His feverish cheek!
Enough! Move over, Little Gidding. Go live your own life.
Hard to keep it in the fictionalised third person when remembering the actuality makes your own head spin. Hard to be that altruistic. A writer such as I am feels he’s been away from the first person for too long if a third-person narrative goes on for more than two paragraphs never mind a chapter.
He, him, his . . . Why bother when such words as I, me, mine exist?
Vanessa, in that case, my Vanessa, liked, in the early days of our marriage, our marriage, to keep me guessing sexually. And Poppy, I felt, was in on it. The giving and the withholding, but especially, it seemed to me, the withholding.
It’s possible that the pain Poppy conspired in inflicting on me was her revenge on the junior diplomat who’d thrown her out for playing Brahms with the fiddler who’d photographed her nude at her cello. And there may have been a bit of making it up to Vanessa in it, too, for having taken her to Washington in the first place, for having failed to find a reliable second father for her. So I was the never-to-be-forgiven male figure around whom they could unite. They would hit the town together, anyway, mother and daughter arm in arm, unloosed like a pair of cats on the tiles, swaying into each other, bumping hips and laughing, enjoying the wolf whistles, revelling in what the sight of them did to their husband and son-in-law.
Was Vanessa unfaithful to me? And if she was, did Poppy encourage her to be unfaithful to me, as a way of being unfaithful to me herself ? Was I being made a fool of twice over?
Only a writer or a pervert would have tolerated this. Gid, the happy retailer and sometime comedian, would not have survived a double infidelity. Whereas I, I was gathering material.
Teachers of Unglush Lut – such as Philippa the word-slut – demean novelists in the act of sentimentalising them. Fifteen years or so into my marriage with Vanessa I discussed this very question with the same Philippa in the Barossa vineyard, after literary sex.
‘You novelists tell the story of the human heart,’ Philippa said. ‘You see what no one else can see.’
She was still holding my pruck as she was saying this.
‘That,’ I said, ‘is because we tell the story of our hearts.’
‘But when you look into your hearts you see humanity.’
‘We don’t. We see ourselves. We model humanity in our image. Jane Eyre and Alexander Portnoy, Joseph K and Felix Krull, Sam Spade and Scarlett O’Hara – do you think they’re characters? They’re not. They’re writers by another name, feeling life’s stings and disappointments just as a writer feels them.’
‘But that makes luhterature about uhtself.’
‘You’ve got it,’ I said. ‘Henry Miller called the writer the “uncrowned puppet-ruler”. That’s why I revere him. He didn’t lie. The barely fictionalised scurrilous young reprobate probing the vagina of every woman that came his way was him. Henry. The novelist. Even the vagina was him. That’s what we do. I make no apologies for it.’
What happened next in the vineyard was strictly between me and Philippa – the novelist and his reader.
If the power exchange between Vanessa and me, and even I dare say between me and Poppy, was of another order, I was still only party to it because I was the writer – what Miller called the ‘wounded angel’, and, heaven be my witness, I went on consenting to a wounding on an eschatological scale.
Sometime into our marriage – who’s counting – we went, the three of us, to a casino. We were in Manchester, staying at the Midland Hotel for the fun of it, to see a lawyer, not about divorce, about matters relating to the death of Poppy’s second husband. More money coming her way, whatever the explanation. She was one of those women for whose sake men died and left her things. You wanted her to go on thinking about you after you’d gone.
We hung around in the city so the women could shop for what Wilmslow did not provide, ate a Chinese meal, during which they flirted with the Chinese waiters – a near impossible feat – then, at Poppy’s suggestion, took a taxi to the casino.
Writers feel at home in casinos. Self-asphyxiation, sentence-making, gambling – gasp, gasp, gasp, rub, rub, rub – they address repetitively the same itch. Feel bad at night, and then begin the day gasping and rubbing where you left off. I wasn’t interested in the medium – horse racing or cards. I wanted the betting pure and simple, without any mediating spectacle: the spin of the wheel, me against the numbers, pure chance except that I believed I could supersede chance, just as through words I could supersede death, by systematising the sequence in which the numbers appeared. I watched the wheel for half an hour and saw that every time the ball landed in 25, numbers 28 or 29 followed. Don’t ask me why no one else had spotted this. A half an hour later I had won five hundred pounds. It was like beginning and finishing a chapter with the same expletive. Another victory over randomness.
