No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (22 page)

‘It looked to me as though twiddling your thumbs was exactly what you were doing,’ Frank says. For the cosmos is a joke to him.

She looks for something to throw at him. The closest thing to hand is the book she’s been reading, the paper-pornoback woman’s rut-
roman
whose rude romanticism was responsible for rolling her on to her side and turning her thoughts to impurity in the first place. It catches Frank a glancing blow on the forehead. He is not unduly discommoded by that. What unduly discommodes him is the novelette itself. He recognises it even before it hits him. He knows the look of it well. The blatant high-gloss art-work -purple on black, woman in marvel-bra on top, man with bruised eyes and soft mouth under, helpless to resist despite
arms that could raise
Titanic
. There is a stack of them in his house – in what
was
his house – in Dulwich. It is called
Coming Is Too Good For You
and its author is his partner –
was
his partner – Melissa Paul.

So how does he feel, as they ask on the box? What are you meant to feel when the woman with whom you are sharing a bed, albeit chastely, is discovered playing Rachmaninov on her cunt as consequence of reading what your estranged lover has to say on the subject of fucking and its attendant folderols, which are not matters she has had anything to say to you about for some considerable time? Can there be a sexual advantage to yourself anywhere in this?

If anyone can find it, Frank can.

O
UTSIDE THE PALAZZO
the snow fell in heavy flakes. Before She’d met Lorenzo, before this afternoon, her existence had been as cold as that dead ground, as colourless as that leaden sky. Now everything had meaning. His jutting penis. Her wet clitoris. His savage thrusting. Her gorged vagina. Everything.

‘Carissima.’

‘Don’t talk,’ she said. Just go on filling me with meaning.’

But he had to talk. It was her talk he had originally fallen in love with. The way she shaped her lips to make words. The darting movement of her lizard tongue whenever she used a word that began with L. Love. Lick. Liquid. Long. Lorenzo. If he talked to her, Italian custom demanded that she talk back to him. He had to get her to talk to him. He had broken into every other part of her, now he had to break into the maidenhead of her silence.

‘Tell me you love me, Sabina.’

Hush, my darling. I want to listen to the snow fall while you fuck with me.’

But Lorenzo wanted to hear a word that began with L.

‘Ask me to lick you, Sabina.’

‘I don’t need to, my darling. You will when it feels right for you.’

‘Describe my cock, Sabina.’

‘Wonderful.’

‘What about its size?’

‘Thick.’

‘I mean the other way.’

‘Interminable, my darling.’

‘Do you know what I am going to fill you with, Sabina?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Say it,
carissima.’

‘Meaning.’

Inside the Palazzo Lorenzo’s liquid fell in heavy droplets, lubricating her longing labia.

If only the moron would shut his fucking trap, she thought. If only he’d put a lock on his ludicrous lips.

Or something like that.

Frank will have remembered it, naturally enough, from the man’s point of view. Will have disobeyed the publisher’s express instructions and slipped mirth into it. Will have missed the intensity of Sabina’s struggle to be mistress of her own destiny. If he remembers rightly, Sabina gets control of the Palazzo and Lorenzo ends up being hung from a hook in Sabina’s study, a gag in his mouth and a leather strap separating his balls, so that Sabina can choose which of them to flick, at whatever time of the day she chooses to flick it. His penis is attached by two fine gold chains, one to the mouse of her computer, the other to the keyboard – that way it inclines towards her every movement, like a sunflower following the sun, traces every word she writes at the very moment that she writes it. Eventually he will learn to understand, the only way a man can, what it is she is thinking. When she wants him to come – and his coming is entirely at her discretion and bidding – she types the word come on to her screen and he comes. Sometimes she opens her mouth to swallow him while he’s coming and she’s working, sometimes she doesn’t. He, of course, because he is
blindfolded as well, has no way of knowing whether her mouth is open or not. But if he guesses wrongly, or misses, he is beaten.

He knows he cannot cry out or otherwise make a sound. If he otherwise makes a sound he knows Sabina will cut his tongue out.

