Think or Swim: Part VIII

"Santé!" said Yvette.
"Sláinte!" said Mao.

They clinked their glasses of the cloudy liquid. Mao wasn't a big drinker, but he had a secret liking for absinthe that dated to a reading of Ernest Hemingway's "Death in the Afternoon" during his university days in Dublin. He was not a fiction fan, but he had been impressed by Hemingway's cocktail recipe, which he immediately memorized: "Pour one jigger absinthe into a Champagne glass. Add iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness. Drink three to five of these slowly."

It was an odd thing to commit to memory, no doubt, but anything that acted as an antidote to the perpetual rain was a welcome diversion for the young student. Later that day, he hit the Musée d'Orsay website and made Edgar Degas' painting L'Absinthe his notebook background.

Shortly after he'd drifted to the south of France, he was shopping in a supermarket when he saw a bottle labelled spiritueux à base de plantes d'absinthe. He bought it and made it last a fortnight, adding restrained measures of the spirit to glasses of water every second evening before going to bed.

"Did you know," Mao asked, "that Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud and van Gogh were absinthe drinkers?"

Yvette shook her head, although she knew. Obviously he needs to talk, she thought to herself. Besides, he was weirdly attractive.

"There was something about absinthe that made people mad, if they weren't mad already, in which case it made them bad," said Mao. "For example, the year Oscar Wilde was arrested and imprisoned happened to be Aleister Crowley's first year at Cambridge."

And Mao, who had once seen a documentary about this strange character, launched into a vivid description of Crowley's occult life, which was filled with taboo-breaking rituals, with both men and women, and mystical rites.

At one point, he looked across the table and saw Yvette sneaking a glance at her watch.
"Oh, my God," said Mao. "I'm such an idiot. You should have told me to shut up."

"No. No. It's fascinating. It's just that I have to catch a flight to Amsterdam in a few hours. I'm doing a workshop for a week with Erik-Jan De Jong, you might have heard of him, of the Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest."

Mao had never heard of Erik-Jan De Jong or, for that matter, the Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest, but he nodded his head vigorously. Yvette had told him she played the cello, but he thought she was talking about a hobby.

"How about if I pay here," said Yvette, "and you get the next bill?"
He was fully unprepared for this gambit and tried to think through the implications. She was either brushing him off, kindly, or she was probing what the advice sites usually referred to as "his intentions."

Truth to be told, he'd had a pretty disastrous record with women, once he'd decided that he wasn't bisexual or gay. His intensity frightened them away, and although he'd read on the advice sites that women liked men who had a sense of humour, especially if they turned it against themselves, he had no idea how that worked. He was what he was and a few furtive disasters and regular porn amounted to the totality of his experiences to date.

"Great," he said. "Let's synch, then."
"Fine," said Yvette, taking out her communicator, a sliver of metal that screamed money and, probably, Indian design and Iraqi manufacture.

This kind of synching was a bit like shoot-outs in those old Western films. Everything happened instantly and the level of access each "shooter" granted the other, in real time, revealed everything about their objective. If he went high and she went low... If both went low...
He went for high because he felt he had to see her again and he'd nothing to lose. He closed his eyes.

The communicator's vibration forced him to look at the display. He smiled. Yvette Guiliano's lifestream was his to explore. The high-level one he had exchanged with her looked authentic and was authentic in its own way, but it wasn't real. He had to be careful.

"Can I get Mireille to call a taxi for you?" asked Yvette as she beckoned to the women polishing glasses behind the bar.

"Ah, no, thanks. I'll walk," said Mao.

"OK. Well, thanks," said Yvette, standing up. "It was a fun evening and we'll be in touch."
She placed a hand on his arm and lightly kissed his cheek.