by jwilde
Sodomy pained Nicola, but not literally; it was its local prevalence, as it were, that pained her so greatly. It was the only thing about herself that she couldn't understand and wouldn't forgive. How generally prevalent was it (and an unwonted humiliation, this, to seek safety in numbers) ? It wasn't like masturbation, which everyone secretly knew everyone secretly did, apart from the odd fanatic or ostrich or liar. Masturbation was an open secret until you were thirty. Then it was a closed secret. Even modern literature shut up about it at that point, pretty much. Nicola held this silence partly responsible for the industrial dimensions of contemporary pornography - pornography, a form in which masturbation was the only subject. Everybody masturbated all their lives. On the whole, literature declined the responsibility of this truth. So pornography had to cope with it. Not elegantly or reassuringly. As best it could.
When you came to sodomy . . . Instinct declared that nowhere near everybody did it, but one could harbour one's suspicions here too. Nicola remembered reading, with a blush of pleasure, that fully seventy-five per cent of female v. male divorce suits featured sodomy under one subhead or another, anything from physical cruelty to unreasonable demands. How unreasonable was it? How cruel? What did it mean when a woman wanted it? The tempting location, so close to its better sister . . . But wherever it was (in the armpit, behind the kneecap), it would have its attractions. Be literal, and look at the human mouth. The mouth was a good distance away. And the mouth got it too.
Literature did go on about sodomy, and increasingly. This hugely solaced Nicola Six. Now, if she could consider it as a twentieth-century theme . . . Just as Keith Talent would be proud to represent his country in an England shirt, so Nicola, in garter-belt and stockings and ankle-bracelet, would be perfectly prepared to repre- sent her century. It started, she supposed, with Joyce, who was clearly interested in it: a murky nostalgic. Lawrence was interested in it: earth, blood, will (yes, and enforced degradation). Beckett was interested in it: a callowly uncomplicated yearning (Nicola decided) to cause distress and preferably damage, trauma, to the female parts. As for the Americans, they all seemed to be interested in it: with John Updike, it was mainly just another thing humans could do, and everything human interested Updike; of Norman Mailer one didn't need to inquire too deeply (a mere timekiller, before greater violence); Philip Roth, with what must be farcical irony, bedroom-farcical irony, refers to it as 'anal love'. V. S. Naipaul, on the other hand, who was very interested in it, speaks of 'a sexual black mass'. Well, black, anyway. And a black hole was mass, pure mass, infinite mass.
No, not everybody did it. But Nicola did it. At a certain point (and she always vowed she wouldn't, and always knew she would) Nicola tended to redirect her lover's thrusts, down there in the binary system . . . She had a thing of readying herself with the third finger of the left hand. The marriage finger. It was appalling, the crassness with which the symbolism suggested itself: the marriage finger, seeking a different ring, in the place whence no babies came. It was the only time she ever lost control. Not during (certainly not), but after, later, with silent tears of dismay. How much had she cried about it? How much tearfall? How many inches a year?
What saddened and incensed her was the abdication of power, so craven, the surrender so close to home. And power was what she was in it for. Nicola had lived deliciously; but she was promiscuous on principle, as a sign of emancipation, of spiritual freedom, freedom from men. She was, she believed, without appetite, and prided herself on her passionless brilliance in bed. But then, the subtle rearrangement, and the abject whisper . . . And it poisoned everything, somehow. Again, not literally. Although Nicola liked doing what nobody else did, although she liked danger, she didn't like that kind of danger, vandal danger, with no form to it. She was promiscuous, but her lovers weren't (they usually had wives instead); and her gynaecologist assured her, one night, when she still had time to care about such distant matters, that it was safe enough if you did it last. Well, when else would you do it - would you do the last thing? The thing itself was the last thing. It always seeded the end of the affair. And Nicola took some comfort from that fact: maybe it was just her strategy for sending love back the other way.
The only other compensation was an artistic one. At least it was congruous with her larger tribulation; at least sodomy added up. Most types have their opposite numbers. Groups have groupies. There are molls for all men, and vice versa. The professional has his perkie; scowlers get scowlies; so smuggles, loudies, cruellies. So the failed suicide must find a murderer. So the murderer must find a murderee.
