Zip

I am moving house next week; in fact, I should say, I am downsizing, and I have to dispose of some of my possessions. Sifting through boxes of old correspondence, I came across a letter sent more than ten years ago but still unopened. I recognised N’s handwriting, his characteristic, loops that make it difficult to distinguish between n, m and u, and compels the careful reader to move slowly along the lines. Knowing N’s views on literature, his insistence that an intelligent text needs an intelligent reader, who is prepared to work as hard as the writer, rather than a reader who is indulged by the writer, I used to suspect that he was secretly pleased that the apparent illegibility of his handwriting would frustrate a less determined reader. But even a reader who abandoned the task of deciphering N’s handwritten texts would nevertheless be rewarded with the aesthetic pleasure of the pages: whether admired as they are or turned upside down, they are miniature works of art.

I have no explanation why the envelope was unopened. N was a dear friend, and I am sure I would have been pleased to receive the letter and eager to read it straightaway, even more so since he was one of the few people I knew who eschewed emails as a means of personal correspondence. He was principled and meticulous with everything he did in his life. His apartment was immaculate, every object in its place. All his actions were well thought through. But when he made an unusual marriage, entering into a union with a woman he had only just met and who was twenty odd years his junior, everyone who knew him gasped with surprise. The woman, of course, came to a tragic end, but as with most things involving N, this ‘of course’ was once not as certain as we now take it to be.

The other day, on my regular walk in the park, I found myself behind a young couple, N writes. At that time of the day, there are few people around and I can pursue my thoughts undisturbed. As you will remember, I tend to develop my best ideas during my walks. But that was not the case that afternoon. I could neither fail to notice nor ignore the fact that the young couple were arguing. The man was upset with the woman because of something she had done, and she objected to what she called his indifference towards her when they were alone. They continued to exchange accusations. At one point, the man, without raising his voice or increasing the speed of his utterances, became aggressive. It was his choice of words, unnecessarily offensive words, which made me uncomfortable to the point of nausea. You may ask why I didn’t simply take a different path so that I could neither see nor hear them. Why indeed didn’t I do that? It’s a legitimate question and, in your position, I would ask it too. As I walked behind them and they showed no sign of calming down, I knew that I should move away if I were to avoid being sick. But for some reason that I couldn’t identify at the time, not that I even tried, since my mind was too focused on what was going on between them, I continued walking behind the couple, gripped by a compulsion whose origin I was not aware of. Perhaps I could not think clearly because I was upset at the way they had disturbed my solitude, and I knew that my afternoon had been wasted. Eventually, they were greeted by an elderly woman sitting on a bench; she asked them to join her. They sat down, one on each side of the woman, while I proceeded on my walk. I did so with a degree of reluctance. I was very much aware of my unwillingness to move on; for a split second, the thought crossed my mind that I should hover by the bench. However, I quickly realised that would not have been acceptable. By that time my mind was full of the couple and their quarrel and despite trying my best to pretend that nothing had happened and that it was an ordinary afternoon like any other, I could not refocus my brain on developing my thoughts. In retrospect, I was grateful to the elderly woman inviting the couple to join her as I sensed that, had I remained walking behind them and they had continued to argue, I might have intervened, and intervened spontaneously, without having a reason to intervene since the young woman was in no obvious danger. I was sure that had the couple not sat down, I might not have been able to help myself not to become directly involved, N writes. The only way I might have stopped myself from intervening would have been by giving way to my fear that the couple, or one of them, might react in an unpleasant manner to my intervention, which would have made me a spectacle in a public park, a place not far from my apartment, and there might have been people around who have seen me in the neighbourhood and they, I imagined, would have stopped and watched the scene with some glee, as people tend to when someone is the object of other people’s approbation. Schadenfreude, the pleasure of the bored and petty mind.

But, at the time, I was annoyed that the elderly woman, who, judging by the way she spoke to them, and by the way they reacted, was clearly well acquainted with them, had prevented me from observing the couple.

