You never know what’s going to make everything all right again. A good night’s sleep, an aspirin, a plaited belt …
In so far as it paints her as the instigator, Lily will contest the foregoing history of the belt’s role in reuniting them. She wouldn’t be in the slightest bit ashamed to admit it were it true – shame plays a very small role in the drama of Lily’s conscience – but it isn’t how she remembers it. And in so far as it shifts the responsibility on to him, Quaid, too, will raise an objection. But since shame plays an overwhelmingly large part in his moral consciousness, both as the son of a father in whom he can take no pride and the pupil of Miss Gore, he isn’t trustworthy.
‘Why don’t we agree that the only entirely innocent party is the belt itself?’ one of them says when it comes up for discussion in later years.
It doesn’t matter whose words they are. At some point each of them will speak them. But Lily knows the truth and allows Quaid to bend it to save him embarrassment. A man is a very thin-skinned creature, she has learnt. If it falls to her to be his scourge, it also falls to her to be his salve.
Salve/slave …
The anagrams will have to wait until they are a lot older, when words are to play with, not tremble before.
But for those who like to picture the practicalities of a love affair, there are other questions to be answered. Such as: did the plaited leather belt with the snake’s head buckle become a fixture in the passional life of Quaid and Lily?
If yes, did Lily carry it around with her and produce it of her own accord most nights, or did Quaid request it, if not in so many words then by intimation of the sort lovers become adept at communicating? Such as – to make a jest of it – by crossing his wrists behind his head the minute that head touched the pillow. But all jests are facile, heartless and dishonest when it comes to the erotic goings-on of men and women. Act out any desire, and there will always be someone who finds it laughable – no matter that many of those who laugh are performers themselves when darkness falls.
If no, if the plaited leather belt with the snake’s head buckle was brought out only on special occasions, was that because Quaid and Lily were alert to the dangers of normalising a fetish? Did they know how perilous to arousal routine was? We must assume that as mature fugitives from staleness they put their minds to that. But so long as the routine is working, it is as hard to recall, as it is to foresee, what the tedium of sex is like.
Truth to tell, it was not routine that caused Quaid concern in those first prickly days of their rapprochement but the confused trajectory of his self-esteem. That the belt bespoke submission was not discussed. Precisely because words were their medium, there were some that dared never be uttered. The belt was a totem. It radiated a magic silence. But within the force field of that silent radiation Quaid grew anxious. So long as he, a playwright, could think of what he and Lily had begun to brew up between them as ‘play’, he was on secure ground. They were still relatively new to each other. There was still a lot of sparring and finding-out to do. Men in his profession, both on the stage and off it, not uncommonly dressed as women. And vice versa, of course. Roles were not so fixed they couldn’t be interchanged. Love the same, surely. It had to be allowable to shape-shift in the arms of someone you loved. To swap characters even, in the knowledge that you would eventually swap back. But didn’t the noun ‘submissive’, at least in the tacky literature of S&M, denote a near-pantomime rigidity of preference? Submissive, by this understanding of the word, implied a state of total sexual capitulation, a kitsch renunciation of authority, assertion and, if the submissive were a man, everything that made him manly. Would he be lisping next?
And yet, yes, Lily ran things. In Taos he had marvelled at the assurance with which she superintended the shoot; her calm, always polite but never less than firm way with the crew; the decisiveness with which she changed a plan and indeed a script, no matter that he – Sam Quaid, distinguished, prize-winning playwright – had written it; the clear sense she always gave of where she wanted the film to go. Quaid, who never knew where anything he wrote was going, and took fright the minute a direction suggested itself, was awestruck. And not only by her assurance but by her authority. When Jeep Number 2 from which he was being filmed driving Jeep Number 1 broke down between Taos and Santa Fe, she flagged down a passing motorist and suborned his services for the rest of the day. ‘I have to pick my wife up,’ the motorist complained. ‘And I have a film to make,’ Lily said, all but threatening him with the camera. But she did agree to ring the wife.
Back in London she was equally overweening. They cooked up schemes to make more documentaries together but always under her direction. Yes to this; no to that. During absences dictated by his periodic fits of marital compunction – absences which she would not have dreamed of questioning – she ran the diary of their amorousness: where they could look forward to going when he was in the mood – for she read the fluctuations of his moods with uncanny accuracy – and how long they would be able to stay before he felt bad again. Which meant that yes, she ran him. So long as no one outside the two of them was aware of this evolving hierarchy, he was and looked happy – a successful, haughty dramatist who ruled the roost, who took plaudits from audiences and awards from critics as though they were his by right (if not so frequently in recent times), intellectually under the thumb of a clever, discreet, austerely beautiful – and, all right, exacting mistress. Mistress. The belt she wielded made the very word shudder. Whisper it, but she was his mistress in every sense.
