Victory

by James Lasdun

  I do hope this request will not sound too strange to you, and that you will consider granting it. I would be greatly honoured.

  Yours,

  Gerald Woolley

  ‘That’s quite a letter,’ I said.

  ‘I know. Even better than I remembered!’ “Exceptionally decent as well as exceptionally talented.” How extremely helpful is that?’

  I was referring to the letter’s honesty and candour, not its practical utility, but I let that pass.

  ‘I mean, I know victims sometimes send weirdly affectionate messages to their attackers,’ Marco continued. ‘The Ghomeshi case fell apart because of that. But this is her talking to a third party, not me. And look at the date. That’s after the Belfast programme was aired, meaning after that night in the hotel. “Exceptionally decent” – i.e. not some fucking caveman. You can imagine how relieved I was to find this!’

  He’d brought the letter to the Messenger in person as soon as he unearthed it, taxiing across London to their offices near the Embankment. The elaborate security in the lobby made it impossible to surprise Sauer as he’d have liked. Reception had to call up with his name. An assistant had to come down to verify that Marco was who he said he was. A photo of him had to be taken and printed onto a pass. But none of this diminished the pleasure of confronting his nemesis.

  ‘I knew I had the fucker!’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘Bland. Early forties, I’d say. A bit overweight. Gingery hair and eyebrows. Puffy face without a lot going on in it. He started out in that ridiculous flowery mode of his, telling me what a pleasant surprise it was to meet me in person. He even complimented me on a programme of mine he claimed to’ve seen as a student. I shoved the letter at him. You should have seen him as he read it. He was trying to look unimpressed, but these giveaway signs were twitching all over him. He was swallowing, darting his little tongue out to wet his lips, drumming his fingers on the desk … When he was finished he cleared his throat and sort of tucked his chin into his neck, looking at me with this weird expression that I think was supposed to be gently reproving, as if he’d caught me trying to pull a fast one. He started questioning the authenticity of the letter, arguing that I could have written it myself, or that Gerald Woolley might be somehow in cahoots with me after all these years.

  ‘I didn’t bother arguing back – just told him he could think what he liked and that if he still wanted to go ahead and publish the piece, that was his call but he could expect a robust reaction from me. He’d gone bright pink in the cheeks by this point. “I’ll show it to Legal, if it’ll make you more comfortable,” he says, still trying to sound like he doesn’t believe it’ll make any difference. I told him I wasn’t going to leave the original but that he could make a copy if he wanted. He said in that case he wouldn’t bother, since he was only offering for my sake. I got up to leave, basically calling his bluff. I’d just turned my back when I heard him say in this strangled voice: “All right. We’ll make a copy.” So that’s what we did. I didn’t hear from him after that. In fact, I haven’t heard a word from him since. He’s apparently too much of a prick to let me know they’ve pulled the piece. But they have.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Julia told me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah. She called me at my parents’ house a couple of days later – Sauer must have told her about my visit. I recognised her voice immediately even though she sounded like she’d been through the wringer a few times, which no doubt she has.’

  He paused, looking a bit blank suddenly, as if he’d lost his thread. Or possibly he was just exhausted.

  ‘What did she say?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t remember exactly. Something about me being vindictive, wrecking her one chance at getting back in the game, I don’t know. She wasn’t very coherent.’

  ‘She must have known you weren’t going to like the article …’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I guess she hadn’t considered it from my point of view. Maybe Sauer never told her I was putting up a fight. Though he did get her to change that one line. Well, who knows? Anyway, that’s how I learned they’d pulled the piece.’

  ‘It must have been weird, talking to her after all these years …’

  ‘Extremely weird.’

  ‘Was she … was her point just that you’d stopped her getting published, or was it still about the – you know – the accusation itself?’

  He looked nettled for a moment, but then nodded sombrely as though to acknowledge an obligation to satisfy my curiosity. I was his appointed auditor, after all.