That same evening, I was still haunted by the image of my encounter and as the hours passed, the image crystallised into a vision of the couple’s backs, or more precisely of the woman’s back. But it was only as I lay in bed, unable to sleep, that I understood what the image meant to me and I realised that, had I known the address of the couple, or the man, if they didn’t share a home, I would have written to him or possibly even knocked on his door. I would have told him that he was a lucky man and that he should not waste time objecting to whatever the woman might have done because nothing she could have done had any significance in the context. He was stupid not to recognise his good luck and I was prepared to do him a favour by making him aware of that. I do not see myself as an altruistic person, and there are very good reasons for that, reasons I have no desire to elaborate upon at this point, and which, I expect, you would share with me; however, on this occasion I was keen to help the man. You may think my wish to help the man originated from a personal experience and in that you would be right. I eschew sentimentality but the image of the couple’s backs had caused a memory to resurface, a sentimental memory, and rekindled a desire which, I am sad to say, given my circumstances, might have to remain just that.

For days after the encounter, N writes, I took the same path, hoping to come across them again or, preferably, the man alone since otherwise I knew I would have to ask him to step aside so that I could explain the situation. I didn’t think it would have been a good idea to speak in front of the young woman. I envisaged it as a man-to-man talk, the advice, the well-meaning advice of an older man, albeit hardly an experienced one when it came to women, to a younger one, but there would have been no need to disclose that particular aspect of my past. As it happens, despite my reluctance to sacrifice my afternoons in the park, the afternoons which are essential for me to think about my writing, I was prepared to look for the young man but after several weeks, there was no sign of either him or the young woman. I had to admit failure in that respect. He is on his own and I can only hope that the day comes when he understands how lucky he is.

