The woman’s breast is so rock-hard it squashes Harvey’s nose deep into his face, making it difficult for him to breathe. Who, he thinks, wants breasts to be like this? The point about breasts, surely, is their softness? That’s the great thing about breasts, isn’t it? There’s their movement, yes, their slow hypnotic swing, but that movement itself is soft, or at least redolent of softness; and breasts filled with silicon or shrapnel or whatever they put in them to make them like these ridiculous American ones now suffocating him don’t move or swing at all. The two breasts are seemingly no longer two at all. They move in a block, comically, like feet in a single big slipper; there is no movement independent of the rest of the body, which is what gives the breast its iconic, thing-apart status. And, besides, soft: that’s what makes breasts nice to hold, and to bury one’s face into.
What do they put in them, Harvey thinks, as she moves them back and forth across his face, semi-proving, with a shift of weight across her shoulders, Harvey’s semi-point about false breasts and their lack of independent body movement. It feels like small, flat punches, like soft jabs from a practising boxer. Perhaps I should wear one of those head protectors. How hard would it be to find something soft? Feathers? Sponge? Kapok? Although Harvey has never been entirely sure what kapok is.
‘I sense you’re not focused, Gold,’ says Bunce. Harvey, aware that his mouth is still open, and thus that he looks like a mouth-breather, looks over, to where another lap-dancer is sitting astride his American friend, facing away, rubbing what Harvey knows Bunce would call her butt-cheeks across his groin. He is leaning back, his big square head a counterweight to her entire body.
‘How do you know that?’
‘I feel no electric current of desire coming off you.’
‘Really.’
‘Yes. None. And you should. She’s good. She’s very good.’ A flicker of a bored, practised smile shimmers across the dancer’s face as she moves. ‘And I’ll tell you what I really like. She looks like that girl-child opera singer from your country. The one who’s grown up now.’
Harvey looks at her. He is uncomfortable about many things in this situation, not least the clearly assumed licence to talk about the woman naked in front of you as if she is not there. This seems odd to him, as he has never experienced someone so clearly there. The phantom feminist in his mind deconstructs it as yet another type of objectification, as if there weren’t enough going on in this room: a way of rendering her a body without consciousness.
‘Charlotte Church?’ he says.
‘Yes. God. I love her. I’d fuck her until my dick became Welsh.’
‘Do you feel an electric current of desire coming from …’ Harvey twists his neck, with a stab of pain, around the side of his dancer’s left breast, in an attempt to nod towards Bunce’s one.
‘Susan?’
She turns round, on the hearing of her name. She is blonde, and her eyes are not especially dead.
Harvey frowns. Susan? Not Jenna? Chelsea? Angel? Shyla?
‘Most definitively a girl named Sue,’ says Bunce. She laughs, but Harvey thinks she may – just – have heard this joke before; and then goes back to the groin-grinding.
‘But no …’ continues Bunce, leaning over so that his mouth is close to Harvey’s ear, and his big head close to Harvey’s dancer’s – whose name he does not know – still slowly moving breast. He worries about the matter/anti-matter, Higgs Boson-creating style explosion that might happen if these two heavily gravitational objects collide, but they do not, ‘… I don’t feel much in the way of desire coming off Susan. Which is not to say, as the myth would want us to believe, that strippers stroke hookers never get any pleasure from their work. Obviously, some do and some don’t. But, no. Susan, my guess is …’ and here he looks directly at Susan’s buttocks, moving at exactly the same speed as Harvey’s dancer’s breasts, in time with the terrible R ’n’ B song banging out of the enormous speakers hovering like UFOs from the ceiling of Exotique Manhattan Table Dancing, ‘my impression is, for her, it’s just a job. Neither pleasurable nor unpleasurable.’
‘Right …’
‘Which is fine with me. One thing I’ve never understood is the idea that, sex-wise, men need women to feel pleasure. I mean, sure: it’s a bonus. It’s good. I’m happy if they’ve had a good time. But it’s not crucial. The key area, for me, is me. To be specific, my balls. Are they empty? As can be? Check. Job done.’
Bunce smiles as he says this. It is part of his trick. Bunce wraps all his attitudes in just enough self-awareness and irony to pre-empt disapproval, or, at least, to render it po-faced. Smiling, however, does not really suit him; it makes his face look suddenly boyish and over-pleased, in direct contradiction to his given mode of being, the thinking man’s jock.
‘Such an attitude would, I assume, allow for sex with a lot of hookers,’ says Harvey.
‘Well …’ says Bunce, ‘It would. But no, I’m waaaaaay to cheap for that. I hate spending money on a date, let alone a hooker. And besides: with hookers, you lose the thrill of the yes, the gaining of the Golden Ticket, when you’ve persuaded and charmed and conned until she’s reached escape velocity; and the next magic step where she puts her knees behind her ears and lets you sweat and grunt and punish like a bull mastiff on a toy poodle, and your inner voice is throwing both fists in the air and exploding between two thundery reactions: a) I fucking won!; and b) I cannot believe I’m getting away with this shit again.’
Harvey nods, remembering that an evening with Bunce involves listening to a lot of this stuff: this is how he talks, all the time.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘You know this … what Susan’s doing there, to your groin – that costs money? We’re on a tab here?’ Harvey hears himself speaking like an American, going up at the end of the sentence like the Bengali in the taxi, but without the excuse of having heard American speech rhythms burbling on behind him every day for the last however many years. The idea embarrasses him, makes his face go red – he can feel it, although knows it cannot be seen in the flashing dark – because there is something about accent-chasing, especially American accent-chasing, which speaks of desperation, of wanting so much to fit in. It makes him feel like an English fifteen-year-old obsessed by The Fonz.
