by Martin Amis
When Richard went back to Dominique-Louise that time, and Gina, instead of going back to Nottingham and to Lawrence, stayed in London and took up contemporary literature, she started-of course-with the poets.
With the poets: the pastoral, the lyrical, the satirical. Richard had always found stimulation and unaffected good cheer in the company of poets because they were the only living writers who were lowlier than he was. And who would stay lowlier, he then thought. Richard had shown Gina off in the forsaken pubs where the poets gathered. She was not daunted by them: they weren't from London either. They understood her and where she was coming from. As soon as Richard left Gina andstarted regroping his way around the blackened bedroom of Dominique-Louise, the poets, their scavenging instincts of necessity highly evolved, moved in, with their metrical love letters, their crying jags, their bottles of Sangre de Ton. For a time, when Richard went round to her flatlet, which he was allowed to keep on doing, the hallway was like the common room of the Poetry Society on an average weekday evening. At the door he would edge past some Proinnsias or Clearghill; in the stairwell some Angaoas or laiain would be bent over his bicycle clips or patting the pockets of his donkey jacket. There were symbolists and dadaists and acmeists. But Gina was a realist. Did she actually sleep with them, or did they all just talk about the heart, as poets will? Maybe she just heard them out about the heart. Promiscuity among the poets simply wasn't practical; it placed you in a disadvantageous retelling of The Beauty and the Beast-wandering the municipal gardens, going down on down-and-outs, giving blow jobs to bullfrogs, and hoping for a prince. Princeliness, here, was a long shot. Did she further sense that contemporary circumstances were demoting or declassing the poets, reducing their size, reducing their reach? And none of them drove cars. Soon, anyway, Gina was having parallel flirtations with a literary editor and a literary agent. Then she moved on to the novelists. Even now, nearly ten years later, poems still appeared in magazines and slim volumes, with titles like "Stop and Stay" or "Trent River" or even "For Miss Young," eight-liners paralyzed with romantic nostalgia, or longer and looser and murkier efforts full of sexual playback or thought-experiment. You could never be sure (and Gina wouldn't tell him). Poets got women. They didn't get anything else, and women sensed this; so they got women.
Gina's novelist period was unquestionably the toughest time for Richard. He assumed that she must be sleeping with at least one or two of them, or must be seeming to be about to. Why else were they going round there? She wasn't an aristocrat or a psychopath. She was touching (she was a flower from out of town); proletarian-exotic, and still largely speechless, she was perfect for the poets. But that wouldn't hold the novelists. Those marathon men, those grinders of the desk hours, those human sandglasses: they would want diversion at the end of the day. Later, when Gina and Richard were married, two or three novels appeared in which Gina could be firmly identified (largely by her association with an uppity book reviewer who had a sharp tongue and a line in
paisley waistcoats); and certain descriptions of her sexual gifts rang tin-
kly, tinselly little bells of nausea, deep in Richard's middle ear … Where did it come from, then, the talent? He was her second lover; and he couldn't imagine Lawrence as an erotic exquisite, not Lawrence, with histears and his smearing fists. It seemed that Gina was a sexual discovery: she stood revealed. Like the Wesleyan district nurse who has her first drink at the age of forty and wakes up five days-or five years-later in a puddle of hair tonic and skin-bracer. Now, happening to walk down her street, he would exchange wary leers with magical realists, with urban brutalists. Now, standing on her doorstep at dawn, all mauled and bloodshot after a night with Dominique-Louise, he would encounter a brilliant anatomist of contemporary culture or a meticulous dissecter of post-modern mores or (more simply) a strangely compelling new voice. He was a strangely compelling new voice himself, at that juncture, with one book out and another imminent. It seemed that Gina's novelists were becoming richer (and older); he thought she must keep a master best-seller list in the drawer of her dressing table, and intended to work her way up. Although Gina wasn't literary (Gina was literal), she stuck to the literary novel, and did not experiment with the genres-or with the kind of novelist who was famous, but famous for doing something else. Richard wouldn't have minded so much, probably, if she was wintering in Bali with some golfer who wrote novels about computer fraud. Or about golfers. But Gina had chosen to operate within what was approximately-and temporarily-his peer group.
