“Of course I know, she’s Miss Pabst, your young lady.”
“No, I mean who she was. As a baby.”
“As a baby?” Miss Maiden looked at him with a queer expression, at once fearful and expectant. One of the young men at the table said, if the organ of epic was the phallus, of tragedy the testicles, and of romance the vagina, what was the organ of comedy? Oh, the anus, Angelica replied instantly, with a bright smile. Think of Rabelais…
“You remember those twin girls, six weeks old, who were found in an airplane in 1954?” Persse hissed.
“Why should I remember them?”
“Because you found them, Miss Maiden.” He took from his wallet a folded photocopy of a newspaper cutting sent to him by Hermann Pabst. “Look, ‘Twin girls found in KLM Stratocruiser’—and here’s your name: ‘discovered in the plane’s toilet by Miss Sybil Maiden of Girton College.’ You could have knocked me down with a feather when I saw that.”
The cutting seemed to have the same effect on Miss Maiden, for she toppled off her chair in a dead faint. Persse caught her just before she hit the ground. “Help!” he cried. People hurried to his assistance. By the time Miss Maiden had recovered, Angelica had disappeared.
Persse ran distractedly through the Hilton lobby, took the slow and express lifts at random to various floors, prowled along carpeted corridors, searched the bars and restaurants and shops. After nearly an hour, he found her, changed into a flowing dress of red silk, with her hair, freshly washed, all loose and shining about her shoulders. She was about to step into an elevator on the seventeenth floor as its doors slid open to let him out.
This time there was no hesitation in his actions. This time she would not escape. Without a word, he took her in his arms and kissed her long and passionately. For a moment she stiffened and resisted, but then she suddenly relaxed and yielded to his fierce embrace. He felt the long, soft line of her body from bosom to thigh moulding itself to his. They seemed to melt and fuse together. Time held its breath. He was dimly aware of the lift doors opening and closing again, of people stepping in and out. Then, when the landing was empty and silent once more, he drew his lips away from hers.
“At last I’ve found you!” he panted.
“So it seems,” she gasped.
“I love you!” he cried. “I need you! I want you!”
“Okay!” she laughed. “All right! Your room or mine?”
“I haven’t got a room,” he said.
Angelica hung a Do Not Disturb sign on the outside of the door before locking and chaining it from inside. It was now late afternoon and already dark. She switched on a single, heavily-shaded table lamp which shed a soft golden glow on the bed, and drew the curtains across the window. Her dress sank with a whisper to the floor. She stepped out of it, and put her hands behind her back to release the catch of her brassiere. Her breasts poured out like honey. They swung and trembled as she stooped to strip off tights and briefs. The beauty of her bosom moved him almost to tears; the bold bush of black hair at her crotch startled and roused him. He turned away modestly to take off his own clothes, but she came up behind him and ran her cool soft fingers down his chest and belly, brushing his rigid, rampant sex. “Don’t, for the love of God,” he groaned, “or I won’t answer for the consequences.” She chuckled, and led him by the hand to the bed. She lay down on her back, with her knees slightly raised, and smiled at him with her dark, peat-pool eyes. He parted her thighs like the leaves of a book, and stared into the crack, the crevice, the deep romantic chasm that was the ultimate goal of his quest.
Like most young men’s first experience of sexual intercourse, Persse’s was as short as it was sweet. As soon as he was invaginated, he came, tumultuously. With Angelica’s assistance and encouragement, however, he came twice more in the hours that followed, less precipitately, and in two quite different attitudes; and when he could come no more, when he was only a dry, straining erection, with no seed to expel, Angelica impaled herself upon him and came again and again and again, until she toppled off, exhausted. They lay sprawled across the bed, sweating and panting.
Persse felt ten years older, and wiser. He had fed on honey-dew and drunk the milk of paradise. Nothing could be the same again. Was it possible that in due course they could put on their clothes and go out of the room and behave like ordinary people again, after what had passed between them? It must always be so between lovers, he concluded: their knowledge of each other’s nightside was a secret bond between them. “You’ll have to marry me now, Angelica,” he said.
