Mary worked in and part-owned a feminist bookstore in Venice. I met her there lunchtime on my second day in Los Angeles. That same evening we were lovers, and not so long after that, friends. The following Friday I chained her by the foot to my bed for the whole weekend. It was, she explained to me, something she ‘has to go into to come out of’. I remember her extracting (later, in a crowded bar) my solemn promise that I would not listen if she demanded to be set free. Anxious to please my new friend, I bought a fine chain and diminutive padlock. With brass screws I secured a steel ring to the wooden base of the bed and all was set. Within hours she was insisting on her freedom, and though a little confused I got out of bed, showered, dressed, put on my carpet slippers and brought her a large frying-pan to urinate in. She tried on a firm, sensible voice.
‘Unlock this,’ she said. ‘I’ve had enough.’ I admit she frightened me. I poured myself a drink and hurried out on to the balcony to watch the sun set. I was not at all excited. I thought to myself, if I unlock the chain she will despise me for being so weak. If I keep her there she might hate me, but at least I will have kept my promise. The pale orange sun dipped into the haze, and I heard her shout to me through the closed bedroom door. I closed my eyes and concentrated on being blameless.
A friend of mine once had analysis with an elderly man, a Freudian with a well-established practice in New York. On one occasion my friend spoke at length about his doubts concerning Freud’s theories, their lack of scientific credibility, their cultural particularity and so on. When he had done the analyst smiled genially and replied, ‘Look around you!’ And indicated with his open palm the comfortable study, the rubber plant and the begonia rex, the book-lined walls and finally, with an inward movement of the wrist which both suggested candour and emphasized the lapels of his tasteful suit, said, ‘Do you really think I would have got to where I am now if Freud was wrong?’
In the same manner I said to myself as I returned indoors (the sun now set and the bedroom silent), the bare truth of the matter is that I am keeping my promise.
All the same, I felt bored. I wandered from room to room turning on the lights, leaning in doorways and staring in at objects that already were familiar. I set up the music stand and took out my flute. I taught myself to play years ago and there are many errors, strengthened by habit, which I no longer have the will to correct. I do not press the keys as I should with the very tips of my fingers, and my fingers fly too high off the keys and so make it impossible to play fast passages with any facility. Furthermore my right wrist is not relaxed, and does not fall, as it should, at an easy right angle to the instrument. I do not hold my back straight when I play, instead I slouch over the music. My breathing is not controlled by the muscles of my stomach. I blow carelessly from the top of my throat. My embouchure is ill-formed and I rely too often on a syrupy vibrato. I lack the control to play any dynamics other than soft or loud. I have never bothered to teach myself notes above top G. My musicianship is poor, and slightly unusual rhythms perplex me. Above all I have no ambition to play any other than the same half-dozen pieces and I make the same mistakes each time.
Several minutes into my first piece I thought of her listening from the bedroom and the phrase ‘captive audience’ came into my mind. While I played I devised ways in which these words could be inserted casually into a sentence to make a weak, light-hearted pun, the humour of which would somehow cause the situation to be elucidated. I put the flute down and walked towards the bedroom door. But before I had my sentence arranged, my hand, with a kind of insensible automation, had pushed the door open and I was standing in front of Mary. She sat on the edge of the bed brushing her hair, the chain decently obscured by blankets. In England a woman as articulate as Mary might have been regarded as an aggressor, but her manner was gentle. She was short and quite heavily built. Her face gave an impression of reds and blacks, deep red lips, black, black eyes, dusky apple-red cheeks and hair black and sleek like tar. Her grandmother was Indian.
‘What do you want?’ she said sharply and without interrupting the motion of her hand.
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Captive audience!’
‘What?’ When I did not repeat myself she told me that she wished to be left alone. I sat down on the bed and thought, If she asks me to set her free I’ll do it instantly. But she said nothing. When she had finished with her hair she lay down with her hands clasped behind her head. I sat watching her, waiting. The idea of asking her if she wished to be set free seemed ludicrous, and simply setting her free without her permission was terrifying. I did not even know whether this was an ideological or psycho-sexual matter. I returned to my flute, this time carrying the music stand to the far end of the apartment and closing the intervening doors. I hoped she couldn’t hear me.
On Sunday night, after more than twenty-four hours of unbroken silence between us, I set Mary free. As the lock sprang open I said, ‘I’ve been in Los Angeles less than a week and already I feel a completely different person.’
Though partially true, the remark was designed to give pleasure. One hand resting on my shoulder, the other massaging her foot, Mary said, ‘It’ll do that. It’s a city at the end of cities.’
‘It’s sixty miles across!’ I agreed.
‘It’s a thousand miles deep!’ cried Mary wildly and threw her brown arms about my neck. She seemed to have found what she had hoped for.
But she was not inclined to explanations. Later on we ate out in a Mexican restaurant and I waited for her to mention her weekend in chains and when, finally, I began to ask her she interrupted with a question. ‘Is it really true that England is in a state of total collapse?’
I said yes and spoke at length without believing what I was saying. The only experience I had of total collapse was a friend who killed himself. At first he only wanted to punish himself. He ate a little ground glass washed down with grapefruit juice. Then when the pains began he ran to the tube station, bought the cheapest ticket and threw himself under a train. The brand new Victoria line. What would that be like on a national scale? We walked back from the restaurant arm in arm without speaking. The air hot and damp around us, we kissed and clung to each other on the pavement beside her car.
