Lurid & Cute (11 page)

for parties lead to difficult conversations

And there they were, my contemporaries – eating Hawaiian pizzas in Hawaiian shirts and I didn't know if this artistic irony belonged to them or Fate. True, there have been more definitive signs in world history, like it wasn't as specific a pattern as the one experienced by my father's associate, a man called possibly Alvin, who got shot through his car window in a pattern of bullets while sitting at a traffic light, just shot very neatly in his shoulder, and the next day in hospital received a card with the same pattern neatly inscribed inside – at which point this Alvin left town for good. But still, it was something.

— I still have draw, I said to Candy.

— And so I'm rolling? she said.

— But if you could –

— I'm only checking, kook.

I did say my wife was cool. She was way-out severe when she wanted and I liked that very much. So Candy made our joints and I stood there trying not to look at Romy, which meant noticing that Hiro was already here, watching a screen playing reruns of that ancient trash series about the prettiest slayer of vampires.

— Yet again I have rolled a shit joint, said Candy, exhaling.

— Is not so bad, I said.

For I wanted everyone to be as happy as they could be, which is always my ideal but at this more tense moment had a special poignancy.

— You think this weed is sprayed? said Candy.

— You think? I was saying, but then I was interrupted.

— Hola, shifu, said Romy, who had come to talk.

— What's up? I said.

I was trying very hard to gauge the general tone. It seemed like everyone was happy and that I did not need to worry – and I suppose that's what happens when you're deceiving people: conversations become a surface you always suspect of being a depth. Any pattern at large seemed possible, whether numerological as according to the ancient sages or just the patterns of the weather or the flight of swifts, if I could identify a swift, which I think I can't. Pastoral is not my habitat.

ROMY

You are such a Mickey Mouse creature.

ME

What's wrong with Mickey?

ROMY

He's only got three fingers on each hand.

In private I would have been able to reply, and with some eloquence. It's true I can sometimes seem not worldly enough, I would have said, but I would also point out that I have social issues, I am very shy, and perhaps were it not for these social issues I think I could have achieved great things, but there it is, I cannot help it. But in public I was not sure if I were meant to be taking part in this conversation, or if in fact more probably I was instead meant to be teased with a quiet grace, and so as silently requested I stayed silent – because I understood what Romy was saying with this dialogue:
Let's just talk as if nothing is happening, and therefore nothing is happening
.

ROMY

Did I tell you I saw your mother?

ME

My mother?

ROMY

We talked for seventeen minutes about you. It was really something.

HIRO

Everyone's so worried, it's crazy –

CANDY

I'm not worried.

It was like those moments when you touch down in the middle of the night and have to make some connection at an interglobal airport like Houston or Chiang Mai – not that this has ever happened to me but I can at least imagine – so you basically are manic with scanning for signs. That was the anxiety I had held over me in this conversation, like a parasol against the endless sun, this conversation where everyone I loved was just chatting among themselves, and one answer to that type of feeling is just to get even more wiped out than you are already feeling, and so I was glad to see Hiro become absorbed in doing his stacks – cutting a tablet of Modafinil into quarters, then Cipralex and diazepam. For not only did I in general applaud the fact that this was the new digital age of narcotics but also I needed very much at this precise moment to be distracted.

— You sure, cookie? said Candy as she saw me snort enthusiastically.

— Yeah, maybe that's enough, yeah? said Romy, too.

I understood that she had only recently been in hospital and very scared, so she had her own private fears, but really I did not care, because if I needed these narcotics then it was not without good reason. I was standing there, thinking very fast about Romy and my wife and Epstein and my desires, and so it was only kind of woozy the way I realised Hiro had meanwhile drifted away and then heard him gently say to these two kids on a sofa a sentence like:

— But what if we all had an orgy?

I never said I
liked
Hiro. I said he was my best friend. These are very different categories.

where the surfaces seep or leak

Every day – this was the lesson to be learned from the life of Hiro – you should try doing something that might help another person. Even if it's just guessing well when they play charades, that's enough. Or, another of his maxims was: A party is much easier than people think. It basically just needs beer and plastic chairs and music and takeaway food in plastic boxes. While the ideal drink is the minimum of alcohol with the maximum result.

— And anything else? I said.

— Then you just need to get the right atmosphere, he replied.

