by Paul Ableman
— Here we are.
Your parting smile was brilliant and subtly agonized. Again I repelled awareness of the latter quality. We said good-night. I drove away. Not long afterwards Conrad saw you enter the saloon bar of The Groat. The disloyalty and contempt of my returning you to a lifeless room, with the evening sun still beckoning us out on an adventure, had carried you closer to despair than even our parting of a few days before. Under Conrad’s cowled eyes you bought yourself a drink. He watched as your glance first encountered that of the sallow, exotic youth farther along the bar. In the shadow of the green lenses that guarded Conrad’s delicate retinae, you were seen to accept a drink from Kemal and, by the end of that evening, you had initiated the relationship which was to endure for half a year and institutionalize the breach between us.
8
I PALPATED A NODULE in my abdomen. I stood naked on dusty boards in a blaze of filtered sunlight and solemnly fingered the mobile lump. Cancer?
When was that? I think it was shortly after I left the flat and you returned to it. I don’t think Kemal had yet moved in with you. But I can’t be sure. The timing of events in that complex phase of our lives is beyond my recollection.
— Ah yes! An indirect, inguinal hernia.
Dr. Friedman’s dark, bulldog face loomed massively above me as, gazing vacantly over my shoulder into diagnosis, he wobbled the little sliding pea in my groin.
— Well? A little operation? You don’t want to wear a truss for the rest of your life?
— No. Yes, operation.
Down from the snow-muffled uplands, through the rapturous Vale of Peneus, skimming over the central plain and deviating from our direct course far enough to spend a night in Salonika, we still never reached Istanbul. During our night of confetti-bombs and krasi in Salonika, led but only partially financed by the fat station-master, I thought wistfully of the near-by Turkish frontier. But lack of both funds and time kept us from Santa Sophia and we veered back North to the cruel glacier that was Yugoslavia.
— I’ve met someone.
— Really?
— He’s a young student.
— Do you sleep with him?
— No.
But I wondered. And it occurred to me that superstition might have been nourished by the fact that the one country we had snubbed in our long tour should have despatched your lover to Hampstead. But, of course, I couldn’t seriously regard Kemal as the vengeful agent of a slighted mosque!
— Yes, well it’s there all right—direct—inguinal—
— Oh? Dr. Friedman—my doctor—said it was indirect.
The mild glance of the little consultant clung to mine for a moment. Then a slight shake of his head asserted the security of his diagnosis:
— No—I think—direct— Well, you can dress now.
I evolved into a buffoon. The completion of the process was signalled by a snort of laughter emitted by an acquaintance when I edged up beside him in a saloon bar. After snorting, he explained:
— You’re always popping up. No, I’d always thought of you as a formidable intellectual figure and now you’re always popping up—you’ve become a buffoon—
I understood him. A foe to monogamous marriage, I had nevertheless, while leading a married life, enjoyed an accepted social position. Now, stripped of you and your eloquent devotion, I no longer confronted others, nor was considered by them, with directness. Draped uncomfortably in, and yet unable to disengage myself from, the sticky veils of ambiguity our parting had draped about me, I still found it a shock to discover that I was now a buffoon.
Still, yer know, even buffoons got feelings.
Seated alone on the terrasse of The Hart I experienced anguish. It came brutally. I held a book but mused rather than read. The ugly church rode above a torrent of leaves. I lowered the book. The sun dazzled through the leaves. I stretched out one leg along the wooden bench. I wondered if around the corner would come the little actress with the devious eyes. Cars snarled down the hill. The church towered amidst a delirium of leaves. A shaft of remorse pierced my brain. As if a membrane of frivolity had ruptured, knowledge of what I had done flooded my mind. I had sent you away, torn you loose, cancelled twelve years of happiness. An avalanche of gay and tender, loving and laughing, moments mocked through my mind and a silent scream of anguish startled me.
