Money: A Suicide Note (3 page)

And it must be extra tough on a girl like Selina, whose appearance, after many hours at the mirror, is a fifty—fifty compromise between the primly juvenile and the grossly provocative. Her tastes are strictly High Street too, with frank promise of brothelly knowhow and top-dollar underwear. I've followed Selina down the strip, when we're shopping, say, and she strolls on ahead, wearing sawn-off jeans and a wash-withered T-shirt, or a frilly frock measuring the brink of her russety thighs, or a transparent coating of gossamer, like a condom, or an abbreviated school uniform. .. The men wince and watch, wince and watch. They buckle and half turn away. They shut their eyes and clutch their nuts. And sometimes, when they see me cruise up behind my little friend and slip an arm around her trim and muscular waist, they look at me as if to say — Do something about it, will you ? Don't let her go about the place looking like that. Come on, it's your responsibility.

I have talked to Selina about the way she looks. I have brought to her notice the intimate connections between rape and her summer wardrobe. She laughs about it. She seems flushed, pleased. I keep on having to fight for her honour in pubs and at parties. She gets groped or goosed or propositioned — and there I am once again, wearily raising my scarred dukes. I tell her it's because she goes around the place looking like a nude magazine. She finds this funny too. I don't understand. I sometimes think that Selina would stand stock still in front of an advancing juggernaut, so long as the driver never once took his eyes off her tits.

In addition to rape, Selina is frightened of mice, spiders, dogs, toadstools, cancer, mastectomy, chipped mugs, ghost stories, visions, portents, fortune tellers, astrology columns, deep water, fires, floods, thrush, poverty, lightning, ectopic pregnancy, rust, hospitals, driving, swimming, flying and ageing. Like her fat pale lover, she never reads a book. She has no job any more: she has no money. She is either twenty-nine or thirty-one or just possibly thirty-three. She is leaving it all very late, and she knows it. She will have to make her move, and she will have to make it soon.

I don't believe Alec, necessarily, but I won't believe Selina, that's for sure. In my experience, the thing about girls is—you never know. No, you never do. Even if you actually catch them, redhanded—bent triple upside down in mid-air over the headboard, say, and brushing their teeth with your best friend's dick—you never know. She'll deny it, indignantly. She'll believe it, too. She'll hold the dick there, like a mike, and tell you that it isn't so, I have been faithful to Selina Street for over a year, God damn it. Yes I have. I keep trying not to be, but it never works out. I can't find anyone to be unfaithful to her with. They don't want what I have to offer. They want commitment and candour and sympathy and trust and all the other things I seem to be really short of. They are past the point where they'll go to bed with somebody just for the hell of it. Selina is past that point also, long past. She used to be a well-known goer, true, but now she has her future security to think about. She has money to think about. Ah, Selina, come on. Tell me it isn't so.

——————

I worked up a major sweat over the console that morning — yeah, and a major tab, too. Deafened with caffeine, I was just a hot robot, a ticking grid of jet-lag, time-jump and hangover. The telephone happened to be an antique: a dialler. And my fingers were already so sore and chewed that each shirtbutton had felt like a drop of molten solder . .. Half way through the session I was dialling with my left pinkie. 'Room number please,' said the telephonist in her honeying drone, every time, every time. 'Me again,' I said and said. 'Room 101. Me. It's me.'

I tried my own number first and repeatedly thereafter. Selina has her keys. She is always in and out... I spoke to Mandy and Debby, Selina's shadowy flatmates. I rang her old office. I rang her dancing class. 1 even rang her gynaecologist. No one knew where she was. On a parallel track 1 combed the airwaves for Alec Llewellyn. I talked to his wife. I talked to three of his girlfriends. I talked to his probation officer. No luck. Boy, these are pretty thoughts for me to entertain, three thousand miles from home.

The dog barked. My face felt small and clueless between its fat red ears. For a while I slumped back and stared hard at the phone. It held out for several seconds, then it rang. And so naturally I thought it's her and made a hurried grab for my girl.

'— Yes?'

'John Self? It's Caduta Massi.'

'At last,' I said. 'Caduta, it's an honour.'

'John, it's good to talk to you. But before we meet I want to sort some things out.'

'Like what, Caduta?'

'For instance, how many children do you think I should have?'