‘Same again next Friday?’ I said wryly as she climbed in, but the words were cut by the slam of her door. Through the window she waved at me with her fingers and smiled. I didn’t see her for quite a while.
I was staying in Santa Monica in a large, borrowed apartment over a hire shop which specialized in renting out items for party givers and, strangely, equipment for ‘sickrooms’. One side of the shop was given over to wineglasses, cocktail shakers, spare easy chairs, a banqueting table and a portable discotheque, the other to wheelchairs, tilting beds, tweezers and bedpans, bright tubular steel and coloured rubber hoses. During my stay I noticed a number of these stores throughout the city. The manager was immaculately dressed and initially intimidating in his friendliness. On our first meeting he told me he was ‘only twenty-nine’. He was heavily built and wore one of those thick drooping moustaches grown throughout America and England by the ambitious young. On my first day he came up the stairs and introduced himself as George Malone and paid me a pleasant compliment. ‘The British,’ he said, ‘make damn good invalid chairs. The very best.’
‘That must be Rolls-Royce,’ I said. Malone gripped my arm.
‘Are you shitting me? Rolls-Royce make…’
‘No, no,’ I said nervously. ‘A… a joke.’ For a moment his face was immobilized, the mouth open and black, and I thought, He’s going to hit me. But he laughed.
‘Rolls-Royce! That’s neat!’ And the next time I saw him he indicated the sickroom side of his shop and called out after me, ‘Wanna buy a Rolls?’ Occasionally we drank together at lunchtime in a red-lit bar off Colorado Avenue where George had introduced me to the barman as ‘a specialist in bizarre remarks’.
‘What’ll it be?’ said the barman to me.
‘Pig oil with a cherry,’ I said, cordially hoping to live up to my reputation. But the barman scowled and turning to George spoke through a sigh.
‘What’ll it be?’
It was exhilarating, at least at first, to live in a city of narcissists. On my second or third day I followed George’s directions and walked to the beach. It was noon. A million stark, primitive figurines lay scattered on the fine, pale, yellow sand till they were swallowed up, north and south, in a haze of heat and pollution. Nothing moved but the sluggish giant waves in the distance, and the silence was awesome. Near where I stood on the very edge of the beach were different kinds of parallel bars, empty and stark, their crude geometry marked by silence. Not even the sound of the waves reached me, no voices, the whole city lay dreaming. As I began walking towards the ocean there were soft murmurs nearby, and it was as if I overheard a sleep-talker. I saw a man move his hand, spreading his fingers more firmly against the sand to catch the sun. An icebox without its lid stood like a gravestone at the head of a prostrate woman. I peeped inside as I passed and saw empty beercans and a packet of orange cheese floating in water. Now that I was moving among them I noticed how far apart each solitary sunbather was. It seemed to take minutes to walk from one to another. A trick of perspective had made me think they were jammed together. I noticed too how beautiful the women were, their brown limbs spread like starfish; and how many healthy old men there were with gnarled muscular bodies. The spectacle of this common intent exhilarated me and for the first time in my life I too urgently wished to be brown-skinned, brown-faced, so that when I smiled my teeth would flash white. I took off my trousers and shirt, spread my towel and lay down on my back thinking, I shall be free, I shall change beyond all recognition. But within minutes I was hot and restless, I longed to open my eyes. I ran into the ocean and swam out to where a few people were treading water and waiting for an especially huge wave to dash them to the shore.
Returning from the beach one day I found pinned to my door a note from my friend Terence Latterly. ‘Waiting for you,’ it said, ‘in the Doggie Diner across the street.’ I had met Latterly years ago in England when he was researching a still uncompleted thesis on George Orwell, and it was not till I came to America that I realized how rare an American he was. Slender, extraordinarily pallid, fine black hair that curled, doe eyes like a Renaissance princess, long straight nose with narrow black slits for nostrils, Terence was unwholesomely beautiful. He was frequently approached by gays, and once, in Polk Street San Francisco, literally mobbed. He had a stammer, slight enough to be endearing to those endeared by such things, and he was intense in his friendships to the point of occasionally lapsing into impenetrable sulks about them. It took me some time to admit to myself I actually disliked Terence and by that time he was in my life and I accepted the fact. Like all compulsive monologuists he lacked curiosity about other people’s minds, but his stories were good and he never told the same one twice. He regularly became infatuated with women whom he drove away with his labyrinthine awkwardness and consumptive zeal, and who provided fresh material for his monologues. Two or three times now quiet, lonely, protective girls had fallen hopelessly for Terence and his ways, but, tellingly, he was not interested. Terence cared for long-legged, tough-minded, independent women who were rapidly bored by Terence. He once told me he masturbated every day.
He was the Doggie Diner’s only customer, bent morosely over an empty coffee cup, his chin propped in his palms.
‘In England,’ I told him, ‘a dog’s dinner means some kind of unpalatable mess.’
‘Sit down then,’ said Terence. ‘We’re in the right place. I’ve been so humiliated.’
‘Sylvie?’ I asked obligingly.
