The only reason why I came to this funeral is because a friend advised me it would be a great place to find emotionally vulnerable women. I am only distantly related to Gerard, he married the daughter from my great aunt’s (by marriage) first marriage. I couldn’t care less that he’d died, but the date came round, it was an excuse to take the day off work. I was carefully trying to notice everyone who was there, I didn’t want to miss anyone because I hate surprises. “Death reminds us that life goes on, for the rest of us it goes on here, for Gerard he has a new life watching over us with our Lord.†While the minister was saying this I thought that Gerard had been one of the lucky ones, he’d fallen in love young, married young, lived in more or less marital bliss for a few decades then died swiftly and without warning at the age of 54. If he is with God now then he will be grateful as he looks down and notices all the people who live less happy lives for much longer. For those who are happy life can’t last long enough, for the mildly depressed majority it can’t end early enough. I’ve never been inspired by Christianity, the way I feel if I go to heaven when I die then that is a bonus, if I just die, life and consciousness just ends, then at least it is over.
Some even more distant relative that I barely recognized and certainly couldn’t put a name to approached me. I was unlucky, he was one of those old bastards with an excellent memory, he knew exactly who I was.
“Michel, I am glad you could come. When the inevitable happens it is always of great comfort to see not only one’s nearest and dearest, but a great many others, reminding you of all the life that still remains in the world.†I have never known how to deal with death except by maintaining a pathological disinterest. I looked down at the floor, gave a small nod without raising my head enough for him to see the deceit in my eye, and sighed. He touched me on the shoulder and left me. I went back to reconnoitering and immediately noticed a stunning girl dressed in sheer black. She shared the same Spanish look as Gerard who’d been fortunate, so I assumed she must be a relative. This was confirmed when I saw her call Roselina, Gerard’s widow, ‘mother’. It must be Francesca, who I haven’t seen for a decade. The last time we’d met was a golden wedding anniversary when she was barely ten years old. She was pretty then, but intolerable. She had a curvy face, jet black hair and deep brown eyes. She seemed to be pouting, I couldn’t tell if this was sadness or allure.
I smoked a cigarette and drank a glass of wine. It was a warm day so I stuck to red wine, knowing that the white had been left near a window. I examined the food for signs of poison or simple bad hygiene. I craved a bacteria-ridden sandwich that would cause me to faint, giving me an excuse to leave this sorry horde. People are depressed at funerals not because someone had died, but because by coming they’ve committed themselves to at least four hours of speaking to people they barely know and don’t particularly care about. This is also a reason why so many people get drunk. I settled on a neglected-looking pastry which to my surprise was coconut flavored. This gave me fleeting happiness but when I’d finished and looked around to spot Francesca, she’d disappeared. I tried to maintain the happy feeling but it subsided without trace when a woman in her fifties, probably a friend of the widow’s, came up to me and made conversation.
Actually she said,
“I don’t really know what to say to people at funerals. I mean, how do you go about introducing yourself?†I knew I was meant to say something.
“I feel like that regardless of the event. I never know what to say to people.†This stopped her for a moment. I was aching for an excuse to leave or just an interruption, a speech, a fire alarm.
“Are you okay?†she asked.
“Have you seen the price of films lately?†I asked in desperation.
“Yes, I enjoy films. But you are right, they are terribly expensive.†I had given her a conversation without intending to, now the responsibility was on me to show that my conversation was interesting. I had chosen it, I had brought up the topic, but I had nothing to say about it.
“And CDs…†I was trying to say something else but my voice trailed off. She asked if I wanted another drink, I realized I was holding an empty glass. I thanked her for her offer. As she walked away I conceded to myself that although her face was wrinkled, not just with age but with stress, and her hair obviously dyed blonde, that she still had a good figure. I knew under dress she wouldn’t have the taught, nubile flesh of her earlier years, but she’d at least got a slim waist and pert buttocks. Her breasts were a little small, which was probably fortunate given her age, in fact I wasn’t at all displeased that she’d come and talked to me.