“I’m not Angelica, I’m Lily,” murmured the girl beside him He whipped over on to all fours, crouched above her, stared into her face. “You’re joking. Don’t joke with me, Angelica.” She shook her head. “No joke.”
“You’re Angelica.”
“Lily.”
He stared at her until his eyes bulged. The dreadful fact was that he had no idea whether she was Angelica lying or Lily telling the truth.
“There’s only one way to tell the difference between us,” she said. “We both have a birth mark on the thigh, like an inverted comma. Angie’s is on the left thigh, mine on the right.” She turned on to her side to point out the small blemish, pale against her tan, on her right thigh. “When we stand hip to hip in our bikinis, it looks like we’re inside quotation marks. Have you seen Angelica’s birthmark?”
“No,” he said bitterly. “But I’ve heard about it.” He felt suddenly ashamed of his nakedness, rolled off the bed, and hurriedly put on his underpants and trousers. “Why?” he said. “Why did you deceive me?”
“I never could resist a guy who was really hungry for it,” said Lily. “You mean, if any total stranger comes up and kisses you, you immediately drop everything and jump into bed with him?”
“Probably. But I figured who you were. Angie has talked to me about you. Why do you feel so sore about it, anyway? We made it together beautifully.”
“I thought you were the girl I love,” said Persse. “I wouldn’t have made love to you otherwise.”
“You mean, you were saving yourself for Angie?”
“If you like. You stole something that didn’t belong to you.”
“You’re wasting your time, Persse, Angie is the archetypal pricktease.”
“That’s a despicable thing to say about your sister!”
“Oh, she admits it. Just like I admit I’m a slut at heart.”
“That I won’t attempt to deny,” he said sarcastically.
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, really. The things you did.”
“You seemed to dig them.”
“I should have realized. No decent girl would have even conceived of them.”
“Oh Persse—don’t say that!” she suddenly cried, in a tone of real dismay.
“Why?” He went hot and cold.
“Because I am joking. I am Angelica!”
He flew to the bed. “Darling, I didn’t mean it! It was beautiful, what we did, I—” He broke off. “What are you grinning at?”
“What about the birthmark? You forgot the birthmark.” She twitched her right hip cheekily.
“You mean, you are Lily after all?”
“What do you think, Persse?”
He sank down on to a seat and covered his face with his hands. “I think you’re trying to drive me mad, whoever you are.”
He was aware of the girl pulling a coverlet from the bed and wrapping herself in it. She shuffled over and put a bare arm round his shoulder. “Persse, I’m trying to tell you that you’re not really in love with Angelica. If you can’t be sure whether the girl you just screwed is Angelica or not, how can you be in love with her? You were in love with a dream.”
“Why do you want to tell me that?” he mumbled.
“Because Angie loves somebody else,” she said.
Persse dropped his hands from his face. “Who?”
“A guy called Peter, they’re getting married in the spring. He’s associate professor at Harvard, very
bright according to Angie. They met at some conference in Hawaii. She’s hoping to get a college job in the Boston area, and Peter fixed it so she could give a paper at this convention to show off her paces. Angie heard that you were here looking for her, and she felt bad about it because she played some trick on you in England, right? She asked me to break it to you gently that she was already engaged. I did my best, Persse. Sorry if it lacked subtlety.”
Persse went to the window, pulled back the curtain, and stared down at the brightly lit avenue below, and the cars and buses stopping and starting and turning at the intersection with 54th Street. He leaned his forehead against the cool glass. He was silent for several minutes. Then he said: “I feel hungry.”
“That’s more like it,” said Lily. “I’ll call room service. What would you like to eat?”
Persse glanced at his watch. “I’m going to a party, I’ll get some grub there.”
“The penthouse party? I’ll see you there,” said Lily. “Peter is taking Angie and me. This is their room, actually. I was just using it to change in.”
Persse unchained the door of the room. “Does Peter know what you do for a living?” he asked. “I saw your photograph in Amsterdam once. Also in London.”