After about fifteen minutes Nicola was sure that Keith was going to be late - significantly late. She changed her plan. She adopted Plan B. Her life had a Plan B, or it had had: to live on. But intimations of early middle age had settled that. With these intimations, other intimations: the second half of life; and natural death. These intimations were very informative, they were packed with news -and no thanks! You got old quick, like the planet. Like the planet, you could only prostrate yourself before the wonders of modern medicine, modern can-do. But can-do was nothing, when compared to already-done. You had to trust in cosmic luck. The heavenly operation, facelift, transplant. Divine rain.
She changed her immediate plans. Had Keith been prompt, he would have 'surprised' Nicola in tennis shorts, T-shirt and reversed baseball cap, the outfit she wore when, in an ecstasy of vexation, she did her weekly dusting. But he was late. So she took off her shorts and put her jeans back on and coolly went to the shops with the canvas bag.
When Nicola walked the streets she was lit by her personal cinematographer, nothing too arty either, a single spotlight trained from the gods. She had a blue nimbus, the blue of sex or sadness. Any eyes that were available on the dead-end street would find their way to her: builders in the gutted houses, a frazzled rep in a cheap car, a man alone at home pressing his face against the window pane with a snarl. There were three shops at the junction: tobacconist's (and sub-post-office); Asian grocery (and off-licence); and, incongruously, a travel agent's, a shop that sold travel. At the first Nicola bought fuses, and picked up her French cigarettes. The tiny old creature behind the counter (impossible to entertain the idea that she had ever been a woman) ordered the cigarettes especially; and Nicola felt the ghost of an obligation to give warning to stop: I can tell her I've quit, she thought. At the grocer's she bought lemons, tonic, tomato juice and what she confidently hoped would be her last-ever plastic bottle of toilet cleanser. The tobacconist overcharged her, the grocer gave short measure . . . Passing the travel agent's, with its great lists of destinations (and prices, hysterically reduced, in normal times, but now brutally upped: even Amsterdam cost the earth), Nicola abruptly realized that she would never go away again. Would she, ever? Not even a few days with Guy in Aix-en-Provence or a weekend with Keith in Ilfracombe or Jersey or some other paradise of duty free? No. There just wouldn't be time.
On the way back, near the entrance to the dead-end street, she was stared at by two builders who sat half-naked eating Scotch eggs and drinking beer on the porch steps of a corner house they were supposedly or at any rate cursorily renovating. Nicola had noticed them before, this exemplary pair. One was sixteen or seventeen, lean and suntanned and wholly delighted by the onset of his powers; the other, the senior man, puffy, thirty, with long hair and few teeth, and quite ruined, as if he got a year older every couple of months. The boy climbed to his feet as Nicola approached.
'Miss World!' he said in a quavering voice. He wore an expression of ironic entreaty. 'Give us a smile. Please. Ah, come on — light up. It might never happen!'
Nicola smiled. Nicola turned to him as she passed and smiled beautifully.
She arranged herself for Keith's visit with considerable care, despite the fact that she knew how things would go anyway, more or less. Of course, she was in a funny situation with reality (though this never occurred to her with any weight), coaxing it into a shape she knew it already had — somewhere, in phanto
m potentia . . . Simply doing the next thing that came naturally, Nicola had what she called a whore's bath, standing naked on a towel before the basin and the mirror. As she washed, she mentally developed an erotic design. It would be humiliating, and quite unnecessary, to think too specifically on the matter; but one had to be prepared. Taking an example at random, the pretty divots of her armpits, so aromatic and erogenous, so often praised and slobbered over, clearly such excellent value — these might have to go. He might want them shorn. Not yet. It would depend.
