Cocksure

  FLASH-CUT TO LOUDSPEAKERS OVERHEAD

  (in thick Protestant accents)

  “DIFFERENT! DIFFERENT! DIFFERENT!”

  RESUME LONG OVERHEAD SHOT

  As ALL-STAR DEFENSEWOMAN flees.

  Mortimer had hardly recovered from this shock when much of what he had seen earlier was now rerun at frantic speed, but intercut with a shot of a nice, well-adjusted man frolicking about his house and garden. So, from the beautiful but agonized young man mainlining heroin into his arm, the scene now shifted directly to the well-adjusted fellow mowing his lawn, singing. From the chimneys of Dachau the film cut to the same man pulling funny faces, crossing his eyes, as he washed his car. Next the camera zoomed in on two men french-kissing and zoomed out again on the well-adjusted man peeling a banana.

  That well-adjusted man, that villain, was Mortimer.

  Finally Mortimer was held in a frozen frame, winking, licking an ice cream. This frame was superimposed over an H-Bomb explosion, and scrawled in blood over Mortimer’s face was one word:

  WASP

  As the audience rose to give Different a standing ovation, as all around Mortimer there were cries of “Bravo,” he seized Joyce by the arm and fled the cinema, just making it outside before the lights came up. “That ungrateful son of a bitch,” he said.

  Joyce had to laugh. “Why, Mortimer, you amaze me. I thought Ziggy could do no wrong in your eyes.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Joyce, he sensed, was pleased, enormously pleased. Mortimer took a deep breath and explained that had he been used so badly by anyone else but Ziggy, he would sue.

  “But,” Joyce said, delighted to finish what he had left unsaid, “as you have explained so many times before, this sort of dirty trick coming from Ziggy cannot be interpreted as an outrage. It –”

  “Oh, shettup, will you?”

  “It is but another of Ziggy’s sardonic, but meaningful, jokes. Or is that not the case when the joke is so obviously directed at you?”

  “I said I don’t wish to discuss it.”

  “He’s made a fool out of you.”

  “He has not. He most certainly has not. He has merely used my face for his own artistic purposes.”

  Ziggy had not even attended his own world premiere; he had had his name removed from the credits. In a statement distributed by students in the cinema foyer he explained that his film had been emasculated by the producers for commercial reasons. Some of his most finely wrought scenes had been excised from the finished print.

  “All the same,” a reporter asked, telephoning Ziggy the next morning, “don’t you feel you’re better off here than in Russia?”

  “Not bloody likely,” Ziggy said.

  At least, the reporter went on to say, he was not being put on trial for his artistic beliefs. Unlike Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, he had not been sentenced to hard labor.

  Mortimer’s indignation was not mollified, but Joyce was more than somewhat pleased by Ziggy’s astute retort to this typical bit of red-baiting.

  “While I do not approve the recent sentences imposed on Sinyavsky and Daniel, it is a measure of just how seriously art and artists are taken in the Soviet Union.”

  Then Ziggy returned to the censorship question in the so-called freedom-loving West, where artists were considered jokers. He summed up the problem succinctly by saying so long as you couldn’t pull your cock on TV his artistic freedom was impaired.

  11

  MORTIMER LAY NUDE IN BED EXCEPT FOR A SCENTED black silken blindfold. Hands and heated tongue caressed him, rousing him, then a loving mouth came down on him, sucking, sucking. Gorgeous, he thought. Exquisite. Don’t stop … Until a bass voice said, “You’re yummy, baby. Real soul food,” and he leaped up from the sheets, revealed to the world as a queer.

  Different.

  “No, no,” he shouted, wakening.

  Migod. Ziggy Spicehandler’s film had left Mortimer with plenty of food for thought and with Joyce asleep beside him, he lit one cigarette off another. Am I a homosexual? he wondered. If, as Ziggy’s film claimed, invoking the loftiest authorities, the type is not recognizable (limp wrists, fruity voice), then I can no longer be assured that I’m not one simply because I don’t appear to be one. On the contrary. I may be one of the most noxious kind – the repressed homo. Even, he thought, my ostensible enjoyment of conjugal rights may be nothing more than overcompensation; a clever front.

