Heavy Water and Other Stories

by Martin Amis

  “They should be fuckin’ killed, men.”

  Cigarette smoke. Cleve didn’t turn. This would be Kico. Kico: his leather pants festooned with color-coded scarves and plumes and cummerbunds (why didn’t he just stick with orange, which meant Anything?), his blood-seeping eyes, his feathery sweat-dotted mustache.

  “Take them to fuckin’ Madagascar. That’s what they need.”

  “Come on, Kico. Stop this ugly shit. Wow. Look at that.”

  Onscreen, straight cowboys from the Reno Straight Rodeo pranced down Market Street, brandishing the flag of Nevada—and the rainbow banners, which now served (they said) as the standard of all California straights.

  “So you think they okay. They the same.”

  “Not the same, but they have lives to live. More than that, you could say it’s a tough call. Being straight.”

  “They sick, men.”

  Next I’ll be talking with Merv Cusid, said the television, who is hammering together a straight-rights plank to be presented at the convention in August. And then came a shot that even Cleve couldn’t smoothly breathe through or quite meet the eye of: a green hillside, with bright blankets strewn around, and, in queasy propaganda slow-mo, women and young children at play.

  “Thass it. I see that I’m like, let me out of here.”

  “Nature’s straight,” said Cleve with a sudden nod.

  “And thass what they are, men. Fuckin’ animals.”

  “Live and let live. Where’s Grove? Resting?”

  “Sleeping.”

  So Cleve, who had not had sex at the gym, blew Kico in the front hall and then set about making dinner: a Gorgonzola soufflé to be followed by the Parma ham confit with pomegranate, papaw, papaya, and pomelo. Grove appeared, in his robe, and after a while silently served Cleve a glass of chilled Sauvignon. When he’d taken a shower, Grove reappeared, with a white towel on his hips. Grove was in great shape. Cleve was in great shape. The street, the city—the world they were living in—might as well have been called Great Shape. Over dinner they had a long, loud, and poisonously personal argument about which was better: Così fan tutte or Die Zauberflöte. They made it up while Grove did the decaf.

  It was too late to go to any of the things they might have gone to, the gallery openings or moonlit yard sales, the long-dong or class-ass contests, the recitals or lectures, the dinner discos—the antique-sale previews, the travel-agent office parties. So why not have a quiet one? Thus they crouched round the low table in the living room and picked through the magazines. Even Cleve, at such a time, was ready to put aside his Trollope or his Dostoyevsky and pick through the magazines. And smoke a little herb. The contemplation of great texts, in Grove’s company, made Cleve self-conscious. Or perhaps it was Cressida that made him self-conscious: He could almost hear his self-consciousness, like a shell’s imitation of the shore. Even when they are in great shape, hypochondriacs have an illness they can worry about: hypochondria. Cleve, this night, was paranoid about his hypochondria. It might get so much worse… He kept inspecting Grove: his kitteny hair, his tank top, his mustache. The way he read magazines backwards, with his lips crinkled in stoical inanity. Of all Cleve’s lovers, only Grainge had ever shared his intellectual curiosity and literary passion. Only Grainge…

  Soon after eleven Grove looked up from his copy of Torso and said, “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the Toilet.”

  Cleve looked up from his copy of Blueboy and said, “You know, that was pretty funny. The first few times you said it. Besides I know you don’t hit the Bowl anymore.”

  “Who said?”

  “You go to Folsom Prison.”

  “Who said?”

  “Fraze,” said Cleve.

  When Grove was out the door Cleve went to bed with the little TV.… All this straight talk was following him around. At the Democratic National Convention, to be held in New York, the straight caucus was larger than the delegations of twenty states. There was even serious speculation about a straight vice-presidential candidate on the Ted Kennedy ticket. Cleve’s mustache smiled. Dumb thought: Say Ted Kennedy was straight. Imagine it. Wouldn’t that, in a wild way, be kind of Hot?

  Grove woke him, around four, as usual. He fought off his clothes and crashed down onto the bed—comfortingly redolent, as usual, of Tattoo and amyl nitrate.

