Right there, Mortimer felt, was planted the corrupting seed of his discontent, his suspicion that minority-group pricks (Jewish, Negro) were aggressively thicker and longer than WASP ones. And yet – and yet – though he had never cohabited with a colored girl, Mona Capelovitch, the one Jewess he’d had, never made denigrating remarks about him. His fear of derisory size, lying in wait in his unconscious for years, was released by literary experience. Book learning from Baldwin, Mailer, LeRoi Jones.
It seemed to be the philosophical contention of these talented, decidedly outspoken writers and thinkers, however much they differed in style and argument, that the average male Negro had a bigger cock and more thrust power than the average WASP. Furthermore this Holy Grail of a Negro cock was lusted after, consciously or unconsciously, by white women and created fear and trembling among white men, which was why Negroes were not wanted in white neighborhoods. Something else. While it offended Baldwin, Jones, and other Negroes no end to be told they were naturally musical or athletic, they were willing to allow that they did share one racial characteristic: big pricks.
Well, maybe yes, maybe no, Mortimer thought, but couldn’t they be more scientific about it? Take James Baldwin, for instance. Clever dick that he undoubtedly is, how does he know Negro cocks are bigger than white ones? It isn’t the sort of thing one can comparison-shop, is it, and in the natural order of things a guy simply doesn’t get the opportunity to measure one against the other. How in the world would he or, come to think of it, Mailer or LeRoi Jones ever get to see so many pricks, regardless of race, color or creed? It’s not as if they were the sort to hang around public conveniences, spying. Mortimer didn’t get it. His problem was he suspected he was small, but he couldn’t tell for certain. He had seen other cocks, bigger cocks, on statues, yes, but this could have been a case of art improving on life. Like Andy Warhol making his Campbell’s soup tins larger than they were in the supermarkets. At the same time, Mortimer had to allow that these writers were more gifted and intelligent than he was and so they must know whereof they spoke. Possibly the knowledge was intuitive. An insight. Like Mailer’s discovery that cancer in America was caused by Protestants. Protestants like me, he thought.
Goddamn it, Mortimer thought, he didn’t even know how many inches Hy, his best friend, had, and it wasn’t the sort of thing he’d ask him. Or Diana.
Which brought him round to thinking about Joyce.
Not to brag, Mortimer would still say he satisfied her. Naturally there were times when he ejaculated too quickly and other occasions when he botched it through drunkenness, but, on balance, he’d hazard Joyce was not a frustrated wife. And yet – and yet – she might have no enormous need for sex or, conversely, her desires might be profligate but unfulfilled. Is our marital life full, Mortimer thought, or is it niggardly? Here again he had to confess to inexperience; he simply didn’t know what other couples said or did in bed. Once more he was indebted to Ziggy and literary experience, both of which made him fear inadequacy, a lack of imagination.
Ziggy and the chicks: Migod, he certainly never failed for them, did he? Fondly, warmly, Mortimer recalled his first meeting with Ziggy, shortly after the war, in the Red Lion pub in Soho, where Ziggy, his first adolescent poems out in New Writing, was a legend. No sooner had Mortimer been introduced than Ziggy invited him to join his group. My round, Ziggy insisted, doubles for everyone, discovering too late that he had forgotten his bloody wallet at home. Mortimer happily paid for the drinks and several rounds later he was flattered to be asked to continue with Ziggy and his bunch to a party in a squalid basement in Camden Town. Those were the days, Mortimer reflected, remembering how he literally bumped into Ziggy feeling up the prettiest girl at the party in a dark damp corner. The girl was especially exciting to him, Ziggy explained later, because she was pregnant by his best friend.
Embarrassed, groping for any excuse to retreat, Mortimer noticed the girl’s pint-sized beer mug was only half full. “What are you drinking?” he asked, reaching for the glass.
“His,” the girl replied, her eyes seething.
Mortimer hadn’t grasped the full import of what she meant (after all, British beer was notoriously flat) until Ziggy began to chortle at his discomfort.
“But – but – couldn’t that be, well unhealthy?”
“If you really want to know,” the girl said, “I’ve never felt so close to him before. Now bugger off, please.”
