The Great Pursuit

  ‘But you said she was into bears and I thought—’

  ‘The trouble with you, MacMordie, is you don’t think. So she’s into bears. Doesn’t mean the bears are into her for Chrissake. Whoever heard of a woman into anything sexual? It isn’t possible.’

  ‘I don’t know. I knew a woman once with this—’

  ‘You want to know something, MacMordie, you know some fucking horrible women no kidding. You should get yourself a decent wife.’

  ‘I got a decent wife. I don’t go messing no longer. I just don’t have the energy.’

  ‘Should eat Wheatgerm and Vitamin E like I do. Helps get it up better than anything. What were we talking about?’

  ‘Bears,’ said MacMordie avidly.

  ‘Baby’s got this thing about ecology and wildlife. Been reading about animals being human and all. Some guy called Morris wrote a book …’

  ‘I read that too,’ said MacMordie.

  ‘Not that Morris. This Morris worked in a zoo and had a naked ape and writes this book about it. Must have shaved the fucking thing. So Baby reads it and the next thing you know she has bought a lot of bears and things and let them loose round the house. Place is thick with bears and the neighbours start complaining just when I’m applying to join the Yacht Club. I tell you, that woman gives me a pain in the ass all the problems she manages to come up with.’

  MacMordie looked puzzled. ‘If this Morris guy went in for apes how come Mrs Hutchmeyer is into bears?’ he asked.

  ‘Whoever heard of a fucking naked ape in the Maine woods? It’s impossible. The thing would freeze to death first snowfall and it’s got to be natural.’

  ‘Isn’t natural having bears in your backyard. Not any place I know.’

  ‘First thing I said to Baby. I said you want an ape it’s okay with me but bears is into another ballgame. Know what she said? She said she’d had a naked fucking ape round the house forty years and bears needed protecting. Protecting? Three hundred fifty pounds they weigh and they need protection? Anyone round the place needs protection it’s got to be me.’

  ‘What did you do then?’ asked MacMordie.

  ‘Got myself a machine-gun and told her the first bear I saw coming into the house I’d blow its fucking head off. So the bears got the message and took to the woods and now it’s all fine up there.’

  *

  It was all fine at sea too. Piper woke the next morning to find himself in a floating hotel but since his adult life had been spent moving from one boarding-house to another, each with a view of the English Channel, there was nothing very surprising about his new circumstances. True, the luxury he was now enjoying was better than the amenities offered by the Gleneagle Guest House in Exforth, but surroundings meant little to Piper. The main thing in his life was his writing and he continued his routine on the ship. In the morning he wrote at a table in his cabin and after lunch lay with Sonia on the sundeck discussing life, literature and Pause O Men for the Virgin in a haze of happiness.

  ‘For the first time in my life I am truly happy,’ he confided to his diary and that band of future scholars who would one day study his private life. ‘My relationship with Sonia has added a new dimension to my existence and extended my understanding of what it means to be mature. Whether this can be called love only time will tell but is it not enough to know that we interrelate so personally? I can only find it in myself to regret that we have been brought together by so humanly debasing a book as POMFTV. But as Thomas Mann would have said with that symbolic irony which is the hallmark of his work, “Every cloud has a silver lining”, and one can only agree with him. Would that it were otherwise!!! Sonia insists on my re-reading the book so that I can imitate who wrote it. I find this very difficult, both the assumption that I am the author and the need to read what can only influence my own work for the worse. Still, I am persevering with the task and Search for a Lost Childhood is coming along as well as can be expected given the exigencies of my present predicament.’

  There was a great deal more in the same vein. In the evening Piper insisted on reading what he had written of Search aloud to Sonia when she would have preferred to be dancing or playing roulette. Piper disapproved of such frivolities. They were not part of those experiences which made up the significant relationships upon which great literature was founded.

  ‘But shouldn’t there be more action?’ said Sonia one evening when he had finished reading his day’s work. ‘I mean nothing ever seems to happen. It’s all description and what people think.’

