Damascus page 2
‘It’s a change from one thing to another, sometimes dramatic and forever.’
‘Mummy, what does it mean to “see the light”?’
‘It means that everything was all wrong before, and now it will all be ok.’
Wow. I looked out of the window again. Could stuff like this really happen among those minarets and reservoirs and telephone lines and dusty palms that grew larger and larger as the plane descended? Wow. Well, I figured that if my Dad was to finally get his divorce and marry my Mum, if she was to have the other kids she would secretly cry over on the phone to her sister, thinking I wasn’t listening, if I was to stop being a geek and get a pony and be popular, if our heating was ever going to work in the winter – it was going to be here; here, this place was going to fix us all forever. Everything was wrong, and now it would all be ok.
Maybe everything was not quite bad enough, as we only came away from Damascus with a ghetto blaster.
We go to Damascus all the time. A spa weekend in the Cotswolds. A month in the Betty Ford clinic. Joining Scientology. A luxury break for two in Paris, as if the most romantic city in the world will make a bad marriage a better one. It only makes the chasm between passion and indifference all the more apparent, everything that is wrong magnified a thousand times against the first flush of desire on the couple at the table opposite on the Place des Vosges. An overdose of beauty is the cruelest way to see the deficit in your own life. Hanging on desperately, wanting to love in the way that mystery urges us to, but familiarity will no longer allow. Hanging on, becoming bits of each other, but the bits we love the least. Hanging on, month after month, year after year, when the sorcery of sex no longer weaves its spell and we run a film in our head to manage the real one we are living. What happens when we change, but not for the good of those we have loved so intensely once before? Envy the actor, who has lost all sense of himself and can play the role required, yet still believes he is his own authentic self.
In the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Santa Monica, fittingly on one of those rare days when it rains in Los Angeles, I stirred my tea, bit my lip, and realised that I still knew who I was. Paul must have remembered Saul, dreamt of his last life, the weight of silver and the perfume of whores, even after the momentary darkness disorientated him so. Even if I didn’t like myself a lot of the time, even if this had been my pathetic attempt to make up for my wrongdoings by loving as much as I could and long after was healthy for either of us, that little voice was still there, louder now, and reminding me that I could die before a conversion that might never come, and that had in all probability taken place already. Furious, in the way you can only be with those you care for so deeply, I drove back to my hotel, and reminded myself that hell, like Damascus, is here, now, and it is other people’s hearts.
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