"She gives good girlrock, I reckon. Yep."
Richard went on standing there.
"Oh yeh," said Darko with resignation. "Diva's wild for the wild thing."
"Have you known her mega-long? Where is she, for instance?"
Darko excused himself and left the room through a door beyond the kitchen. When he came back he looked at Richard suddenly and said, "Who are you?"
"Richard. Who are you?"
"Ranko."
"You mean Darko."
"Darko is my twin brother. He's Croat. I'm Serb. We look the same but we've got nothing in common."
"Well you both eat pizza. You've still got a bit of it hanging from your mustache."
The man stood there neutrally, continuing to clean his teeth with his tongue. "She's getting up," he said. "Me I'm off out.”
Richard was alone in the room he should never have entered for only five or six turbulent seconds, while one door closed and another opened. If you could have micro-monitored this time frame you would have found: fear of injury, disease and murder, fear of the dark that was now descending, fear of poverty, of poor rooms, fear of Gina and her swelling irises; despair for the stranded self and its timidly humming blood; and, among all these fears and hates, the sense of relief, of clarity and surety a man feels, at the prospect of temptation, when he knows he has washed his cock before leaving the house. He took one smeared glance at Diva as she came slanting into the room and thought: hopeless. He's safe. I'm safe. Not deadly nightshade. Just poison ivy. We're all safe.
"Hi."
"Hi."
"Richard," she said.
"Diva."
She turned a full circle and looked up at him, saying, "Belladonna. That's me."
Richard surveyed her, now (he felt), with a census-taker's detachment. No doubt she would have laughed in his face to hear him say so (she was probably a goth or a grrrl or a bombo: I haven't yet read the Saturday newspapers, he thought, with a self-fortifying swallow, but Belladonna was a punk. That is to say, she had gone at herself as if to obliterate the natural gifts. Her mascara she wore like a burglar's eye-mask; her lipstick was approximate and sanguinary, her black hair spiked and lopped and asymmetrical, like the pruned trees outside the window. Punk was physical democracy. And it said: let's all be ugly together. This notion held a lot of automatic appeal for Richard—for Richard, who would not mind being poor if no one was rich, who would not mind looking rough if no one looked smooth, who would not mind being old if no one was young. He certainly didn't mind being nuts, though, however many were sane; in fact he was really enjoying it, and believed it was the only good thing that had happened to him for years. She was very young and very small and very brown. With effective perversity she wore her underwear as overwear: floppy pink knickers over the black cycling pants; tight white bra emblazoning the black T-shirt. Her voice was London. Richard could not place her, ethnically. He thought she probably came from some island.
She said, "You're not like I imagined you."
"Really?" This was a novel idea: that anyone imagined him. He said lightly, "You mean I'm different from my book reviews?"
Belladonna looked for somewhere to sit down, and selected the sofa.
"You're not as I imagined you either.”
"Yeah?"
"You're so young. I don't know. You don't seem to be Gwyn's type."
"He's like ... in love with me."
With a defiant shake or twitch of the head. On the word love.
"Is he now?" said Richard as he sat beside her. She was gazing down at her clasped hands: anchorectic Belladonna. He found himself entertaining the reckless hope that she was already pregnant. "And how do you feel about that?"
"Pleased, obviously. Proud. I know he's married or whatever."
"Are you .. .? I mean has this been going on long?"
She smiled secretively. "You know what my thing is? Read my lips." My thing, she said silently, is my mouth.
"Your mouth."
"That's what they call me: The Gob. The Mush. Ever since I was little I had this mouth." My thing is my mouth. I'm famous for my mouth.
"You're still little," said Richard.
Here, he thought, we had the second punk principle. Everyone their own artist. Everyone their own legend. That guy's thing is to have a kilo of old newspapers glued to his hair, that girl's to wear a clothespeg through her cheek. Belladonna's thing was her mouth. Richard felt the contradiction (or would later feel it: he was busy now), because the talent was still no-talent, still idly particular, with no claim on the universal. It picked on a contradiction of Richard's. He wouldn't mind having no genius, if no one else had any? No, not true. He did want people to have it, genius; he wanted it to be out there.
