‘All that matters is the hinge!’
The therapist leaned forward. ‘What does the hinge mean to you?’
‘The hinge?’
‘Yes. How does it make you feel?’
I leaned towards her. ‘The hinge of one’s mind! Whether it opens inwards or outwards. Let it be outwards. Let it be – out!’
I fell back in the chair, ashamed of my desire, of all I wanted. That I couldn’t want my life with Susan – which should have been enough – was inexplicable and cruel. The therapist, surely seeing the point of the hinge, would help me with this.
The woman, who presumably believed in the ungovernable desires of the unconscious, appeared, nonetheless, to be some kind of rationalist. She replied patiently that relationships did become less passionate. This was to be expected. Enthusiasm would be replaced by other consolations.
Consolations! Mad to learn what they were, I could have kissed those consolations from her lips!
‘Yes?’ I said.
‘Contentment,’ she murmured.
I leaned forward once more. ‘Sorry?’
She repeated it: contentment.
She was all for maturity and acceptance. Yes!
Sobbing Susan was nodding.
How I wished I were nodding – with my face between Nina’s legs, my hands holding her arse up like a dish I am hungry for, my tongue in all her holes at once – tears, dribble, cunt juice, strawberries! I suck the soup of your love. Soul doctor, therapist – who tickles their tongue in your old hole? I am not ready for the wisdom of misery; I have had that with Mother. I am all for passion, frivolity, childish pleasures! Yes, it is an adolescent cry. I want more. Of what? What have you got?
The therapist insisted we see her later that week.
Susan’s fat, red weeping face in that room the second time, as I declare that I don’t think things can be repaired. To have made it absolutely clear, I should have given her a back-hander or a finger in the eye. Then they would have understood! Instead, the therapist gets up and goes to the shelf where she extracts a book. She tries to get me to read a poem aloud. I glance over it. Seeing it is a bad poem, and being smart, I say I’ve forgotten my glasses. Ever-obedient Susan has to read it out in a tremulous voice, glancing at me in the old way, as if to say, later we will laugh at this. I keep thinking: I’m paying to hear poetry read aloud. I would pay not to hear this. Not even poetry can help us!
After my morning coffee Susan’s blonde head coming through the open window of my flat in west London – a bunch of flowers, a book or a video behind her back. She wasn’t working then, ten years ago. When I’d done enough for the day, she’d drive round in her little black car at the end of the morning, something tight around her breasts making them bulge and sway. I’d kiss her and pull her through the window.
We’d drive out to the country.
‘Pull up your skirt,’ I’d say, looking at her as we went, hoping for more. ‘Higher!’
The morning after the first time, we went out for kippers and fried mushrooms. As we walked she put her arms around me. I remember, most of all, her grip. How she pulled me to her! If only I disliked her entirely, and weren’t in love with Nina. What we like: English seaside towns, for instance, even in the winter. Certain jokes; her taste in food and pictures. Long discussions about English mod groups of the sixties.
There were other pleasures; there must have been. Or perhaps they were consolations. However, I cannot hunt for them now in the clutter of the past. Certainly, there are fewer of them than I might hope. Not a lot rushes to mind. I can’t say that Susan has ever deliberately let me down or been more gratuitously cruel than necessary with someone as recalcitrant as me. I would give her a good reference.
‘I have tried to make things work here!’ she cried, yesterday. ‘Every day I have wanted it to be nice for you!’
In front of her I am ashamed. But the truth is, I cannot amuse or arouse her. And yet, out of all the possible people in the world, we have chosen one another. For what? For a grave and difficult task: to frustrate and punish one another. But why?
I shove her a little, roughly, to see if she will wake up. She stirs, sighs, and sleeps on, oblivious.
How rarely are we really disillusioned! I am not leaving this unhappy Eden only because I dislike it, but because I want to become someone else. The dream, or nightmare, of the happy family, haunts us all; it is one of the few Utopian ideas we have, these days. And so I believe, despite everything – as I told Asif – in love. We begin in love and go to some trouble to remain in that condition for the rest of our lives. Isn’t it the condition in which men and women are mostly likely to flourish? People become the most of themselves; sadists are sweeter, bankers more generous, coroners enjoy life, even bookmakers are sympathetic. And out there, tonight, in the shitty humming city, there is, I’m certain, someone to love me.
But then Victor believes that too. For three years he had an affair with a married woman he thought would leave her husband. She was, after all, unhappily married. But she preferred unhappiness to Victor. Was that failure? It ended; but perhaps the quality of a love can’t be measured by its duration.
At university in the late sixties, Victor had been a radical. Now he lives in a decent flat and earns a good living. But there has always been one thing he has wanted. To have another chance at an ideal love, to marry the right woman, before it is too late for him to demonstrate his new-found enthusiasm, too late for him to play on the floor with his children – children who, this time, will not fling curses and his clothes out of the window after him. He wants to see if he can do it as it is meant to be done. That is all. The same as everyone else; not more, and not less. He needs to know that this most important of things is not beyond him. After all, a lot of people do it and some of them are happy.