  In The New York Review of Books Cleve saw an ad for an “all-straight sea cruise,” Philadelphia to Maine. Why did this haunt him so? He found he no longer laughed when friends cracked straight jokes. How many straights does it take to change a lightbulb? He seemed to see more and more straights in the street now, not just in the immediate environs of Greenwich Avenue but over on Eighth Street, over on Washington Square. Cleve continued to put in the hours at the gym. The great bolts of his shoulder muscles now brushed the very lobes of his ears. His superb upper body: would it be truer to say it was under control or out of control? Cleve’s gym was called Magnificent Obsession. How often he would plod from Magnificent Obsession to the Idle Hour, from the Idle Hour to Magnificent Obsession…

  His hypochondria took a turn for the worse—or did he mean for the better? Because his hypochondria had never felt hardier or more vigorous. Cleve was already an exorbitant devourer of health sections and medical columns and pathology pullouts in the newspapers and magazines. But now a fellow hypochondriac—and self-topiarist—at Magnificent Obsession kept feeding him more and more gear. These days Cleve was even reading The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. In its pages he had started seeing references to what they were now calling Straight Cervix Syndrome. And seeing the straights in the street Cleve would wonder if something was waiting for them, something of the same size as their newfound tautness and address.

  Cleve broke up with Grove. Grove with his entirely unromantic untidiness, his intelligently selective consumerism, his dharmic trances, his foul temper, his plans for the afterlife, and his 2.7 nightly sexual contacts. For a while Cleve was two-point-sevening it himself. But now he had fallen for a talented young chinoiserist called Harv.

  “Pride and Prejudice?” said Cressida.

  Every winter Cleve reread half of Jane Austen. Three novels, one in November, one in December, one in January. Every spring he reread the other half. This was January and this was Pride and Prejudice.

  “Yeah,” he said. “For like the ninth time. What I can’t get over is—every time I read it I’m on the edge of my seat, rooting for Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy. You know—will Elizabeth finally make it with Charlotte Lucas? Will Mr. Darcy finally get it on with Mr. Bingley? I mean, I know everything’s going to turn out fine. But I still suffer. It’s ridiculous.”

  “I always thought Elizabeth would have been happier with the De Bourgh girl. What’s her name?”

  “Anne. It’s weird Jane Austen never had a girlfriend. I mean she had all those babies, like you had to do. But she never got laid.”

  “And she understood the human heart so well.”

  “I want to know something Jane Austen couldn’t tell me,” said Cleve. “I want to know what he’s like in the sack.”

  “Who? Drink your coffee.”

  Cleve drank his coffee. Santos and Java: cappuccino.

  Cleve and Cressida had met up here at the Idle Hour—oh, a whole bunch of times. He would say quite frankly, if asked, that he enjoyed her company. Perhaps, too, he felt it was by no means unsophisticated to number among his acquaintances an intelligent straight friend. “Mr. Darcy,” he said. “I have to know what Mr. Darcy’s like in the sack.”

  “Mr. Darcy. So do I. Masterful.”

  “Majestic. But gracious also.”

  “Tender.”

  “But kind of strenuous. ‘Fitzwilliam’ Darcy. That’s so Hot.”

  “Presumably he…?”

  “Oh, for sure.” Cleve hesitated, and shrugged, and said, “I think we can safely assume that it’s Mr. Bingley who takes it in the ass.”

  “Absolutely. That’s a lead-pipe cinch.”

  He considered h
er. Most of the women Cleve knew tended toward the extremes of high burnish or unanxious self-neglect. Little smocked refrigerators under pudding-bowl haircuts, like Deb and Mandy in the adjacent apartment on Twenty-second Street. Or plumed icons of war paint and body sculpture, like his colleagues Trudy (in Marketing) or Danielle (in Graphics). What did the gloss and finish of Trudy and Danielle have to say? That they were interested, active, ready? What was spelled out by the dumpy torpor of Mandy and Deb? Refrigerators and pudding bowls? A nondieting pact? He had thought, at the outset, that Cressida had the typical straight look, the no-comment look, the look that just said, Don’t mind me. Composed, but dutiful, somehow. Straight. But just recently, Cleve felt, Cressida had taken on a glow, a color, a tangible charge of life. Was she… Hot? Or just hot. There she sat, loosening her raincoat and blowing the fringe off her brow. Cressida’s so-called husband, John, who held New York in disdain (straight pride, hereabouts, wasn’t proud enough for that fiery separatist), had taken his big mouth off to San Francisco, where he was a big cheese, or a big noise, on the National Straight Task Force. Being straight was his career. Still, Cleve didn’t like to ask about Cressida’s plans for the future.