But Bunce seems not to notice; he just shrugs, and says:
‘Hey. I am large. I contain multitudes.’
The music stops, followed a split-second later by a calming of the lights. Both dancers get off both laps. There is an awkward moment, like a potted version of waking up the morning after a one-night stand, as they stand there putting their underwear back on. Harvey’s dancer, demurely, turns away to do this. Susan is less bothered: she fiddles with her bra straps face-on, while fixing Harvey with a gaze that feels to him like a rebuke. He looks away, catching sight of his reflection in one of Exotique Manhattan Table Dancing’s many mirrors. He looks, as well he might – right-on man gone wrong, new man grown old – ashamed.
‘So, honey,’ she says, ‘wanna go upstairs to the private room?’
He glances over to Bunce, who, Harvey thinks, raises an eyebrow, although because he is absurdly blond, with eyebrows that verge on the invisible in daylight, it’s hard to tell: it could just be some random crinkling above the contact-lens-blue pupil. Harvey used to be able to do a killer raised eyebrow – an inheritance from his father – but lately, the muscle seems to have atrophied.
‘No thanks,’ says Harvey. ‘I’ve just found out I’m the Federal Reserve for the evening.’
She nods, and looks away, not bothering with a polite smile. Why, thinks Harvey, am I trying to sound so fucking American? He is trying, in fact, to sound at home here, to sound like the sort of person who comes to these kind of places often and is not in any way daunted by them, and thus has fallen into what he imagines might be the lingua franca of, say, a hedge-fund manager on a bawdy night out.
He wonders, too, as Susan and her beautiful buttocks – but why? What is so beautiful about the bisected pound of flesh? How can something so banal, something not actually that different, graphically, from the inflated Ws he would draw over and over again on rough-book paper as a child, drag his eye towards it so? – walk away, why he failed to take up her offer. It was not the cash, even though one of the reasons Harvey is trying to affect a breezy confidence is that he has no real idea how much the bill for the evening at Exotique will be. It had been Bunce’s idea to meet here. He said he would rather get it out of the way at the start of the evening, so that they could talk properly for the rest of the night without having to think When for fuck’s sake are we gonna go to a strip club?
So meanwhile: why not the private dance? Harvey had been more attracted to Susan than to his own dancer – not least because her breasts looked considerably more real – but had felt intimated by the forthrightness with which she had offered her services. Also, he had felt sorry for the other one, having made the assumption that her quietude was indicative of some secret sadness, which is the kind of assumption that soft-hearted men have always preferred to make about women who work in the sex industry, from Sir John Everett Millais onwards. Not that that makes any sense: because she looked maybe a little sad, he chose her, rather than her friend, for a lap dance; he did not whisk her away to a safe house and provide her for the rest of her days with a steady income.
The reasons why he doesn’t follow Susan up to the smaller rooms on the first floor are manifold. There is the money issue. And then, Harvey is – this is key: this is his shield and sword against chaos – faithful to his wife. Within the confines of this faithfulness, pornography, street sexual anguish, feeling like he is going to faint in front of Lark and, once in a very blue moon, a lap dance, are containable. Beyond lie the great plains of infidelity; and Harvey feels that, right on the border to those plains, fringing it, like a fence that may be in one land or another or both, stands the private lap dance. Also: Harvey is so aware of his own tendencies that he is frightened that the more intense, one-on-one intimacy of the private dance may lead him, instantaneously, to fall in love. Which would be both disastrous and embarrassing.
The music cranks up again. The thudding bass starts to give Harvey a headache, not helped by his having had two Budweisers, the second of which is sitting in front of him now, its last quarter, like all beers he has ever had, undrunk and turning sour. Away from the trance state that the gyrating female body inspires, a kind of alienation effect sets in, making him suddenly see no connection at all between the trimmings of this place – the bass lines, the lights, the mirrors, the velvet furnishings – and sexiness. As if to counteract this, two other dancers, who have been idling by the bar, move, with self-conscious slinkiness, towards him and Bunce. Harvey looks towards them, uncertain, but his fellow lap-dancee, sitting up and ready, has an air of knowing exactly what to do: he doesn’t go so far as to wink at Harvey, but everything about his body language implies it. As the women get there, and settle, in front of the two men, hands on hips and eyebrows expectantly raised, Bunce yawns, theatrically, and says:
‘Shall we make a move?’
‘No. No. You’re so wrong, Gold. The bigger and faker the better, and I think I like them even better when fully clothed. I like the cartoony element. I like them stretching out of a shirt or a suit or pulling some sort of fabric that doesn’t want to be pulled any more. I want them larger than life, ridiculous, preposterous, because they appeal to my sense of the absurd, and my id’s sense of the absurd; and I draw encouragement from the truth that the woman has spent a fortune and put herself into the hands of a mad scientist, has become Hanna Barbera’s conception of a female, solely to draw men’s sexual attention.’
Bunce slams his empty beer glass down on the bar as he says this. He is not angry, but Harvey confiding in him his uncertainty about false breasts has led to an outbreak of definitiveness on the subject. Bunce has no half-positions: he thinks in rant.
They are sitting in Why Not?, a bar on the corner of West 40th and 9th, overshadowed by the hulking concrete of the Lincoln Tunnel Overpass. Bunce, on leaving Exotique, perhaps to disperse pent-up sexual tension, had wanted to walk. It had felt directionless to Harvey, and when they ended up here, in the unhip section of Hell’s Kitchen, he had started to feel anxious, a little because of an old 1970s sense that New York was dangerous at night, but more because the street-scape had started to resemble the badlands of his dreams. In his dreams, Harvey often finds himself lost in some tangled urban land-lock of shopless streets and dead ends and fenced-off areas and gravel-scrubbed waste grounds and closed industrial parks and half-finished bridges, black wires rising out of their broken struts and joists like the legs of insects trapped inside the masonry. This part of New York looks so like his dreams that he had started to wonder whether he had been here before, like something was jogging his unconscious. It gave him the creeps. The appearance of Why Not? felt oasis-like.
