order’ but being ‘true and strong and open’. ‘I don’t know who you are.’ It was over. ‘I want you to have no hope.’
Amid the agony of accepting and refusing to accept what I had always known was going to happen, I suspect I quite liked the portrayal of me here, the compartmentalised, enigmatic multi-man. It is a sort of fun being a dick-head, that’s why there are so many of us. It wasn’t unique to me – did other people really reveal themselves truly to others? Were they better than me or did they just make a better job of pretending to be? I didn’t believe it was only me who was so hungry, so weak.
What mattered actually was that Sarah thought there were truthful people around and that she was one of them, even if she was in a minority. There were better people than me for her to risk spending her life with.
I was desperate to go home, to make a dramatic gesture; I had to talk to her face to face, convince her she could believe in me.
I quickly saw how much worse this would make things. It was my constant presence in daily emails that had driven her to such a quick conclusion. She wouldn’t want to see me; she would be disgusted at my additional cowardice, at my throwing away the chance to write the novel I had been talking about for so long. Perhaps if I gave her time to forget the vivid recent pain and remember the pleasure, my devotion . . . if I stayed here and learned something, wrote something to show her who I was. It was my only chance.
It was then that I decided to write the love letter, the love letter to end all love letters. I would take notes for months, write it all by hand – the pornography of the internet found its correlation in the email, instantaneous, generic, regretted. This time I would write slowly to Sarah, I would think and revise, I would find out how I felt about her and surprise us both with its truth.
This was my new faith.
But life was unbearable. I needed distraction, I needed a friend.
So I emailed Amy Casares. I had met Amy when I published her first novel, five years ago. She was half Argentine, half English, Argentine on her father’s side, and had spent her late twenties in Buenos Aires producing a film at the same time as Bennett lived there (this was at the end of her brief first career working as the gorgeous daughter in the Oil of Ulay TV adverts). I had mentioned her to Bennett on the night I met him to see if he knew her, and he told me he had fallen in love with her and never forgotten her. I was not surprised about that, for I had been in love with her myself since we published her. She was ten years older than me and painfully beautiful. I didn’t need to imagine her in her twenties or even thirties for I loved her as she was now, chastely, immaculately. The novel had done well, as these things go, but it had not made Amy a star, and Bennett had no idea it had been published until I told him.
It took some courage to email her. I knew that she would know some people out in Buenos Aires, but I did not know what she had been told about me, what she thought about Bennett’s death. I didn’t know whether she had gone to the funeral and, if she had, what stories people would have told her afterwards. Three days after I had sent the email, when I had had no reply from Amy, I decided she had made her decision about me. And so, despite my misgivings, I contacted Sarah’s friend Lizzie on Facebook, the friend who had provided the initial reason for the trip. Lizzie sent me her number and I gave her a call that evening. She had a light, springy voice when she answered the phone, an accent that reminded me of Sarah’s. ‘So how is Sarah?’ was almost the first thing she said. ‘She’s not here?’
‘No, she’s . . . she’s got a lot of work on at the moment. I’m here for a while. She’ll come later.’
‘Are you missing her yet?’
‘Lots,’ I said truthfully, and we arranged to meet at her flat in Recoleta.
I walked to her apartment at nine that evening. The sky was a darkening regal blue at that time and the city felt poised, waiting to do something. Young men and women walked past me with groceries, old ladies walked dogs, couples sat on walls and benches tonguing each other unashamedly – it was still early, there was much to do.
I found Lizzie’s apartment and rang the buzzer, and the most beautiful man I have ever seen answered the door. He was clearly Argentine, and I can only describe him, as I apprehended him then, like something from a brochure: his long dark glossy hair, honey-coloured skin, perfect brown pools for eyes where one could drop one’s soul and never hear a splash. He was smoking ‘a fragrant joint’.
‘You must be Liam,’ he said, reaching out a hand and leaning forward when I took it to kiss me on the cheek. I’d read in the guidebook that this was how they did hellos and, though I liked it, it surprised me. I didn’t know whether to return it, but he left his cheek there for me so I kissed him back. Behind him, the woman who must have been Lizzie was lying on her front, her feet raised up and casually wiggling behind her while she laughed on the phone and waved at me. His stubble scratched against mine as we separated and made me want to light a cigarette. Her legs made my initial. Behind her was an open balcony, with a view of many more balconies in the warm dark where the streetlights seemed to shine brighter than English streetlights, simply because they weren’t English streetlights. Lizzie, folded up, looked like she’d be tall when she straightened.
He was introducing himself. ‘My name is Arturo,’ he said. ‘You have just come to Buenos Aires?’
I nodded. It was calming to be in a real living room, without any calming electronic tango music playing. Arturo had a really good haircut. It shone. He shone. I asked him the question I already knew the answer to ‘How do you know Lizzie?’ and he just smiled and turned around to look at her. I remember the phone she was talking into was an old-fashioned one with a rotary dial. Her legs were tanned and the soles of her feet looked like they would always be dirty. Some men wouldn’t have liked that. But not me and Arturo. In fact, I just didn’t know which of them to look at.
He offered me his spliff and, still stunned, though I hated dope, I took it and inhaled. Twice. Again. And then we were grinning at each other and embracing, as if enacting the second stage of the unusual hello we had begun before. ‘You want a beer,’ he told me.
While he was getting it, Lizzie hung up and tipped herself from the sofa like a slinky springing over a step. ‘Liam!’ In the same motion, she fell forward into me and hugged me doggily, pushing her chest into me, all coconut smelling, tall and limber, freckled brown skin still radiating the afternoon’s sun. ‘What fun.’ It was a hug I was in no hurry to leave but we pulled apart as Arturo came back into the room with my beer.
He handed it to me and studied me more carefully. This alone should have been reason for him to relax if he was assessing me as a threat. He looked hard at Lizzie before turning back to me. ‘But you are not here with your girlfriend, Liam.’
‘She’s had some work come up that was too good an opportunity to miss. She can’t leave right now. Hopefully –’
‘Oh, yes, let’s talk about Sarah,’ interrupted Lizzie. ‘I want to hear all about what she’s been up to – and how you met, what you do.’
And so, like the dutiful proud boyfriend I wanted to remain, I began to describe Sarah’s blossoming career as a curator, her invitations to New York and Sao Paulo, how she had nearly finished her PhD, about the offers she had to teach short courses that summer at universities around the world. After years of having no money and having to admit at parties to being a student, she was suddenly in possession of a glamorous success story. I knew what that felt like, how useful it was, how heady the opportunities, how excited and self-absorbed it had made me. She would survive it better. It was perfect poetic symmetry that I had fallen just as she had reached her peak. She could do whatever she liked
