The Teleportation Accident (6 page)

‘Well, I can hardly say no after you’ve been so frank, can I?’ There was a sardonic edge to Rackenham’s tone but there was also a genuine sympathy, and for just a moment, as Loeser looked into the Englishman’s handsome blue eyes, he felt a befuddling combination of tearful gratitude, unaccustomed optimism, and perhaps even a small homoerotic tremor. Probably something in the coke. Regardless, he thanked Rackenham warmly and they rejoined Adele and Achleitner, then Rackenham went off with the girl. He was about to explain the situation to Achleitner when he saw Tetzner standing near by, and he didn’t want a conversation about his drug debts, so he rushed off in the other direction, and that was when he collided with Klugweil.

The actor had his arms in a double sling that bore a regrettable resemblance to the harness that had injured him the first place. And he was in mid-conversation with, of all people, Marlene, which was unfortunate but wasn’t a total surprise, since he had always been the first man she flirted with at parties, even when she was going out with Loeser. Thankfully, Klugweil was devoted to his boring girlfriend Gretel, and in Loeser’s experience it was always boring girlfriends who lasted the longest – like some Siberian brain parasite, they seemed to shut down their host’s capacity to imagine a more exciting life.

‘Hello, Adolf,’ said Loeser. ‘Hello, Marlene.’

Klugweil just glared at him, and Marlene said, ‘The doctor says that his arms will never quite go back to how they were before. That’s what you accomplished today, and here you are at a party as if nothing had happened.’

‘I did almost get my nose broken.’

‘And worst of all, Adolf says you made some comment afterwards about how the machine was actually designed to injure him, and that’s why you gave it that name.’

‘No, I didn’t say that, I was only making a theoretical point about how the name of the thing couldn’t logically make any difference to whether or not—’

‘Oh God, you’re always making some point, aren’t you? Always some useless fucking point. Well, what about his arms?’

Loeser shrugged. ‘At least they didn’t get ripped off completely.’

Marlene gasped in disgust and led Klugweil away, presumably to counsel him not to slip into the darkness. ‘Hey, calm down,’ Loeser called after them. ‘I was joking. Adolf! You know I’m sorry about it really. I am!’

‘Oh, just fuck off!’ Klugweil shouted back at him, not very languidly.

Loeser thought this might be a good time to do some more coke. So he found Achleitner and they went off into a corner and started drafting lines on top of a sewing machine.

‘That wasn’t actually Brecht, by the way,’ said Achleitner. ‘It was Vanel, but he happened to be wearing one of those long red overcoats like Brecht always wears.’

‘So why was there all that commotion by the door?’

‘It turned out he had a corkscrew on him.’

‘Oh, I might as well get Adele back from Rackenham, then.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I left her with him so that Brecht wouldn’t notice her. He was very helpful about it.’

‘That was brave,’ said Achleitner.

‘Brave?’ said Loeser. Near by he heard one of those startling explosions of communal laughter that are distributed at random intervals through parties like moisture pockets in a fireplace log.

‘He’s very charming.’

‘Yes, but he’s hardly going to make a move himself, is he? He’s queer. Ideal chaperone.’

Achleitner cocked his head. ‘Not exactly.’

Another monstrous thought sank its teeth into Loeser’s brain, which made the previous monstrous thought look like an adorable snuffly pet. ‘What do you mean?’

‘As everyone knows, all those English public-school boys are Gillette blades. They cut both ways.’

‘But you said he was queer.’

‘I didn’t, Egon. I just said I fucked him. Not the same thing.’

‘You’re playing games with me.’

‘No.’

‘You must be.’

‘No.’

‘You must be because otherwise I will kill you and then kill myself.’

‘I’m afraid I’m not.’

Loeser made a run for the dance floor, but Adele and Rackenham were nowhere to be seen. He collared Hildkraut, who looked as if he were mourning the loss of his corkscrew monopoly. ‘Have you seen that girl with the long black hair and the big eyes?’ he shouted over the music. ‘She’s with an Englishman in a waistcoat.’

