Money: A Suicide Note (19 page)

In the Autocrat I turned to Fielding and asked huskily, 'Can he talk? I mean properly?'

'Spunk? Sure. He did Richard the Second off Broadway last fall. He was kind of nervous about his accent, but the articulation? Superb. Okay, Slick. What do you say?'

'I say we go with Spunk.'

We drove straight to a panelled restaurant in the dining district between Fifth and Sixth for an exploratory meeting with Christopher Meadowbrook. It was depressing, after Prehistoric. One look at Meadowbrook and I knew he was hopeless for us. The sharp-shouldered chairs in this joint, which reminded me of Selina's torso and its erect triangularity, seemed specifically designed to give clients with sore backs a really rough ride. In the end I did at least as much squirming as Christopher Meadowbrook, and he squirmed a lot. The guy was in shocking shape—that was clear. He didn't look like a goodie. He didn't look like a baddie either. He looked like a weakie, unmanned, pure victim. I once saw this same beseeching looseness of eye and mouth in the face of a ragged little faggot on Sunset Boulevard, scorched and peed-on and limping back for more. After drinks and introductions and a few minutes of jangled Smalltalk, as if the three of us were gods or apes or spacemen, Fielding did the bad thing. He left for a light supper with Butch and Caduta at the Cicero. He would later swear that he had cautioned me about this the previous night. No doubt he had, no doubt he had. I looked at him helplessly and he vowed to return at ten.

As soon as we were alone Meadowbrook took my hand, hunkered forward and said, 'I have to have the part, sir. Sir, you have to let me have it.' Then he burst into tears. Now this I didn't need... Money, of course. The actor was out for seventy-five big ones. Cocaine debts, he said — though he'd kicked it long ago. A dear friend (oh so very dear) had run out on him. His mother needed an operation. He needed an operation. And on it went. I suppose, in theory, I've had worse times, but not many, and not much worse. Jesus, am I ever as bad as this? Do I ever show such concerted and repetitive frailty? He sank four cocktails. He instigated a meaningless rumble with the maître d'. A waiter bounced back by handing him a molten soup-plate. Meadowbrook upended the whole fiery mess into his lap and let out a scream of such inhuman power that the restaurant cat (a sleepy, sloth-flattened Persian) kamikazeed through a glass screen into the startled shards of the lobby. Then he went to the John for twenty minutes and squelched back clicking and ticking like a geiger-counter. At this point I noticed that he had only one nostril. Abuse has a habit of smacking you in the nose like that, for all to see. Back home there's a guy who works in my nearest off-licence: he's got a conk like a haemorrhaged strawberry. I avoid him. I go to the next off-licence along, where the guy's nose is still okay ... Now Meadowbrook started making with the Shakespeare. To be or not to be. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Never never never never never. In despair, and despite the zags and zigs, the lagjag, the alphabet chowder of my own alcothon, I hit the scotch. Fielding returned. Semaphoring his credit card, Meadowbrook made a big thing of catching the tab. 'And lose that soup!' he warned. The card was borne back on a silver tray. It was snipped into four pieces.

'I'm dying here,' said Meadowbrook.

'No rating,' grinned the waiter.

'Jesus, let's go.'

That was me. I stood up.

So did Fielding. 'You're out, Chris,' he said, and drew two fifties from his golden clip.

——————

There is a sense, as you sit in your cab and tunnel through the grooves and traps, there is a sharper sense (there must be) of the smallness of human concerns — in New York, where you always feel the height and weight of the tall agencies. Control, purpose, meaning, they're all up there. They're not down here. God has taken columned New York between the knuckles of his right hand — and tugged. That must make the ground feel lower. I am in the cab, going somewhere, directing things with money. I have more say than the people I look out on, nomads, tide-people. They have no say. Twenty-Third Street, and its running dogs.

I now know for certain that Selina Street isn't fucking Alec Llewellyn, or not for the time being anyway. The more I think about it, the more I persuade myself that I've misjudged little Selina. She's faithful to me, that Selina. True, she behaves like someone who is unfaithful to me all the time. She behaves like someone who is hyperunfaithful. But she behaves like that because she knows I like it. (Why do I like it? I do, clearly, don't I. Then why don't I like it?) Selina, she just does it to please me. If she were really being unfaithful, she wouldn't behave like that, now would she. She would behave like someone who wasn't being unfaithful, and nobody could accuse her of behaving like that. How very cheering.

