Moon Over Minneapolis

by Fay Weldon

  Only in adultery, I imagine, does the contemporary young person capture something of this rich duality, quadruplicity, of existence.

  The words spoil everything. Penis, vagina, cock, cunt, buggery, fellatio, cunnilingus. How dreary the po-faced responsibility of the sex-education class! Caring relationships! Sensitive approaches! Safe sex. Where is the exultation, the exaltation? Safe sex. Why do it at all, the young must think; absurd, the very notion, that sex might be for pleasure’s sake. Perhaps, as with Jenny, it seems okay to do it to exercise power, to improve status, to relieve a low self-image. That’s all. Once you define it, you’ve had it. Language makes nothing of sex. Words should not enter in. But they do, they have, and the world of carnal mystery is denied our children, poor impoverished things; they are obliged to live in their one, unified, seedy, boring, over-real world: no wonder they look so dreary, so hopeless, so alienated, in their black mourning clothes with their white faces, their exhausted eyes. They are mourning a world they do not even know exists.

  When Jenny went through her drug phase and nearly killed me with the distress of it, I blamed myself, as you know well, Miss Jacobs. How those first three years, I said, everyone said, must have scarred her! Forget what came after. Poor little Jenny, all her mother Mary’s fault, all of it. Mary was irresponsible, said everyone, Mary stayed out, went to parties, drank too much, took a job, had a career even after she married Don and settled down (so-called); Mary was wild, wasn’t she; the rows she and Don had; glasses of wine and plates of food flung in restaurants, so what can it have been like for poor little Jenny left at home? The marvel is, said the friends, said the world, said me, that Carl is so steady, not that Jenny went to the bad.

  That’s what was said, Miss Jacobs, and don’t think it didn’t hurt me. It did: it gave a new, quite violent dimension to guilt and anxiety and shame. I longed for Jenny to reflect credit on to me, be the proud child of love and sexual freedom, of kindness and cuddles: not this angry skinny devil who shot up heroin and would steal and borrow money from my friends to do it. This laughing buoyant child of the family photograph: Jenny, with her pretty bedroom with the Kate Greenaway wallpaper and the tasteful toys, to come to this? So full of hate, so determined to humiliate her mother? Well, Jenny is okay again. Given up the drug culture, back at college, doing fine: but her twenties thrown away, wasted. Ordinary, loving Jenny back again. But she’s almost thirty, and only beginning now. Did she just take longer to grow up than young people are supposed to? Do we have unreasonable expectations, that by the age of twenty a person should be able to cope, go out to work, make a living, live on their own? Perhaps these days the young just take longer to grow up and we must expect them to stay round for thirty years, not twenty? Support them, sustain them, sop up their passions, for all that time; not attempt to pass on to them the burden of responsibility at twenty-five any more than we do when they’re ten. It is the much-loved child of the middle classes, Jacob’s Benjamin, who so often goes to the dogs, to the drug culture: the Minister’s son, the Judge’s daughter; see the scandal in the paper? We sneer and say, told you so: a failure in parental love; they were too busy, those bad, bad parents, about the world’s business, too little at home; so the child suffered. I am not sure any more it’s true: I think there is another element at work here: some other phenomenon. Perhaps the parent-child bond can be too powerful, too immediate; the assumption of love is strong in the parent but quite fails to get through to the child. Too much trust is placed in ‘love’. Love is a mere instinct; there is no credit in it; no achievement: no sacrifice. The child demands sacrifice from its parents: not a flow of easy emotion. And does not the child inherit its temperament from both parents, good bits and bad bits alike? The body is not an innately healthy organism which will grow up straight, proud and true unless you somehow thwart it: it is destined to grow up flawed, and as pleasant and perfect, or neither, as the mixture of its parents’ genes would suggest. I daresay a mother, or father, can get the best out of that mix or the worst, but you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Jenny’s okay now: and I do think my love, instinctive as it was, helped her, not hindered her. It was not my fault that she took to the dogs: it is to my credit that she survived.

  Jenny survived to get to Narcotics Anon, where she met many a child of many a long-lost friend of mine: and they all sit round together, brooding on the sins of their parents, that is to say me, and losing their anger and beginning to laugh.

  A strange thing happened, Miss Jacobs. It was how Jenny got out of drugs, got to Narcotics Anon. She was lying on a mattress on the floor of some dreary squat, with black walls and only hate, hate, hate written in white paint on the ceiling for decoration, and she was staring at this ceiling, working out who to con so as to get her next fix, and a black cat jumped on to her chest. A very flat chest, Miss Jacobs, though she’s put on some weight since, thank God. It stared at her, and she thought for a moment it was The Cat, but of course it couldn’t be, for The Cat was dead.