‘The short bony girl? Looks about twelve?’ said Hildkraut.

‘I suppose so,’ said Loeser. That others might not find Adele as attractive as he did had not even occurred to him.

‘They were here, but they left.’

‘Where did they go?’

‘Well, they were doing some coke, not very discreetly—’

‘He gave her coke?’

‘Yes. And then I think they went out by the back entrance.’

‘Fuck!’

Outside, there was nobody but Klein vomiting methodically into an upturned copper corset mould. Loeser dashed past him and out into the street beyond, but it was deserted, so he hurried back to the party, wondering if Hildkraut might have got it wrong about the other two leaving.

Like a faithful old butler who quietly begins preparations to auction the antique furniture and dismiss the French chef several weeks before his master has even begun to wonder if all that fuss about the stock market might have cut a little bit into his income, there was an inferior part of Loeser’s brain which had long since accepted that it was going to be Rackenham, not him, who fucked Adele tonight, and which was already getting ready for the moment when the superior part had no choice but to accept the same thing. Until then, however, Loeser would just go on running back and forth, looking in cupboards, tripping over dancers, asking incoherent questions of possible witnesses, inventing optimistic excuses (she might have become suddenly and disruptively menstrual!), and generally behaving as if what was now obviously true might still, somehow, be false. In the end, though, after a frantic, undignified and predictable twelve-minute crescendo of desperation, the last hope finally departed Loeser like a last line of credit finally withdrawn. ‘That worthless cunt!’ he howled, stamping on the ground. He realised he didn’t have a drink, and just at that moment he saw Gobulev put down his bottle of black-market vodka to light a cigarette, so he grabbed it and sloshed as much of its contents into him as he could before it started to dribble down his chin. Then he slipped unsteadily back into the crowd, away from the dance floor.

What now? The main thing was not to dwell on it. There were alternatives. He could just go back to his flat, where whatever hour happened to show on the clock it was always, mercifully,
Midnight at the Nursing Academy
. But for once the book might not quite be enough to satisfy him. He could try and fuck someone else at this party. But he didn’t have the spiritual stamina to fix upon a new target and begin a whole seduction from nothing when he was almost certain to fail as usual. What about Marlene? Could he persuade Marlene to go to bed with him for old times’ sake? That was the sort of thing people did, wasn’t it? But she hated him too much. Which only left the Zinnowitz Tearooms. He wasn’t often drunk enough to want to go to the Zinnowitz Tearooms. But if he forced down the rest of Gobulev’s vodka, he would definitely be drunk enough before long.

If some confidant had learned that the sole reason Loeser didn’t like going to prostitutes was that they made him feel so uncomfortable, he might have deduced that Loeser had no moral sentiments at stake in the matter – or otherwise he might have deduced that this very feeling of awkwardness was itself a sort of moral sentiment – a sickly, selfish, and impotent sort of moral sentiment, but a moral sentiment nonetheless. Whatever the case, Loeser hadn’t gone to a prostitute sober since he was nineteen, and he hadn’t even gone to a prostitute drunk since late last year. That last occasion had been particularly bad. About a minute into the act he had stopped thrusting and cleared his throat nervously.

The girl, who called herself Sabine, turned her head to look back at him. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said. Loeser’s forehead felt riverine with sweat but hers, as usual, was somehow still talcum dry.

‘Look, if it’s all the same to you . . .’

‘What do you want me to do, darling?’

‘It’s not that I don’t appreciate the effort you put in, with all the moans and the lofty commendation of my dick and so forth, but the truth is . . .’ He’d never had the courage to say this before. ‘I don’t like it when a waiter or a clerk pretends to be a bosom friend, and I don’t like it when you pretend to be enjoying all this, either. No offence meant. I know it’s part of the job. But we both know you’re not really enjoying it. The suspension of disbelief isn’t quite there. And on the whole it just puts me off.’