  What concerned Mortimer most deeply was that unlike Ziggy Spicehandler he had never had a homosexual trauma. Ziggy, possibly, was a bad example, if only because he would have had a homosexual experience, he had had all the advantages, famous public school, etc., etc. But Ziggy … Ziggy had tasted and rejected homosexual experience. Not Mortimer, however. Why, he thought, I find the very thought of a physical relationship with another man vomit-making. A dead giveaway, that.

  Queers were an abomination to Mortimer. Waiting for Joyce in a pub unnerved him, especially West End pubs, which were thick with them. Naturally he always took a newspaper or magazine with him (if it was the New Statesman, he never had it open at the book pages) and made a point of glancing meaningfully at his watch again and again, so that no unattached man in the pub could possibly get the wrong idea and embarrass himself. Even so, single men had occasionally smiled at Mortimer or even tried to start up a conversation. Once, in the Yorkminster, a man standing beside him had said, the ploy pathetic, “Got a light, mate?”

  “Now you stay away from me or I’ll hit you,” he said.

  “What in the hell are you –”

  “I’m a married man with a child,” Mortimer protested, gulping down his drink and choosing to wait for Joyce outside.

  And then, if Mortimer was going to be absolutely honest with himself about suppressed tendencies, he also had to own up to the barber bit. Mortimer was very, very choosy about barbers. He always had his hair cut in a shop where there were lots of them, so that he could select his chair circumspectly. Even so, he didn’t trust himself to be shampooed any more and had to wash his hair at home now. What had happened was a couple of years back, at Simpson’s, in Piccadilly, he had agreed to a shampoo with a scalp massage, was enjoying it hugely, until he discovered himself with an erection. Fortunately it wilted before the barber, a fatherly type, removed the protective sheet from him.

  Mortimer had to admit to even another quasi-homosexual experience. When he and Joyce were still living in Canada, he used to make a habit of watching the hockey games on TV on Saturday nights, and thereafter, unaccountably, he always felt horny, which was not in itself suspect, but – but – but once in bed with Joyce, fiercely determined not to ejaculate too soon, he used to hold himself back, so to speak, by reliving the hockey game, eventually coming to his climax, eyes squeezed shut and mind closed to his thrusting, moaning partner, with the clear and exciting image of Gordie Howe bearing down on the nets to score; his ultimate joy synchronized – inadvertently, perhaps, with Joyce reaching her sexual summit, but consciously with Gordie Howe whipping the puck into the nets.

  Am I a faggot? he thought.

  Even the most bullish hetero, he’d read somewhere, had a smidgin of homosexuality in him. Yes, Yes, but how much was too much? Mortimer had devised a trial for himself, a trial he had never dared to take in waking life though he had had nightmares about it from time to time.

  In his dream Mortimer lies nude except for a scented blindfold, he is tied to the sheets, roused by a probing tongue and adoring mouth, forced to submit to the test, rather like those endured by housewives on TV who are offered a fiver if they can tell Stork margarine from butter. Like them, he fails. He can’t tell a man’s mouth from a woman’s. Furthermore, in his dreams he enjoyed being sucked immensely and was only disgusted after the fact if it turned out that it was a man who had been doing it.

  And yet – and yet – something in Mortimer refused to accept that he was a homosexual. A more sensible inner voice assured him that it was a slight tendency, no more, a containable driv
e magnified in his mind, because he unconsciously appreciated how dull he was, a placid WASP with a regular job, and only craved depravity in the hope it would make him more interesting to such as Ziggy Spicehandler.

  Or Polly Morgan? No, no; unlike every other man at Oriole (and, according to rumor, at most other publishing houses) he was not out to make Polly. Not only, he thought, because I have no chance of success where everyone else has reportedly failed. I just don’t give a shit about Polly Morgan, that’s all.

  Good old Ziggy, he thought, for he had already forgiven him. Unrepressed Ziggy, he thought, finally falling asleep.

  Pale and weary, her gorgeous big blue eyes smarting, Polly Morgan emerged from the late movie at the Academy and hailed a taxi. Whew, she thought, for it was her fourth movie of the day. “Annabel’s, please,” she whispered.

  Until he pulled up before the discothèque in Berkeley Square, the taxi driver, absorbed in a reverie of his own, didn’t notice that his fare was no longer there. His taxi was empty. What the hell, he thought.