In everything he did, he liked to add to what was normal. And already two kids had got naked very fast. They had hardly been so dressed already, so the difference was arguably small. Just as I suppose I could at least envisage a perspective from which the difference between the clothed and the unclothed would be minuscule – but at this moment I couldn't quite believe in it. I still think clothes are a major difference, like the way skin is as well. I know once again this makes me as old-fashioned as an ice-cream van, in the same way as my inability not to begin and end an email like I'm writing out a letter, but there it is, that's how I think. It was about as soft and minuscule as the warmth a person leaves behind on a toilet seat, the manner in which Hiro proposed this orgy, and how it began. But then that's how things happen and it's why it's so difficult to talk about any event you care to mention. It was like if you imagine everything's a surface – and after all everything
is
a surface – but then something disturbingly still manages to seep through. These are the kind of actions I think happen most often nowadays, these kinds of small seepages or cracks in the general sheen. Everything feels so fleeting that it's almost impossible to notice an event when it occurs, like someone giving you a jacket they no longer like and it goes so well with your new pair of jeans, that's one way a story can work and when it stays like that it's fine – but also too late you can find yourself inside something much more supersized, like what is really taking place is Godzilla greenly emerging from the radioactive waves.

& become, for instance, an orgy

It was like I was looking at a scene from one of those envellumed Renaissance prints – the secret kind known only to the pervert connoisseur, with giant muscles and endraped beds. Had I ever thought about it, this word
orgy
would have been something very different, belonging to other ages, a time of swingers clubs and plumed moustaches, with a softcore piano score. But maybe the fact that this was so different was because this is no more the time of swingers clubs than a time when things are really obscene. As soon as you're in bed with someone you can do anything you like, that's the basic arrangement nowadays – there is no disgust or danger. Maybe that was why the scene before me was so peaceful and so different from my previous assumptions, and maybe this is true for so many words, for most words we happily use are in fact outmoded, or exaggerations. If the atmosphere was crazed, it did not seem that way. Whereas now, from this distance, when everything has disappeared, I wonder if I should have thought about it more. For the problem with happiness is how often it requires the cooperation of other people, and it's never clear if they're cooperating for the right reasons, by which I mean the same reasons. Sure, everyone has their reasons, as the swami has it. But the fact that there are overlapping reasons in a situation is no guarantee at all that the consequences will be overlapping, too. But at the time I was not thinking with such detachment. Instead I was just marvelling how different things were from how I ever imagined them, and I liked that discovery very much. This orgy was quiet and industrious, a whole
you wanna take over or – no no, I'm cool, you cool? – no problem, let's stay like this
– that salon talk, just kindly and methodical. I liked it, the way people were considerate of each other. They'd get up for water and sit around chatting and sometimes just take over for a little, if someone needed a break from licking, or kissing. It was charming, the way people went about it. It's so easy, I was thinking, to multiply yourself. I was the same person who had arrived at this party; the self in me was the same. This is not a surprising situation and happens very often. But now inside that self, occupying the space which earlier had only the haziest notion of how the word
orgy
might have been fulfilled, there were these two naked kids just shyly or lazily kissing in the most laid-back way, and a cigarette that the girl had put aside was unravelling itself unnoticed in an ashtray. And perhaps if it had just been this, a general escalation of a blissful vibe, then I could probably have accepted it. But this was to ignore the fact that an orgy among people with whom you have many secrets is a difficult social encounter. I did not blame Hiro for this. If Hiro was sweet then he was sweet like the most catastrophic kitten. If now he does perhaps seem to me like one of those space invader demons leaking down poison in pixels, it's not as if those pixels were luminously visible. I was very sure that Hiro had no malice in him, but still, it made me wonder if therefore I should have considered much more carefully the issue of Hiro's pills, e.g. the issue of whether his sporadic taking of the medical pills that were said to stabilise or ameliorate his general condition was in fact as useful for the common good as Hiro always maintained. There was no time, however, to consider this, I had to consider it only in retrospect, when it was in a way too late, when whether or not Hiro's manic behaviour was a danger had been proved beyond all measure.

surprisingly social

For what was happening in front of me in this the present moment was that Romy and Epstein were naked too – or at least Epstein was, and Romy was let's say topless. She came over to nakedly smoke a cigarette with Candy and me so I began a balanced conversation, one of those casual phrases like, oh I don't know, like
Romy, what the fuck?
There was a vein on one of her breasts I could see, and as ever I considered how odd it was that nakedness feels like such an extensive knowledge, that even if one has seen a person naked already their nakedness is always an event, and it was an event – the way Romy's breasts were there. So I just tried to make a neutral observation.

— Epstein is really out there, I said.

I think it was definitely neutral as talk goes but in fact I was thinking very specific things, the main one being a feeling of absolute jealousy and aloneness that I could never tell to anyone, for what right did I have to be jealous of Romy when I myself was attached very publicly to another woman? But still, I was jealous, after all, in this melancholy way, and I was sad that it turned out that she was seeing other people, or not just seeing them but loving them in a way that perhaps she did not love me. But then of course why should I be her only love, when she was not mine? Of which jealousy there was a secret compartment, as in some portable writing desk borne with him in the night by an aristocrat fleeing the workers' revolution, which was this vision I now possessed of Epstein's dark penis. I don't think I'd ever seen an aroused penis that wasn't mine, outside various screens, and it was very strange, to be both seeing a penis and knowing it belonged to a man who was fucking a woman I loved, or was about to, and possibly in front of me. Also I must admit, it seemed large or certainly not small and as well therefore as a sadness I also was interested to feel just kind of objectively impressed, so when Romy wandered away to return to this surprising athlete I just quietly pointed the fact out to Candy.

