The Pregnant Widow (7 page)

“It’s like with the gaping yokels in the bar in Montale. Only more extreme. Amen, Keith, grew up in the Sahara Desert. The women he’s used to all look like bowling balls. Then one afternoon he’s down at the pool, he comes up for air, and sees a six-foot blonde. Topless. And there they are, staring down at him. Scheherazade’s breasts.”

So it’s true, thought Keith. “Topless,” he said nauseously. “You’re kidding. I thought Lily was just teasing me.”

“No. Scheherazade down at the pool—topless as nature intended. And now, with Amen, it’s become a negative obsession.”

“Mm. I’m trying to see them from his point of view.”

“It’s complicated. He’s artistic and it’s complicated. Sometimes he says they’re like a terrifying sculpture called
Female
. And not stone—metal. And get this. Sometimes he says they belong in a thick glass jar. In a backroom at the lab. With all the other freaks.”

“That
is
—that’s formidably gay … Me, I expect to take them in my stride. I think I’m pretty clear-headed about breasts. I was bottle-fed, see. No topless period in babyhood.”

Corpulent raindrops began here and there to fall.

“It might be less trouble,” said Whittaker, “if we all looked like bowling balls. Amen’s sister, Ruaa, she’s not fat, I don’t think, but she’s … She looks like—what’s that horror film with Steve McQueen? Oh yeah.
The Blob.”

The thirty-two pieces on the sixty-four squares were now reduced to seven a side.

“Draw?” said Keith. “Here’s a tip for Amen. The next time he sees Scheherazade’s breasts, can’t he just pretend they’re an arse? Are there bits of
your
body Amen doesn’t like?”

“He doesn’t like any of it. I’m thirty-one. You guys are all kids. Too big, too small, too this, too that. When are you ever going to feel good about your bodies?”

A
fter dinner he played an hour of cards with Scheherazade on the thick-rugged floor of a distant chamber
(the den
or
the gunroom
, with its moose’s head, its crossed cutlasses, its miniature cannons on either side of the grate). Keith had spent most of the evening in conversation with her mother, so he was now well placed (Scheherazade’s fanned cards were six inches from his chin) to see what youth was. Her face was actually narrower than Oona’s, but the flesh itself was full and plump. And it had a self-magnifying quality, her flesh—the plump peel of youth … There was much laughing and, on her part, some beaming; every now and then she beamed at him. Just before twelve they climbed the tower by lanternlight.

“I’m Scheherazade,” said Lily in the dark. “This is Scheherazade lying here. But she’s been drugged. She’s completely at your mercy. She’s helpless on drugs.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“She can’t speak. She’s helpless. Do your worst!”

Later Lily said,

“No. Stay. Have it by the window. Lean out.”

He leant out, and smoked. The night was starless, with silenced cicadas … Seventeen years ago to the hour, on July 15, 1953, he was allowed down to see the stranger in his parents’ bedroom. Karl was now also present, and there was a midwife packing up, and his mother’s face on the pillow was flushed and moist and wise. Keith was not quite four. With a suddenly flaring heart he approached the cradle—but no, in his mind it wasn’t a cot or a basket: it was a bed, and on it lay a creature the size of an established infant, with thick, damp, chest-length blonde hair, and warm cheeks, and the knowing smile of sleep. A false memory (or so he always assumed), touched up or restored by facets and lustres that awaited her in the future—because he had seen a newborn baby or two, meanwhile, and he had no illusions about how they looked. But now (leaning out, smoking, thinking) he decided that this impossible vision, his formed sister, was what he actually saw, in his hallucinatory state, smashed on love and protectiveness.

No stars and no cicadas. Just a quarter-moon, lying on its back and at an expectant angle, like a baby girding itself for the bottle or the breast.

“Where’s our storm?” said Lily as he joined her.

