"The thing is I've moved. I'm with Gal now." "So I've read." "You remember Gal." "Of course I remember Gal."
Richard reassumed his cueing posture, chin at table height, upper body bent or slumped over the side cushion. You were not supposed to talk while playing snooker—except about snooker. Richard had had to insist on this. Too many times, or so Richard felt, he would be lining up a frame-clinching sitter, and Gwyn would start telling him about the Italian TV crew he was expecting the next morning or the surprising figure offered for his Saudi translation rights, and Richard would find that he had somehow shoveled the cue ball onto the adjacent table . . . Two weeks after the event, he was still reading Rory Plantagenet's diary columns, hoping for a long piece about how Richard Tull had humiliated Gwyn Barry in front of the Shadow Minister for the Arts. Instead, that morning, he had found a long piece about how Gwyn Barry had switched agents, controversially taking his custom from Harley, Dexter, Fielding to Gal Aplanalp.
"She's already got me a huge deal on my next one." "You haven't finished your next one."
"Yeah, but they like to do these things earlier now. It's a campaip. It's
like a war out there. World rights." "Get more drinks." "So who are you with now? What's your position with agents?”
"More drinks," said Richard, whose position with agents went like this. He had started out under the wing of Harley, Dexter, Fielding, who had signed him up as a twenty-five-year-old, pre-Aforethought, on the strength of his eye-catchingly vicious reviews of new fiction and poetry. Richard stayed with Harley, Dexter, Fielding for his first two novels and then fired them after his third was rejected by every publisher in the land, including John Bernard Flaherty Dunbar Ltd., Hocus Pocus Books, and the Carrion Press. He then transferred his talents to Dermott, Jenkins, Wyatt, who fired him after his fourth novel met an identical fate. Next, Richard went solo, and dealt personally with all submissions and negotiations on novel number five: that is to say, he photocopied and packaged it so many times that he felt like a publisher himself—or a printer, printing samizdat in a free country. As yet he had no plans for his sixth novel: Untitled. And he needed plans. He badly needed plans.
"I haven't got an agent," he said.
"You know, Gal's a big fan of yours."
"You mean she has pleasant memories of me? Or that she liked my stuff."
"Both. She liked your stuff."
All the reds were gone. Only the eight balls remained on the table: the black and the brown, the pink and the blue, the green and the yellow; the lone red; and of course the white. Both of them were so lousy at snooker that it would be misleading to claim that Richard was better at it than Gwyn. But he always won. In this area, as in one or two others, he understood that there was a beginning, a middle and an end. He understood that there was an endgame. And it was in the endgame that Gwyn showed his only wisps of talent: a certain Celt-Iberian canniness, a certain sideburned cunning. Careful now.
"She told me to tell you to expect her call."
"It's a pretty cheesy list though isn't it—Gal's?" said Richard, who found that he was blushing and almost fainting as he lowered his head over the drinks table: blushing bloodier than the pink, bloodier than the red. "Isn't it all rock stars and cookbooks? And how-to?"
"She's taking it upmarket. More literary. She's got quite a few novelists."
"Yeah but they're all famous for being something else. Famous mountaineers. Comedians. Newscasters." Richard nodded to himself. The newscaster, he had read, was not only famous for being a newscaster and
for being a novelist. He was also famous (at present) for something else: for getting fantastically beaten up, the other night, in a mews off Kensington High Street. "And politicians," he said.
"It's the right move, I think. She'll go in a bit harder for me. Because of her list. Because I'm prestigious."
"Because you're what?" But then Richard paused and just said, "Of course you wouldn't know what prestigious means. Or meant. Deceptive. As is prestidigitation. Conjuring."
"When was the last time you saw Gal? She was a nice-looking kid but now she's ... she really. . . She's really..."
