Heavy Water: And Other Stories

by Martin Amis

  Pop Jones turned.

  “Floor.”

  “Timmy?”

  He could see the moisture in the child’s eyes.

  “Timmy, Timmy. Who did this to you, Timmy?”

  At one remove, it seemed, Pop Jones felt astonishment gathering in him. How entirely different his own voice sounded: thick, mechanical. In this new time, when he, in common with everyone else on Earth, was submitting to an obscure and yet disgustingly luminous reaffiliation, Pop Jones found that thing in himself that had never been there before: the necessary species of self-love.

  “Day,” said Timmy clearly. And he said it again, quite clearly, like an English teacher. “Day… Day done it.”

  Darkness increased its hold on the room of glass. Pop Jones’s new voice said that night was now coming. He moved toward the boy. Hush there. Hush.

  1997

  STRAIGHT FICTION

  IT ALL BEGAN that day in the bookstore coffee shop—when Cleve saw the young woman reading a magazine called Straight News. Or was it Straight Times? Straight News or Straight Times: one or the other. Take your pick.

  Now Cleve liked to think of himself as a reasonably civilized guy. Live and let live, he’d say. He didn’t have any kind of problem with straights. Unlike that little brute Kico, for instance. Or unlike Grainge, who always… Cleve checked himself. Every chance he got, he was still thinking about Grainge. Grainge—oh, Grainge! “It’s over,” he murmured, for the ten-thousandth time; and then he obediently reminded himself that he was very happy with his current lover—a talented young muralist called Orv.

  The young woman reached for her short espresso. Cleve proceeded with his Sumatra Lingtong. (Low acidity: Cleve was careful about such things.) He found that he was staring at her—found also that she was staring back, with intelligent defiance. Automatically Cleve bade his face to suffuse itself with tolerance and congeniality. And it worked out: there they sat, a table away, smiling at each other.

  “Who would have thought it?” he said lightly. To strike up a conversation, hereabouts, was no big thing. This was the coffee shop of the Idle Hour bookstore. A bookstore coffee shop committed to good coffee (Coffee Boiled Is Coffee Spoiled). People were always striking up conversations. “Burton Else,” Cleve went on. “Burton. Burton Else for Christ’s sake.”

  It took her a second to get his meaning. She pressed the magazine to her bosom and peeked down, reacquainting herself with its front cover. There was the tabloid-size photograph of Burton Else, the movie star, sashed with the diagonal caption: TOTALLY HET.

  “You find it hard to believe?” she said.

  “I guess not.”

  “You’re surprised? Disappointed?”

  “Nah,” said Cleve. Which wasn’t true. He was scandalized. “I saw his new one just last night,” he went on. That was true enough: Cleve and Orv, at the movies, with their popcorn and their Perriers. And up on the screen—Burton Else, your regular join-the-dots romantic lead. The usual kind of thing. Burton taking his young feature star Cyril Baudrillard to a disco opening. Burton and Cyril attending a yard sale, and encountering Burton’s ex. Burton cradling Cyril’s sweat-soaked nudity in the marmalade glow of the log fire, after that fight about the flower catalogs. “There he was up there,” said Cleve, “doing his dreamboat routine.”

  “They say he has to be helped into his trailer after he does those love scenes. They give him a back rub and he does his breathing exercises and he’s usually okay.”

  Cleve laughed. “You’re kidding. But he seems so…”

  “What?”

  “You know. So…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. So…”

  “Hey there.”

  Immediately Cleve sat to attention. The young woman was being joined by her young man. By her lover; this was instantly clear. Of course you saw it all the time these days (downtown, anyway), straights kissing in public, on the lips and everything—open mouthed, even with tongues, like a demonstration. Cleve was only thirty-eight, but in his lifetime people used to go to fucking jail for doing that. Or for doing what that portended. The young woman had her head tipped back. The young man was leaning over the side of her chair. Her face was small and round and candid, not pale, but evenly freckled—the freckles like asperities on the skin of a new potato. (Cleve found that he thought about food, or about cooking, almost as often as he thought about Grainge.) As for the young guy—dark, compact, tight-jawed, plump-lipped—and yet, in Cleve’s estimation, somehow totally un-Hot. Uh-oh: more kissing. And more whispering. He listened. It wasn’t intimacies they were exchanging. More like duty-roster stuff. Whose turn it was to do what.

