Two days ago I changed Marmaduke's diaper. It was right up there with my very Worst Experiences. I'm still not over it.
I guess it had to happen. There are nanny-lulls, still centres in the hurricane of nannies. I am always hanging around over there. I am always hanging around where people are hanging around, or going where they're going, eager to waste time at their speed. In the end Lizzyboo helped me get him under the shower. Then we mopped the nursery wall. And the ceiling. I'm still not over it.
Marmaduke possesses his mother with a biblical totality, and he is always goosing Melba and frenching Phoenix (and watch him splash his way through the au pairs); but Lizzyboo is his sexual obsession. He shimmies up against her shins and drools into her cleavage. He won't have a bath unless she's there to watch. He is forever ramming his hand - or his head - up her skirt.
Of course, and embarrassingly, Lizzyboo is becoming more and more certain that she needn't fear any such nonsense from me. No, in my condition I'm not about to get fresh. She sometimes gives me a puzzled but interrogatory look - the eyes seem to cringe - while Marmaduke is scouring her ear with his tongue. Or trying to force her hand down the front of his diaper. Being human, she is starting to wonder what is wrong with her. I could tell her I'm gay or religious, or just frightened of catching some fatal disease. I suppose I really shouldn't continue to trifle with her affections. Especially now that I don't need to.
I have Thrufaxed all twelve chapters off to Hornig Ultrason, where, it seems, my stock is already rising high. You can tell by the way everyone speaks to you. Unless I am mistaken, even the computerized voice of the reception bank betrays a secret liking for me. 'One momint. I have Missy Harter for you,' said Janit Slotnick, in the tone of somebody preparing a three-year-old for a particularly winsome treat. 'Oh, and have you heard the news that's causing such excitemint here?' I was already romping and tumbling in the zeros of a paperback or book-club deal when Janit said: 'She's pregnint!' But I never did get through to Missy Harter. The computer screwed up and twenty minutes later Janit called and said that Missy would soon get back to me, which she hasn't.
On impulse I said, 'Janit? Say spearmint.' 'Spearmint.' 'Now say peppermint.' 'Peppermint.' "Thank you, Janit.' 'Sir/
Incarnacion wraps up or abandons a long anecdote about her adventures in the supermarket (a story from which she emerges with obscure credit) to inform me that Mark Asprey has phoned while I've been out — while I've been out avoiding Incarnacion.
Mr Asprey, relates Incarnacion, is endearingly keen to pay a flying visit to London. Of course, at a single snap of his fingers, he can put up at a top hotel, or find a bed with any number of heartsick glamour queens — but Mr Asprey would find it far more agreeable to stay right here, in the place he calls home, and where, in addition, Incarnacion can bring all her powers to bear on the promotion of his comfort. She is altogether sympathetic to this sentimental yearning of Mark Asprey's. In fact I get thirty-five minutes on the primacy of home, with its familiar surroundings and other pluses.
Incarnacion herself suggests that I could conveniently return to New York. For her, the symmetry of such an arrangement is not without its appeal.
I don't say anything. I don't even say anything about the difficulties of non-supersonic East-West transatlantic air travel, in case I get an hour on, say, the inadvisability of central thermonuclear war. I just nod and shrug, confident that in the very nature of things she must eventually shut up or go away.
Last night I attended a dinner party at Lansdowne Crescent. Also present were Lizzyboo and Dink. The main guests were not distinguished; they were just born rich. Three brothers, Jasper, Harry and Scargill, three joke representatives of the English gentry (down from Yorkshire, near Guy's dad's place, for an agribusiness conference), together with their speechless wives. The boys from Bingley - and they were boys: time-fattened, time-coarsened, but boys, just boys - did a lot of shouting at first and then fell silent over their plates: devout and sweaty eaters. Dink kept looking at Hope with a bored scowl in which some other message was impatiently enciphered; Guy hardly said a word. There wasn't any competition or, for that matter, any choice: I was the life of the party. And I have so little to spare.
