by Martin Amis
Out on Ninth and B, between Bold Agenda and the Life Cafe, a little
bookshop (The Lazy Susan) lurked, in a half-basement, behind thick light-bending glass. Unlike most American bookshops-unlike the bookshops he had already meandered between on Fifth and on Madison(monitoring his own absence and turning Amelior Regained to the wall or inhuming it beneath stacks of contending trex), and unlike the bookshops he would come to know, the Muzaked and mallish, the underlit and wood-paneled and pseudo-Bodleiaic, the disco-Montparnassian- this was Richard's kind of bookshop. It looked like a garage sale thrown by the dependents of some bibliomaniacal niggard. As he ventured further, into the pleasant barnyard smell (the smell of the twins' hair), he was struck by a contrary association-the Christian Science Reading Rooms of the English high street, and their structural futility: because a Reading Room meant freedom and possibility, and (as he was often reminded on his doorstep) Christian Science, which was all there was to read in there, was a nonstarter and meant absolutely nothing. He bumped about with his mail sack, finding categories, alphabetization. Maybe this was a broader church; it offered revelation by a variety of means-crystals, heavenly configurations, numerology and, here and there, yes, poetry, fiction, criticism, philosophy. Then he saw it, on a bench, the slow staggered stacks and the sign saying bold agenda. The mail sack thudded into his spine as he quickly approached and quickly halted. Hush Now by Shanana Ormolu Davis, Cowboy Boots by John Two Moons, and, among other works by other visionaries of the Bold Agenda imprint, a brace of copies of Unfilled by Richard Tull.
He tarried in the Lazy Susan Bookstore for over an hour. No one bought Untitled; no one flipped through it or weighed it in their hand; no one strayed that close to the bench enshrined to Bold Agenda-all of whose publications, it turned out, bore the same strange nimbus of fur and fuzz, as daunting to the eye as to the touch. It was certainly a pity about the look of it, the look and feel of Untitled. No dust jacket, for instance; and that horsehair texture. Wrenching his first copy out of its Jiffy Bag, back in Calchalk Street, Richard had caught a hangnail deep in its bristling weft. And his fingertip was little more than a blob of plasma when he eventually shook it free … Richard tarried for over an hour. And no one touched Untitled. But he paid this no mind. What was an hour? Literary time wasn't cosmic time or geological time or evolutionary time. Still, it wasn't quotidian time. It went slower than the clock on the wall.
Which Gwyn Barry would do well to learn, thought Richard, when he got back to the hotel. Shackled and hostaged to the secular, to the temporal, an eager hireling of his own novel, Gwyn was still Stockpiling interviews in his suite on the fourteenth floor. Richard watched and listened to three or four of them (simplicity, unsophistication, carpentry), quietly mesmerized by boredom and disgust. True, Amelior Regainedwasn't published until early next month, and Unfitted had been out, or available, for at least a fortnight, but Richard still reckoned he was holding his own. Why? And why did he want a great deal of alcohol so much (why did he want to upend the drinks table into his mouth?), and why did he throb for Gina's touch? Waking beside her, on some recent mornings, he had felt as questingly nubile as the opening bars of Peter and the Wolf. .. They were flying out in the late afternoon. Somehow Richard found time to cab downtown to Avenue B, to reenter the Lazy Susan and establish that neither copy of Untitled had left the bookstore. On the other hand, perhaps one had been sold and his modest pile had been fondly replenished from the stockroom. Perhaps one copy had been sold. Perhaps, somewhere, a reader was frowning and smiling and scratching his hair. Perhaps one copy had been sold. Perhaps two.
We have reiterated that neither Demeter Barry nor Gina Tull enjoyed any connection with literature except by marriage. Just as Richard had no connection with Nottingham except by marriage. Just as Gwyn, at the outset, had no connection with the nobility, or with central heating, except by marriage.
This wasn't true. Demi had her literary salon for a while, after all, and had briefly served on a committee or two which championed the cause of oppressed, silenced, imprisoned and murdered writers, and the cause of the Ghost Writer himself, he who is here and yet not here, he who is among the living and yet not among them. As for Gina, she and literature went way back.
