Vac (3 page)

With Silvia, I defended you and, since a champion
assimilates
some portion of his hero’s merit, gained a little
self-esteem
by doing so. I said that the modes of achievement that we have institutionalized are not necessarily the highest and are certainly not the only ones. That a person’s achievement may be expressed in terms of the change he effects in others. Jim had certainly changed you, Silvia. And me. I said that it was arguable that all forms of acknowledged success
represented
pathological hypertrophy of a particular function or attribute, that beyond this might lie a realm of subtle
achievement whose measure was the total effect of the
immersion
of a personality in a culture.

We have talked so much, Jim, and deeply probed each other’s nature. No conventional barriers of shame, no
restraint
of class, race, origin have impeded our intimacy. But I never asked you about that plaster girl.

T
HE FLAT WAS
not bad. We left it for a year, most of which we spent in Europe. We took the telescope with us and sold it in Venice. In Venice we walked through rosy autumn. There has been a hint of cameras turning throughout our love. We reached Greece.

Behind us in the flat, the daughter of the professor of
English
Literature of Western Reserve University dwelt without a telescope. We lived on the Acropolis, in a sleeping car. Greeks came and led us back to their hovels for cooked guts, weed and abundant
krasi.
Back to their teeming hovels.

You never liked the flat. One has an awareness of themes. The process seems banal and one rejects it. Still one
is
the dominant factor in one’s environment. I sensed that my work, whether good or bad, would not prosper. It never has. A blunt word and a relationship trembles for a decade. You said:

Our three-roomed flat, self-contained, with a quaking floor. It surveyed London. Regional HQ of the occupying forces would have had the impression, at least, of dominating the Thames Valley conurbation from our living room. Through a good telescope one sometimes saw exciting things quite a long way away. I arose hurriedly from a stretch of dense prose construction and manned the instrument. Quite close a white body, bathed in weak sunlight, lay screened by provoking new foliage. The breeze stirred the trees, veiling and again
revealing
the white girl in the open window. My thirty-five
magnifications
conveyed my phantom eye to within stirring distance of the white mounds and the ruddy growth of the crotch. The experience moved me.

Clearly I had to reject your superstitious allegation. Such neo-Gothic imprecations are alien to modern Hampstead. I observed that we were naked. The blast wave from unruly hydrogen fusing anywhere over London would have toppled us like a flake. The hot pulse would have seared us to the clay. I watched the invulnerable sky modulating through glory above the great crystal of guilt. London is ruthless and still. You slept like a child next door. No harmonic waves invaded our flat. I shrieked soundlessly in creative impotence. I loathed that telescope.

We need our records. We can store very little reality. The powerful scanner, our brain, weaving through space-time, has only a fitful recall unit. Hence the necessity for ritual. The passion is processed into observance and the woman laying flowers on the grave of the one who was everything is
probably
brooding on the price of beef.

And yet—themes. They are magnified by duration. We scratch up the tip of a cone of significance and shrug it away. Yet it will fulfil its geometrical prerogative. Or, possibly a closer metaphor, the coded cell must evolve into the mature organism. No matter how stable and dense a biological system it is perpetually secreting its own ruin. The microscopic novelty of sperm and spore will soon invade the flourishing landscape and transform it.

No, really, you’ve got the period wrong. Ours is a
modern
novel. Not even a novel, a film—you sand I wander not through moral labyrinths but incontrovertible visual reality. The cuts are absolute, replacing Madrid with Athens, the rose-gem of Chartres with the limed cement of a Cretan inn. The dialogue is vernacular and inconclusive. Our motor rides come from Hollywood, our sex from the Latin neo-realists. How can a flat be unlucky? That would imply a schematic life, rooted in a durable locale, where the crack in the fireplace can evolve, over tedious years of inescapable contemplation,
into a curse from the cabbala.
We
hum from flat to flat, city to city—how can ‘unfurnished accommodation’ be unlucky?

Still our luck decayed. Naive and superstitious it may have been to have located the cause in our new flat, you at least detected a disease. I don’t think I did then. It was in you, in me, in the morning headlines and the Saturday party.

Nevertheless, we successfully defied the curse for several years and when we motored off to the Pyrenees and the Alps, it was not to escape the mysterious sentence but simply to have a look at Europe.