The tragedy was that I had nothing to say to her, and she had nothing to say to me. There was no way we were going to be able to talk for the minimum of thirty minutes before one of us suggests sex. It was obvious that we were playing that game, too average looking people, single, lonely. I could look around the room and I am sure spot a dozen others who were in exactly the same stage of life. They may or may not have had respectable sex lives so far, maybe a dozen partners or more or less, but they will all be in the aporia the precedes middle age. You sense that time is ticking away, still young enough to care but too old to do much about it. If you haven’t got married by 35 then chances are you never will. Not that marriage is the important thing. The companionship that only comes from flesh against flesh, that is what these people want. The representation of intimacy by two (or more) human bodies. That is as close as two people can get.
We need an Other in order to construct any sense of ourselves. This certainly seems true of the slender woman I was just speaking to; in the last couple of minutes I’ve seen her try, and fail, to start conversations with three different men. All three men were identical to me in all the significant ways, all men in their late thirties, middle class. All with that hallmark tiredness to their faces that comes from years of working without love to go home to. Lacan wrote that all people are born prematurely. When you consider that a great many mammals are born with the capacity to walk and feed themselves, or attain these capacities within weeks of birth, human babies seem like pale, pathetic replicas of human beings by comparison. Saying that most people live their whole lives prematurely, and end up as pale pathetic replicas of themselves. Although this could be cultural rather than biological, the obsession with the new and the now leads people to jump on any number of passing bandwagons in case they miss an important one. The ‘information age’ is a time where we record almost everything, but hence have no idea what any of it means.
Another sip, another lungful of smoke. Middle age is a long wait. When you enter it you either settle into some regular and simple existence, preferably with a loving partner. While you are in it you don’t want it to end because then you enter old age. Middle age is like a waiting room for the afterlife, or just for death. Everyone has their allotted time but no-one knows if life is running late. Some are lucky, they reach their peak at this age. Their work starts to pay dividends, their children have left for work or university. Freedom from parenthood and financial comfort equates to happiness for a great many. Men and women alike gain time to do all the things they wanted to do before children and careers took priority. We are born prematurely, we live prematurely, we die belatedly.
‘Gerard was a loving father, a loyal husband and a noble friend. He will be deeply missed.’ Out of boredom rather than curiosity I was reading the messages of condolence on the wreaths sent to the house. One read ‘To my lover Gerard, who could never tell the whole truth.’ It was unsigned but I assume it was from Gerard’s mistress. Most of the people here didn’t know about her, including the widow. I thought it best that she didn’t see the message, at this stage she should just keep her happy memories. I hid the wreath in the bin outside, taking the time to get a breath of air. Outside it was a crisp, cold October afternoon. I was looking up at the house, thinking that for all his infidelity Gerard had at least seen through his financial commitment to his family, he died in a state of decent wealth, left it all to his wife. She might never know the truth but at least she hasn’t been left with nothing. Gerard could easily have left all his money to his mistress, it isn’t uncommon.
While I was ruminating along these lines I didn’t realise Francesca was standing nearby. When I turned to go back into the house I noticed her. The still, cold air gave her beauty an edge, it sharpened the considerable bulges of her breasts and her hips. I was momentarily transfixed, particularly as she gazed at me without saying a word. She walked towards me, her breasts bouncing slightly confirming that she was bra-less under the dress.
“Go upstairs, wait for a few minutes. The third door on the left is my room.†I wasn’t going to argue with her. I nodded without taking my eyes of hers, which were now sparkling. I walked back inside the house and made my way upstairs without anyone noticing. I counted three doors to my left and entered the room. It was furnished with pine and had posters on the walls betraying Francesca’s liberal upbringing. A Greenpeace poster was adjacent to ones for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Ecole de Etudes Hautes in Paris. The Ecole was probably where Francesca wants to go to university. I had a cold moment when I noticed on her dresser a picture of her father, Gerard, from a few years back, when he was my age. The image looked familiar until I noticed that it was taken in Japan, a country I’ve never visited. Then as I placed the picture back on the dresser and caught a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror I noticed that I looked not at all unlike Gerard in the picture.