‘Yes yes. Grotesquely humiliated.’ This was nothing new. Terence dined out frequently on morbid accounts of blows dealt him by indifferent women. He had been in love with Sylvie for months now and had followed her here from San Francisco, which was where he first told me about her. She made a living setting up health food restaurants and then selling them, and as far as I knew, she was hardly aware of the existence of Terence.
‘I should never’ve come to Los Angeles,’ Terence was saying as the Doggie Diner waitress refilled his cup. ‘It’s OK for the British. You see everything here as a bizarre comedy of extremes, but that’s because you’re out of it. The truth is it’s psychotic, totally psychotic.’ Terence ran his fingers through his hair which looked lacquered and stiff, and stared out into the street. Wrapped in a constant, faint blue cloud, cars drifted by at twenty miles an hour, their drivers propped their tanned forearms on the window ledges, their car radios and stereos were on, they were all going home or to bars for happy hours.
After a suitable silence I said, ‘Well… ?’
From the day he arrives in Los Angeles Terence pleads with Sylvie over the phone to have a meal with him in a restaurant, and finally, wearily, she consents. Terence buys a new shirt, visits the hairdresser and spends an hour in the later afternoon in front of the mirror, staring at his face. He meets Sylvie in a bar, they drink bourbon. She is relaxed and friendly, and they talk easily of Californian politics, of which Terence knows next to nothing. Since Sylvie knows Los Angeles she chooses the restaurant. As they are leaving the bar she says, ‘Shall we go in your car or mine?’
Terence, who has no car and cannot drive, says, ‘Why not yours?’
By the end of the hors d’oeuvres they are starting in on their second bottle of wine and talking of books, and then of money, and then of books again. Lovely Sylvie leads Terence by the hand through half a dozen topics; she smiles and Terence flushes with love and love’s wildest ambitions. He loves so hard he knows he will not be able to resist declaring himself. He can feel it coming on, a mad confession. The words tumble out, a declaration of love worthy of the pages of Walter Scott, its main burden being that there is nothing, absolutely nothing in the world Terence would not do for Sylvie. In fact, drunk, he challenges her now to test his devotion. Touched by the bourbon and wine, intrigued by this wan, fin de siècle lunatic, Sylvie gazes warmly across the table and returns his little squeeze to the hand. In the rarefied air between them runs a charge of goodwill and daredevilry. Propelled by mere silence Terence repeats himself. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the etc. Sylvie’s gaze shifts momentarily from Terence’s face to the door of the restaurant through which a well-to-do middle-aged couple are now eating. She frowns, then smiles.
‘Anything?’ she says.
‘Yes, yes, anything.’ Terence is solemn now, sensing the real challenge in her question. Sylvie leans forward and grips his forearm.
‘You won’t back out?’
‘No, if it’s humanly possible I’ll do it.’ Again Sylvie is looking over at the couple who wait by the door to be seated by the hostess, an energetic lady in a red soldier-like uniform. Terence watches too. Sylvie tightens her grip on his arm.
‘I want you to urinate in your pants, now. Go on now! Quick! Do it now before you have time to think about it.’
Terence is about to protest, but his own promises still hang in the air, an accusing cloud. With drunken sway, and with the sound of an electric bell ringing in his ears, he urinates copiously, soaking his thighs, legs and backside and sending a small, steady trickle to the floor.
‘Have you done it?’ says Sylvie.
‘Yes,’ says Terence. ‘But why… ?’ Sylvia half-rises from her seat and waves prettily across the restaurant at the couple standing by the door.
‘I want you to meet my parents,’ she says. ‘I’ve just seen them come in.’ Terence remains seated for the introductions. He wonders if he can be smelled. There is nothing he will not say to dissuade this affable, greying couple from sitting down at their daughter’s table. He talks desperately and without a break (‘as if I was some kinda bore’), referring to Los Angeles as a ‘shithole’ and its inhabitants as ‘greedy devourers of each other’s privacy’. Terence hints at a recent prolonged mental illness from which he had hardly recovered, and he tells Sylvie’s mother that all doctors, especially women doctors, are ‘assholes’ (arseholes). Sylvie says nothing. The father cocks an eyebrow at his wife and the couple wander off without farewell to their table on the far side of the room.
Terence appeared to have forgotten he was telling his story. He was cleaning his nails with the tooth of a comb. I said, ‘Well, you can’t stop there. What happened? What’s the explanation for all this?’ Around us the diner was filling up, but no one else was talking.
Terence said, ‘I sat on a newspaper to keep her car seat from getting wet. We didn’t speak much and she wouldn’t come in when we got to my place. She told me earlier she didn’t like her parents much. I guess she was just fooling around.’ I wondered if Terence’s story was invented or dreamed for it was the paradigm of all his rejections, the perfect formulation of his fears or, perhaps, of his profoundest desires.
‘People here,’ Terence said as we left the Doggie Diner, ‘live so far from each other. Your neighbour is someone forty minutes’ car ride away, and when you finally get together you’re out to wreck each other with the frenzy of having been alone.’
Something about that remark appealed to me and I invited Terence up to my place to smoke a joint with me. We stood about on the pavement a few minutes while he tried to decide whether he wanted to or not. We looked across the street through the passing traffic and into the stores where George was demonstrating the disco equipment to a black woman. Finally Terence shook his head and said that while he was in this part of town he would go and visit a girl he knew in Venice.