It is not, though, the sort of bar Harvey expects to find in Manhattan. This seems to be another trick, similar to his failure to find in the city a hotel room with the Promised View. What Harvey had assumed it would be was a long, narrow room, plush and hardly lit, with a bar flanking a series of narrow booths for the conducting of sexual and economic deals. Why Not? is not that. The fittings are pine; there is a jukebox, and a pool table, over which denim-clad men are bent; no women are present, apart from those serving drinks; and although there is not actually a confederate flag above the bar, when they walked in ‘Tuesday’s Gone’ by Lynyrd Skynyrd had been playing. It feels to Harvey like reality is for once conforming to film and TV, except the wrong films, the wrong TV; expecting a bar out of Sex and the City, they have walked into one from The Accused.
Bunce orders two more beers from the woman behind the bar, who breaks the mood further by looking very like Angela Merkel.
‘Bunce,’ says Harvey.
‘What?’
‘Don’t make me drink any more.’
‘I’m not making you drink anything, Harv.’
‘No. But you’ve ordered me another drink. And I’ll feel the need to finish it, once it’s here. And then I’ll feel sick, and later – because I’m forty-four, and masturbation has, over many years, inflamed and swelled my prostate into a prostate wearing a fat suit – I’ll spend all night going back and forth to the toilet.’
Bunce laughs, and Harvey smiles, although misgives a little inside, knowing that he has now started copying not just the accent but the speech rhythms of his alpha male friend. The fall in his stomach comes from a slippage of self, a knowledge that he is no longer quite his own man. The Harvey Goldness of him is vulnerable, easily contaminated.
The drinks arrive: Angela puts them down in front of the two men, and turns away swiftly in full, confident assurance of her invisibility to them. Harvey looks at it, finding as always the white froth more attractive than the urine-coloured liquid underneath. He wishes he had brought his last bottle of Extra Tart Sour Blast Spray with him. Perhaps he could have secretly gone into the toilet with it.
‘So what the fuck are you doing these days?’ says Bunce. ‘Apart from waiting for your dad to die. Are you writing?’
‘Yes. I wasn’t for a long time. But, yeah. I just got a job here.’
‘Here?’
‘In New York. I’m writing an autobiography for a pop star. Well, I will be writing it. Once I get round to it.’
Bunce drinks, a big male glug: he drinks as if he is going to wipe his mouth across his face afterwards.
‘Bono? Elvis Costello? Beyoncé?’ He says it in an exaggerated black voice, with a snap on the last syllable. Harvey registers that Bunce is being cruel – ironically, obviously; it’s all irony, everything is irony, the world is awash with irony – knowing that Harvey would never be in the frame to ghostwrite such people’s autobiographies.
‘No. Someone you’ve never heard of.’
‘Some indie faggot?’
‘No, but – you won’t have heard of – of her.’
Bunce drinks more beer. Harvey can feel that the word her has made him want to interrogate further. It was partly the way he said it, stumbling slightly: like it was a secret. Harvey doesn’t want to talk to Bunce about writing Lark’s autobiography. He is embarrassed about it, because she is nineteen and hasn’t done anything. But he also doesn’t want to talk about it because he has been thinking a lot about Lark recently: a lot more than he really wants to. She is slipping out of her container.
‘So anyway,’ Harvey says, before Bunce has a chance to follow up on this line of questioning, ‘how’s sex crime?’
Bunce nods thoughtfully, before saying: ‘I’ve really got to give it up.’
‘Well, you haven’t been caught yet.’
‘No, but it’s just a matter of time.’
Harvey smiles: this is the conversation he knew they would have. Bunce now works for the CSC, the Criminal Sexual Conduct unit of the Toledo County Detroit Prosecutor’s Office. Bunce is an assistant prosecutor in the unit. He really is.
‘No, but honestly – how the fuck did you end up in that department?’
‘I dunno. The job came up.’
‘What do you do all day?’
‘I fuck up paedos. I take paedos down.’
‘Great job description. Paedos? Not rapists? Flashers? Necrophiliacs? Horse-fuckers?’
‘Not often any of those guys. We see all the colours of the male sexual rainbow in my work, yes, but generally we’re dealing with the deepest, darkest black.’ Harvey sees a gear change in Bunce’s face, a shift away, amazingly, from irony, but not towards gravitas exactly; towards OK, we’re talking business now. ‘Say: rape. Sexual touching of children outnumbers it by at least fifteen to one. It is a fucking pandemic. Committed ten to one by men – overwhelmingly, white men. Also: ratio of touching by stepfather, as opposed to father, I’d put at about seven to one. There seems to be a taboo about one’s own children, though it’s often overcome. Stepchildren? Open season. Our office has five lawyers devoted full-time to prosecuting child molesters. And they are overworked.’
‘Wow,’ says Harvey, and then thinks how stupid a word that is in response to what Bunce has said. But Bunce has not noticed, has hardly paused for breath.
‘And here’s a weird thing. It is really common – heartbreakingly common – for the natural mother of the abused stepchildren to battle the prosecution at every step. Typical scenario: sexual abuse is detected; the stepfather stands accused; the mother of the children defends the rapist and focuses all her fury on the police, prosecution and children. Even when faced with conclusive evidence of guilt. Given the choice between her children and her man, too often there is no choice. The children are sacrificed to the lover. To the man.’
‘But …’
‘What?’