  Entering her basement flat, Polly rested briefly with her back against the door. Her eyes twinkling, she sucked in an enormous breath, inflating her bosom, and then, quite suddenly, she kicked off her shoes. Arms outspread, Polly spun across the living room floor, skirt billowing high, as she floated toward her bedroom, finally tumbling to her bed, laughing secretively, joyously, as she wriggled free of her skirt and went to gaze out of the window.

  A full moon stared back at Polly as she hummed the opening bars of the “Moonlight” Sonata. He is looking at the same moon, she thought.

  Polly scooped up the red telephone. Holding it to her as she tumbled backward on the bed, her jet black hair simply ravishing against the white pillow, she began to sing into the receiver,

  Somebody loves me,

  I wonder who,

  Maybe, it’s you.

  12

  MORTIMER LEAPED OUT OF BED TO COLLECT THE morning mail. There was a thick letter from his regiment, which he hastily tore up.

  “Aren’t you even going to read it?” Joyce asked.

  “It’s the anniversary of the battle. I know exactly what’s in it,” he said, putting a match to the pieces.

  Hy Rosen put down his Daily Express and glared at Diana across the breakfast table.

  “Where were you last night?” he demanded.

  “For the last time, darling, I was at the movies. I –”

  “If I ever catch you with another guy –”

  “Another man? After your brutish demands, where would I find the energy?”

  Heh-heh. Hy swept his arm across the breakfast table, sending boiled eggs, toast rack, milk jug and teapot crashing to the floor. “Into the bedroom with you,” he said.

  Diana swallowed a sob. Leaping up, hopeful yet incredulous, she asked, “First thing in the morning?”

  “Come on.” Hy clapped his hands together. “Mush!”

  Dino Tomasso, taking breakfast at his desk at Oriole House, read in his morning newspaper that the postmen were going out on strike. They were asking for another fifteen shillings. Two dollars. Well, that wasn’t exactly peanuts, maybe they would settle for half. Then Tomasso looked at the newspaper story again. No, no, they weren’t asking for another two dollars an hour. Incredibly enough, what they seemed to want was two dollars more a week. Tomasso thrust the newspaper at Mortimer, the first to arrive for the morning conference. “Is this a misprint?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Tears welled in Tomasso’s eyes. “Oh, my God,” he said, “how much are they paid now? Basic?”

  “Oh, thirteen … fourteen pounds a week, possibly.”

  Tomasso thought his heart would break. O England, my England, where they haven’t even got enough niggers to collect the garbage, but have to do it themselves.

  The morning conference was dull, uneventful, until the efficiency experts from Frankfurt appeared, bringing Tomasso a copy of the first title in the Our Living History series. The manuscript was delivered by Herr Dr. Manheim, two assistants in black leather coats, and Fräulein Ringler. “All right,” Tomasso said, seemingly alarmed. “That’s all for this morning, fellas.”

  Later, Mortimer sought Tomasso out. Like all the other old editorial hands, he naturally wanted the first two titles in the Our Living History series to fail, but now, with publication day approaching, his loyalty to Oriole and what it stood for overrode his distaste for Tomasso. Mortimer suggested that he would try to book a provincial speaking tour for the Labour politician. “Forget it, baby,” Tomasso said. Mortimer offered to try to cajole one or another of the art cinemas into doing a season of the faded star’s films. “Skip it,” Tomasso said, chuckling.

  “Look here, if my services have become redundant under the new order of things, all you have to do is let me know.”

  “But, Mort, you are being groomed to take over. Didn’t you know that?”

  “What?”

  “The Star Maker especially asked to see your file. The Star Maker was enormously impressed.”

  “What, may I ask, did he find so impressive?”

  Tomasso narrowed his eyes; he grinned smugly.

  “Dino, I think the time has come for you and me to have a serious talk. There’s a lot going on at Oriole that baffles me.”

  “Tomorrow maybe,” Tomasso said, dismissing him.

  Hy hadn’t shown up for the morning conference and so immediately afterwards Mortimer went to his office. He wasn’t there, either. Mortimer stopped Jennifer Mills in the hall. “Seen Hy?” he asked, concerned.