  ‘Well, both,’ he said, clearing his throat.

  ‘So you talked about it? The accusation?’

  ‘I mean, nothing new. She said what she’d written was true and that she had a right to publish it, and I told her it wasn’t and she didn’t. That’s basically all.’ He closed his lips, breathing in through his nose, his fierce features expressing the affronted dignity that I’d come to recognise as his way of showing pain.

  After a moment, he added: ‘But I guess hearing her say it, hearing her actual voice in my ear telling me I’d made her do something she didn’t want to do, was different from reading it in Sauer’s email.’

  ‘You mean more … real?’

  ‘Something like that.’ He smiled drily. ‘She hung up on me before we could get too deeply into it.’

  The waitress came to refill our glasses, and he paused, observing her with his coolly appraising eye as she poured and withdrew.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t get satisfaction from the thought of Julia being upset, however much she maligned me. That I can promise you.’

  I believed him, and said so.

  ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘defeating Sauer after the shit he put me through – that was pure joy!’

  I raised my glass. I wasn’t certain I’d extracted every significant nuance of his conversation with Julia, but I felt I’d pushed him as far as I could without spoiling the atmosphere.

  ‘Well. To victory,’ I said.

  ‘To victory!’

  We finished the bottle and Marco ordered crème brûlées and Gorgonzola with Vin Santo and then some grappa. I’d drunk more than I wanted, but I was experiencing a resurgence of that irrational negative reaction I’d felt when he first told me the news, and I thought alcohol might help suppress it. I didn’t understand this lurking animus. He’d been wrongly accused. He’d defended himself; fought back single-handed against a national newspaper, and won. Why would I begrudge him his feeling of triumph? It wasn’t as if I had any reason to doubt his version of events. And I didn’t doubt it. There just seemed to be some resistance on my part to actual rejoicing. Had I internalised the campus outlook, I wondered, with its endless, tedious refinements of anxiety over power and privilege? I suspected this must be the case: these virtuous attitudes have a way of insinuating themselves even as you resist them, as if the very act of resistance creates the pathways they need to establish themselves in your psyche.

  Back at his house he smoked a cigar in his partitioned living room with its mismatched charity-shop furniture and odd remnants of ornate wood panelling. (He’d bought the building, a former Single Room Occupancy with warrens of tiny rooms on every floor, long before gentrification had spread to the neighbourhood, and was defiant about not restoring it to its pre-SRO condition, or in any other way tarting it up.)

  I made my excuses as soon as I politely could, and staggered upstairs where I had the sparsely furnished top floor to myself. Passing his bedroom on the second floor I noticed several pairs of scuffed leather ankle boots, all stylishly pointed at the toe as if to address an idea of locomotion inseparable from that of impalement, lined up in pairs against the wall, and a sort of cheap amusement passed through me, the hostility of which I preferred not to examine too closely. I was feeling surfeited, bloated – not just with food and drink but teeming, incoherent thoughts. My head started spinning as soon as I
got into bed. The ceiling tilted ominously. A vivid sense of the viscous orange sauce on my pasta came back and for a moment I thought I was going to throw up our celebratory dinner. I held it down, just, overcome by the still stronger urge to sleep.

  7

  The summer passed, and in September I resumed my regular weekly stayovers at Marco’s house. Alicia, his daughter, had moved in recently, along with her partner. Hanan was also staying there, having given up the lease on her own apartment. She was a Lebanese-born Australian, with a background in finance, who’d got into film after raising money for a documentary on the looting of antiquities in war zones, and divided her time between Sydney and New York. She always seemed a bit absent when I met her. Polite but distracted. I attributed this to the remoteness of her origins from the little world of Brooklyn, which I imagined must have seemed a bit frivolous to her; a village of pampered neurotics. But it might just as easily have been jet lag, or a lack of interest in me personally (she did seem to have trouble remembering why I came to stay at the house every week). She and Marco had a quiet, undemonstrative relationship. She was quite a bit younger than him, but they seemed content, and well matched. She’d taken over the money side of his Crime and Place series, which was by now officially in development after preliminary financing had been agreed on by a consortium she’d put together. The household was livelier than usual, and Marco seemed to be thriving in it.

