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jealousy

Grove Press

Chapter One

Unless one believes in predestination, it is clear that the circumstances of any encounter with another person, which, for the sake of ease, we attribute to chance, are in fact the result of an incalculable series of decisions taken at each crossroad in life, which secretly steer us towards them. Even the most important of these encounters may not have been consciously sought, or even desired. Rather, each of us proceeds like an artist or writer, who constructs a piece of work through a succession of choices; a gesture or word does not inevitably determine the gesture or word which follows, but instead confronts the author with a new choice. A painter who has used a touch of red may choose to mute it by juxtaposing a touch of violet; he may choose to make it sing with a touch of green. In the long run, whatever mental image of the painting he may have started out with, the sum of all the decisions he takes, some of them unforeseen, will give a different result. Thus we lead our lives by a series of acts which are in fact far more considered than we care to admit - since to take full and clear responsibility for them would be a great burden - but which nevertheless set us on the path of people we have unknowingly been gravitating towards for some time.

How did Jacques' face first register on my field of vision? I could not say. Elsewhere I have written that I was struck by his voice, as heard twice removed by a tape machine (it was a recording) and the telephone (down which someone played the recording to me). On the other hand, there is no visual image lodged in my memory signaling his epiphany in my life. A curious fact, since I am blessed with an excellent visual memory but have no ear at all. Perhaps it is precisely because my ear is relatively little used that I have managed to isolate one of the rare occasions on which it was sensitive, whereas my eye is so much in use and so ready to observe details, at times, it seems, indiscriminately, that I sometimes feel like one of those mad people who are unable to sift and order the visual signals which reach them from the outside world. Thus my first image relating to Jacques is a Gestalt, his presence as a dark, dense mass, inseparable from the surrounding space, which was lighter, white or rather cream coloured, its depth - I remember this quite clearly - delineated by a board fixed to the wall, serving as a work surface, and the door which led to the toilet.

I should say that we were having to concentrate on a page in a catalogue where there was a piece of text he'd written, which we had to correct by hand. We had been working for several hours, sitting side by side in the narrow office. I can still see the page, the text printed in characters imitating those of a typewriter. I can also see the house of the friend where he took me to dinner once the tedious job was done, and the bed, doubling as a sofa, on which we sat chatting after the meal; I can even still make out the faces of one or two of the other guests. But what marks out Jacques at that moment is still not his image, but a very discreet gesture, in which he just brushed my wrist with the back of his index finger. The circumstances of this memory enable me to identify a phenomenon I have observed at the moment when sensual pleasure first starts to stir; my visual attention seems to focus less on the actual object of my desire than on what surrounds it. In fact it is a reflex we all have in public, to put people off the scent. It affords the twofold pleasure of contact and dissimulation: we gaze intently into the eyes of the person on our right, to distract attention from the person on our left, who is stroking our knee under the table. But could it not be, also, that we respond generously to the blossoming of one of our senses, so that, in this instance, even as my skin was enjoying the touch of a man's hand, softer than any I had ever known, or ever would know, my eyes could focus all their curiosity on his friends?

The image appears slowly in the developing tray of memories. I can recall, without hesitation, the position of our bodies in his bed the following morning, while, as often happens at such times, a voluble exposition of our selves as social beings succeeded the hasty exposition of our physical selves, and although I can still judge the exact level of daylight in the room during this exchange, it is only in memories from a later date that I begin to see the outline of his face and fill in the details of his features.

Significantly, in these memories, which belong to a period when our relationship was already established and steady, the image is not a close-up, which might have shown his face, with the expression in his eyes or mouth, but, at first, an establishing shot: for example, I see him parking his motorbike on the pavement opposite, and track him as he crosses the street, detaches his body from the rolling stream of other passers-by and comes towards the terrace of the caf where a group - myself among them - is waiting for him. It seems to me that it is now that I notice the slightly elongated rectangle, the regularity of his head, accentuated by his short-cropped hair, which is already beginning to thin at the crown. This geometry is echoed in the square-set torso - the shoulders, waist and sides seem all to be of equal measure - accentuated by the loose- fitting shirt. In other words, I could only register his features by taking time and - literally - a step backwards, in imitation of certain painters who work in the old-fashioned manner, taking several steps backwards to get a better sense of their subject, the relation, proportionally, to the setting, and the effect of contrast with it.

I did not have a laser, instead of eyes, with which to pierce the world's haze and immediately cut out the face of Jacques Henric. Although I had retained the childhood habit of drifting off into daydreams, my imagination respected its boundaries and I never imported into my life the ideal image of a man, formed in my imagination and projected onto the features of every man I met. I was twenty-four; I had been born in the Paris suburbs, in an unpromising environment, which I left aged eighteen, my only baggage the books I'd read. I needed, therefore, to widen my experience of the real world, and I yearned to discover new worlds, just as others at that time were taking to the open road, their rucksacks on their backs. The backpackers did not settle somewhere straight away. Similarly, it was not until my eye had 'photographed' a wide variety of groups that I felt the desire to draw a ring around one face in particular. Romantic clichs were not my thing then; they still aren't today and I could never say that I recognized Jacques as one in a thousand; no, it was rather that until I'd met a thousand others I could not know that at the root of my relationship with him was a feeling whose nature and durability distinguished it from all others. Just as when faced with an intriguing, but apparently banal painting, which conceals an anamorphosis, you try to discover the precise angle from which, out of disparate elements, the laws of optics will enable you to perceive an astonishing coherent object, so at first I had to find my bearings in life, and then, having gleaned various different impressions of a man, in circumstances which did not particularly distinguish him from the others, put them all together to find standing before me the one who would move me more than any other.

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