My women, meantime, were otherwise engaged. At a roulette table at the other end of the room they had found an Egyptian-looking croupier they liked the look of. ‘Handsome devil, don’t you think?’ Poppy whispered to me. ‘He’s taken to our Vanessa.’
Vanessa, more like, had taken to him. He had eyes like a scarab’s and a shiny bristling moustache. There was something about him I recognised, but I assumed it was his resemblance to Omar Sharif. He had so obviously modelled himself on Omar Sharif he was a joke.
I mentioned this to Poppy. ‘There are worse people to model yourself on,’ she said.
‘Oneself, or myself ?’
She didn’t know what I was getting at.
‘Are you saying,’ I said, ‘that I should model myself on Omar Sharif?’
She had been gazing idly round the room but now paused to take me in. I’d say to look me up and down, but as she was in her highest heels up was not an option for her. Let’s say she looked me through and through, then laughed. They were laughing at everything tonight. Poppy especially. Free drinks, I remembered. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you as you are,’ she said, squeezing my arm.
It took me a minute or two to realise that she was turning me round, getting me to look elsewhere than at her daughter and the handsome-devil croupier. Long enough for them to exchange phone numbers?
‘So, did you get it all?’ I thought I heard Poppy ask her daughter as we were leaving.
‘Get what?’ I wanted to know.
Was there hesitation?
‘I said “bet” not “get”,’ Poppy said.
‘You were watching,’ I said. ‘You’d know if she’d bet it all.’
‘Who’s this “she”?’ Vanessa wanted to know.
By which time I could continue only at the risk of looking a fool.
But the question remained. Did she ‘get’ it all? His address, the measure of his interest in her, a quick feel of the great god Horus under the roulette table – everything that ‘all’ in this context denoted?
And was Poppy the Vicarious in on it?
All good questions – gasp gasp, rub rub, scribble scribble.
Out on the street, Poppy realised she had mislaid her pashmina – a beautiful white-and-gold concoction, light as air, spun from eyelash of Himalayan goat, which had been a present to her from me. Pashminas of this quality were a Wilhelmina speciality. Vanessa, too, had several. ‘You probably left it at the roulette table, on the back of a chair,’ she told her mother, with one eye on me, making it clear whose job it was to retrieve it.
Was it deliberate? Was I to slip back in so he could slip back out?
I didn’t refuse, anyway. You have to go with the story. I knew I should consider myself lucky to be in the company of two such expert manipulators of plot.
In the event I found the pashmina just as Omar the croupier found me. ‘Guy!’ he said. ‘It is Guy, isn’t it?’
I stared into the scarab’s eyes. He had beautiful eyelashes, long and fine. You could have spun a pashmina from them. So where had I seen him before since he was so certain that he had seen me? Not in Egypt; I had never been to Egypt.
‘It is Guy, yes,’ I answered tentatively. Had Vanessa put him up to this for some reason of her own? Get me to like him? Get me to invite him back? Get me to lend him my wife?
He put an arm round my shoulder. ‘Boychick!’ he said. ‘Well, fook me,’ his pronunciation distinctly now from round here.
He waited for me to recognise him. Or to say ‘Well, fook me, boychick’ in return.
‘Well, fook me, boychick,’ I said in return.
But he could tell I didn’t know him.
‘I’m Michael.’
I stared.
‘Michael Ezra.’
‘Michael Ezra! Fook me!’
I had palled out a bit with Michael Ezra at school. He had been part of the Jewish clique to which I hadn’t quite belonged, one of those who gave me that we are all in this shit together look and could no more do metalwork than I could. He’d been good at maths, though, I remembered. And poker. The prerequisites of a good croupier.
‘Long time,’ he said.
‘You can say that again,’ I agreed. ‘I would never have picked you for you. You look –’
‘Egyptian, I know. Turns out I had an Alexandrian great-grandfather. My skin turned half black when I was twenty-one. My parents had been expecting it but it was a bit of a shock to me, as you can imagine. Mind you, the birds like it. Not that –’
‘I bet they do,’ I said. ‘You look like –’
‘Omar Sharif, I know. To be honest, the moustache is what does it. Anyone with a black moustache looks like Omar Sharif. You, though – you haven’t changed. You still look like the Pope.’
‘The Pope! Which Pope?’
‘How many Popes are there? The one that’s against contraception.’
‘That doesn’t exactly narrow the field, Michael.’
‘The Polish one, for fook’s sake. Waclaw or Vojciech, I don’t know. You look like him anyway. Younger of course.’