The first time Richard set eyes on her he wondered why she wasn't doing her nails in the master bedroom of a thirty-berth yacht in the Persian Gulf, or bawling out her greeters as she stepped from the scrapertop helipad, late for her little lunch with B.J. or Leon or Whitney. More than this (because her face was artistic, unhackneyed, it was original), he could see her on the parapet of the Spanish castle, long emplaced as mistress-muse of the smocked and popeyed iconeer … All these impressions were strongly and strangely reinforced the first time he went to bed with her, which in fact took some doing. But there she sat, unregarded, behind a desk, selling postcards and catalogs in a black-timbered Nottingham museum, and behind her, through the glass, a patch of walled garden with the sun squinting at it after the rain, and a lone crow on the grass flexing
its shoulders and straightening its sooty zootsuit. The world had not
found out about her. How come? Because Richard knew it couldn't just be him. This was genetic celebrity, which had an audience and an essential value. In other times and climes her family would have kept her in alocked room and held an auction on her sixteenth birthday. Leaning forward at her desk, counting money and sighing without weariness, she was ten years further on into womanhood-and the word, the phone calls and faxes, still had time to go out to the planet's playboys, all of them, from the pub spiv with his white-lipped salacities, up past the jodhpured joke in his jeep and right the way through to the kind of OPEC keltocrat who blew half his GNP on his own Johnson. Richard felt the ignoble excitement of a Sotheby's smoothieboy buying a Titian from a tinker. He was thirty, and Oxonian, and still handsome. He lived in London: the capital itself. He had a notorious girlfriend-the powerful Dominique-Louise. He was a freshly published novelist. But his knees were the knees seen through that bendy leaded window, seen by that brute of a crow, which was watching him and harshly purring.
He bought his seventh postcard and second catalog and said, "Do you like Lawrence?" And she looked up at him with eyes so great and clean that they were obliged to include some vapidity, some provincial vapidity, because there was room in there for everything. Gina was no English rose, dead the next day. This was subsoil: Celt-Iberian, Northern-swarthy, gypsyish. Her eyes were set in dark loops of shadow, like badger, burglar, brawler, dramatically bruised by some internal suffusion (embarrassment always deepened these shadows); her nose was a Caligu-lan quarter-circle; her mouth was lean- wide, but not full.
"Do you like Lawrence?"
"Eh?"
"D. H. Lawrence. Do you like him?"
How do you mean, like? her eyes said, then. But her mouth said, "You had me there. My boyfriend's called Lawrence. Anyroad, I can tell you like him."
Richard laughed sparingly, grandly. (And she really did say anyroad. Just that once. And never again.) With his ears all gummed and humming, Richard explained. This was indeed his fifth visit to the museum in two days. But his interest was professional, was shrewd, was remunerative. Around them a temporary exhibition in honor of D. H. Lawrence had been mounted (his shaving brush, his fob-watch, his manuscripts, his surprisingly well-controlled paintings), here in the author's hometown. Richard was writing a piece about it-very much the kind of piece he wrote in those days: regional, marginal, with a flat fee for expenses. Richard in a room at the bunky boardinghouse; a half-bottle of whisky and the Selected Letters, the poems, Lady Chatterley, D. H. Lawrence, Novelist, A Selection from Phoenix, Women in Love. That kind of thing made him happy then.
"It's for the TLS. The Times Literary Supplement." That was good. All those prissy syllables were good. Richard knew that words were all he had. Not the words that would appear in the Times Literary Supplement. Nor the words that would appear on the pages of Dreams Don't Mean Anything, due out in the autumn. Just the words he would
use on Gina Young. In speech, and of course in letters, in notes. Because Richard knew about women and letters, women and notes. He knew about women and words.
She said, "Where are you stopping?"
Ah: a local ambiguity. Stopping meant staying. And Richard wasn't stopping anywhere. He was going all the way. He said, " 'The Savoy,' 3 Stalton Avenue. Can I ask you if you'll do something?"
"Eh?"
"Come live with me and be my love."
"Bloody hell."
"And we will all the pleasures prove . .. Wait. I'm sorry. But what does one say? I've never seen anyone like you before. Your eyes."
She was looking around. Who for? A policeman. Or a critic, to come and help with the cliches. But we like cliches, don't we, in matters of the heart? Lovers are a mob. No detail, thank you, nothing too interesting in itself, if you don't mind, where love is concerned. That all comes later. Our tiring and fantastical requests and provisos, our much-humored peculiarities, our exasperating attention to detail.