  “No. But my guess would be the library. Or haven’t you had the pleasure yet?”

  “No.”

  “Our new librarian. Splendid body metabolism. And,” she added acidly, “mammary glands that are absolutely super.”

  Mortimer didn’t actually get to the library until six o’clock. The lights were out; it looked deserted. Mortimer was about to leave when a husky voice called out, “I’m in here.”

  The girl’s voice came from behind the stacks, where the reference office was situated. The new librarian was the good-looking, elegantly dressed colored woman Mortimer had encountered in Lloyd’s bank.

  “Well, hullo there,” she said, her smile teasing.

  “Sorry to trouble you so late. I was looking … um … for Mr. Rosen.”

  “I don’t recall a Mr. Rosen. Mind you, everyone else has been and gone. Now if you have a minute,” she added, “I’ll show you how I swing from stack to stack.”

  “Eh?”

  “Or don’t you think a colored librarian is a curiosity?”

  “Certainly not. But, um, if people have been dropping in, perhaps it’s because a girl as young and, ah, attractive as you are …”

  “Well, thank you. My name is Rachel Coleman.”

  “I’m Griffin. Mortimer Griffin.”

  Rachel was wearing a green cashmere sweater and a white leather skirt, cut stylishly short. Mortimer coughed studiously loud so that if anybody happened to come into the library they would realize at once that he was making no attempt to conceal his presence. On the contrary. Then he helped Rachel into her coat. Her perfume was bewitching, but he dared not sniff emphatically lest she think he believed colored people had a peculiar smell.

  Outside, they bumped into Jacob Shalinsky, of all people, carrying an enormous stack of his magazines. Touching his hat, Shalinsky grinned too knowingly for Mortimer’s taste. “Good evening, Mr. Griffin … Ah, Miss Coleman.”

  “You know him?” Mortimer asked.

  “Doesn’t everybody in Soho know Jake? He’s charming.”

  “He’s an obnoxious bastard, that’s what he is!”

  “I had no idea,” Rachel said, “that you were an anti-Semite.”

  She made that sound as if, to her delight, there was actually hair on his chest.

  “Don’t be absurd,” Mortimer said, startled.

  Which left them immediately outside The Eight Bells. “I suppose you wouldn’t have time for
a drink?” Mortimer asked, trapped.

  “I’d love a drink.”

  Just my luck, Mortimer thought, all the regulars were there. The wide boys. Rapani the chemist from next door, Donnelly from the betting shop, Lawson, Gregory the headwaiter, Taylor, Wzcedak, and most of the others. As Mortimer entered with Rachel, who looked strikingly elegant, he sensed a wetting of lips all around him. Derek grinned lasciviously at him from behind the bar.

  “I know,” Rachel said, clapping her hands, “let’s have champagne.”

  Mortimer looked amazed.

  “A half bottle, then,” she said.

  Somewhere behind Mortimer’s stinging red neck, Donnelly began to softly whistle “Roll Me Over in the Clover.” Wzcedak caught Mortimer’s eye in the bar mirror. He wiggled his ears at him. While Derek opened the champagne with unnecessary ceremony, Rachel went to make a phone call. Rapani the chemist was instantly by Mortimer’s side. “Was getting worried about you, mate, you haven’t been in my shop for a week now.”

  “The poor luv’s beginning to feel his age,” Taylor called out, bringing forth hoots.

  Rapani, reeking of garlic, began to whisper in Mortimer’s ear. “It was getting round to closing time and you hadn’t been round for a whole bloody week –”

  Wzcedak gave Mortimer the thumbs-up sign.

  “– so I says to myself, use your loaf, Alex, and I brought the stuff with me.”

  Rapani slipped Mortimer the package. Fortunately just before Rachel returned to the table.

  “We’ve met before,” Mortimer said to Rachel, pouring the champagne. “At the bank, remember?”

  “The bank,” Rachel said, appalled. “Now I’m too late.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Silly me. I meant to go, but it was my first day at Oriole – I haven’t a penny.”

  “How much do you need?”

  “Ten pounds. Would they cash a check for me here, do you think?”

  “No, no, let me. I’ll lend it to you.”

  “Oh, aren’t you a sweetie,” she said, waiting.