There is a beautiful literary law, slightly scuffed and foxed, yet still beautiful, which decrees that the easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.) So there was a sense of sighing inevitably when, via an arts editor and a theater critic, Gina made her switch to the dramatists. Here too Richard bade farewell to his reveries of arm's-length coquetry and provincial restraint. She moved: and her new flat, in a modern block off Marble Arch, was soon established in his mind as the locus of the most humorless carnality. Visiting her now (nodding to the porter, waiting for the lift), Richard was obliged to review, one after the other, the fiery mediocrities of the London stage. No famished bard, no myopic storyteller. Instead, an elaborately quenched Marxist in black leather trousers. Richard had hated all the poets and novelists too, but the playwrights, the playwrights . . . With Nabokov, and others, Richard regarded the drama as a primitive and long-exhausted form. The drama boasted Shakespeare (which was an excellent cosmic joke), and Chekhov, and a couple of sepulchral Scandinavians. Then where were you? Deep in the
second division. As for the dramatists of today: town criers, toting leper
bells, they gauged the sickness of society by the number of unsold seats at their subsidized Globes. They were soul doctors demanding applause for the pitilessness of their prognoses. And also, presumably, and era-daily, they made a lot of money and splashed their way through all the actresses. Richard could stand it no longer, and he made his move.
Afterwards, he often used to wonder how far Gina would have gone. And he had no trouble visualizing her poolside with the five-million-a-pop screenplay writer, walking the chateau grounds with the belly-worshipping Francophile-or holed up in the safe-house of the Ghost Writer (he who is with us, and not with us), or piously following the electric wheelchair of the afflicted astrophysicist. Really he should have married her the day she came down from Nottingham. What held him back-the feeling that she was insufficiently literary, and would never give him enough to write about? There'd been an evening, early on, at Gwyn's. Gwyn and Gilda. Richard and Gina. Pasta, and a family-sized bottle of red wine. Gwyn was still a failed book reviewer then, back in those golden days. The humble meal, the whispering girls with their wavering vowels. Richard, in his soiled cravat, somehow thought he deserved better. He left Gina's cuddly animals for the stygian boudoir of Dominique-Louise. But he kept coming back. Her thing with all the writers-it looked like a stratagem but maybe it was just despair. It seemed to say, Look what you've made me do. Why not? Why not? it seemed to say. It also gave him a chance to leapfrog over the entire opposition. Which he took.
So one morning he lingered at the hospital long enough to see the IV tube attached to Dominique-Louise's wasted bicep and jogged straight over to Gina's and stood there with his arms folded while one of Britain's more outspoken young scenarists put his electric toothbrush in his metal briefcase and went out of the door forever, with Richard saying, "Let's get married," and Gina assenting with a sneeze of tears.
That sneeze of tears: he thought it belonged to the female repertoire. Yet he had done it too, when his book was accepted by Bold Agenda . .. This had nothing to do with the dramatists, but Richard still wondered about female theatricality. Women did all this feeling, and seemed to need guidance from the theater. Still, men were theatrical too, insomuch as they needed to be, feeling less. As with the styles of trousers they wore, women liked variety. And men attended only one school of acting (the
method), that of the cool. That's men. That's men for you: hams of cool.
"Is Audra Christenberry going to be Conchita?"
"She's a very talented actress. Such radiance. And vivacity." Gwyn nodded to himself, considering this. "Yeah, I think she'd be good." "She'll have to have her tits back out," said Richard, who wasn't cool,who had failed at cool. He was decreasingly a cool guy, and was abandoning cool. But was there anywhere else to go?
"Back out?"
"Yeah, back out. You know. Off again."
"Off again? I don't get you."
"In the book Conchita is flat-chested, right? She has a rather masculine chest."
"Not masculine. Just not pronounced."
"Flat."
"On the small side, I suppose."
"So what are you going to do about them?"
"About what?"
