He is working on a new play. He doesn’t yet know its subject. Famously troubled men, if his previous plays are anything to go by. Man out of time and place. Man marooned. Man Gored. Any resemblance to himself being purely incidental.
Only the act of writing will decide what the new play’s about. This is the best time, waiting for the ‘about’ to reveal itself. Notwithstanding his reputation for being spiky and unyielding, he submits ecstatically to the capricious wiles of language. The words will look after him.
It’s their way of saying thank you. He looks after words, they look after him.
His wife is still half-asleep at 9.30 when he brings her coffee. She drank too much the night before and calls for water. In their early days they drank freely together, laughing as they uncorked yet another bottle. ‘How are you?’ he would ask when they opened their eyes late into a new day. ‘Pissed-blind,’ she’d say and he’d gather her into his arms, as though a pissed-blind lover with long flanks was the most precious commodity in the world.
‘You?’ she’d ask.
‘The same.’
Then she would roll out of his arms and gather him into hers. Now, pissed-blind is no longer endearing to either of them.
Selena was thirty when they met. Already divorced and with two daughters, less substantial than her, both as light and long-legged as dragonflies. He shook their hands when he met them. Hello girls. Which exhausted his interest in children. She – the mother – was a book illustrator in the style of a roughed-up Cicely Mary Barker with ambitions to be a portrait artist she wasn’t yet sure in the style of whom. He had a proposal for her. No, not that. In idle hours, when he couldn’t see how to get from Act I to Act II, he penned world-weary fables in which he affected a disillusionment beyond his years. He had even put a small, loose-leafed book of them together, tentatively entitled The Ostrich That Had Seen Enough. It would do, he thought, as a gift. Would Selena like to illustrate it? He can’t recall now what became of her attempts. Not cynical enough, he thinks. She couldn’t draw a nihilistic ostrich.
It was he who made her think that their careers were following a similar trajectory, though he, at twenty-six, was the Wunderkind, with two successful plays and countless critical pieces he called Amusements to his name. Why he went on soaring and she never quite took off is hard to explain. Talent for talent, he assured her, they were fairly matched. Success, however, is wanton. And responds well to ambition, of which he had more than her. But wasn’t he ambitious enough for two – great writer and great painter, the all-creative, all-charismatic, all-conquering colour-supplement pair, gifted, caustic, and nearly twelve feet tall between them? Only trouble was, he forgot to ask her if this was a partnership she wanted. Looking over his shoulder, one day, to be sure she was keeping up with him, he saw she was not there. ‘Rush, rush, rush,’ she breathlessly shouted after him. ‘Pushing and shoving and smarming, to get where?’
She had a point. They were artists, not entrepreneurs of art. The rush was not something he could explain. Was it that his meteoric start demanded nothing less than a meteoric future? Vultures waited for him to fail. He wondered if he was one of those vultures himself. Had he already exceeded his desserts? Did he hope that if he moved fast enough no one would see in him what he, on bad days, saw – namely, not very much at all?
But none of this was relevant; if she didn’t want to keep up, that was her business.
‘How about,’ she pleaded with him one day, ‘you just go at your own speed and allow me to go at mine?’
He fell to his knees and apologised. Her frustrations were all his fault. He had uprooted her from her natural habitat of quiet concentration. He had thrown her in the path of rowdy failure.
‘Get up, Quaid,’ she said. ‘I don’t need any of this.’
‘What do you need?’
‘For you to leave me the fuck alone.’
A fond pleasure in beholding Selena hasn’t gone entirely. It returns unexpectedly and in degrees. This morning, aroused by the sight of an uncovered breast, still as blue-veined and milky as a dairymaid’s, desire – or is it the memory of desire? – stirs in him. With one arm still extended, waiting for water, she has gone back to sleep. There is a libidinousness in accidentality. Stealthily, like a biblical villain, like one of those lascivious Elders or Noah’s sons, he leans across the bed and with trembling fingers uncovers her breasts a little more – a man secretly spying on his own wife’s nakedness.
A dozen questions nag at his conscience. Is desire transferable? In stealing a look at Selena is he actually stealing a promissory look at another woman altogether? And if there is another woman – he is only saying if – is it a betrayal of that other woman to be looking in this way at breasts that are not hers? Can one look betray the whole sex?
He covers her up – the eternal, eye-ravished wife – and leaves the room on quiet feet, a fugitive from his own marriage bed.