The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith Read Online Free PDF Page B

kind of grimace. ‘I’m here for the long haul.’
    ‘Sure you are.’
    ‘You want to know what love is?’ Wally said.
    ‘Wally,’ Bill said, ‘don’t do this to me.’
    But Wally did do this. Showed him exactly what his love was made of. First he grinned, showed his two gold teeth to Bill, then he winked, then he knelt and slipped under the bottom wire.
    That’s how it is when you have three men around one woman – a general excess – passion, foolishness, misunderstanding – the half-assembled audience, imagining the show had begun, stood in their seats and cheered.

7
    When Wally leaped, what Vincent saw was suicide, gentian violet between its naked toes. He saw the red waistcoat, the huge bunioned feet daubed violet, the violiniste production manager descending like some dreadful cock from heaven.
    If he had been previously aware of the eight-by-eight foot safety net, he now forgot it, and he was in any case too depressed toaccommodate the notion that the leap might be a declaration of love.
    When the audience applauded, Vincent was shocked. When Wally bounced off the net and bowed to him, Vincent felt out of joint, confused, angry. The violiniste’s arm was broken – it was hanging like a rag – but he was grinning and running from the stage like some
space creature.
Vincent could not hope to understand. He looked around, surprised to see the
Neufzine
critic, a woman not normally sympathetic to the Feu Follet, smiling broadly and applauding. Then the drums started and Vincent gave himself over to his greater fear – the one that had obsessed him all afternoon, the one that had hung around him like a cloud since he had seen the Gardiacivil banging at my mother’s door – that his ‘son’ was somehow monstrous.
    It is clear enough by now that I am not Vincent Theroux’s son, but at the time nothing was so simple. My maman had imagined both of her lovers to be, in different ways, my father. Bill, her public man, was strong and beautiful. Vincent, her secret lover, was rich and intellectual. And if she had conceived me with Bill, it was Vincent she had discussed me with most often. Vincent was married already, but he wanted me, more than anything he could imagine. Bill was only twenty-two, but Vincent
wanted the role.
    My maman wanted me too, but after
Lear
, after
Mother Courage
, after the tour to Nez Noir. She scheduled me, rescheduled. She named me Tristan * in the summer of 366, even as she postponed me. I was Tristan before my egg was hit, Tristan before they knew if I was a boy or a girl.
    The moment I was conceived, I was Vincent’s little liefling. † He treasured me, the idea of me, just as he might a folk painting, offered by a dealer by transparency, purchased on recommendation, presently being crated in another country. Ever since the day he had seen the small phial of urine turn a gorgeous lilac colour, he had drawn on this reservoir of wonder and joy which was nothing less than my existence.
    And he had maintained this feeling until he had – one hour before the curtain of the Scottish Play – met the Gardiacivil knocking on my maman’s door. I am not suggesting that the sight of uniforms alone depressed him, but the Gardiacivil were no friends of the Feu Follet and he knew they were not delivering flowers. Indeed, they brought with them an administrator from the Mater Hospital and, it was this gen, kneeling on the top step so his fat lips were level with the keyhole, who gave Felicity Smith, actor-manager, a legal warning – that she would be held legally responsible for the death of the child should she refuse to provide it with the proper care for its condition.
    ‘What condition?’ Vincent asked.
    But the three men had that dull, flat-faced look of policemen at murder scenes. They drew a line around themselves and their terrifying secret.
    ‘Are you the father, Mr Theroux?’
    Vincent was a married man, a public figure, the chief executive of Efica’s largest pharmaceutical