Vac

by Paul Ableman

  Each woman is whore the first time.

  In enduring marriages, wife regularly modulates through a brief whore phase, the honeymoon, into ‘old dear’, ‘old love’, etc., i.e. into mother.

  The higher primates are, to varying degree, polygamous or herd animals.

  The purpose of male promiscuity is in part the accumulation of a mental herd.

  The governing drive of the male is the widest possible dissemination of seed, that of the female the reception and elevation to maturity of one single seed.

  Cultural evolutionary factors having crystallized in the West into the ideal of the durable association between one man and one woman, maturity is equated with successful adaptation to monogamy.

  Whore has no duration.

  The essence of mother is reliable presence.

  The original of whore is the breast. The original of mother is the provider of the breast.

  The concept of the obscene is essentially an expression of resentment towards mother for having it in her power to dispense or withhold whore.

  By turning woman into an abstract display of breasts and genitals, i.e. into something obscene, one asserts one’s independence from mother.

  But the obscene is the domain of whore who has no duration.

  One must return to mother to live.

  17

  RAM WAS ONE of the trail of bottle-bearing layabouts who followed us up the hill one Saturday night after the pubs closed.

  When the last drop of cheap wine had been gulped and our random guests had ambled away we were both surprised to find a slight, dapper Indian in a red velvet jacket still entrenched in the living room. He spoke:

  — I understand you’re a writer.

  — That is correct.

  — Really?

  A gratuitously sceptical and thus irritating smile on his brown, baby face, Ram plucked at his thin moustache. Maintaining his superior air he questioned me. The questions were about literature, genius, style—the conventional conversational currency of bohemian districts. Yet I found myself getting more and more annoyed. The knowing smirk on his face seemed to imply that, in some mysterious but absolute sense, I was a fraud. Finally, while his sceptical stance remained unshaken I became quite heated and more or less ordered him to leave.

  — Impudent little—

  We marvelled over an alka-seltzer and went to bed.

  When was it? Oh yes bouncing down French roads in my ancient Ford, we discussed attractive qualities in people. Jim, you and I enthusiastically agreed—I daresay convinced that to some extent anyway we three possessed it—that the one irresistible quality a person can have is vitality.

  Ram had vitality all right.

  Even through my anger that first evening I reluctantly registered it. He looked like a pocket maharajah, gleaming eye, taut, trimmed moustache, face mingling a schoolboy and the devil. When he stood in his underpants in the erotic squalor of his basement flat, probing my views cautiously with sidelong glances, there was an unmistakable air of coquetry about him. But on the few alcohol-relaxed occasions when I hugged his warm body to mine, tenderness was the nearest thing to desire I consciously felt.

  Consciousness, we know, is addicted to an ostentatious display of what opposes subconscious urges. Still I doubt if the enviable parade of girls which Ram, in those days when my sick fidelity restrained me from more than a surreptitious caress or embrace masked as gaiety, led through the saloon bar of The Hart testified to the classical flight from homosexuality. But perhaps it did.

  There were certainly elements of homosexuality in our relationship.

  We were forever probing each other’s sex lives.

  Twice we shared a girl.

  We seemed to mobilize strong emotional responses in each other.

  Our relationship proved incapable of finding a stable state.

  At times I adored him.

  — You are not honest!

  And at others I could have throttled the little bastard!

  — I beg your pardon?

  — I say you do not tell the truth. You are always claiming this great honesty thing and you are not honest.

  — In what way am I not honest?

  But he would, sure enough, produce evidence of evasion or partiality. Or even, alas, of fabrication of evidence. Cock-sure of my general thesis and indignant with memory or learning for not supplying the datum I required to substantiate it, I was capable of:

  — Joyce himself said that the future of literature requires a fusion of prose and poetry and—

  — Did he say that?

  — Yes, I think—anyway it’s implied by—

  — Where did Joyce say that?

  — Oh for fuck’s sake, the point is—

  He was the most untrusting damned shishya a nimble guru ever had!

  Ram enjoyed the use of one of the firm’s cars and hurled it about London with cavalier and often drunken abandon. On one occasion I turned, after he had dropped me, because I heard a clangour as of armies locked in conflict. What I beheld was Ram trying to turn his car round in the narrow street. Rabid at the wheel, he clanged back and forth off the rows of parked vehicles. I watched fascinated for some time as he punished steel but hastened through my front door as the first incredulous owner rushed gibbering out of his house. After that I refused to be chauffeured by him. Still, the frugality of his actual harvest of disaster—a few mangled animals and buckled panels—enabled him to maintain the haughty hypothesis that he was a magnificent driver, dogged by petty misfortune.

  He was also a mighty poet whose universal recognition was impeded only by the fact that he had somehow never actually written any mighty poetry.

  He was also:

  — Really handsome! I mean—look at that face, that aristocratic moustache, that profile—

  — You’ll crack the fucking mirror if you don’t give over.

