and you said you couldn’t really understand daytime sex on the grounds that it “wasted time.” Time that could be more profitably spent working! V threw his hands up in despair. It was my turn to laugh and also to protest—in the spirit of these things I had been at least half joking. Yes, persisted V, but at the core of it there was a truth. I think of sex, any act of sex, as something that ignores and in fact obliterates time, so that sexual pleasure never is and never could be a waste of time, because it negates time entirely!
After we had cleaned our plates—in my case to the point you would never know it had ever had food on it—the waiter returned and ignored our mutually feigned ambivalence toward dessert. We ordered a platter of mixed cheeses and a giant crème brûlée. I tried to defend myself by pointing out that a woman’s life so often feels dictated by time: biological time, historical time, personal time. I thought of my friend Sarah who once wrote that a mother is a sort of timepiece for a child, because the time of a child’s life is measured against the time of the mother. A mother is the backdrop against which a child’s life is played out. It might be understandable if such a time-weighted being found it hard to allow pleasure to entirely obliterate time. V pretended to seriously consider this counter-argument but then as soon as I’d stopped speaking presented a substantial list of women artists, past and present, who’d delighted in daytime sex, although how he knew this about them he didn’t explain. Maybe you’re simply too English, suggested V, and I conceded the point.
By the time V paid the bill it was past midnight, but as we’d started late we felt we hadn’t quite had enough of each other, so proceeded to Café de Flore, ordered more wine, and considered all the exercise we would have to do the next morning to counter the effects of the wine, cheese and sugar on our middle-aged physiques. I asked him how he felt about aging. V frowned and asked why was I worrying about the subject, I looked exactly the same. But that’s what friends always say, I replied, and they’re not lying, but it’s a delusion of familiarity. I don’t feel that you’ve aged or that any of my friends have aged but that can’t possibly be the case. Yes, said V, but you really haven’t or not that much, so it’s offensive and boring—not to mention in bad taste—to hear you complain about something that barely affects you. I reached out to pinch V’s waistband, and pointed out the—what? Twenty-nine inches it had always been? Twenty-eight, he cried. It’s twenty-eight! Please get it right and also make a note so you remember! I promised to do so. With his iPhone, V took a selfie of the two of us, which we eagerly bent over the screen to study, only to discover that neither of us looked anywhere near as young as we’d imagined. But if we were white, said V, a little glumly, putting his phone back in his pocket, it would already be a lost cause so at least we have that to be thankful for. Still, one day I know that I will look in the mirror and see one of those very, very old men you see selling fish by the river in rural Chinese villages, and you will look and find whatever the Jamaican equivalent of that is. It will happen very abruptly. We’ll have been thirty-seven for twenty years and then all of a sudden we’ll both be a hundred and five.
By this point we were quite drunk. Our conversation staggered around haphazardly, like an old fool stumbling down the road, paying no attention to the cracks in the pavement. We wondered what young people overhearing us might make of our ancient conceptual divisions—straight, gay, bi, men, women—how ridiculous we must sound to them. I put it to V that in revolutions young people are generally always right and old people almost always wrong, but V rolled his eyes and said: Well, if that were true we’d all still be living in spiritual cults in the San Fernando Valley. I was wrong at twenty, he murmured, and I’m still wrong now. Being wrong is a lifelong occupation. We fell quiet and watched the street traffic. Since my last visit to Paris