At that moment Francesca walked in, closed the door behind her and locked it. I stood up fully, and faced her. She took my hands and placed them on her breasts. I could feel her nipples through the soft material. We lay down on the bed in an embrace, already I could smell her and my erection was pressing against her leg. I moved one hand down her back and grabbed her ass and pulled her right up against me. She moved one of her legs between my thighs and used it to rub the underside of my cock. She kissed me fully, her tongue lashing and flicking against mine. I took my hand off her buttock and brought it round to the front of her body. I rubbed the front of her vagina through her panties, she stroked my prick through my trousers. She giggled and broke free of our embrace. She lay on her back, slid up her dress and took off her underwear. Her pussy was already glistening. She took my head in both hands, kissed me hard then pushed me down. She gave a little whimper as I flicked her clitoris with my tongue. I slipped a finger inside her, she was hot and wet. She started to move against me, a slight rhythmic rising and falling of her hips, in time with the strokes and probing of my fingers. Suddenly she let out a moan and put her legs over my shoulders, pulling my face into her cunt. She came, her lips quivering.
It was a few seconds before her legs relaxed and I moved up to kiss her. She could taste her own juices on my lips. She was still gyrating slightly, her pubis pressed against the erection now straining in my pants. Then she pushed me off her, and climbed on top of me. I could feel the heat of her snatch through my clothes as she rubbed herself against me. She sat up, ran both her hands down my chest and stomach and undid my belt and then my trousers. My cock was bursting and she placed one palm on my balls and slowly began to wank me with the other. I responded by rubbing her clitoris with a finger, running it slowly up and down her labia, enjoying the soft, moist folds. She climbed off me, squeezing my cock as she did so. She repositioned herself then slid the hand on my balls down to my anus. As she lowered her mouth over the end of my prick she pushed a finger into my anus. She flicked the head of my penis with her tongue, causing me to gasp. She lowered her head and took my penis fully in her mouth. I groaned, she looked up at me and smiled, my prick still in her mouth. I came suddenly and violently. She wasn’t expecting it but she carried on sucking until the pulses subsided, swallowing my cum. I am not sure but I thought I saw a tear roll down her cheek.
She didn’t say anything, we just lay together for a minute. Then she sat up and moved to the edge of the bed. She lent over the bed to find her knickers, her dress riding up and giving me a glorious view of her ass. She stood up, put her underwear on and told me I should leave first, because if I were found here on my own it would be strange. As I opened the door to glance and make sure the landing was empty I had that same feeling of potentially being caught that most people sneaking out of an 18 year old girls’ bedrooms must feel. I hadn’t done anything wrong, inappropriate perhaps, but not morally wrong. There was no-one on the landing so I stepped out of the room, closing the door behind me without looking at her.
Downstairs someone had turned the music up and the drinks had been flowing. Everyone seemed to have forgotten that someone had died. I noticed Roselina flirting with Gerard’s brother, and him flirting back, so any my residual conscience was cleared. I opened a bottle of Dutch lager and wondered whether anyone had noticed mine and Francesca’s simultaneous absence. I thought about leaving, so that people would assume I left when I went outside. But then this plan was scuppered when Gerard’s brother came over to talk to me.
“Michel, good to see you.†I haven’t spoken to this guy in over five years, but he greets me like an old friend. “Glad you could come, Gerard would be happy that you are here.†This was a sycophantic lie, Gerard had never liked me. Given what had just happened I couldn’t blame him for that. Anton (Gerard’s brother) swayed a little, he had a large glass of Scotch in his hand. There was a silence, so I proposed a toast to Gerard. I had misjudged how drunk Anton was for he took up the idea with great enthusiasm. He tapped his glass loudly with a fork and the room went quiet.
