Mantissa

by John Fowles

  “Not a philosopher, by any chance?”

  “How extraordinary. How did you…?”

  “Just a guess.”

  “I mean, that crowd are all the same. Charlie put it rather amusingly in one of his farces. He said they didn’t know their phalloi from their pyge.”

  “Which farce was that?”

  “The horrid Clio once told me it hadn’t survived. But knowing her I expect she’s just filed it under Inca irrigation systems or something. So she can sneak it away and give herself a spinster’s Saturday night out when no one else is looking.”

  He has continued staring at the ceiling.

  “But I remind you of… old Doodah.”

  She kisses his shoulder. “Only very slightly, darling. A teeny-weeny bit. Just sometimes.”

  “I don’t see any connection at all, myself.”

  “Miles, don’t go all stiff and hurt. I’m not talking about physical things.”

  “When have I ever complained about your taking your clothes off?”

  “But you are always trying to turn me into something I’m not. As if you’d like me better if I was perfect. Or Nurse Cory. I feel I never quite live up to what you really want. I know I have faults. Actually my nose is a few millimeters too long.” She pauses. “I had another friend once. He was always making fun of it. He was a rat, anyway. He went off with the deadly dull Calliope. I got my own back, though.”

  “Who was this?”

  “You don’t mind me chattering on? You must say. Actually, I got ‘nose’ stuck on to his real name. Then he was sent into exile. Where he wrote a most appallingly long-winded what’s-it about the founding of… you know. March march march.”

  “Rome?”

  “Rome.”

  He stares at the ceiling.

  “You’re confusing two people.”

  “No I’m not. I couldn’t ever forget him.”

  “Virgil’s the one who wrote about Rome.”

  “Of course. How clever of you to remember.”

  “The one you had an affair with was Ovid.”

  There is a silence.

  “Miles, are you absolutely sure?”

  “Publius Ovidius Naso. Nose.”

  “It does ring a sort of bell, now you mention it. Didn’t I inspire him with some odes or something?”

  “That was Horace, for God’s sake.”

  “Oh yes. That lovely little thing about a sparrow.”

  “Catullus.”

  “Oh I remember him. He was a darling, such fun to tease. I was his Livia, you know.”

  “Lesbia. Christ.”

  She clings a little closer. “Darling, I’m sorry. I do try.”

  “I just wonder if this is how you treat the great poets of the past, how the devil you treat –”

  “Miles, I only inspire people. Sprinkle a few seeds. I can’t be everywhere when the flowers come out. And reading anything but Greek always hurts my eyes so. No other alphabet has ever had quite the same undertones for me.”

  Miles Green stares at the ceiling; and mulls in silence. She kisses his shoulder.

  “Darling, tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “You know what I’m thinking.”

  “Honestly.”

  “I’m wondering if you’ve read a single line of anything I’ve ever written.”

  Now she is silent a moment. Then she burrows her face in the side of his neck, and kisses it. “Miles, I have read some reviews. And heard lots of people talking about your work.”

  “But you haven’t actually read it?”

  “I know what it’s about. The general drift.”

  “I asked if you’d read it.”

  “Well… not quite in the literal sense, darling. I have always kept meaning to. Cross my heart.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Miles, you know I love the real you.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t use that word ‘real.’ You’ve totally undermined my confidence in it.” He goes on before she can speak. “First of all you tell me I’m hopelessly wild and inaccurate. Then you reveal you haven’t read a bloody line. You know something? You ought to take up reviewing.”

  She buries her forehead against his shoulder. “I’m like you. I’m not clever with words.”

  “Look, Erato. The games we play in the game, so to speak, are one thing. But more and more you are introducing them into our rest periods. More and more you are making fun of things that are important to me. Like reality. And don’t for God’s sake tell me again that you’re only being what I want. I do not want you like this. All you’re being is what you want. And it’s getting beyond a joke.”

  “Please don’t be angry.”

  “I’m not. Just shocked. And extremely hurt.”

  He stares at the ceiling. Her hand smooths idly down over his stomach and finds his limp penis; strokes it, then squeezes it gently. After a while he speaks.

  “You’re always up to something.”

  She kisses his shoulder. “Which is more than you are.”

  “I wasn’t talking about that.”

  “I can’t help it over names. It’s like having a cloud of flies buzzing in your brain.”

  “Is that the best simile you can come up with?”

  “What’s wrong with it, darling?”

  He keeps his mouth pressed grimly closed; but then can stand it no more.

  “You can remember perfectly well. When you want to.”

  She goes on fondling his penis.

  “Some things.”

  He leaves a small silence.

  “It’s all very well for you. Of course I realize that the thing in the meadow on Parnassus is only a metaphor, a symbol for the alphabetical conjunctions that make words, and so on. But I don’t see why you can’t make some allowance for my lack of sexual experience. Experience like yours. It’s surely not too much to ask you to slip into someone else’s skin for an hour or two. Once in a while.”