'Well I thought just the one.'

'No, John.'

'More?'

'Many more.'

I said, 'About how many?'

'I think I should have many children, John.'

'Well okay. Sure. Why not. What, say two or three more?'

'We'll see,' said Caduta Massi. 'I'm glad you're amenable to that, John. Thank you.'

'Forget it.'

'And another thing. I think I should have a mother, a white-haired lady in a black dress. But that's not so important.'

'You got it.'

'And another thing. Don't you think I should change my name?'

'What to, Caduta?'

'I don't know yet. But something a little more appropriate.'

'Whatever you say. Caduta — let's meet.'

After that I had them send me up a rack of cocktails and canapes. The same black bellhop walked skilfully into the room with the silver trays on his tense fingertips. I had nothing smaller, so I flicked him a five. He looked at the drinks and he looked at me.

'Have one,' I said, and picked up a glass.

He shook his head, resisting a smile, averting his mobile face.

'What's up?' I said coolly, and drank. 'Little early for you?'

'You party last night?' he asked. He couldn't straighten his face for more than a couple of seconds at a stretch.

'What's your name?'

'Felix.'

'No, Felix,' I said, 'I did it all by myself.'

'. . . You gonna party now?'

'Yeah. But all by myself again. Damn it. I got problems you wouldn't believe. I'm on a different clock to you, Felix. My time, it's way after lunch.'

He lifted his round chin and nodded his head tightly. 'I take one look at you, man,' he said, 'and I know you ain't never gonna stop.'

I didn't attempt anything else that day. I drank the drink and ate the grub. I had a shave. I had a handjob, closely structured round my last night with Selina. Or I tried. I couldn't remember much about it, and then all these guys came walking in on the act... So me and my sore tooth throbbed our way through a few hours of television — I sat flummoxed and muttering like a superannuated ghost, all shagged out from its hauntings, through sports, soaps, ads, news, the other world. Best was a variety show hosted by a veteran entertainer, someone who was pretty well over the hill when I was a kid. Amazing to think that these guys are still around, still alive, let alone still earning. They don't make them like that any more. No, come on, let's be accurate: only now, in 1981, do they make them like that. They couldn't before — they didn't have the technology. Jesus Christ, this old prong has been sutured and stitched together in a state-of-the-art cosmetics lab. The scalloped blaze of his bridgework matches the macabre brilliance of his flounced dicky. His highlit contacts burn a tigerish green. Check out the tan on the guy — it's like a paintjob. He looks terrific, positively rosy. His Latin rug sweats with vitamins. His falsy ears are sharp and succulent. When I make all the money I'm due to make and go off to California for that well-earned body transplant I've promised myself, I'll mention the name of old green eyes here, and tell the medics, as I go under, There. That's how I want it. Give me one just like that. . . But now this aged android starts bringing on a string of even older guys, also spruce and dazzlingly metallic, a chorus line of tuxed fucks called things like Mr Music and Entertainment Himself. Wait a minute. Now I know that one has been dead for decades. Come to think of it, the whole show has the suspended air and sickly texture of treated film, that funeral-parlour glow — numb, tranced and shiny, like a corpse. I switched channels and sat there rubbing my face. The screen now showed a crater-field of dead cars, the frazzled heaps pummelled to the sound of tinnitus, a new necropolis of old American gods. I telephoned, and found no answer anywhere.

Time passed until it was time to go. I climbed into my big suit and brushed the hair back off my face. I took one more call that afternoon. It was a curious call, a strange call. I'll tell you about it later. Some whacko. No big deal.

Where is Selina Street? Where is she? She knows where I am. My number is up there on the kitchen wall. What is she doing? What is she doing for money? Punishment, that's what this is. Punishment is what I'm taking here.

I ask only one thing. I'm understanding. I'm mature. And it isn't much to ask. I want to get back to London, and track her down, and be alone with my Selina—or not even alone, damn it, merely close to her, close enough to smell her skin, to see the flecked webbing of her lemony eyes, the moulding of her artful lips. Just for a few precious seconds. Just long enough to put in one good, clean punch. That's all I ask.

