Gut Symmetries

by Jeanette Winterson

  Within this arrangement of formalised Bohemianism we met all together, once a month, Jove chairing the moot, while over a Chinese takeaway we were supposed to discuss the finer points of our triune romance.

  In fact, Jove tore up the bills presented to him by Stella. I returned to Jove the thirty love letters (one a day) he had written to me since our previous moot, and Jove shouted (this time at me), ‘Why the hell don’t you talk?’

  Jove was Italian born New York raised. Stella was Jewish. Not any old Jewish but Jewish of the House of David. She was Queen Jewish, biblical Jewish, Jewish in silver and kohl. Like Jove, her forked tongue was an entire canteen of cutlery. It was not that either of them were insincere, simply that, being bored by an argument, they could change sides faster than a mercenary offered double pay. Just as I had carefully listened to each of their petitions and decided how to vote, they would somersault over each other, land on the opposite side, and finish by glaring at me. Utterly unnerved, I could not stop myself asking …

  ‘Would anybody like a cup of coffee?’

  I must stop saying that. World War Three is about to begin and I will be pushing the hostess trolley.

  Stella looked away, flexing her fingers and rattling the bangles up her arm. She was looking away into the deserts of her ancestry, looking into the tenacity that has made her people great. She was built out of the cedars of Lebanon and inlaid with precious stones. What cared she for light refreshments?

  Jove stared into space, head thrown back, English brogues under the table. He had his arms folded and he seemed to regard me as a kind of spore; a unicellular, asexual, reproductive body. Was he wrong? Every month I offered up an identical cup of coffee and had lost all trace of whatever definite sexuality I might have had. A man. His wife. The mistress of both of them. If I was tongue-tied, Jove and Stella were the ropes.

  THE MOOT. ROUND ONE.

  The minutes of the meeting, as taken by me, read as follows:

  1) Jove insists on the rights of his penis; that is, he has fucked Stella and Alice and ought to be allowed to continue to do so.

  2) Stella says that all marital rights are forfeited by an affair.

  3) Jove says he is not the only one having an affair.

  4) Stella disagrees:

  a) Jove is no longer having an affair. (I nod.)

  b) She, Stella, is not having an affair. She is exploring the possibilities of an alternative relationship.

  (Here there is usually a pause while they use the last of the spring rolls to mop up the prune sauce.)

  5) Jove says he is not threatened by our relationship.

  Stella rattles her bangles.

  Jove says he would like to move back in. This is his home.

  Stella pushes a variety of unpaid bills across the table.

  Jove says, ‘Shall I go and get my things?’

  Stella says, ‘No.’

  Jove tears up the bills.

  Stella says, ‘Why don’t you ask Alice how she feels?’

  Jove says, ‘How do you feel, Alice?’

  This is the beginning of my terror. It is as though I were back at school and the hairy-nosed-tweed-bodied headmaster has said to the class, ‘Alice will tell us the answer.’

  After five minutes Jove says, ‘Why the hell don’t you talk?’

  Stella says, ‘Why should she talk to you, you bully?’

  ROUND TWO

  Jove stalks the apartment throwing things into a canvas bag. Stella circles him and picks them out again. This is symbolic only. Jove wants her to know that everything is his, she wants him to realise that it all belongs to her. Eventually … ‘We should get a divorce.’

  One or the other of them uses this gambit at 9 p.m. precisely. The food has been eaten, the contents of the apartment have been packed and unpacked.

  ‘I’m a reasonable man,’ says Jove.

  ‘I have suffered enough,’ says Stella.

  What judge could find against her with her camels and her tents at her back? Jove then declares himself to be a perfect number, in other words, a number equal to the sum of its aliquot parts, in other words, he is big enough for the both of us. When he says this he can’t help smirking down towards his centre. Like most men he is obsessed by the size of his member. I do not necessarily object to this vanity but I do think he should use a ruler. His priapic optimism goads Stella into some hard physiology. No he is not the biggest man she has ever met. No and not the second biggest either. Dreadfully, they turn to me, Jove’s virility hanging by a thread. This is the moment, the terrible moment when I gather up the takeaway plates like a protective charm and run towards the air-raid shelter of the kitchen.