‘Take some spare underwear,’ I suggested.
‘Yeah,’ he called over his shoulder as he walked away. ‘See you!’
There were long pointless days when I thought, Everywhere on earth is the same. Los Angeles, California, the whole of the United States seemed to me then a very fine and frail crust on the limitless, subterranean world of my own boredom. I could be anywhere, I could have saved myself the effort and the fare. I wished in fact I was nowhere, beyond the responsibility of place. I woke in the morning stultified by oversleep. Although I was neither hungry nor thirsty, I ate breakfast because I dared not be without the activity. I spent ten minutes cleaning my teeth knowing that when I finished I would have to choose to do something else. I returned to the kitchen, made more coffee and very carefully washed the dishes. Caffeine aided my growing panic. There were books in the living room that needed to be studied, there was writing that needed completion but the thought of it all made me flush hot with weariness and disgust. For that reason I tried not to think about it, I did not tempt myself. It hardly occurred to me to set foot inside the living room.
Instead I went to the bedroom and made the bed and took great care over the ‘hospital corners’. Was I sick? I lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling without a thought in my head. Then I stood up and with my hands in my pockets stared at the wall. Perhaps I should paint it another colour, but of course I was only a temporary resident. I remembered I was in a foreign city and hurried to the balcony. Dull, white, box-shaped shops and houses, parked cars, two lawn sprinklers, festoons of telephone cable everywhere, one palm tree teetering against the sky, the whole lit by a cruel white glow of a sun blotted out by high cloud and pollution. It was as obvious and self-explanatory to me as a row of suburban English bungalows. What could I do about it? Go somewhere else? I almost laughed out loud at the thought.
More to confirm my state of mind than change it, I returned to the bedroom and grimly picked up my flute. The piece I intended to play, dog-eared and stained, was already on the music stand, Bach’s Sonata No. 1 in A minor. The lovely opening Andante, a series of lilting arpeggios, requires a flawless breathing technique to make sense of the phrasing, yet from the beginning I am snatching furtively at breaths like a supermarket shoplifter, and the coherence of the piece becomes purely imaginary, remembered from gramophone recordings and super-imposed over the present. At bar fifteen, four and a half bars into the Presto, I fumble over the octave leaps but I press on, a dogged, failing athlete, to finish the first movement short of breath and unable to hold the last note its full length. Because I catch most of the right notes in the right order, I regard the Allegro as my showpiece. I play it with expressionless aggression. The Adagio, a sweet thoughtful melody, illustrates to me every time I play it how out of tune my notes are, some sharp, some flat, none sweet, and the semi-demi quavers are always mis-timed. And so to the two Minuets at the end which I play with dry, rigid persistence, like a mechanical organ turned by a monkey. This was my performance of Bach’s Sonata, unaltered now in its details for as long as I could remember.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and almost immediately stood up again. I went to the balcony to look once more at the foreign city. Out on one of the lawns a small girl picked up a smaller girl and staggered a few steps with her. More futility. I went inside and looked at the alarm clock in the bedroom. Eleven forty. Do something, quick! I stood by the clock listening to its tick. I went from room to room without really intending to, sometimes surprised to find that I was back in the kitchen again fiddling with the cracked plastic handle of the wall can-opener. I went into the living room and spent twenty minutes drumming with my fingers on the back of a book. Towards the middle of the afternoon I dialled the time and set the clock exactly. I sat on the lavatory a long time and decided then not to move till I had planned what to do next. I remained there over two hours, staring at my knees till they lost their meaning as limbs. I thought of cutting my fingernails, that would be a start. But I had no scissors! I commenced to prowl from room to room once more, and then, towards the middle of the evening, I fell asleep in an armchair, exhausted with myself.
George at least appeared to appreciate my playing. He came upstairs once, having heard me from the shop, and wanted to see my flute. He told me he had never actually held one in his hands before. He marvelled at the intricacy and precision of its levers and pads. He asked me to play a few notes so he could see how it was held, and then he wanted me to show him how he could make a note for himself. He peered at the music on the stand and said he thought it was ‘brilliant’ the way musicians could turn such a mess of lines and dots into sounds. The way composers could think up whole symphonies with dozens of different instruments going at once was totally beyond him. I said it was beyond me too.
‘Music,’ George said with a large gesture of his arm, ‘is a sacred art.’ Usually when I wasn’t playing my flute I left it lying about collecting dust, assembled and ready to play. Now I found myself pulling it into its three sections and drying them carefully and laying each section down like a favourite doll, in the felt-lined case.
George lived out in Simi Valley on a recently reclaimed stretch of desert. He described his house as ‘empty and smelling of fresh paint still’. He was separated from his wife and two weekends a month had his children over to stay, two boys aged seven and eight. Imperceptibly George became my host in Los Angeles. He had arrived here penniless from New York city when he was twenty-two. Now he made almost forty thousand dollars a year and felt responsible for the city and my experience in it. Sometimes after work George drove me for miles along the freeway in his new Volvo.
‘I want you to get the feel of it, the insanity of its size.’
