David Lodge - Small World (20 page)

In spite of her weariness, and the discouraging decor of the bathroom, all cobwebs and peeling paint, Thelma felt a quickening of erotic excitement as she prepared herself for Howard’s pleasure. She softened her bathwater with fragrant foam, massaged herself afterwards with scented skin cream, dabbed perfume behind her ears and in other intimate hollows and crevices of her anatomy, and put on her sexiest nightgown, a frivolous garment of sheer black nylon. She brushed her hair for one hundred strokes, and bit her lips to make them red. Then she tiptoed to the living-room, threw open the door and posed on the threshold. “Howard!” she cooed.

Howard was crouched in front of the ancient black-and-white TV, fiddling with the controls while the picture buzzed and flickered. “Yes?” he said, without turning round.

Thelma giggled. “Now you can have me, honey.”

Howard Ringbaum turned round in his seat and looked at her stonily. “Now I don’t want you,” he said, and resumed his fiddling with the controls of the television.

At that moment, Thelma Ringbaum determined that she would be unfaithful to her husband at the earliest possible opportunity.

All around the world people are in different states of dress and undress, alone or in couples, waking or sleeping, working or resting. As Persse McGarrigle walks along an Irish country road in the middle of the night, with Morris Zapp’s deerstalker tipped back on his head, the same sunbeam that, reflected off the moon, now illuminates his way, and shows him the shapes of darkened farms and cottages where men and beasts slumber and snore, has just a few seconds ago woken up the pavement dwellers of Bombay and the factory workers of Omsk, shining directly into their wincing faces or stealing through the gaps in tattered curtains and broken blinds.

Further east, it is already midmorning. In Cooktown, Queensland, in his office at the University of North Queensland, Rodney Wainwright is working at his paper on the Future of Criticism. To try and recover the impetus of his argument, he is copying out what he has already written, from the beginning, as a pole vaulter lengthens his run-up to achieve a particularly daunting jump. His hope is that the sheer momentum of discourse will carry him over that stubborn obstacle which has delayed him for so long. So far it is going well. His hand is moving fluently across the foolscap. He is introducing many new gracenotes and making various subtle revisions of his original text as he proceeds. He tries to suppress his own knowledge of what comes next, tries not to see the crucial passage looming ahead. He is trying to trick his own brain. Don’t look, don’t look! Keep going, keep going! Gather all your strength up into one ball, ready to spring, NOW!

The question is, therefore, how can literary criticism maintain its Arnoldian function of identifying the best which has been thought and said, when literary discourse itself has been decentred by deconstructing the traditional concept of the author, of `authority’. Clearly Yes, clearly…?

Clearly

Clearly what?

The vaulter hangs suspended in the air for a moment, his face red with effort, eyes bulging, tendons knotted, the pole bent almost to breaking point under his weight, the crossbar only inches from his nose. Then it all collapses: the pole breaks, the bar is dislodged, the athlete falls back to earth, limbs flailing. Rodney Wainwright slumps forward onto his desk and buries his face in his hands. Beaten again.

There is a timid knock on the door. “Come in,” Rodney Wainwright moans, looking up through latticed fingers. A blonde, girlish head peers round the door, eyes wide.

“Are you all right, Dr Wainwright?” says Sandra Dix. “I came to see you about my assignment.”

On a different latitude, but much the same longtitude, Akira Sakazaki, seated crosslegged in his carpeted cubicle in the sky, is grading papers English-language exercises by his first year students at the University. “Having rescued girl drowning, lifeguard raped in blanket her,” he reads. Sighing, shaking his head, Akira inserts articles, rearranges word order, and corrects the spelling of “wrapped”. Such work is small beer to the translator of Ronald Frobisher. “Small beer,” says Akira aloud, and smiles toothily to himself. It is an English phrase whose meaning he has learned only this morning, from one of the novelist’s letters.

Akira is dressed in his Arnold Palmer sports shirt this morning, and his Jack Nicklaus golf shoes stand beside the door ready to be slipped on when it is time to leave for the University. For today is his day for golf. This evening he will break his journey home to play for an hour at one of Tokyo’s many driving ranges. Already his fingers itch to curl themselves round the shaft of his club. Standing on the upper gallery of the floodlit, netted range, erected like a gigantic birdcage in the isosceles triangle made by three criss-crossing railway lines, he will lash a hundred yellow-painted golfballs into space, see them rise, soar above the million roofs and TV aerials, only to hit the net and fall anticlimatically to earth, like stricken birds.