Her underwear she selected without a flicker of hesitation: suspender-belt, stockings, brassiere - but all white this time, all white. She sat on the bed, tipping backwards, then stood up with her head bent sharply, making the right adjustments. Nicola was amazed — Nicola was consternated — by how few women really understood about underwear. It was a scandal. If the effortless enslavement of men was the idea, or one of the ideas (and who had a better idea?), why halve your chances by something as trivial as a poor shopping decision? In her travels Nicola had often sat in shared bedrooms and cabins and boudoirs and powder parlours, and watched debutantes, predatory divorcees, young hostesses, even reasonably successful good-time girls shimmying out of their cocktail dresses and ballgowns to reveal some bunched nightmare of bloomers, tights, long Johns, Y-fronts. A prosperous hooker whom she had hung out with for a while in Milan invariably wore panties that reminded Nicola, in both texture and hue, of a bunion pad. To ephemeral flatmates and sexual wallflowers at houseparties and to other under-equipped rivals Nicola had sometimes carelessly slipped the underwear knowledge. It took about ten seconds. Six months later the ones that got it right would be living in their own mews houses in Pimlico and looking fifteen years younger. But they mostly got it wrong. Over-elaboration or lack of self-love, or sheer lack of talent; plus minor vagaries, like the persistent and profitless fallacy of black underwear, which showed the right brothelly instinct, and beat boxer shorts and training-bra, but missed the point. Perhaps women couldn't believe how simple men really were - how it could all be decided in five minutes at the hosiery store. At this particular end of this particular century, they wanted tight bright white underwear, white underwear. They wanted the female form shaped and framed, packaged and gift-wrapped, stylized, cartoonified, and looking, for a moment at least, illusorily pure. They wanted the white lie of virginity. Men were so simple. But what did that do to the thoughts of women, to the thoughts of women like Nicola Six?
Never in her life, not ever, had Nicola decisively discarded any item of clothing. The flat's large second bedroom had become a supercloset - it was like a boutique in there, the suits, the party dresses, the theatrical costumes and disguises, the belts, the scarves, the hats. Imelda Marcos herself might have wondered at the acreage of Nicola's shoes ... If Keith Talent were dressing her now, if Keith were designing her (she speculated), how would he want things to go? What did he want, at the top of the stairs? Nicola in thigh-high pink boots, rayon mini-skirt and bursting blouse. Yes, either that or Nicola in low-corsaged opal balldress and elbow-length ivory gloves, with a sable-trimmed brick-quilted dolman, a comb of brilliants and a panache of osprey in her hair. Queen of Diamonds, Queen of Hearts. But of course you couldn't do it quite like that.
'Come on up,' she said.
As Keith followed her heavily into the apartment, Nicola did something right out of character: she cursed her fate. Then she swivelled and inspected him, from arid crown to Cuban heels, as he cast his scavenging blue eyes around the room: Keith, stripped of all charisma from pub and street. It wasn't the posture, the scrawniness of the shanks and backside, the unpleasant body scent (he smelled as if he had just eaten a mustard-coated camel), the drunken scoop of his gaze - unappealing though these features certainly were. Just that Nicola saw at once with a shock (I knew it all along, she said to herself) that the capacity for love was extinct in him. It was never there. Keith wouldn't kill for love. He wouldn't cross the road, he wouldn't swerve the car for love. Nicola raised her eyes to heaven at the thought of what this would involve her in sexually. And in earnest truth she had always felt that love in some form would be present at her death.
'Well let's get started,' she said, directing Keith towards the kitchen and its dead machines. Once there, Nicola folded her arms and watched, increasingly astonished by how things evidently stood between Keith and the inanimate world. Such flexed and trembling helplessness, such temper-loss and equipment-abuse. She was inept in the kitchen herself; she had never, for instance, produced anything even remotely edible from the electric cooker, now long disused. But this frenzy of domestic quackery . . . Keith went at the ironing-board like the man in the deckchair joke. The tube of the hoover became a maddened python in his grasp. After his final misadventure with the coffee-grinder plug and the screwdriver Nicola handed him a paper tissue for his gouged thumb and said in a puzzled voice,
'But you're completely hopeless. Or is it just being drunk?'
'It's all right, it's all right,' said Keith rapidly. 'See, I don't normally do none of this myself. I got a team in White City. Real craftsmen. Here we go.'
With difficulty - there were blood and sweat and tears on the bakelite by now - Keith at last wrenched off the cap. Together they stared down at the pastel tricolour of the plug's innards. Their faces were close; Nicola could hear the soft baffled panting through Keith's open mouth.
'Looks okay,' he volunteered.