‘What’s that building?’ I would say to him as we sped past an illuminated Third Reichian colossus mounted on a manicured green hill. George would glance out of his window.
‘I dunno, a bank or temple or something.’ We went to bars, bars for starlets, bars for ‘intellectuals’ where screenwriters drank, lesbian bars and a bar where the waiters, little, smooth-faced young men, dressed as Victorian serving-maids. We ate in a diner founded in 1947 which served only hamburgers and apple pie, a renowned and fashionable place where waiting customers stood like hungry ghosts at the backs of those seated.
We went to a club where singers and stand-up comedians performed in the hope of being discovered. A thin girl with bright red hair and sequined T-shirt reached the end of her passionately murmured song on a sudden shrill, impossible top note. All conversation ceased. Someone, perhaps maliciously, dropped a glass. Halfway through, the note became a warbling vibrato and the singer collapsed on the stage in an abject curtsy, arms held stiffly in front of her, fists clenched. Then she sprang to her tiptoes and held her arms high above her head with the palms flat as if to forestall the sporadic and indifferent applause.
‘They all want to be Barbra Streisand or Liza Minnelli,’ George explained as he sucked a giant cocktail through a pink plastic straw. ‘But no one’s looking for that kind of stuff any more.’
A man with stooped shoulders and wild curly hair shuffled on to the stage. He took the microphone out of its rest, held it close to his lips and said nothing. He seemed to be stuck for words. He wore a torn, muddied denim jacket over bare skin, his eyes were swollen almost to the point of closing and under the right there ran a long scratch which ended at the corner of his mouth and gave him the look of a partly made-up clown. His lower lip trembled and I thought he was going to weep. The hand that was not holding the microphone worried a coin and looking at that I noticed the stains down his jeans, yes, fresh wet vomit clung there. His lips parted but no sounds came out. The audience waited patiently. Somewhere at the back of the room a wine bottle was opened. When he spoke finally it was to his fingernails, a low, cracked murmur.
‘I’m such a goddamn mess!’
The audience broke into fallabout laughter and cheering, which after a minute gave way to footstamping and rhythmic clapping. George and I, perhaps constrained by each other’s company, smiled. The man reappeared by the microphone the moment the last clapping died away. Now he spoke rapidly, his eyes still fixed on his fingers. Sometimes he glanced worriedly to the back of the room and we caught the flash of the whites of his eyes. He told us he had just broken up with his girl-friend, and how, as he was driving away from her house, he had started to weep, so much so that he could not see to drive and had to stop his car. He thought he might kill himself but first he wanted to say goodbye to her. He drove to a call box but it was out of order and this made him cry again. Here the audience, silent till now, laughed a little. He reached his girl-friend from a drug store. As soon as she picked up the phone and heard his voice she began to cry too. But she didn’t want to see him. She told him, ‘It’s useless, there’s nothing we can do.’ He put the phone down and howled with grief. An assistant in the drug store told him to leave because he was upsetting the other customers. He walked along the street thinking about life and death, it started to rain, he popped some amyl nitrate, he tried to sell his watch. The audience was growing restless, a lot of people had stopped listening. He bummed fifty cents off a bum. Through his tears he thought he saw a woman aborting a foetus in the gutter and when he got closer he saw it was cardboard boxes and a lot of old rags. By now the man was talking over a steady drone of conversation. Waitresses with silver trays circulated the tables. Suddenly the speaker raised his hand and said, ‘Well, see you,’ and he was gone. A few people clapped but most did not notice him leave.
Not long before I was due to leave Los Angeles George invited me to spend Saturday evening at his house. I would be flying to New York late the following day. He wanted me to bring along a couple of friends to make a small farewell party, and he wanted me to bring along my flute.
‘I really want to sit,’ said George, ‘in my own home with a glass of wine in my hand and hear you play that thing.’ I phoned Mary first. We had been meeting intermittently since our weekend. Occasionally she had come and spent the afternoon at my apartment. She had another lover she more or less lived with, but she hardly mentioned him and it was never an issue between us. After agreeing to come, Mary wanted to know if Terence was going to be there. I had recounted to her Terence’s adventure with Sylvie, and described my own ambivalent feelings about him. Terence had not returned to San Francisco as he had intended. He had met someone who had a friend ‘in screenwriting’ and now he was waiting for an introduction. When I phoned him he responded with an unconvincing parody of Semitic peevishness. ‘Five weeks in this town and I’m invited out already?’ I decided to take seriously George’s wish to hear me play the flute. I practised my scales and arpeggios, I worked hard at those places in the Sonata No. 1 where I always faltered and as I played I fantasized about Mary, George and Terence listening spellbound and a little drunk, and my heart raced.
Mary arrived in the early evening and before driving to pick up Terence we sat around on my balcony watching the sun and smoked a small joint. It had been on my mind before she came that we might be going to bed for one last time. But now that she was here and we were dressed for an evening elsewhere, it seemed more appropriate to talk. Mary asked me what I had been doing and I told her about the night club act. I was not sure whether to present the man as a performer with an act so clever it was not funny, or as someone who had come in off the street and taken over the stage.
‘I’ve seen acts like that here,’ said Mary. ‘The idea, when it works, is to make your laughter stick in your throat. What was funny suddenly gets nasty.’ I asked Mary if she thought there was any truth in my man’s story. She shook her head.