Come and look, Belladonna mouthed. Look closely. She leaned back and adjusted the head of the angle-poise lamp, as if she was her own dentist. Richard—a consultant, a second opinion—bent himself nearer. I've never had a filling, he saw her say, her lower lip answering, as in a dance, to the movement of the tongue. Her teeth were indeed pitilessly perfect. Look how long my tongue is . . . Belladonna's mouth: Richard almost had his nose in it. And he knew he would never feel the same way about women's mouths again, how internal they were, how red and pink and white and wet. Yes, that was right: like a lateral and platonically perfect pubis, containing thirty-two teeth. There was no confusion here. He knew where the teeth were and where they weren't. Before he sat back he let her breath register on him and he found its taste was sweet, but sweet like a medicine, not like a fruit.
"There are tricks I can do with it."
Her tongue appeared and arched up and settled its straining sting on the tip of her nose. Then it withdrew, and the mouth smiled, and said, "Or this." Now the lips distended and scrolled away from one another. They said, "Blackface." The teeth and gums within looked distant, like a mouth within a mouth. Reconstituted, the mouth mouthed, Take my hand.
He obeyed her. It was a normal hand, too, but he could hardly connect it with Belladonna, who was, as she said, as her mouth said, just a mouth.
Which said "Watch" as the free hand approached it and then disappeared into it, wrist-deep.
Richard turned away, in search of his identity. All he could find was some very worn old stuff. "You want to be careful," he said, "who you show that to."
"I am." Her whole face was looking at him with indulgent reproach. I am.
When she switched off the lamp Richard realized that the room had been smoothly and silently invaded by the adulterous light of dusk; the light that lovers know, intimate and isolating and flatteringly amber. In this particular spasm of his spousal evolution, adultery was a red-light district, and the red just meant danger. He had been in wrong rooms before. He had been in wrong rooms before, but they tended to be better appointed than the one in which he now lurked. The circumambient red was the red of Darko's gums, closing on the fruit vert. A year ago, with Anstice, he had shed his clothes in one of these wrong rooms. What saved him from technical adultery, on that occasion, was a mysterious inner strength, something mysterious even to himself (though he knew a whole lot more about it now): impotence . . . What starts to go, around now, he had decided, is not necessarily the hard-on but the sensation of the hard-on. And with the loss of that sensation (the hurting blood) goes the loss of the belief, the loss of the transcendence and, very soon afterwards (before you know it, in fact), the loss of the hard-on. Such as it was. In its stead, the little death, the little death of ruined powers, of dud magic. Anyway, sensation informed him that impotence would not save him now, if it came to it. Some other dynamic would be obliged to intercede. The most likely candidate, at present, was premature ejaculation. He thought: I'm here because I'm scared of dying. I didn't do it. Death did.
His life, his whole life, was approaching its third-act climax. There would be two acts to follow. The fourth act (conventionally a quiet act). And then the fifth. What genre did his life belong to? That was the question. It wasn't pastoral. It
wasn't epic. In fact, it was comedy. Or anti-comedy, which is a certain kind of comedy, a more modern kind of comedy. Comedy used to be about young couples overcoming difficulties and then getting married. Comedy wasn't about that now. Romance, which used to be about knights and wizards and enchantment, was now about young couples getting married—romance, supermarket romance. Comedy was about other things now.
"There's a test I do on boys," she said. Richard showing interest, she continued, "Just tell me. I'll go out of the room and then come back in again and do whatever you want."
"How do you mean?"
"It's simple. Just tell me and I'll do it."
"What kind of thing?"
"Whatever. Your favorite."
"My favorite what?"
"Don't be shy. You know: any little thing. Your favorite."
"Say I don't have a favorite."
"Everyone has a favorite. They're funny, these little things, sometimes. It tells you so much about someone."
"Yeah, but what kind of thing?"
"Anything!"
Abruptly the room reminded Richard of the classroom in the crammer he had attended years ago, on Gwyn's street. Mostly it was the dimensions, he supposed, and the room's intransigently undomestic feel. Perhaps, too, the sense he had then, at eighteen, that he was being graded here for the rest of his life; that information about himself, welcome or unwelcome, was on its way, and getting nearer.