It broke up just after eleven, when Marmaduke's hollerings and thunderings could no longer be ignored or even talked through. I saw the pummelled au pair trying to free his hands from the banisters. Guy and Hope looked as though they would be gone some time.
Exhaustedly I stood with Lizzyboo on the stoop and watched the four cars steal off into the hot night. She turned to me with her arms folded. I was afraid. She did that thing with the lowered head and the childishly questioning fingers on my shirtbuttons, giving her somewhere to look while she asked me why I didn't like her. I was afraid. I was afraid of something like this. What was the nature of this fear of mine? Like the weight of a million adulteries, complications, untruths, chances for betrayal. Also the inexplicable sense that I had already loved her or liked her or felt male pride in her, long ago, and kissed her breasts and held the pressure of her legs on my back already, many times, until what love there was all ran out, and I didn't want to do it, ever again. I wished I had a little certificate or badge I could produce, saying that I didn't have to do it, ever again. I was afraid of her body and its vigour, of her flesh, of her life. I was afraid it might hurt me. I was afraid it might break me.
'I like you very much.' All I saw was the perfect evenness of her parting as she said,
'Do you? Do you want to come to my room for a little while?'
'I uh, believe not.'
'Why? Is there something wrong with me?"
Actually the nails on her big toes are beginning to lose symmetry, she has a steep-sided mole on the back of her neck, and generally her skin (when compared to someone like Kim Talent) is definitely showing signs of wear, of time, of death. But I said, 'You're beautiful, Lizzyboo. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt. The thing is, I'm in love with someone else.’
Then I went over to Nicola's for an update. I'm not in love with Nicola. Something intertwines us, but it isn't love. With Nicola it's more like the other thing.
Missy Harter comes through on the line to say that she has a check on her desk - enough to front me for another few months: enough. I said. 'Thank God. You must have cut some corners. I take it this call is not being monitored?' 'Right. It's a virgin.' 'Good. Any other news?' 'On what you call the world situation? Why yes. Next week: breakout.' 'Surely you mean breakdown.' 'Breakout. Frank renega-tion.' 'But that's terrible.' 'Not so. The reason: if we don't, they will. Goodbye now."Wait!. .Any other news?" Yes. I have news for you. I'm expecting a baby.'
'And I have news for you. It's mine.'
'Bullshit,' she said.
'I knew it. It is!'
'Bullshit.'
'That last time. On the Cape.'
'Please let's not do this. I was drunk.'
'Yeah, and I bet you were drunk in the morning too. That's when it happened. In the morning. I felt a pop. I even heard it. A distinct pop.'
'Bullshit. I'll end this now. I'm ending this.'
'Don't hang up! I'm coming back. Now.'
'Back? To America?' She laughed sadly. 'Haven't you heard? There's no way in.'
It is with great, with ineffable — it is with the heaviest ambivalence that I -
I don't want to go. I don't want to go. I'm not in good enough shape to take on America. I'm not up to America. I want to stay here, and see how it all turns out, and write it down. I don't want to go. But I'm going. Not even I could live with myself if I stayed. Besides, there is a sky up there that looks like a beach and I mean with white sand and blue ocean and helixed volleyballs and cumulus putti exploding out of the surf. Good for flying. Maybe good for love.
So I'm sitting here now with my bag packed and waiting for a car that doesn't show. I just called the minicab people again (their proud slogan: you drink, we drive). A taped message, followed by three Engelbert Humperdinck numbers, followed b
y the slurred evasions of a guy who speaks no English. Hard to believe that in this hovel of stop-gap there yet abides a smouldering genius who knows the way to Heathrow Airport. Still, no doubt someone or other will make some kind of attempt to get here in the end.
The sky is telling me that I might just get away with it. Oh hey nonny nonny, or however it goes. Having failed in art and love, having lost, I may win through with both, even now, so late in the goddamned day. My affairs are in order. My actors are on hold. But where's my cab?
