Forty-Seventeen

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘There’s that funny voice again,’ she said playfully, ‘four or five and you make six.’

  ‘And your boyfriend, I suppose, this morning.’

  ‘Oh yes him. He’s into all this whore-fantasy shit too.’ She laughed. ‘But of course with him it’s no fantasy.’

  He dissolved into the eroticism she spun and she ceased to be either the archetypal seventeen-year-old or the New Sex Queen of the West End and instead became a complete and overwhelming other presence.

  As they were leaving she said, ‘I said a lie before.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Back at the Basil I said I dressed like this for work. Well …’ she gave a grim smile as she secured all the locks, ‘I sort of always dress like this. It makes me feel less split. When I wasn’t working I used to dress like Princess Di, an English girl out of Country Life, and one day I said, hell, I’m a whore, I’d rather be dressed like one. Well maybe not always like a whore. But I guess my style is “expensive sexy” now. It feels right.’

  ‘I’m frightened by how much I like it. We’re still good in bed together.’

  ‘Yes, we are.’

  Out in the street she said, ‘Well, this is where we have to say goodbye.’

  ‘No chance of dinner?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Look, if you need help – or your fare back to Australia …’

  ‘You’re generous to offer. But I’m well off. I don’t need money but I’ll keep your offer in mind. I’ll go on doing what I’m doing for now.’ She put on her gruff voice. ‘Puts me in touch with myself.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘It’s good for my feminist critique. I’m learning from being a spectacle.’

  ‘I don’t really understand.’

  ‘I’ll explain it one day.’

  ‘I’ll take you up on that.’

  ‘What will you do in London? You said, I remember, something about taking me to Hazlitt’s grave or old rooms. But I don’t think I can really go sightseeing with you. I’m on a tight rein, one way or another.’ She took his arm. ‘What about you? You seem to be living near the edge despite your international diplomacy and all that.’

  ‘Oh yes, I feel close to the edge sometimes but I have a job to do.’

  ‘I remember! Another thing you used to say – you used to say, “It’s no use asking me about nuclear disarmament because I have a death wish”.’

  He smiled as he heard his words.

  ‘Do you still have?’

  ‘I’m still alive. But I say now that all international negotiation for disarmament has to be based on total distrust. The IAEA is a body founded on distrust. That’s why I like it. It tries to take trusting people out of negotiations by developing techniques for verification and inspection. I believe in negotiated distrust.’

  He added, ‘That’s probably why I ended up there. I put my faith in distrust now.’

  For the first time she seemed to like something he’d said.

  He was already seeing tomorrow’s looming desire for her and facing now again the possibility of denial.

  He said, concealing this from his voice, ‘You’ll see me tomorrow?’

  ‘Professionally?’ she said, leaning into him. ‘No, of course I’ll come to the Basil at three. We’ll do something. But I must rush now.’ She gave a wry smile, wrapped her coat tightly about herself and moved off, refusing the admiring glances from passing males.

  She turned and made a kiss. ‘It’s a weird world I’m in now.’

  As he walked away from her he remembered that she hadn’t retrieved the £100 from the jar in her apartment. She would bring it tomorrow, he guessed.

  He wondered if he would introduce her to Edith his unwanted travelling companion, who had foisted herself on him following the completion of their official business in Vienna.

  ‘We’ll go our own ways,’ she’d said when they’d been in Vienna, ‘but it seems silly for us to split up if we’re both going to be in London and then going on business together in Israel.’

  Edith called the next morning, on the telephone from her room at the Basil, to see what he was doing that day.

  ‘How did your reunion go with your lost love?’ she asked, trying to exclude from her voice any suggestion that she vied with the younger woman for his time, or that she, Edith, had any claim on him – yet these ridiculous and unreasonable shadows were there.

  ‘She is not, as you know, my “lost love”, Edith, although I wish she were in some ways my found love and yes, I’ve lost her. It is all in the past.’

  That didn’t sound very coherent.

