he said no, not really, and I didn’t say anything then, and in the days that followed I often found myself imagining him in that place, in the flat just ten meters away from where he already is, and there were parquet floors and double doors and the walls were painted dark ochre and the glass in the window frames surged so it didn’t matter a great deal that the canal wasn’t right there below because out there all looked a bit like it was underwater anyway, and the supple shadows on the walls ripple and flicker and sway, and he looks at ease and perspicacious in this room. He moves about. He moves about, but not like before. Before there was an agitated almost desperate energy to the way he turned about, but here it is not that at all. He is seeing what goes where and he looks quietly distinguished. The air around him seems to wait. It’s very still and sort of attentive—expectant even. And his movements—a few steps in this direction, a slow acquiescent turn of the head there, a hand smoothly casting out this way—all of these gestures are the gestures of a man orchestrating the private elements of his life in a deliberate yet instinctive fashion. He can see it all and walk right into it because it’s been inside of him already for quite some time, without him particularly knowing about it or even thinking that that kind of thing is especially important to him, but here it is, but here it is, but here it is. “No, I didn’t go to see that flat,” he said, when I asked him about it a week or so later, by and by. “How come?” I said. “A man sits outside the front of it all the time,” he said. “A man who lives there?” I said. “Yes,” he said, “he lives in the same building and he sits in a chair out the front all day and he asks things and it would be a nuisance.” “Yes, it would,” I said. “Is he there every day, then?” I said. “Yes,” he said, “every day, all day long. Anyway,” he said, “I quite like it here at the moment.” “Fair enough,” I said. 

He’s been in his current flat a long time. Fifteen years. His bed is in the kitchen and he has a moody gray cat called Salieri. That won’t necessarily bother me. I imagine because of the way he is that his cat isn’t vengeful, and as for where his bed is, I lived in a bedsit years ago and that kind of close-quarters arrangement can easily be rendered vaguely bohemian with a bit of artful tweaking. Though the sound of the fridge, I recall, got right inside my skull at night sometimes and tormented me terribly. I asked him about the fridge and he said it doesn’t make a sound. “Well, are you sure it’s working,” I said, “because I’m sure they ought to make some kind of noise if they’re working properly.” He said as far as he could tell “it works fine.” I think perhaps he just doesn’t hear it anymore, because of how long he’s been there. I expect I’ll hear it. But I don’t mind. I don’t mind that when I go to see him Salieri will probably be demonstrably put out and the bed is in the kitchen within earshot of the fridge. His mother on the other hand thinks my coming to stay in the flat is a terrible idea. She thinks he should book a hotel. “There’s a nice hotel around the corner,” he said, and it is a little bit tempting, to stay in a nice hotel. We’ve stayed in a hotel three times now and each one was very nice. But what I would really like, now, is to lie with him on a sofa. I find myself thinking about it a lot.   

There was a sofa in the last hotel we stayed in, but it wasn’t very big and it didn’t have any arms. We couldn’t lie on it. We sat on it. We sat on the sofa, side by side, not long after we’d checked in. He said when he saw the photographs of the room online that he’d imagined us sitting on the sofa side by side, looking straight ahead at the wall in front of us. One evening we had wine and I did manage to sort of lie down on it, with my knees bent and my head in his lap. I had my head in his lap and looked up at him. That was nice. But really what I’d like is for him to be lying down too, with me, on a sofa. I know he’s got a sofa, a fairly big one, and I know he lies on it. He lies on it a lot, as far as I can tell. And he orders Chinese takeaway quite a lot too, so I said we can do that one night while I’m there. He’d said about restaurants again and I said not to worry about it too much. I wasn’t that fussed on going out to a restaurant—we’ve been to quite a few restaurants by now and in my opinion we’ve spent more than enough money on eating out, so it doesn’t bother me at all to stay in his flat one evening and order takeaway and lie on the sofa. We can watch something on TV even—I don’t have a TV and can’t order takeaway, because of where I live. They don’t come out this far, it’s not worth their while, so I imagine it would make a nice change for me. It’s interesting, the intimate possibilities a heretofore un-encountered piece of furniture can proffer. This imminent sofa has inspired all sorts of erotic imaginings. Another compelling scenario that comes to me in various iterations is of him being on the sofa, reading perhaps, waiting for me to get ready. Or not. Perhaps he is lying on the sofa flicking through a slim stapled manuscript and we aren’t going anywhere just yet. Perhaps I walk into the room to get something and my hair is wet from the shower I’ve just had. Perhaps I’ve showered and put on a pair of black knickers, a pair of black tights, a black bra, and my hair is wet and slicked back and I’ve got a little bit of makeup on, and perhaps I am looking for somewhere to plug the hairdryer in. I’m not holding the hairdryer, I’m just looking, I think, for somewhere to plug it in. I stride into the front room. I feel nice and lithe and quite slinky in my black tights and he’s on the sofa and even before I’ve said anything about the hairdryer and plugging it in he senses he needs to assist me in some way because he takes his legs off of the sofa, swings himself round into a seated position, on the sofa, and looks at me, and I go over to him then, I go over and kneel down in front of the sofa so that his face, which hasn’t moved at all, is in front of mine. My hair is wet, I can feel it down my back. I kiss him and it gets passionate very quickly. I am so clean. I think he’s getting off on how clean I am. I push him back so that his back is against the sofa which means I can undo the zip on his trousers and he lets me do that, and I’ve imagined this many times, I’ve imagined for weeks now being in this situation, where there is a sofa and he is sitting on it and I come over—the wet hair is a detail that came about more recently—prior to that I think the scenario was more conventional—we were both dressed up to the nines, about to go somewhere ritzy for dinner, etc., it was more like something from a film, like something I’ve already seen and was replicating, the wet hair and opaque tights is more recent and that’s totally me and the man on the sofa is absolutely him, and it’s the daytime, it’s light in the room, it’s probably midmorning—my hair is wet—I probably did some stretches then took a shower, and while I was in the shower he got up and went into the front room. Perhaps he made himself a coffee and brought it in with him. Perhaps there is a coffee cup on the coffee table in front of the sofa and I slide down between the coffee table and the sofa, I slide down between his knees and we kiss and I can feel him, exulting in my cleanness. His hands touch my wet hair and I gently push him backwards so now he is relaxed against cushions along the back of the sofa and there is his lap and it’s easy for me to unzip his trousers and I do that. I do that and I take out his penis, it’s pretty much erect and it feels quite warm and it’s his and I hold it firmly in my left hand and begin to lick the end of it, all the way around and up and down, I lick it and rub it a little with my hand for quite some time before closing my mouth over it, and I’ve thought about this many times, many times. Sucking him off in the silent translucent morning while he is sitting on the sofa. And there are two long windows behind him and there are trees just outside of the windows, beautiful big trees full of glinting blossom, and I am sucking him off and his hands move in and out of my wet hair, twisting it and pulling it and caressing it, I’ve imagined it in shimmering detail a great many times, and it seems to me staying in a nice hotel around the corner is a diminished prospect and out of the question. Our proceedings will surely, at this crucial stage, be spurred on magnificently by the humdrum array of worktops, bannisters, doorjambs, and ottomans that await our finely honed minds and fugitive bodies.