I called Guy and told him not to do anything rash while I'm gone. I don't want him to do anything rash until after I get back. With luck, he'll have a quiet time of it. Or a noisy time of it. I foresee a recurrence of Marmaduke's bronchial troubles. Left in sole charge of the child for over an hour, Keith Talent, I happen to know, did more than fulfil his normal quota of one cigarette every seven minutes. On top of teaching Marmaduke how to box and swear and gurgle over the pinups in the tabloid, Keith taught Marmaduke how to smoke.
Keith himself of course I couldn't do anything about. All his life people have been trying to do stuff about Keith, and they never got anywhere. They've tried locking him up. I'd lock him up too, if I could, just for a couple of weeks. Like me, like Clive, like the planet, Keith's debt is getting old; and Keith will do whatever Keith needs to do ... Anyway I went over. I trudged up the concrete stairway, through the pinged obscenities. Christ, even ten years ago, in London, it was quite an achievement to get past two men talking in the street without hearing the word fuck or one of its cognates; but now they're all doing it — nippers, vicars, grannies. I let myself in, Kath having wordlessly presented me, some days ago, with a single gnarled key. Mother and child were at home: no dog, no cheat. Kim was pleased to see me — so pleased, in fact, that if I didn't have this love-mission to blind and dizzy me, I might have to admit that something serious is seriously wrong at Windsor House. An hour of Keith's parenting is enough to hospitalize Marmaduke Clinch: and so Kim Talent — and so Kim Talent. . . On the nature short the adult crocodile reaches for the baby with its jaws. You fear the worst: but that ridged croc mouth is delicate enough to handle new-born flesh, cat-and-kitty style. On the other hand reptiles don't normally tend their young. And when daddy gets mad, big jaws will stretch for other reasons, for other hungers . . . Kim cried when I said goodbye. She cried when I left the room. I think she must love me very much.
I've been loved before, but no one ever cried when I left the room. Incredibly, Missy used to cry when I left the apartment. And so did I. Before I went I wrote a note for Keith (plus £50 for the skipped darts lesson) and left it on the kitchen table, unmissably close to the October Darts Monthly.
Jesus, I could drive to the airport myself. The bigger question is: could I drive back? And Mark Asprey will want the use of his car. 'I couldn't ask you, could I, Nicola,' I said on the phone, 'to be prudent, and keep activity to the minimum while I'm gone?' She was eating something. She said, 'What takes you there?' 'Love.' 'Ooh. What a shame. I'm planning some hot moves. You're going to miss all the sexy bits.' 'Nicola, don't do this.'
She swallowed. I could hear her inhaling masterfully. Then she said, 'You're in luck. In fact I just told Guy I'm going away for a few days. To my retreat.'
'Your what?'
'Don't you love it? A place with a couple of nuns and monks in it. Where I can think things over in a sylvan setting.'
'It's good. And I'm grateful. Why are you stalling?'
'No choice. So don't worry. You've got a few days' grace.'
'What is it?'
'Guess . . . Oh come on. The thing I can't control.'
'I give up.'
She sighed and said, 'It's the fucking curse.'
A lordly Indian has just chewed me out for even expecting a cab to show up anywhere definite in the calculable future. He seemed to feel I was living in the past. Things, he told me, just aren't like that any more. But he'll see what he can do. I'll take the notebook, of course. And leave the novel. Neatly stacked. Many pages. Do I want Mark Asprey to read it? I guess I do. I'll take the notebook: with all the waiting around and everything — I envisage having a lot to say. Will America have changed? No. America won't have come up with any new ideas, any new doubts, about herself. Not her. But maybe I can take a new reading: a think piece, maybe, based on my own experiences, a substantial (and publishable?) meditation, extending to some eight or ten thousand words, on the way America has started to fulfil -
Oh, this is rich. Outside - what a pal - Keith has just pulled up in the royal-blue Cavalier. I get to my feet. I sit down again: again, the heavy reluctance, in the haunches, in the loins, whence love should spring . . . Now how will the etiquette go on this? He's climbed out of the car and glanced warily down the street. I've waved. He has raised his longbow thumb — his bent, his semicircular thumb. Keith sports a fishnet shirt and pastel hipsters but his chauffeur's cap nestles ominously on the hood. He is polishing the chrome with a J Cloth. If he opens the back door first then I'm out another fifty quid. Enough. I'm ready. Let's go to America.
