by Glen Duncan
Afterwards we lay awake side by side with only a ripple of light from the curtains’ gap crossing our shins. Half the bedding was off. Sweat cooled. After the bliss of the void the incremental reintroduction of humble finites: fingertips, eyelids, wrists, nipples, soles. London was beyond the window, seven million anonymous lives bearable again now that adventure had returned to mine. In the last months before Scarlet had left me we’d become enamoured of a particular position, her on her belly with her hands between her legs and her arse raised, me astride her thighs entering her from behind. We’d started off just now traditionally, with me on top, but with sly telepathy had worked our way back to it.
‘Like picking up a conversation,’ I said. Brave words. The dirty wave had heaved us up and deposited us. Now here she was lying next to me with her legs parted and her arms held away from her sides like a woman tanning. Already life was starting to mutter, the insistent prosaic substructure.
‘I came to London to look for you,’ she said. ‘It’s what I’m doing here.’
The muttering ceased. Impossible. But not as impossible as the idea of her saying it for any reason other than that it was true. Honesty whether we like it or not stabs out brilliantly. ‘Imagine my surprise, then, when there you were at the airport waiting to meet me.’ The tone was deliberate ungenuine levity. Defeat, in fact.
‘I can see I’ve spoiled something.’
She didn’t answer straight away. Thinking of whether what she had to say was funny or flat or angry. ‘Well, I had a quest, didn’t I? You don’t often these days undertake a quest, do you?’
‘No.’
‘And then there you were and I thought there’d been a reality shift, as in: Whatever you want, there it is.’
That wasn’t what she’d said in Arrivals. She’d said she was here on holiday. Started with a lie. There was a Hot Chocolate song ‘It Started with a Kiss’. Errol Brown could do anything to me, she’d whispered in my ear one day during a lecture on Mrs Dalloway. He could nub me with his head. I panned out from this one memory and saw with a sort of vertigo the mountain of memories of which it formed a tiny fleck. We’d have to decide what to do with it. Do you remember that little wooden box you had with that…Do you remember that time when you said…The potential to sicken each other if we didn’t watch it.
‘When did you decide to come and find me?’ The empty space above our throbbing bodies didn’t to me seem quite empty; some just-palpable weight or heat, an angel or devil lying on top of us.
‘I don’t know. It wasn’t a concrete thing. I just realized after a while that I’d been doing things in preparation for coming here. My passport needed renewing beginning of this year.’
‘Don’t you have an American one?’
‘Yeah, but I like to come in on the British one. There’s a psychological difference at the airport.’
Between utterances I was busy with the same paradox, that she couldn’t possibly be telling the truth and that she couldn’t possibly be lying. I came here to find you.
‘Must be great knowing you can do the same trick going back the other way.’
‘It is. All those losers queuing to be bullied, meanwhile I swan through. There’s not much to compare with being entitled to enter America.’ She was rubbing the top of her left foot with the ball of her right, an itch. These were the shocking intimacies, not the sex, although I’d been surprised to find she shaved between her legs now. Her cunt had felt meaty and blatant, the shaved lips’ frill of flesh arousingly cynical, used to the world. Twenty-first century, I reminded myself. Women follow porn’s dictates with a shrug. In the Eighties middle-class feminism was everywhere. Now all the gals are good-time gals; even Germaine Greer’s been on the front of a Sunday supplement in the soft-lensed buff, wearing make-up and trinkets. What happened?
‘What does it mean?’ I said. ‘Us. Meeting like this. It’s got to mean something. Hasn’t it?’
‘Well, you’d think so.’
Which turned us up into heightened silence. I was already over the irritation of the wasted past. Seventeen years but here she was again. Fine. No problem. I’ll take that. Well, you’d think so. The idiom implied a qualifier.
‘To find me for what?’ I said. I could feel her thinking that she’d been carried this far without having to ask herself. A few seconds passed. Tiredness radiated from her, a boredom with the complexity of everything. Plus the latest kink of jetlag. I thought she was going to say: I’m not sure.