“I’ve retired from that,” she said. “I decided to go back to school, after all. Columbia. I live in New York, now.”
“When you used to work for Girls Unlimited,” said Persse, “did you come across a girl called Bernadette? Her professional name was Marlene.”
Lily reflected for a moment, then shook her head. “No. It was a big organization.”
“If you should ever come across her, tell her to get in touch with me.”
Persse took the elevator down to the ninth floor and found the door of room 956 open. Inside, Morris Zapp was sitting on the bed, eating nuts and drinking bourbon and watching television. “Hi, Percy, come in,” he said. “All ready for the party?”
“I could do with a shower,” said Persse. “Could I possibly use your bathroom?”
“Sure, but there’s somebody in there right now. Sit down and fix yourself a drink. That was a real curveball of a question you threw at us this afternoon.”
“I didn’t mean to make things difficult for you,” said Persse apologetically, helping himself to the bourbon. “I don’t know what came over me, to tell you the truth.”
“It didn’t make any difference. It was very obvious that Kingfisher wasn’t interested in what I was saying.”
“Are you disappointed?” Persse sat down on a chair from which he had an oblique view of the TV screen. A naked couple who might have been himself and Lily an hour earlier were twisting and writhing on a bed.
“Nuh, I think I finally kicked the ambition habit. Ever since I was kidnapped, just being alive has seemed enough.” Suddenly the screen went blank, and a legend appeared: “Dial 3 to order the movie of your choice.” Another film, this time about cowboys, commenced. “They give you five minutes of a movie for free, to get you interested,” Morris explained. “Then if you want to watch the whole thing, you call and have them pipe it to your room and charge it.”
“Everything on tap,” said Persse shaking his head. “Oh brave new world!”
“Right, you can get anything you want by telephone in this city: Chinese food, massage, yoga lessons, acupuncture. You can even call up girls who will talk dirty to you for so much a minute. You pay by credit card. But if you’re into deconstruction, you can just watch all these trailers in a row as if it was one, free, avant-garde movie. Mind you,” he added pensively, “I’ve rather lost faith in deconstruction. I guess it showed this afternoon.”
“You mean every decoding is not another encoding after all?”
“Oh it is, it is. But the deferral of meaning isn’t infinite as far as the individual is concerned.”
“I thought deconstructionists didn’t believe in the individual.”
“They don’t. But death is the one concept you can’t deconstruct. Work back from there and you end up with the old idea of an autonomous self. I can die, therefore I am. I realized that when those wop radicals threatened to deconstruct me.”
The bathroom door opened and out came a lady in a towelling bathrobe and a cloud of fragrant steam. “Oh!” she exclaimed, surprised at seeing Persse.
“Good evening, Mrs Ringbaum,” he said, getting to his feet. “Have we met before?”
“At a party on the Thames last spring. The Annabel Lee.”
“I don’t remember much about that party,” said Mrs Ringbaum, “except that Howard got into a fight with Ronald Frobisher, and the boat started drifting down the river.”
“It was Ronald Frobisher who set it adrift, as a matter of fact,” said Persse.
“Was it? I’ll tackle him about that this evening.”
“Is Ronald Frobisher here—at the MLA?” exclaimed Persse. “Everybody is at the MLA,” said Morris Zapp. “Everybody you ever knew.” He was now watching a film about boxing.
“Everybody except Howard,” said Thelma, with her head inside the wardrobe. “Howard is stuck in Illinois because he’s been barred for life by the airlines for soliciting sex in flight from a hostess.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Persse.
“It doesn’t bother me,” said Thelma with a chuckle. “I left that fink back in September, the best thing I ever did.” She shook out a black cocktail dress and held it up in front of herself, standing before a full-length mirror. “Shall I wear this tonight, honey?”
“Sure,” said Morris, without taking his eyes off the TV. “It looks great.”
“Shall I go to the bathroom to put it on, or is this young man going to do the decent thing and wait in the hall?”