  Now she said, “Do you read much straight fiction? Everyone tries Proust, I guess. And E. M. Forster. And Wilde.”

  “I didn’t even know Forster was straight until I read Maurice.”

  “Yes, he kind of broke cover with that one. By common consent his least good book. That’s often the way with straight fiction. It’s as if they needed the secrecy. Without it the inner tension goes. They get overrelaxed.”

  Cleve said shyly, “I read Breeders.”

  “John hated that book. I thought it was pretty accurate. About the whole…”

  “Orientation,” said Cleve, with delicacy.

  “It’s not an orientation.”

  “Sorry. Preference.”

  “It’s definitely not a preference. Take my word for it.”

  “What would you say it is?”

  “It’s a destiny. Am I dying, or is it incredibly hot in here?”

  “It’s incredibly hot in here,” said Cleve—to reassure her. But then, suddenly, it was incredibly hot in there. Cressida stood up and removed her raincoat. And it seemed to Cleve that he was breathing the very snarls of the coffee machines, and that the monstrous slabs of his upper body were entirely soaked and coated by their sweaty gas. More than this: he was breathing the hot flash of biology.

  “You’re pregnant.”

  “So I am. Not very pregnant.”

  He was already thinking that Cressida looked a lot less pregnant than Mandy, the little butter-mountain in the next apartment, under her cuboid togas and tepees. Cressida’s belly, so mildly and yet so insidiously distended. One of Cleve’s therapists had told him that hypochondria was a form of solipsism. But now he looked across the table at Cressida, who was someone else, and felt the red alert of clinical fear.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be,” she said, and briskly added: “You know, maybe you read more straight fiction than you think. I’m convinced Lawrence was straight.”

  “You mean T. E. Lawrence? Sure. T. E. was straight.”

  “Not T. E., D. H.”

  “D. H.!”

  “D. H. When I read him I keep thinking, God, what a jam this guy is. Hemingway, too.”

  “Hemingway? Come on.”

  She was smiling. “An obvious het. He’s like Burton Else.”

  “Come on.”

  “An obvious het. A howling het.”

  “Hemingway,” said Cleve. “Hemingway…”

  They said goodbye on Greenwich Avenue. He stood on the curb, his hardback of Pride and Prejudice almost fully concealed in the chasm of his armpit, and watched her walk toward Christopher Street.

  Harv was there when Cleve got home. How about this: Harv’s birthday was seven months away, and he was talking about it already. The Antique Mart on Nineteenth Street was previewing a new glassware display, so they looked in on that, and then had a couple of white wines in the Tan Track, their neighborhood bar, followed by a simple supper of cottage pie in the Chutney Ferret, their neighborhood bistro. Back at the apartment Cleve planned the menu for the little dinner party he would be staging that Thursday. Arn was coming over, with Orv, and Fraze was coming over, with Grove; Arn and Fraze used to be together, and Grove had once had a thing with Orv, but now Grove was with Fraze and Orv was with Arn. Cleve intended to prepare marjoram ravioli and pumpkin satchels Provençale… He was doing the thing he always did after his meetings with Cressida, seeing his life as a stranger might see it: an unsympathetic stranger. Cleve kept eyeing Harv, who lay on the chesterfield, reading. Harv: his heavy dark glasses, his rectangular mustache, his fishnet tank top. He didn’t read magazines. He read chain-store romance. Chain-store romance for Christ’s sake. Whenever Cleve took a browse through one of Harv’s novels, it was always the same story, patiently repeated: stablehands getting mauled by guys with titles.

  Over their cups of hot chocolate they had a vehement, repetitive, and hideously ad hominem argument about who was better: Jayne Mansfield or Mamie van Doren. They made it up while Harv unpacked the goblets that Cleve had bought him. And went back to talking about Harv’s birthday… In the middle of the night Cleve woke up and went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and thought: I am in a desert, or a crystal world. Every few years I go and whack off into a tube of glass: It’s like jury duty. I was formed in vitro. I didn’t get born. I got laid. There is no biology here. There is zero biology here.

  Spring came. Fashions changed. Cleve hung up his leathers and switched to painter’s pants and Pendletons. He started on the other three Jane Austens: Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion. Harv learned how to cook Japanese. They took a trip to Africa: they did Libya, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Uganda, Zaire, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, the Congo, Nigeria, and Liberia. Cleve broke up with Harv. He two-point-sevened it until he fell for a talented young macraméist called Irv.

