'Meet me tonight. I won't be drunk, I promise. Look, I'm really sorry about last night.'
'Last night?'
'Yeah. Things got a little out of hand.'
'Last night?'
'Yeah. I don't know what came over me.'
'It wasn't last night. It was the night before. Call me at eight. I'll be able to tell. If you're drunk then I'll just hang up.'
Then she just hung up.
Now I'd felt some queasy queries posed my way as I climbed out of bed, and undressed slowly before the window's span, sensing huge chemical betrayals and wicked overlappings up there in the spilled sky. I had even said to myself, Christ, it's another of those inner eclipse deals — but then Felix appeared with my breakfast, and wished me good morning, and all seemed well. Apart, that is, from the food. My omelette looked docile enough on the plate, yet it soon took on strange powers of life.
I buzzed down for Felix and summoned him to Room 101.
'Now look, kid,' I said, pretty stern. 'Why did you let me oversleep like that yesterday? You're supposed to look out for me. Time is money. God damn it, Felix, I'm a busy man.'
'Huh?' said Felix, tipping his head. 'Man, you weren't even here yesterday. I thought you gone away for the weekend or something. You got in last night. Late.'
'Drunk?'
'Drunk?' And here he began his smile. 'Downstairs they don't agree but me I think it was the best yet. You had a party hat on your head. You whole face was covered in lipstick. Drunk? They ain't got a word for where you were at. You gone and beat yourself up with that bottle. You were — you were just dead.'
This was a real bitch, no error. I could remember nothing to speak of about last night, yesterday, or the night before. Worse, I could remember nothing at all about Animal Farm.
Whatever I got up to yesterday has given me a boil on my ass—and a big 'un, too. I've had some boils on my ass before, but this mother has to be the daddy of them all. Boy, is this a big boil. I thought that these characters had gone out of my life along with circle-jerks and slipped octaves. Apparently not, apparently not. It must be the booze, it must be the junk, it must be all the pornography... I feel as though I'm sitting on a molten walnut or a goof ball of critical plutonium. Amazing, even flattering, to think that the body still harbours this stinging volatility, these spiteful surface poisons. It fucking hurts, too. If I turn my back on the uncensored mirror, touch my shins and peer through my parted legs, like a scowling pornographic come-uppance, then I get a pretty good view, thanks, of this purple lulu scoring its bullseye on my left buttock. It really means business. It isn't messing about. No wonder they call them boils. Oh, brother, sometimes, bathrooms, familiar as the body itself or just rented like this one, with sheets of doublehired reflection, spotty steel, the shower curtain as wrinkled as an elderly raincoat, they take you back twenty years and make you question whether you have travelled at all ... Lying down is okay. Walking hurts, standing hurts, sitting hurts. Abiding hurts. It must be the booze, it must be the junk, it must be all the pornography.
So my day became a strange one of tracing paper and invisible ink. I sat there reading, re-reading, and sieving my mind and room for clues and taunts. Beasts of England. Boxer, the big drudge. The face-flannel in the bathroom looked like a roller-towel in a busy cat-house: where did that lipstick come from? Whose lips imparted it? She could only have been a professional. No one kisses me willingly any more. Squealer, the liar. It must be the booze, it must be the ... As I bathed my boil (whew — my ass was never one of the world's great sights but it's a real clock-stopper now) I couldn't help thinking of the Happy Isles: She-She — she did it. I have a confession to make. I might as well come clean. I can't fool you. The truth is, I — I haven't been behaving as well as I've led you to believe. No doubt you suspected that it was all too good to be true. I've gone back to Third Avenue, not to the Happy Isles but to places like it, to Elysium, to Eden, to Arcadia — no more than once a day, I swear to God, and only for handjobs (and on the days when I'm ill or unusually hung-over I don't go there at all). I go to adult movies on Forty-Second Street instead. I go to porno-loop parlours. There is no kissing in hard core. Come to think of it, there is no kissing in Third Avenue either. There is French and English, Greek and Turkish, but no kissing. I must have paid extra for this perversity. I must have paid through the nose. Ah, I'm sorry. I didn't dare tell you earlier in case you stopped liking me, in case I lost your sympathy altogether—and I do need it, your sympathy. I can't afford to lose that too. Napoleon, the bully: this pig likes his apples. I found a bookmatch in my jacket pocket: Zelda's — Dinner and Hostess Dancing. Where else have I been? Maybe I should ask the woman who trails me around New York. She'd know. I found a three-pack of condoms in my wallet, two joint-ends in my turn up, and a cocktail stick in my rug. Is it any wonder I've got a boil on my ass? It must be the booze, it must be the junk, it must be all the pornography.