  ‘In the contemplative novel thought is action,’ said Piper, quoting verbatim from The Moral Novel. ‘Only the immature mind finds satisfaction in action as an external activity. What we think and feel determines what we are and it is in the essential areness of the human character that the great dramas of life are enacted.’

  ‘Ourness?’ said Sonia hopefully.

  ‘Areness,’ said Piper. ‘Are with an A.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It means essential being. Like Dasein.’

  ‘Don’t you mean “design”?’ said Sonia.

  ‘No,’ said Piper, who had once read several sentences from Heidegger, ‘Dasein’s got an A too.’

  ‘You could have fooled me,’ said Sonia. ‘Still, if you say so.’

  ‘And the novel if it is to justify itself as a mode of intercommunicative art must deal solely with experienced reality. The self-indulgent use of the imagination beyond the parameter of our personal experience demonstrates a superficiality which can only result in the unrealization of our individual potentialities.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit limiting?’ said Sonia. ‘I mean, if all you can write about is what has happened to you you’ve got to end up describing getting up in the morning and having breakfast and going to work …’

  ‘Well, that’s important too,’ said Piper, whose morning’s writing had consisted of a description of getting up and having breakfast and going to school. ‘The novelist invests these events with his own intrinsic interpretation.’

  ‘But maybe people don’t want to read about that sort of thing. They want romance and sex and excitement. They want the unexpected. That’s what sells.’

  ‘It may sell,’ said Piper, ‘but does it matter?’

  ‘It matters if you want to go on writing. You’ve got to earn your bread. Now Pause sells …’

  ‘I can’t imagine why,’ said Piper. ‘I read that chapter you told me to and honestly it’s disgusting.’

  ‘So reality isn’t all that nice,’ said Sonia, wishing that Piper wasn’t quite so high-minded. ‘We live in a crazy world. There are hijackings and killings and violence all over and Pause isn’t into that. It’s about two people who need one another.’

  ‘People like that shouldn’t need one another,’ said Piper, ‘it’s unnatural.’

  ‘It’s unnatural going to the moon and people still do it. And there are rockets with nuclear warheads pointing at one another ready to blow the world apart and just about everywhere you look there’s something unnatural going on.’

  ‘Not in Search,’ said Piper.

  ‘So what’s that got to do with reality?’

  ‘Reality,’ said Piper, reverting to The Moral Novel, ‘has to do with the realness of things in an extra-ephemeral context. It is the re-establishment in the human consciousness of traditional values …’

  While Piper quoted on, Sonia sighed and wished that he would establish traditional values like ask her to marry him or even just climb into bed with her one night and make love in a good old-fashioned way. But here again Piper had principles. In bed at night his activities remained firmly literary. He read several pages of Doctor Faustus and then turned to The Moral Novel as to a breviary. Then he switched off the light and resisted Sonia’s charms by falling fast asleep.

  Sonia lay awake and wondered if he was gay or she unattractive, came to the conclusion that she was closeted with some kind of dedicated nut and, hopefully, a genius and decided to postpone any discussion of Piper?
??s sexual proclivities to a later date. After all, the main thing was to keep him cool and collected through the publicity tour and if chastity was what Piper wanted, chastity was what he was going to get.

  In fact it was Piper himself who raised the issue one afternoon as they lay on the sundeck. He had been thinking about what Sonia had said about his lack of experience and the need for a writer to have it. In Piper’s mind experience was equated with observation. He sat up and decided to observe and was just in time to pay close attention to a middle-aged woman climbing out of the swimming bath. Her thighs, he noted, were dimpled. Piper reached for his ledger of phrases and wrote down, ‘Legs indented with the fingerprints of ardent time,’ and then as an alternative, ‘the hallmarks of past passion.’

  ‘What are?’ said Sonia looking over his shoulder.

  ‘The dimples on that woman’s legs,’ Piper explained, ‘the one that’s just sitting down.’

  Sonia examined the woman critically.

  ‘They turn you on?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Piper, ‘I was merely making a note of the fact. It could come in useful for a book. You said I needed more experience and I’m getting it.’

  ‘That’s a hell of a way to get experience,’ said Sonia, ‘voyeurizing ancient broads.’