During the year following our return, our life became
intolerable
. You left. What? All right, I drove you away.

D
R
. S
ELIGMAN WAS
fat again. A few months earlier his clothes had drooped. He had lurked healthily in a collapsed, pin-striped tent. During his previous bulging phase, he had shown me huge, blue love-bites in the swell of his belly. A few years before he had been struck by a coronary. Excess flesh unfairly burdens an ailing heart. He had been relatively thin for only a few months and now his navy pin-stripe clung tautly round him again.

He glanced up vaguely but attentively, stubby cigar
between
extended fingers, medical text in his hand.

Sue’s teeth had in fact nipped, to the accompaniment of a little savage whimper, my left testicle. My gasped protest, as the sickening pain spread, had fortunately disciplined her.

I watched Dr. Seligman frowning gently, sucking the cigar, occasionally inserting a correction or emendation as he edited medicine into a text I had translated. I had asked him about Sue as much to brag about being in a position to seduce a girl, schizophrenic or otherwise, as to elicit information. He had probably sensed this. I felt humiliated.
His
erotic anecdotes had been one of the factors which had made marriage seem intolerably constraining. How ignoble! Had I been jealous of the fat, middle-aged doctor? He lived with mum, who always answered the phone:

In a voice rigid with the gutteral accent of the harried. Jim
visualized her as ‘his greedy old mother’. How else account for his superb economic disasters? From Hungary and then a Russian prison camp where his captors, in deference to his technical enemy nationality, had flung a solitary Jew amongst Nazi officers, he had trekked through shattered Europe and liberated Paris to London and the ultimate catastrophe of hire purchase. This had nearly broken him as the earlier ordeals had failed to. He had snatched up, in an orgy of consumer lust, houses, cars and domestic equipment and so far had he waded into debt that it seemed he would flounder in it for the rest of his days. His evasive actions were picturesque and humiliating. He would sell and repurchase his car within an hour in order to modify the interest rate, alternately plead with the post office and threaten them that a disconnected
telephone
might, in addition to spoiling his chances of ever paying the bill, menace a patient’s life, borrow small sums and juggle large ones. Why was he so poor? He worked like a donkey. He had a research appointment, a private practice, devoted nights, not like other doctors and lesser men, to sleep but to an emergency service which, when he was not actually out on a call, provided what time he had for translating. Then why was he so poor?

Jim maintained.

But I tried to parry this. Each explanation was more
complex
and fabulous than the last. Naturally I didn’t want the fat, funny, clever pathologist to get another coronary but he showed a tendency to borrow money from us and then neglect our work.

I felt wary rather than alarmed. Was it a standard hazard of consorting with girls disturbed in this particular way?
Actually
Sue hadn’t seemed at all disturbed that glamorous
evening
—at least until the poignant farewell.

I couldn’t recall from random but fairly extensive reading in psychopathology that schizophrenic women were disposed
towards
oral castration. Perhaps it would be as well, if another intimate opportunity arose, to try and direct matters into more orthodox modes. That time she had had a period and we couldn’t do it properly.

Steak and wine. Her slight form, dark face, quick little smiles, as she daintily sipped and chewed, impressed me with her youth. I was still ageless.

In the car, as we hummed along the pastoral ridge to
Highgate
, she snuggled against me. Seated on a bench outside The Grapevine, in Highgate, she asked for:

A white-shield Worthington—so she was on pet-name terms with the powerful ales. We sat side by side outside The Grapevine. Each gust of wind generated a blizzard of pink petals. I told her about you and me in selected phrases. That was, I think, my first attempt to reconcile fidelity to our love with an urgent desire not to alienate a girl. A craven
compromise
? True, I should have said:

As a shiny vehicle pulled out of the tiny courtyard,
accumulated
petals slid from it as from a bridal car. Sue placed her hand on mine and squeezed it.

Her charm survived her views. She had it in for the blacks. I brought her another whirlybird. I tried not to slip from a bantering into a didactic mode. I refrained from advocating a liberal immigration policy. Sue turned and smiled clearly and sweetly. We slid away through the deep dusk to The Nag’s Head.