Richard looked on, not at all sympathetically, as Gwyn's mind blundered about, searching for a way of saying what he wanted to say. What he wanted to say, presumably (Richard had heard this from others, and believed it), was that Gal Aplanalp was mercilessly beautiful. Gwyn stood there with his concessionary shrugs and frowns, beset by reasons for not saying what he wanted to say. Which he couldn't do without seeming invidious or impolitic, disrespectful both to Gal and to those less well favored. And so on.
"I hear she's very lucky in her looks," Richard said. "Wait a minute. You're famous for being something else too."
"Am I? What?"
"Happily married. Uxorious."
"Oh that."
Gwyn sneaked home on the black, but it was a dead frame anyway, and Richard didn't hate that too much, having prevailed 3-1. On their way out, moving side by side down the passage with their slender cue cases, like musicians or executioners, they passed an exercise room where, by the way, Steve Cousins had given karate lessons for six months, six years ago, to the juveniles of West Ten. The arrangement ended because all the parents complained and because Steve couldn't bring himself to punctuate his discourse with enough religious shit about restraint and self-control and the empty hand.
"Have you ever come across a girl called Belladonna?"
"I don't think so," said Gwyn. "And I think I'd remember, with that name."
"Still. People are always changing their names, aren't they. These days."
They parted on Ladbroke Grove beneath the elevated underground: that patch of London owned by bums and drunks, exemplary in its way—the model anti-city; here the pavement, even the road, wore a coat of damp beer (in various manifestations) which sucked on your shoes as you hastened past. Crouching men with upturned fucked-up faces ... It made Richard think of Pandaemonium and the convocation of rebel angels—hurled like lightning headlong over the crystal battlements of heaven, falling and falling into penal fire and the deep world of darkness. Then their defiant council. He liked Moloc best: My sentence is for open war. But he felt Beelzebub was more on the money: contrivance, slow revenge, seduction—the undermining of innocence and Eden.
My sentence is for open war . . . That sentence was awfully good. When writers hate, it all comes down to something very simple. His word against mine.
This whole thing is a crisis. The whole mess is a crisis of the middle years.
Every father knows the loathed park and playground in the unmoving air of Sunday morning (every mother knows it Friday evening, Tuesday afternoon—every other time), the slides and seesaws and climbing-frames like a pictogram of inanity. The fathers on the edges of benches, or strolling, or bending and peering: this is their watch. They exchange slow nods of resignation and hear the wall of childish sound from which no sense is detachable: its twangs and pops and whipcracks.
I was there in the fog. The fog was sorry about it—the fog was wretched about the whole thing. Like the fathers the fog had nowhere else to go. Ancient and stupid, but equipped with new chemical elements and contributions, the fog loomed and idled, hoping it wasn't in the way.
Here I found a reversal of the more familiar protocol: no adult was allowed into the playground unless accompanied by a child. The playground was therefore maniac-free, murderer-free. You were not a murderer. Your child was the living guarantee that you were not a murderer.
A little boy approached me—not one of my own. And he made a sign. Keeping a humorous distance, he made a sign: the two forefingers in the shape of a T. Deaf-and-dumb kid, I thought, and felt my face widen with the unsurprised tolerance I automatically wanted it to have. My look was so tolerant it didn't even look tolerant: just open. T. Wasn't that deaf-and-dumb for the'? Wait. He was doing another one now, and another. Wasn't the circle, the O, deaf-and-dumb for nothing? I found that my head was intensely incline
d toward him, that I was suddenly braced for revelation, frowning, essaying, as if the boy could tell me something I really might need to know.
Because I know so little. Because I need information from any source.
"Tom," he said. "It's my name."
And I made the Sips—the M, the A—with my strange and" twisted fingers, thinking: how can I ever play the omniscient, the all-knowing, when I don't know anything? When I can't read childish capitals in the apologetic fog.
I wrote those words five years ago, when I was Richard's age. Even then I knew that Richard didn't look as bad as he thought he looked. Not yet. If he did, then someone, surely, a woman or a child—Gina, Demi, Anstice, Lizzete, Marius, Marco—would take his hand and lead him to somewhere nice and soft and white, kindly whispering to his gasps for breath. Intimations of monstrousness are common, are perhaps universal, in early middle age. But when Richard looked in the mirror he was looking for something that was no longer there.
