Vac (7 page)

Lost a thought. Cold on the greasy floor. A web of flesh in the syrup of time. Parting thighs. Dull red glow from the fire. Nelly on the huge bed, asleep. Her skirt disarranged at the back and her little white bottom peeping out. A single life-web. Parting thighs.

Many rooms.

I sat, half-dressed, smoking on the bed and watched Fay grooming her little son. Savaging the rowdy image of the past she was impeccably maternal. A wistful tale spilled from her lips.

I found this touching. I interpreted it as nostalgia for a lost, and now irrecoverable, simplicity. But this interpretation, it seemed, was faulty:

Many rooms.

I found little trophies in each, of fleeting erotic thrill,
insight
into other life-paths, new perspectives on how we live now in the West. In some I opened tins and gulped their
contents.
In some I tuned in briefly on the cathode world. I flicked through magazines and books. In none could I bear to establish myself to the extent of linking words with effort or being solitary in the evening. I acknowledged no home but
my forsaken one. Opening hours of the pubs inevitably lured me out to the
ersatz
home of thick camaraderie. There must have been the odd occasion when virus or exhaustion chained me but, combing as thoroughly as I can that first year of our separation, I cannot retrieve a single evening when I went sober to bed.

Y
OU CRIED IN
that dream but not violently, not with the passionate misery of a repulsed child, as you often did. You cried gently, almost smiling, but tears forming and falling. I struggled to get near you, to comfort you and erase every source of grief. My darling, my love, my heart and life, don’t —oh don’t be sad! Then, although you were still weeping, your smile brightened a little and, with a little sigh, you
murmured
:

N
ELLY’S HUSBAND
WAS
in Africa, making films and having heart attacks. On the balcony over the deep well of his London studio was a large bed. I lay naked on my back on this bed. Also naked, Nelly sat on the edge of the bed, talking into the telephone. Her free hand affectionately pressed my genitals. She removed it from my genitals and clapped it over the mouthpiece.

Then into the telephone:

If I had known you as well then, Nelly, as I did later, I might have received the flattering implications a little more warily. Not that I leapt to my feet and cheered. I just lay in post-coital drowsiness and felt that it was agreeable to think that I had fucked a change into you.

Nelly finished telephoning, stood up and, in a practical and dainty gesture, placed a folded paper tissue in her crotch to absorb squandered life. She turned her pert smile on where I observed what she was doing.

Deceit, Nelly! Oriental deception—not hypocrisy. Your Byzantine sexual politics in fact came from China. And the scholarly Chinese Don Juan who instructed you was only one of the men who had long ago accustomed you to being watched when you were naked. In fact, you adored it. I asked:

The call had been courteously timed. We’d just finished.
Fucking Nelly was like fucking a stream. She rippled beneath you. Her body, like her voice, rushed up in little trills of wonder. She reached round as if trying to cram my whole bulky body into her taut little hole. Often, in later days, when I tried to leave her she would groan and tug me back. One drunken night I lay pinned to her from when the pubs closed until five in the morning, periodically shuddering awake only to thrust myself back into oblivion.

Nelly tripped daintily off down the gallery steps to have a bath. I lay still, glad that she had gone so that I could fart and relieve the pressure that had been building up inside me. Our intimacy was only beginning at that time.

When, still nude, I went downstairs to the kitchen/
bathroom
Nelly giggled at me over the edge of the tub as if she were just learning to appreciate being watched while naked.

I signified my need and, with another naughty giggle, Nelly gently and deftly washed my clammy parts as I stood by the bath.

We were back in the gallery. Nelly was nearly dressed, I admiring her pretty frock and prettiness. I was nevertheless glum. The evening was starting and she was going off to a dinner party and I had nowhere to go. She asked:

We discussed possible destinations but most of them were too far for the available funds. Just drive out of London and find an enchanted village. Swig ale amongst gruff farmers, walk in woods—

We left the studio for the London night: electricity and motion and expatriate trees. I was taking Nelly to her dinner
party. I couldn’t take her quite to the door. We must be discreet. She reached for my hand. I felt reserved and
fraudulent.
We stopped for a drink. I stood beside her bar-stool, pressing, as if impulsively, against her but I felt reserved and fraudulent.