Several whirlybirds later I stood by a low wall. Sue sat on the wall. Around us, murmuring in the night, were the people of the suburbs. You were now inaudible. I had raised a wall of
whisky between us. Ram too had been troublesome earlier. He had squeaked several times that my conduct was just as cynical as I had implied his had been. Wasn’t I getting her drunk? No, Ram, I am not so priggish as to claim purity of motive but I am not merely attempting seduction. I find the girl delightful. Probably I exaggerated the severity of her mental instability. You can see that this evening she is rational and gay.

Soon I took Sue’s hand and led her to a stone nymph at the deserted end of the garden. I had only to swing her lightly towards me for her to sidle into my arms. I seasoned the kiss with a discreet but yearning caress of her leg and thigh. She pressed closer against me.

Back in the flat, we stood by the fish tank and kissed. Blue lights marched across London. We stood by the table for an age. Her tubular dress had climbed to her waist, her dramatic knickers had fallen to her knees. Her head was slightly on one side, her eyes closed, her hands on my shoulders. You entered singing and laid the table for three. You dissolved in a mist of anguish. A white, knitted lamb peeped at us. We stood
immobile
, in erotic equilibrium. Seasons swarmed silently around us. I grew heavy with years which tilted the house, toppling us on to the divan. There the contest with tangled bedclothes restored me to green youth.

I became crafty and avuncular. It was often the best time, I explained, for many excellent reasons. There was definitely no harm in it. Just let me—

I slumped. Strategic withdrawal. Must re-group. We were
still again, listening to the slow diesel groaning through Gospel Oak. There may be iron spindles on that train. Are these your white legs? I have no talent for rape. Now you can hear the fish again. I don’t know why they click like that. It may be disapproval. Your long, white legs and your soft sealed lips. And your plugged-up body. Sue, you were fine this evening. I am menaced by this rigidity. I will stroke you into
submission
.

We lay in different postures, our bodies nearly as intractable as our clothes had been. Speech jams the signals of groping hands. It stems from a different sector of evolution, a saloon car in a Jurassic swamp. That roar is peace carrying executives to Nairobi. Let me just—there! The classical position for Western man. Or its dry approximation. Grip tightly, Sue. I am disinherited without the slippery coils but you seem—

Sue, I will never reach the crest but I am doubling for your sake. There is pleasure in inflicting pleasure.

Not in hours. And you won’t need hours. Minutes perhaps. The clock of your respiration is speeding up. Seconds—that little jerk of your chin registered the crisis? How mild. You did make it, didn’t you? Here, lie against me. Rest. There are no rats in this house. The ancient world is dust but so is the future one. We have recently invented dynamic dust that ripples. How did you get down there? You are tickling my feet. They have drained the virtue out of us and pumped it into our institutions. You are browsing on my leg. This
afternoon,
when I telephoned you I mentioned, without design, that I had just bathed. Would you have indulged these ‘secret desires’ without that assurance of hygiene?

The room was splotched with light. I lay like a specimen, probed by a diligent student. You are methodical, Sue, leaving no cleft or protrusion unexplored. I wish my undischarged vigour had not flagged. Why doesn’t this charming caress
reanimate me? Is it too clinical? Now you have reached the variant parts and—

Sue, that was savage! And was it lust or rage that tore the muted snarl from your pretty lips as you nearly ruined me? The pain! Strange pain that dilates slowly. When the big boy clutched me that summer day in the Connecticut alfalfa I held in a gasp as the pain expanded until I thought my bowels would melt and tears oozed out. Will it increase this time until—no, it seems your little nip was not too fierce. It begins to abate already.

Now the lights are on. You are squatting beside me and laughing, shaking me like a carnival toy.

Girlish, long white legs, still wearing a green blouse.

You cocked your head at this sly admission. Then you jumped off the bed and started to dress. Perhaps not. I hadn’t really noticed, even when I stirred your nipples, how
‘well-developed’
you were beneath the green blouse. Is it time for you to go?

Sue dressed rapidly. I lay naked and watched her. She glanced at me once or twice but didn’t smile. I prolonged the intimacy by remaining naked. How long would her period last? We had got on very well. I felt a stirring in my bowels. Sue moved towards the door.

She lurched out into the passage. I twisted off the bed and flew after her. She had opened the hall door, stood poised at the dark stairwell.

I smiled affection, smiled farewell, until next time. The exhausted thing turned. Hostile eyes met mine. The smile was that of someone who wanders alone through a blasted land, the voice was a whisper from beyond relevance.