In this sport, Akira sees an allegory of the elations and frustrations of his work as translator. Language is the net that holds thought trapped within a particular culture. But if one could only strike the ball with sufficient force, with perfect timing, it would perhaps break through the netting, continue on its course, never fall to earth, but go into orbit around the world.

In London, Ronald Frobisher is asleep in his study, wearing dressing-gown and pyjamas, slumped in front of the television set on which he was watching, some hours earlier, the repeat of an episode from a police thriller series for which he wrote the script. Bored by his own dialogue, he dropped off to sleep in his chair; and the late news, weather forecast, and an epilogue by an earnest Evangelical clergyman on the reality of sin, have all washed over him unheeded. Now the television set emits only a high-pitched whine and a faint bluish light which imparts to the novelist’s stubbly, pockmarked jowls a deathlike hue. Neglected at his feet lies a blue aerogramme closes his eyes in despair. Ji-Moon Lee silently recommences the with questions neatly typed: “p .152, `jam-butty’. What is it? p .182, removal of wax from his ear. ‘Y-fronts’. What are they? p .191 ‘sweet fanny adams’. Who is she?”

Arthur Kingfisher is also seated in front of a television set, though he is not asleep, since it is still early evening in Chicago (where he is staying on for a few days after the conclusion of the conference on “The Crisis of the Sign” in order to repeat his keynote address in the form of a lecture at Northwestern University for a one-thousand-dollar fee). He is watching, intermittently, a pornographic movie ordered by telephone and piped to his room on one of the hotel’s video channels—intermittently, because he is at the same time reading a book on hermeneutics which he has agreed to review for a learned journal, an assignment which is now long overdue, and he glances up from the page only when the aridity of the discourse becomes too much for even his dry old brain to bear, or when the film’s sound track, shifting from banal dialogue to panting and moaning, warns him that its feeble pretence of telling a story has been abandoned in favour of its real point and purpose. At the same time, Ji-Moon Lee, stooping over his shoulder in a charming silk kimono, is excavating the wax from Arthur Kingfisher’s ear, using a small carved bamboo implement specially designed for the purpose and widely used in Korean bathhouses.

Suddenly, Arthur Kingfisher becomes excited—whether it is the images of copulation on the small screen, or the subtle stimulation of his inner ear, or the mental glimpse of some new horizon of conceptual thought prompted by the writer on hermeneutics, it would be difficult to say; but he feels a distinct sensation of life between his legs, drops the book, and hurries Ji-Moon Lee towards the bed, pulling off his bathrobe and urging her to do likewise.

She obeys; but the kimono is delicate and valuable, its sash is wound around Ji-Moon Lee’s tiny waist in a complex knot, and it is at least half a minute before she has disrobed, by which time Arthur Kingfisher’s excitement has subsided—or perhaps it was always an illusion, a phantom, wishful thinking. He returns despondently to his book and his seat in front of the TV. But he has forgotten what new theoretical leap he had begun to see the possibilities of a few moments ago, and the naked bodies writhing and clutching and quivering on the screen now seem merely to mock his impotence. He slaps the book shut, snaps off the TV and closes his eyes in despair. Ji-Moon Lee silently recommences the removal of wax form his ear.

In Helicon, New Hampshire, it is evening, dinner is over, and Desiree Zapp is crouched conspiratorially over the payphone in the lobby of the writers’ colony, talking to her agent in New York in an urgent whisper, anxious not to be overhead by any of the other residents. For what she is confessing to her agent is that she is “blocked”, and this word, like “cancer” in a surgical ward, is never under any circumstances to be uttered aloud, though it is in the minds of all. “It’s not working out for me, this place, Alice,” she whispers into the telephone.

“What? I can’t hear you, this must be a bad line,” says Alice Kauffman, from her apartment on 48th Street.

“I’m no further forward than when I came here six weeks ago,” says Desiree, risking a slight increase of volume. “The first thing I do every morning is to tear up what I wrote the day before. It’s driving me crazy.”

A great sigh, like a bellows emptying, comes down the line from New York to New Hampshire. Alice Kauffman weighs two hundred and thirty pounds and runs her agency from her apartment because she is too heavy to travel comfortably even by taxi to another part of Manhattan. If Desiree knows her, and she does know Alice very well, her agent will at this moment be sprawled on a divan with a pile of manuscripts on one side of her massive hips and an open box of Swiss cherry-liqueur chocolates on the other. “Then quit, honey,” says Alice. “Check out tomorrow. Run.”