It might help if we knew where we lived. Each of us, after all, has the same address. Every child has memorized it. It goes something like.
This or That Number, This or That Street, This or That Conurbation, This or That County, This or That Country, This or That Continent, This or That Hemisphere, The Earth, The Superior Planets, The Solar System, Nr. Alpha Centauri, The Orion Spur, The Milky Way, The Local Group, The Local Cluster, The Local Supercluster, The Universe,
This Universe. The One Containing: The Local Supercluster, The Local Cluster, And So On. All the Way Back To: This or That Street, And This or That Number.
It might help if we knew where we were going, and how fast.
The Earth revolves at half a kilometer per second. The Earth orbits the Sun at thirty kilometers per second. The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way at 300 kilometers per second.
The Milky Way is traveling in the general direction of Virgo at 300 kilometers per second.
Astronomically, everything is always getting further away from everything else.
It might help if we knew what we were made of, how we keep going and what we will return to.
Everything before your eyes—the paper and the ink, these words, and your eyes themselves—was made in stars: in stars that explode when they die.
More proximately we are warmed and hatched and raised by a steady-state H-bomb, our yellow dwarf: a second-generation star on the main sequence.
When we die, our bodies will eventually go back where they came from: to a dying star, our own, five billion years from now, some time around the year 5,000,001,995.
It might help if we knew all this. It might help if we felt all this.
Absolutely unquestionably, the universe is high style.
And what are we? Flat-earthers. Richard's opening move, in his plan to ruin Gwyn's life, was not calculated to be in itself decisive, or even dramatic. On the other hand it did demand from Richard a great deal of trouble and expense—and internal wear. All these phone calls and stunned crosstown journeys and talentless grapplings with brown paper and string. Whether Richard had any talent for fictional prose remained arguable, perhaps; but he was definitely no good at all with brown paper and string. Nonetheless, he was decided. He even raised his chin for a moment in simple heroism. His nostrils widened. Richard Tull had resolved to send Gwyn Barry a copy of the Sunday New York Times. With a note. And that was all.
He was quite clear about it in his own mind ...
"Daddy? Are you bold?"
"I sometimes like to think so, yes, Marco."
"Will you always be bold?"
"Despite the ills that await life's balm, Marco, though made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, to strive, to seek—"
"Have you always been bold? How did you get bold?"
Richard closed his eyes. He dropped his pen on to the desktop and said, "You mean bald. Go elsewhere, Marco."
The child remained. He went on gazing at his father's hair. "Have you got male-pattern boldness?"
"I suppose so. I suppose that's the kind I've got."
"When did you start to be bold?"
"Go elsewhere, Marco. Go and play in the traffic. I'm trying to work."
He was quite clear about it in his own mind . . . Richard sat at his desk; he had just put Unfitted away for the morning, after completing an hysterically fluent passage of tautly leashed prose, and was now assembling his notes (which were widely dispersed) for a review of The Soul's Dark Cottage: A Life of Edmund Waller. Even Richard's book-reviewing career, unusually, described a tidy downward curve, like the bedside graph of an open-and-shut moribund. He had started off with fiction
and poetry; then fiction; then American fiction (his specialty and passion). Things began going wrong when they steered him on to South American fiction: an interminable succession, it seemed, of flowery thousand-pagers about sheep-dips or coconut shies. Then biographies.