As for me, the image of the backs of the young couple, or to be precise, of the back of the young woman, rekindled a very personal memory, a memory which, next to my reading and writing, is the most pleasurable experience of my life. The young woman in the park wore a shift dress, a cream-coloured shift with a large zip at the back, stitched on prominently visible, a style feature. I remembered Catherine wore a dress with a similar zip and she said it was a statement zip. I was puzzled. A statement zip? What was it stating, I wondered? Since when could zips make statements? It was Catherine’s turn to look bemused. She shook her head but offered no explanation, N writes. I could see that she thought I was teasing her. In my world, such a sartorial detail was a result of the tailor’s lack of skill, or laziness in finding the appropriately coloured zip. But then it occurred to me that perhaps the style required the invisible to become visible, exposed, as if the dress was being deconstructed, as if the dress were trying to tell us: I didn’t just come into existence but someone has actually spent time working on me, someone had to stitch on this zip. Perhaps a statement zip functioned in a similar way to meta-narration in a novel. Nevertheless, the concept of the statement zip still puzzles me. Catherine’s shift dresses always had a zip on the back, visible or invisible, and even now, after all these years I experience a frisson each time I remember how casually she would ask me to help her pull up the zip. Since I have been living alone, I have been entirely self-reliant for my sensual pleasures. Increasingly, I have no need for anyone, and I am content with this state of affairs. But I am also aware that pulling up a zip was one thing, perhaps the only thing, I did during my years of marriage that gave me real pleasure and that I now miss. I cannot replicate it alone and so I was bound to be needy in that respect. Catherine was an ordinary young woman but she had one characteristic that, at least in my eyes, distinguished her from her contemporaries: she wore dresses more often than trousers, and while that in itself wasn’t important to me, she stood out among her peers with her shift dresses. Whenever asked to help her, I was happy to oblige, happier than I wanted to show and, indeed, I made sure that she didn’t know how much it meant to me. Any display of strong emotions of whatever kind is best avoided, a principle I learned from my mother, and I stick by that. You must never give the other person the impression that you are dependent on them, she used to tell me, N writes. While doing up the zip, it was easy to hide my feelings since the nature of the task demanded that I stood behind Catherine. I recall how I would take my time, cheating, as I pretended that the zip was stuck or was not moving smoothly and I would pull it up, only to pull it down and up and down and so on, like Penelope undoing her weaving to gain time to postpone the end. Or Scheherazade telling her tales. Sometimes Catherine became impatient with me, which I welcomed because it showed me that she had no idea what I felt. I ignored her if she complained. I cannot think of anything that is more feminine, more part of what I consider the female mystique, than a woman asking a man to do up a zip on the back of her dress. When I say that, I am aware that my pleasure, at least in part, came from a memory of a scene in a black and white film, a film in which a man wearing an immaculately tailored, dark suit, most likely complete with a butterfly tie, and a woman, with a perfect haircut, one of those sharp haircuts that I associate with elegant Parisian women, a cut where not a single hair is out of place and the women are slim and chic, and in my mind the woman looks like Delphine Seyrig in L’Année dernière à Marienbad. Although, and I am sure of that, the scene in my mind is not from the film but possibly comes from an earlier one whose title I don’t remember, N writes, and it is even possible that the film is a mixture of my fantasy and my unreliable memory. If such a film doesn’t exist outside my imagination, which seems likely to me, someone should make such a film, the film I have dreamt, or that I remember, or misremember, and if someone wanted to make it, I would be happy to donate my idea gratis. If only I knew who to send it to, but I don’t know such people and therefore the idea will remain just that. I remember how the woman in the film that plays in my mind, the film that may or may not exist, turns to allow the man to deal with her request. As she lowers her head, she exposes the nape of her neck, her gracious nape, with the fine down that becomes visible only when a shaft of light illuminates her skin. As I watch the scene play out, a scene in which nothing is said since both players understand their role perfectly, I am the man, the elegant man with his immaculately tailored, dark suit and a butterfly tie, a man with a firmer physique than mine, a man with broader shoulders, certainly a man with a stronger presence than I could ever muster, I see and feel what the man sees and feels and I can smell the woman’s perfume. I perceive the tiny droplets of perspiration behind her ears and an erotic charge passes through my body. I feel warmth and admiration for the beauty of the woman, that woman in the film, the woman in my head and for women in general, these strange and mysterious creatures, N writes. I recall that the camera follows the man as he gently places one hand on the woman’s shoulder and, with the other, he starts to pull up the zip, slowly, millimetre by millimetre, as if nothing else in the world exists except the movement of his hand on the woman’s back. The scene is distilled pleasure, pleasure I returned to whenever Catherine asked me to do up the dress on her back, even though Catherine didn’t resemble the French actress in any way, nor was she particularly elegant, despite her propensity to wear dresses rather than frayed jeans, as most of her friends did. But that didn’t matter; her lack of Parisian elegance was not a problem as my imagination supplied the missing details and I remember, whenever I was asked to help with her dress, that particular scene would play in front of my eyes and I was the man in a dark, immaculately tailored suit and butterfly tie and she was the elegant woman, mysterious and unattainable. During those moments I felt it was worth being married. Yes. It was worth it. The demands on my time that I so much resented, and which you may recall I mentioned to you in passing, paled into insignificance at that moment. But perhaps I am being unfair, as I had no bad memories of my life with Catherine except that there were hours, and days even, when our union made it hard for me to focus on my studies, a situation I resented, but only in a quiet, unspoken way. I never protested. I never lost my temper. There was no point. If I had a problem, I told myself, I would deal with it in my own way, quietly. I believe that since she has gone, my Catherine, the image I have of her has changed. In my memory she has grown; she has become a person of substance. Whenever my longing for that moment when the man, the man who is me, pulls up the zip on the back of a woman’s dress reappears, I shiver at the thought that I may never again have that experience, N writes. Thinking of times that cannot be recovered brings to mind a woman I saw for a while in my student days, a woman who, even in her early twenties, was worried about ageing and who told me that she had read an interview with Simone de Beauvoir, who was at that time in her seventies, in which the great French writer said that she had accepted, she had come to terms with the idea, moreover, she felt a sense of calm at the knowledge that she would never again be able to run as young people run and that she would never again make love. My student friend said she admired de Beauvoir for that because she knew that she herself could never attain a state of such equanimity about old age. Now it is me who shudders at the thought, who has difficulty accepting that my chances of once more pulling up a zip on the back of a woman’s dress are gone, N writes. And the down, the down on her nape … Oh, what would I not give for a moment of that sensation, for the briefest chance to put my left hand on the woman’s back and to pull up that zip with my right hand, slowly and sensuously, while my eyes caress the woman’s back, while I feast on the sight of the miniscule, sparkling droplets of perspiration behind the ears of the woman from the black and white film I remember? Now, as I write, I can smell the woman’s scent, I can smell the exquisite French perfume she is wearing. Alas, most women I see on my daily walks don’t care for shift dresses. How silly that man was to have quarrelled with the woman in a shift dress, how intolerable it is to know that he risked forfeiting the opportunity to help her with her zip. Sometimes it occurs to me that I was born too late but at least it was early enough for me to perceive and retain the image of the fantasy, so that even ordinary women, and my wife was an ordinary woman, could provide brief moments of pleasure, moments when my fantasy became real. I am not complaining; I have learned to be content with my life and what helped me was the realisation that such moments, the briefest moments of pleasure are what living is all about, or rather, what it was about. I have not much living left, let alone any hope of pleasure. Except in memory, the memory of pleasure. The pleasure of memory. And when I experienced such pleasure, the line between reality and fantasy dissolved, and that was happiness. Happiness? Let’s not exaggerate. Contentment? Yes, that is more precise.