In dubious control of myself, a little later, I marched into the gloomy saloon for another pint. Hope that doesn’t happen very often. Could do without too much of that!
I swung into Repton Street and immediately braked to the side of the road. Issuing from the iron gates of the nursery school farther down the slope, face uplifted in easy confidence, came my little boy hand in hand with Kemal. I slid the lever into gear and then back into neutral. Instead of offering them a lift, I waited and then edged guiltily around the corner and roared away in a different direction.
— He’s like me. He just sits and smokes and watches me iron. He’s exactly like I was, with you.
I called at the flat sometimes. I watched Kemal sitting and smoking hashish and watching you iron. For a nineteen-year-old he had a pretty bloated habit. The drug had small obvious effect on him. While he smoked and you ironed, the portable radio he had brought with him ejected endless pop songs. A faintly speculative look crossed his face and he turned to me:
— Bill, how many kind cigarette there are?
I attempted to satisfy him, during our meetings that summer, as to the precise richness of our isles in makes of car, brands of cigarette, distillers of whisky, manufacturers of lighters—his fascination with our culture was nothing if not naive.
They summoned me to the knife.
— You will visit me?
— Of course I will.
— I mean—alone? Without Kemal?
But visiting times brought the pair of them. He was a friendly lad, medium bright and with a ready laugh but I longed to have you alone. The registrar danced in clad in a green smock. Screens were pulled round the groaning young man.
— Where does it hurt? Where? What?
Groans remained the only distinct response to the registrar’s quest for diagnostic data.
— It hurts all over? Well—in your arms? Look I realize it hurts but I must find out where!
A nurse spooned soup into the wispy remnant of a man. When the fluid accumulated beyond a certain point in the ruined stomach a mild spasm hurled it all out again. The tiny Cockney was starving to death.
Plum-coloured liquid mounted in bottles attached to looped rubber tubes emerging from the penes of prostate cases.
The young man, no longer groaning, was restored to the ward. The capable registrar had correctly operated for acute appendicitis.
I was shunted down for surgery. Stunning eclipse of anaesthesia. Slow, muddled waking and your face wavering above me. Violent pain. I rolled and fidgeted through the hours until the promised morphia at bedtime.
— I say—em—nurse—
— Yes, yes! Sister’s just coming up to give you your injection.
Half-doubled we hobbled about the ward to keep sluggish blood from congealing. Even blasé nurses occasionally laughed at our grave, surrealist gyrations. One of them checked herself.
— No really, I shouldn’t! I made Mr. Pointing laugh and he burst his wound.
— He—what!
— Had to go down to the theatre to be stitched up again.
The registrar reached my bed. He was crisply handsome in the traditional English way. I asked Dr. Seligman about him later.
— Saintly man. Should be a consultant but he won’t be. Never thinks about himself.
The registrar studied my chart. Then, as he recalled me from the session with the consultant, his face brightened.
— It was indirect, by the way.
— Oh? But the consultant—
— Yes, but not in the way your doctor thought. You see it—oh it’s too technical to explain. But it was an indirect hernia of a special kind—actually, first one we
’ve ever had here.
He noted the faint reserve with which I received this news.
— Oh you needn’t worry. The repair’s the same.
His life momentarily cheered by his encounter with my unconventional hernia the registrar passed on to the next bed.
9
— How’s your car going, Brian?
— All right.
Brian laughed. His laughter, emerging in little snorts, seemed to escape during moments when his vigilance was slack.
— How is your wife going, old friend?
— Barbara?
Brian looked up astonished. He shook his head in amazement. Then doubts as to the validity of being amazed seized him. He shook his head glumly. Barbara fled out of the window and disappeared into some shrubs. We were both morose. We returned to the studio and inspected an angular collossus. Brian brought back two yellow pints. As he approached me he stepped into a puddle, shivered and remarked:
— Damn.