"Get away," she said.
"Okay then. Lunch."
"I've a boyfriend."
"Yes. Lawrence. I bet. Long time? How long?"
"Nine years."
"Of course. And you like Lawrence. And Lawrence wouldn't like it."
"No he wouldn't. What would I tell him?"
"Nothing. No, not nothing. Tell him good-bye. Good-bye, goodbye."
He turned. A lady-her tolerant swallow, her habitual beam-had formed a one-lady queue behind him. Richard glanced at the postcard in his hand: Mexico. He paid for it. How sore his throat was. And her face, pointing up at him from where she crouched at the brown table, how swollen, how infused. We must remember the particular ghost (though Gina hadn't read him, and never would) who presided over the innocent triteness of their exchange. Not Henry James. Not E. M. Forster-oh dear me no. Look at Sir Clifford Chatterley, in his wheelchair: he wasn't man enough to call a cunt a cunt! But now behold the hot Lawrence witha hundredweight of hot horseflesh clenched between his thighs, with the fat and frightening Frieda on the next saddle along, thundering through the spark-shower and crimson brushstrokes of Popacatapetl …
Gina had slept with Lawrence, he assumed. She hadn't slept with any writers. Before very long, she would sleep with many.
"Can I meet you after work?"
"No."
This is the past. And so it's true.
In Washington there was a party for Gwyn at the British Embassy, co-thrown, it seemed, by Britain and the publicity boy.
Under a ton of chandelier Richard stood with ovals of light streaming at an angle across his face. This made him look like a creature on some riverine mission or vigil: it imparted an amphibian-no, a reptilian- quality to his unvarying stare. And it was with reptilian patience, a croc-like consideration of the percentages, the rot-rates and backlash factors, that Richard watched and waited, and waited and watched. Gwyn was doing his thing on Lucy Cabretti: Lucy Cabretti, who in Richard's hearing had been referred to by the publicity boy (the publicity boy was big on game plans) as Profundity One. For the first hour or so they'd stationed Gwyn at the door, working the arrivals: a succession of sodden wayfarers (they seemed to form a subscription audience of the local sociocultural), with their snow-capped umbrellas and slithering galoshes. Effusive enough when introduced to Lucy in the hall, Gwyn was now concertedly loving her up-on a sofa beneath the mullioned window, against a galaxy of lamplit snow. She was laughing with her small head thrown back, a hand placed on Gwyn's arm to ward off further hilarity. Under the trembling chandelier Richard maintained his reptilian vigil. He wondered what Gwyn had going for him, these days, in terms of sexual charm. Gwyn never used to have any; but since then he'd thrown some money at his appearance (need Richard adduce the tinted contacts?), and of course he had the entree now. Success revamps you. It must keep you young. Because failure sure makes you old.
For largely accidental reasons (an international conference, plus culture week at the White House, according to the publicity boy), several American writers were present, none of Richard's outright heroes but a fair selection of middleweights, hallowed background figures, on cautious exhibit. Had they been here, their British counterparts would have been sitting in a clump, cheerfully monolithic and practically indistinguishable. Yet the carved idols of American letters kept their distance, the nuclei of their own inner circles. And Richard had circled these circles, earlier on, appreciatively sensing the repulsive force that kept them apart. Why did they hate each other? It was obvious. To exaggerate: here was a two-foot Alabaman with his face in a bucket of hooch: there was a towering Virginian belle with her mint julep and her honeysucklevowels; here was a gnashing Jew from Dneopropetrovsk: there was the writhing moustache of the wandering Lebanese; here the granddaughter of an African slave, here a Boston brahmin, here a Swedish hippie from Duluth. America is like the world. And look at it, the world. People don't get on. And writers should hate each other, Richard naturally believed. If they mean business. They are competing for something there is only one of: the universal. They should want to go to the mat.
"Excuse me, are you Lucy Cabretti? Richard Tull. Literary Editor of The Little Magazine, in London. I wonder if you saw the review we ran of Double Dating."
"No! I didn't see that."
"I was told you'd be here so I brought along a copy of it. Look at it later. An interesting review, as well as a favorable one. / thought too that you found the most tenable position. You make the legal situation very clear, without losing sight of the fact that we're talking about real men and women."
