No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (5 page)

The husband hangs back even further. Frank wonders why he doesn’t quit the scene altogether. But that’s naive. A man has to be unusually lacking in masochistic curiosity not to want to grab a glimpse of a stranger fucking his wife in the middle of Oxford in broad daylight.

Frank inspects the contents of the bag. All telly books. Uppity telly books. An Inspector Morse mystery. A Commander Dalgliesh thriller. And
Middlemarch.
He chooses
Middlemarch.
Winner in category best provincial novel by woman over thirty not a lesbian. Had she been alive now, they say, George Eliot would undoubtedly have been writing for television. Oh yeah – just as Marquez and Llosa are, Roth, Kundera, Bellow, Grass, Gordimer, Updike. Can’t keep any of’ em off the box. Frank knows he’s in the wrong
profession. He likes sentences more than he likes action. Thoughts more than he likes pictures. Nothing he can do about it, it’s his age – he’s a moral insight man. As for example, since
Middlemarch
is in question, that shrewd and poignant encapsulation of the motive force of men’s long-suffering fidelity to their wives and mistresses –
He dreaded a future without affection.
He being Tertius Lydgate. But what’s in a name? Tom, Dick, Tertius, Frank.

He inscribes it on the tide page. And signs it as though it’s his own.

She bows, drops a bead of perspiration on to his wrist, then stands beside him in a peculiarly artificial manner. It takes Frank much longer than it should to realise that her cuckold of a husband has his camera out and is snapping them. The pervert, Frank thinks. The weirdo. But in one corner of himself he is envious. With Mel, all deviant snapping had to stop.

Twenty minutes later Frank catches sight of the smutty pair walking slowly, shoulder to shoulder, down St Aldates, trying to figure out the meaning of his inscription. One of them looking for the compliment. The other looking for the pain.

Otherwise, Oxford isn’t giving him whatever it is he’s come for. The stones still exude the sickly mildew odour of collegiate privilege, enticing the morbid to imagine what they can never have. Even his own not so very old college with its kitsch bridge and far-from-secret gardens has sealed over in his absence and once again become a mystery he cannot hope to penetrate. Like the Swede’s cunt. But the town, the town has become a mug and T-shirt bazaar run by bouncers. Heavies in black trousers and summer anoraks, striking aggressive attitudes and communicating through walkie-talkies outside genteel tea rooms and public houses, places of entertainment to which, in his day, you wouldn’t
have scrupled to take your mother and father … people the age he is now.

What explains the number of foreign bouncers is the number of foreign kids. He has always thought of himself as a man who likes crowds, but a crowd is evidently a relative concept. His tolerance level of kids in numbers was determined in more tranquil times, when the world’s population was half what it is today. He finds himself stepping off the pavement to avoid them. Sometimes he doesn’t see them coming. They don’t know they’re coming themselves. They gather involuntarily, inexplicably, like flocks of migrating birds darkening the sun, swoop in a body across the road or into a store, then just as inexplicably disperse. Would these be his students if he were back here doing his old language job, these hard-faced little consumers with writing on their clothes? Where are the lovable ones? Where are the fuckable ones, come to that? The girls are wearing skirts so short they might as well not be wearing skirts at all. But they’re not dressed for pleasure. For
his
pleasure. They’re actually in uniform, tunics of the puritan revolution; they might as well be Stalinist youth, kitted out for callisthenics, so stern are they in pursuit of … what? He doesn’t have the word for it, but he has the word for what it isn’t. Dialectical. The girls he used to know shortened their skirts in order to pursue a satiric dialogue on the nature of exposure. With these kids it’s straight narrative: what it says is what it means.

What’s done it? Communicable sexual disease? The women’s movement? Is this why Mel and her consumptive chums are vomiting themselves to death, do they know that the next generation has got what they want and never can have – complete freedom from the desire to please?

Or joke. He’s been away from home a half a day and already he is beginning to worry about his capacity for
survival. How is he going to make it in a world where people wear what they mean and mean what they say; where the genitals are not a sort of joke about genitals; where there’s no dissonance, no counterpoint, no dramatic irony?

Or is he missing their joke? Are they altogether too ironical for him?