  True, he had a lingering, somewhat morbid tendency to talk about his ‘ordeal’, but he’d been badly shaken by it, so perhaps that was natural enough. Sometimes it was the moment of victory he’d want to relive, and he’d go back over his meeting with Mel Sauer with voluptuous relish, as if there were still vital juices to be sucked from its memory. Sometimes it was the dread that had come before; the sense of imminent ruin. Meanwhile he’d become more obsessed than ever with the assault and harassment scandals that seemed to be breaking just about every week in the news. The stories triggered violently contradictory responses in him, all of them transparently visible as he sat at breakfast in his shabby blue bathrobe, reading the New York Times. The progressive liberal in him would rejoice in the fall of some dinosaur mogul or smug college jock, drunk on their sense of unassailable omnipotence.

  But then, as he began reappraising the story from the point of view of his own experience, misgivings would seize him. Might the accusations be false? Or at least exaggerated? Or over-simplified? If the truth happened to be complicated, could that complication ever be addressed by a process that recognised only the strictly differentiated categories of predator and victim? Was it possible to get a fair hearing in the current climate, where a good chunk of the populace seemed to have come to a tacit agreement that it was better that a few innocent men should be ruined than a single guilty one go free? He’d remark on his own quickness to condemn accused men; his willing – even exultant – participation in the ritual of public denunciation that these stories offered, and he’d shudder at how close he’d come to being the victim of that quickness and willingness himself. Then, as if catching himself sliding into sympathy with that week’s proven sleazeball staring at him from the pages of the Times, he’d frown and toss the paper aside, muttering: ‘Fuck this asshole anyway.’ And then a week or so later the whole cycle would start up again.

  ‘I’d like to make a documentary about these men,’ he said one morning, jabbing at the paper. ‘I think I could get them to talk, and I think they’d have interesting things to say about what it means to be disgraced in this era. They’re all very different, of course, but collectively they comprise an interesting anthropological phenomenon. They’re guilty, I don’t question that, except in a few instances, but they’re also functioning as sacrificial figures. We’re entering a phase of political theatre not unlike what you had in China and Russia back in the day. The morning denunciation. The noon denial. The evening firing squad. Or in our case just the firing – so far. I’m thinking of “The Tarnished” for a title. How does that sound?’

  ‘How about “The Abusers”?’ Hanan said. ‘Or “The Harassers”?’

  She’d been sitting quietly next to him, working her phone and combining precisely measured amounts of grain and seed into her cereal bowl, seemingly uninterested in his words. It occurred to me that she still didn’t know anything about his own troubles in this department. I remembered his remark about not wanting to ‘put her to the test’.

  ‘That’s not the aspect of their stories I’d want to focus on,’ he said.

  ‘There is no other aspect.’

  She pointed to his newspaper, where a picture of Roger Ailes, all chins and jowls and baldness and bad skin, stared out. ‘You think people want to hear about how unfairly he’s been treated?’

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying.’

  ‘It isn’t?’

  ‘No!’

  He frowned, staring at the photo, and one could practically see the heavy machinery of his interest in this topic grinding through its cycles.

  His daughter, Alicia, emerged from the basement with her girlfriend, both of them groggy from a night on the town. ‘Morning, Daddy,’ she said sweetly, stooping for a kiss on the forehead. The tones and habits of childhood were still second nature to her. I wondered if it had ever crossed her mind that coming nonchalantly to her father’s breakfast table in a T-shirt and shorts with a female lover who, from the pale tuft of beard at her chin, seemed (though Marco hadn’t dared ask) to be switching gender – whether she’d considered that all this constituted a momentous breach with several thousand years of tyrannously inflexible social convention, especially concerning the behaviour of marriageable girls. No doubt it had; she was well informed and curious. She’d graduated from Vassar that summer and had a place lined up at Cornell for a masters in International Relations. But she certainly wasn’t burdened by the knowledge. She had the aura of inhabiting an entirely benign cosmos that had always and ever been thus.