  In fact Cleve was grateful for the diversion. It gave him a chance to contemplate the visage of Burton Else—the shamed visage of Burton Else, which smiled joshingly on, over and above the block capitals that sliced his chest in two. At the bottom of the page it said: BURTON ELSE ACTOR. ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE. ROARING STRAIGHT. Cleve really was scandalized. The thing being… he’d been told more than once that he resembled Else. And been pretty pleased to hear it. As the young woman whispered to her young man, her fingertips steadying his cheek, Cleve felt marginalized, and outnumbered. The young woman; the young man; and now Burton. Suddenly he saw himself from the outside. Cleve: his cropped and kitteny black hair, his heavy dark glasses, his halter straps, his gold popper holder, his rectangular mustache, his fishnet tank top. In accordance with the latest Look, he resembled a half-dressed policeman getting ready for night shift. Burton Else was clean-shaven, for some reason. Or was that a tell?

  He was about to return to his book and his Sumatra Lingtong when the young woman said, “I was talking to…”

  “Cleve,” said Cleve.

  “Cressida,” said Cressida. “And this is John.”

  John nodded humorlessly at Cleve, who nodded back.

  “We were talking,” said Cressida, “about the outing of Burton Else.”

  “And how did Cleve feel about that?”

  “Cleve didn’t yet say.”

  And Cleve thought: eek. He leaned sideways and shrugged loosely. One thing about Cleve: he was more thoughtful than he looked. Being more thoughtful than he looked was getting easier all the time, as Cleve continued to alarm himself with the development of his upper body, down at the gym off Washington Square. Recently Orv had taped him with the camcorder—at Watermill, on the Island, trudging along the shore with Arn and Fraze. Cleve’s neck was astounding, especially when viewed from the rear. His back seemed to go all the way up to his head, after the brief and minor interruption of his shoulders. He said, “Well, let me see how I feel about it. Burton Else… Okay, so Burton’s straight. Big deal. It’s a secret, not a deception. He’s not one of those video preachers. Calling down hellfire on, uh, ‘alternative lifestyles.’ It’s not like he’s some hypocritical politician.”

  “That’s right,” said John. “It’s like he’s some hypocritical movie star.”

  The way he said that, the way he leaned into it, leaned his practiced intensity right into it: Here we go, thought Cleve. John, the young man—Cleve now saw that he had a speckly, rough-barked layer to his face. He was young but already weathered. Cleve said, perhaps not so thoughtfully, “Burton—guess Burton could lose a lot of fans if this gets around. He could lose roles. Supposing it’s true.”

  John said, “Wait a second. You don’t think Burton isn’t promoting something? Like a lifestyle, for instance? He’s up there forty feet high. With his black cap and his tank top. A regular bees-knees faggot.”

  “John.”

  “And you’re worried about his roles? His fans? Fuck his fans.”

  “Hey,” said Cleve. Again he felt unfairly singled out. He turned his head and saw that an elderly gentleman at an adjacent table was frowning at him with comradely indignation. The old guy looked like a half-dressed policeman too, but fatter and grayer and balder (and even more junior in rank) than the half-dressed policeman Cleve looked like; he wore a black
T-shirt with the white lettering: THE MORE HAIR I LOSE, THE MORE HEAD I GET. Cleve said, “Come on, John. Is Burton obliged to have a position?” His tone became mildly imploring. “Doesn’t Burton have a life here? Is he just a symbol, an icon, or is he a human being? Doesn’t Burton—?”

  “Fuck Burton. And if you can’t see that he’s a disgrace to his orientation, and an impostor, and a kind of preacher, as well as a jerk, then fuck you too, Cleve.”

  “John,” said Cressida.

  But with a quake of crockery and a flourish of his (grimy) mac tails—John was gone.

  “I’m like, ‘Wow.’” This was Cleve.

  “I’m sorry—he’s very active.” This was Cressida.

  They looked at each other. They were two of a kind; there was unanimity.

  “You get that way. Forgive us,” she said. She was gathering her things: her bag, her book, her magazine. “Look into it and you’ll understand. I’m sorry but you get that way.”