— You think that's cool? said Candy.

— I think it's cool, I said.

— It's big.

— Sure is.

— But will he ever know what it's like, said Candy, — to have a girl take his whole cock in her mouth and then look up at him gently with her big brown eyes?

I didn't know what to say to that. Elsewhere there were conversations –

— Are you up yet? said Romy.

— You can't tell? replied Hiro.

– but I carried on saying nothing, and just considered the interiors.

made painful by the existence of secrets

To say you have a secret life may possibly give some basic grandeur impression – as if you enjoy meetings in private cabanas inaccessible to the average person in their parka, that you are maybe attending suppers with cardinals in their palazzos and gossiping about presidents – but really secrecy makes your ordinary life so minute and heavy, it has this difficult effect that it forces you into braveries that no one really should have to bear. It sounds contradictory or kooky but secrecy, it turns out, is a form of exposing yourself to more things in this world than you should; it is to take your privacy into places that it should not need to go – like this moment where I understood I would have to watch Romy have sex with someone else, and with my wife naked beside me, and do this with the appearance of a bland curiosity. Porn barons or fascisti might imagine such things, but I have only ever been gracious in what I imagine. I am not grand enough to end all feeling altogether and see a person as only a body or form of pleasure. But then, I was thinking, this is what happens if you possess many secrets: you will have to learn something which perhaps other people are often spared, which is that everyone is inhabiting multiple universes at the same time – it's just that usually the various asteroids and supernovas of these universes never meet. But sometimes if you have more than one life then the present moment will unfortunately see these worlds collide, and at these moments the contemporary will therefore call for total poise and bravura, and always I have wanted to be equal to the contemporary. If I had to watch these awful things, if I had to be my era's chubby piece of heraldry, yes if I had to be its martyr, ecstatically poaching myself in boiling oil, sunning myself on a stake, then so be it. I would take on the demented consequences myself – even if in general it was usually in fact Candy, and not me, who found the contemporary easy and possible to accept. She was always good with stressful situations, like this one of taking off your clothes in multiple company – a situation I could not help but find extremely difficult, reminding me as it did of that moment in changing rooms, when everyone is naked but pretending to ignore the situation, the imprints of sock elastic on ankles, like toothmarks. But then perhaps this is also true when it's just two of you in a room – that undressing is an unusual process, because to undress is so exhausting, it requires so many movements and processes of thinking. Yes, taking your clothes off and putting them on again in front of a stranger, it's the most unnatural thing in the world. Perhaps that's why desire's necessary, otherwise no one would ever undress, not at all. Though as if in answer to my awkwardness Candy kindly gestured me underneath a duvet that someone had brought out – a child's duvet printed with elongated footballs – and once again it struck me how tender she was, how much she loved and cared for me, while we sat there on the sofa, in observation, and in return I felt a total tenderness for her, too. But still, I do not recommend it – being present at an orgy sitting beside your wife, while watching a girl with whom you have recently woken naked in a hotel room, and bleeding – unless you're some narco lord who is used to this condition of many wives and mistresses. Always my capacity for transgression had been very small. The usual transgressions of stealing scrips, or jumping the barriers of the metro, the manic machismo of dicking the help, I always thought these were beyond me. And so the nakedness I saw around me – because now more and more the atmosphere was happy and delighted and a large amount of people were kissing while in various states of nakedness, I say
large amount
which was maybe only nine or ten, but that I think is still a large amount of nakedness to observe – felt very intimidating, and in response I could feel my attention wanting to migrate, just stealing over the border into the empty wide fields. I often find it hard to concentrate on just one thing, and being here in this way I felt very much coerced or even trapped, inveigled by Fate and the very high stars – like the moment when the psychopath and his knife are claiming you, on the upstairs landing, and you know that the police goon in his squad car parked in the street below for a calm cigarro and empanada de carne is no way going to help you. And yet also I would say that, as in all things, predicting the precise degree to which you will be made uncomfortable is not an easy profession. I imagined that the problems of an orgy among close friends would be quite small, that they would be these problems of
spectatorship
. With spectatorship and jealousy I could make some exhausted arrangement. The bright disasters that were advancing, however, were something much more fantastical and suddenly I had this thought of my mother and my father, secluded in their bedroom, not so far away, my mother watching the late-night shows, my father snoring or in the bath, and I felt a total sadness or abandoned kind of feeling, like all I ever wanted was the miniature comedy of my parents. My father used to read the newspapers aloud to my mother, and they would comment derisively on the general scene. That kind of intimacy now seemed to me very distant and romantic, romantic perhaps precisely because it seemed so impossible and far away.