Lurid & Cute by Adam Thirlwell Page B

prove the endlessness of receding selves
    But then, this was just the universal problem. A person is a little sequence or bundle and you never see all of their aspects. With those you love, however, it’s especially unnerving because they at least are the ones where you decide you do want to know them all, even if really it is impossible, and it makes people act quite strangely or unforgivably, or perhaps more precisely makes you realise how strangely people do act, all the time, it’s just that it’s only those you love who are scrutinised with the appropriate attention. And yet also I realised that if I was feeling this sense of estrangement and receding selves, as in some funhouse mirror, then Epstein was surely feeling it more. If he could have spoken to me in a private booth I knew how he would have been feeling. He would have wanted to subject me to an inquisition. Where were you that night? What did you do? How can I trust you? When of course he couldn’t trust me and he knew that very well. He was suddenly discovering that he couldn’t trust anyone, or at least he was perhaps not discovering this fact for the first time in his life, since he was surely old enough for this knowledge to have been forced on him at least once or twice before, but perhaps he had thought that with Romy never again would this sadness of hidden selves be revealed to him, but here however he now was, and I thought I could observe a certain exhaustion in his eyes at having to once again accept this difficult knowledge – and it made me sad. I mean, I was sad to be present at his moment of disillusion, or more precisely I was sad to be the agent of such disillusion, since mostly I think illusions are to be cherished and adored. But since always I am keen to be as noble as possible, when Epstein was telling me how grateful he was I did not pause, I accepted his praise as graciously as possible. These are the ways in which one has to behave to one’s friends and acquaintances. I did it quickly, though, because I did doubt my ability to continue such a comedy indefinitely. Then I excused myself very gently and went back to my beloved wife.
    & the dangers of every party
    Everyone goes to a lot of parties, which must mean that mostly no one thinks there is anything wrong with that. Whereas of course the motives for ever leaving a house and entering society are often flawed or even dangerous – such as the desire to sleep with someone else, or to complete a sociological survey, like see inside a house or meet people you might never usually meet in the course of an average day, which was why I could sometimes be found in the houses of my richer friends, at their birthday parties in restaurants or salons with cinema producers and gallerists, even if the next day I would feel guilty and ashamed for my sudden love of social climbing, but also other seemingly minuscule motives like boredom or the request of a friend, because even such seemingly innocuous motives begged the basic question – that really you should not be having friends at all, you should only be accessing your own solitude and delinquency, and never leaving the seclusion of your room. How blithely do we enter these parties! Because it really is dangerous, to enter society, especially when you think of the possible danger to your various attachments. Everyone thinks that there is only one person in the world for them, this is how they are told to operate, and I suppose in general it works very well, whereas of course the truth is that there are many people whom you could find as charming as possible, not just sadly scattered at distant points around the globe but on every street you walk down, it’s probably true of nearly everyone you have a conversation with – which is therefore why those couples who talk with wonder about the extraordinary sequences of chance events that unbelievably have brought them together are sadly comically wrong, I mean