Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi Read Online Free PDF Page B

of cultivation. Jeff's frustration simmered constantly; confronted with a recalcitrant piece of equipment – a frozen computer, a jammed printer – it boiled over, but in social situations it always transmuted itself, without effort, into its smiling opposite.
    Someone tapped him on the shoulder: Jeff recognized him instantly, actually knew him quite well, but his name, for the moment, escaped him. Like a witness scrutinizing a police photo-fit of a suspect, Jeff registered the details of his appearance – broad nose, short brown hair, white shirt emphasizing tanned complexion – but they refused to add up to a name, an identity. Jessica and Melanie were talking to a guy in a blue Bob Marley T-shirt and pale jeans. Mike and the Kaiser had wandered off. The original little group, having acquired a gravitational mass, was dispersing, fragmenting into new groups. Ah, this was Venice, this was a party … A party where there were a lot of nice-looking women, all decked out in their Missoni and Prada dresses.
    ‘Plenty of nice-looking women here,’ said … What the fuck
was
his name? Before Jeff had started racking his brains, trying to dredge up his name, he'd been thinking exactly the same thing but, said aloud, this completely accurate observation took on a surprisingly coarse quality. It suggested that your life was spent in a woman-less pub, empty except for a few men gazing forlornly into their pints of aptly-named bitter. Blotting out this image, Jeff took a sip of his womanly bellini.
    ‘There really are,’ he said as they stood there, bellinis in hand, looking. Of course it was nice, being at a party full of nice-looking women, but the real value of this situation – a party full of nice-looking women – was that it meant therewould be one woman who was stunningly gorgeous, who was radiant in a way that only one man in the party – Jeff, hopefully – could properly appreciate. And so it proved.
    It was her hair he noticed first: shadow-dark, falling to just below her shoulders. She had her back to him. She was tall. She was wearing a pale yellow dress, sleeveless. Her arms were thin, tanned. She was talking to a shaven-headed man in a striped shirt. The guy whose name Jeff still couldn't remember was talking about an artist he'd not heard of who did these drawings of trees that took forever to do and looked exactly like photographs – that was the
point –
even though they were drawings. Jeff nodded but all his attention was focused on the dark-haired woman in the yellow dress. She was still facing away, still chatting to the shaven-headed guy in the striped shirt, but he knew that when she turned round she would be beautiful. There was so little doubt that he was not even impatient to have this prediction verified. All he had to do was stand and wait. So he stood there, glass in hand. The shaven-headed guy was laughing at something another shaven-headed guy had said. A woman came up to her and touched her on the shoulder. She turned round, smiling when she recognized her friend, whom she kissed on the cheek. Without being able to make out the details of her face, Jeff knew that he had been right. As she stood chatting with her friend he saw her dark eyes and pronounced cheekbones. Her hair, parted in the middle, was almost straight. To the impartial onlooker her face may have appeared too bony, slightly equine; that was it, the flaw that clinched it for him, the flaw that was not a flaw. He was no longer listening to what was being said, just standing there gawping. He tore his gaze away from her, focusing again on his companion, who was no longer talking about the photographs that looked liked drawings of trees or whatever it was. It occurred to Jeff that he had enteredthe
vague
phase of his life. He had a vague idea of things, a vague sense of what was happening in the world, a vague sense of having met someone before. It was like being vaguely drunk all the time. The only thing he was not vague about was