Mortimer had melted away gratefully, suppressing nausea. But come noon the following day he was seeking out Ziggy at the Red Lion.
“You want her,” Ziggy said, willing to arrange it for a fiver.
“No!”
“Quite right. She’s thoroughly middle-class, actually. What I mean is she goes with dogs, but stops at great Danes.”
Possibly, Mortimer thought, if our sex life is conformist, it’s not completely my fault. Joyce could be partially to blame. Not once, flooded with passion, had she ever bit his ear to make it bleed. Or called out to him, “Fuck me good, Daddy-o!” Why? Did he inhibit her? Would she make such licentious requests of other partners? He didn’t know. Once, only once, inspired by a novel he had just finished before they got into bed, had he walloped her on the buttocks, as they were enjoined in the most banal of love positions. There they were, he recalled, he thinking of Gordie Howe bearing down on the nets, she thinking of God knows what, when he had suddenly reared back and landed her an open-handed belt on the buttocks, but instead of releasing the animal needs in Joyce, it made her cry. She cried and cried, throwing him over and calling him names, not bracingly obscene, but clinical.
Bitch. She may be nonconformist-minded, he thought vengefully, but she undoubtedly had an establishment cunt.
Mortimer’s shrinking confidence, his wilting prick, assailed by minority-group litterateurs and conjugal doubts, had been further abused in contacts with the hoi polloi. Two topics of conversation were all-pervasive at The Eight Bells: geegees and sex. Mortimer did not play the horses and to judge by the early and prejudiced reception he got from Donnelly, Rapani, Gregory, Taylor and Wzcedak, you’d think he had no sex life either; if only because he was undeniably middle-class, his manner reticent, his dress neat. Once, in the early days, Mortimer had entered a pub to find the men linked round Rapani, who was reading aloud from a paperback that had just been published:
He reached down with both hands and grabbed the front of her dress. The fabric came away with a rasping, tearing sound. He put his hands inside her brassiere and pulled her breasts up and out. She stared at him, a fear growing deep in her eyes as once more he stood over her. Slowly he lowered himself onto her breasts until he was sitting facing her.
He looked down at her and laughed. “Now, tell me. Examine it carefully. See, am I not the biggest man you ever saw?”
Despite his weight she managed to nod.
Donnelly clacked his tongue approvingly.
“Not bad,” Wzcedak said.
Gregory pulled his lower lip. “It’s Harold Robbins. I recognize the style. With that man, the words leap off the page.”
“Wait, wait,” Rapani said, turning to another page. “Here’s something even better.”
“You’re an animal.”
Dax grinned. “It isn’t that. What do you expect when you’re standing there naked?”
She stared at him for a moment, then squashed her cigarette in a plate and dropped to her knees beside the bed. Tenderly she touched him. “Quelle armure magnifique,” she whispered. “So quick, so strong. Already he is too large for both my hands to hold.”
She –
“Not bloody likely,” Taylor said, aggrieved.
“You think Rapani’s making it up?” Gregory asked.
Taylor stared coldly at Rapani over the rim of his beer glass.
“But he couldn’t. Rapani’s no writer,” Wzcedak said.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Finish the passage.”
“It says here, she says, quote: ‘Already he is too large for both m
y hands to hold.’ ”
She buried her face against him. He felt the warmth of the tiny edges of her tongue tingling his flesh. He crushed her head against him.
“Unquote.” Rapani looked up to notice for the first time that Mortimer was standing on the edge of the group. “Oh,” he said.
Embarrassed, Mortimer raised his glass to Rapani. Rapani slammed the paperback shut. “Good evening, Mr. Griffin,” he said.
It had been like that every time. Simply because Mortimer was always courteous and occasionally carried a furled umbrella, his entry into the pub, like a prissy schoolmaster’s into an unruly classroom, had been inhibiting to the regulars. If, for instance, Gregory was relating one of his endless run of dirty stories or Wzcedak, the taxi driver, was slowly unwinding another tale of an astonishingly obscene happening in his taxi, this being the rule with his fares rather than the exception, then they both clamped shut as soon as Mortimer stepped up to the bar, as if even talk of sex would embarrass him. Griffin, the signal for propriety.
