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Sport 32: Summer 2004
Bon Voyage
Bon Voyage
His last night in New Zealand, two in the morning, the Sawmill in Leigh, Lucien dances.
He dances expressionlessly, still wearing the ridiculous Dr Seuss hat, still wearing the homeless person's overcoat and the granddaddy's hideous woollen vest. He pirouettes, raises (expressionlessly) his long arms over his head like a ballerina, twirls; his legs kick out like compasses, and fold back into themselves with exactly a compass's skeletal complexity. Lucien can take the piss out of himself with grace, it would seem. Feet away, rolling cigarettes, drinking water, leaning against a wooden bench and against each other, Emma and Tara are helpless with laughter. ‘Oh, Lucien—’ they say, to the air, to one another. This will be Lucien's leaving-New-Zealand epitaph, the thing that signifies this period of his life: that (falling, or dying) cry: ‘Oh, Lucien—’
His last morning in New Zealand, nine o'clock in the morning, Lucien discovers road rage.
page 129Part of this is that it takes him at least half an hour of the hour and a half drive from Leigh to the Auckland airport to figure out that the Volvo's speedometer is in miles, not kilometres; hence doing sixty along smallish curvedish countryish roads is going quite fast, really. (And here it is again, from the three women in the car, from the forty-year-old lesbian riding shotgun, from the twenty-five and the thirty-five-year-old straight women in the back: that falling or wailing laughter: ‘Oh, Lucien—’)
For Lucien, now just twenty-two—with all that talent, all that technique; the technique that does something technique isn't meant to do, that is, it came (one senses) to him instinctively; with the trained and, anyway, excellent mind he prefers to veil beneath the uninflected mumbling of boys mooching, together, along Cuba Street Saturday afternoons; with all his chops, as the musicians say to each other, and not to anyone else—is still enough of a child to want, desperately, to win at the impromptu, stoned and absurd quiz game that starts up between him and Alda's husband, one o'clock in the morning, the Sawmill. He wants to win so much that when Charles is distracted by another conversation and turns and then wanders away, Lucien insists the quiz continues, up to ten points, as was originally agreed. He bends forward, fiercely scowling. When you run out of questions. Lucien will give you the question. ‘Ask me—’ he'll say, and then will speak of Greek texts, of ancient battles three or five thousand years past, of the golden stable built for Caligula's horse, with some learnedness of twentieth century poetry. Nothing could be more surprising, from this beautiful, sarcastic, flat-voiced boy; the understanding that these esoteric and non-musical minutiae are things he knows about, and must once have cared about passionately.
‘I used to read them,’ Lucien will tell you, fiercely scowling. ‘When I was eight, I read—’ —Everyone, it seems. Maybe (it occurs to you) Lucien is, or at any rate was, lonely. Gifted children usually are. Yes. Loneliness, and the fierce angry awareness of your own gift, and the surly angry knowledge that your peers don't get it, and being very tall, and then finding out you're very handsome, and being sardonic. Yes.
Lucien was a prick in Jazz School—he will volunteer this, it's not something you need to extract from him. He will fold his crazy compass page 130 legs over the balcony at Havana, in unusually expansive mood, and announce it. ‘I was really young,’ he will remind you, flatly (he was sixteen when he started; he had two degrees by twenty). Being very young, in the group you move in: and it's still years and years before he's going to be released from that one. What can you do, really; except keep being as very very good as you are, and wearing Dr Seuss hats, and liking girls, and being sarcastic, before the world can be sarcastic at you. What can you say, really: except, on that dying, laughing, faintly anxious fall:… Oh, Lucien.