Harvey doesn’t know what to say. He wants to say: But they are mothers. Bunce takes his silence as shock, which it is. Harvey shakes his head, and takes a sip of the beer: sour, of course.
‘I tell you, Harv, it must be the best sex ever, because I don’t think you can ever rehab a real chicken hawk …’
‘A what?’
‘Paedo. Child molester. That’s what we call them in the biz. Let’s say you lock one up for ten years, take everything away, stick him in a jail where he will be tortured every day as the lowest on the totem; beaten, spat at, pissed on, anally raped with iron bars, and that’s just the guards – it’s a fucking Hieronymus Bosch painting for them in there – and still: the moment he is released, he will not pause for food or rest or a hot shower, but will go right about the business of finding more young ass to penetrate. It is a drive unlike anything you or I will ever experience. My take? Easier to kick a fifteen-year crack habit than to curb your desire for young boys or girls. Harsh truth: the only thing we can do is lock them away. They haven’t the strength to stop.’
Harvey nods, but doesn’t feel entirely comfortable talking about this stuff. He knows what it is like to be driven and distorted by desire. He has no wish, however, to feel any kinship with these men. He shivers, repulsed by the thought.
‘But how do you deal with it? Having to look at – whatever it is that you have to look at?’
‘I deal with it by … I don’t know.’ For the first time, Bunce’s rhetoric falters. He shakes his head. ‘It is hard. Some of the things I’ve seen … I’ve been in rooms with people who like to think of themselves as the hardest of men – seen-it-all men, men who present themselves as having souls thick as lead – and evidence – films, fucking films, seized by the cops, that these scumbags have made of themselves with kids – has gone on the DVD player: and by the end, everyone – everyone – is crying.’
There is a silence. The image Bunce has conjured up has dried out Harvey’s mouth: he has to drink some beer to rehydrate. Its effect is dizzying, as if the alcohol has been injected directly into his brain. Bunce breathes in. Harvey can feel him returning to earth, or at least Planet Bunce.
‘And also,’ he says, ‘it doesn’t make for easy chitchat. “Oh, hi, honey, what did you do today?” “Oh, watched another video of a four-year-old getting fucked. What’s for dinner?”’
Harvey laughs, as he knows he has to. Laughter is the way of normalization; it’s how modern man says whatever it is, I can deal with it.
‘And what about sex – doesn’t it weird up sex? Looking at that awful shit all day? Although you were always a bit weird about it …’
Bunce does a face of mock outrage. ‘How so?’
‘Oh, y’know. The way you always …’ Harvey pauses, not sure whether he is straying into difficult waters.
‘What?’
‘Found fault. With women. You were always the guy who managed to find the fault. Even the most perfect looking women, you would scope it out somehow. Maybe that’s why you went into sex crime.’
Bunce puts his glass down and considers. He is silent for so long Harvey starts to wonder if he had been wrong in thinking of Bunce as one of those people who it’s impossible to offend.
‘You’re right,’ he says, eventually. ‘And you don’t know the half of it. Not the quarter of it. Let me see. Reasons that I’ve broken off with women in my time include …’ he spreads the fingers of his right hand and marks off the numbers with the index finger of the left, ‘… stretchmarks; too fat; too thin; facial hair; too much vaginal hair; too much anal hair; bad breath; too many moles; pores …’
‘What about them?’
‘Too big and open. Which suggested to me a weird kind of alien sweat; which I then started to smell on her. It may have been psychosomatic. Irregular-shaped breasts. Irregular-shaped vaginal lips. Big hands. Veiny thighs. Protruding hips. Thin lips. I liked her.’
‘What?’
‘The thin-lipped one. She was great. Met her in a bar in downtown Detroit. I liked her a lot. But after about four dates, I was just thinking, so much: if only she had just slightly thicker lips. And I couldn’t be doing with that thought in my head all the fucking time for the rest of my fucking life.’ He sticks his left hand out now, and puts the right index finger on the left pinky. ‘Shortness of neck.’
‘Shortness of what? Are you mental?’
‘A long neck, fellow. That’s a great thing. Swan-like. You’re a great writer’s son, you should know. “Her neck was long, and finely tuned” – Henry Fielding, describing the beauty Sophia, in Tom Jones.’
‘Yeah. Obviously, I knew that.’
‘Cankles.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘Camel toe.’
Harvey frowns. ‘But surely she could just have bought a less tight pair of trousers?’
Bunce shakes his head. ‘No: it showed itself with every pair: I think maybe she had cloth-attracting labia. Spotty ass.’
‘This is a different woman, now?’
‘Yes. Unless I make it clear, each defect represents a separate reason for dumping a separate woman, OK?’
‘You never operated a two – or even – three strikes and you’re out system?’ Why am I asking all these questions, Harvey thinks. Is it because whenever I meet men who can do this – go through women quickly, apparently unscarred; as if all the scarring has been inflicted only on the women – no, that’s not quite it – as if all the scarring of women has not scarred them – I want to know how. I hate these men, and yet I admire them, Harvey thinks. I think of them, at some level, as courageous; as honest; as living a life close to the bone, the bad bone of what it is to be a man.
Bunce shakes his head again. ‘One’ll do it for me. BO.’
‘BO?’
‘Body odour. Smelliness.’
‘I know what BO stands for, I just can’t believe anyone’s saying it when it isn’t actually 1974.’
‘Fuck me, man, she smelt like she last washed in 1974. Weird toenails.’
‘Weird in what way?’
‘Dinosaur weird. In my head I would imagine her cutting them with secateurs.’
‘How many women have you been through?’
‘A lot.’
‘Is the dumping reason only ever physical?’
Bunce takes a sip of his beer; he chucks the liquid around his mouth before swallowing, to indicate consideration of this question.