“Percy, go take that shower while Thelma is dressing,” said Morris. “Borrow my electric razor if you need a shave. And by the way, in case your Irish Catholic conscience is shocked by the set-up here, I should tell you that Thelma and I are thinking of getting married.”
“Congratulations,” said Persse.
“Our romance started in Jerusalem,” Thelma confided, smiling fondly at Morris. “Howard never even noticed. He was too busy plotting to have sex with me in one of those cable cars at Masada.”
When Persse had showered and shaved, the three of them took an express elevator to the highest public floor in the hotel, and then a man with a key admitted them to a small private lift that took them up to the penthouse suite. This was a huge, magical, split-level, glassed-in space which afforded breathtaking views of Manhattan at night. It was already crowded and loud with chatter, but the mood of the company was relaxed and euphoric. It helped that the only drink available was champagne. Arthur Kingfisher had donated a dozen cases. “He must have something really important to celebrate,” commented Ronald Frobisher, who had commandeered one of the cases. He filled Persse’s glass and introduced him to a lean, shrewd-eyed, red-haired woman in a green trouser-suit. “Desiree Byrd, Section 409, ‘New Directions in Women’s Writing,’ ” he said. “I’m Section 351, ‘Tradition and Innovation in Postwar British Fiction’. Strictly speaking I’m just the Tradition bit. We were talking about that extraordinary spell of fine weather this afternoon.”
“I’m afraid I missed it,” said Persse, “I was indoors the whole afternoon.”
“It was amazing,” said Desiree Byrd. “I was in my agent’s apartment talking about my new book. I was really depressed about it—I mean, it’s virtually finished, but I’d completely lost faith in it. I was saying to Alice, ‘Alice, I’ve decided I’m not a real writer after all. Difficult Days was a fluke, this new book is just a mess,’ and she was saying, ‘No, no, you mustn’t say that,’ and I said, ‘Just let me read you some bits and you’ll see what I mean,’ and she said ‘OK, but I’m going to open the window for a minute, it’s so hot in here.’ So she opens the window—imagine opening a window in Manhattan in the middle of winter, I thought she must be crazy—and suddenly this extraordinarily sweet warm air comes drifting into the
room, and I started to read at random from my manuscript. ‘Well,’ I said after a page or two, `that isn’t too bad, actually.’ `It’s tremendous,’ said Alice. I said, ‘It’s not typical, though. Listen to this.’ And I read out some more. When I finished, Alice said, ‘Fantastic,’ and I said, ‘Well, perhaps it’s not all that bad.’ And, you know—it wasn’t. It really wasn’t. Well, you can guess what happened. The more I looked for lousy passages, the more enthusiastic Alice became, and the more I came to believe that Men is perhaps quite a good book after all.”
“Marvellous,” said Ronald Frobisher. “I had a similar experience. I was sitting in Washington Square at the same time, thinking about Henry James and basking in this extraordinary sunshine, when suddenly the first sentence of a novel came into my head.”
“Which novel?” said Desiree.
“My next novel,” said Ronald Frobisher. “I’m going to write a new novel.”
“What’s it going to be about?”
“I don’t know yet, but I feel somehow that I’ve got my style back. I can sense it in the rhythm of that sentence.”
“By the way,” said Persse, “I met your Japanese translator last summer.”
“Akira Sakazaki? He just sent me his translation of Could Try Harder—it looks like a bride’s prayerbook. Bound in white, with a mauve silk marker.” He refilled Persse’s glass.
“I’d better get some grub inside me before I drink any more of this,” said Persse. “Excuse me.”
He was helping himself to the splendid buffet supper spread out along one wall when a long arm, encased in a charcoal-grey worsted sleeve, very greasy around the wrist, reached over his shoulder and twitched the last remaining slice of smoked salmon away from the platter under his nose. Persse turned round indignantly to find Felix Skinner’s yellow fangs grinning at him. “Sorry, old man, but I’ve a fatal weakness for this stuff.” He dropped the slice of smoked salmon on to a plate already heaped with assorted foods. “What are you doing at the MLA?”
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