Paris Trance by Geoff Dyer Page A

Friendship? (Who needs it?) She liked him, as far as she knew him at all, was attracted to him, but in a sense the whole evening was taking place in a kind of anticipated retrospect. Its purpose was to find out what it led to, if it would lead to anything. They were on a date.
    Which made it all the more surprising that, two sips into her wine, they were joined by Alex’s friend – the one he’d been with that night in the Petit Centre – and his girlfriend. For a moment Sara thought they had turned up by chance but, as Alex introduced them and began arranging more chairs round the table, she saw that it was to be a group evening. She was disoriented, a little disappointed. How would he have felt if she’d invited friends along? Had she misunderstood the situation entirely?
    No. Only Alex’s handling of it. It was precisely because they were on a date that Alex had asked Nicole and Luke along. What Sara had felt only faintly, momentarily, as she arrived – that sense of first date as preliminary survey – Alex experienced with something akin to dread. He hated the serve and volley, the I-say-something-you-say-something-back of the one-to-one. The problem, as he saw it, was that, unless you got mugged or sprained an ankle, the typical formula for a first date – drinks, conversation, dinner – was designed for an exchange of histories but offered no opportunity to begin racking up some shared history. Dinner together involved two people cocooned separately in a vacuum of expectations and desires. Whereas this format – four friends having dinner – meant that, from the word go, they were caught up in events, in one another’s lives. They were gathered round a table, they all had drinks. Alex said how pleased he was to meet Nicole, said he had only seen her through the fence at passage Thiéré.
    ‘Luke said you were the one that kicked the ball at my head that day.’
    ‘No, that was that yob Matthias. I was the one that kicked the ball over that way so he could talk to you.’
    ‘What! It was deliberate?’
    ‘Of course. Didn’t you know?’
    ‘No. Is that true Luke?’
    ‘I’m afraid so,’ said Luke, not displeased at having his cunning revealed.
    ‘What about you?’ Sara said to Alex when he had told her the story. ‘Were you waiting for me on rue de la Roquette the other day?’
    ‘He’s always waiting on rue de la Roquette,’ said Luke. ‘Stalking his prey.’
    Thinking it best to move the conversation on, Nicole asked Sara where she lived. As soon as Sara had told them Luke plunged into a diatribe about a café he happened to have been to on that street, a fucking awful place where the barman . . . Alex didn’t need to listen: he saw straight away that Luke was wired up on his behalf, so desperate to make sure that the evening was a success, to speed through the preliminaries of getting to know each other, that he was quite happy to serve as pace-maker. Mouthing off like this was actually part of being good company. Let Sara think him a fool, an egocentric, loud-mouthed idiot, anything just to speed things along, to generate the energy the evening needed. He was still in mid-rant when Nicole placed her hand on Sara’s and said,
    ‘Take no notice. He likes to think he’s all the Ms: mean and moody, but he’s actually all the Ns: nice and normal.’
    ‘I’m sure he has hidden shallows,’ said Sara. She was hungry. They were all hungry but deciding where to eat took them into another round of drinks. Several places were proposed and rejected. Alex wanted to go to a Vietnamese place around the corner.
    ‘Is it cheap?’ said Sara.
    ‘Oh yes,’ said Alex. ‘If we’re being absolutely frank, I don’t do expensive.’
    ‘I appreciate your telling me.’
    ‘I’ve always thought it a shame that miserliness is not considered a more attractive quality in a man.’
    ‘It is pretty low on the list.’
    ‘You mean there is something lower? That’s reassuring.’
    ‘Well, there’s a