He is in bed by ten. Flat on his back with his head on his fists, staring up at the whorled love-in-a-cottage ceiling with its oaky chandelier, trying not to hear the sounds of riot issuing from the Dewdrop. Not a position that flatters him physically or spiritually. He is at his best upright or on all fours. He needs to be busy. Prone, he is prey to passivity and mawkish sentiments. The pity of it, oh the pity of it, lago. The pity of his unravelling sleeve of flesh. The pity of his dulling senses – remember how it used to be in a strange hotel room, how every sound was thick with promise; how the very doorknobs and window-catches, the swinging keys in the wardrobe, the slightest ripple of the unfamiliar drapes, gave shape to the unimaginable future. Where’s the unimaginable future now?

Imagined. Imagined out.

And more pitiable still, most pitiable of all, the present. What a waste of himself it is, to be lying here in a bed – a bed! – as it were unattached, as it were unemployed, and no one to get the benefit. Of all life’s squandered opportunities, this has always been the one that touches him deepest. A nameless night in a nameless room in a nameless town -going begging.

He made the mistake, once, in their early days, during a period that was meant to be experimentally adult, of trying to explain to Mel how it felt to be out of town and on his own in a begging bed.

‘Even for just one night?’

‘What do you mean,
just one night?
Like telling someone they were to endure hell-fire, for just eternity.

‘So how does it feel?’

He paused, to give it weight. ‘It feels as though a great prince is languishing in prison,’ he told her.

She rewarded his confidence with a raised-letter feministical-erotic satire –
The Great Prince.
His consolation was that it took her six years to write and didn’t sell. Her readers didn’t want satire. They wanted cunts, wet panties and Wittgenstein. And they were the bright ones.

He has to change his position; the French pair have begun Je t’aiming again in his head. At a pinch he could always knock himself out by whacking off, give his dick a treat if nothing else. But that would entail finding it. To say nothing of allowing Mel the satisfaction of being right again. ‘Letting the prince out of prison, are we? And how many hours is that he’s been incarcerated? Six? Seven?’

He can’t face television. That too would be a capitulation to the predictable. Dick in his hand, crap on the box – Mel would love that. He props himself up on one elbow and tries the tourist literature provided for more easily amused guests –
What’s On Around Oxford, Twelve One-Day Walks in the Cotswolds.
When he’s done with those he flicks through an old hotel browsing copy of
Oxfordshire Life.
Sees a couple of Manor Houses he wouldn’t mind owning, a chair he wouldn’t mind rocking in, a life-style he wouldn’t mind indulging – apartment in Rome, boat off Barbados, the gallery that funds it all in Woodstock. The Josh Green Gallery, specialising in Fine Paintings mainly British of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
His
Josh Green? The arse connoisseur? A photograph of the owner in front of an Alma-Tadema Roman bath-house confirms it. The same owlish eyes, red cheeks, receding chin; the same somewhat drowning look. Greyer now, of course, but still just bobbing
above the waves, the very Josh Green whose hand he hasn’t grasped since the last bus of the summer pulled away from the Dewdrop in the year of the Finn. Frank remained a regular for several summers after that, partly because language teaching was his only source of income at the time, partly because he couldn’t face not being there when the new bus pulled up. Josh only did it for one season. He was the one with the qualifications; English as a Foreign Language was his oyster. Frank had heard vague rumours that he’d gone to France, gone to Greece, gone to Turkey, then that he’d given up teaching altogether and opened a shop; but a gallery in Woodstock, Fine Paintings mainly British, apartments in Rome and the rest of it, all this is news to him.

Frank is unable to read an article in a magazine or a newspaper from beginning to end, consecutively. He has to skip, jump in at the middle, come out before it’s finished. It’s not personal or judgmental; he would read his own column this way had he not written it. It’s habit. Consecutive reading is for special occasions. Like
Middlemarch.
So he has to jump back in again to know what else Josh is up to. Once a teacher blah blah. Runs gallery with wife Anna-Liisa blah blah. One daughter blah blah. Largest private gallery outside London blah blah. Finest collection … Frank hauls his eyes back up the page. Anna-Liisa? Was that the wife Frank remembers? Anna-Liisa … ? No, Josh Green’s wife was Jean, no, Jill. Could have been his twin sister, owlish eyes, receding chin, air of drowning. They always looked as though they’d made a pact to go under together, but they haven’t have they, quite the contrary, or at least
he
hasn’t…

So what’s become of Jill and why does he think he knows the name Anna-Liisa? His pores open suddenly; in a matter of seconds he goes from bone dry to wringing wet. Anna-Liisa was the name of the Swede! That was why Josh Green hadn’t returned for another dip in the paradisal lake – the
canny little bastard had hot-footed it to Sweden and
drunk
the paradisal lake!