‘Generally. Although the finding of a personality flaw is, in truth, often concomitant with the finding of a physical one. One woman I thought was great. Dated her no problem for a month. Then it turned out that her hero, her fucking intellectual mentor-giant-guru-person-she’d-most-like-to-meet was Hillary Clinton. Five minutes after she told me that I noticed her nostrils were slightly different sizes.’
‘Hmm.’
‘And when I first starting working in Toledo County, I split up with an intern I was fucking – and she was gorgeous, astonishing, and properly fucking dirty, the imagination of an Arab dictator’s harem-favourite combined with circus-level flexibility – because she told me there was a history of cancer in her family.’
‘Oh, Bunce … that’s terrible.’
Bunce does a Hey, I don’t make the rules face. ‘Breast cancer. You can’t be too careful.’
Harvey laughs, in spite of himself. He wonders, though, about a flaw that Bunce has not mentioned. He has not said: too old. I split up with her because she was too old. Harvey has been thinking he will say it in a minute, fearing the saying of it, in fact, knowing it will pierce him. But so far he has not. Harvey wonders if Bunce, too, is part of The Great Silence; and then realizes no, he has not been with any of these women long enough for them to get old.
‘You’re such a cunt,’ he says. Bunce smiles, pleased. ‘And so proud of your cuntiness. It’s incredible. What did you tell her?’
‘I said it’s not you, it’s me. Of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘I said it with real tears in my eyes.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Fuck, you’ve fucked a lot of women.’
‘I have.’
‘It’s making me feel envious.’
‘What did you think was the point of this conversation?’
Harvey laughs. ‘But these are all still basically physical things. Hillary Clinton, yes, but then there was the nostril thing. And the poor intern, you split up with her because a picture of her in your mind with a double mastectomy made your cock shrivel.’ He deliberately says cock, even though the word that appeared in his mind was dick: he is fighting the idiom, summoning his mental mujahedeen to resist America. ‘There must be one –’
‘Oh! Here’s one! Do you remember that woman Bryony, who I was fucking at college, the one with the blind dad?’
‘Yes! Fuck! Bryony! What happened to her?’
‘I split up with her because she refused to believe that the Romans were ever in Britain.’
Harvey gasps. ‘What? How could she not have known that?’
‘I don’t know, but the point is not that she didn’t know it – although, yes, obviously, that’s a sacking offence right there – but that having found it out – having had this piece of fundamental ignorance corrected, finally, at what, nineteen, twenty – she set her face against it. I tell you, I was still rowing with her and calling her a stupid bitch and telling her just to read fucking Gibbon long after I’d decided to split up with her. A voice in my head was saying, you don’t have to do this – just walk out the door – but I just couldn’t believe anyone I had ever been associated with could be so dumb.’
‘Anything more to drink, gentlemen?’
Harvey looks up: it is the woman behind the bar. How long has she been there? As Bunce has warmed to his subject, and Harvey, drunk, has been drawn in by the tangy thrill of this unfettered man-to-man banter, he has lost track of the outside world, the two of them on their own in their unwatched-by-women bubble. But now he worries that she has heard much of it; that she may have been counting how many of Bunce’s microfiche of female flaws she, a weighty woman in her mid-fifties, displays; and that therefore, any minute now, she will take a pair of bottles from the row behind her, smash their tops off and screw the zigzagged glass into each wrist, or, alternatively, his and Bunce’s faces. Her expression, however, is unreadable.
‘No, I’m OK, thank you,’ says Harvey.
‘Bring him one, would you?’ says Bunce.
‘Bunce …’ Harvey turns back to the woman: ‘No, thank you.’
‘You’ve got to drink. You have to toast me.’
‘Toast?’
‘I got married.’
Harvey opens his mouth in astonishment. His mouth is even more open than when, earlier, his nose had been crushed by silicon-impacted skin.
‘You’re joking.’
‘No.’ Bunce’s expression is flat, but his eyes sparkle with the knowledge that he is upending Harvey’s preconceptions. ‘To my ongoing astonishment, I am a married man.’
‘Who is she?’
‘Her name is Kelly. Here.’
Bunce flicks open his phone, a BlackBerry. On its main screen is displayed a fair-skinned woman, with short, sandy hair, and an expression that says to the person with the camera: I’ve got your number.
‘She’s also a lawyer; a very unlesbianic tomboy, total extrovert, popular with women and men, unpretentious, non-neurotic, with good common sense that lapses far less often than with most women. I never wanted to be married – still don’t. I’m radically unsuited to it, but I liked her so much as a friend that it turned into love. So here we are.’
‘Fuck. For how long?’
‘Getting on for two years.’
‘What else are you going to surprise me with? Have you got kids?’
Bunce snorts. ‘Fuck no. Being with a child? It’s like hanging out with a drunk – the falling over, the incomprehensible crying, the even more incomprehensible laughing, the hitting, the shouting. But one you’re not allowed to walk away from. Childlessness – and for that matter, petlessness – is a non-negotiable contract term.’
‘What about her flaw?’
Bunce smiles. ‘I’ll find it eventually.’
Harvey glances back down to the phone, and thinks – based on an estimation that Kelly is about twenty-nine – in about ten years time, Bunce, you and your fascist eye will be spoiled for fucking choice.
‘The fact of my being married is, of course, why I’ve packed, for this trip, a number of identical shirts.’
‘Huh?’
Bunce is wearing what looks to Harvey like a 100 per cent cotton, white, button-down-collar, Brooks Brothers shirt. He raises his arm; The Material is streaked with brown.
‘Something you need to know. American Caucasian strippers cover themselves in spray tan. It’s happened to my buddies more than once: returning home to an accusing wife, standing in the foyer in hot denial, only to look in a mirror and see themselves covered in this brown chalky stuff nipple to knee, like they’ve just slid head-first into third base.’