  “Miles, I know black is beautiful, but it does hurt me the tiniest bit that I’m not enough for you as I am. Quite apart from the fact that we did agree in the beginning that I’d only be someone else when I felt like it.”

  “Except that you never do.”

  “I don’t see why we can’t simply be ourselves.”

  “Because you don’t understand me. I sometimes think we’d both be better off being two entirely different people.”

  She raises the penis and lets it fall.

  “Darling, I do. I may not have read your books, but I have read you. I know you by heart, almost.” Now she pats the penis, as if in farewell, and slips her hand up to his shoulder. “And please don’t let’s talk anymore. Let’s have a little rest. Perhaps I’ll feel different in a minute. When we start the next revision.”

  “I don’t consider this matter settled at all.”

  “Darling.”

  “All we ever do nowadays is talk. I’ve had you just a miserable twice in what would have been, if this wasn’t an unwritable non-text, one hundred and eighty-three pages at least. That’s not what we’re here for.”

  “I promise I’ll think of something lovely for next time.”

  He breathes out. “It’s just not good enough.”

  “Darling.”

  “All right.”

  “I won’t say a word. You can have me over and over and over again.”

  “That will be the day.”

  “I promise.”

  She pats his shoulder. He opens his mouth, but then closes it.

  Silence falls on the room, except for the quiet ticking of the cuckoo clock. The two figures lie embraced on the crepuscular bed, their eyes closed, a charming picture of sexual concord; clinging female, protective male, peace after the sensual storm. She raises her right leg an inch or two higher across his loins, and stirs her own sleepily against his hip; then lies still again.

  All male sympathies must go to Miles Green; or so Miles Green himself overwhelmingly feels. It is surely not unreasonable that he might someti
mes wish to tread (as it were) in the Bard’s footsteps. And indeed he does, by way of self-consolation, for a minute or so review various mental slides of the vivacious, eager and now historically fascinating West Indian girl. But then he quite naturally elides, in the silence, to other solutions to his present predicament. Polynesian, Irish, Venezuelan, Lebanese, Balinese, Indian, Italian, Russian and various points between; shy, passionate, pert, cool; dressed and undressed, tamed and wild, chased and chasing; teasing, in tears, toying, tempestuous… a whole United Nations of female eyes, mouths, breasts, legs, arms, loins, bottoms prettily slink and kaleidoscopically tumble through, or past, the windows of his mind; but alas, like the images in the fluttered pages of some magazine; or like snowflakes, frozen because unrealizable.

  The maddening thing, of course, is that they all lie, waiting to spring or be sprung into charming life and labile reality, inside the body his right arm loosely holds – that is, if the wretched girl (Homer indeed) and her absurdly capricious and banal female vanity (particularly absurd in a family generally obsessed to the point of dottiness with showing how polymorphic they are) can only be brought to appropriate heel. It has to be said: like most divinities, she has picked up some rather silly human characteristics during her career. The way she goes on, one would think she was just an ordinary woman; even worse, a wife.

  So reflects Miles Green. It is not, he tells himself with his usual objectivity, that day in, day out, taking all in all, the rough with the smooth, one can complain too much about having a goddess prepared to try almost anything (except metamorphosis and the Brazilian fork) as one’s bed-partner; nor is that sole concession she has made to man’s eternal quasi-spiritual quest for something a tactile centimeter (or syllable) better than what he already has, Nurse Cory, to be sneezed at. Nonetheless, one is bound to think of all the other concessions she might so easily have made, while she was about it. This has been the most bathetic revelation of all: the discovery that a muse might actually lack imagination in this matter has come as a severe disappointment. It is like being given a Ferrari, then not being allowed to drive it over ten miles an hour.

  He has to face it: if she wasn’t who she was, one might reluctantly by now be beginning to wonder whether she wasn’t in fact a distinct touch suburban. All this talk about being her “real” self borders on the petty-bourgeois, on the dread disease Cartlanditis, on the ethos of shop-girls. And as for being jealous of herself just because he begins to find her sexier when she is someone else… words fail him. One is perilously near demanding whether her true home is not Parnassus, but some vicarage.

  Nor, heaven knows, is that the worst, thinks Miles. This last and intolerably wordy variation has confirmed only too well what he has long begun to suspect. The notion that the muses are shy and fugitive is one of the grossest deceptions ever perpetrated on man. For “shy and fugitive” read “irredeemably frivolous and devious” – and then you’d be a damned sight nearer the mark. The only thing the one beside him had ever slipped away from was anything that remotely suggested the serious. I mean (says Miles to himself), take a thing I might have raised and haven’t yet but bloody well will next time – the little question of why ninety-nine percent of everything this girl and her siblings are supposed to have inspired always has been and remains a total waste of ink and paper. It just shows how much they really care. “Delphi Dancing Girls” was right; many a true word… my God, he wouldn’t mind betting the few that had produced something worthwhile had done so very much not because of, but in spite of, Erato.