Dewdrop din or not, it is necessary for him to throw open his windows. He paces the room, shaking his head. Perspiration continues to pour from him. He doesn’t know why he is so disconcerted by what he has learnt. Who’s Josh Green to him? Who’s the Swede? Can he possibly begrudge Josh twenty-five years of having to mop up around those eyes after every fuck? Once was enough for everyone else. Anna-Liisa, oh lovely Anna-Liisa what ails thee so? Except … except that when he recalls embrocating her distress away he doesn’t recall addressing her as Anna-Liisa. Frida, that was the Swede’s name. Frida the Phenomenal.

So does this mean Josh Green hasn’t, after all, married the Swede? And since it must do, why isn’t Frank feeling any better? Why is he still pacing his room?

It’s that name, Anna-Liisa. He knows he knows it. Anna-Liisa. Anna-Liisa. He rubs the back of his neck. A shaft of iron has entered his spine. Anna-Liisa. Anna-Liisa. Through the open window comes the sound of screams. Girls at play. Leaving the Dewdrop and getting into cars. Jesus Christ, don’t tell me … It is, it is, that’s who it is, it’s the Finn! Josh Green didn’t do the blindingly obvious thing and sneak to Sweden to marry the snivelling Swede, he snuck to Finland and married the fucking Finn!

If Frank goes on walking the carpet much longer he will walk through it. He thinks about another shower but knows he will come out of it stickier than when he went in. He is unaccountably upset. Forget disconcerted; he is discomforted, discomfited – spell it how you like. He is discommoded.

Viewed from the point of view of envy, it makes no sense. Frida was the prize. Frida was the beauty. But what if it’s been the most terrific fun with Anna-Liisa? A half a lifetime
chasing her fidgety cunt all over her body. ‘Tis here, ‘tis here, ‘tis gone! A scream for them both. A co-operative of talents. Runs the gallery with the assistance of his wife Anna-Liisa blah blah blah. What if Josh Green, connoisseur of the lovely arse – which Anna-Liisa’s definitely was not – made a supremely intelligent choice, abjured the aesthetics of the heart in favour of the dick and has been rewarded with a happy and successful life?

As opposed to, ‘I mind that we don’t play together any more – ’

He climbs back into bed. If I’m going to make a go of this, he tells himself, I’m going to have to avoid comparisons. We can only live our own life. The trouble is, by imagining Josh Green first with the Swede and then with the Finn, he’s given him two lives. And Frank can’t decide which of them he must avoid comparing his own with.

He puts out the light. There’ll be no sleep until he has mentally trampled on his day. The last-straw brawl, the greasy chips, the boy with the loose eye he’s probably criminalised, the pathetic fan, the inane record … Serge somebody and Jane somebody, Jane with a Lawrentian surname, Chatterley, Brangwen, Birkin, Jane Birkin, that was it. Went to Paris and lived with a frog. What a waste of brain cells. Not living with a frog, remembering Jane Birkin. He drifts off, women of all nations coming and coming and coming in his head in pidgin French.

Y
OU CAN’T JUST
breeze into the Josh Green Gallery. It isn’t a shop. You have to ring a bell, wait, and then suffer the scrutiny of a sort of chamberlain, a melancholy gentleman of a gravity beyond his years dressed in an undertaker’s suit. Where there’s art there has to be death.

Frank is asked whether he is looking for anything in particular. He is quick to realise you don’t say you’d just like to have a little browse around if that’s all right. On the offchance that a Holman Hunt might take your fancy.

‘Mr Green is
who
I’m looking for. Though I have no appointment. I’m an old friend of his. Frank Ritz.’

Now that he’s here, Frank hopes that Josh isn’t. The reunions he always plans entail old friends marvelling at how well
he’s
done. He might be Broadcasting Critic of the Year, but that’s not a hell of a lot to crow about to someone who owns the National Gallery. Least of all when you’ve just been booted out of your home – your only home – and are feeling a lot less optimistic about that than you were the day before. And it shows in ink and charcoal circles around your eyes.