  ‘I wasn’t voyeurizing anything. I was merely observing. There was nothing sexual about it.’

  ‘I should have known,’ said Sonia and lay back in her chair.

  ‘Known what?’

  ‘That there was nothing sexual about it. There never is with you.’

  Piper sat and thought about the remark. There was a touch of bitterness about it that disturbed him. Sex. Sex and Sonia. Sex with Sonia. Sex and love. Sex with love and sex without love. Sex in general. A most perplexing subject and one that had for sixteen years upset the even tenor of his days and had produced a wealth of fantasies at variance with his literary principles. The great novels did not deal with sex. They confined themselves to love, and Piper had tried to do the same. He was reserving himself for that great love affair which would unite sex and love in an all-embracing and wholly rewarding totality of passion and sensibility in which the women of his fantasies, those mirages of arms, legs, breasts and buttocks, each particular item serving as the stimulus for a different dream, would merge into the perfect wife. With her because his feelings were on the highest plane he would be perfectly justified in doing the lowest possible things. The gulf that divided the beast in Piper from the angel in his truly beloved would be bridged by the fine flame of their passion, or some such. The great novels said so. Unfortunately they didn’t explain how. Beyond love merged with passion there stretched something: Piper wasn’t sure what. Presumably happiness. Anyway, marriage would absolve him from the interruptions of his fantasies in which a predatory and beastly Piper prowled the dark streets in search of innocent victims and had his way with them which, considering that Piper had never had his way with anyone and lacked any knowledge of female anatomy, would have landed him either in hospital or in the police courts.

  And now in Sonia he seemed to have found a woman who appreciated him and should by rights have been the perfect woman. But there were snags. Piper’s perfect woman, culled from the great novels, was a creature who combined purity with deep desires. Piper had no objection to deep desires provided they remained deep. Sonia’s didn’t. Even Piper could tell that. She emanated a readiness for sex which made things very awkward. For one thing it deprived him of his right to be predatory. You couldn’t very well be beastly if the angel you were supposed to be beastly to was being even beastlier than you were. Beastliness was relative. Moreover it required a passivity that Sonia’s kisses proved she lacked. Locked occasionally in her arms, Piper felt himself at the mercy of an enormously powerful woman and even Piper with his lack of imagination could not see himself being predatory with her. It was all extremely difficult and Piper, sitting on the sundeck watching the ship’s wake widening towards the horizon, was struck once again by the contradiction between Life and Art. To relieve his feelings he opened his ledger and wrote, ‘A mature relationship demands the sacrifice of the Ideal in the interests of experience and one must come to terms with the Real.’

  That night Piper armed himself to come to terms with the Real. He had two large vodkas before dinner, a bottle of Nuits St Georges, which seemed to be appropriately named for the encounter, during the meal, followed this with a Benedictine with his coffee and finally went down in the elevator breathing alcohol endearments over Sonia.

  ‘Look, you don’t have to,’ she said as he fondled her on the way down. Piper remained determined.

  ‘Darling, we’re two mature people,’ he mumbled, and walked unsteadily to the cabin. Sonia went inside and switched on the light. Piper switched it off again.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘Look, you don’t have to appease your conscience,’ said Sonia. ‘And anyhow …’

  Piper breathed heavily and seized her with dedicated passion. The next moment they were on the bed.

  ‘Your breasts, your hair, your lips …’

  ‘My period,’ said Sonia.

  ‘Your period,’ murmured Piper. ‘Your skin, your …’

  ‘Period,’ said Sonia.

  Piper stopped. ‘What do you mean, your period?’ he asked, vaguely aware that something was amiss.

  ‘My period period,’ said Sonia. ‘Get it?’

  Piper had got it. With a bound the author by proxy of Pause O Men for the Virgin was off the bed and into the bathroom. There were more contradictions between Life and Art than he had ever dreamt of. Like physiological ones.