  As if finally subdued by the combined effect of his daughter’s innocence and his girlfriend’s scepticism, Marco put down the paper and dropped the subject.

  But later that morning, after they’d all left the house, he started up again, arguing that the condition of being ‘tarnished’ was somehow intrinsically fascinating and worthy of study, and propounding, at some length, a theory that the older a man was, the more vulnerable he was to accusations of harassment, and the less likely to be given any benefit of the doubt, for the simple reason that it was repulsive to imagine older people having sex under any conditions at all.

  I listened with my usual non-committal expression. As I said, I wasn’t required to agree or disagree, just to provide him with an audience. Also, I genuinely didn’t know what I thought. My opinions about these cases were as unstable as his, lurching between an icy willingness to condemn every accused man without further questioning, and what appeared to be a perverse, atavistic loyalty to the patriarchy that would take hold of me like a temporary seizure, and from which I would emerge stunned at myself. I didn’t trust any of them.

  The documentary idea seemed to fade, but Marco’s agonisings over the subject persisted. They dominated our conversations at dinner when we went out after my class. And they were what prompted him into dragging himself across town for events such as that talk at the Irving Foundation, on rape and memory.

  After the talk ended, Marco and I took the subway back to Brooklyn. We discussed the presentation for a while. Marco made a caustic comment about the slideshow, likening the installations to the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History, and from there we got on to the topic of a new phenomenon I’d noticed among students, namely a growing reluctance to discuss anything to do with sex.

  ‘They’ll fall into this embarrassed silence whenever I raise the subject, which is problematic, since that’s what drives most of literature.’

  ‘Sex?’

  ‘Well, sex and money. Death too, though death they’re okay with, especially if it has to do with Female Character Sacrifice, which is
something they can get righteously indignant about. Money’s tricky since characters who have any are presumed a priori to be villains, which makes nonsense out of most nineteenth-century novels. But sex is impossible. They’ll just clam right up, and if you try to draw them out you start feeling like some pervy creep in a park.’

  In the crowded A train with its noisy teenage schoolkids primping and posing and flashing their smartphones like mating plumage, I told him about a class I’d taught on Anna Karenina, in which I’d tried to get the students to isolate the psychological principle underlying the opening descriptions of Anna, where Vronsky meets her and starts shifting his allegiances towards her, away from Kitty Shcherbatsky. I’d drawn their attention to Kitty’s extreme virginal reticence, and then pointed them to the contrasting passages where Vronsky and Anna dance the mazurka together, and where Anna takes the train through the blizzard back to her husband in Petersburg. I wanted them to grasp the particular quality of awakened sexuality in Anna that draws Vronsky to her, and the way Tolstoy frames it as something at once powerfully life-enhancing and highly dangerous. I’d told them to look at the phrases he uses to describe Anna in that first meeting; those repeated images of barely contained ‘animation’; of natural desire swelling up against the straitjacket of a dead marriage. Look at the ominous notes of painful pleasure on the train back to the husband she’s about to betray, I’d told them, where she feels as though something were being torn to pieces, but at the same time finds that feeling oddly exhilarating. I’d wanted them to feel how Tolstoy himself felt the iron law of social convention twisting his heroine’s amazing carnal vitality away from life and onto the path of destruction – the deathward track that supplies the gruesome terms for the big scene of sexual consummation, with its charnel-house imagery of murder and hacked bodies, its terrible mixture of ‘shame, rapture and horror’. But I couldn’t get anywhere. The more I talked about Kitty’s inviolable virginality and Anna’s awakened desire, the more stubbornly silent the students fell, and the more embarrassed they all looked.