  ‘Would anybody like a cup of coffee?’

  There then followed a war-chant from Jove which should have been Olympian but was more gondolier. Visitors to Venice will recall the genial machismo shouted across the canals, the tenor/baritone of ‘Who did you have last night?’ There’s a story that the gaily striped barber’s poles that stand to moor the boats on the Grand Canal work too as notching posts. At the end of the season, the gondolier who has nosed his prow furthest wins a dinner from his comrades.

  I did not mind being one of Jove’s canals but I did not like being reeled off within the entire waterway. He shouted names as though he were giving directions. Perhaps that is what we were, elaborate ways for him to find himself.

  When this was over, and invisible lovelies perched about the apartment in support of their god, it was Jove’s habit to take one or two examples at random and give us the details of the affair. The sexual details. Heaving bosoms, flying buttocks, baby-doll sighs, massive erections. Limbs and noises were pantomimed before us with the seriousness of a travelling porno booth. Jove could have set himself up as a Punch and Judy of the groin. Perhaps it was the commedia dell’arte in his blood. We had to let him do this because it was the only way to exhaust him. While he performed, I washed up and Stella did the crossword.

  One month, Stella looked up from One Across Two Down and said to Jove, ‘Before I met you I had a different man every night.’

  ‘Now that I am through with you I could have a different woman every night.’

  I stood in the doorless kitchen doorway and looked at them both and it was at that second that I had a queasy feeling of being nothing but a tie-beam; a beam connecting the lower ends of rafters to prevent them moving apart.

  (Pause here for their monthly word-game. Jove to accuse, Stella to counter in her own defence.)

  HE: Braggart.

  SHE: Story-teller.

  HE: Liar.

  SHE: Inventor.

  HE: Fantasist.

  SHE: Fictioneer.

  HE: Madwoman.

  SHE: Poet.

  HE: Deluded.

  SHE: Deluder.

  HE: Faker.

  SHE: Illusionist.

  HE: Printer’s devil.

  SHE: Genii.

  HE: Schizophrenic.

  SHE: Genius.

  HE: Fork-tongued.

  SHE: Mercuric.

  HE: Gobbledegooker.

  SHE: Runic.

  HE: Legerdemain.

  SHE: Linguistical.

  HE: Falstaff.

  SHE: Prospero.

  HE: Canary.

  SHE: Diva.

  HE: Pot-pourrist.

  SHE: Alchemist.

  · · ·

  Jove turned to me: ‘All this is your fault.’

  Stella to Jove: ‘Of course it isn’t Alice’s fault. It’s your fault.’

  Jove to me: ‘Don’t listen to her, she’ll damage you. Whatever she tells you, it isn’t true. What does she tell you?’

  Alice to Jove: ‘She tells me how you met …’

  Jove to Alice: ‘Oh that stuff, I can’t talk about it … how we grew up together, how she left for Berlin, how she came back to the trattoria, how I was sitting there broken-hearted, looking out of the window, handsome, lonely, wondering if there was any life left, and how she …’

  Came back
to New York with a suitcase full of hope and a little money, another escapee to the tiny island, whose length and breadth has spanned the world. She knew that New York could not exist; that it was an invented city poised in the minds of its inhabitants, a hoisted dream.

  She was so excited she took the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building and looked out for the city her parents had seen through the steam of the boats.

  ‘In all the cities of this year

  I have longed for the other city.’

  Her mother used to read that poem to her and think about Berlin. In Berlin the girl had read the poem and thought about New York.

  ‘In all the rooms of this year

  I have entered one red room.’