'It could be the fuse.'
'Yeah. Could be.'
'Change it,' she suggested, offering him a new fuse from the paper bag.
Chipping a yellow fingernail, swearing, dropping screws, confusing fuses, Keith accomplished this deed. He then slapped the plug into the wall, pressed the switch, and briskly actuated the coffee-grinder. Nothing happened.
'Well,' said Keith after a while. 'It's not the fuse.'
Then could you take a look at the lavatory seat at least.'
The bathroom was unexpectedly spacious — carpeted, and full of unnecessary air; there seemed to be a great distance between the fat bathtub and the red chaise-longue. Here was a room, here was a set that had experienced a lot of nakedness, a lot of secretions and ablutions and reflections. Through the round window above the bath the sun cast its spotlight. Keith's face flickered or rippled as Nicola closed the door behind them.
The toilet,' he announced with savage clarity. He approached the commode and raised the wooden lid. Nicola tingled suddenly — her armpits tingled. She knew what Keith was looking at: the small faecal stain on the cold white slope. On seeing it there earlier, Nicola had resolved to clean the bowl. She knew, however, that if she didn't do it at once, then she wouldn't do it. She hadn't done it at once. So she hadn't done it.
The seat wobbles,' she said. 'And it slips.'
As Keith knelt and toyed doubtfully with the lid, Nicola sat herself down on the red sofa. She assumed a thinker's pose, chin on fist. Keith glanced her way and saw what was there to see: the light-grey cashmere, the white stockings, the brown underflesh of her crossed left leg.
'Wobbly toilet,' Keith said to her in a gurgling voice. 'Can't have that. Might do yourself an injury. Might ruin your married life.'
Nicola stared at him. There was perhaps an infinitesimal swelling in the orbits of her eyes. Several replies offered themselves to her with urgency, like schoolboys raising their hands to please the pretty teacher. One was 'Get out of here, you unbelievable lout'; another, remarkably (and this would be delivered in a dull monotone), was 'Do you like dirty sex, Keith?' But she stayed silent. Who cared? There wasn't going to be any married life. She stood up.
'You're dripping blood. Here.' She fetched a tin from the shelf. The light changed as she moved towards him.
Now she applied plaster to the meat of Keith's gently quivering thumb. Seen close up, flesh looks genital: minutely hair-lanced, minutely pocked. If his hands looked genital, what would his genitals look like, close up? The physiological effects of this thought told her all over again
that he was the one. Their hands dropped. In different dizzinesses they saw, against the cold bowl, his bright blood meandering through the dark of her waste. This is disgusting, she thought. But it's too late now.
'Through here,' she said.
Five seconds later Keith was standing in the passage as Nicola zestfully loaded him up with ironing-board, iron, hoover, coffee-grinder. While she did this she talked to him as if he were subhuman, or merely representative. Would you very kindly. A great help. If you could also. Be most grateful. . .She loomed above him. Keith's Cuban heels began to edge backwards down the stairs. He peered up at her, so very hampered. He looked like a busker. He looked like a one-man band.
She said, 'I'd better give you a deposit,' and reached for something on the side table. She came closer. 'The man in the Black Cross. Guy.'
'Yeah. Guy,' said Keith.
'He's someone - he's someone of importance, isn't he, Keith.'
'Definitely.'
'Oh really?' Nicola had expected Keith to balk at any favourable mention of Guy Clinch. But his tone was respectful, even admiring. At this moment he seemed to need all the support and associational glamour he could get.
'Definitely. He works in the City. He's titled. I seen it on his chequebook. The Honourable, innit,' said Keith shrewdly.
Nicola stepped forward. With her fingers she was rolling two fifty-pound notes together. Keith twisted himself, in preparation. 'Wait,' she said. 'You'll drop everything.' He was wearing a black fishnet shirt with a patched chest pocket. But his darts were in that. So she rolled the money tight and placed it in his mouth. 'Is he rich?' she asked.
Keith worked the tubed notes sideways, as if his lips were used to having money between them. 'Definitely.'
'Good. There's a thing you and I might do together. A money thing. Have him call me. Will you do that? Soon?'
He twisted again, and nodded.
