Chapter Eight
How Marie-France Dreslin made the transition from casual acquaintance to live-in lover remains forever shrouded in mystery, and no more so than to the man himself. Garnet, having frequented the bookshop for a period of several months, on an almost daily basis, purchasing during this time a considerable number of volumes, none of which he had either the time or the intention of ever reading, all, seemingly, caught up in a whirlwind of spiralling inflationary prices, and on each occasion met without the slightest hint of recognition, let alone friendship, by the increasingly - to his mind - pulchritudinous proprietress, it came as a great shock to him, when one day, as he was preparing to depart the bookshop, a copy of the 1894 Paris Librairie edition of Zola’s La Curre wrapped inside a modest brown paper bag and stowed away beneath the storage compartment beneath his wheelchair, and two one hundred francs notes fewer in his wallet, that he thought he heard the object of his desire ask him if he would like to go to bed with her. Garnet had heard about mirages occurring when a person was subjected to great mental or physical duress, classically, imaginary oases appearing to thirst-starved desert travellers, but the words he now heard were almost an auditory equivalent of the visual phenomenon: if he had been granted a wish, it would have been the phrase he would most have desired to hear. Now though, he was forced to ask Mme. Dreslin to repeat herself, so uncertain was he of his own ears; so incredulous that prayers could genuinely be answered. The first time that they made love, it was in the storeroom behind the shop counter - Garnet not being capable of scaling the steep and narrow staircase, which was the only means of entrance to Mme. Dreslin’s boudoir - Garnet’s carer, patiently waiting, all the while, outside, solemnly reading the spines of the books on the shelves marked ‘Religion and Esoteric’. The second time, the venue had switched to Garnet’s Seefeldstrasse mansion, by the third occasion Mme. Dreslin arrived carrying a large suitcase, containing various personal items, and several changes of outfit.
Mme. Dreslin made love in much the same way that she did everything else, unemotionally and efficiently, almost as though it was purely a perfunctory act that she was obliged to undertake by the stipulation of some unspoken vows. For Garnet, the pleasure of intercourse was always tempered by fears as to his performance: his disability, and increasingly his age, making him an erratic bed partner. In Mme. Dreslin, though, it seemed that he had found his perfect mate. The cool French woman’s general demeanour of indifference, and selfish pursuit of her own pleasures, usually would have been a combination guaranteed to induce paralysing, self-conscious embarrassment in Garnet, but strangely enough, the greater Mme. Dreslin’s apathy to any sensitivities on his own part, the more liberated Garnet felt, both sexually and also mentally. For someone that had never known love, it came as something of a surprise to discover that he was capable of experiencing that emotion.
One disquieting voice, during this summer of love, was raised by Garnet’s lawyer, Leyton Drisdale. Garnet had initially enlisted the services of the New York based professional during his first unsuccessful attempt at building the world’s tallest structure. Drisdale, by his own admission, was no expert on construction industry litigation, indeed, only recently graduated from law school at the time, he was a self-confessed novice at many of the practical applications of the law, but, in many ways it was this very innocence which Garnet had been keen to exploit: he had need of a grateful lawyer not a big-name lawyer, someone who was on the up and for whom the addition of such a prize client as Garnet G. Wendelson would mean the difference between sink and swim; Park Avenue or Skid Row. Leyton Drisdale appeared to fit the description perfectly. After the collapse - or strictly speaking, non-materialisation - of Garnet’s initial building venture and his subsequent self-imposed exile from New York, Garnet had only seen the young lawyer on one occasion, when he had paid for Drisdale to fly to Zurich to read and ratify his tenancy agreement on the Seefeldstrasse property, but he had maintained a regular communication by telephone, keeping the advocate updated on any changes in his personal and business affairs, something that Drisdale was more than happy to continue, since his retainer fees were burgeoning so rapidly that he already had a fixed eye on a larger apartment, somewhere in the mid Sixties.
The words ‘gold-digger’ were not specifically used, not being considered appropriate legal-speak, but that was unquestionably the gist of the short letter of warning that Leyton Drisdale sent to Garnet Wendelson in July 1983. Garnet angrily screwed up the missive into a tight ball when he first read it, dispatching it to the furthest corner of his study with a deft flick of his wrist. It was only later on that same morning when he retrieved it with the aid of a pair of long handled pincers, specially designed for this and similar purposes, that he objectively considered the well-intentioned words, flattening out the crinkled paper, and filing the letter in a tray marked ‘Pending’.