‘To see if I’m still who I think I am,’ she said.
Careful what you ask for. I’d been resisting the temptation to take what she’d said about coming to find me at face value. Now I was glad I had resisted and depressed that I’d been right to.
‘My life,’ she said, but didn’t know where to go with it. Reached instead for the cigarettes on the floor on her side, lit one, passed it to me, lit another for herself. The first exhalation was a heavy one. ‘I didn’t run a talent agency,’ she said. ‘I ran an escort agency.’
The room, I realized, had a softly humming air conditioner. There was a little digital programming pad on the wall by the door, studded with three frosty green lights and one martial red one. Between couch and bed I’d had to go to the bathroom to pee and when I came out she’d been resetting it. So we wouldn’t be cold when we kicked off the bedclothes. In a moment of disinterested sociology I thought how much better everyone’s sex lives would be if their bedrooms were warm enough to dispense with bedding. Your mind will go anywhere rather than.
‘You heard me correctly,’ she said.
The need was to do something: get up, retrieve my drink, look out of the window. All I could manage was to haul myself a few inches higher on the pillows. Every hooker call girl whore prozzie tart escort courtesan from every book film play television programme King’s Cross and the trip to Amsterdam and that one woman I saw entering an Arab household in Knightsbridge that time and thought Jesus that’s amazing it’s really going on and this is what you get if you’re loaded and she really was absolutely astonishingly beautiful and at the back of it in the colours of a faded snapshot my old man sitting in Ho Fun’s, the egg custards, Eugene’s appearance in the blinding band of sun opposite. Whoreshop.
‘I haven’t got anything,’ Scarlet said. ‘A disease, I mean, assuming that’s part of what you’re cogitating on.’
‘I’m lost for words,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I ever have been before. Are you saying you’re a prostitute?’
‘Was. Last paying customer ten years ago. Then I set up the agency.’
‘You have sex with men for money?’
‘Had. Watch those tenses, please.’
‘Why?’
A pause.
‘You’re joking, presumably?’
‘No, I’m not joking. Jesus Christ.’
She got up from the bed, went flat-footed to the minibar, squatted and opened it. Icy light from its interior on her face, breasts, belly, knees. Making love, I had after all found signs of aging, the backs of her hands, her elbows, her feet. It had stirred tenderness into lust, annihilated and simultaneously insisted on the distances between the child, the girl, the woman. Kissing her underarms I’d thought what a fierce, humble, honourable, sad, beautiful business it was having a body, all that silent, invisible, blazing cellular death and renewal. She’d been written on in the years since me, carried time’s accrual in the lines of her wrists, eye-corners, the backs of her ankles, even the nipples, erect, seemed more concentratedly puckered as with an effort at holding on to youth; I could love her just for that, her body’s honourable testimony to the life lived. Love? Yes, that was the word. It had flashed like a blood-gout in the lamplight with no respect for absurdity, for years, for the logic of estrangement. If I’d stopped for a moment I could have laughed at myself. But I would have laughed and kept the word. Love. I’d wanted to say it. I still love you. I had had in the languid phases of the long coupling images–imaginings, rather–of her life since me. I’d seen her (
what was this? telepathic insight? fantasy? whatever it was, the insistence was irresistible) in the high-ceilinged polished main hall of a Thirties American train station, the one from Witness, Philadelphia, presumably; naked in a field of long-stemmed small-faced swaying wild flowers; in a deserted alleyway between beach houses on a hot day; in a rumpled bed alone in the early morning oranged by curtain-filtered city sunlight. Now, as she rummaged through clinking miniatures, I thought with a feeling of irreversible subtraction of the men, the Men, who must be upper-cased when they’ve paid, unlike lovers who no matter how many they are retain the innocence of the untransacted. There was this feeling of her having been to a place which would always come between us, but a feeling too (let’s not be naive) of hectoring excitement. Experience. The sly aphrodisiac. All the cocks and come and surely fascinating psychic fracture. It was one of the ways open to a woman who wanted to discover America.