But not even that will give Sabina any real pleasure. Whatever she does to a man, still, in Wittgensteins’s words –
Ich kann mich nicht selber aufwecken
- she cannot awaken her true self. Her dream body, her
Traumleib,
moves, but the real her does not stir.
Mein wirklicher rührt sich nicht.

Something stirs in her panties. Is it real or is it a dream? She puts a hand under her skirt. It is real. She is wet. Thinking of Wittgenstein always causes her to wet her panties.

Perhaps tomorrow she will stab Lorenzo in his heart with the silver knife she uses to open envelopes. Perhaps that will bring her out of her dream body, back to herself.

She will see.

Tomorrow.

The End.

‘Where I think it falls down,’ Frank says, ‘is in the characterisation of Lorenzo.’

Yes, they are talking. Just. But they are not talking in bed. As the scene of the shame and the incursion, bed is out. They are in a gay vegetarian restaurant of D’s choosing, overlooking the bay, watching the sun go out. Frank has not told her that the Melissa Paul who wrote
Coming Is Too Good For You
is the same Melissa who booted him out of his house. You can tell too much sometimes. He simply admits to knowing something of the plot, having found the lurid treatise on top of a paper towel dispenser in the lavatory of an inter-city express train.

‘How long ago was that?’

‘A year or two ago.’

‘Where was the train going?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Glasgow, or somewhere.’

‘I don’t believe you. You wouldn’t be going to Glasgow. I’ve heard you on the subject of Glasgow. And if it was a year or two ago you wouldn’t have remembered the characters’ names. I bet you’re a secret porno reader. I bet you’ve got piles of the stuff at home.’

Too true. He smiles weakly. Is he prim? Why does he hate being implicated in the universal comedy of wanking? It’s the breeziness. That’s what it is, it’s the chirruping. Once she’d got over the shock of being crept in upon and had returned her bedwear to something like its proper order, D had defended stoutly her right to paddle in her snatch since there was nothing on the telly and he was out mooning in the park, watching men playing with their boats. Frank had no attitude to that other than surprise that Melissa Paul’s prose could so much as remind her that she had a snatch.

Don’t take a tone with me, D had warned him.

A tone, he’d told her, was the last thing he was taking. He was all for making oneself feel sick with porno.

Who, she’d wanted to know, was making themselves sick? She was enjoying her body, that’s what she was doing. She was getting to know herself. She was treating herself lovingly. It was a change – and she had Melissa Paul, among others, to thank for that – to read eroticism that had women’s parts in view.

Bully for you, he’d told her, but he didn’t see why her sex had to go in for all that flowery self-discovery vocabulary when they were in it for the debasement, just as the blokes were.

Debasement! Did he say debasement?

He most certainly did: wanking debases you, that was his
point; wanking debases you, that’s why you do it. And pornography – while he’s on the subject – degrades you, and that’s why you do that. Sex and death, D, sex and death. I’ll jump into the flames with you any time, D. I’ll lift your apron and describe whereupon I look and we can go to hell together, but don’t pretend we’re doing it
to get to know our bodies better.

This is how they have got on to Lorenzo. Frank reckons that he’s the one who’s getting the most out of this revisionist fantasy – Lorenzo, the man, yet again the man, just as in all those instances of pornography that Ms Paul is meant to be revising. What does it change, hanging him up, dividing his balls, stuffing his mouth, pulling his dick, computerising his come, cutting out his tongue, sticking him with a paper knife? It’s just the same old porno in a nutshell. If Melissa Paul thinks she’s reversed the formula she’s mistaken. Death of the man has always been what it’s about.

D shakes her head. She is got up like Jessye Norman doing Madame Butterfly tonight, with chopsticks in her hair. When she shakes her head Frank has to look out for his eyes.

‘You’re just trying to provoke me,’ she says. ‘First of all you’ve made that up about Lorenzo. No one sticks him. She just hangs him where she can get at him. It’s a joke. You’re always saying you want jokes. Now you’ve got one. Hang the bloke up where you can get at his dick when
you
need it. A woman’s joke, Frank. And for me, whatever you say, a nice change from the usual splayed female. Death of the man is
not
what it’s always been about. The carcass is invariably a she, Frank. It’s always a woman left shagged on the slab.’