You know (and the afternoon is now tilting past me in strictest blue, and the book is also turning on itself and getting nearer to being over), I lie here and cower to a sense of cautionary justice in matters of the body— and maybe there simply isn't any, any justice. Think of the nun who wears her grey skin and its no-sex cosmetic as she twists with curse-pains and life-change in her standardized cell. Certain children are perfectly capable of dying young from old age. Deprived of their zinc or iron, their manganese or bauxite, impeccable stoics start to crackle and fizz. The foes of my body are legion, and far more vicious than my sins. They have the organization. They have the finance (who tabs them?). They have infantry, spies and snipers, streetfighters, minefields, chemical-weapon systems, thermonuclear devices. And they have more than this, for now my body monitor in intensive care is playing space invaders too, with swarmers, mutants, baiters, bristling zipships and twanging smartbombs. Hell, we're all up for grabs. And spare a thought also for the peeping torn with his twenty-twenty vision, the sprinting veering mugger and his good, his excellent heart, the X-rated moviestar with his thick rug and flat belly, the charming child-murderer and his sterling smile.
How can you grow up, with a boil on your ass? Who would take you seriously? A joke is being played, at my expense.
It must be the booze, it must be the junk, it must be all the pornography.
'Actually I quite enjoyed it. What next? Rupert the Bear? Come on, give me a break. How about a real book next time? Porker and Squeaky and the rest of the guys. I'm too old for animal stories. I mean, we don't have to start that far back, do we?'
For all its offhand delivery, this speech had been pretty shrewdly rehearsed. I expected Martina to shrug and apologize and put me on to something harder. She would be impressed, a little stung and chastened perhaps, by the restless brainpower she had started to awaken. I met her gaze. Her bruised, active eyes were flooding with consternation, with delight. Fuck, I thought. Animal Farm was a joke all along.
'You know it's an allegory,' she said.
'What?'
'It's an allegory. It's about the Russian Revolution.'
'What is?'
She explained.
Now this was a shaker, no two ways about it. The Russian Revolution wasn't exactly news to me — well, I gathered that they'd had a major rumble and rethink over there, early on in the century sometime. But this allegory deal had certainly caught me napping. I listened as Martina talked on. That big horse Boxer — he was the peasantry, if you please. Little Squealer—he wasn't just a pig, he was the propagandist Molotov. Did I know that Molotov was a pre-Revolutionary editor of Pravda? I did not. To hide my panic (and it is panic, panic in the face of the unknown), I threw in my criticism, the one about the pigs.
For some reason Martina had a good laugh about this too. Like most people she has two laughs, the polite reflexive laugh, and the real laugh. Martina's real laugh is the least ladylike I have ever heard — savage, childish, but symphonic, with competing levels and strains. Yes, she likes a good laugh, this Martina.
'I'm sorry
,' she said. 'Actually pigs are cleverer than dogs. They have bigger brains relative to body size. That's what counts. Pigs are nearly as clever as monkeys.'
'You don't say,' I said. 'Well I don't know about you but it seems a hell of a way to live. I mean, if they're meant to be so smart... I mean, you have seen pigs, haven't you.'
'I like pigs,' she said.