After I dropped Nelly, I lost my way. I reached an area where the four-lane highway, bordered by flood-lit hoardings, curved up as if approaching a stilted motorway. I ransacked mental maps but I couldn’t orientate myself. Was that
orange-section
block, diffusing phantom green, the air terminal? I u-turned dangerously amongst flashing cars. Rail networks were slotted behind the hoardings. I hurtled left amongst twenty-storey crystal cubes. Finally I hit the Fulham Road and dove into the first pub. Numb hypocrisy ached in my nerves.

Nelly thought I was a freebooting sexual pirate and I wasn’t. I was only the cabin-boy, from a pious home, scared of the rough men and ashore in my first foreign port.

Go away with her?

Sacrilege!

What? Oh sure, we did it. Impulsive, the lust of the moment—but drive out of London with another girl!

Orange light leaked through parchment shades. It was an old-fashioned pub with wooden screens, frosted glass and an old-fashioned, lecherous, timid husband wretchedly gulping whisky. I went back to the fine rain in the Fulham Road.

There were lonely ghouls everywhere. Seven-hundred
dawn-fresh
typists in a plastic office—these do not resemble my haggard friends. I saw lonely ghouls in the pubs. Embittered Denise, trying to con Scotch and forget love. Lonely ghouls prowling the years.

I was sick with need for you. I could live only in your arms and heart. Deprived, oh self-deprived, of you I would soon be
another ghoul of the streets and saloon bars. From pub to pub I descended the rungs of romantic self-abasement until I stood once more in the nocturnal pit of the studio waiting for Nelly to return.

I filled a glass from her flask of wine and examined the curios. I hefted marble eggs and felt perfectly disciplined. My conscious mind, the conscious mind of alphabetic, Western man, was rigidly intact. The monsters and molecules were locked in engendered history. Only deep anaesthesia or terror could breach the integrity of my synthetic self.

The phone rang. Insert a greeting and a jest will be
dispensed.
And yet I cannot move.

Where was Nelly? It was a great bore waiting for her. She knew I was waiting. Waiting to sail off down the unchartered main of the motorways as we had agreed.

I knew who was ringing.

Nelly was still being a success at table and I was locked in immobile convulsions—and now he was ringing.

I wished he would stop and knew that he wouldn’t.
Tenacious
he probably was. That was doubtless a quality he had—tenacity. So the phone went on ringing. I poured some more wine.

What did we say? What were the words and ideas? I
remember
talking to you about this, about human intersexual relations. I think you were singing in the kitchen and I came in and made you cry. No that was another time. I had this idea, a certain notion I wished to explain. It was before I kicked a hole through the cupboard. You say we had rows for a nightmare year? The point is we won’t always be young. No, that’s
not
really the point. Where’s the fucking wine?

Look, darling, I know, I mean, I know, I mean, I—yes, but it’s not possible. I mean, fidelity—I’ve said this before. It’s just as irrational to base marriage on sexual fidelity as on conversational or social or—or professional fidelity. I mean one can’t do it. That bastard’s still ringing! Willy-nilly or
hocus-pocus,
no—you see, I conceive it, marriage, as durable, as
sharing and thus multiplying all experience, as perpetually enriching—I’ll put it like this, the attempt is vain and doomed to get
all
from each other but one can get the most and the best. You see what I mean? Yeah, I
see
that you get jealous. Fuck it! I never believed in monogamous marriage!

Still ringing.

Maybe it’s Nelly ringing. Maybe she’s ringing to say her husband’s come home and is on his way round here with a Smith-Wesson .45, if Smith and Wesson ever dabbled in that calibre. Met people before who seemed gentle and suddenly beamed a killer glare.

Better find out. Just lift receiver and—

Bad mistake. Now he’ll know there’s something dodgy. Arch-ghoul that he is. Clout him with a marble egg if he glides round here. There! He’s ringing again and this time he won’t stop.

Three fingers of wine left.