  *

  In the big house overlooking Freshman’s Bay in Maine, Baby Hutchmeyer, née Sugg, Miss Penobscot 1935, lay languorously on her great waterbed and thought about Piper. Beside her was a copy of Pause and a glass of Scotch and Vitamin C. She had read the book three times now, and with each reading she had felt increasingly that here at last was a young author who truly appreciated what an older woman had to offer. Not that Baby was, in most aspects, older. At forty, read fifty-eight, she still had the body of an accident-prone eighteen-year old and the face of an embalmed twenty-five. In short she had what it takes, the It in question having been taken by Hutchmeyer in the first ten years of their married life and left for the last thirty. What Hutchmeyer had to give by way of attention and bovine passion he bestowed on secretaries, stenographers and the occasional stripper in Las Vegas, Paris or Tokyo. In return for Baby’s complaisancy he gave her money, indulged her enthusiasms whether artistic, social, metaphysical or eco-cultural, and boasted in public about their happy marriage. Baby made do with bronzed young interior decorators and had the house and herself redone more times than was strictly necessary. She frequented hospitals that specialized in cosmetic surgery and Hutchmeyer, arriving home from one of his peripatetic passions, had once failed to recognize her. It was then that the matter of divorce first came up.

  ‘So I don’t grab you,’ said Baby, ‘well you don’t grab me either. The last time you had it up was the fall of fifty-five and you were drunk then.’

  ‘I must have been,’ said Hutchmeyer, and immediately regretted it. Baby pulled the rug from under.

  ‘I’ve been looking into your affairs,’ she said.

  ‘So I have affairs. A man in my position’s got to prove his virility. You think I’m going to get financial backing when I need it if I’m too old to screw?’

  ‘You’re not too old to screw,’ said Baby, ‘and I’m not talking about those affairs. I’m talking financial affairs. Now you want a divorce it’s all right with me. We split fifty-fifty and the price is twenty million bucks.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ yelled Hutchmeyer. ‘No way!’

  ‘Then no divorce. I’ve done an audit on your books and those are the affairs I’m talking of. Now if you want the Internal Revenue boys and the FBI and the courts to know you’ve been evading taxes and accepting bribes and handling laundered money for
organized crime …’

  Hutchmeyer didn’t. ‘You go your way, I’ll go mine,’ he said bitterly.

  ‘And just remember,’ said Baby, ‘that if anything happens to me like I die suddenly and like unnaturally I’ve stashed photocopies of all your little misdemeanours with my lawyers and in a bank vault too …’

  Hutchmeyer hadn’t forgotten it. He had an extra seat belt installed in Baby’s Lincoln and saw to it she didn’t take any risks. The interior decorators returned and so did actors, painters and anyone else Baby fancied. Even MacMordie got dragged one night into the act and was promptly docked a thousand dollars from his salary for what Hutchmeyer lividly called fringe benefits. MacMordie didn’t see it that way and had protested to Baby. Hutchmeyer reimbursed him with two thousand and apologized.

  But for all these side-effects Baby remained unsatisfied. When she wasn’t able to find someone or something interesting to do, she read. At first Hutchmeyer had welcomed the move into literacy as an indication that Baby was either growing up or dying down. As usual he was wrong. The strain of self-improvement that had manifested itself in her numerous cosmetic operations combined now with intellectual aspirations to form a fearful hybrid. From being a simple if scarred broad Baby graduated to a well-read woman. The first intimation Hutchmeyer had of this development came when he returned from the Frankfurt Book Fair to find her into The Idiot.

  ‘You find it what?’ he said when she told him she found it fascinating and relevant. ‘Relevant to what?’

  ‘To the spiritual crisis in contemporary society,’ said Baby. ‘To us.’

  ‘The Idiot’s relevant to us?’ said Hutchmeyer, scandalized. ‘A guy thinks he’s Napoleon and icepicks some old dame and that’s relevant to us? That is all I need right now. A hole in the head.’

  ‘You’ve got one. That’s Crime and Punishment, Dummkopf. For a publisher you know but nothing.’

  ‘I know how to sell books. I don’t have to read the goddam things,’ said Hutchmeyer. ‘Books is for people who don’t get satisfaction in doing things. Like vicarious.’