  ‘You are fortunate that you have so little in your past,’ she said. ‘I trust, anyhow, you had a pleasant enough evening.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He’d become quite drunk on his own in his room watching television and had then for a time sat in silence.

  ‘I didn’t,’ she said, accusingly, ‘I ate at the place around the corner and found it execrable – you were going to recommend a place but of course with your urgent personal life you went off without a word. I’m afraid the places I used to know around here have long gone.’

  He let the complaint pass.

  ‘Anyhow I thought,’ she continued, ‘that you might like to make it up to me by coming to the Summer Exhibition at the British Academy – we could walk from here. Do us good.’

  ‘I’m seeing my friend, I’m afraid, Edith.’

  ‘Oh? Again? Things must not have gone so badly then. You should watch that you don’t allow yourself to be hurt again.’

  This was a new kind of advice. This was not matrimonial, this was, this was maternal. That was too much.

  ‘Oh go to hell, Edith – I’m afraid I can’t squire you around London. I’m sorry, but no. That’s not my role.’

  ‘You mean you can’t waste your time squiring around an old woman.’

  ‘I found your advice a trifle maternal.’

  ‘I don’t know which is the more insulting,’ there was a pause, ‘I thought you were more sophisticated – I thought of you as a friend.’

  She was lying to herself. Ah for the pure friend.

  ‘I’m afraid, Edith, that I do have my own business to do here.’

  ‘You didn’t seem to object that much in Vienna. I can remember times when you were the one glad of company, glad of a friendly face at breakfast. And, I dare say, you will feel the same way when we resume our business in Israel.’

  ‘This is London. This is a personal visit. We are not required to be together.’

  ‘I well appreciate that,’ she said, coldly, ‘all I was asking of you was whether you would …’ she now enunciated each word, ‘accompany/me/to/the/Royal/Academy.’

  ‘No. I will not. I have, repeat, my/own/things/to/do/if/you/don’t/mind.’

  He hung up on her.

  Oh God, that had all sounded sickeningly matrimonial. He had no sense of being severed from her at all, he’d gained nothing from having spoken his feelings. The exchange would heighten his awareness of Edith for the rest of the day in a perturbing way. And, simultaneously, he was in a welter of desire for the girl, and an agony of fear that he would be denied her by something. ‘Girl whore,’ he said it aloud to himself, ‘girl whore.’

  Then he said, ‘Old bitch, old bitch.’

  I’m going crazy.

  He began to dress. Would he change his clothes before meeting her? How should he fill the time before she came? I’m going crazy.

  He left the Basil intending to go to a gallery to fill time. The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition was usually a mess. He could walk a little further to the National.

  He had to walk by the Royal Academy and as he did he felt he might as well look in. He tried to dismiss the chance of meeting Edith. ‘I can go to the Royal Academy alone. I am in no way excluded simply because it was her wish that we go there together.’

  He entered the gallery. He saw Edith at the other end of the gallery. He gave a nervous, jerky wave. She did not wave back but retur
ned to her catalogue.

  They moved about the gallery as if fixed on opposite ends of a long rod. He determined that he would not leave ‘because of her’. He did not want his behaviour to be in any way determined by her existence. But he acknowledged that his consciousness of her was inescapable. The irritating thing was that he should be stuck like this, manoeuvring around a seventy-year-old woman in an art gallery, simply because a bureaucrat had placed their names, two strangers, together on a list of suggested delegates on a government mission.

  He completed the rounds of the paintings, only half-seeing, aware that sometimes he and Edith drifted closer together but then a navigational correction would be made by either or both and they would move apart.

  He lunched alone at Bentley’s, which was far enough away from the Academy to avoid any coincidental meeting with Edith, and then returned to his room.

  As he dressed to meet the girl he noted that in the past when visiting a brothel he had always shaved and considered his dress and personal hygiene, not wanting to show disrespect. It was after all some sort of a date, a special sort of personal transaction.