  He was also the sole principle of efficiency in the industrial equipment firm for which he worked. This seemed relatively plausible. They flew him about England and sometimes Europe to lecture salesmen. They gave him a car and a lavish expense account. They refrained from sacking him. Yet his week’s work, judging from the frequency with which a call at his sordid little flat, dripping with sperm and menstrual blood, found him at home, represented a few visits to the office when he succeeded in easing his hangover out of bed at a reasonable hour. However, in spite of his contribution towards its decadence, no one was more critical of British industry than Ram:

  — It is really incredible! I have been today to install air conditioning in a managing director’s personal lavatory. That lavatory was ornamented with marble and gold. Industry in this country is not even operating at ten per cent efficiency. It is really incredible!

  He was the scourge of his fellow countrymen.

  — There are too many bloody Indians everywhere!

  — You’re a bloody Indian.

  — I would like to start a league to keep them out. They are ignorant. They do not want to adapt themselves at all. If I were an Englishman I would not want a lot of dirty Indians smelling up my country with their curry and everything.

  His tirade would only be halted by our arriving, in my car, at an Indian restaurant for curry.

  But I am making fun of Ram. He wrote a novel, unpublished so far, that contained an infamous caricature of me. I had intended to maintain the lofty impartiality of this work even when retaliat—er—describing him, but possibly some slight bias has crept in. Affectionate bias, of course! There’s not a drop of venom in my nature!

  — Do you know of a party, Bill? I must go to a party. I have not had a woman for nine days! Nine days!

  A Coil of Parties

  Real and yet the projections of a dream. Irony stands in the centre of the ring and suddenly darts a mocking finger at—me, you, that sage, this reformer. Thought whirls in the grip of the magnets of necessity. Intent on ripping loose and ploughing through light-years of reality it achieves only—higher velocity. We ripple int
o different shapes like fish beneath water and imagine we legislate for a stable system. The brain is composed of circuits and the idea that seems to be winging into mystery orbits back into cliché. Horrible, the life dedicated to a noble ideal which reveals itself, too late for redemption, to have been a neurotic need.

  Ideal figures drifting in thought, we affirm our inescapably parochial values. A paragraph by a probing intelligence obliterates the meaning of a million heroic lives. The ones who will tell us what and why we were are not seeded yet in seeds and may not walk and think for a thousand years. And yet we must have myths in order to move.

  A coil of parties.

  — No, not the same.

  The stocky Italian gazed through thick lenses at the thrashing boys and girls. He wanted an orgy. He wanted to film it for public consumption and also, I felt, for his own delectation. I had asked him if Italian youth held parties like this.

  — No, not the same.

  A Coil of Parties

  Beneath the glamour of the idea—under the parasol held by the publicist to ward off the complex and dire rays of reality—the struggle incessantly continues. There are no orgies. There are no parties. There are no film stars. There are no wise dons who understand. The confrontation is perpetual and perpetually challenging, the confrontation with the new.

  As our glance meets, stark alien, we construct each other’s face.

  Irony, a small, demonic Indian, lounges in the centre of the ring. As we come round, borne round on the grave fury of events, into contradiction of what we have long professed, his mocking finger lifts and a peal of Vedantic laughter shudders through the arena.

  See them separate out. Here in the lab of history, precipitating out of the modest girls and pious youths of our ideal grandparents, the throbbing cats at the party.

  That chick half-stoned on hash and Spanish red, squeezing her fellow’s buttocks as they writhe, strolled eighty years ago demurely on the lawn, blushing at the respectful bow of the subaltern on leave next door. Dad’s still a bank manager. Small manic Indian with glowing eyes appropriates her and she sinks into his practised arms. The other shrugs faintly and looks about for another dolly and a murmur of vedantic laughter drifts round the room.

  A Coil of Parties

  As we danced, I was implacably conscious of the press of bodies around us.

  — David—

  I sat on the divan and watched a weaving forest of legs.

  — David—

  I sat on the divan and watched a weaving forest of legs. And the haunches of the girls. My hand cradled a stubby tumbler of wine.

  As we danced I pressed Eleanour against me. You came up behind and kicked me on the leg. I turned to confront the glittering smile of challenge on your face.

  — Has anyone seen David?

  Stavros had made twelve Greek salads. One room was full of toys.

  We couldn’t move in the passage. The crowd immobilized us. As we waited for the slow current to carry us into one of the rooms I allowed the back of my hand to press gently against Eleanour’s tender mound. She gazed at me thoughtfully.

  — David, where have you been?

  The salads were excellent. Cheerful, free-loading bohemians congregated in the tiny kitchen spooning up black-eyed beans. I ate some of the chick peas, which tasted really excellent the way Stavros had prepared them.

  Milo made fourteen Iberian salads for his party. These were excellent. I sat on a publisher’s knee.

  — Have you been upstairs with that bitch? David? Have you?

  As I danced with Emmeline Crabbe, I caressed her breast with my left hand and her buttocks with my right. You came up behind her and jammed your cigarette into my hand. Sullen, I removed you from the party. We quarrelled for a week.