‘It’s not the only thing I did,’ she said. ‘Do you want one of these?’ Stolichnaya, Blue and Red.
‘Either.’
‘There’s no ice.’
‘Never mind. Whatever mixer there is.’
There were several. She poured two vodka and tonics. Returned to the bed, handed me the drink, sat up with her back against the headboard, ankles crossed. ‘Well, working for someone else was out of the question. I have to have money and freedom and I have to be in control. If you don’t mind having sex with strangers it’s the obvious choice.’
‘You’ll have to tell me whether you’re being serious.’
‘Yes, I’m being serious. There are certain practical matters of fact. If you’re the sort of professional I was, you make more money in a couple of hours than most people make in a couple of weeks. Money shapes reality. The richer you are the more you have to learn who you are. Poverty has a similar effect. It’s the great mass of people in the middle, the people with enough but not plenty, who are still flailing about and joining cults and doing Open University degrees in their forties and fifties.’
‘Oh, right, there’s a philosophy. I didn’t realize.’
She waited a moment, sipped her drink, then said: ‘Listen, I’m not trying to be difficult but there are certain things you’re going to have to abandon if we’re going to have this conversation. Sarcasm in the service of some sort of pseudo-moral rectitude. I don’t live in that world any more.’
I said nothing.
‘You’re excited by what I’ve told you,’ she said. ‘No doubt depressed and disturbed, but primarily it’s just made me more interesting. So, please, let’s not have postures.’
‘Am I allowed to say I’m glad you’re not doing it any more?’
‘I’m glad I’m not doing it any more.’
‘But I mean…What…Didn’t it make you feel bad?’
‘Of course, though most of the girls spend a lot of time and energy telling themselves the opposite: it’s fun, it makes them feel powerful, they’re learning, they’re proud of their bodies, they like having sex, all of which from time to time may be true, but the cumulative effect is undeniable. Learning’s possible if you abandon the romantic notion that men don’t hate women.’
‘Oh, great.’
‘That’s one end of the spectrum. The other is that men go to women for the answer to the question of themselves, the question of what they are and whether what they are is acceptable, manageable, okay.’
‘I’m getting unpleasant images, I’m afraid.’
‘Well, yes. I’ve seen unpleasant things. But I have to have money. The first message America gives you, from the second you step off the plane–in fact, while you’re still on the plane if it’s American–is that you have to have money. You can see it in the cabin crew: there’s a particular vividness to their wristwatches and haircuts, there’s a look in their eyes, the presence or absence of medical insurance.’
‘So you did it to make money. Wasn’t there any other way you could have made money?’
‘Not fast, no. But I did it, too, because I was interested. In sex. What it was to me.’
‘Years ago you said a therapist told you it was to punish your mother.’
‘Well, it is that, was that, but it’s a lot of other things, too. It’s an extreme experience for me. Possibly you never really got that, how much I liked it. The trip out into the void.’
‘And you liked it with these men who were paying you?’
‘Only very occasionally. But I had men who weren’t paying. I had boyfriends when I wanted them. I’m being misleading. Pleasure wasn’t primarily the incentive. It was that I was good at becoming things, what they desired. That, believe it or not, is empowering, or at least it creates an illusion of empowerment.’
She was wide awake now, emanating controlled excitement. The excitement was an unavoidable phase, not the end; she was already in possession of conclusions about herself, had been for some time.
‘Anyway, the novelty wears off. It becomes impossible to see non-paying men as anything other than furtive or repressed versions of paying ones.’
Which begged the question of what sort of trick I was, in potentia. She raised her hand, pre-emptively. Later, if you really want to know. I said nothing. Turned on my side. Just close enough to her soft flank to feel its warmth. She held the tumbler above her breasts.