  Their apartment block had been demolished but the iron fire escape was still there, crazy, twisted, leading to nothing. She climbed it and opened the lost door to the invisible room, Mama’s red kitchen where the diamonds were. Was it here? Here that the two of them, inextricably complicit, had snuck away from the vexations of Sodom and walked through a graphite night as black as the diamond inside her was pure. Carbon: fundamental four-fold matter, coal and diamonds from the same source.

  The wind rocked the unfixed ironwork and as she began to make her way down gingerly, she saw, over in the corner of the building lot, at the customary respectful distance, the dark-dressed figure waiting for her.

  FOOD TASTES BETTER IN ITALIAN.

  Not to Giovanni, dashing and thirty to the day. He pushed his spaghetti alla vongole round and round his plate and debated with himself what method of suicide might be the least painful and the most dramatic. Do not blame him. He was a Leo.

  A divorced unemployed Leo whose anti-nuclear campaigning had finally lost him his wife, his child and his job.

  In 1961 he had been angry-eyed and determined, and was one of those who had stayed out in the open in City Hall Park, when the city was ordered to practise drill for nuclear war. He was on record as a subversive because he had refused to inform for his college in the 1950s. In the 1960s, nuclear mania and Vietnam tarred him as an outsider. Only the calibre of his work had saved him from gaol and the Draft. He was necessary. His wife had thought him a coward.

  Into the checked room, a good-looking woman carrying a bag. There were plenty of free tables but she sat down opposite Giovanni, smiled and pulled out a knife. He stared at her in weary amazement and with a kind of relief. If he was going to be murdered he would not have to worry about suicide.

  SHE: I did.

  HE: What?

  SHE: Protect my virginity.

  They were married a couple of weeks later in St Patrick’s. Divorced Catholics cannot remarry in church but for years the Fathers had eaten at the trattoria and for free. God is merciful and especially on a full stomach.

  It was a happy time and no one noticed that one dark member of the congregation had not been invited.

  SHE: Do you remember, it must have been in 1958, before I went back to Berlin, and you had taken me to meet Papa at the Museum of Modern Art and a fire had broken out and burned up one of Monet’s ‘Waterlily’ series and I was afraid and I thought I saw Papa in the fire and you snatched hold of me and promised me that no fire would come to hurt me. Do you still say that?

  ‘Of course,’ said Jove, Keeper of the Thunderbolt.

  · · ·

  I watched them, eyes bright, afloat on history. Someone had said to me, ‘Jove and Stella are inseparable.’ I had smiled quietly at the time, assuming myself to be the object of desire and not the sacrifice.

  What do the alchemists say? ‘Tertium non datur.’ The third is not given, whatever it is that reconciles two opposites. If I was here to reconcile them were they planning to dump me overboard when the job was finished? Piratical Stella? Buccaneer Jove? Alice under the skull and crossbones of their love?

  The sailing holiday planned by Jove and me was now to include Stella and me.

  ‘No,’ I thought, ‘no,’ but as ever with Jove, yes.

  I had the expertise to hire a yacht without crew and although I would have preferred to take a cabin boy, Jove would not agree.

  ‘No, no no. We are going away to decide our future not to be spied on by a lecherous mafioso.’

  The day before we were to fly out I had a telephone call from Mother. Father had collapsed. Would I come home at once? She had booked a ticket for me on the evening plane.

  I packed with one hand, made frantic calls to Jove and Stella with the other. I couldn’t get hold of either of them. Finally, in a panic, wondering why the world is at its most indifferent when we are at our most desperate, I sent a fax to Jove, at the Institute, telling him what had happened and leaving my numbers in England. What could I say to Stella in the thirty-second opportunity regulated by her answer-machine?

  It was two days before I tried to reach either of them again. I found they had set off as planned and had taken the yacht.

  I realised that it would be possible for them to use my sailing certificates and to impersonate me. I sign myself as ‘Dr’ deliberately, to avoid the intrusion of Mrs? or Miss?, as if my marital status had anything to do with the rest of the world. When there is no other evidence it is assumed I am a man. Inevitably.