In the numb deep of the night Nelly came back to the studio. All trains and flights were being watched and lust was dying under a canal bridge. One needs to be liked, Nelly. Do you think we should strangle each other? I have named this studio: the citadel of the tocsin. A boy friend of yours, in the avatar of an electric bell, has been visiting me but I kept the wine to myself.

He needs you, Nelly. And I need space, in order to let the vileness escape. I’ll drive you to him, Nelly. Come, Nelly, let’s get back to velocity and glare.

I
AM A DISINHERITED
magic monarch.

An artist in this nuthouse century is like a man running an obstacle race fitted out with all the gadgets of our riotous technology. He gets blown a mile into the air on a jet of liquid helium, shuttles about on little rocket tubes, plunges into the deeps of the ocean, shoots out again a hundred miles into space while lurid sights and sounds shred his senses. Every year, every month, another ‘panoptic’ work appears and warps his consciousness into a new shape. Knowledge itself is in a molten, a plasmatic, state and what titanic electromagnetic grip of intellect would be required to lock it solid long enough to reach artistic fusion point? The damned language becomes obsolete as it clatters from the typewriter.

I am a disinherited magic monarch.

Get Univac to write your books!

T
HERE WAS NO
doubt about Jason’s capacity for
aggression
. He proclaimed it himself:

For a few days I heard him thundering about above my head and then he stamped up to my office door:

I indicated mildly that, since I merely rented premises in the building as he did, I felt under no obligation to scrub his stairs. He leered at me in faint anguish, wondering how to
unmask
me as the caretaker he was convinced I was.

Baffled, he returned to the task of applying plastic covers to his modest but choice collection of books. The knowledge that I too was concerned with books seeped up to him and before long he was drinking coffee in my little office and sounding me out on Bloomsbury. I expressed the opinion that Virginia Woolf, like most non-Lesbian lady writers, was deficient in much:

I made a gesture that expressed the hopelessness of seeking universally valid critical laws and inadvertently knocked Jason’s painting out of the window. He exclaimed:

And shot away down four flights into the slimy area to retrieve it.

Before consigning this book to publisher and printer I will carefully substitute a fictitious name for everyone, including myself, that appears in it. The purpose of this is to render
impenetrable
its relationship with reality. When that editorial phase arrives I will be spared the task of fictionalizing the name of Jason’s painter friend:

Because I either never knew it or have since forgotten it. A series of postcards came from the North, confirming the affinity that the orphan had long suspected. I see fish drying on
pebbled
beaches. Behind the fish is Norwegian clarity, in postcard white and blue, or berg and sea. The continuous narrative on the cards described response to Northern light and form.

Light from the North is sinister to a Jew. I wondered a trifle guardedly why the boy who had known no other
parent-age
than an institution should have invented a Norwegian for a father.

The painting that the artist had given Jason was a tiny
landscape
on board, already semi-abstract, in black, blue and green. It was a pleasant painting and, in addition to its aesthetic qualities, possessed great reserves of physical strength. It hurtled repeatedly from Jason’s window.

I returned from lunch to meet Jason clattering grimly down the stairs, cold pipe clenched between his teeth.

I urged him to locate it elsewhere in his curious,
shabby-exact
flat but he obstinately replaced it against the
broken-hinged
window and seemed angrily pained when it again took the plunge.

Jason apparently saw himself as the last of a line of
scholar-eccentrics.
His tremendous aggressions were required to defend
this stance when, as he fumed up Webster Street one afternoon muttering about moral decline, a little man was injudicious enough to comment:

Jason instantly seized the impertinent one, whirled him into the hall of our building and issued a ferocious ultimatum:

I subsequently pointed out that the infringement had been reciprocal and that if he had the right to inflict his mutterings on passers-by they surely had the right to retaliate in kind. With a rueful smile, Jason admitted some justice to this.

Jason blazed off to the government department that
employed
him and rushed through the offices of colleagues, knocking pin-ups off their walls. He then composed and
despatched
a twelve-page memo to the director, stating that it was imperative to combat moral decline and giving detailed
suggestions
for reforming the organization. He was, of course, instantly sacked. Jim marvelled:

God’s pickets encompassed Jason. His father coached black bishops. His uncle carried Christ to the Amazon. Brothers and cousins spouted the divine message. His hereditary wake seethed with parsons and psalmists. Jason toiled through
literary
bohemia under this oppressive heritage.