Then more biographies. Like most young reviewers, Richard had come in hard. But instead of getting softer, more catholic, more forgiving (heading toward elderly impartiality and, beyond that, journey's end: a gurgling stupor of satisfaction with everything written), Richard had just got harder. There were personal reasons for this, of course, which everyone eventually sensed. As a reviewer he wrote forcefully—he had an individual voice and an individual memory. But he subscribed to the view of the Critic as Bouncer. Only geniuses were allowed in Richard's speakeasy. And the real trouble with all those novels he was sent was that they were published. And his weren't. . . Richard leaned back: he was achieving the difficult feat of taking his own pulse while continuing to bite his nails. His smaller son Marco, who had failed Gina's dawn fitness test and was taking another day off school, remained at his father's side, balancing a rubber troll or goblin on various roughly horizontal surfaces: Richard's forearm, Richard's shoulder, one or other of Richard's bald spots. And from outside through the shivery window came the sound of fiercely propelled metal as it ground against stone, shearing into the sore calcified struts and buttresses with sadistic persistence: the house, the street, the whole city, taking it deep in the root canal.
For instance, it had to be The New York Times. The Los Angeles Times was even bigger, Richard knew, but in his judgment Gwyn wasn't quite nuts enough for the Los Angeles Times. Still, he was surely nuts enough for The New York Times. Richard would have staked his sanity on it. If Gwyn wasn't nuts enough for The New York Times, then Richard was losing his grip. Now he reached for his jacket, hooked over the chair and dug out the bent checkbook on which he hoped he might have written a few words about The Soul's Dark Cottage: A Life of Edmund Waller. He had: shops his mates to avoid axe p. 536ff. The checkbook joined his other notes, loosely gathered on the heaped desk: a credit-card slip, a torn envelope, an empty matchbook. His desk was so horrendously burdened that his telephone often stopped ringing before he found it—or, quite possibly, before he even heard it.
The plan was this: Richard would send Gwyn Barry a copy of the Sunday New York Times, the whole thing, that forest-razing suitcase of smeared print, accompanied by a typed note that would read, in its entirety,
Dear Gwyn,
Something in here to interest you. The price of fame!
Yours ever, John There would of course be no indication where this interesting something might be found. Sitting back, sitting back in the alphabet soup of his study, Richard imagined Gwyn opening the package, frowning at the note, looking first, with a slight smile, at the Book Review, then, rather less equably, at the Arts and Leisure, then . . .
"Marco, what's the point of doing that?"
Either Marco didn't hear or he didn't understand. He said: "Wot?" There is of course this difficulty of rendering childish speech. But how do you get round it? Marco didn't say "What?" He said "Wot?"—definitely a humbler and shorter word, and entirely unaspirated.
"Balancing that toy on my arm," said Richard. "Why? What for?"
"Does it bolla you?"
"Yes."
"Does that bolla you?" he asked, balancing the toy on Richard's head.
"Yes."
"Does that bolla you?" he asked, balancing the toy on Richard's shoulder.
"They all bother me." Edmund Waller bothers me. "How'm I supposed to do this review?"
He wanted Marco elsewhere so that he could call Anstice and smoke a cigarette with his head out the window and generally get on with fucking Gwyn up. Edmund Waller was born in. Go, lovely Rose! Tell her, that wastes her time and me . . . Basically, now that the guilt had evaporated, the Anstice thing was just a bottomless drag. He spent all this time talking to her in case she killed herself. A consummate air-sniffer and seat-warmer (and mediocrity), Edmund. But he wanted her to kill herself. Conversely, killing yourself demanded energy, which Anstice didn't normally have. In an energetic state, she might do other things too, like ringing up Gina. A fairweather Royalist, an expedient Republican, and a mercenary bridegroom. Although he had gone to bed with Anstice, he hadn't made love to her—but she didn't seem to realize this. Waller's Plot was in itself a fiasco. Yet it provided him with the chance to betray all his. How bad would it be anyway, if Gina found out? As it happened, Richard assumed and even hoped that Gina was having an affair herself: for pressing reasons that will soon become clear. Small is the worth of beauty from the light retired. . . Writers don't lead shapely lives. Shape they give to the lives of others: accountants, maniacs. Whereas Edmund Waller. While Waller. Although. Despite the fact that. Whilst Waller . ..
What was it with -whilst} A scrupulous archaism—like the standard