  It would not be the first time that Jove and Stella had covered the traces of where I began and where they ended. I liked the playfulness of the lovers’ argument: who are you and who am I? Which of us is which? Liked it less when the erotic twinhood devolved into forged letters and faked signatures.

  It had begun as a game. Post-coital ludos lathered with champagne. Bubbling with love I had shown Jove how to calligraph himself as me. If he could turn his wrist to mine, he might become me, he might free me. If he could be let go into myself, then I might be let loose into another self. He might displace me as a heavy solid displaces water.

  At the time, I did not find this analogy sinister.

  Once upon a time there were two friends who found a third. Liking no one better in the whole world, they vowed to live in one palace, sail in one ship, and fight one fight with three arms.

  After three months they decided to go on a quest.

  ‘What shall we seek?’ they asked each other.

  The first said, ‘Gold.’

  The second said, ‘Wives.’

  The third said, ‘That which cannot be found.’

  They all agreed that this last was the best and so they set out in fine array.

  After a while they came to a house that celebrated ceilings and denied floors. As they marched through the front door they were only just in time to save themselves from dropping into a deep pit. While they clung in terror to the wainscoting, they looked up and saw chandeliers, bright as swords, that hung and glittered and lit the huge room where the guests came to and fro. The room was arranged for dinner, tables and chairs suspended from great chains, an armoury of knives and forks laid out in case the eaters knocked one into the abyss.

  There was a trumpet sound and the guests began to enter the room through a trap door in the ceiling. Some were supported on wires, others walked across ropes slender as youth. In this way they were able to join their place setting. When all were assembled, the trumpet blew again, and the head of the table looked down and said to the three friends, ‘What is it you seek?’

  ‘That which cannot be found.’

  ‘It is not here,’ she answered, ‘but take this gold,’ and each of the diners threw down a solid gold plate, rather in the manner that the Doge of Venice used to throw his dinnerware into the canal to show how much he despised worldly things.

  Our three friends did not despise worldly things and caught as many of the plates as they could. Loaded down with treasure they continued on their way, although more slowly than before.

  Eventually they came to Turkey and to the harem of Mustapha the Blessed CIXX. Blessed he was, so piled with ladies that only his index finger could be seen. Crooking it, he bade the friends come forward, and asked in a muffled voice, ‘What is it you s
eek?’

  ‘That which cannot be found.’

  ‘It is not here,’ he said in a ghostly smother, ‘but take some wives.’

  The friends were delighted, but observing the fate of Mustapha, they did not take too many. Each took six and made them carry the gold plate.

  Helter-skelter down the years the friends continued their journey, crossing continents of history and geography, gathering by chance the sum of the world, so that nothing was missing that could be had.

  At last they came to a tower in the middle of the sea. A man with the face of centuries and the voice of the wind opened a narrow window and called …

  ‘What is it you seek?’

  ‘That which cannot be found … found … found,’ and the wind twisted their voices into the air.

  ‘It has found you,’ said the man.

  They heard a noise behind them like a scythe cutting the water and when they looked round they saw a ship thin as a blade gaining towards them. The figure rowed it standing up, with one oar, but it was not an oar. They saw the curve of the metal flashing, first this side, and then that. They saw the rower throw back his hood. They saw him beckon to them and the world tilted. The sea poured away.

  Who are they with fish and starfish in their hair?

  Death

  June 8 1960. Liverpool, England. Sun in Gemini.

  My father at the wheel of the Godspeed. Myself birthed and bloody in my mother’s fur. The creosoted cabin, the paraffin lamp. Smell of oil, tar, sardines and gin.

  I flew into London Heathrow and when the Customs officer asked me if I had anything to declare, I said, ‘My father is dying.’

  I took a connecting flight to Liverpool and a taxi to my grandmother’s house, the old two up two down nearby the defeated docks.