  Just when it seemed that it could expand no further (where, he wondered, was all this coming from?), Cleve’s upper body burst into a whole new category of immensity. Hooked over the twin tureens of his laterals, Cleve’s arms now felt uselessly short, like those of a tyrannosaurus; and his head appeared to be no bigger than a grapefruit, forming a rounded apex to the broad triangle of his neck. Cressida was growing, too. On the street, on Greenwich Avenue, nobody looked at Cleve, because everybody looked like Cleve looked, but everybody looked at Cressida, whose sexual destiny, every day, was more and more candidly manifest. No need to out Cressida, not now… They didn’t talk about it. They talked about books. But as he escorted her from the Idle Hour, west, to the brink of Christopher Street, he noticed how people stared and pointed and whispered. Oh, Cleve knew what they were saying (he’d said such things himself, and not so long ago): reproducer, carrier, bearer, spawner, swarmer. On Greenwich Avenue, one time, an old woman called him a fertilizer. So they weren’t just staring at Cressida: they thought Cleve was straight. Walking beside her, now, his protective instincts were regularly roused; he could almost hear them, his instincts, waking up, yawning, stretching, rubbing their eyes. But he also felt that he was in the end zone of his fair-mindedness, his tolerance—his neutrality. How could you protect Cressida from what was coming her way? He experienced abject and lavish relief when, late in the fifth month, she left for San Francisco, to join John.

  The supermarket tabloids were calling it the straight cancer and the straight plague, but even the New York Times, in its frequent reports and updates, struck a note of heavily subdued monotony that sounded to Cleve like the forerunner of full hysteria. A spokesman for the Bay Area Network of Straight Physicians noted that certain unsanitary practices, including (unavoidable) recourse to backstreet obstetricians, provided a “breeding ground” for disease. A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Straight Women’s Health Crisis Center demanded prompt government funding to meet the emergency—
a demand that was itself dismissed as an attempt to establish “the first straight pork barrel.” A spokesman for the Anti-Family Church Coalition predictably announced that the straight subculture had brought this scourge on itself. As for the new president, asked about the hundreds of known cases of ovarian infection, septicemia, and puerperal fever—all of them straight-related—replied, stoutly: “I wouldn’t know.”

  Cleve and Cressida were still pals. They were pen pals. At the outset he imagined a correspondence of remarkable—indeed publishable—brilliance, all about fiction. But it didn’t turn out that way. Cressida’s letters, he soon found, were irreducibly quotidian. The cooker, the clothes dryer, the conversion of the box room—should she paint it blue or pink? “I know you’re interested in home improvement,” she wrote, “but this isn’t decoration. This is nesting.” Dutifully Cleve’s football jersey quaked over the kitchen table, leaning on the pad and ballpoint, as he attempted sophisticated riffs about exactly how Fanny Price made time with Mary Crawford, exactly how Frank Churchill strapped on Mr. Knightly. And the next morning what would he get but another nine-pager on Cressida’s health insurance or plumbing bills. Such was straight life. Her letters didn’t bore him. He found himself both gripped and frazzled. It was like getting hooked on one of those British soap operas they showed on cable: proletarian ups and downs, week in week out, relentless and endless, lasting longer than a lifetime. Cressida was really big now, splay-footed and short-winded, and constantly fanning herself.

  Irv. Irv looked a lot like Cleve. Harv had looked a lot like Cleve, too, as had Grove, as had Orv. But Irv and Cleve (as Irv pointed out) were like the two sides of the same ass. That first time, when they groped toward each other through the fumes of Folsom Prison, Cleve felt he was walking into a mirror—reaching out and finding the glass was warm and soft. Sometimes, now, when Irv mislaid his house keys (which Irv was always doing), Cleve buzzed him up and waited for the knock and then went to the door, feeling entirely depersonalized, wiped out, to admit his usurper, his sharer, his shadow. It was like the recurring nightmare in the novels of William Burroughs, when your dreadful ditto comes calling. Burroughs! More straight fiction… Back in the first few days of their relationship, when they still had sex, Cleve and Irv always did it missionary, face-to-face; and Cleve was Narcissus, riveted to the reflection of his own watery being.