Desire, a short fiction

The other day, I can’t remember now where it was, unless it was Notting Hill Gate before or after teaching, I caught from a passer-by (although I was unable to identify exactly which person it was) the whiff of that perfume which S. used to wear, and I was suddenly back in those warm September days when desire was ripening slowly, too slowly, delicious in its pure potentiality, which was how I preferred it in those days of course, as also with L. Remember with L, you sat across from one another in her lounge, her sundry aristocratic paraphernalia of antique books and original sketches and woven scenes of country life, saying to her “seduction involves ostensibly talking about one thing when you both know that you’re talking about something else.” What a typically involuted, self-referential conversation it was, and me enjoying that painful circuit of suspended desire, as I always did until well into middle age. Remember also that time when you stayed in her London flat when she was on holiday. She’d left on her desk an open notebook and there I saw my name, raised and insistent, as it were, but deliberately avoided reading, feeling it had been lewdly left open for my attention - there was no other conclusion. Even though it was meant for me, I did not read it. I preferred the perverse refusal.  

Anyway, in Notting Hill, briefly, I was for an instant flushed with that feeling of approaching passion, the tremors of “something happening”, the signpost to somewhere unknown. I was there, for an instant. But that brief perfume did not return me to S. herself, as an object of former desire, it did not make her present to me once again. I was, as I said, returned not to her but to that state of blossoming, all the more tasteable and precious for having been divorced from S, to whom it had been temporarily fastened, back then. People are ultimately dispensable, and our nostalgia is only for the beauty of the waves or ripples they leave inside us, or the light as it plays on the waves or ripples they leave inside us.