‘Everyone here,’ she said, gesturing towards the setting sun, ‘has got some kind of act going like that.’
‘You seem to say that with some pride,’ I said as we stood up. She smiled and we held hands for an empty moment in which there came to me from nowhere a vivid image of the parallel bars on the beach; then we turned and went inside.
Terence was waiting for us on the pavement outside the house where he was staying. He wore a white suit and as we pulled up he was fixing a pink carnation into his lapel. Mary’s car had only two doors. I had to get out to let Terence in, but through a combination of sly manoeuvring on his part and obtuse politeness on my own, I found myself introducing my two friends from the back seat. As we turned on to the freeway Terence began to ask Mary a series of polite, insistent questions and it was clear from where I sat, directly behind Mary, that as she was answering one question he was formulating the next, or falling over himself to agree with everything she said.
‘Yes, yes,’ he was saying, leaning forwards eagerly, clasping together his long, pale fingers, ‘That’s a really good way of putting it.’ Such condescension, I thought, such ingratiation. Why does Mary put up with it? Mary said she thought Los Angeles was the most exciting city in the USA. Before she had even finished Terence was outdoing her with extravagant praise.
‘I thought you hated it,’ I interjected sourly. But Terence was adjusting his seat belt and asking Mary another question. I sat back and stared out the window, attempting to control my irritation. A little later Mary was craning her neck trying to find me in her mirror.
‘You’re very quiet back there,’ she said gaily. I fell into sudden, furious mimicry.
‘That’s a really good way of putting it, yes, yes.’ Neither Terence nor Mary made any reply. My words hung over us as though they were being uttered over and over again. I opened my window. We arrived at George’s house with twenty-five minutes of unbroken silence behind us.
The introductions over, the three of us held the centre of George’s huge living room while he fixed our drinks at the bar. I held my flute case and music stand under my arm like weapons. Apart from the bar the only other furniture was two yellow, plastic sag chairs, very bright against the desert expanse of brown carpet. Sliding doors took up the length of one wall and gave on to a small back yard of sand and stones in the centre of which, set in concrete, stood one of those tree-like contraptions for drying clothes on. In the corner of the yard was a scrappy sagebrush plant, survivor of the real desert that was here a year ago. Terence, Mary and I addressed remarks to George and said nothing to each other.
‘Well,’ said George when the four of us stood looking at each other with drinks in our hands, ‘Follow me and I’ll show you the kids.’ Obediently we padded behind George in single file along a narrow, thickly carpeted corridor. We peered through a bedroom doorway at two small boys in a bunk bed reading comics. They glanced at us without interest and went on reading.
Back in the living room I said, ‘They’re very subdued, George. What do you do, beat them up?’ George took my question seriously and there followed a conversation about corporal punishment. George said he occasionally gave the boys a slap on the back of the legs if things got really out of hand. But it was not meant to hurt them, he said, so much as to show them he meant business. Mary said she was dead against striking children at all, and Terence, largely to cut a figure I thought, or perhaps to demonstrate to me that he could disagree with Mary, said that he thought a sound thrashing never did anyone any harm. Mary laughed, but George, who obviously was not taking to this faintly foppish, languid guest sprawled across his carpet, seemed ready to move into the attack. George worked hard. He kept his back straight even when he sat in the sag chair.
‘You were thrashed when you were a kid?’ he asked as he handed round the scotch.
Terence hesitated and said, ‘Yes.’ This surprised me. Terence’s father died before he was born and he had grown up with his mother in Vermont.
‘Your mother beat you?’ I said before he had time to invent a swaggering bully of a father.
‘Yes.’
‘And you don’t think it did you any harm?’ said George. ‘I don’t believe it.’
Terence stretched his legs. ‘No harm done at all.’ He spoke through a yawn that might have been a fake. He gestured towards his pink carnation. ‘After all, here I am.’
There was a moment’s pause then George said, ‘For example, you never had any problem making out with women?’ I could not help smiling.
Terence sat up. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Our English friend here will verify that.’ By this Terence referred to my outburst in the car. But I said to George, ‘Terence likes to tell funny stories about his own sexual failures.’
George leaned forwards to catch Terence’s full attention. ‘How can you be sure they’re not caused by being thrashed by your mother?’
Terence spoke very quickly. I was not sure whether he was very exicted or very angry. ‘There will always be problems between men and women and everyone suffers in some way. I conceal less about myself than other people do. I guess you never had your backside tanned by your mother when you were a kid, but does that mean you never have any hang-ups with women? I mean, where’s your wife… ?’
Mary’s interruption had the precision of a surgeon’s knife.
‘I was only ever hit once as a kid, by my father, and do you know why that was? I was twelve. We were all sitting round the table at suppertime, all the family, and I told everyone I was bleeding from between my legs. I put some blood on the end of my finger and held it up for them all to see. My father leaned across the table and slapped my face. He told me not to be dirty and sent me up to my room.’
George got up to fetch more ice for our glasses and muttered ‘Simply grotesque’ as he went. Terence stretched out on the floor, his eyes fixed on the ceiling like a dead man’s. From the bedroom came the sound of the boys singing, or rather chanting, for the song was all on one note. I said to Mary something to the effect that between people who had just met, such a conversation could not have taken place in England.