"Do you like doing this test on boys?"
"Yeah I really want to know it about people. What their favorite is."
"Because ..."
"It tells you so much. About them."
"How many times have you uh, run this test on boys?"
She shrugged expressively—but not enlighteningly. Two or three times? Two or three times a day? Richard thought that there probably wasn't much point in trying to read her manner. Not much point in assigning adverbs to it, and so on (proudly, indignantly, flusteredly). As was the case with Steve Cousins, Belladonna had her feelings and reactions and affectations, but they played to a different and newer rhythm whose beat he didn't know.
"Give me an example. What was Darko's favorite?"
"Darko," said Belladonna (proudly, indignantly, flusteredly).
"... Okay. What's the most usual favorite? What do they usually want you to do?"
"Well, usually . . ." She paused—fondly, you might say. Her eyes opened wide, in all innocence. "Usually they ask me to go out of the room," she said, "and then come back in nude, and then do a little dance. And then like suck their cocks."
The room gained another magnitude of dark. Who else but lovers— and solitary depressives—would sit in light like this and make no move for the switch?
"I always think it's the trick I show them with my hand. That makes them choose that. So go on. What's your favorite?"
But Richard asked, "What was Gwyn's favorite?"
"Gwyn." And here the adverbs would say thoughtfully, wistfully, tenderly. She turned to him, her face still lowered in shadow. Her clothes, as you might expect, emphasized what she liked most about herself and her body, what she was best pleased with, not a body part (in her case) but a certain rotational quality in the waist and hips. She squirmed and smiled and said, "You know I've never actually 'met' Gwyn Barry."
Richard stood up. He was leaving. He was pretty sure he was leaving. "So you don't know him," he said, "mega-well."
"He loves me."
"You mean you think he loves you."
"It's the way he like looks at me."
"When does he look at you?"
"When he's on TV."
"Do a lot of people on TV look at you?"
"No. Only Gwyn," said Belladonna, staring straight ahead, as if conducting a conversation with Richard's trousers. Then she tipped her head back. "You think I'm all mouth, don't you," she said, and let it half-smile and pout and quiver. "I'm not. I'm not. What's your favorite? I want to know."
"Why?"
"So we can make Gwyn jealous."
And Richard was gone.
Gal Aplanalp didn't call.
"Gal Aplanalp is on the phone to me two hours a day," said Gwyn. "Foreign rights. She does it all herself. Alexander used to just give them away. But Gal gets decent bread even from the East Europeans. Gal's great. So much vivacity. So much exuberance. So much love of life."
It seemed to Richard that the maggot that lived in Gwyn's brain had got itself stuck in a corner or a U-bend between the two frontal hemispheres, causing its host to go on standing there (perhaps indefinitely) making faces of chaste and twinkly approval. The two men were in the outer bar of the Warlock, leaning on the quiz machine, or the Knowledge, as it was called hereabouts, even by the cab drivers, for whom the Knowledge had meant crouching for a year on a kid-sized moped with a clipboard up on the handlebars. Gwyn and Richard were not here to play tennis. They were here to play snooker (the Portobello Health and Fitness Center was closed for remodernization). This meant they had to wait for a table. At length, Gwyn's maggot freed its wiggling back leg. His face cleared, and then frowned, watchfully. He was wearing a new tweed jacket; the material was yellowish and tufty, like a lightly chewed corncob.
"Thanks for the first chapter of the new one," said Richard. "Mouthwatering. Is it all like that, more or less?"
"More or less. If it ain't broke, don't fix it—that's what I always say. Proofs will be ready next month. You'll get one."
"I can't wait."
A gum-chewing teenage girl in a hot-pink catsuit walked past, heading for the stairs and the aerobics room. They watched her go.
"Do you wonder," said Gwyn, "do you ever wonder, as you get older, about changing sexuality?"
"What the next batch is like?"
"Because that's progressing at the same rate as everything else. It's all speeded up. They're different now."