Well I'm back.
I'm back.
Six days I've been gone. I didn't write a word. The way I feel now I might never write another. But there's another. And another.
I lost. I failed. I lost everything.
Unlucky thirteen.
Jesus Christ if I could make it into bed and get my eyes shut without seeing a mirror.
Please don't anyone look at me. I really took a tumble - I really took a tumble out there. Oh, man, I'm in bits.
Apart from the fact that on account of the political situation they and their loved ones might all disappear at any moment (this sentence needs recasting but it's too late now), my protagonists are in good shape and reasonable spirits. They still form their black cross.
They look a bit different. But not as different as I look, catapulted into my seventies and still recovering from the fall.
I go into the Black Cross and nobody recognizes me. I'm a stranger. And it all has to begin again.
Perhaps because of their addiction to form, writers always lag behind the contemporary formlessness. They write about an old reality, in a language that's even older. It's not the words: it's the rhythms of thought. In this sense all novels are historical novels. Not really a writer, maybe I see it clearer. But I do it too. An example: I still go on as if people felt well.
I look to the kids, who change quick too. Marmaduke, so far as I can tell, is exactly the same except in one particular. He has stopped saying 'milt'. He now says — and he says it often and loudly — 'mewk' or 'mowk' or 'mulk' or, more simply, 'mlk'.
All right, if we are going to go on with this thing there'll have to be some changes around here. Apart from anything else I think I'm going blind: so let the colours run. Actually Nicola herself, with her recent outrages, has already forced this on me. Who says these people need so much air and space? We're all in it together now.
Kim has stopped saying 'Enlah'! She cries normally, humanly, complicatedly. No longer does she pay homage to the sudden, the savage god of babies: Enlah!
We're all in it together now. As is the case with the world situation, something will have to give, and give soon. It will all get a lot woollier, messier. Everything is winding down, me, this, mother earth. More: the universe, though apparently roomy enough, is heading for heat death. I hope there are parallel universes. I hope alternatives exist. Who stitched us up with all these design flaws? Entropy, time's arrow — ravenous disorder. The designer universe: but it was meant to give out all along, like something you pick up at GoodFicks. So maybe the universe is a dog, a pup, a dud, slipped our way by the Cheat.
'Milt' I reckon I can live without. But 'Enlah'? Already I miss it. And I'll never hear it again. Nobody will, not from her lips. How did it sound? How well can I remember it? Where has it gone? Oh, Christ, no, the hell of time. I never guessed that you lost things coming this way too. Time takes from you, with both hands. Things just disappear into
it.
Keith is under the impression that he has come through a stern examination of his character and emerged with flying colours. There he stands, with one hand under his nose, with courting finger resting in the cusp between barrel and shaft, with pinkie raised - Keith's integers! And Guy's okay, considering. The fall guy: fool, foal, foil. I went to see him in hospital. There he lies, in white nightie, palely smiling. He really had us worried for a time. But they're both on course.
I'm not getting something and what I'm not getting has to do with the truth and it so happens that I'm well placed to take a crack at it -the truth, I mean — because this story is true.
The form itself is my enemy. All this damned romance. In fiction (rightly so called), people become coherent and intelligible - and they aren't like that. We all know they aren't. We all know it from personal experience. We've been there.
People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought-experiment. At the camp fire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there.
Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a full-time job looking the other way.
A highly civilized note from Mark Asprey, rounded, well turned, like the man himself, and left in the study, propped against my stacked typescript:
My dear Sam: Two things are missing. (Have you been keeping low company?) I don't expect you to have used or even noticed these items, because you're a blameless non-smoker - whereas I adore the harsh cut of Turkish tobacco with my morning coffee no less than I relish at the other end of the day the rough solidity of a colossal Havana between my lips. Item 1: onyx cigarette-lighter. Item 2: ormolu ashtray. Yours ever, MA