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The text of
You Stay Late into the Afternoon
refers to a lunch at the Royal Festival Hall shared by the artist and a young actor in the early 1990s.
The artist and the actor barely knew each other and the lunch was intended as a performative experiment in sudden and reckless intimacy. An unpublished artist’s text describes the experiment in detail:
You’ll have lunch with me. With the river outside. And the wind and the cold and the river make a brilliant blankness, not quite white, behind you.
You look thinner, hungrier. You were so hungry here once and there were only stale oranges in the house.
We have little to say to one another. I’ve asked you for the sake of the writing. I’ve asked you so that you can upset life. I look at you flatly, frankly. And I have no idea how much you’ve really seen or understood.
We stay late into the afternoon. We’ve sat for an extraordinary length of time. We’ve said very little. Sat in the terrible light. Close to the window. Unable to speak.
You can wish for life to be different in a hundred different ways. You can want it to be shone up with a restlessness, an uneven, mad life - the greatest fairground ride of our lives. But you do not consider what it might otherwise have been, how very hard in a practical way it might have been.
I have trouble regulating my behaviour sanely.
It is grey and raining. You are late. Or do not come
at all. We are tongue-tied, embarrassed by one another. The food is bad. You’ll arrive late and sit with your back against the light. You’ll see that I’m afraid, the shadows under my eyes, the strange ridges that appear just above my cheekbones when I haven’t slept.
And you can imagine yourself at sixty. God! At sixty! Undaunted! Another glass of wine! Your good friends. Your writing. Your glorious, failed writing. “Here’s luck!”
We do go to lunch. We meet and the talk comes easily. You are light, elastic. Only one of us understands. This invented life. Scale. Overwhelming, enormous, ruinous scale.
We do go to lunch. We sit at one of the sheet-glass windows by the river. We talk about Shakespeare, about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
You sit very quietly, very palely. And then you smile and the deep etches appear at the corners of your mouth.
We have lunch. And I tell you I’ve been writing here. Writing out our lives.
We sit in the blank light from the river. I look directly ahead, fix you in my sights.
By the end of lunch they had decided to collect their passports and flee to Paris but as the effects of the alcohol wore off, so did the protagonists’ bravado, producing the paralysis described in the artwork.