  The Cat had been walking along outside our house when a car went out of control and mounted the pavement and killed her. I watched the spirit go out of her—I held her head as she died. Don was there beside me. We crouched in the street and watched this creature turn from live to dead, from something to nothing, become just a lump of fur. The Cat was twelve. I think she was too proud and stubborn to envisage any kind of lingering death, any diminution of energy: sudden was best for her and worst for us. I don’t think Jenny liked the way we grieved. A cat, she said, just a cat. The proper cat for us, we said; the family cat: The Cat, deceased.

  But as, years later, Jenny lay on her dirty mattress, a stray black cat jumped on her chest and stared at her for a moment and then ran out of the open door. And Jenny went after the animal to see if it was The Cat though she knew it couldn’t be; and once she was out the door in the clear air she began to cry, she didn’t know why, and couldn’t bear to go back in. Or that’s what she told me. Drug addicts are like that: reason drags them down—the hopelessness and pointlessness of existence if you think about it too much—instinct saves them. And one of my friends—I do have friends: I talk so much it saves them the bother of talking: they just hang around: they like it—just happened to be passing and took Jenny in and talked to her and she was receptive, for some reason, and she joined Narcotics Anon, and it worked, though the start was shaky.

  Intervention by cat happened on a second occasion, Jenny now tells me. It’s why I’ve come to see you. I need to talk about it. She said she went home one night with a boy she’d met at Narcs Anon. She woke in the morning, before him, full of the guilt and spite that went with her list of one-night stands. She was about to slip out of the bed and slam out of the house. She still had her eyes closed: she was under the quilt. She felt a gentle thud and a scrabble down by her feet and knew a cat had arrived. She felt the cat pick its way up her, over her, sit by her ear. She felt a velvet tapping on her cheek. She opened her eyes and saw Holly staring at her. She lay still. Holly moved across her and tapped about for a bit and circled, and then settled down, purring, between her and the boy. And presently the purr became intermittent and the cat slept, a warm, steady presence. So Jenny felt reassured and went back to sleep too. When she woke, Holly had gone and Saul—that’s his name: she’s still with him: I really like him: he turns out to be the son of one of my friends—was making coffee in a domestic kind of way, so Jenny stayed. And between them they worked it all out, and neither went back to the needles, which had been in the air.

  Now of course it can’t have been Holly. Holly lives with us, miles away from Hampstead. But I suppose it could have been some descendant of The Cat’s, some second cousin or other of Holly’s, which explains the resemblance. I try not to think that Holly did indeed send her spirit out that night, and that is why the poor creature has no energy left and sits in her little nest in the grass outside the house and waits to die, which—and I suppose I must face it—she will soon do. And why Jenny lives, who I th
ought would die. For ten whole years I dreaded the ring of the telephone which would tell me she was dead.

  No, more like something good I once did, once upon a time, just fed back into the pattern of events and worked out okay, and came back to rescue me. Us. Pow! So that phone call never came. Forget the cats. What are cats?

  That is all, Miss Jacobs, for today.

  About the Author

  Novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Fay Weldon was born in England, brought up in New Zealand, and returned to the United Kingdom when she was fifteen. She studied economics and psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She worked briefly for the Foreign Office in London, then as a journalist, and then as an advertising copywriter. She later gave up her career in advertising, and began to write fulltime. Her first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke, was published in 1967. She was chair of the judges for the Booker Prize for fiction in 1983, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews in 1990. In 2001, she was named a Commander of the British Empire.

  Weldon’s work includes more than twenty novels, five collections of short stories, several children’s books, nonfiction books, magazine articles, and a number of plays written for television, radio, and the stage, including the pilot episode for the television series Upstairs Downstairs. She-Devil, the film adaption of her 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, starred Meryl Streep in a Golden Globe–winning role.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1991 by Fay Weldon

  Cover design by Connie Gabbert

  The following stories have previously appeared elsewhere: ‘Subject to Diary’ (Lear’s, 1989); ‘I Do What I can and I Am What I Am’ (Elle, 1989); ‘The Year of the Green Pudding’ (There’s More to Life Than Mr. Right, Piccadilly Press, 1985); ‘Ind Aff’ (Observer, 1988); ‘A Visit from Johannesburg’ (Blaubartchen, Carl Hanser Verlag, 1990); ‘Au Pair’ (Honey, 1985); ‘Down the Clinical Disco’ (New Statesman, 1985); ‘Sharon Loves Darren’ (Soho Square, Bloomsbury, 1988); ‘Who Goes Where?’ (Woman, 1989); ‘The Search for Mother Christmas’ (Woman, 1988); ‘A Move to the Country’ (Listener, 1988); ‘Chew You Up and Spit You Out’ (Woman, 1989); ‘The Day the World Came to Somerset’ (Just Women, 1989); ‘A Gentle Tonic Effect’ (Marie Claire, 1988).

  978-1-4804-1252-1

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EBOOKS BY FAY WELDON

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Available wherever ebooks are sold

  Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.

  Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases

  Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.

  Sign up now at

  www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters

  FIND OUT MORE AT

  WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM

  FOLLOW US:

  @openroadmedia and

  Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia