David Lodge - Small World (13 page)

In the same airplane, some forty metres to the rear of Fulvia Morgana, Howard Ringbaum is trying to persuade his wife Thelma to have sexual intercourse with him, there and then, in the back row of the economy section. The circumstances are ideal, he points out in an urgent whisper: the lights are dim, everybody within sight is asleep, and there is an empty seat on either side of them. By pushing back the armrests dividing these four places they could create enough room to stretch out horizontally and screw.

“Ssh, someone will hear you,” says Thelma, who does not realize that her spouse is perfectly serious.

Howard presses the call-button for cabin service, and when a stewardess appears, requests two blankets and two pillows. Nobody, he assures Thelma, will know what they are doing under the blankets.

“All I’m going to do under mine is sleep,” Thelma says. “As soon as I’ve finished this chapter.” She is reading a novel entitled
Could Try Harder
, by a British author, Ronald Frobisher. She yawns and turns a page. The book is rather dull. She bought it years ago on their last visit to England, took it home to Canada unopened, packed it again when they moved back to the States; then, looking yesterday for something to read on the plane, plucked it down from a high shelf and blew the dust off it, thinking this would be a good way to re-attune herself to English speech and manners. But the novel is set in the Industrial Midlands, and the dialogue is thick with a dialect that they are unlikely to encounter in the vicinity of Bloomsbury. Howard has a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to work at the British Museum for six months. They have arranged to rent a small apartment over a shop just off Russell Square. Thelma is going to enrol in a lot of those wonderfully cheap adult education classes they have in England on everything from foreign languages to flower arranging, and really do all the museums and galleries in the capital.

The stewardess brings blankets and pillows in polythene bags. Howard spreads the blankets over their knees and puts his hand up Thelma’s skirt. She pushes it away.

“Howard! Stop it! What’s gotten into you anyway?” Though flustered, she is not altogether displeased by this unwonted display of ardour.

What has gotten into Howard Ringbaum is, in fact, the Mile High club, an exclusive confraternity of men who have achieved sexual congress while airborne. Howard read about this club in a magazine, while waiting his turn in a barbershop about a year ago, and ever since has been consumed with an ambition to belong. A colleague at Southern Illinois, where Howard now teaches English pastoral poetry, to whom Howard confessed this unfulfilled ambition one night, revealed himself to be a member of the club, and offered to put Howard’s name foward if he fulfilled the single condition of membership. Howard asked if wives counted. The colleague said that it wasn’t customary, but he thought the membership committee might stretch a point. Howard asked what proof was required, and the colleague said a semen-stained paper napkin bearing the logo of a recognized commercial airline and countersigned by the partner in congress. It is a measure of Howard Ringbaum’s humourless determination to succeed in every form of human competition that he succumbed to this crude hoax without a moment’s hesitation. The same characteristic trait, displayed in a party game called Humiliation devised by Philip Swallow many years before, cost Howard Ringbaum dear—cost him his job, in fact, led to his exile to Canada, from which he has only recently been able to return by dint of writing a long succession of boring articles on English pastoral poetry amid the windswept prairies of Alberta—but he has not learned from the experience. “What about the toilet?” he whispers. “We could do it in the toilet.”

“Are you crazy?” Thelma hisses. “There’s hardly room to pee in there, let alone… For heaven’s sake, honey, control yourself. Wait till we get to our little apartment in London.” She smiles at him indulgently.

“Take off your panties and sit on my prick,” says Howard Ringbaum unsmilingly.

Thelma hits Howard in the crotch with her book and he doubles up in pain. “Howard?” she says anxiously. “Are you all right, honey? I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Morris Zapp goes into the Swallows’ kitchen, boils a kettle, and fixes himself a cup of strong, black, instant coffee. Outside the sky is growing lighter, and a few birds are chirping hesitantly in the trees. It is 6 a.m. by the kitchen clock. Morris drains his cup and stations himself in the front hall to forestall the cab-driver’s ring on the doorbell, which might waken the household.

But someone is already awake. There is a creak on the stairs, and Philip comes into view in the order of: leather slippers, bare bony ankles, striped pyjama trousers, mud-coloured dressing-gown, and silver beard.