Harvey immediately looks to his own clothes: the one pair of jeans he wears all the time, a dark blue Diesel pair he thinks don’t make his hips look too bulgy and womanly, and a nondescript grey Gap top.
‘You can’t really see it on your trampy wear in this light, but I promise you it’ll be there.’
Harvey brushes himself with his hand; sure enough, he feels the sticky dust clinging to his clothes. It sticks to his hand.
‘I would recommend a very heavy laundering with starch at a Chinese laundry,’ continues Bunce. ‘Although that advice is based on my experience of wearing, y’know, proper clothes.’
Harvey looks down at the phone again. The image of Kelly clicks back to Bunce’s home screen, a picture of himself that Harvey has seen before, on the Toledo County Prosecuting Attorney’s website – Bunce, smiling, teeth forward, a kind of publicity shot, wearing a suit and tie, and underneath it, a white, 100 per cent cotton, Brooks Brothers, button-down-collar shirt. He lifts his glass, full of American beer.
‘Congratulations, Bunce.’
And Bunce raises his, and they clink, and Harvey feels small drops of the beer fall onto his sticky hands.
* * *
Violet Gold sits in her room at Redcliffe House, holding her copy of Solomon’s Testament. It has always sat on her little mantelpiece, next to a framed photograph of her nephews, a biography of Bruce Forsyth and two crime novels – one by Patricia Cornwell and one by Barbara Vine. She has never read the whole book, despite its dedication to her, printed after the title page. To V.
She wonders if now would be too late to read it. She has started it before, a few times. This copy, a first edition, was given to her by Eli on April Fools’ Day 1953, three days before he left her. It is inscribed, below the dedication, ‘… light of my life, love you still’. And then he’d signed it: Eli Gold. She had thought at the time that that was a little strange – that he hadn’t written Eli, or E, with maybe a few xxxxs. It speaks to her now of a number of things – Eli’s apartness from her; his not wanting to put down in writing (especially not in writing) their intimacy; his grandiose sense of self, even in this, his first book, as if his name said in full had a power that diminutives would lack; his need to give her a clue that he would soon leave and therefore to familiarize her with a more formal type of address, a world in which pet names would be dead and awkward – but mainly she thinks maybe he thought it would be worth more. Maybe he thought, after I’m gone, she’s going to need the money, and when I’m the most famous writer in the world, with my full signature that’ll be worth something.
She tried to read it first on the night he gave it to her. Eli was out, again, as he was most nights towards the end of their marriage, and she went to bed early. She put her bedside lamp on, and read, like Eli did every night, although without all the sighing and blowing in frustration at the rival author. With the blankets around her, Violet felt a small thrill at the possession of her own territory, alone in their bed, reading. She didn’t wear glasses, but considered looking for Eli’s spare pair, not because the words were blurred on the page but because it would complete the picture of herself reading that she had in her mind.
But the book was difficult. She had read books before, schoolgirl stories, Angela Brazil, Dora Chapman, Elsie J. Oxenham, with titles like Rosaly’s New School and The Fortunes of Philippa. These were about girls her age, and though their life and education bore no resemblance to her own – except on the odd occasion when Rosaly or Philippa would pass by some poor children and feel sorry for them – reading these books felt comforting to Violet, projecting her into a safer world, with rooms and fires and tea and turrets and rules that everyone knew without having to learn them. Solomon’s Testament did not do that. It did not project her into any world. There were so many words in every sentence, and everything was described so much, that the only world conjured up by the book was a world of language – or, rather, a closed door of language, behind which lay the world of Solomon’s Testament.
That was her first attempt. A few months later, after all Eli’s things had gone from their bedsit, she picked it up again. But not to read it. It had crossed her mind to use the book to make some grandiloquent gesture, like women were supposed to in these circumstances – maybe burn the book, or tear out the pages one at a time, or write some obscenity across the cover and send it back to him in the post. None of which she did: when she thought about herself doing such things, it felt contrived, like behaviour copied from the movies. She knew that she wasn’t coming up to the mark in terms of vengefulness, that the expected feminine response to being left by one’s husband was rage, parleyed eventually into an air of good riddance to bad rubbish, but she didn’t really feel it, however much she pretended it was the case to an encouraging Gwendoline. What she felt, in her heart of hearts, was that now at last she could get on with her life: the quiet, simple one she was supposed to have had.
Some years later, when Eli was long gone and had left his second wife, the French film actress Isabelle Michelet, she tried again, reading it not in bed but on the tube. The journey from Kilburn to Monument took over forty-five minutes in those days, and she noticed that a fair few people passed the time with books. She found that having a book with her made quite a difference to the way in which she travelled. Most importantly, it made her keener than ever to get a seat. She was, by then, over thirty: not old enough to have a seat given up for her in deference, nor young and beautiful enough any more for a man hoping to start a conversation to do it either. Or, at least, not considered so at the time; now she sees on television and in the magazines that women are allowed to hold onto youth and beauty for much longer, into their fifties even. So if she wanted to read she needed to find a seat: it was too uncomfortable to hold the book standing up all that way. She tried it once, but her hand began to hurt by Oxford Circus.
Mostly, though, she did find a seat, even in the rush hour. This was when she discovered her penchant for crime fiction. A good Agatha Christie, or latterly Patricia Highsmith, could wrap her in a bubble of narrative mystery, which protected her from noticing the packed groins in front of her face, or the rancid recirculated air of the tube. They also made her feel like she could read books for grown-ups, books about death and the dark side, and so felt minded to give Solomon’s Testament another go.