‘It’s the paleness. Anyone who’s pale looks like a Polish Pope.’
‘Yeah, well, you always did. But you’re famous now. And that gets the birds, doesn’t it? A famous writer – who doesn’t want to fook a famous writer?’
‘Almost nobody,’ I lied. ‘About the same number who don’t want to fook the Pope.’
‘I believe it. I clocked you with your beautiful wife. What a stunner.’
I inclined my head. What else did he expect? my gesture implied.
‘And her daughter, too. Also a knockout.’
I couldn’t decide whether that was an insult or a compliment to Poppy, an insult or a compliment to Vanessa, or an insult or a compliment to me. But the mix-up, following hard on the heels of the flattery – knew I’d written a novel! thought me famous! – aroused me in a way I suspected it shouldn’t. Had this been Vanessa’s plan – to embroil me in one of those erotic confusions she knew I would never be able to think my way cogently out of ?
‘So what time are you on until?’ I asked, assuming ‘on’ was the right preposition for tending a roulette wheel.
He looked at his watch. ‘Another hour.’
I looked at mine. ‘Well, listen, why don’t you come around to the Midland? We’ll be in the bar. It would be great to catch up. I want to hear about your Alexandrian grandmother.’
‘Grandfather.’
‘Him too.’
Men look at you strangely when they think you might be pimping your women. Invariably, I find, they touch their wallets to be sure you haven’t begun fleecing them already. But his eyes flashed black light. ‘I’ll see you there,’ he said.
‘What do you know – your croupier chum and I are old school friends,’ I told them in the taxi back. ‘Looks like an Arab warrior but comes from Wilmslow. I’ve invited him to the hotel for a nightcap.’ I squeezed Poppy’s hand. ‘He thinks I’m married to you,’ I said. Then I squeezed my wife’s. ‘And you, Vee, are the daughter. Let’s go along with it.’
‘Why?’ Vanessa wanted to know.
I made an experimental shape with my hands. ‘Oh, for the fun of it.’
Poppy looked at Vanessa, Vanessa looked at me. She didn’t say ‘On your own head be it’, but I read the warning in her expression.
So what was I doing? Trying to pair Vanessa off with Michael Ezra so I could have time alone in the Midland with her mother? Or was I simply interposing myself in whatever had been going on in order to claim authorship and control of it? Guy Ableman, ringmaster. Not nice, but it beat being Guy Ableman, the dancing bear.
It would be satisfying to report that the four of us repaired to the biggest bed the Midland had to offer. And that I saw and did things there that would have made Satan’s devils howl with shame and envy. But the great Olympia Press debauch I had been waiting for from the minute the Eisenhower girls showed up in Wilhelmina’s – the rouging of nipples, the anonymous removal of wisps of lace, no one knew whose or by whom – failed again to materialise. Poppy made her excuses and retired soon after Michael Ezra turned up. ‘No, no, you stay down here and talk to your friend,’ she insisted, smiling at me sweetly. ‘I’ll be asleep when you come up.’ Vanessa, on the other hand, made free with the opportunity which not being thought of as the wife afforded her, throwing back her head, arching her throat, and on one occasion running her fingers along Ezra’s Egyptian moustache to see if it was as diabolically silken as it appeared.
‘Oh, it is!’ she said, withdrawing her hand and shuddering. It was as though she had put her fingers to a place the like of which they had never been before.
Later that night, I knew, she would put them to my nose.
She said she needed air and would see the croupier into a taxi. ‘Go to Mummy,’ she ordered me.
Ah, if only.
Michael Ezra and I clasped hands. ‘Fook me!’ he said, shaking his head.
‘Fook me!’ I agreed, shaking mine.
Vanessa, standing watching us, shook hers.
She took his arm and they left the hotel together. If it truly was a taxi she was escorting him to, she for some reason ignored those waiting outside the hotel.
Was she unable to wait until they were out of sight before giving him one of her famous street blow jobs, or was she merely stooping to brush something off his trousers?
How men deal with such uncertainties when they are not poets or novelists I have no idea. Do they, without the redemption of art, go mad?
God knows what blind Homer supposed was going on in front of his nose, never mind behind his back, but we owe the Iliad to his ignorance and the Odyssey to his suspicions. What lesser writers who never made it beyond a couple of short stories would have given for a Vanessa and a Poppy to torment them into creativity! Never let it be said I am not grateful to them myself. Before they ruined me, they made me. And out of ruins, too, can come deliverance.