“Just off, then?” he says, stifling a yawn.

“I hope I didn’t waken you,” says Morris.

“Oh, no.. Anyway, can’t let you go off without a word of goodbye.”

An awkward silence ensues. Both men are perhaps a little embarrassed by the memory of confidences exchanged the night before under the influence of whisky.

“You might let me know what you think about my book, some time,” says Philip.

“Wilco. I have it with me to read on the plane. By the way, I have a new book coming out soon myself.”

“Another one?”

“It’s called
Beyond Criticism
. Neat huh? I’ll send you a copy.” Both men jump at the shrill noise of the doorbell.

“Ah, there’s your taxi!” says Philip. “Plenty of time, it only takes half an hour to get to the airport at this time of day. Well, goodbye then, old man. Thanks for coming.”

“Thanks for everything, Philip,” says Morris, grasping the other’s hand. “See you in the new Jerusalem.”

“Pardon?”

“The conference. The Jerusalem Hilton is in the new part of the city.”

“Oh, I’m with you. Well, we’ll see. I’ll think about it.”

The cab driver picks up Morris’s suitcase and carries it to the car, a courtesy that never ceases to amaze Morris Zapp, coming as he does from a country where cab drivers are locked into their driving seats and snarl at their customers through bars, like caged animals. As the taxi turns the corner, Morris looks back to see Philip waving from the front porch, clutching the flaps of his dressing-gown together with his other hand. Above his head a curtain is drawn back from a bedroom window and a face—Hilary’s?—hovers palely behind the glass.

In Chicago it is midnight; yesterday hesitates for a second before turning into today. A cold wind blows off the lake, sends litter bowling across the pavement like tumbleweed, chills the bums and whores and drug addicts who huddle for shelter beneath the arches of the elevated railway. Inside the city’s newest and most luxurious hotel, however, it is almost tropically warm. The distinctive feature of this building is that everything you would expect to find outside it is inside, and vice versa, except for the weather. The rooms are stacked around a central enclosed space, and their balconies project inwards, into a warm, air-conditioned atmosphere, overlooking a fountain and a lily pond filled with multi-coloured fish. There are palm-trees growing in here, and flowering vines that climb up the walls and cling to the balconies. Outside, transparent elevators like tiny glass bubbles creep up and down the sheer curtain walling of the building, giving the occupants vertigo. It is the architecture of inside-out.

In a penthouse suite from whose exterior windows the bums and whores and drug addicts are quite invisible, and even the biggest automobiles on the Loop look like crawling bugs, a man lies, naked, on his back, at the centre of a large circular bed. His arms and legs are stretched out in the form of an X, so that he resembles a famous drawing by Leonardo, except that his body is thin and scraggy, an old it man’s body, tanned but blotchy, the chest hair grizzled, the legs bony and slightly bowed, the feet calloused and horny. The man’s head, however, is still handsome: long and narrow, with a hooked nose and a inane of white hair. The eyes, if they were open, would be seen to be dark brown, almost black. On the bedside table is a pile of magazines, academic quarterlies, some of which have fallen, or been thrown, to the floor. They have titles like
Diacritics, Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, Poetics and Theory of Literature, Metacriticism
. They are racked with articles set in close lines of small print, with many footnotes in even smaller print, and long lists of references. They contain no pictures. But who needs pictures when he has a living breathing centrefold all his own?

Kneeling on the bed beside the man, in the space between his left arm and his left leg, is a shapely young Oriental woman, with long, straight, shining black hair falling down over her golden-hued body. Her only garment is a tiny
cache-sexe
of black silk. She is massaging the man’s scrawny limbs and torso with a lightly perfumed mineral oil, paying particular attention to his long, thin, circumcised penis. It does not respond to this treatment, flopping about in the young woman’s nimble fingers like an uncooked chippolata.