I never saw his Committee. The way he described them, I had the impression of gummy eyes pitched on abstract paintings. Surely they must be docile if Brian dominated them? He expounded the virtues of a painting:
— I think it’s worth the sixty-four pounds. It’s virtually certain to appreciate.
— But—ho! hee! ha!—is anyone virtually certain to appreciate it?
Stiff nudges. Toothless smiles. Brian takes off his horn-rimmed glasses and bites his lip. He exclaims:
— Ha. Ha. I do think we should have it.
— How’s your car going, Brian?
— There’s something wrong with its central nervous system.
— Does it steer well?
— The steering is satisfactory. It barks in the morning.
— Do you sail these days?
— On a vast reservoir. My father has built a boat for me.
— How is your family?
— Mary is pubescent. She and her friends giggle about pubic hairs.
— What about God?
Brian shrugs irritably. God? Better to go to church than argue about it. Barbara makes him go.
— You never used to believe in God, Brian?
— Oh, I don’t believe in God. Perhaps I believe in—going to church. I don’t know.
— I wouldn’t mind fucking your wife, Brian.
— I wouldn’t mind fucking yours.
— Do you think people fuck more now than they used to?
— No.
Brian reflects, nibbling his finger-nails, then adds.
— Perhaps.
10
A Coil of Rooms
MANY ROOMS.
I called round to see Conrad.
I have a composite image of the visit, doubtless assembled from several which I am unable to separate distinctly in memory. Conrad is standing up in his bedroom. Behind him is a small stone idol which I incorrectly identify as a Cycladic fertility goddess. Another small stone sculpture is on the chest of drawers. It is an alabaster worm. Conrad is standing up wearing nothing but a string vest. The dense black shag on his chest glistens through the coarse mesh. He comments enthusiastically on the hygienic properties of the garment.
— Haw! They’re very healthy. What?
This tall, dark man, whose mouth seemed always to be ejecting an ‘o’ of heavily-qualified interest, stands erect in his bath-tub. This image is doubtless imaginary for I seem to be standing beside him in the tub. I am fully-dressed and he is nude. Peeping through the curly fleece of his pubic and lower-abdominal hair shines the tiny dome of his circumcised prick.
— Do you think it’s too small? Haw! What?
Then, leaving insufficient pause for me to reply, he adds:
— Gets very much larger when it’s erect.
I nod politely. He continues:
— Leads a submerged existence. Haw? Tell me, what are the symptoms of cancer of the penis?
In the next frame, Conrad is dressed. The large living-room is ostentatiously bare. The rat-coloured sofa has tasted the urine of cats and children. Bright shards of toys litter the floor. The glaucomatous eye of the television set, gleaming with elaborate and alien purpose, picks out the milky morning.
Our encounter is geometrical.
This sense of formal structure, which I dimly perceive has always characterized my relations with Conrad, invites whimsy. Thus I might write:
When Conrad and I discussed politics, sex or the arts, the air became thick with conic sections. Spectral solids reared and reeled about us. Angles gaped or clapped their infinite limbs enthusiastically.
The nucleus of validity, without which metaphor is abhorrent, resides in the fact that our conversational exchanges rarely generated understanding. We would set side by side little blocks of information, deposit units of feeling or observation, and then inspect the resulting patterns. Meanwhile I would think: he has become guarded, is ashamed of being a dealer. The more money he makes—and he makes mounting piles—the guiltier he feels. He is unwilling to acknowledge my authority and therefore he asks questions and feigns lack of interest in my replies. He bolts from topic to topic in order to peg out the considerable tracts he has colonized. But nothing spontaneous remains free in that breast.
— Tell me, what are the symptoms of cancer of the penis?
The door flies open and two little boys, yelling hysterically, discharge themselves at Conrad.
— What? Haw! My word, what’s this? Down, sir. Stop that! Haw!
Repeatedly detaching an infant from his neck, or shaking one from his leg, Conrad asks:
— Do you read American sociology?