Soon, therefore, there were others for Victor. Attractive women; good women. Some were a little zealous, particularly the American who, hardly having been into the bedroom, described to me how she intended to rebuild the flat. But none of them was right. Too old, too kind, too wrapped up in their career, too needy, too this, or too that. I’d meet a woman and think of him. We were all working on it, friends, relatives, even one of his children. Potential loves passed through his room like actresses auditioning for a part yet to be written.
He saw me with Nina, and he loved her. As long as she wasn’t his, he could see what she was, and enjoy her. But as soon as the other stuff started with a woman – longing, missing, fearing, hoping – he was off. It was too much. Why can’t he do it?
Why can’t I?
Perhaps I can.
I don’t want to wonder who Nina is with tonight as I lie here remembering how, when I came, she would hold my head and whisper in my ear, ‘And I love you, and I love you …’ She would caress my ears and compare them to those of the dog across the road when she was a child. I was flattered. It was a pointer.
I rub myself through my jeans. I wish I had someone to do this. Not everything can be achieved alone. I won’t do it here. Susan is offended by my solo efforts. She is of a disapproving generation of women. She thinks she’s a feminist but she’s just bad-tempered.
Nina encouraged me to masturbate on her back, stomach or feet while she slept. She liked me to do it before she rushed off, to have me on her on the tube.
I want Nina but then I always want Nina when I have an erection. I will test my theory that one should masturbate before considering any woman seriously. That way one discovers if one wants her for sex, or whether there is anything more.
But this involves getting up. Increasingly I find myself adopting unnatural positions in order to move about at all. I have to sit down in order to put on my socks; my sons bring me my shoes, if they’re in the mood. Then I have to tie my laces, straighten up, get to my feet, and move forward. Like my sons, when I am finally dressed, I consider it an accomplishment. Often, when I get into bed these days, all I do is remove my trousers. It occurs to me now that that could be the reason
Susan finds me less attractive than she used to.
I raise myself quietly and tiptoe away from the sleeping woman.
How weak the arc of my urine is, and how I strain to send a respectable semicircle into the pan. Even when my boys were tiny, and those round little worms, their penises, were no thicker than a cable, the arc of their urine had a magnificent velocity. With me there is always a sticky mess on the floor. Dad had prostate cancer. They stuck metal and plastic instruments through the opening of his prick.
I have started to visit hospitals. I know where they all are now, without the A-to-Z. I think of my acquaintances: a woman I lived with for a week has got a brain tumour; another friend has throat cancer, and a good pal has had a stroke; cancer of the balls is rife. I am invited to more funerals than dinner parties. These are their bodies. I omit their minds for the time being. We are going down already, and before we have acclimatized.
On! Over the sink.
I push down my trousers and look for a suitable lubricant. The last time I did this, when Susan had some friends round for dinner, I used my children’s shampoo, and felt as if a wasp had been pushed into my urethra. I should have complained to the manufacturer and had them conduct an experiment on animals. Even masturbation can be a medical minefield.
In the cupboard I find a greenish cream with a sugary smell. I stare at the label but find it difficult to make out the print without my reading glasses. After some examination I see that it is an anti-ageing unguent. God knows how much of our money Susan spends on this pig fat. Catching me once using it as hand cream, she became incensed. Maybe if I apply this every day to my prick it’ll become fourteen again.
I stick my penis in it.
A few months ago I spotted someone I recognized in the corridor of a company I was visiting. Who is that, I thought, puzzled. Finally I recognized Susan, dressed in clothes too tight and modish, not to mention the purple nail varnish. She wasn’t trying to look young, but hadn’t realized how she had changed.
Lately, though, she has become concerned about the deterioration of her body. She said that after the second boy, she knew she would never get her previous face back. She could see herself now only in photographs. She always seems to be smoothing grease into the cracks in her face, and at the weekends she windmills in front of exercise videos, the boys and I sitting on the stairs. ‘Mummy’s getting thinner,’ one of us will say optimistically. It isn’t that she has become unattractive but that she has become middle-aged, and therefore of a different order of life. She receives, unfortunately for her, only serious consideration.
What if I met her now, for the first time, at a party? I would look at her twice, but not three times. It is likely that I would want to talk to her. Fearing those she can’t seduce, she can be over-attentive to certain men, looking at them with what I call the ‘enraptured gaze’, until they wonder why she wants to appeal to their vanity rather than their intelligence. There are women who want to please men, and there are men who like to be pleased. You’d think they’d be enough for one another. But it is the women, I am convinced, who require this attention for themselves, and they soon resent the primacy they’ve given you.
I should have gone out with her for six months. Or maybe a one-night stand would have been sufficient. But I wasn’t ruthless enough, and I didn’t know what I wanted.
I begin to rub and pull my prick.
How long will she dislike me? A few months? Years? These partings or abandonments can cut deep. But disliking someone is exhausting; to hate them is to stifle oneself interminably.
Victor’s wife still doesn’t speak to him. She won’t let him in the house but makes him sit outside in the car until the children are ready. It might have something to do with Victor persuading her to suck him off and swallow his come – something she would never previously do – the night before he left after fifteen years. By then he could only hate her. Ever since, she has sustained the loathing and bequeathed it to the children, as if her sanity depended on it.