It didn’t work, though. Apart from anything, she was worried about the book’s physical safety. The crime novels protected her; her copy of Eli’s signed first edition felt like it was something she had to protect. Reading it on the tube, she was concerned that men might brush their grimy flies against its spine, or that if she put it down on the seat next to her it might pick up an imprint of the rough check, or that she might just leave it behind when she got off. The book itself made her feel more keenly than ever a sense that she was holding a rare jewel out on her palm for anyone on public transport to scratch, because the words within it so failed to create a bubble around her. They seemed designed, in fact, entirely to burst that bubble. Solomon’s Testament made you aware all the time of the fact of reading – which made it very hard to go into the trance. And when you did, when for a couple of paragraphs she could follow it for long enough to feel that, yes, here was a story, then the character who she had hung her hopes on, who she would be using as a rope into it, would vanish, and a new one would appear, only for them to go a few pages later. Plus there would be characters who would recur, or at least Eli would be writing as if they were recurring, but she couldn’t remember who they were, so she would have to flick back through the pages to try and find their first appearance, in order to identify and situate them in the crazed geography of the novel.
Sometimes, when she didn’t have a book, she would buy a copy of the Daily Express, in order to do the quick crossword. She liked the replacement of one word with another, the filling in of blank space, the satisfying way the letters fitted together. But sometimes she saw, over the male commuters’ shoulders, or on the backs of their copies of The Times or the Telegraph, the cryptic crosswords. She would stare at the clues and all they would do was stare back at her. ‘A ring, found, makes the Hoover cleaner, perhaps’; ‘The bell, not heard in this congregation’; ‘Man, puts head in lion, tame?’; ‘From Bletchley, a river next, sailed on by a sheikh’. They would not yield. Even when she saw an answer being pencilled in by one of the men, still nothing was clear – she still could not tie the answer to the clue, the meaning to the words.
This was what it seemed like reading Solomon’s Testament. Like Eli had written a whole book of cryptic crossword clues. And what would be the point of that? Especially when he hadn’t put in the answers at the back.
So she gave up again. And periodically, throughout her post-Eli life, she tried again. But it never took hold for her. And as her life went on, and her history with Eli became more and more unreal, there seemed less and less reason to read it. It was not her type of book. The only reason for her to read it would be her connection to the author, and as that connection frayed in her mind with time, the book sat on her mantelpiece: an ornament, a relic.
Valerie was always on at her to sell it. In the mid-1970s, she brought an antiquarian bookseller called Neville round, uninvited, to Violet’s Cricklewood flat, in order to make an estimate. Neville was swarthy, and had a moustache whose tips ran all the way to his chin. He picked up the book and held it close to his face, as if sniffing it.
‘I mean, who knows?’ Valerie had said, flipping her arms up while keeping her elbows at her side. ‘Some people may pay good money for it!’
She shook her head as she said it. Violet felt a little sorry for Valerie: she so clearly wanted this symbol of her sister’s moment in the sun no longer to be around, but she also patently wanted to impress Neville, who Violet thought she may be having an affair with. She wanted him to make money from it; at the same time, she was desperate to suggest that the book was essentially worthless. Confusion rang out from her features, even as she pouted towards Neville.
‘It’s signed to you, I presume?’ he said, looking at the frontispiece.
‘Yes.’
‘Did you know him well?’
‘We were married. I am V.’
He opened his mouth, making his moustache curve down through the middle, like two arms describing the shape of a cartoon sexy woman.
‘You were married?! To Eli Gold? Valerie, why didn’t you tell me?’
Valerie raised both eyebrows and made a downward move at the corners of her mouth, as if to say: Didn’t think it was important. They were having tea. The radio was playing tinnily in the background. Violet had recently started to leave it on all day, perhaps as a counterbalance to living alone. She vaguely recognized the music as something by The Osmonds, that song with the sirens in it at the start. She didn’t know anything about pop music, but she had seen them on the TV and found that the looks of the main one, the one with the teeth as white as a newly painted wall, moved something in her and made her want to blush.
‘That’s amazing. What’s he like?’ From the inner pocket of his tweed jacket Neville took out a packet of Menthol cigarettes and offered Violet one. She shook her head.
‘Well, I don’t know if I can say any more. We were divorced …’
‘He left her,’ said Valerie, taking a cigarette. She was supposed to have given up, but Neville being a smoker would have wiped out her resolution.
‘… in the fifties. We were married ten years.’
‘But still. Eli Gold.’
‘I suppose he was –’
‘Never mind about him,’ interjected Valerie, waving a match out, as if its tiny flame were Eli’s personality. ‘What about the book? Come on, Neville – valuation’s your strong point.’
Neville picked up the book again, and flicked through it with a certain self-consciousness, a sense that he was now performing the ritual which would demonstrate the truth that valuation was indeed his strong point. He drew deeply on his cigarette; a second later, smoke billowed from his nostrils. Violet imagined its tendrils snaking through the packed black nostril hair.
‘Hmm … small amount of yellowing at the edges … in the original dustjacket … one tiny bump to the rear board … but overall a fine copy. And, obviously, the inscription adds a personal dimension, which a lot of book buyers love – Nabokov sometimes gives close friends copies of his books with a drawing of a butterfly on the flap: that’ll add a small fortune to a copy of, say, Lolita …’
Valerie was nodding, as if this was all information that she, of course, knew already. She combined the nod with a smirk at the mention of Lolita, to suggest that such a reference must be flirtatious.
There was a pause. It was the kind of pause that in a few years, on The Antiques Roadshow, would be viewed often by Violet – though always with a certain level of discomfort, concerned that these people, normally aged and vulnerable, were about to be let down; or that, during the pause, they might not be able to keep the greed and hope out of their straining faces.
