The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [76]
Critics had already described Scarf ace as "operatic," which perhaps was only their way of saying it was Latin, noisy and bombastic. It was set in a Miami so violent and so opulent, so glittering and soulless, that Nick found himself worrying about how people survived in it, and then about how he would survive in it. In his disaffected mood he kept wandering off from the film itself into paranoid doubts and objections. He saw that he was reacting like his mother, for whom any film on the telly with a sex scene or the word shit in it took on a nearly hostile presence, and was watched thereafter with warm mistrust. Scarface was all about cocaine, which alarmed him. He remembered tensely how Toby had taken it at Hawkeswood with Wani Ouradi. The film confirmed his worst suspicions. Nowhere in it was there a hint of the delicious pleasure that Toby had spoken of. The drug was money and power and addiction—a young blonde actress in the film snorted joyless volumes of it.
The couple on Nick's left were slumped in a slowly evolving embrace. He was aware of a hand on a thigh left bare by a very short skirt—and when it moved, his glance twitched guiltily away. He had an unusual sense of the cinema as a room—a long narrow space with the dusty plaster mouldings of an old theatre. Instead of the proper oblivion of the filmgoer he felt a kind of foreboding. When the picture brightened his eyes yearned down across the shadowy ranks of heads, but Leo was little and so was he, and he never had that one clear view of him again. Because the film was Leo's choice, he imagined him enjoying it, taking it on, adjusting himself, as it went along, to its new standards of hardness. A film that was shocking quickly lowered the threshold, it made people unshockable. Nick felt that if he'd been sitting with Leo he might have tittered and groaned at the shootings and blood like everyone else. But now they were apart, as they might have been on occasion in this very cinema before they even knew of each other's existence, sitting separately in the near dark. It was irrational, perhaps, but the glaring unreality of the film seemed to throw a suspicion of unreality over everything else, and his affair with Leo, which was so odd, so new, so unrecognized, felt open to crude but penetrating doubt. He wondered if he would have noticed Leo a year ago, in the shuffling semi-patience of the exit line, or carried his image home to lie awake with. Well, probably not, since one of Leo's affectations was to sit through to the very last credits, the lenses, the insurers, the thanks to the mayor and police department of . . . oh, somewhere obscurely a solution and a puzzle at the same time.
And it wasn't in fact until all that was over that Leo came into the foyer, blinking and nodding and then genially puzzled at the troubled look on Nick's face. "All right, babe," he said quietly, and gripped his upper arm to steer him out. "That's what I call snorting coke," he went on, referring to a scene in the film's final hour where Pacino had torn open a huge plastic bag of cocaine on his desk and plunged his nose into it, the slave at last to his own instrument of power. It had struck Nick as completely ridiculous. "Did you like that, then?"
Nick hummed and cleared his throat like an anxious bringer of bad news. "Not much," he said, and gave Leo a thin smile.
"It was quite a laugh," said Leo. "The ending was outrageous."
"Yes . . . yes it was," Nick agreed, hesitantly but firmly, recalling the comprehensive final bloodbath. As so often he had the feeling that an artistic disagreement, almost immaterial to the other person, was going to be the vehicle of something that mattered to him more than he could say.
But Leo said, "Nah, sorry about that, babe, it was pretty crappy. And we never got our