  But what flagrantly gave her present game away was that she apparently could inspire, if she wanted to. She had been perfectly happy to be the Dark Lady, Lesbia, Calypso and heaven knows who else when she fancied; she had even been prepared to be a bit of a Grecian urn and a blessed damozel, for lack of anything better. But that was for other men; for him she is not even prepared to spend an off-duty session being a mere little West Indian nurse. On duty she has never even bothered to see what he might have done with a little grave and genuine inspiration, never even bothered to read what he had written in the past – when she would surely have realized at once that he was much too significant a person to deserve such dismissive treatment.

  It has to be said again (says Miles): she is incorrigibly shallow, just as she is incorrigibly talkative. One might conceivably overlook the way she sends up everything one believes in in literature, including and not least oneself, in exchange for her passable enough body. But it is now shockingly clear that she doesn’t even take that seriously. One can at a pinch allow two opinions about how respectfully one ought to take writing and writers; but not over what women owe men in the most fundamental thing of all. There must be a point, in that area, where the teasing and joking has to stop, and biological reality, why women are here in the first place, be given its due. One doesn’t want to boast, and one’s certainly not going into competition with Casanova, Byron or Frank Harris; but one did not go to her, she came to one. And patently there can only be one reason for that.

  This, of course, is what underlies her attitude: her resentment at being physically attracted to him – a crowning instance of how far she has fallen from true divinity and Descartes and how close she has come to being just one more brainwashed, average twentieth-century female. Heaven knows one knows the type well enough from the tedious monism of the real world outside the grey-quilted room: grudging, nagging, slighting, vinegar-tongued as soon as they think their precious little liberated egos are threatened by what their bodies have betrayed; asking for it, then denying it; slaves of their senses one moment, flaunting their supposed freedom of will the next; and always mocking what is beyond their comprehension, trying to drag men down to their own level. They are perpetually adolescent, that is the trouble; no sense of timing, not the faintest idea of when to stop, of when to be their age, as Erato herself so abundantly demonstrates.

  Miles thinks back to their first variations – how physical, how passionate, how free of dialogue they were; how experimental, how sublimely irreproducible in text. And now! It is her fault entirely. With women one always ends in a bog of reality, alias words. From time to time one even asks oneself if they have not invented literature just to get their own back, deliberately to confuse and to distract their masculine betters; to make them waste their vital intellectual aspirations and juices on mantissae.*

  Miles Green should by now, it may seem, have been plunged into only too justifiable gloom. But in fact, as he lies there, there is something curiously like a smile playing around his lips. Its cause is simple. He has just set up, with great astuteness, a sacrificial pawn; and intends to lose it only to gain a queen. His recent reiterated references to Nurse Cory and her breasts were not in the least a mere result of tactlessness, or spite; but very deliberately made to outwit an opponent quite transparently determined to outwit him. When Erato is made jealous enough over Nurse Cory, he will spontaneously and lightly suggest she should be dropped – and then propose a new alternative. This new and far better candidate he has – not without a detailed review of all the possibilities, as already hinted – chosen. As a matter of fact he can’t imagine how he was so stupid in the first place not to see how much more ideally suitable she was; and besides, having to impersonate her might teach the Greek girl (God, how right the Trojans were about charity from the Greeks) beside him one or two much needed lessons concerning proper comportment in the face of biological reality.

  He evokes this new candidate now, as he stares at the ceiling. She is Japanese: modest and exquisitely subservient in kimono, exquisitely immodest and still subservient without it. But incomparably her greatest beauty and attraction is linguistic. The very thought of it makes something inside Miles Green curl with ecstasy. With her, any dialogue but that of the flesh is magnificently impossible. One may just conceivably allow Erato, à la japonaise, a few sentences in broken English. “Hallo, Johnny,” “You like naughty Nippon lady,” a few absurdities like that; but anything more will be spl
endidly and irrefragably implausible.

  He sees her chastened and cast-down eyes as she kneels and tinkles away on her samisen – which can only be an improvement on the rifted lyre; then her eventually bared white body, smelling of rice-powder and chrysanthemum leaves, her glossy black hair unpinned, kneeling mutely beside him, her samurai, as she goes through some elaborate and increasingly delicious sexual equivalent of the tea ceremony. The fluttering hands, the seaweed-scented hair, the plump little Japanese breasts; and all in complete silence. Until, finally, maddened (he sees this most clearly of all), he throws her down on the tatami, or whatever the thing is called, and she lies at his feet, inviting whatever ultimate reward he chooses to bestow on her erotic skills. His infinitely compliant woman, true wax at last, dutiful and respectful, uncomplaining, admiring, and above all peerlessly dumb – except perhaps for one or two hoarse and incomprehensible whimpers of discreetly grateful oriental pleasure as her imperious lord and master…

  Miles Green has, during this agreeable vision, closed his eyes. But now he opens them again. In some way, quite as incomprehensible as the Japanese whimpers that have just sounded in his right cerebral lobe, he feels as if he is swathed in towels; in either a Turkish bath or a fever.