This is not to say the regulars at The Eight Bells were not exceedingly nice to Mortimer, indeed they were, but they also were insultingly correct, as if – in their crafty woggish way – they could sense he didn’t have a big one.
Then one day Joyce phoned him at the office, her manner uncharacteristically flirtatious, and asked him to be sure and pick up a tube of vaginal jelly at the chemist’s before coming home. The promise of sex, even with Joyce again, was exhilarating, though it did mean he would have to wait while she went into the bathroom to hold her diaphragm up to the light to check against any rubber fatigue since last time. Afterwards she would insist that he bathe. The sheets would be changed. All the same, it might be fun.
Mortimer went to Rapani’s, two doors down from The Eight Bells. The old man wasn’t happy to see him. Taking him by the arm, he led Mortimer away from his biggest display counter, the one which featured roll upon roll of striptease films, as if even a glimpse of these small boxes might corrupt Mortimer. Hastily getting into his apothecary’s white jacket, straightening his tie as he stood pointedly under his framed graduation certificate, the unshaven Rapani rubbed his hands and asked, “And what can I do for you, Mr. Griffin?”, somehow suggesting that Mortimer’s needs couldn’t be more complicated than digestive tablets or perhaps razor blades.
Mortimer told Rapani what he wanted.
“I beg your pardon?”
Mortimer repeated his request and Rapani went to fetch the tube, his manner perplexed, as he wondered if Mortimer knew the stuff wasn’t any good for chapped lips.
“Thanks,” Mortimer said snidely.
Mortimer did not visit The Eight Bells for the rest of the week. On Monday evening he had no sooner entered the pub than Rapani was at his side. “Did it do the trick?”
The other regulars watched, one or two of them smirking. Mortimer had been found out. In spite of his furled umbrella, he indulged in sexual sports from time to time. This, he thought angrily, is insolence indeed, but he swallowed his indignation. How, he wondered, would Ziggy Spicehandler convert a situation like this to his own advantage?
“It was just the thing, Mr. Rapani. Trouble is I need another tube tonight.”
“Already?”
The following week Mortimer, walking past Rapani’s shop, was startled by a rapping on the window. The old man beckoned Mortimer into the rear of his shop and handed him an unlabeled little box of brown pills. “My own mixture,” he said with a wink. “In case you get tired.”
Soon Mortimer, trapped into playing out his Ziggy-inspired role, felt obliged to stop at Rapani’s at least once a week. He found himself buying tubes of vaginal jelly, diaphragms in all available sizes, prophylactics, and Rapani’s very own aphrodisiacs. His stature at The Eight Bells skyrocketed.
“Clean collar, dirty mind,” Donnelly observed.
Rapani seldom began to read from his pornographic paperbacks before Mortimer had arrived. “Would you say, Mr. Griffin, that this writer was, ah, accurate?”
The day after News of the World revealed that greenbelt suburbanites, seemingly respectable, actually went in for wife-swapping, Gregory, the headwaiter, went out of his way to be friendly. “It’s nobody’s business but your own,” he said.
Wzcedak leaped to Mortimer’s defense when the Sunday Pictorial did a series on orgies in Debland. “The way they parade their pussy on the King’s Road,” he said, “there isn’t one of them who isn’t asking for it.”
Mortimer walked tallest in the heady days of the Profumo scandal.
“Here he comes,” Rapani would say, raising a glass to him, “the man in the mask.”
Wzcedak was openly envious. “He’s just lucky enough to have the right accent and –”
“And something else besides,” Taylor interrupted, beaming.
With the Denning Report looming over all of them, Donnelly worried for Mortimer’s sake. Night after night he insisted on buying him doubles. “Not to worry,” he said again and again. “They wouldn’t dare to name names.”
Mortimer tried to give up his visits to Rapani’s shop, but it was no use. Now Rapani brought the goods directly to the pub, forcing them on an unwilling Mortimer. When Mr. Justice Linslow chose to exercise discretion in the case of a famous film star’s adultery, Rapani pinched his cheek. “Naughty boy,” he said. “Naughty boy.”
Then things quieted down until one American magazine after another looked upon London and pronounced it swinging.
“They should have gone to you for an interview. You could have told them what’s what.”