  He thought he sometimes got the performance of ‘going to a whore’ right. When his mood and inclination was for nothing else – when it was not a substitution for anything else or a pretence for something else. He sometimes desired the anonymous, unthreatening – or ‘threatening’ in its own peculiar way – autonomous sexual act which contained within it the very faint mimicry of love but was not intended as a substitute for it. It was still two humans exchanging something, a small conversation, a small physical act, a simple, limited, stylised touching of two human beings. Sometimes it worked so well, the prostitute acting and interacting slightly, and he the client, acting the client and also, sometimes, interacting in that slight, very slight way. It was such a perfectly ‘simple’ act but highly refined by history. It surprised him how often it contained simple ‘good will’.

  But this was more now, he was courting her, wanting maybe to win her back from her boyfriend. About ‘Johnny’ he was uncertain; he did not know how to approach the claims that Johnny might have on her. Maybe he really wanted to displace Johnny and to be both her lover and her pimp. How to dress as a lover? How to dress as a pimp? How to dress as a client? Did pimps really have a style? How did that idea arise?

  He went to the bar to wait and rehearse his conversation. He felt randy. A stirring of life.

  Life, like a martini, should be stirred, not shaken. He’d say that to her.

  He waited until she was well over three-quarters of an hour late. He then went to reception and asked if there was a message for him. Maybe she was ‘working back’. There was a message. He opened it and it said that she had on second thoughts considered it best not to meet him again. ‘Let’s part while we’re ahead.’ She said she felt a special kind of love for him but nothing could be done about it just now.

  Just now.

  He felt a shock of thwarted desire. It was not that torment which came from withheld love, it was thwarted desire. No remedy presented itself. He did not want a drink. He wanted to court her but that really hadn’t started. He was not lovesick, he was thwarted.

  He went to his room, pulled off his so-carefully-tied bow tie, restless with lost equilibrium. He was annoyed that he felt, too, a slight cowardly marginal relief from not having to face her and the strangeness which surrounded her.

  He tried laughing at his expectations. He saw himself swirling in fantasies from times past, a Berlin Weimar fantasy of decadence which he’d never found.

  The telephone rang and he picked it up, relieved instantly from his turbulent condition, back on full longing alert for her, but it was not her, it was Edith.

  ‘I rang to apologise,’ she said, ‘about my uncivil behaviour in the gallery this morning – I realised later that you’d come to, well, make a gesture, and I rebuffed you. I’m sorry. I was imposing on you. For that, also, my apologies. But thank you for coming to the gallery.’

  ‘Oh,’ he stumbled, ‘oh that’s all right, I was the one who was rude. I owe you an apology.’

  ‘Well, I’m out of your hair. I’m booking into another hotel. I’ll fade into the night. After all, we still have Israel to do. We’ll see enough of each other.’

  ‘That’s not necessary, Edith. No. Don’t go to that trouble.’

  She was silent, wanting maybe further encouragement to stay.

  He said, ‘Let’s have a drink.’

  ‘A drink? It’s a little early for me. But, well, what the hell, yes.’

  ‘I’ll see you in the bar.’

  ‘Will I get to meet your lady friend?’

  ‘Oh no – I’ve put that off. How about we have a drink and then go down to Hazlitt’s tombstone. In St Anne’s.’

  ‘Love to.’ He felt her consciously not pressing for details of his personal life.

  As he waited in the bar he read from Hazlitt: ‘To live to oneself – what I mean by living to oneself is living the world as in it not of it: it is as if no one knew there was such a person and you wished no one to know that.’

  Martini

  He mixed the martini in the jug, stirring with studied performance. ‘Always stirred, never shaken,’ he told her.

  ‘I’ve never drunk a martini in my life.’ She made it sound as if she were now fifty and had astoundingly missed the martini. Instead, she was seventeen and with no reason to have tasted a martini. ‘We can pretend we are in New York.’

  ‘Paris. It was actually invented by a Frenchman.’

  ‘All right. If you like you can be in Paris and I’ll be in New York. I really want to be in New York.’

  ‘That’d be no fun.’

  ‘We could call each other from those night-club table telephones.’