"About those two windsocks of silicone she's got now?"
"It's a different medium. Christ, the way you talk. How do you know they're false?"
"We've seen her in films before. We saw her in that film where I got my black eye. She didn't have any tits then. She had two backs. Perfect for Amelior."
"Maybe she's a late developer."
"Oh sure. When she turns a corner, she goes one way and they go the other. She goes indoors for a club sandwich, and they're still poolside, soaking up the rays."
"Jesus."
"She's like the girl in The Limpsons."
"What's that?"
"Pornography."
"I would never watch that stuff."
"Because?"
". . . Well, for one thing it objectifies women. It turns them into objects."
"It'd be a handy way for you to check on changing sexual styles. Whither fellatio, and so on. Actually you can never see anything because there's always some wine bottle or flower bowl in the way. It turns women into objects. Such as silicone."
"What's the matter with you?"
"I'm dying here."
"You're drunk. What's the matter with your voice? You sound like a farmer with adenoids. You better get your voice fixed by Boston. No one's going to understand a word you say."
Thus, occasionally, in the afternoons, Richard was venturing out, hopelessly dazzled, to the dazzled courtyard, in his antique T-shirt andlong khaki shorts. Usually he sat at a diffident distance from Gwyn and whoever Gwyn was with-and watched the bathers. By no means all of the women were as high-gloss and high-tech as Audra Christenberry. Many were as matte and as mottled as he, though no doubt at least twice his age. They did their laps, with that bent-arm crawl favored by women, especially American women, and with that expression, not pinched, but set-that expression of American resolve. This particular Hamlet, and physical ruin, felt no urge to mock American resolve. Unprecedentedly overweight, Richard was still pretty slim compared to the Texan couple with whom he had rode down to the mezzanine: a couple so fat that they had you rereading the installers' guarantee that the elevator could carry eighteen people. The men out here on the deck-these wonderful providers-swam and ate and telephoned; confidently occupying the sun beds, they sprawled on their sides with one leg crooked and one hand flat on the tensed belly, and talking provider talk with fellow providers, fellow prime-of-lifers. Richard felt, in Los Angeles, that he wasn't hard currency; he was a zloty, a despicable kopek. Nearby, Gwyn would be sampling a plain omelette, an iced tea, and answering questions. Writing is like carpentry. It's speculative, but there has been movie interest. I use a simple word processor, more like a typewriter with added functions. From breakfast until lunch, and a bit more in the late afternoons … Five feet away, the stress-equations of Audra Christenberry's swimsuit. Or else the hundred-percent expressionlessness of the publicity boy.
With his Iberian blood, Gwyn grew dark and sparkling in the sun. Richard's brief visits to the pool, in his nontransferable English flesh, gave him first-degree burns on his arms, thighs, neck, nose and forehead. When clothed he looked like a bit player in a cheap video, or in pornography, the repulsive patsy of slapdash makeup and deathwatch lighting. Naked, he felt he had the distinctive markings of a London pigeon. Even the skinny pigeon redness of his legs contributed to his homesickness. Other things were going wrong with him here in the Pacific city. He couldn't get his mouth wet, no matter what he drank. His tongue was curling up at the edges. Beads of information were traveling along his gum lines, information about the immediate future. In two locations (upper left, lower right) the pain fairies were already breaking little fairy eggs of fairy pain, at every second's throb. Then it would go away again. At night he reviewed biographies in his room, and marked up Untitled
for the reading in Boston, which was the end of the line.