  I sat glumly on the divan in the field of the weaving buttocks of the girls. Milo said:

  — For fornication. This kind of party has no other use.

  When they refused to admit her, Rita burst into tears and punched her fist through the glass panel in the door. She received numerous cuts, several of them deep, and I was secretly glad to be spared the grim erotic quest that evening by the self-imposed task of stanching Rita’s wounds.

  — I don’t know where David is.

  As we danced, I was implacably conscious of the press of bodies around us.

  Water gushed into the sink and sprayed the girls clustered around the man who was ineffectually trying to mend the tap.

  Rita lay down the floor, tugged her skirt up to her waist and screamed:

  — Fuck me, somebody! For God’s sake, fuck me!

  I stood by the slops on the table and watched the writhing bodies. I took a paper cup from the table and furtively trickled whisky into it from my reserve supply.

  I went into the bathroom and found a girl changing her skirt for thick, winter trousers. I grabbed her at once. As we kissed I watched the door anxiously lest you appear on my trail.

  I sat on the divan and watched a weaving forest of legs.

  — Who David? I haven’t seen him for months.

  There was a camp-fire in the garden. There was a balcony round the studio. There was a spiral staircase leading to split-level bedrooms. There was a huge kitchen with a bath in the middle. There was only one lavatory and nearly two hundred guests.

  — Is that David over there? I’m leaving.

  They’re smoking pot in the small kitchen upstairs. There’s a blue film running in the front room. They’re charging half a crown to see it. I’ve stashed two bottles of special Dutch gin at the back of the fridge. There’s a girl having hysterics in that bedroom. There are three blokes with her. They claim they’re looking after her but they’ve got her half-undressed. There are seven policemen at the door. There’s a girl standing on the balcony holding her skirt over her head. There’s a bloke vomiting in the lavatory. He’s been at it for two hours. There’s an ambulance in the street.

  — There’s a party tonight.

  — Oh?

  Large-eyed, with the transparent evasiveness of a child, you received the electrifying news. I asked flatly:

  — Do you want to go?

  You shrugged with bogus indifference.

  — Don’t mind—do you?

  Cliché situations that mobilized petrified attitudes. We were not exploring each other’s views. We were rehearsing tacit pleas. I was silently imploring you to say:

  — Yes, oh yes. I love you, but tonight let’s be wild and free. We’ll go to the party and if we get separated it doesn’t matter. And if I see you embracing another girl it doesn’t matter. And whatever happens doesn’t matter because morning will reunite us in the stable routine of our love.

  And your counter-plea was:

  — If we’re together, of course I want to go to the party. Or to Shanghai or to the deep of the night! As long as we’re together. But I’m afraid you may desert me if we go.

  And the silent struggle between my corrupt and your matutinal desire would generate beastly words. Sick with self-revulsion I would lash you with beastly words.

  After we parted I often felt lonely at parties.

  18

  WE CREATE EACH OTHER.

  We invent reality.

  As our glance meets, stark alien, we construct each other’s face.

  I define your potential. Independently of your will, you do the same for me.

  One could describe the universe in a word.

  Any word.

  The anguish inherent in Western consciousness is an awareness of the perpetual destruction of the present. This is felt most keenly when consciousness is most intense, that is in childhood.

  19

  A CAR DRUMS NORTH with two old friends inside it. The humane, sophisticated millionaire speaks several languages. The face grins quickly. The voice is dented with the inflections of a Kansas farmer. He now belongs to the cosmopolitan rich.

  Chris stares at the road ahead. Soon I give him the wheel and doze. They call this place England.

&nbs
p; My dear. That was one of the hot summers. The amber of the beer infused the early evening. From where we sat in the yard of The Wakefield I could see a burst of poplars shattering the sunlight. My dear, there is a death of bricks.

  — Is she one of your—?

  The shop-keeper unfolded into a scholar, at least an amateur archaeologist. He knew a great deal about Michael Ventris and Linear B. Everyone came. A builder with a joke about a bed-bug. You came, my dear, with that young Turkish chap and a small boy.

  — Is she one of your—?

  We are mocked by asphalt. The trees leap up to intercept the sunlight which streaks to this pub across ninety-two million miles of space.

  Trodden paths are now air networks and are twining outwards into space networks, built by Guinness-loving builders. Do you understand anything but love? That’s a nice little boy. He just called me ‘dad’.

  The car drummed North. When we stopped for petrol my patron and ancient colleague of Paris bohemia paid for most of it. When we stopped for lunch my patron and affluent friend picked up the bill. When we reached Edinburgh, another American from a Tartar khanate attempted to drill flesh into my words but the cast rebelled. Chris and I lived in the death of a residential suburb where hate and love are modalities of income.

  — The theatre is words.

  I insisted. But the American embraced gesture and stifled my words. The critics came and blasted us both. At night in the bar a hundred girls breathed through their cunts and the despair which is the nucleus of desire wracked my whisky-drenched brain. I knew then that I would always be broke.