She brought me a glass of white wine and parked me on the terrace as she went upstairs to change. It was my first drink of the day. I wasn't hungover. I was in withdrawal — but there were shards of despairing hilarity among all the sourness and static. Martina's terrace had a lot of flowers on it, in pots and tubs and wall-brackets, big ones, small ones, red ones, blue ones, supervised by corpulent bees, their shields as rich and shiny as dark pebbles in running water. Metallic, superdynamated, these creatures of the lower air moved about me like complicit demons, so heavy that when they hovered they seemed to be idling from invisible threads. I welcomed their company. They wouldn't waste their suicide stings on me. Below lay the checkered decks of half-paved back gardens — fishponds and weak fountains, curlicued furniture, an overalled woman with ticking scissors. The birds of New York shivered and croaked among the bent branches. The birds of New York have more or less given up the ghost, and who can blame them? They have been processed by Manhattan and the twentieth century. A standard-issue British pigeon would look like a cockatoo among them — a robin redbreast would look like a bird of paradise. The birds of New York are old spivs in dirty macs. They live off charity and welfare handouts. They cough and grumble and flap their arms for warmth. Declassed, they have slipped several links in the chain of being: it's been rough all right. No more songs or plump worms or flights to summer seas. The twentieth has been a bad century for the birds of New York, and they know it.
'Are you all right down there?'
I tipped my chair back. Martina's face, veiled by the hanging brushwork of her hair, inspected me from an upstairs window.
'No,' I said, 'it's heaven down here.'
The face withdrew silently. And so I sat out on the terrace in the hot dusk, drinking wine among the puppet bees.
We ate in. This spooked me somewhat. I had booked a fashionable table at the Last Metro on West Broadway, and was generally keen to push out some dough. 'Cancel,' said Martina. And I cancelled. She made dinner. Omelette, salad, fruit, cheese. White wine. The two-floor apartment presented itself as the ordered setting for healthy and purposeful lives. Books, paintings, desk surfaces, a typewriter, a chess set, a tennis racket standing easy against the closet door. Upstairs Ossie's fresh clothes would be set out in lines and stacks... The tall Martina wore a V-necked jersey and a blue denim skirt. She has a useful hind-end on her, and she's blessed up top too, though perhaps not as fulsomely as I imagined. No, it's her own body, not built on any model. 'Let's stay in,' she had said. 'It's just nicer.' May I be frank? Are you sure you want to hear this? Well I'll own up now and say that I have always secretly suspected that what Martina fancied was a bit of rough. That's right — me, in the sack. It sounds unlikely at first, I agree. But people are unlikely these days. It's happened. Twenty years ago she would have settled for her home, her interests, her burnished husband. She would have given me no headroom. But now? You just don't know any more — you don't know, they don't know. Why has she persisted in my chaos? I mean, what am I here for tonight. My conversation?
Mind you, she always appeared to like me. I used to see them around, in the Sixties, Ossie and Martina, the optimum couple. He would help her down from the running-board of the Landrover they went about in, and the tall pair would advance hand in hand into the marquee or theatre foyer or converted tramshed or through the doors of the favoured restaurant or speakeasy or eel-and-pie shop. They turned heads, those two. Part of their glamour lay in the firm fact they were so eminently and maturely a couple, rich but clean, while the groundlings were alleycatting around or blitzed on drugs: LSD, dope — yeah, and penicillin. Ossie was an actor then. He did Shakespeare. I wonder what she thinks, now that he's just a money-man, like everyone else. I knew Martina from way back at film school, and I used to amble up with whatever stylist or make-up girl I was squiring and say hi to the talented team. It did my rep a lot of good. Martina always seemed pleased to see me. Perhaps she fancied a bit of rough, even then.
So, towards the end of dinner, as Martina stood at my side pouring out the last of the wine, I rammed my hand up her skirt and said, 'Come on, darling, you know you love it'... Relax. I didn't really. In fact I behaved doggedly well all evening. You see, I'd figured it out by then. Oh, I knew what her angle was — I knew what this Martina Twain character was after. Friendship. Friendship: no sex or duplicity or complication, no money, just frictionless human contact. Well that's no fucking use to me, is it, I thought at first. I was out of my mind with sobriety, teetotalled — I felt lightheaded, I felt downright drunk, eating dinner up here with this sicko who saw nothing in me but myself. Jesus, what kind of pervert am I dealing with now? And yet I steadied, and the talk came freely enough. It takes all sorts, I concluded with a shrug, and resigned myself to the whole deal. Besides, I had this boil on my ass.
I did try a gimmick on her, though, as I took my leave at eleven-thirty. The best women, sometimes, are the most neglected, and you never know your luck.
'Oh yeah,' I'd just said. 'Give me another book to read.'