Desiree looks nervously over her shoulders, fearful that this heretical advice might be overhead. “Where to?”

“Give yourself a treat, a change of scene,” says Alice. “Take a trip someplace. Go to Europe.”

“Hmm,” says Desiree thoughtfully. “I did get an invitation to a conference in Germany, just this morning.”

“Accept,” says Alice. “Your expenses will be tax-deductible.”

“They were offering to pay my expenses.”

“There’ll be extras,” said Alice. “There always are. Did I tell you by the way, that
Difficult Days
is going to be translated into Portuguese? That’s the seventeenth language, not counting Korea which pirated it.”

Far away in Germany, Siegfried von Turpitz, who sent the conference invitation to Desiree, is asleep in the bedroom of his house on the edge of the Black Forest. Tired from his long drive, he lies to attention, on his back, his black hand outside the sheets. His wife, Bertha, asleep in the other twin bed, has never seen her husband without the glove. When he is taking a bath, his right hand dangles over the side of the tub to keep dry; when he takes a shower it projects horizontally from between the curtains like a traffic policeman’s signal. When he comes to her bed she is not always sure, in the dark, whether it is a penis or a leather-sheathed finger that probes the folds and orifices of her body. On their wedding night she begged him to remove the glove, but he refused. “But if the lights are out, Siegfried?” she pleaded. “My first wife asked me to do that once,” said Siegfried von Turpitz cryptically, “but I forgot to put the glove back on before I fell asleep.” Von Turpitz’s first wife was known to have died of a heart attack, found one morning by her husband lying dead in the bed beside him. Bertha never asked Siegfried again to remove his glove.

Most people in Europe are asleep now, though Michel Tardieu is awake behind his reptilian eyelids, troubled by a faint aroma of perfume emanating from the body of Albert, asleep beside him, which is not the familiar fragrance of his own favourite toilet water, Tristes Tropiques, which Albert customarily borrows in liberal quantities, but something sickly and cloying, vulgarly synthetic, something (his nose twitches as he strives to translate olfactory sensations into verbal concepts) such as (his lizard eyelids flick open in horror at the thought) a woman might use! Akbil Borak, however, is not awake, having fallen asleep sitting up in bed, fifty pages from the end of
The Spirit of the Age
, and is bowed forward as if poleaxed, his nose flattened against the open book reposing on his knees, while Oya, her head turned away from the light of the reading lamp, slumbers obliviously beside him. And Philip and Hilary Swallow are asleep back to back in their double bed which, being as old as their marriage, sags in the middle like a shallow trench, so that they tend to roll towards each other in their sleep; but whenever Philip’s bony haunches touch Hilary’s fleshy ones, their bodies spring apart like opposed magnets and, without waking, each shifts back to the margins of the mattress.

Persse McGarrigle stops in the middle of the road to transfer his bag from one aching arm to another. The hitching had gone well enough as far as Mullingar, but there he was picked up by a man on his way home from a wedding and far gone in his cups, who drove past the same signpost three times, finally confessed that he was lost, and fell abruptly asleep over the wheel of his car. Persse rather regrets, now, that he didn’t doss down himself in the back seat of the car, for his chances of getting another lift this night seem remote.

He stops again, and looks speculatively about him. It is warm and dry enough to sleep out. Spying a haystack in a field to his right, Persse climbs over the gate and makes towards it. A startled donkey rises to its feet and canters away. He throws down his grip, kicks off his shoes and stretches out in the fragrant hay, staring up at the immense sky arching above his head, studded with a million stars. They pulse with a brilliance that city-dwellers could never imagine. One of them seems to be moving across the sky in relation to other stars, and at first Persse thinks he has discovered a new comet. Then he realizes from its slow and steady progress that it is a communications satellite in geostable orbit, a tiny artificial moon that faithfully keeps its station above the Atlantic, moving in pace with the earth’s rotation, receiving and sending back messages, images and secrets, to and from countless human beings far below. “Bright satellite!” he murmurs, “Would I were steadfast as thou art.” And he recites the whole sonnet aloud, willing it to rebound from space into Angelica’s thoughts, or dreams, wherever she is, that she might feel the strength of his longing to be with her.