  Left alone, Cleve lingered, over his Sumatra Lingtong, trying to read—or at least skim—The Real Thing and Other Tales, by Henry James. Browsing was encouraged at the Idle Hour. All the same, even browsing was more than Cleve could manage just now. You try to be reasonable with these people and meet them halfway. And what do you get? Cleve disliked unpleasantness of any kind; he disliked aggression; he disliked being hollered at by an uppity little straight in a bookstore coffee shop. In certain ways (he guessed), yes, in certain ways he was a pretty staid kind of guy. Maybe he got it from his parents. Whoever they might have been…

  On his way back to Literature he made a stop at the Special Interests shelves and found himself staring at subsections called Personal Growth and Astrology and… Straight Studies. On the covers of the trade paperbacks various man-woman pairings peered out at you in frowsy resignation. There was straight fiction too: careworn, dirty-realist, kitchen-sink. The only straight novel that rang any kind of bell with Cleve was called Breeders. Written by a straight man, Breeders, he remembered, had sparked considerable controversy—not least within the straight community itself. The author, it was argued, had dwelt too relentlessly on the negative aspects of straight life. Cleve slipped Breeders under his arm and then went back to Literature, where he found another Henry James, one he was surer he hadn’t already read: Embarrassments. And it struck him: Jesus, was James straight?

  He came out onto Greenwich Avenue, a couple of blocks north of the straight district around Christopher Street.

  Soon afterwards Cleve and Orv took a trip to the Middle East. They did Baghdad and Tehran and then Beirut, where they could unwind completely and concentrate on their suntans. By the pool, on the beach, and during their picnics up in the hills, Cleve read Embarrassments. He also read Breeders. The straight world, as here portrayed, seemed outré and voulu and so on—but incredibly developed, above all.

  Cleve learned that there were two and a half million straights in the New York area alone: a million in Manhattan and around two hundred thousand in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Long Island, and the Dan-bury Triangle respectively. New York was known, by some, as Hymietown; but it now contained more straights than Jews.

  They drove south and did Israel. Sight-seeing and shopping in Jerusalem and Bethlehem; Herodian and Massada; and then for the final weekend they chilled out on the Gaza Strip. They drove north to Tel Aviv and hopped on a flight back to Kennedy.

  “Listen. Hey, this is kind of great,” said Cleve, on the plane, looking up from his copy of Time.

  Orv looked up from his copy of USA Today. He looked up interestedly, because for the past three days Cleve had been speechless with concern about his upset stomach. Cleve’s stomach was actually fine. But he had swallowed a mouthful of the Dead Sea and expected the worst.

  “This stuff about the straight gene,” said Cleve. “They did an experiment on fruit flies? It’s so cute they’re called fruit flies. Now. Fruit flies are superstraight. They breed like crazy—a new generation every two weeks. In this experiment they neutralized the straight gene. And guess what. Usually, in the culture jar, the boy and girl fruit flies would be busy reproducing. Instead the boys all went off together and formed a conga line.”

  “A conga line?”

  “A conga line. Feeling each other up and everything.”

  “A conga line?”

  “You know. Like Island Night at the Boom-Boom Room.”

  “Oh, a conga line. Get this,” said Orv. “Your look-alike, Burton Else. They must have injected him with the straight gene. It says here he’s straight.”

  “Yeah, I heard that. Burton.”

  “Burton. He denies it. He’s suing the straight magazine that fingered him. ‘Nor do I endorse alternative lifestyles.’ But they got this bunch of rent-girls queuing up all ready to blab. Burton Else straight. Jesus, is nothing sacred? Christ, where do they get off calling themselves straight? They take a fine old English word and fuck it up for the rest of us.”

  “It’s a word we use a lot. I keep noticing. Straight and narrow.”

  “He used a straight razor.”

  “He won in straight sets.”

  “It was a straight fight.”

  “Is my tie straight?”

  “And keep a straight face.”

  “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight.”

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “The Bible. I think it’s the Song of Solomon.”

  “Solomon wasn’t straight, was he? Jesus. Excuse me? Excuse me. Could I get a blanket, please?… Did you see that?” said Orv, not to Cleve but to some other half-dressed policeman across the aisle. “What’s his problem?”

  “We hurt his feelings. He’s straight,” said Cleve. “Flight attendants are all straight.”