Hell, it's all good news.

'Yeah?' I'd said warily, expecting Lorne or Meadowbrook or Frank the Phone.

'John? Ella Llewellyn here. I've rung you because there's something I think you ought to know. Bad news, I'm afraid.'

Oh, come on, Ella, no need to take that tone with me. I fucked you once — on the stairs, remember? — when Alec blacked out in the kitchen that time. 'Hi, Ella. Okay, tell me,' I said, and I stiffened myself for the worst.

'Alec's in prison. Brixton, on remand. He had it coming. He just wanted me to tell you.'

Bad news? Bad? No, these are excellent tidings in their own right. Well before Selina's sly face had a chance to invade my mind screen, I felt a gulp of innocent, bright-eyed pleasure that my best and oldest pal was in such serious trouble. Mm, it's so nice when one of your peers goes down. You know the feeling? A real buzz, isn't it. Don't be ashamed, if you can.possibly help it. Now Alec can't get away, he can't escape, translate, burst clear. He can't go up there, with them. He must stay down here, with me. He must stay down here, further down, deeper, much deeper.

The present rendezvous had been riding high on my chart of dreads. How is that? How can a quiet lunch with a beautiful and intelligent girl, in a licensed restaurant, be the cause of dread? Go ask it on the mountain. (I had dreaded the other meetings with her too, hadn't I. Yes I had.) But in the end it soothed me. Only when you are soothed do you realize how much you needed soothing. I was going insane. I was dying. That was what I was doing, dying.

Before we talked about the phantom dinner party we talked about aesthetics. Or rather Martina did. Aesthetics is a topic I have previously discussed only with my cosmetic dentist, Mrs McGilchrist (as in 'the aesthetics are going to cost you on this one'), and with the odd deluded lighting-cameraman who might have his views about the aesthetics of a Bulky Bar dissolve, a Rumpburger close-up, a Zaparama zoom. Martina talked about aesthetics more generally. She talked about perception, representation and truth. She talked about the vulnerability of a figure unknowingly watched — the difference between a portrait and an unposed study. The analogous distinction in fiction would be that between the conscious and the reluctant narrator—the sad, the unwitting narrator. Why do we feel protective when we watch the loved one who is unaware of being watched? Why does the heart hurt when it sees the unattended pair of shoes? Or the loved one asleep? Perhaps the dead body of the loved one expresses all the pathos of this absence, the helplessness of being watched, and not knowing... Actors are paid to pretend that they are unaware of being watched, but they of course rely on the collusion of the watcher, and nearly always get it. There are unpaid actors too (I thought): it's them you really have to watch.

I sat cocked on the brink of my seat. I could follow her drift for seconds at a time, until the half-gratified sense of effort — or my awareness of watching myself — intervened, and scattered my thoughts. I felt tense. How tense? Maybe not that tense... We were lunching at an emeried chalet off Bank Street in the West Village — licensed, sure, but with a suspicion of health food, of careful eating, of macrobiotics and longevity. Waiters of both sexes eerily serviced the wooden nooks. There went Hansel. There went Gretel. They moved in white like doctors and nurses. The food they brought you was administered as medicine, as elixir. Their grub was of the very healthiest — not like that shit they make you eat uptown. I craved liquor but survived on frequent tureens of white wine. Martina contented herself with a pot of tea, and held her cup with both hands, as girls are bound to do, the fingers spread for all the warmth. When she ate, she dipped her head into each mouthful, her eyes on mine: round, dark, clean.

'Perhaps drunks are like that too,' I said. 'I mean, they don't know they're being watched. They don't know anything. I don't know anything.'

'They're also not themselves,' she said, 'which lessens the pathos.'

'Yes, I bet it does. You'd better tell me — about the other night. The suspense is killing me.'

'You really can't remember? Or do you just pretend you can't.'

I thought about this, and said, 'I can't bear to remember. Maybe I could if I tried. It's the trying part that's unbearable. Who was there, for instance?'

'Same as last time. My only friends. Ossie's friends are all... The lady from the Tribeca Times. Fenton Akimbo — he's the Nigerian writer. And Stanwyck Mills, the Blake and Shakespeare man. Ossie wanted to ask him about the two gentlemen of Verona.'