I recall moments of friendship, and I recall moments of sensuous, erotic pleasure and, among them, there were also moments of true learning. That’s all there was and if I had God-like powers, I don’t think I would allow humanity more than fleeting moments of friendship and moments of erotic pleasure since satiation of friendship, or love, even satiation of art, is the death of pleasure.

I am not a person who regrets the past; since we cannot alter it, regret is pointless. And clearly, we cannot regret anything in the present since, as soon as it may occur to us to do so, it is already in the past. I do not know why it never crossed my mind to tell you before of the pleasure I used to experience pulling up the zip on Catherine’s dresses, a pleasure that I still experience whenever I recall the memory. Perhaps you might have written a story about a woman in a dress with a zip on the back. I could have been the male character in that story. You might have appreciated my contribution. It is a story that should be written to make men aware of the pleasures they might not have discovered. Isn’t that what art is about? Making us notice the unnoticed in our lives, N writes.

There are many stories here. I am thinking of a protagonist who is a man in his late eighties, who recalls a memory from thirty years earlier when he had found himself walking behind a man and a woman in a park arguing fiercely, and he was possessed by a desire to hit the man and hit him so hard that he falls unconscious, possibly dead, so that the old man could run away with the woman, the woman who is wearing a shift dress with a long zip down her back. The man remembers having to concentrate hard not to commit violence as his desire grew out of control, a desire prompted by the memory of pulling up the zip on his late wife’s dress during his marriage many years earlier when he used to see himself as a character in an old black and white film, a man in a formal suit pulling up a zip on the back of a dress worn by a woman who looked like the central female character in L’Année dernière à Marienbad, a woman with an impeccable French haircut. In this mise-en-abyme, the frail, eighty-year-old man’s memory allows him to become a man in his forties, a man with broad shoulders. But perhaps there are other stories here, the story of the woman from the park, a woman unaware of her allure, and the story of the man’s wife and the story of the woman in the film. They might have found a place in your writing. The woman with a zip on her back would have fitted neatly into one of your stories, N writes at the end of his letter.

As I read these lines, I saw in my mind’s eye Man Ray’s photograph of ‘Le violin d’ Ingres’ and I wished I could ask N whether he found the image erotic. Alas, since he is no longer around, I can only speculate what he would have said.