“Where would I find the time?”
17
ANOTHER SLEEPLESS, OPPRESSIVE NIGHT, FOLLOWED by another vile day. Coming out of the toilet, The Times folded under his arm, Mortimer ran smack into Joyce, who said in her special icy voice, “Forgot something, didn’t we?”
Mortimer was baffled, caught off-balance, until she thrust the tin at him: deodorant spray. “Oh,” he said, taking it and returning sheepishly to spray away his smell.
Mortimer wasn’t angry. Hygiene, he knew, was her obsession. She simply couldn’t tolerate stale food or body odors or a speck on her sheets or insects in the house, even one little fly, which she would hunt down if it took her hours, armed with yet another deadly spray. Joyce’s horror of filth extended to secondhand books. She wouldn’t let him keep them in the house on the grounds that the previous owner might very well have been a smallpox carrier. Or syph-ridden.
Oh, well. Mortimer dropped Doug off at his wretched school and then continued to Oriole House. In the parking lot alongside Oriole, he ran into the so recently rejuvenated Lord Woodcock.
“Can you take the chair at the conference this morning?” Lord Woodcock asked. “Dino Tomasso is indisposed.”
Remembering the two black-suited motorcycle riders, Mortimer asked, “Nothing serious, I hope?”
“Eye trouble. A minor operation. Can you or can you not take the morning –”
“Certainly, sir.”
“That’s marvelous, Mortimer. We’re counting on you, you know.”
How well Lord Woodcock looked, Mortimer reflected, as the saintly old man strode to his car.
Only a year ago Lord Woodcock had seemed to be withdrawing into feeble and melancholy dotage, which was easier to comprehend if you remembered the trials and deceptions that British radicals of his generation had endured: Ramsay MacDonald, Spain, the Stalin-Hitler Pact, Hungary, Nye Bevan’s untimely death, Nkrumah … Mr. Woodcock, as he was then, was understandably disconsolate, even bitter. Almost alone among surviving old socialist hellions of the thirties, he had not been ennobled. Again and again, he was overlooked on the Honours List, increasingly cut off from old comrades who now read Tribune and formed ginger groups in the bar at the House of Lords. Then, miraculously, Woodcock was offered a peerage, the Star Maker came into his life, and the transformation in the old man was heartening to behold. At Oriole Press, once more he rode with the young, possibly even a step ahead of
them. On the terrace of the House of Lords, he was reinstated to the company of old radicals, once again able to reminisce about the hunger march and even to take the micky out of old Oxbridge enemies, peers of the wrong type, the hereditary type, who had served on the opposite side in the general strike. Old leopards, to hear Lord Woodcock tell it, never change their spots. Defiantly, he explained to Mortimer, the Labour lords rented their ermine at Moss Bros., cracked naughty jokes about the Queen, and insisted on being called by their first names at the party conference. These men who wrote revolutionary pamphlets during the Spanish Civil War now honored their radical past by scribbling anti-establishment graffiti in the peers’ toilets. It’s there, Lord Woodcock said, chuckling, for all the other lords to see.
Counting on you. This was the first indication Mortimer had had from Lord Woodcock in months that, like Hy, he was still a candidate for the big job, once Dino Tomasso returned to Hollywood.
Following the morning conference, Mortimer cornered Hy in the hall. “Hy,” he pleaded, “let’s bury the hatchet. We’ve been friends for years. I –”
“Any time you’re prepared to meet me in the gym, baby, you just let me know.”
“Hy, for Christ’s sake. It’s soon going to be Christ –” Mortimer stopped himself, flushing.
“Christmas? Thank you. Thank you very much,” Hy said, slamming his office door after him.
Grudgingly, Joyce started on her shopping for Christmas dinner, going to Monty’s, on Haverstock Hill, to place her fruit order well in advance. Fortunately for Monty, who abhorred serving Joyce above all his other customers, he saw her coming this time and quickly bolted out the back door, obliging Archie, the new assistant, to take her order.
“Sprouts?” Archie asked brightly, pencil poised.
Joyce said a pound would do.
“And what about new potatoes? Lovely they are.”
“Where are they from?” Joyce demanded suspiciously.