Other things were going wrong with him here in the Pacific city, the city that went on being a city as far as the eye could see in every direction, forever and ever. A couple of times he accumulated the energy to bedriven out into it, when Gwyn did radio or TV, and he attended Gwyn's reading, in a mall somewhere. The city was like a city doing remarkably well so soon after that unfortunate all-out nuclear attack, after that Everest of a meteorite, that mile-high tidal wave; there were blips and glitches, square miles of them, but sun and enterprise and multicultural synergy were always getting the place back on stream. As Gwyn had truckingly told his audience, during the warmup at the reading, Los Angeles was Amelior .. . With differences. Nikita Khrushchev, flying in over the West's last stop and seeing all the swimming pools innocently open to the sky, knew at once that Communism had failed. And Richard's body knew that whatever it was Richard stood for-the not-so-worldly, the contorted, the difficult-had failed. Los Angeles sought transcendence everywhere you looked, through astrology or crystal or body-worship or templegoing, but these were stabs at worldly divination, tips and forecasts about how to do better in the here and now. What mattered was to prepare for the future. And Richard was not prepared for the future. Bodily knowledge of this seemed to pass in through his sinuses; knowledge of this presented itself not in the mind but in the ears and nose and throat.
Women, he thought, understood about time. (Gina understood about time.) Women could send their imaginations out over the future and situate themselves at certain points within it. Time is a dimension, not a force. But women felt it as a force, because they could feel its violence, every hour. They knew they would be half dead at forty-five. This information did not fall in the path of men. Men, at forty-five, were in "the prime of life." The prime? Prima (bora): first (hour)? They get the Change. We get the Prime. And this is the reason why our bodies weep and seep in the night, because we're half dead too, and don't know how or why.
"Wow," said the publicity boy. "Too bad about your face. Does it hurt a lot?"
Richard said, "Not as much as you'd think."
"Pardon me?"
"Not as much as you'd think."
"Pardon me?"
He shook his head no. That hurt a lot. Just before dawn Richard had got out of bed and moved toward the bathroom mirror with unusually intense disquiet. Sure enough, his face was the shape of a television. He looked like one of the Simpsons. He looked like Bart Simpson. In profile Richard resembled the joke figure in a newspaper cartoon about a den-tist's waiting room. Full face, though, he looked like Bart Simpson. Because he had two joke toothaches: lower right, upper left.
At the airport he sat with Gwyn while the publicity boy banged his head against the wall of a nearby phone booth, rearranging interviews. Their flight to Boston was delayed, and there were further complications. Following the mid-afternoon reading they were to make a short hop to Provincetown, over the bay, in Cape Cod, there to attend a party at the holiday home of the toiletry tycoon or burger king who owned Gwyn's publishers. The publicity boy returned, saying,
"The Globe guy and the Herald lady will meet us at Logan and we can do a double interview in the cab."
"Did you get Elsa Oughton?"
"I keep getting this jig who just bawls me out and won't take a message."
&nbs
p; The publicity boy sat down heavily.
Gwyn was staring at him. "Try again. What is this? She's Profundity Three for Christ's sake."
On the afternoon of Gwyn's Los Angeles reading the publicity boy had pointed to the lone cloud in the sky-pink-fringed, chef's-hat-shaped, utterly lost-and predicted, drolly, and wrongly, that no one would show up, this being Los Angeles. In Los Angeles the sky had only one imitation it could do: that of the interstellar void. As for telling Los Angeles about the kind of day it was having, the sky, like Gwyn Barry when they asked him about the Millennium deal on Amelior, had no comment. The sky above Los Angeles was a no-comment sky.
The simultaneous or parallel reading was to be given in a converted theater in Boston's commercial midtown. Richard took it as auspicious when he saw the crowd outside, and the crowd in the entrance hall, and the crowd lining the passage, and the crowd in the bar where the simultaneous or parallel signing session would later take place. Gwyn's table was ready, hardly visible beneath the earthworks and palisades of his fiction: the stacks of Amelior Regained, the stacks of Amelior, and (Jesus) the stacks of Summertown in a bright new paperback original. Richard approached his own table, which was of course entirely bare, and started unloading his mail sack. Lifting out the first copy of Untitled, and catching the usual hangnail in the rough loom of its jacket, Richard watched Gwyn and tried to imitate his expression, benign, bemused, unsurpris-able. He was also endeavoring to take heart from the rampant and (by definition) laughably undiscriminating enthusiasm on display. In England, if your favorite living author who also happened to be your long-lost twin brother was giving a reading in the next house along, it would never occur to you even to stick your head round the door. But Americans clearly went out and did things.