'Uh?' What a crew, I thought. 'Okay. Tell me.'

Then she told me. It wasn't that bad. I was relieved. Between ourselves, I was even quite impressed. Apparently I had windmilled in at a quarter to ten, with three bottles of champagne, all of which I dropped in one catastrophic juggle. The kitchen floor, Martina said, was like a Jacuzzi. Full of beans, I took my seat at the stalled dinner. Then, for the next twenty-five minutes, I told a joke.

'Oh Jesus. What sort of joke? How dirty?'

'I can't remember it. You couldn't either. Something about a farmer's wife? Yes, and a travelling salesman.'

'Oh Jesus. What then?'

Then I went to sleep. I didn't simply black out at the table, oh no. I stood up, yawned and stretched, and threw myself on to a nearby sofa. There I snored and whinnied and gnashed for nearly three hours, awaking refreshed and raring to go at a little after one. Everyone had gone. I went too. Then I came back again. Then I went away again.

'What did I say to Fenton Akimbo? Did I say anything?'

'How do you mean?'

'I mean, I didn't call him a black bastard or anything?'

'Oh no. You only said your joke, and that was about it.'

'Great.'

'You said something to me though. As you left, the first time.'

'What?'

She smiled, rawly, savagely — not a grown-up smile. A tomboy smile. She had easy access to the girl inside her. The girl was always available.

'What?' I repeated.

'You said you loved me.' And she laughed her laugh, that shocking laugh which turned heads and caused her to blush and put a hand over her naked mouth.

'And what did you say?'

'I said ... let me think. I said — Don't be an idiot.'

'Well, maybe it's true,' I said, emboldened. 'In vino — you know, when you drink you tell the truth, and all that.'

'Don't be an idiot,' said Martina.

Yes, she sounds sane, doesn't she, among all these other people I'm working around? But then she has always had money — she has never not had money. Money is carelessly present in the cut and texture of her clothes, her leathery accoutrements, in rug-brilliance and mouth tone. The long legs have travelled, and not just through time. The clean tongue speaks French, Italian, German. The expectant eyes have seen things, and expect to see more. Even as a girl her lovers were always hand-picked, an elite, far above the usual rabble of irregulars, mercenaries, pressed men. Her smile is knowing, roused and playful, but also innocent, because money makes you innocent when it's been there all along. How else can you hang out on this planet for thirty years while still remaining free? Martina is not a woman of the world. She is a woman of somewhere else.

'Hey,' I said. 'How come you always know when I'm in New York and when I go back?'

She shrugged. 'Ossie tells me.'

'How does he know?'

'He's back and forth from London all the time. He must know people you know.'

'I suppose that figures,' I said.

'How's — your girlfriend?'

'Selina.'

'Yes. How's all that? You're with her. You're together.'

I considered. Then I said, or perhaps one of my voices Said it for me, 'I don't know. I mean — you can be with someone and still be alone.'

'... She's beautiful.'

True,' I said. 'How's Ossie?' '

She didn't say anything.

'He's beautiful,' I said.

But she still didn't say anything. Instead, she asked me why I thought I drank so much, and I told her why I thought I did.

'I'm an alcoholic,' I said.

'No you're not, you're just a greedy kid with nothing better to do. Aren't you tired of it?'

'Yes, I'm tired. I've been tired of it for years ... Yes, I'm tired.'

Twenty minutes later we stood outside on the spongy pavement. Before us, across the road, the line of shop windows glistened like a strip of film — Manhattan and its little concerns: a Thai laundry, a handbag hospital, a delicatessen (' "Lonnie's" — For A Better Sandwich' — 'No Nukes' — 'Sorry. Closed'), a florist's forest, a Zen nicknackery which welcomed all major credit cards, a diesel bookstore. Martina and I performed the uncertain dance of people parting, with its limited steps. She still faced me, but her shoulders had already begun to turn away... If you're small and the thing you evade is big (have you ever had this dream?), then the only place to hide is a place where the big thing can't fit. But then you have to stay there, in the small place, or must even shrink to cower deeper. I'm tired of the small place. Me, I've fucking had it with the small place. I'm tired of being watched and not knowing it. I'm tired of all these absences.

'Okay, look,' I said desperately. 'Help! Give me books to read. Point me out a book to read.' I gestured across the road at the blind shopfront. 'Something educational.'