Lurid & Cute

by Adam Thirlwell

  THE WAVE OF EROTICISM

  & to a new high-energy atmosphere

  For maybe just a few hours or days later I was once more filled with a gorgeous seam of energy, like I was on a megadose of vitamin supplements and antioxidants. Still I was oblivious to any form of imminent punishment. It really did seem that if we kept up this level of energy, we were on the brink of one final revelation, in the full pistachio light, and in particular it encouraged me to enlarge my personal recreations. I had never felt such power and talent for maintaining so many people. Our exploits offered a distinct sense of possibility. I became a monster of industriousness, as if everywhere opposing forces were going about their dire work, and I had to try to ward them off – like a game of computer tennis. Although if I really did sense that nothingness was depleting the world I lived in, the way the ghosts deplete things without you really knowing they are there, I cannot be sure. From this distance, it’s impossible to know. So many time frames were occurring all at once! They overlapped and dislocated. But still, I was definitely occupied. Like any other utopian or tycoon, I was very busy with the problems of my communications. Sometimes for instance I wanted to write to Romy an email that would sound something like this:

  Sometimes I wonder if I didn’t love you so much whether I would therefore already have you. Because if I didn’t love you as much as I do then I wouldn’t be as much wanting to be your friend as well, to give you the best advice possible for your future happiness, and therefore would not say that of course it is not certain that I will leave my wife – even though I know I will leave her, because I no longer love Candy, not as much as I love you – nor would I be counselling you at least to reserve some doubt or hesitation. Whereas if I loved you less I would be promising everything for real, and so would have you. Because you would be convinced of our future together. I will lose you because I love you.

  But even as I wrote that I knew that it was possible it was not true, that I was being sentimental, that the reason I could not promise anything absolutely, but only with small vaguenesses like commas or semicolons in my speech, was because I knew it was not true, I would not leave Candy, because in fact the love I felt for Candy was absolute and unmovable, which was precisely why Romy could not find it in herself to be convinced of our future together. I would lose her because I did not love her enough. Then neither of these possibilities seemed true. And that’s just one example of a wider problem.

  despite the multiple snags

  Not that I am into total teletransportation and time travel but definitely I think it happens very often, that on an average day you try to make yourself into some backflip or loop-the-loop: to take one edge of the present moment and then fold it back over the other edge, just very neatly superimpose the whole design – the way I used to fold sheets with my mother to help her with the laundry, going forwards, then backwards, then forwards again to meet in the middle, while the sheet got smaller and smaller. Such moments happen all the time and I think that’s how love works when it’s at its height, or at its worst: it’s like night school for the overworked, in a course on the true conditions of time and space. The true conditions of time, it then turns out, are always disappointing: snags, prematureness, belatedness, prophetic glimpses, misrecognition. Time, I would say, when I consider this account, is always in a strange and opaque state. No wonder, therefore, if it makes events very cloudy and also difficult to follow.

  like the silence of Candy’s conversations

  And at this particular staging post of the story I was conscious of one particular opaque problem, the absence of one scene, which was the scene where Candy talked to me about what she had witnessed that night at the fiesta, the privacy she had encroached on between Romy and me. From Candy I now expected possible shouting and other events: spaghetti and its red sauce splurged against the walls. And perhaps I did want that, very secretly. But as always we said nothing. Which meant that from then on Candy had this silent power, if knowledge not deployed is a kind of power, which I think it is. The image I had of her was of a person enthroned: there she sat, holding the sceptre of her private knowledge, and I had no way of knowing what to do. Whenever Candy paused in any conversation I would wonder if what she was really contemplating was this image of Romy and Dolores, of Romy somehow talking about me in this manner that was rightfully only a manner that Candy possessed. It had only been a moment, like a sudden flicker of light – but a flicker is enough for setting your terrors into motion, for understanding that two people may be in more direct communication than you previously suspected or imagined. I mean, two people will seem all the more familiarly linked if that link or association is seen to be unconscious. And to those of you who are saying So tell her! Tell Candy everything! You are a monster! She does not deserve you! – like we are at a pantomime and I am the villainous creature – then I would say, I understand this argument, but still – is it really not possible to mean two things at once? At no point was anything I did insincere, with her or with other people. Perhaps to you this is already crazed, because what is more insincere than to lie or deceive but me I am not so sure, I mean, I am not so sure that deception is so wrong, if the alternative is to make a definitive end to something. For why shouldn’t things happen simultaneously? While also, if I had to lie, could it be that Candy was to blame – for the fact that my small transgressions would be punished so mercilessly? If I imagined telling Candy everything, I mean about Romy and my infidelity, I felt that surely she would leave me and be angry and depleted – and therefore naturally I could not tell her. Surely her potential lack of forgiveness or understanding was part of the same problem? And it was meaning that, despite my best intentions, I just had this nagging feeling that I was losing the power to be absorbed – the way you might look at a portrait of a courtesan in some provincial museum just before that museum closes, when you are tired and you want to get out of there to find a beer or milkshake and so the beauty of this courtesan is powerless, because it is irrelevant to your current needs. And so I would lie awake in the night and list other things that had lost their one-time lustre: the old Coney Island, the old Soho, the old Kreuzberg, the old Belleville, and so on …