She thanked him. Richard had skimmed Double Dating: Yes and No, Lucy's how-to book about not getting raped by all your friends. He had agreed with her arguments, while simultaneously wondering why anyone would need to hear them. Who could explain the fact that "My Way" was the anthem of modern America? Americans didn't want to do it their way. They wanted to do it your way.
"I'm actually traveling with Gwyn while he's touring here. I'm writing it up. We're very old pals. Yes, we shared rooms at Oxford. Scholarship boys. I came up from London, and there he was, fresh in from the Welsh valleys."
"How romantic."
"Romantic? Yes. Well."
"I'm sorry. I'm a disgusting Anglophile."
"He was from Wales, not England," said Richard, who thought it extraordinary that Anglophilia was still staggering around the place. "Imagine it as something like Puerto Rico."
"Even more romantic."
"Romantic? Well, Gwyn was certainly a ferocious … A 'ladies' man' is I suppose a polite way of putting it."
"Really?"
"A very polite way of putting it," he said, realizing that he was about
to get carried away. "Let's go and sit over there. Let's get a drink. You'll
need it."
Richard had not, so far, found much to do in Washington, which was only the center of the world. All afternoon he reclined on his hotel bedin a trance of cunning. While Gwyn had done four photo sessions and six interviews in a variety of mediums, while also finding time to visit the Phillips Collection, the Senate, the Library of Congress, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Richard had succeeded only in washing his hair. Oh yes. And in throwing in a call to the Lazy Susan (this was arduous), where he was eventually told that they had two copies of Untitled in stock. Washing his hair was no formality either. Again he found himself riveted to the bathroom mirror, immersed in the question of how the same human being could look so bald and so shaggy. In the end, after a visit to the pharmacy, he smothered himself in mousses and conditioners. It hadn't worked out, and, for the time being at least, Richard's hair was basically in deep shit… He made his own way to the party. Because of the weather, or the zone system, his cab kept picking up new passengers, all orphans of the loosening Milky Way, all starred and kissed by the six-faceted snowflakes. Richard sat zestlessly in the back while the driver idled them all over town, along the unbarricadable boulevards, through the bare snowfields of Amer
ican history; the cab glass creaked to the sharp switches of the winds, but the many-eyed Capitol seemed to loom no bigger however close you got to it; they did Georgetown, the Hill, Du Pont Circle, following the city's large design which was accessible only to a higher being. He climbed out at last, in the embassy district. And Gwyn was there to greet him at the door.
"There's probably a medical term for it now," Richard was saying. "Satyromania or some such."
"Well he has a certain style," Lucy said tolerantly. "And all those pretty students . .."
"Oh no. It wasn't with the students. All those little paragons from Somerville and St. Hilda's. With as many O-levels as freckles on their noses. No no. He'd never get the turnover he needed. It wasn't the students. No." Richard paused and said, "It was the college servants that friend Barry looked to for his sport."
Lucy frowned: a small frown under her dark ringlets. As a parting gesture, Richard conjured up a genuine memory from his first year at Oxford: himself, crashing in at two in the morning, after some debauch in some bedsit at the secretarial school, to find Gwyn, in his earphone sideburns, still bent over his books, inching down that long road toward his bad Second. Every other weekend Gilda would bus herself in from Swansea. She used to cower in the little bedroom. On Sunday mornings, after breakfast in Hall, Gwyn would bring a bun back for her hidden in his pocket. She liked marmalade. Anyway, marmalade was what she got.
"He was notorious for the way he went after the scullery maids. Inthose days, the college servants, or 'gyps' as we used to call them-unbelievable, isn't it?-were almost slave labor. They were sacked en masse at the beginning of the long vacation and hired in the autumn, after a summer of breadlines and doss houses. So if a young gentleman wanted to take advantage …" Richard moved his head upward and sideways, in pained recollection. "There was one particularly unfortunate incident involving a kitchen maid of barely sixteen. A touching-looking girl. Dark ringlets. Just a child, really. Some said she was a Gypsy girl-a foundling." Richard tried to pull himself together. His eyes were stinging at his own fiction. "Gwyn … Gwyn and one of his fellow bloods contracted a wager. I'll spare you the details. Gwyn won, but his friend- Trelawney his name was-refused to pay up. A matter of a few guineas."