Keith sank back. Lily too was like a foster-sister to him … All will be decided here, he thought. All will be decided in the castle in Italy. Right from the start, as he scaled the tower with his bags, three steps below Scheherazade (the segment of white in all that churning bronze), he strongly intuited that his sexual nature was still open to change. For a while it worried him: he would go gay and be swept off his feet by Amen; he would fall for one of the prettier ewes in the field beyond the paddock; at the very least, he would develop a sick thing for, say, Oona, or Conchita—or even Dodo! … This is the climax of my youth, he thought. All will be decided here.

Then it came, an hour later, two hours, three hours. Amateurish, tinny, like a pantomime shotgun. You could almost see the bearded villain in his frock coat, and the flabby smoke ring widening over his blunderbuss. Amateurish—and neolithically loud.

“You?” Lily suddenly said.

“Yes,” he said. “Me.”

“Mm. Tomorrow all your dreams will come true.”

“How’s that?”

“After the storm. We display ourselves. Her. Down by the pool.”

The Me Decade wasn’t called the Me Decade until 1976. In the summer of 1970 they were only six months into it; but they could all be pretty sure that the 1970s was going to be a me decade. This was because all decades were now me decades. There has never been anything that could possibly be called a you decade: technically speaking, you decades (back in the feudal night) would have been known as thou decades. The 1940s was probably the last we decade. And all decades, until 1970, were undeniably he decades. So the Me Decade was the Me Decade, right enough—a new intensity of self-absorption. But the Me Decade was also and unquestionably the She Decade.

It was all being arranged, history was arranging it—just for Keith. Or so he sometimes felt. It was all being done with Keith in mind.

Among the poor (according to a distinguished Marxist historian),
women went out to work after 1945 because, to put it crudely, children no longer did so
. Then higher education, with the female share of university places set to double from a quarter to a half. Also, and never for a moment forgetting Keith’s needs: antibiotics (1955), the Pill (1960), the Equal Pay Act (1963), the Civil Rights Act (1964), the National Organization for Women (1966), “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” (1968), the National Abortion Rights Action League (1969).
The Female Eunuch
(love and romance are illusions),
Women’s Estate
(the nuclear family is a consumerist hoax),
Sexual Politics
(bottomless insecurity drives the man’s will to dominate), and
Our Bodies, Ourselves
(how to emancipate the bedroom) all appeared in 1970, back to back, and with perfect timing. It was official. It was here, and just for Keith.

• • •

Not until the year 2003 did the year 1970 catch up with him.

The date was April 1, or April Fool’s Day, and he was fresh from the most extraordinary encounter with his first wife. Keith’s immediate response, when the encounter ended, was to call his second wife and tell her about it (his second wife thought it was outrageous). When he got home, he gave a more detailed version to his third wife, and his third wife, who was nearly always insanely cheerful, thought it was very funny.

“How can you laugh? It means my whole life is meaningless.”

“No it doesn’t. It just means your first marriage was meaningless.”

Keith looked down at the backs of his hands. “My second marriage isn’t looking too clever either. Suddenly. Talk about a rebound.”

“Mm. But you
can’t
say that. Think of the boys. Think of Nat and Gus.”

“That’s true.”

“What about your third marriage?”

“That’s looking all right. Thanks to you, my darling. But all that time I was just … Now I’m feeling even worse. In my head.”

The doorbell buzzed. “That’s Silvia,” she said (meaning her grown-up daughter). “Be positive about it. You should thank God you never had any children with that mad old bitch.”

• • •

There was a beautiful girl, called Echo, who fell in love with a beautiful boy. One day, when he was out hunting, the boy strayed apart from his companions. He called out to them:
Where are you? I’m here.
And Echo, watching him from a cautious distance, called back
, I’m here. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

I’ll stay,
he said
. You come to me.

Come to me. To me, to me, to me.

Stay there!

Stay there,
she said in tears
. Stay there, stay there, stay there.

He stopped and listened
. Let’s meet halfway. Come.

Come,
she said
. Come, come, come.

• • •

Our Marxist historian writes:

What, then, was the sartorial commentary on the period under review? For the Italian trip, Keith was careful to standardise his not very extensive wardrobe: jeans, shirts, T-shirts, and his only suit. But you should have seen him in the spring, trolling up and down the King’s Road, with an identically dressed Kenrik, in high-heeled snakeskin boots, elephant loons, a belt as bulky as a grappling hook, paisley-patterned shirt, a military tunic with gilt epaulettes, and a grimy silk scarf knotted round the throat.