“Michel had just proposed a toast, to Gerard.†The ‘to Gerard’ was echoed by the room. I had unwittingly made myself the centre of attention.
Fortunately Francesca chose that moment to reappear and without the slightest glance in my direction she walked across the room, made herself a drink and began chatting to some relative or friend.
“Beautiful girl isn’t she?†Anton was leering.
“Yes.†I thought it best to agree. From the attention caused by Francesca’s reappearance I’d say this was the accepted opinion of the room.
“You know she’s an artist?†Anton asked.
“No, I didn’t know that.†What was he getting at?
“Yeah, she paints and sketches. She’s very talented. Roselina wants her to study art, but she’s set on social science.â€
“She’ll learn. Most social science students choose the subject for the same reason Psychology students choose that. As society gets more and more individuated people grow up feeling like they don’t understand the people around them. So they study something which they think will teach them about people, how to interact. This is the same reason why ‘Real Life’ stories are so popular and why dating services have grown exponentially.†Anton nodded, he seemed to agree. I continued, “What the students invariably find is that the rampant theorizing of Psychologists and the abstract generalizing of Sociologists doesn’t improve their social lives one bit. And all it trains them to do it repeat the same clichés and theories to other people.†I didn’t think much to these two subjects, seeing them as the result of a culture I had no desire to maintain, put simply I am as lonely as the next person. Also the principles of psychology are steeped in a Cartesian notion of the individual that they merely serve to perpetuate the culture that created them.
Social science suffers from a different problem, it can’t decide whether it is liberal or Marxist in origin. A lot of the methods and basic presumptions of social science, the self as a social construction for example, are based in Marxist philosophy. But we live in a liberal culture and so both the subject matter, the data for social science, and the climate to which it seeks to be relevant, are liberal. I suggested this to Anton but his eyes had gone blurry and I saw his glass was now empty. I gave him a pat on the shoulder, a rare moment of appropriate physical contact between heterosexual men, and left him. Walking around the house, which surprisingly American styling, I wondered whether France has ever had what could reasonably be called a national character. Until the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries the majority of French people were semi-literate peasants, tied to the land. A great many of them would never have been out of France, nor knew a great deal either about their own country or others.
Now the majority of French people has either been abroad or is at least aware that there are other countries, other cultures and other languages. We now import so much in terms of media and other culture (not to mention immigrants) that France is too plural to be effectively summed up in a national character. Neither situation, the one where most people were agricultural peasants, the other where most people are highly pluralized media junkies, is particularly convincing as representing the national character. Everything that happened to turn the first into the second moved too quickly to be stable enough to demonstrate the national character. Indeed, apart from our general attitudes towards the British and the Americans there is very little shared by French people. I suppose it is the same elsewhere, everywhere has become so cosmopolitan that it is impossible to take it all in.
There are too many signs to know what they all mean, even if you read a book a day for your whole life you still wouldn’t finish al the literature in the English language, let alone the rest. And a lot of those books won’t make much sense unless you’ve seen certain movies, listened to certain CDs, known about certain historical and political events. Sometimes it seems you simply have to be of a certain taste to understand something, although I’ve never understood that. In this room there are about a hundred people, all wearing clothes, jewellery, make up, perfume, all of whom engage in conversations in certain ways, all of whom are dealing with the loss of Gerard in certain ways. To even decipher this relatively small and simple arrangement could take months, or years. Certainly you’d have to record the whole thing because there is no way one person can take in this amount of data at once.
The party started to break up. Although I felt sorry for Roselina and Francesca because they’d have to clear up all this mess and therefore have lots of time to dwell on their loss, I was one of the first to go. As with many things in life as soon as one person went there was a more or less constant stream of people making their excuses. As soon as the burden of being the first to leave had been lifted, people showed little subtlety in making their way out to cars and taxis. A great many people had drunk and eaten their fill, in that respect it had been a successful occasion. Whether Gerard’s memory had been paid the respect it was due was anyone’s guess. I honestly didn’t know him well enough to say.