‘Is that a good thing do you think?’ Mary asked.
Terence said, ‘The English tell each other nothing.’
I said, ‘Between telling nothing and telling everything there is very little to choose.’
‘Did you hear the boys?’ George said as he came back.
‘We heard some kind of singing,’ Mary told him. George was pouring more Scotch and spooning ice into the glasses.
‘That wasn’t singing. That was praying. I’ve been teaching them the Lord’s Prayer.’ On the floor Terence groaned and George looked round sharply.
‘I didn’t know you were a Christian, George,’ I said.
‘Oh, well, you know…’ George sank into his chair. There was a pause, as if all four of us were gathering our strength for another round of fragmentary dissent.
Mary was now in the second sag chair facing George. Terence lay like a low wall between them, and I sat cross-legged about a yard from Terence’s feet. It was George who spoke first, across Terence to Mary.
‘I’ve never been interested in church-going much but…’ He trailed off, a little drunkenly, I thought. ‘But I always wanted the boys to have as much of it as possible while they’re young. They can reject it later, I guess. But at least for now they have a coherent set of values that are as good as any other, and they have this whole set of stories, really good stories, exotic stories, believable stories.’
No one spoke so George went on. ‘They like the idea of God. And heaven and hell, and angels and the Devil. They talk about that stuff a whole lot and I’m never sure quite what it means to them. I guess it’s a bit like Santa Claus, they believe it and they don’t believe it. They like the business of praying, even if they ask for the craziest things. Praying for them is a kind of extension of their… their inner lives. They pray about what they want and what they’re afraid of. They go to church every week, it’s about the only thing Jean and I agree on.’
George addressed all this to Mary who nodded as he spoke and stared back at him solemnly. Terence had closed his eyes. Now that he had finished, George looked at each of us in turn, waiting to be challenged. We stirred. Terence lifted himself on to his elbow. No one spoke.
‘I don’t see it’s going to hurt them, a bit of the old religion,’ George reiterated.
Mary spoke into the ground. ‘Well, I don’t know. There’s a lot of things you could object to in Christianity. And since you don’t really believe in it yourself we should talk about that.’
‘OK,’ said George. ‘Let’s hear it.’
Mary spoke with deliberation at first. ‘Well, for a start, the Bible is a book written by men, addressed to men and features a very male God who even looks like a man because he made man in his own image. That sounds pretty suspicious to me, a real male fantasy…’
‘Wait a minute,’ said George.
‘Next,’ Mary went on, ‘women come off pretty badly in Christianity. Through Original Sin they are held responsible for everything in the world since the Garden of Eden. Women are weak, unclean, condemned to bear children in pain as punishment for the failures of Eve, they are the temptresses who turn the minds of men away from God; as if women were more responsible for men’s sexual feelings than the men themselves! Like Simone de Beauvoir says, women are always the “other”, the real business is between a man in the sky and the men on the ground. In fact women only exist at all as a kind of divine afterthought, put together out of a spare rib to keep men company and iron their shirts, and the biggest favour they can do Christianity is not to get dirtied up with sex, stay chaste, and if they can manage to have a baby at the same time then they’re measuring up to the Christian Church’s ideal of womanhood – the Virgin Mary.’ Now Mary was angry, she glared at George.
‘Wait a minute,’ he was saying, ‘you can’t impose all that Women’s Lib stuff on to the societies of thousands of years ago. Christianity expressed itself through available…’
At roughly the same time Terence said, ‘Another objection to Christianity is that it leads to passive acceptance of social inequalities because the real rewards are in…’
And Mary cut in across George in protest. ‘Christianity has provided an ideology for sexism now, and capitalism…’
‘Are you a communist?’ George demanded angrily, although I was not sure who he was talking to. Terence was pressing on loudly with his own speech. I heard him mention the Crusades and the Inquisition.
‘This has nothing to do with Christianity.’ George was almost shouting. His face was flushed.
‘More evil perpetrated in the name of Christ than… this has nothing to do with… to the persecution of women herbalists as witches… Bullshit. It’s irrelevant… corruption, graft, propping up tyrants, accumulating wealth at the altars… fertility goddess… bullshit… phallic worship… look at Galileo… this has nothing to…’ I heard little else because now I was shouting my own piece about Christianity. It was impossible to stay quiet. George was jabbing his finger furiously in Terence’s direction. Mary was leaning forwards trying to catch George by the sleeve and tell him something. The whisky bottle lay on its side empty, someone had upset the ice. For the first time in my life I found myself with urgent views on Christianity, on violence, on America, on everything, and I demanded priority before my thoughts slipped away.
‘… and starting to think objectively about this… their pulpits to put down the workers and their strikes so… objective? You mean male. All reality now is male rea… always a violent God… the great capitalist in the sky… protective ideology of the dominant class denies the conflict between men and women… bullshit, total bullshit…’
Suddenly I heard another voice ringing in my ears. It was my own. I was talking into a brief, exhausted silence.
‘… driving across the States I saw this sign in Illinois along Interstate 70 which said, “God, Guts, Guns made America great. Let’s keep all three.” ’
‘Hah!’ Mary and Terence exclaimed in triumph. George was on his feet, empty glass in hand.