  impasses of desire

  For our dialogue was listless and happy, at the same time, in the manner of –

  CANDY

  You OK, cookie?

  ME

  Me? Oh fine, I’m fine.

  CANDY

  Because you seem –

  ME

  No really.

  CANDY

  Really?

  That’s basically a composite summary of our nocturnal interactions, like one of those puzzle pictures that the police dream up to catch the roaming killer. Whenever the real approached, I was very careful to remove it very gently from the area, the way you remove a child from dangerous machinery. To borrow from an old authority, we no more said anything specific than we let the hound off the leash on a busy road: for you had no idea what mazy craziness the hound of a conversation would lead to if something specific were ever said. I let her words just disintegrate into the open suburban air, out there among the hangars and the water parks in the distances, in this amphibian space, with its roofs and grass, pavements and furrows, shops and miniature sky. And maybe, sure, there are just some things desire cannot do and one of them is last, or last for ever, or in the same way. It’s maybe as unlikely as the B-movies where the killer pursues his prey for at least three hours of screen time. It just seems improbable, I mean, to so continuously care. But still, it made me resolved to do better. Perhaps once I might have tried to explain this account of the powers ranged against our marriage with talk of angels and cherubs and cupids, I mean that might have been the vocabulary of previous gentler eras, but I think if I had to describe the new sensation I could say with more accuracy that the bedroom rarely now had that heavy clouding stink about it, the lovely sourness that is the proof that liquids of every kind are being produced underneath your duvet. We would kiss and kiss,
Candy and I, and it was like one of those cable shows you come to late one night where you don’t know what’s going on, you just keep watching because it’s late and you’re tired and you are hoping that soon some minor plot moment will arrive and illuminate the whole perspective. And yet of course it doesn’t. But I wanted to carry on because I did not want her to be sad, and so I would lick at Candy between the legs and sometimes look expectantly up, but her face was turned away and then it was me who felt sad, in my turn. I would stay there looking at her, just gazing between her legs and wondering what had happened to me, and wondering if even the way she tasted had changed, even though that must be impossible, like whereas before it had this penumbra that was mineral and soiled, now it was just the taste of itself, and therefore not dirty enough.

  & other problems of ghostly communication

  When I tried to explain this to Wyman, he blamed it on the ghosts. For Wyman believes in ghosts, it is one of his many outmoded charms that I appreciate, and I was starting to agree with him. Or at least, I was starting to understand how opposing forces might exist and once you admit that it’s hard not to make them human in some way. According to Wyman the ghosts existed in every means of communication ever invented – including the carrier pigeon and gramophone – and perhaps Wyman was right. There were ghosts against me in particular in the telephone lines and in the wireless connections humming in every room. For the problem is that no one really exists when you write messages or emails to them, or talk to them very briefly on the phone. I’m sure in some way we do know this, which is why we think it is important to build fast cars, giant hovercraft, and all the other systems to bring people alone together in the same room, but at the same time you have to remember the far greater power of computer screens, miniature phones, and all their small developments. There are so many toys for making people disappear, and for making yourself disappear, too. My correspondences! Maybe it’s possible that modern times are a perfect paradise of communication, but still, it comes with other problems, especially if you have a nervous disposition – like the various ways in which someone’s privacy can be observed. And for me this centred on Romy and her mania for instant messaging – for I had never had this before, this love of messaging, and in particular I had not therefore known this particular form of anxiety about another person, where you could see whether or not they were there, or could see that recently they had been there and therefore seen your messages, and yet not replied, or even in Romy’s case I would wake up and then be able to see that until four in the morning she had been messaging, but not to me, and that was a horrible worry, to be thinking who it was she had been writing to, and why she had been awake so late and never told me she was going out. Just as in particular if we were then arguing I felt so helpless, being able to see whether or not she was typing a reply, or waiting – and so time would stall there, just coagulate in pools – and these new forms of communication only made me realise how jealous I was of her, how avidly I needed her attention and yet had no right to this attention. Because it really is not a good feeling, to realise how jealous you can be, when you yourself have invented the situation. And so I demanded she do impossible things, like that she entirely stop having sex with Epstein, or only have sex in the most boring possible way (How can I do that? she said. You know I like sex), like I was the movie mogul who wanted to sign off the final edit. But I could not help it. The jealousy kept on working inside me, the way water keeps on rocking inside a bucket when you set it down.