'All right, hang on then.'
It was 1984 — by George Orwell again.
I raised a finger at her. 'No animals?'
'No. Just a few rats.'
'Any allegory?'
'Not really.'
'Say,' I said (and here was my gimmick): 'I had a swell dream about you the other night.'
Normally, with this line, in my experience you get either coy withdrawal or outright panic, depending on the dame. But Martina merely gazed at me with level curiosity and asked, 'Oh yes? What happened in it?'
'Uh — well I was sort of rescuing you from Red Indians. Except they weren't red but white, with fair hair. I was rescuing you in my car. It's a Fiasco. And then the car wouldn't start.'
'What was so swell about it all?'
'Oh, then another car showed up and I drove you away in that. To safety.'
Actually this was my first deviation from truth. I did have a dream. What happened was, the Red Indians disappeared or went off somewhere else, the Fiasco was transfigured into a kind of playboy pad, Martina shed her cotton shirt and buckskins — and I loved her up pretty good on that oval sack.
'Yes, it was a real bitch,' I said, 'my car not starting like that.'
'It was probably drunk,' said Martina, smiling as she opened her door to let me out.
The adult movie was a period piece and more thoughtfully plotted than usual, all about a black plenipotentiary (Ottoman? Carthaginian?) and the appetites of his talented wife (Juanita del Pablo), who, with the help of her chambermaid (Diana Proletaria), puts out not only for her husband but for most of his army too, as well as the odd handful of servants, slaves, eunuchs, acrobats and, finally, executioners. He catches Juanita at it in the end, and throws her into some stock footage, where the lions get her. As I shuffled down the aisle with my Orwell and my pint, and as an hysterical voice-over blurbed the coming attractions ('... starring Diana Proletaria, the Princess of Pawwun. Iss whyuld. Iss hat!'), two black dudes climbed tiredly to their feet, rubbing their eyes.
'Man, I sure could use some of the bc. I wouldn't want to go back too long.'
'Yeah. A couple of weeks, maybe.'
'Two, maybe three. I wouldn't want to go back too long. But oh man I sure could use some of that bc.'
Five minutes later I was in a gogo bar on Broadway, discussing inflation with an off-duty stripper called Cindi. If you'd asked me how I felt, I would have told you that it was a big relief—to be back in civilization again.
'I want to thank you, John,' said the telephone, 'for our date the other night.'
'Which night was that?'
'Saturday night. Or Sunday morning. Don't tell me you don't remember. We met. Kind of. You were very nice to me, John. You didn't try and kill me or anything. No, you were very dear.'
'Don't talk crap,' I said.
Frank the Phone again, giving me a hard time. Actually I was still deeply curious about Saturday night. The harder I tried to remember — or, let's be accurate, the harder I fought to keep memory away — the more convinced I became that something really bad had happened, something definitive, something life-wrecking. I think that was why I had drunk myself to pieces all through Sunday. To keep that memory away, away. But Frank the Phone I could handle. This wimp couldn't worry me.
'You find a bookmatch in your pocket?. .. Go find it again, John. I wrote a message for you inside.'
'Oh yeah? What?'
'Go find it, John. I want you to see the proof.'
I went to the wardrobe and frisked my suit. I had thrown nothing away. I never throw anything away. Here, the telltale bookmatch, valentine-pink, the colour of sweet lipstick: Zelda's — Dinner and Hostess Dancing. I snapped it open, and I got the message.
'Oh you sick bat,' I said. 'You poor idiot. Will you tell me something? Why are you doing this? Tell me again. I keep forgetting.'
'Oh it's motivation you want. You want motivation. Okay. Here. Have some motivation.'
Then he made his longest speech to date. He said to me, 'Remember, in Trenton, the school on Budd Street, the pale boy with glasses in the yard? You made him cry. It was me. Last December, Los Angeles, the hired car you were driving when you jumped that light in Coldwater Canyon? A cab crashed and you didn't stop. The cab had a passenger. It was me. 1978, New York, you were auditioning at the Walden Center, remember? The redhead, you had her strip and then passed her over, and you laughed. It was me. Yesterday you stepped over a bum in Fifth Avenue and you looked down and swore and made to kick. It was me. It was me.'