— No. Well—some—sometimes.
— Yes, but tell me—off, get off!—what do you think of the Americans? Culturally?
— Great.
— No, I mean—stop that! Dorothy! It’s a disgrace: two women in the house and perpetual uproar! Tell me, what are the symptoms of cancer of the penis?
I do not see the being called Dorothy. She had been tugged from the Kentish lanes, through the silver mesh of nocturnal Soho, to Conrad’s side. In Cardiff gasped Conrad’s cardiac mother, so bitterly steeped still, after the mire of Auschwitz, in racial arrogance that her son had never dared admit to her that he had married a ‘goy’.
Intimacy breeds an intimate environment which then stifles the man. The man weaves a cocoon around his lovely bride and then, gasping, claws rents in the silken walls in order to breathe.
I ask abruptly:
— You couldn’t put me up?
— What? Certainly—I mean—haw! for how long?
— Indefinitely.
— Yes? I suppose you could sleep in the cupboard. Haw!
Conrad and I talked most often about sexual frustration. He confessed that he suffered acutely from this. We stood in the baby-sitter’s room in order to escape the children. The baby-sitter was out.
— It can be quite alarming. I mean, one could lose control, what? Seriously, one could wind up a News of the World case.
— I know.
Conrad conferred with agents and customers in Zurich, New York, Paris. He stood in the hall, by the wobbly shelf, his blue dressing gown flapping around his hairy legs, and organized the movement of paintings through the skies and across oceans. Often the work of art never came near him but later the commission arrived at the door.
— Met an extraordinary woman in Paris—an artist with her mouth.
— What?
— Well—oral stimulation, surely you’ve heard of it?
— Oh yes. Delightful.
— Dorothy and I seem to be—mismatched. Sexually you understand?
— Could you put me up?
— What? Certainly. Well—haw!—for how long?
— Indefinitely.
— Yes? Haw! You could sleep in the cupboard.
So I moved into the cupboard and was tolerably comfortable there. I shared the cupboard with disagreeable surrealist paintings and refused to share it with a cat. For some time I suspected I might
be sharing it with other organisms and often I pulled back the covers of the big bed and peered at the sheets. I probed black specks but none of them jumped. And yet something was biting me.
Light reached the cupboard both from a single, unshaded bulb and through a glass window high up in the partition that divided the cupboard from Conrad’s and Dorothy’s bedroom. Acoustically I slept in the same room as they did and whenever I farted feared their bed must tremble. Each night I wound home, after the pubs had closed, to my cupboard. I exaggerated my drunkenness and general air of dissipation. I was in training to be a buffoon.
Many rooms.
What could I do?
I had lost a large chunk of myself. I kept asking for it in pubs but no one had handed it in. Whenever I met you, even saw you, I became whole again and disintegrated as soon as we parted. I observed that you often had a nice-looking little boy with you. I noted that the two of you seemed to compose two-thirds of a happy family.
Many rooms.
Conrad flew off to Amsterdam to buy paintings and commit adultery. Dorothy, the baby-sitter and the babies hummed down to Cornwall in the new mini. This left me alone in the flat. No not quite alone for there was a living cat and a rather more living painting by a modern English master who paints boneless people. This one showed an amorphous female with a leprous head sprawling on a maroon sofa. Formally, it was a most elegant painting. Mornings, I would wander nude out of my cupboard into the living room and uneasily contemplate the painting.
Why did this man paint this kind of painting? Did it reflect a homosexual’s revulsion from fertile flesh? I had read this interpretation and been unconvinced. My own feeling was that in a welfare world of guilt-free sex Ham painted the spiritual bankruptcy of nuclear man. Nietzsche suggested that our suicidal guilt at having murdered God would compel us, even as we celebrated humanity and devised ever more impressive institutions for human welfare, to construct behind our back the instruments of human destruction. He painted the somnambulist, sybarite workers in the global death factory.