"Probably."
"But different in what way? My impression is ... and this is only from the letters I get, mind .. . my impression is that they're more pornographic. More specialized."
"What letters do you get?"
"There's usually a photograph. And a broad hint at a certain— speciality.”
Richard realized that he had always found Gwyn erotically inscrutable. Who cared, when Gwyn was with Gilda? Not for the first time he wondered if—thanks to an impossibly humiliating complication—he was queer for Gwyn in some way. He thought about it. Richard didn't want to kiss Gwyn. It was surely inconceivable that Gwyn wanted to kiss him. Anyway, it wasn't going to happen, was it. And Richard didn't really care why he was doing what he was doing.
"Demi's young."
"Not that young."
And Richard felt power slowly absent itself from him as Gwyn said,
"She didn't really grow up in the sexual swim. Not sheltered, exactly. Between you and me, she's been around. Not that she remembers that much about it. This was in her cocaine phase. You know. Upper-class girls all have a cocaine phase. When they're born their dads put their names down for the smart dry out clinics. She's even been—she's even had several lovers of West Indian origin."
"You astonish me."
"I'm proud to say it. Good for her! But she's hardly your thoroughly modern miss. Now take fellatio. My impression was, years ago, that some girls did it and some didn't. Or they were like Gilda, and did it on your birthday. Well I bet they all do it now. It's not whether they do it. It's how they do it."
It was like a game when you lost the rhythm of dominance, and you never moved freely but always in reply. Richard said, "There's this girl who wants to meet you."
"Attractive?"
"Extraordinary mouth. She wants to ask you a question."
"What's my favorite color?"
"No. What's your favorite."
Richard then found himself giving Gwyn a gavel-to-gavel account of his experience with Belladonna. As he did so he thought: what was I playing at in there? Belladonna was barely seventeen, and out of her mind. Common sens
e demanded that he should have made her take her clothes off, at least, and do a little dance. Ever since that crepuscular encounter Richard had been adding to the large number of outrageous novelties that were, he discovered (now he came to think about it), his favorite. There was one favorite in particular: the kind of sexual intercourse that involved not an exchange of bodily fluids so much as a full transfer.
"Well," said Gwyn. "Send her over."
"What is your favorite?”
"No, no. I just want to fill out the picture. Why knock yourself out for a hamburger when your wife serves Chateaubriand every night."
Yes, thought Richard, who had heard this line before: but a hamburger is sometimes just what you fancy. And do you really want chateaubriand every night?
"I would never—I mean, what I have with my lady is just..." Gwyn fell silent. The maggot kicked in for a while, as he shook his head with his eyes closed and then nodded his head with his eyes open. "We were making love this afternoon. No. It must have been last night. No. It was yesterday afternoon. Or this morning. Anyway. That's not important. We were making love and I was kidding her about one of her West Indian lovers. And she looked up at me and said, 'Darling. Believe—' Ah. Here she is!"
He broke off and greeted his wife as if—as if what? As if this was 1945, and he hadn't seen her since 1939. When that was over Demi regained her balance and stood there, with a change of clothes in her shopping bag, smiling weakly at Richard, who moved forward to kiss her, in his turn.
Gwyn said, "When are you two going to get together? For your in-depth chat about yours truly. It's the least I can do to fix you two up. In exchange for the 'sexy young fan' that Richard is bringing over for me. Come on, Demi—get up those stairs. We don't want any extra inches, do we love."
When Demi had gone on up for her class Gwyn spent the last few minutes filling Richard in on his European deals for Amelior Regained. While doing this he used several slang synonyms for the denomination of one thousand. Richard had noticed that as soon as any novelist clawed his way past three figures he immediately started trying out the word grand. He himself would never do this. He would never do this, even if he got the chance. It was a disgraceful capitulation to the here and now—to the secular, to the mortal. Why would you want to sound like a tycoon or a gangster? Whatever you were going to get, you weren't going to get it in your time. That was the gamble. That was the shot... Anyway, and more locally, Richard was feeling so poor these days that he switched off his windscreen wipers every time he drove under a bridge.