Could I tolerate being disliked? Perhaps, somehow, we have an Arcadian fantasy that there will be a time when everyone will finally agree, that there will be no dissent, dissonance or strife. But one of the virtues of being a parent, I can see, is the ability not to mind being disliked by one’s children. At times I hated Father. I would scream at him, even when he returned from the hospital after open-heart surgery. I put laxative in his cereal so he’d shit himself on the train. I hate my children, at times, as they must hate me. You don’t stop loving someone just because you hate them.
Susan can be a virulent combatant, with a sharp tongue I’ve enjoyed. Unfortunately, her bitterness is too urgent to be witty; she lacks detachment. But her crude blows can hit the target. Nevertheless one soon tires of it. I am looking forward to the day when I won’t give a damn what she says, when the spell will be broken.
What is it I require? A kind indifference, and some interesting underwear. As Scott Fitzgerald wrote, ‘So we beat on …’
I sort through the laundry basket and extract a pair of her knickers, pulling them from her tights and laying them on the sink. Here we go. No; the grey knickers lack the je-ne-sais-quoi. Victor says I can become too self-depriving. The white might just do the trick. But perhaps the black with the lace trim have more dash. When it comes to self-abuse, I am an aesthete.
Is this an act of love or hate, or both?
I wish I had something to look at. Mind you, pinned to the wall is a postcard of the Matisse Odalisque in Striped Pantaloons. She is voluptuous, better than the best pornography. But life is the best pornography, I find.
Soon I am running through my library of stimulating scenes. Which one will I replay – the time in Berlin, or the middle-aged Italian who wept? What about the girl who rode her bicycle knickerless? Or perhaps the occasion I was wearing tight cowboy boots and adhesive trousers, and discovered, as the woman lay down for me, that I couldn’t remove either my jeans or the boots, even with her pulling at them, and was forced to proceed with them on, in a kind of stumbling bondage.
In the old days it was possible scenes of the future – scenes that might actually occur – which I would use as an aid, rather than this nostalgia. And when, by mistake, I glance into the mirror and see a grey-haired, grimacing, mad-eyed, monkey-like figure with a fist in front of him, and the other hand placed delicately on his side because his back hurts from lifting the children, I know I am more likely to weep than ejaculate.
I was a child once, too.
I will think of Nina.
How often I am sitting in a bar or restaurant, or at a party with friends, and all I want is for her to walk in the door. I am under the impression that at that moment everything will be all right. No one else is as good as she is. There is so much I want to say. Our love is more important than everything else. Yet I am aware how susceptible to illusion we all are. How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.
I don’t think I can keep this up much longer. Before, the mere thought of a woman’s body would have me spurting; now this act requires concentration and considerable labour. If there isn’t some excitement soon, I’ll get cramp or pull a muscle.
Three fingers, up to the knuckle, pushing inside you, stretching into the yielding flesh until it seems like a skin glove. ‘It feels like a pulse,’ you say. My hand is a part of you, yet it controls you.
Nina’s face; then the way she turns over and offers her arse to me.
That should do it.
Christ. Yes.
I drop Susan’s pants into the basket, reminded of D. H. Lawrence’s remark that even animals feel sad after ejaculation. I wonder what observation could have led Lawrence to this knowledge. Still, I feel better, as if I wanted to rid myself of desire.
I am washing my hands when I hear a noise. Quickly I close my pants. The bathroom door is pushed open, as if by a ghost. I watch and listen.
*
From the darkness of the hall a child’s luminous dummy b
obs into the room, a tiny circle of green light. The boy’s eyes are shut as he stands there in his Batman T-shirt, pyjama bottoms and furry slippers, three years old. Actually, he is asleep. He staggers suddenly, and automatically raises his arms as if he has scored a goal. My hands fit under his shoulders, I pull him up along my body, and smell and kiss his hair.
‘What are you doing here, my beautiful boy?’
I carry him downstairs, put on a reading light and open the shutters. I lay him on the sofa and pull off his bottoms and soggy nappy. The smell is unpleasantly sharp and familiar at the same time; it is him. He is wilful and keeps trying to turn over, so I place one hand on the middle of his chest and push down, while grasping his ankles with the other as if I am about to hang him upside down from a hook. He thrashes and blinks as I wipe him. Then I shove and push to get the nappy in the right position. It is like trying to change the wheel of a moving car. I am terrified that he will start yelling. At last I replace his pyjama bottoms.
I hope he will do the same for me, one day.
Breathing hard, I sit at the window with him in my arms, whispering and blowing in his ear.
‘Have I been good enough to you, little boy?’
I didn’t enjoy him much as a baby, dreading the crying and whingeing, the refusal to get dressed, eat or go to sleep, as if my whole purpose was to get him to do things he didn’t want to do. I was astonished how whole days would pass when there was no time for anything but him, not even in the evenings, and particularly not at night. Having considered several books on the upbringing of children, usually in the early hours, and often with faeces or vomit on my fingers, once I threw him backwards into his cot, hitting his head. I put brandy in his milk. I booted him hard up the nappy before he was even walking. How can children make us feel so helpless?