  “Christ,” said Orv. “I’m surrounded!”

  They got their blankets. Cleve tried to sleep. He found he was still brooding about Burton Else—brooding woundedly, self-pityingly, about Burton Else. Because the guy just seemed so normal. As he stretched and twisted in his seat, and as the plane’s engines whistled and hissed, Cleve’s mind became a collage, a photo spread, devoted to the tarnished movie star. Oh, those turbulent stills: Burton, laughing, in his chef’s hat; Burton dusting down his framed dressing-table portrait of Gloria Swanson; Burton alphabetizing his guidebooks…

  He ran into Cressida again. Same place, same time, same coffee, same book: The Real Thing and Other Tales. Cleve had been back for over a week. His tan was like a carapace of oxblood shoe polish. His superb upper body had had another gallon of compressed air pumped into it, down at the gym. In the last of the September humidity he wore hot-cream cycling pants with a canary-yellow singlet and Adidas low-siders. Cleve had broken up with Orv. Wretched at first, he had since fallen for a talented young bijouterist called Grove. Grove—this virile, creative, troubled, valuable individual—had moved in last Friday. He came over in a van and just dumped his stuff everywhere.

  With Cressida, Cleve had a completely cool conversation: about Dickens. No tension, no jarring notes, no John: just Dickens. He sipped his Kenya Peaberry; she dispatched her short espresso. They left the Idle Hour together, lingering, briefly, in Poetry and Drama, and said their farewells on the street, ambling half a block westward, toward Seventh Avenue. So they stood on the very brink of the straight district—Christopher Street, where Cressida lived, with John. You could feel a carnival heat in the crowded middle distance, the sizzle of street music, of block party; and Cleve noticed the ass-end of some kind of parade or demo out on the Avenue, trailing loosely by. He concluded that this must be a big day in the straight calendar—parades, pugnacity, pride. Or was it always like this? He didn’t say anything. They stayed off sexual politics altogether, as if by agreement… Now Cressida said something more about Bleak House (about Esther, about Ada), and Cleve said something more about Hard Times (about Grad-grind, about Bounderby). He told her to take care. And off she went, into it. Cleve walk
ed back down Greenwich Avenue, heading for the gym. On Eighth Street he began to feel more at ease, more at home, more himself. He often came down to Eighth Street to buy clothes, fun outfits from Military Issue, Cowboy Stuff, the Leatherman, Blue Collar. More normally, of course, he went to the smart department stores or the uptown boutiques like the Marquis de Suede on Madison or See You Latex, Alligator on Fifth… When she smiled, when Cressida smiled, Cleve was always riveted by her teeth; they weren’t pretty so much as imposingly functional, eliding matter-of-factly with her gums and involving no clear change of bodily medium. Her smile reminded him of Grainge (oh, Grainge!). How could a girl remind you of a boy? Even boy-girl twins could never be identical. Only fraternal. As he strode on toward the gym, bowlegged with thigh muscle, Cleve thought of twins (twins, which all primitive cultures feared), suspended together in liquid behind the fat glass.

  Cleve returned to his Chelsea apartment a little before seven and found Grove in bed, noisily having sex with Kico, the disc-jockey cousin of the cabinetmaker, Pepe, who had built Cleve’s new bookcases earlier in the summer. Cleve went into the kitchen and fixed himself a cucumber sandwich. Annoyingly, Grove had left the little television switched on. (Grove was always doing that.) On the TV: more straight news. The straight thing—it was kind of amazing. You got through life hardly giving it a second thought and then, suddenly, everywhere you looked… Whoa: Here was a big item about Straight Freedom Day, as celebrated in San Francisco, “the straight capital of the world.” Cleve stopped chewing; his mustache was still. There was an aerial shot of the Straight Freedom Day Parade, in the Mission District, led by the Straight Freedom Day Marching Band. In cutaways, men and women of reassuringly—indeed, depressingly—earnest demeanor talked about straight concerns, straight demands, straight goals. Straight leaders and activists were coming to terms with their newfound political clout as the most important single voting bloc in a city where two in five adults were “openly straight.” In the Castro, it seemed, everyone was straight. The whole community. They had straight greengrocers, straight bank tellers, straight mailmen. They even had straight cops.