——————

So now I must go uptown to meet with Fielding Goodney at the . Carraway Hotel — Fielding, my moneyman, my contact and my pal. He's the reason I'm here, I'm the reason he's here too. We're going to make lots of money together. Making lots of money — it's not that hard, you know. It's overestimated. Making lots of money is a breeze. You watch.

I came down the steps and into the street. Above, all was ocean brightness: against the flat blue sky the clouds had been sketched by an impressively swift and confident hand. What talent. I like the sky and often wonder where I'd be without it. I know: I'd be in England, where we don't have one. Through some physiological fluke — poison and body-chemistry doing a deal in their smoke-filled room — I felt fine, I felt good. Manhattan twanged in its spring ozone, girding itself for the fires of July and the riot heat of August. Let's walk it, I thought, and started off across town.

On masculine Madison (tightly buttoned, like a snooker waistcoat) I took my left and headed north into the infinite trap of air. Cars and cabs swore loudly at each other, looking for trouble, ready to fight, to confront. And here are the streets and their outlandish personnel. Here are the street artists. At the corner of Fifty-Fourth, a big black guy writhed within the glass and steel of a telephone kiosk. He was having a terrible time in there, that much was clear. Often as I approached he slapped the hot outer metal of the booth with his meaty pale palm. He was shouting — what, I didn't know. I bet money was involved. Money is always involved. Maybe drugs or women too. In the cabled tunnels beneath the street and in the abstract airpaths of the sky, how much violence was crackling through New York? How would it level out? Poorly, probably. Every line that linked two lovers would be flexed and snarled between a hundred more whose only terms were obscenity and threat... I've hit women. Yes, I know, 1 know: it isn't cool. Funnily enough, it's hard to do, in a sense. Have you ever done it? Girls, ladies, have you ever copped one? It's hard. It's quite a step, particularly the first time. After that, though, it just gets easier and easier. After a while, hitting women is like rolling off a log. But I suppose I'd better stop. 1 suppose I'd better kick it, one of these days ... As I passed by, the negro cracked the phone back into its frame and lurched out towards me. Then his head dropped and he slapped the metal once more, but feebly now. Time and temperature flashed above.

Fielding Goodney was already in attendance at the Dimmesdale Room when I strolled into the Carraway a little after six. Erect among the misangled high chairs, he stood with his back to me in the depths of this grotto of glass, two limp fingers raised in a gesture of warning or stipulation. I saw his talking face, bleached to steel by the frosted mirror. A low-browed barman listened responsibly to his orders.

'Just wash the ice with it,' I heard him say. 'None in the glass, all right? Just wash it.'

He turned, and I felt the rush of his health and colour — his Californian, peanut-butter body-tone.

'Hey there, Slick,' he said, and gave me his hand. 'When did you get in?'

'I don't know. Yesterday.'

He looked at me critically. 'You fly Coach?'

'Standby.'

'Pay more money, Slick. Fly in the sharp end, or supersonic. Coach kills. It's a false economy. Nat? Give my friend here a Rain King. And just wash that ice. Relax, Slick, you look fine. Nat, am 1 wrong?'

'That's right, Mr Goodney.'

Fielding leaned back against the rich wood, his weight satisfyingly disposed on two elbows and one long Yankee leg. He regarded me with his embarrassing eyes, supercandid cornflower blue, the kind made fashionable by the first wave of technicolor American film-Stars. His thick unlayered hair was swept back from the high droll forehead. He smiled ... Speaking as an Englishman, one of the pluses of New York is that it makes you feel surprisingly well-educated and upper-class. I mean, you're bound to feel a bit brainy and blueblooded, a bit of an exquisite, when you walk through Forty-Second Street or Union Square, or even Sixth Avenue — at noon, the office men, with lunchbox faces and truant eyes. I don't get that feeling with Fielding. I don't get that feeling at all.

'And how old are you?' I asked him.

'I'll be twenty-six in January.'

'Jesus Christ.'

'Don't let that spook you, John. Here's your drink.'

Frowning Nat expectantly slid the glass towards me. The liquid looked as heavy as quicksilver.

'What's in this?'

'Nothing but summer skies, Slick ... You're still a little lagged, no?' He placed a warm brown hand on my shoulder. 'Let's sit down. Nat: keep them coming.'

I followed him to the table, steadied by that human touch. Fielding adjusted his cuffs and said, 'Any thoughts on the wife?'