‘Yeah, but that leaves out where the man is and what he’s doing when he’s reading about it.’

‘On his knees, with his dick out.’

‘Exactly. In the supplicant’s position, with his back to danger, with his cheeks red, with his eyes popping, with his
self-esteem shot to pieces, with a pain about to arrow through his anus and his testicles, with his heart leaping out of his throat, with hot sperm about to jerk through the hole in his cock and mess up the carpet, and with the knowledge that in thirty seconds from now he’ll be wishing he were dead. Tell me about degradation of women, D. Tell me that it’s time a man was made to suffer.’

‘Who wants a man to suffer? Most of us just want him to give us a decent shag. If he’d get up off his knees for five minutes we’d all be in with a better chance.’

‘If you don’t want anyone to suffer, what do you want porno for?’

‘Pleasure, Frank.’

She isn’t serious. He can’t get her to be serious.

‘Are you telling me that when I burst in upon you this afternoon you were experiencing nothing but pleasure, sheer contextless unassociated free-floating keep-your-nose-out never-met-you-before born-yesterday pleasure?’

‘Why do you find that so hard to believe?’

He can’t do it. However much she deserves it, he can’t give it her between the eyes, he can’t ask her why, if she was experiencing nothing but pleasure, she looked so much as though she were in pain, why she lay in the bed like a shot elephant, why she made noises like a dying family of chaffinches, why she was sobbing, why she was hissing, why the pillow was dyed cheese yellow by her perspiration, why there was so much tension in her body that the glass in the hotel windows was shrieking.

She’s no use to him. She isn’t serious. She isn’t like Mel who, although she has resented having to write her crap as much as he’s resented having to watch his, has always known that you can’t do porno unless it tends to death. Mel’s a moralist. That’s why she hung Lorenzo. That’s why she kicked Frank out. A moralist can’t live with another person.
Nor can another person live with a moralist. Least of all if that other person is also a moralist. But of what possible use to you is someone who is so little of a moralist that she thinks she’s covered sex when she calls it pleasure – and this in the face of the fact that she doesn’t have any sex – and who won’t admit that a wank is an act of wilful damage to the self? What’s the matter with this D? Is she Dutch, or something?

The arrival of cappuccinos saves him from having to tell her why it’s hard to believe anybody who doesn’t own up to the universal blackness. D has been to this restaurant before. They do wonderful cappuccinos. Organic.

It feels like a secret. Just something shared by the gay community of Torquay and D. Where to get the best camp cappuccino in the south west.

A waiter with a face pitted like the moon dances the coffee to their table. Mops up the spillage in Frank’s saucer. Sugar for her, sugar for him? White, brown, raw, lump? Oh, he’s forgotten the mints. Away he goes, back he comes. Mints for him, mints for her. How he laughs when D makes a grab for Frank’s. Now, now. How he knows about greed.

It’s D who notices what’s been done to the cappuccinos. ‘If I were you …’ she warns, using the side of her hand to tip back Frank’s chin as it’s on its way to the cup.

‘What? Is there something in it?’

Frank once belonged to a gentleman’s club in W
I
. Under a high Mediterraneran blue ceiling the waiters spat freely into your coffee. Gay merchant seamen, ex, most of them were. At home only in a world without women. But with an inexplicable grudge against toffs. That was the reason he relinquished his membership in the end. He couldn’t justify a thousand a year for the privilege of swallowing marine faggots’ spittle.

‘Look,’ D says. She shows him hers. No chocolate has been sprinkled on hers. ‘Now look at yours.’ On Frank’s a
small and quite perfect brown circle, painstakingly, even artistically, formed.

He peers from her cup to his and back again. ‘Chocolate.’

‘Keep going.’

‘Me chocolate yes, you chocolate no.’

‘Keep going.’

At the best of times he hates tests. But tonight, after she has failed all his … ‘What are you showing me?’

‘Well, there’s no accounting for taste, but I suppose you’d have to call it a mark of their admiration for you.’

He narrows his eyes and stiffens his shoulders, a diver preparing a leap into the foaming ring of chocolate. But he can’t jump. He shakes his head. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t get it. Unless it’s supposed to be a bull’s eye.’