‘I’d made money. I started my own agency. Particular kind of girl. White, educated, upper-middle-class American. Clients were businessmen, diplomats, brokers, lawyers and celebrities. There were two hundred and ninety lawyers in the Éclat Rolodex when I sold the company.’
‘Éclat?’
She laughed, once, through her nose. ‘My theory was you could weed out undesirables according to how they pronounced it. But look, I’m not telling you anything right, I’m making a mess of it.’
‘Feels like you’re telling me quite a lot.’
‘Okay, let me go off at another tilt. For the last six years I’ve been dividing my life into thirds. One third spent making money, one third spent doing good, and the last third spent on myself.’
‘Doing good?’
‘I look after old people, believe it or not. I visit prisoners, read to the blind, clean toilets and wash clothes at homeless shelters. You name it. If it’s conventionally regarded as good works, chances are I’ve done it.’
‘A woman of many parts.’
‘In a nutshell, yes. I’ve given up thinking about it. I have needs and things that I know are good for me. They’re hardly ever the same. The unified self is a myth. Leave the myth and you lose the dissonance.’
‘Voluntary schizophrenia,’ I said–and regretted it immediately.
‘I’ll overlook the bad tasteness of that,’ Scarlet said. ‘But you’re not far off. My mother kept waiting to arrive at herself. She couldn’t help it, she had the illness. I’m not waiting. I’m not waiting for resolution.’
So why are you here? I didn’t ask the question. Didn’t need to. The old mutual transparency had endured.
‘Yes,’ she said, as if I had spoken. ‘Well.’
Don’t say anything. Don’t push. Push and she’ll run.
She’ll run anyway. It’s why she’s here: to see if she’ll still run.
‘Let’s talk about something else,’ she said.
Which, no matter how hard I tried, told me all I needed to know.
‘You remember the girl in the photograph?’ she said, when it became obvious I couldn’t think of a suitable shift. ‘The Vietnamese girl?’
Gary had made Wally look at it. I’m keeping this, Scarlet had said. It’s mine. Rubbishy theorizing on my part down the years had led me to the conclusion that she’d taken it totemically. The girl looked like she felt. She identified with her. That or she kept it to take out and look at to remind herself that however bad things were they weren’t that bad.
‘Have you still got it?’
‘No, I threw it away. Some years back they had this thing, a “ceremony of forgiveness” on Veterans’ Day in Washington. She’s al
ive–her name, rather unfortunately, is Kim Phuc–and living in Canada. Anyway, the point is that at the ceremony a US staff officer–now a Methodist minister, incidentally–came forward and took responsibility for what had happened to her. He wasn’t the pilot, but he was the guy who allegedly ordered the air strike. So he comes forward and there are tears and the girl–who’s obviously a grown woman with kids and everything now–publicly embraces and forgives him. It was a very moving moment, you can imagine.’
‘But?’
‘But it wasn’t him. He wasn’t the guy who ordered the strike. He’d just got caught up in the need to be forgiven. He was in Vietnam, but he had nothing to do with the strike. Press investigation revealed that not only was this guy an impostor, but the girl, Kim Phuc, knew the whole thing was a set-up. She went along with it.’
‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘Presumably she was paid off, but what was in it for the impostor? A fee?’
‘Apparently not. He just felt lousy about Vietnam, lousy enough to cook up a fiction of responsibility so that he could be forgiven and move on. Amazing, isn’t it?’
‘There are worse things in the world.’
‘Of course. I said amazing, not terrible.’
I got up on one elbow to look at her. ‘You’re astonishingly beautiful,’ I said.
‘It’s all going, darling.’
‘I know, but you’ve got years.’
‘This is work you’re looking at here. There’s a gym in Manhattan called Crunch where the motto is “No judgment”.’
‘Sounds like my kind of gym.’
‘Yeah, well, I don’t go to that one. I go to one called Hell. Their motto is “No mercy”. Let’s order something. Champagne?’
‘Christ, what time is it?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Champagne and what? Not caviar. Are you hungry?’