‘That’s right,’ he cried. ‘That’s right. You can put it down but it’s right. This country has a violent past, a lot of brave men died making…’
‘Men!’ echoed Mary.
‘All right, and a lot of brave women too. America was made with the gun. You can’t get away from that.’ George strode across the room to the bar in the corner and drew out something black from behind the bottles. ‘I keep a gun here,’ he said, holding the thing up for us to see.
‘What for?’ Mary asked.
‘When you have kids you begin to have a very different attitude towards life and death. I never kept a gun before the kids were around. Now I think I’d shoot at anyone who threatened their existence.’
‘Is it a real gun?’ I said. George came back towards us with the gun in one hand and a fresh bottle of Scotch in the other. ‘Dead right it’s a real gun!’ It was very small and did not extend beyond George’s open palm.
‘Let me see that,’ said Terence.
‘It’s loaded,’ George warned as he handed it across. The gun appeared to have a soothing effect on us all. We no longer shouted, we spoke quietly in its presence. While Terence examined the gun George filled our glasses. As he sat down he reminded me of my promise to play the flute. There followed a bleary silence of a minute or two, broken only by George to tell us that after this drink we should eat dinner. Mary was far away in thought. She rotated her glass slowly between her finger and thumb. I lay back on my elbows and began to piece together the conversation we had just had. I was trying to remember how we arrived at this sudden silence.
Then Terence snapped the safety catch and levelled the gun at George’s head.
‘Raise your hands, Christian,’ he said dully.
George did not move. He said, ‘You oughtn’t to fool around with a gun.’ Terence tightened his grip. Of course he was fooling around, and yet I could see from where I was that his finger was curled about the trigger, and he was beginning to pull on it.
‘Terence!’ Mary whispered, and touched his back gently with her foot. Keeping his eyes on Terence, George sipped at his drink. Terence brought his other hand up to steady the gun which was aimed at the centre of George’s face.
‘Death to the gun owners.’ Terence spoke without a trace of humour. I tried to say his name too, but hardly a sound left my throat. When I tried again I said something in my accelerating panic that was quite irrelevant.
‘Who is it?’ Terence pulled the trigger.
From that point on the evening collapsed into conventional, labyrinthine politenesses at which Americans, when they wish, quite outstrip the English. George was the only one to have seen Terence remove the bullets from the gun, and this united Mary and I in a state of mild but prolonged shock. We ate salad and cold cuts from plates balanced on our knees. George asked Terence about his Orwell thesis and the prospects of teaching jobs. Terence asked George about his business, fun party hire and sickroom requisites. Mary was questioned about her job in the feminist bookshop and she answered blandly, carefully avoiding any statement that might provoke discussion. Finally I was called on to elaborate on my travel plans, which I did in great and dull detail. I explained how I would be spending a week in Amsterdam before returning to London. This caused Terence and George to spend several minutes in praise of Amsterdam, although it was quite clear they had seen very different cities.
Then while the others drank coffee and yawned, I played my flute. I played my Bach sonata no worse than usual, perhaps a little more confidently for being drunk, but my mind ran on against the music. For I was weary of this music and of myself for playing it. As the notes transferred themselves from the page to the end of my fingers I thought, Am I still playing this? I still heard the echo of our raised voices, I saw the black gun in George’s open palm, the comedian reappear from the darkness to take the microphone again, I saw myself many months ago setting out for San Francisco from Buffalo in a drive-away car, shouting out for joy over the roar of the wind through the open windows, It’s me, I’m here, I’m coming… where was the music for all this? Why wasn’t I even looking for it? Why did I go on doing what I couldn’t do, music from another time and civilization, its certainty and perfection to me a pretence and a lie, as much as they had once been, or might still be, a truth to others? What should I look for? (I tooled through the second movement like a piano roll.) Something difficult and free. I thought of Terence’s stories about himself, his game with the gun, Mary’s experiment with herself, of myself in an empty moment drumming my fingers on the back of a book, the vast, fragmented city without a centre, without citizens, a city that existed only in the mind, a nexus of change or stagnation in individual lives. Picture and idea crashed drunkenly one after the other, discord battened to bar after bar of implied harmony and inexorable logic. For the pulse of one beat I glanced past the music at my friends where they sprawled on the floor. Then their after-image glowed briefly at me from the page of music. Possible, even likely, that the four of us would never see each other again, and against such commonplace transience my music was inane in its rationality, paltry in its over-determination. Leave it to others, to professionals who could evoke the old days of its truth. To me it was nothing, now that I knew what I wanted. This genteel escapism… crossword with its answers written in, I could play no more of it.
I broke off in the slow movement and looked up. I was about to say, ‘I can’t go on any more’, but the three of them were on their feet clapping and smiling broadly at me. In parody of concert-goers George and Terence cupped their hands round their mouths and called out ‘Bravo! Bravissimo!’ Mary came forward, kissed me on the cheek and presented me with an imaginary bouquet. Overwhelmed by nostalgia for a country I had not yet left, I could do no more than put my feet together and make a bow, clasping the flowers to my chest.
Then Mary said, ‘Let’s go. I’m tired.’