As for the girls, well, take Scheherazade, for instance: the modest Cleopatra sandals (with kitten heels), and then a vast expanse of bare brown calf and thigh, the two firm stems going up and up and on and on, and up, and on, until, at the last possible instant (the suspense was killing everybody), the corolla, in the form of a light summer skirt hardly broader than a watchstrap; next, starting persuasively low on the hips, another expanse (the moist concavity of the navel), ending in the gathered loop of the transparent top, and finally the unsupported gulch of the cleavage.

To summarise and approximate: the boys were dressed as clowns, as they eagerly (and quite rightly) signed away about a third of their estate
without conditions
. And the girls? Was it—all the display—was it meant to sweeten the pill of the transfer of power? No, because they were going to get the power anyway. Was it a form of saying thanks? Maybe, but they were going to get the power anyway. Now he thinks that the display was a display, not of female power, quite, but of female magnitude.

• • •

Keith stood over the sink in his study or studio at the far end of the garden, tending to the wound on the back of his hand. This wound had been sustained in early March, when his knuckle came into unemphatic contact with a brick wall. The injury was now on its third scab, but he was still tending to it, dabbing it, blowing on it, cherishing it—his poor hand. These little hurts were like little pets or potted plants you were abruptly given the care of, needing to be fed or walked or watered.

As you pass the half-century, the flesh, the coating on the person,
begins to attenuate. And the world is full of blades and spikes. For a year or two your hands are as nicked and scraped as a schoolboy’s knee. Then you learn to protect yourself. This is what you’ll go on doing until, near the end, you are doing nothing else—just protecting yourself. And while you are learning how to do that, a doorkey is a doornail, and the flap on the letterbox is a meat-slicer, and the very air is full of spikes and blades.

• • •

It was April 10, 2003, and in the caff Keith was reading the paper. Baghdad had fallen. This new struggle, between Islam and Christendom: Keith’s infantile but persistent thought (which came from the squashed poet in him) was something like, But we used to get on so well, the believers and the infidels … It wasn’t really a fight between different religions, or between different countries. It was a fight between different centuries. What would future historians call it? The Time War, perhaps, or the War of the Clocks.

The secret police of the regime that had just been deposed went by the name of Jihaz al-Haneen. This included the torture corps—whose operatives were scholars of pain. Yet Jihaz al-Haneen translated as
the instrument of yearning
. The only way the phrase made any sense to him was as a description of the human body.

• • •

He had his wound coming, a different kind of wound, in the castle in Italy. It was the sensory opposite of torture: her pincers of bliss, her lips, her fingertips. And what remained in the aftermath? Her manacles, her branding irons.

It was here and all around them. What were they to do, the young ones? The response to the sea change, the realignment of power: this was the thing they were beginning to feel their way through, along with hundreds of millions of others. It was a revolution. And we all know what happens in a revolution.

You see what goes, you see what stays, you see what comes.

Under the burning axle of the parent star, he sat topless, poolside, his face inclined over the pages of
Peregrine Pickle
. Peregrine had just attempted (and failed) to drug (and ravish) Emily Gauntlet, his wealthy fiancée … Keith kept looking at his watch.

“You keep looking at your watch,” said Lily.

“No I don’t.”

“Yes you do. And you’ve been down here since seven.”

“Eight thirty, Lily. Beautiful morning. And I wanted to say goodbye to Conchita. You know, I have a bond with Conchita. And it’s more than us both being adopted … Anyway, I wasn’t thinking about the time. I was thinking about drugging girls. They’re
all
at it.”

Lily said, “What’s the time got to do with drugging girls? I suppose drugging girls was your only hope—back then. That was how you did it.”

“Yeah.” He thought, now, of another ex-girlfriend: Doris. “Yeah. Instead of going on at them about the sexual revolution. Bending their ear about the sexual revolution … Have you decided yet? Whether to get your top brown?”