This is Arthur Kingfisher, doyen of the international community of literary theorists, Emeritus Professor of Columbia and Zürich U Universities, the only man in academic history to have occupied two chairs simultaneously in different continents (commuting by jet twice a week to spend Mondays to Wednesdays in Switzerland and ‘Thursdays to Sundays in New York), now retired but still active in the world of scholarship, as attender of conferences, advisory editor to academic journals, consultant to university presses. A man whose life is a concise history of modern criticism: born (as Arthur Klingelfischer) into the intellectual ferment of Vienna at the turn of the century, he studied with Shklovsky in Moscow in the Revolutionary period, and with I. A. Richards in Cambridge in the late twenties, collaborated with Jakobson in Prague in the thirties, and emigrated to the United States in 1939 to become a leading figure in the New Criticism in the forties and fifties, then had his early work translated from the German by the Parisian critics of the sixties, and was hailed as a pioneer of structuralism. A man who has received more honorary degrees than he can remember, and who has at home, at his house on Long Island, a whole room full of the (largely unread) books and offprints sent to him by disciples and admirers in the world of scholarship. And this is Ji-Moon Lee, who came ten years ago from Korea on a Ford Foundation fellowship to sit at Arthur Kingfisher’s feet as a research student, and stayed to become his secretary, companion, amenuensis, masseuse and bedfellow, her life wholly dedicated to protecting the great man against the importunities of the academic world and soothing his despair at no longer being able to achieve an erection or an original thought. Most men of his age would have resigned themselves to at least the first of these impotencies, but Arthur Kingfisher had always led a very active sex life and regarded it as vitally connected, in some deep and mysterious way, with his intellectual creativity.

The telephone beside the bed emits a discreet electronic cheep. Ji-Moon Lee wipes her oily fingers on a tissue and stretches across the prone body of Arthur Kingfisher, her rosy nipples just grazing his grizzled chest, to pick up the receiver. She squats back on her heels, listens, and says into the instrument, “One moment please, I will see if he is available.” Then, holding her hand over the mouthpiece, she says to Arthur Kingfisher: “A call from Berlin—will you take it?”

“Why not? It’s not as though it’s interrupting anything,” says Arthur Kingfisher gloomily. “Who do I know in Berlin?”

The taxi jolts and rumbles through the outer suburbs of Rummidge, throwing Morris Zapp from side to side on the back seat, as the driver negotiates the many twists and turns in the route to the airport. An endless ribbon of nearly identical three-bedroomed semi-detached houses unwinds beside the moving cab. The curtains are still drawn across the windows of most of these houses. Behind them people dream and doze, fart and snore, as dawn creeps over the roofs and chimneys and television aerials. For most of these people, today will be much like yesterday or tomorrow: the same office, the same factory, the same shopping precinct. Their lives are closed and circular, they tread a wheel of habit, their horizons are near and unchanging. To Morris Zapp such lives are unimaginable, he does not even try to imagine them; but their stasis gives zest to his mobility—it creates, as his cab speeds through the maze of streets and crescents and dual carriageways and roundabouts, a kind of psychic friction that warms him in some deep core of himself, makes him feel envied and enviable, a man for whom the curvature of the earth beckons invitingly to ever new experiences just over the horizon.

Back in the master bedroom of the Victorian villa in St John’s Road, Philip and Hilary Swallow are copulating as quietly, and almost as furtively, as if they were stretched out on the rear seats of a jumbo jet.

Returning to bed after seeing off Morris Zapp, Philip, slightly chilled from standing at the front door in his dressing gown and pyjamas, found the warmth of Hilary’s ample body irresistible. He snuggled up to it spoonwise, curving himself around the soft cushion of her buttocks, passing his arm round her waist and cupping one heavy breast in his hand. Unable to sleep, he became sexually excited, lifted Hilary’s nightdress and began to caress her belly and crotch. She seemed moist and compliant, though he was not sure if she was fully awake. He entered her slowly, from behind, holding his breath like a thief, in case she should suddenly come to her senses and push him away (it had happened before).

Hilary is, in fact, fully awake, though her eyes are closed. Philip’s eyes are also shut. He is thinking of Joy, a purple-lit bedroom on a warm Italian night. She is thinking of Morris Zapp, in this same bed, in this same room, curtains drawn against the afternoon sun, ten years ago. The bed creaks rhythmically; the headboard bangs once, twice, against the wall; there is a grunt, a sigh, then silence. Philip falls asleep. Hilary opens her eyes. Neither has seen the other’s face. No word has passed between them.