‘Violet,’ said Valerie crossly. Violet looked at her blankly. ‘You’re doing it again.’
‘What … oh. Humming. Was I?’
‘Yes.’
‘I hardly know I’m doing it.’
‘You always do it. The minute there’s any silence. You’ve always done it. I wouldn’t mind if you actually hummed a tune, a nice tune, but it never actually –’
‘OK,’ said Neville, breaking through the sisterly spat, which had rather destroyed the dramatic tension of his pause, ‘I’d say, to a collector … if you were lucky … for this copy of Solomon’s Testament …’ He held it up, like a flaming torch, ‘… you’d be asking two hundred pounds.’
Valerie immediately let out a long, slow whistle, which, because it had so obviously been coming whatever figure Neville was going to quote, induced in Violet a shudder of repulsion.
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘How marvellous!’ said Valerie. ‘Do you have a collector in mind?’
‘I do, actually. Big modern classics lover. Jewish, so, you know – not short of a bob or two.’
‘Although they don’t part with it easily …’
‘Don’t I know it. But I think for this …’
‘That’s very interesting, Neville,’ said Violet, getting up and brushing some biscuit crumbs off her skirt, feeling as she did so how wide-hipped she seemed to be becoming – broad in the beam her father used to call it, ‘but I don’t think I actually want to sell it.’
Neville coughed, and stubbed out his cigarette. Valerie narrowed her eyes at her sister, menacingly.
‘Is the issue … commission?’ said Neville. ‘I normally charge fifteen per cent but in this case I was thinking – no more than ten …’
‘No. No, I – I just think I want to keep it.’
‘Right.’ He scratched his nose. ‘It’s just that Valerie – I assumed … had you not spoken?’
‘Yes! Of course!’ said Valerie.
‘Val …’ said Violet.
‘What? I remember quite clearly a conversation we had about what it might be worth.’
‘Yes. Not about whether or not I wanted to sell it.’
‘Well, what on earth else is one supposed to conclude from such a conversation?’ said Valerie, raising her voice a notch not only in volume, but also in class. Violet had noticed long ago that her sister disavowed their background in the way she talked; when challenged, and angry, her vocabulary would not revert to type, like some, but instead become even more artificially refined.
‘I …’
‘Violet. Can I ask?’ said Neville. ‘If you don’t mind, why don’t you want to sell it? I mean, seeing as, as you said, it was all a long time ago …’
Valerie turned from him towards her, and nodded, slowly. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Good question, Neville. Very good question.’
Violet was still standing. She felt awkward, as neither her sister, nor her sister’s friend, had risen, which had the obscure effect, though she was physically above them, of making her feel the more bullied: as if both of them were simply ignoring her body language and its patent implication that this meeting was over. An answer came quickly to her mind: That’s none of your business. It was followed almost as quickly, however, by a flash of uncertainty, an intimation that the phrase that’s none of your business normally implied a clear, if private, motivation. But she did not know what her motivation was for not selling the book. Valerie was right, however sneeringly she said it: Neville’s question was a good one. In the silence, surreally punctured by the fading of the synthesized sirens from the radio, various explanations did come to her:
I haven’t even read it yet.
The smell of it reminds me of when I was young.
It’s mine. It’s signed to me. There’s an inscription.
It’s the only proof I’ve got that, once, I was married to Eli Gold.
The thought of saying these things out loud triggered in her a rush of self-pity. They made her sound so like a child; but she also knew, even as they appeared as discrete phrases on the wall of her mind, that she would never say any of them to these people, and felt sorry for herself again, trapped forever under the boot of inhibition. She felt a tear begin to appear and, for the first but not the last time, had an impulse not just to cry but to flood: to let all excreta come from all orifices at once; to respond to this question by melting in a heap of tears and snot and blood and shit and piss.
‘Oh,’ said Neville, flushing, ‘I’m so sorry … of course. I’m sure it must mean a lot to you; please don’t worry about it any more.’
‘No, wait a minute, Neville …’
‘Valerie …’ This in a whisper. ‘She’s crying.’
Valerie frowned at her sister. For a split second her face softened, and there showed in it some sign of sibling concern, some trace memory of when she was five and Violet was seven and their father carried her in from outside because she had hurt her wrist on one of the cobbles, and Valerie’s sky had fallen in. At this first intimation of life’s capacity for damage she had begun to cry, much, much more intensely than Violet, and did not stop crying until Violet returned from hospital with her arm encased in a frayed, white plaster, and told her sister, many times, that she was all right. And then Valerie let this memory fall back into the velvet pouch of her soul, buried so deep now in the earth of her she had no idea it was still there: the softness vanished, no more than the faintest flit, to be replaced by the hard set of an eternal tut.
So now Violet opens Solomon’s Testament again, which she has not done since that day in Cricklewood. She opens it at random. She knows that the opening chapter has defeated her, time and time again: the thought of starting again with I am Solomon Wolff, and this is my testament exhausts her, and, besides, she does not have the time. Eli will be dead soon, and so will she. That chronology – beginning, middle, end – does not apply any more. Near death, life shrinks to the quantum level.
She begins at a random page: 147. Dust motes rise from the page. She reads and reads: the one thing she has, even though she does not have it, is time. She has no time, and yet time stretches endlessly for her, here in the black hole of Redcliffe House, every minute an hour and every hour a lifetime. As she reads, something dawns on her: something so obvious, something which anyone who knew anything about books, and first novels especially, could have told her long, long ago, and which would have thrown the book into a new light, a light which perhaps might have allowed her to read it much sooner. But no one did tell her. No one told her that Solomon’s Testament is about many things – America, Jewishness, language, class, comedy, food, sex, all that brave new 1950s stuff – but it is also, quite clearly, about her.