••••••••••
The leaves upon the trees along the route of the Dolderbahn were rapidly turning golden brown as the onset of autumn firmly gripped the city. It would not be long before the first snows of the season. Garnet and Marie-France had joined the funicular railway at Romerhof, intending to disembark at Bergstation, high up on the Dolder, overlooking the lake and the city. Garnet had dispensed with the services of his carer for the day; it had been agreed that Marie-France would wheel him for the afternoon, it would be a pleasant trip in the countryside for them both, perhaps the last opportunity that year, before the ice and snow made the ground impassable for the wheelchair.
The air at the summit of the hill felt chillier than it had been down by the lake and a fine rain was beginning to fall, and when the greedy clouds swallowed up what little remaining warmth there was in the weak sun, the two voyagers decided to rest a while and take tea in the lounge of the Dolder Hotel, from where they could look out on the valley below. It was too wet and cold to sit outside on the terrace, where the striped umbrellas above the tables looked forlorn and forgotten, the area deserted of people, the bedraggled canopies, swung by the wind, barely capable of protecting the white surfaces from the continual drift of unwelcome wet leaves, which tenaciously clung to the tables and chairs like cheapening insults. Garnet and Marie-France sat watching the depressing scene, comfortably warm in the air-conditioned interior. The hotel lounge was empty of residents, and had the air of a sleepy retirement home or the convalescence room in a sanatorium. A day that had started with such purpose had deteriorated into a meaningless exercise in clock watching, a protracted wait for sufficient hours to pass before either darkness or hunger enforced a change to the status quo. Once, the company alone would have given the situation necessary meaning for Garnet; now it was the silence he found particularly oppressive. Across the valley, high above and beyond the far shore of the Zurichsee, in the mountains that formed the distant horizon, there would be other couples staring out, locked together in equally interminable attendance, their gaze focussed on the very spot where Garnet and Marie-France currently sat, contemplating whether the grass was greener on the other bank of the majestic lake, but knowing in their hearts that it was just exactly the same.
It might have been that same day, if not, it was certainly very shortly afterwards, when Mme. Dreslin asked Garnet if she could move a friend into the Seefeldstrasse house. Initially confused, thinking that perhaps his mistress was anticipating a visit from an overseas acquaintance, he agreed that a spare room could be made available if she so desired, provided, of course, that the guest did not overstay her welcome and did not prove too disruptive to their normal household routine. When Mme. Dreslin corrected Garnet’s misapprehension and informed him that her friend was actually a man, and further that an additional room would not be necessary, that, instead, he would be sharing both her room and her bed, it still took Garnet some moments to assimilate the implication of her words. Mme. Dreslin’s response to the ensuing explosion was her typical one of disdainful unconcern: she did not argue with Garnet’s
resentful accusations, neither did she attempt to defend herself against his torrent of abusive descriptions, instead she matter-of-factly informed him that it was ‘quite the usual thing’ in her home country and that she ‘could not see what he was getting so upset about’. When Garnet persisted in his verbal attack, the only rejoinder from her lips that his bile inspired was the coolly-spoken, wounding opinion that ‘in his position he should be grateful for any crumbs that fell from her plate, and that he had enjoyed too large a portion of her cake for too long’. As a rapier strike, it pinioned him firmly back in his wheelchair as effectively as a mounting pin stuck through an ornamental moth.
Surprisingly, Marie-France Dreslin did not vacate the Seefeldstrasse mansion immediately, instead, it was Garnet who left on an extended tour of some of the famous Swiss health spas, ostensibly in order to consult a range of physicians about possible medical advances which might ease some of the pain he habitually suffered as a result of his accident, but, in reality, to recollect his thoughts, away from surroundings which he could now only view with unhappiness.
It was in the village of Valens, high in the mountains, overlooking the famous spa town of Bad Ragaz, close to Switzerland’s eastern border with Liechtenstein, that Garnet’s thoughts began to turn once again to tall buildings. Psychiatrists at the famous health centre probably would have described Garnet’s mental processes as being classically Freudian: the pursuit of constructing a vast, new, artificial erection somehow acting as a substitute for the current perceived slur upon his actual virility and physical manhood. No real shame associated there: the same accusation has been levelled, in times past, at whole nations, let alone impotent individuals.
As the slalom skiers wove intricate patterns in the deep snows of the Pizol range, and the hopeful - and wealthy - invalids of continental Europe settled into the restorative waters of the mineral spring, Garnet drew a blanket more tightly around his legs, sipped at the glass of maize whisky on the tray in front of him, and considered the heavens.