So where did this leave him?
Paradoxically, it solved the issue of his fearing he had gone downhill since his legendary starred first and become yesterday’s man. Yesterday’s man could not have consented to this intimate arrangement with Lily. Yesterday’s man would not have had sufficient confidence in his virility – his ruggedness, let us say – to allow it to be compromised in this way. Thus, the less of a man he became, the more of a man he felt. To employ a figure from a greater dramatist than him – a concession he didn’t find it easy to make – he was bound upon a wheel of contradiction: richly rewarded in the very actions that demeaned him.
Of those rich rewards, the richest, precisely because it could have been the most unmanning, was Lily’s subjection of his ‘person’ to her will. In matters relating to sex, Quaid favoured biblical circumlocution. By ‘person’ he meant that entity he was not prepared otherwise to name. His veneration of Lily was of such a kind that he could not envisage her in the neighbourhood of that entity in language other than Old Testament. From the first moment that she (the woman), took possession of him (the entity), he (the man and the entity) passed into her possession. Her hand was small, her touch was of the lightest. But it was as though she had, once and for all, laid claim to him.
‘I feel,’ he told her, his wrists lashed behind his head, his body open to her invasive gaze (and whatever else she chose to invade him with), ‘as though just one of your fingers could—’
How did the Bible put it?
This wasn’t a time to consult a concordance and, besides, she didn’t need the Bible, for lo, miracle of miracles and praised be the Almighty, just one of her fingers did as he foretold it could.
‘I can well imagine that one day,’ he said, ‘even your touch won’t be necessary. Just your command.’
Having said which, it has to be conceded that he sometimes fell back into shame. Would the time come when all his functions operated by her will alone? God forbid any member of his audience – naturally, he hated the word ‘fan’ – got to learn of it.
He was proud, invigorated, elated, exultant, but he wasn’t out of crisis yet.
Lily, as might have been guessed, was not in the slightest bit troubled by any deviations from the straight and narrow of love. If it pleased him to be mistressed, it pleased her more. She could do pliancy, in its time and place she could positively enjoy pliancy; but assertion suited her better. She was no less a woman for playing the man, and in her eyes Quaid was no less a man for playing the woman. Who originally assigned those roles anyway?
What passed between them as she tightened the belt and rose above him was an exchange that didn’t stop at he becoming her and she becoming him; it was a dissolution of what ‘he’ and ‘she’ meant. It could be said that they were pioneers in the probing of pronouns.
From the beginning, her nerve had been stronger than his. He blinked first. Or rather, wherever this was going to take them, she wouldn’t blink at all.
Thus Quaid, long and widely lauded as supreme puppet-master and magician of the English stage, embarked upon a covert life as puppet and magician’s pretty assistant.
‘Am I absurd to you?’ he asked her.
‘No.’
‘Am I a disappointment to you?’
‘No.’
‘Would you rather—?’
‘I wouldn’t rather anything.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What for?’
‘Everything.’
‘Who are you apologising to? Me or yourself?’
‘You,’ he said.
‘And why do you feel the need to apologise to me?’
She knew perfectly well why but among her many jobs was that of confessor and exorcist.
‘I don’t have the words to explain it.’
‘Ha! Don’t have the words, you! The time you don’t have words is the time the world will have run out of them.’
‘Now you’re just trying to make me feel better.’
‘I can make you feel worse if that’s what you want.’
‘I want everything.’
She was supporting her head on one elbow, looking down on him. ‘You’ve got everything.’
‘But have I?’
‘Haven’t you?’
‘Yes, but how did I come by everything?’
‘Luck?’
‘What if I didn’t “come by” anything? What if I insisted my desires?’
‘On me? Don’t flatter yourself.’
He flushed and looked away. Then, ‘Do you know what I most fear?’ he asked.
‘What do you most fear?’
‘Coercion.’
‘I thought our working assumption is that you love coercion.’
‘I don’t mean that you have been coercive. I mean that I have.’
‘You have not coerced me. Groomed me a little, maybe …’
‘Oh, God. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. I’m not. I wouldn’t have gone anywhere I didn’t want to go. Not everything’s for you. This’ – she opens her hands wide to suggest the panoramic spectacle of his abnegation, Samson before Delilah, John the Baptist decollated on Salome’s platter – ‘is as much for me.’
‘But if I had not somehow signalled …’
‘Yes, yes, and if I had not not known how to interpret it … And if you had not known what you dared or dared not communicate … And if I … And if, and if, and if … Quaid, don’t you think we are too far in to trace the origins of things? Of course if you are wanting to bail out …’
He looked startled. ‘Not ever,’ he said. ‘Not ever, ever …’
Now it was her turn to look away. ‘Don’t make promises,’ she said. ‘I know you to be a man who breaks them.’
Man. He took her in his arms. At least she called him man.