He’d expected her to get a bit sulky but in fact she just said, ‘Whatever you say.’ Relieved, he went back to work, but straight away she started squirming away from him and gasping, ‘No, no, please, let me go, please, it’s too big!’

He stopped in horror. ‘I’m so sorry.’

She looked back at him again. ‘Why did you stop? Did I get it wrong?’

He hadn’t realised she’d been acting. ‘What were you doing?’

‘You told me to pretend I wasn’t enjoying it.’

‘No, I just told you to stop pretending that you
were
enjoying it.’

‘So am I supposed to be enjoying it or not?’ she said.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Well, then.’

‘But not in that way.’

‘If I’m not enjoying it, then I’m going to want you to stop, aren’t I?’

‘But you weren’t enjoying it previously, and you didn’t want me to stop. Well, I mean, I’m sure on some level you did want me to stop, actually, that’s part of my point, but the difference is you didn’t say anything.’

‘You didn’t ask me to say anything.’

The exasperation in her voice was murdering Loeser’s erection. ‘I know, but . . . Look, can we just agree that I’m not giving you hundreds of orgasms, but I’m also not raping you, I’m just a polite stranger offering you a fair wage in exchange for the efficient completion of a specific service within a capitalist system of alienated labour, all right? That’s my shameful fantasy.’

From then on she was as silent and still as a coma patient. Which was by far the worst of the three scenarios. After another few minutes he had to pretend he’d ejaculated just so that he could leave, which was not something he’d ever anticipated he’d have to do with a paid consort, but he knew it was his own fault.

So it was with a rucksack of apprehension that he stepped out of the taxi outside the Zinnowitz Tearooms on Lieblingstrasse. At two in the morning the streets of Strandow were crowded with screeching drunks from the beer halls near by, many now queuing up like a congealed riot to buy boiled meatballs with caper sauce from stalls to eat on the way home. He nodded to the brothel’s bouncer and went inside, where he was greeted straight away by Frau Diski, the dwarfish proprietor. ‘Herr Loeser! What a pleasure. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? Sit down, sit down. What would you like to drink?’

‘I suppose I’ve probably had enough tonight.’ He couldn’t remember what he’d done with the bottle of vodka.

‘Some tea, then.’

‘Fine.’ Around the room sat six or seven other men, alone or in pairs, some of them with girls on their laps. Mercifully there was no one among them he knew. With its floral wallpaper, bentwood chairs, and Blandine Ebinger records playing softly on the gramophone in the corner, the Zinnowitz Tearooms, even after midnight, really did retain the stolid atmosphere of the sort of place your aunt would take you for chocolate cake, which was presumably a calculated psychoanalytic strategy on Frau Diski’s part to stop her customers from getting rowdy: they had all been nice boys once and there were some deep bourgeois instincts that even a barrel of beer couldn’t drown.

‘You seem to be in low spirits, Herr Loeser.’

‘I haven’t had a fantastically good evening.’

Frau Diski sat down beside him. ‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’

‘There’s no point.’

‘I want to know.’

‘Well . . . I was after a girl, of course. And I should have got her. But someone else got her instead. And what makes it really intolerable is that it was my fault that he did.’ He meant that he’d handed Adele over to Rackenham, but now he remembered that he’d also been too stubborn to let her believe he was a writer. Would that have made a difference? Did writers really get more sex just because they were writers? Presumably writers hoped and prayed that they might. He’d read somewhere that Balzac only took up writing because he thought it might help him meet women. And it worked, of course: he married one of his fans. But that was after he’d written ninety-two novels, and they were married for just five months before Balzac died of a lung complaint. Even assuming they’d fucked every day since the wedding, that meant Balzac had written about half a book for every wheezy sexual encounter. Not a very efficient rate of return. Still, it was better than nothing, and if Countess Ewelina Hanska was as good in bed as Marlene Schibelsky, it might just about have been worthwhile.

‘Who is she, this object of desire?’ said Frau Diski.