We were friends for some years.

Jason came to dinner. We discussed books seriously and sex facetiously. He asked:

Jason knelt down and collaborated with my perfectionist little son in the production of motor crashes. Between courses he leaned towards the nearest book-case and ran speculative
eyes along the titles. After coffee, he smiled owlishly and said:

Jason’s upper class drawl indulged remarkable
mispronunciations.

These culminated, as far as I was concerned, in his despatch of a disagreeable letter which contained references to the police and the possibility of physical violence.

I hadn’t actually tried to rape Louise while driving her to the station as one version of the tale subsequently maintained. Apart from the extreme impracticality of such an undertaking, I had never tried to rape anybody. I had, however, escorted her back to my room, shared several marijuana cigarettes with her and then pursued my advances to the point where Louise elected to walk out of the room, flat and house. Then, dimly alarmed at the fate of a girl groggy with weed and wandering aimlessly, I had chased after her and driven her to the tube station. Louise had, in fact, proved more resistant to the hemp than I was and, after a final drink with me at The Bullfinch, tripped competently away to the tube.

I had first taken Louise out a year before. It was shortly after you and I parted.

Louise and I sat amongst lounging suburbans in the
rose-garden
of The Nag’s Head. The night was purple. Green exploded in the flare of headlights. Persecuted birds shrieked from a cage at the end of the garden. Louise and I talked candidly across a chord of the round iron tabletop. Louise said she had been delighted with the results of early
experiments
in masturbation.

Mountains loomed over an antipodean suburb. Each
sun-drenched
house was nested in vivid blooms. On a narrow bed
lay an adolescent girl. Downstairs her father was feebly
elucidating
the Freudian basis of his latest infidelity to her sceptical mother. From the tarred street came the emotional shouts of sturdy children. Louise fingered herself methodically until a gasp and convulsive thrust of her narrow thighs expressed her first orgasm.

Years later a strong man strode down from the hills,
married
her, wrote a book about animals he’d met and returned to the wilderness. When he next hit town he was famous and Louise encountered her husband lurching out of bars with women hanging from him. When he’d converted the last of his royalties into raves he returned briefly to Louise, refertilized her and disappeared again into the bush. Before he could emerge once more, she took the children under her arms and embarked for London. There she obtained tranquil work and devoted her spare time to seducing every single heterosexual member of a school of poets.

I wondered about Louise’s poise. She sat beside me in the car with a faint smile. Was she really so composed? She sat in the unkempt flat with the same smile. Did the candour and sophistication mask something vulnerable? I moved up behind her and stroked her neck. She shrugged me off fiercely.

So I sat on the rumpled divan and gazed at the forlorn room. We sipped whisky. Slowly a friendly conversation matured. Which cloud is a camouflaged spaceship? Yes, Heine wrote that platoon of books. Courage is the fuel of sanity. A hotel is an obsequious prison.

I rose docilely and followed Louise into the tousled
bedroom.
I placed the whisky beside the bed, undressed quickly and then lay on the bed and watched her undress. Animals in clothes, seeking the animal. Off came the dense, green dress. Light from the street-lamp, organized by the windows, cast
warped rectangles into the room. Louise hovered, hands
plucking
behind her at the clasp that secured her black brassiere. Then her breasts shone in the lamplight. Lactation. She urged down her black pants, hopping slowly out of them. She
advanced
to the bed. I checked her gently and gazed at the scar-furrows that dented and warped her abdomen.
Parturition.
She stirred unhappily beneath the inspection.

I pulled her down beside me.

An orgasm later, I gazed up at Louise, writhing slowly on me like an eel on coral. One leg of the impaled girl eased up my thigh and then languidly extended itself again. Her shoulder dipped voluptuously. Her face, melted into soft abandon, drooped past my arm on to the pillow. Inside Louise, millions of coded cells thrashed towards the rubber seal that barred them from the soft caves of generation. My hands lay lightly on her stirring buttocks. Male and female, citizens with distinct personalities, flesh inwraught in flesh.