  ‘I like to know the vermouth is there,’ he said, scholastically, sniffing the jug for the vermouth, ‘many don’t. The great martini drinkers just want the gin mixed with mystique. Let the beam of light pass through the vermouth bottle and strike the gin – that was sufficient, sayeth Luis Buñuel.’

  ‘Who is Luis Buñuel again? I know you told me once.’

  ‘Buñuel is a Spanish film director. When we are in Spain we’ll go …’

  ‘… Belle de Jour! Right?’

  ‘Correct. I took you to see it in some town in Victoria.’

  ‘What I remember is you at the motel afterwards.’ She giggled.

  ‘When we go to Spain we’ll go to Buñuel’s birthplace.’

  ‘You made me take money from you.’

  ‘Aragon.’

  ‘You showed me how a whore does it. And why do we have to go to people’s birthplaces?’

  He hadn’t answered that question before. ‘You’re too questioning. You go to see where the magic started. You go to see if you can be touched by the magic. To see if there is any left.’

  He carefully carried the brimful martinis to her on the balcony of the beach house.

  ‘You’re incredible,’ she said, taking her martini, ‘you’ve even brought along the proper glasses. I know they’re martini glasses, that much I do know.’

  ‘The glass is half the drink.’

  ‘As you always say.’

  Was he beginning to repeat himself?

  He looked out at the sea in which he’d swum as a boy. ‘I’ve never made love to anyone here in my home town – you are the first. That’s unbelievable in a way, given that I lived here until I was seventeen, your age …’

  ‘I’m eighteen now – you keep forgetting.’

  ‘Sorry. But it took me to this age, well, getting towards forty, to have sex in the place where I was born. Says something.’ He tried to muse on this but nothing occurred to him.

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘Was it different?’

  He kissed her fingers, one still slightly pen-calloused from her schooling. ‘It’s always different with you.’

  ‘No slimy answers,’ she said, ‘tell
me how it was different. I want to know.’

  ‘Did the earth move?’

  ‘Don’t make fun of me. Tell me.’

  ‘Different because of “formative circuits”,’ he teased. ‘Do you want me to say things like that?’

  ‘Whatever screwing circuits. Tell me!’

  ‘I think you seek poetry.’ He couldn’t tell her now. ‘I’ll tell you when I’ve worked it out. I’ll write a sonnet.’

  It was different because he was getting emotional cross-tunings. He was making the cross-tunings.

  ‘Another thing,’ he said, ‘is that it’s my parents’ home. Or at least their beach house. Which will do.’

  ‘Will do what?’

  She bridled when she sensed he was using the conversation to talk to himself.

  ‘Well there is always, you know, the mother, always the mother, if it’s not the bed where I was conceived, it’s near enough.’

  ‘Yuck.’ She moved swiftly away from that. ‘It’s a beautiful drink. I could become really hooked on martinis. But what do you do with the olive, do you eat it at the beginning or the end of the drink or is it just a … garnish or what?’

  Garnish, nice word.

  ‘That’s a personal preference. It’s useful to play with during conversation. You can prick it with the toothpick and the olive oil seeps out.’ He did it. ‘See, the olive oil comes into the drink.’

  ‘The olive on the toothpick gives the drink an axis.’

  Yes, she was right.

  She pricked her olive.

  But regardless of the cross-tunings he was getting, seeking, he wanted also to imprint at the very same time a uniqueness onto their experience. To mark her off from his crowded personal history. He had used up so much – she couldn’t be his first, well, first anything just about, not first love, first wife, nor first adultery, not even his first seventeen-year-old – and he couldn’t give her any of the body’s six or seven significant virginities, although at seventeen – eighteen – she seemed also to have exhausted most of these herself. Well, not all. And some she had given him. And they did share one or two sensual firsts of the minor scale. He supposed he was trying to consecrate their experience by bringing her to his home territory, the aura of kin if not kin. Into the family beach home – almost home – if not as a bride then as someone in her own significant category. He wanted to rank her equal with love if not as love. He couldn’t tell her this yet.