  ME

  I don’t want to control you.

  ROMY

  You just mean you don’t want me to control you.

  ME

  I don’t know. I mean, maybe. How should I know?

  ROMY

  It’s like we’re in some long-distance relationship. I never wanted that.

  ME

  But I’m here.

  ROMY

  But not really.

  ME

  There are some moments when I don’t feel separate at all. Just moments when I hear your voice.

  ROMY

  We’ve never been separate. Not really.

  I guess it’s possible for there to be a happiness that is also an absolute sadness. For it was only with lying and secrecy that such wonders had even been allowed me in the first place – but at the same time it was this very secrecy which was now warping all the feelings, and not allowing them the usual relaxation of tempo. You could only have such feelings with secrecy, but the secrecy then changed them – it made them emerge slightly melted, like a plastic spatula you leave too long in the squelching pot of cholent. But still, the feelings were there – and what are you meant to do with feelings? They’re very controlling, feelings: they make life very difficult and painful. To not include dark jealousy in my thoughts! How could I have been so careless? I had never thought in maintaining these relations how often I would think about Romy and imagine or know that she was in bed with Epstein or nearly. It was a tribulation. When I thought about Romy and how I would maybe never sleep with her again, that never would I be the one to push her mouth further over my red penis, or watch her come while she sprawled in front of me with her hand draped over her, as if in modesty or privacy, these things made me as sad as the ancestral pedlar on the boat across the Atlantic, never to see the shtetl again.

  from which our hero tries to find erotic solace

  I think it was to avoid such thoughts that at this time I also abandoned all restraint. Or possibly it would be kinder to me to say that restraint abandoned me and I could not get it back. I had this terrible weakness that I was still amazed by sex. For this I possibly blame the way there had been this whole new violence when I was in bed with Candy. It seemed to allow new depredations in my thinking. Because I so much thought of women as distant and in control, that every time I realised they were as much a mess as I was, and in the grip of some fantasy or confusion, I felt this mixture of tenderness and desire and the wish to see what happens next. It’s a complicated position to be in because in general also I find it difficult, to know how to want to sleep with a girl without it being scary or very wrong, like I am the person skinning a woman alive and displaying her hide. I am the primeval swamp and all its swampiness. But still, I found it very easy to talk to people and to ask them about themselves, and when you do that after a while you can ask them to do anything, and mostly I think they will. To Wyman I explained it in cruder terms.

  ME

  Because I have this problem.

  WYMAN

  What?

  ME

  That I am really good in bed.

  WYMAN

  Oh sure –

  ME

  Is an affliction, or a curse.

  WYMAN

  Huh –

  ME

  I’m just saying. It makes life very difficult. It must be easier for the men who just lie on top of women and are heavy. I do think so.

  Not that every scene was perfect, not at all, like for instance there was Shannon who due to a strange quirk of our time-tabling was on her period both times we were in bed together, and while personally I adored this, I adored the viscous stickiness inside her and the way my penis emerged with its small tidemark of brown blood, it seemed to upset her, nevertheless; or there was Cassity who turned out to be a virgin and when I held her in my arms she trembled, but still I carried on; or Timeka with whom I did nothing but talk about our childhoods, and she haunted me perhaps the most of all – but nevertheless I was glad of all these experiences, however imperfect, I really was, I would not have given up this knowledge for anything. For when you are in that bar with the girl who has the ponytail and biker jacket and is very tall and gaunt and pale and therefore something you desire –

  — Keep going, said Wyman –

  – then it is much more of a temptation to sleep with her than not to sleep with her because you know in your heart that this will be a very interesting experience, and that in fact that experience is very close and possible, w
hereas the dweeb who has no such confidence will be experiencing in this bar many feelings of anxiety and worry that in the end the whole experience may not be so hot, for him or her, and then will be able to convert these anxieties into marble moral towers, columns of reasoning, such that when he leaves that bar without her he will in fact have really not experienced any choice at all, even if to him it feels like he has become the noblest stoic in the world. Me, I have no such luxury. I cannot help myself make her happy and eventually say something like: