No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (20 page)

‘What’s snakes and ladders got to do with anything, Frank? I’m just asking you why everything has to have a warped sexual explanation?’

‘What’s warped? Where’s that word come from? I haven’t described anything warped. What’s warped about shtupping your first wife? Myself, I think that’s rather a nice thing to do. Myself, I think Billy Yuill should hurry back home and join in. I’d have, if they’d let me. If Kurt had been any kind of a friend he’d have been only too pleased that I once shtupped his wife, and if Billy Yuill were any kind of husband he’d be only too pleased that Kurt wants to shtup her again. And they both should be only too pleased that I’d still be only too pleased to join them. It confirms your judgment when another man wants what you’ve got

‘Oh yeah? I saw your face, Frank, when I suggested that you’d been booted out to make room for another man. I saw how confirmed in your judgment you felt.’

‘I’m talking about ideal behaviour, D, not the accidents of the hour. Can’t we have some philosophy around here? It’s a compliment when someone wants what’s yours, that’s what I’m saying. Sure, it may take a little time to see it that way, but when you do, gey gesunterhait, is what you should say. Be my guest, enjoy yourself, go in good health. Here, look, I’ll even hold her legs apart so you can enter her in comfort. That’s how much I love you. That’s how much I love her. Kuk the knish – go on, get an eyeful of the cunt. You’ll never see a finer. And while you’re down there you should listen to it as well. Looks like a shell, sounds like a shell. Splash, splish – the music of the knish. Beautiful,
n’est-ce pas?
I’ll hold it open while you put your ear to it. And you call that warped? I call it devotion. Devotion, D. Friendship. You want to know what warped is? I’ll tell you what warped is -’ He bangs the bed, sending the squares of black chocolate flying in all directions. ‘Warped is going to bed in
your socks.’ He rips at his pyjama cord. ‘Warped is dressing up to go to sleep. This is what I call warped’ – he punches the duvet – ‘this fucking bolster!’

Woman – mouth – talk.

Man – forehead – bang.

He is dismayed by his own violence. Anyone would think he resents the territorial integrity which her bolster and her bedsocks stand guard over. Whereas he doesn’t in the least. See her diaphanously bagged in her flouncing pig-out night attire, reader; see how ill the crocheted cuffs of those same woolly bedsocks set off her jammy limbs, and you will believe Frank when he swears he has only celibacy in his heart. Now, though, it is open to her to accuse him of regretting and even resenting the undertaking he has given her – not exactly a vow of chastity on his own part, but decidedly a vow to respect whatever she’s vowed.

She’d laid her cards on the table three nights before in a factitious boutique bottle-drinker’s pub in Exeter – The Hole in Gertie O’Reilly’s Bucket, or something like – where he’d persuaded her to meet him after her show to hear the apology owing from Cheltenham and to receive again his offer to be her chauffeur if a chauffeur she still required. Ella Fitzgerald was singing on the factitious nostalgia juke box. All the dreamiest, most aching urban stuff. ‘Stars Fell on Alabamba’. ‘Moonlight in Vermont’. ‘A Foggy Day in London Town’. D loved Ella Fitzgerald. Ella Fitzgerald found her soft side. Frank too. Frank had smooched his first ever smooch to Ella Fitzgerald, not knowing what she looked like. He was surprised, later, to discover that it was a fat woman in glasses who had stirred him to such smoky city-lights eroticism on the floor of the Plaza ballroom on Oxford Road in Manchester, moved his heart and his manhood to dance in that perfect accord. Fancy a fat woman having the power to synchronise him. He was also surprised to discover,
later, that the girl he had smooched with had lifted his wallet while they were cheek to cheek. In memory, the lost wallet only increased the ache. A hotel room with a balcony high above the lights of the city, the smell of expensive perfume and guttering candle, neon flashing, a sax playing, champagne in a silver bucket on a silver tray, yourself in a tuxedo, an unfamiliar golden head on your shoulder – petty larceny too belonged to the experience. And why stop at larceny? Let the golden top go ahead and plug you with the pearl-handled forty-five she’s got concealed in her Gucci evening purse, the night can only get better. So powerfully does it come back to him – not anything he’s ever had, but everything he’s always wanted to have – that he takes D by her pleated wrists and pulls her up from the beery table and puts his arms as far around her as he is able. It may only be The Hole in Gertie O’Reilly’s Bucket in downtown Exeter, but music speaks to all time and all places, does it not? D wouldn’t disagree with that. Ella Fitzgerald awakens tawdry new world longings in her as well. There is no room to move, but then who’s moving? Cheek to cheek’s hard; nose to nose, though, they can just do. ‘I behold your adorable face,’ the fat woman in the glasses croons, and as long as the song lasts D and Frank agree to behold the adorable in each other.

It was immediately after this, back down among the brown ales, and returned to her loud laconic stage-shagger’s intonations, that D took him into her confidence.

‘I’m not,’ she told him, ‘on the best of terms with my cunt.’

Frank was man enough not to look around. ‘Who’s to blame for that?’ he asked. ‘Or is it six of one and half a dozen of the other?’

‘We’re just not in comunication. If you want to know,
I’ve seen neither hide nor hair of my genitals since I was a sixteen-year-old comprehensive schoolgirl.’

‘Is that so?’ Frank said. He hadn’t wanted to appear too inquisitive. Like the cunt-fearing devil in fairy stories, he wondered if she bore some terrible deformity between her legs.

‘I have an apron of fat,’ she told him (there you are, he was right), ‘which covers my genitals completely. I can’t see myself.’

‘Well I could always lift it for you,’ Frank had ventured philanthropically, ‘while you look …’

She showed him her tongue.

‘Alternatively – ‘

‘It isn’t funny to me, Frank,’ she’d said, despite the sacred responsibility she owed, as a professional comedian, to find everything funny.

She didn’t like herself, surprise surprise, that was what it came to. She told fat slag shagger stories on the stage which were of practical help, surprise surprise, to everyone but herself. She reconciled two thousand women a night to the grossness of their bodies, but she hated her own too much ever to trust it to a single act of love.

‘It’s like being the captain of a sinking ship,’ Frank said, understandingly, ‘or a member of the priesthood. You’re expected to save every soul but your own. Telly critics are the same. You expiate every other fucker’s sins of time-wasting and triviality, but there’s no one to square things up for you. They’re back on dry land, sleeping the sleep of the righteous, and you’re still stuck on the burning deck, having to watch crap on the box all day.’

Having said which, he sat back in his round-armed bar chair with the look of a man who had revived a corpse. That was the cunt problem solved. Next.

But she didn’t want her cunt problem solved. She was
relieved not to be on good terms with it. There was a bright side to not having to see it, not having to be reminded of it, every day. She was liberated. She could have friendships with men. An ulterior motive was at a stroke removed.

OK by Frank. He’d read about friendship with women. And he wasn’t doing anything else.

As captains of their separately sinking ships they should help each other, because no one helped them – that was the deal. They could keep each other company on the road. Frank was wrong about how light she travelled. There was more loot on that stage than he thought there was. She had a van to take care of all that, but who wants to be shaken around in a van? So yes, Frank could drive her, unencumbered, and in a spirit of non-ulterior-motive friendship, across Dartmoor to her next gig at Torquay. After Torquay she was down to have a few days lazing in the sun, which really meant sitting up in bed noshing chocolates, and he could join her in that. Then, if things were still working out, he could drive her to St Austell, which was not that many blind Cornish miles (not that he was counting) from Little Cleverley. And she, for her part, could be around late at night, as a sort of surrogate anchoring device, to stop him taking his dick out in public places and otherwise losing sight of his own best interests. That there was to be absolutely no fucking or anything in the slightest bit preparatory to fucking – unless you call black chocolate and brown ale a preparative to fucking – suited him fine. After what happened to him in Lynton or Lynmouth he has come to a new understanding of what it means to be fifty. Instead of wanting to fuck, you want to blubber. The day he left Mel he had cried, and he has cried on just about every day since. Sperm or tears, where’s the difference? One way or the other it’s the same profligacy with liquids and emotions. One way or another you’re still jerking off. So what you have to do is stay away
from temptation in regard to spillage of either sort. And as far as any such temptation goes, D does indeed seem to have the requisite quality – the effects of Ella Fitzgerald’s intercession notwithstanding, she no more wants any of Frank’s liquids than any of Frank’s liquids want her.

Except that now he is shouting and banging the bolster.

If that were Mel at the far end of the bed, he would at this point expect to be banished to an inferior room and a lower storey. But then if that
were
Mel at the far end of the bed he would never have got to finish his speech. Because he doesn’t love D he is free to admire her, and one of the things he admires about her professionally (and no one is admirable
except
professionally) is her confidence to allow hecklers to have their say. Patience is a potent comic weapon in her hands; she stands still as a mantis on the stage, her arms folded across her chest, exactly as they are now, her lips pureed into a parody of infinite forbearance, and just waits and waits, assured that the trouble maker will at last choke on his own too much. This is an advantage she enjoys over Mel as a companion – she gives Frank leave to expatiate. Thereafter, mind you, the opinions of the two women quickly converge. And that’s another reason he’s glad he’s not fucking any more. There is now so little ideological or cognitive disparity between women – between the ones Frank meets, anyway -that there is a sense in which once you have fucked one, you have fucked all. See how time has changed him from the boy who thought he would be pulling at the Kardomah till he was a hundred, so peculiar in every particular, so infinitessimally herself and not another, was every girl he met. He was a cunt collector then, and to a trained eye no doubt cunts are still as various as they ever were. But as befits a man at the end of his sexual usefulness, he notices only the intelligences of women today, and it’s those intelligences he doesn’t mind he isn’t fucking, since he’s fucked them all already.

A long and heavy silence has prevailed since he banged the bolster, broken only by the sound of D knocking back what’s left of the ale.

‘I think sorry is the word you’re searching for,’ she says finally.

He agrees with her. ‘I am sorry,’ he says. ‘I’ve been a bit shaken up over the last few days.’

She allows a light yeasty belch to part her lips. It’s not quite a snort, though it’s on a snort’s errand.

‘Do you know what I’d do if I were you?’ she asks, but without waiting, as Mel would have waited, for an answer. ‘I’d go and see a therapist.’

‘To what end?’

‘To get help, Frank. You need counselling. Did you hear yourself just now?
The
cunt.
The
knish. You talk about women as if they’re nothing but parts.
The
bit of what you fancy.’

‘It’s the definite article you object to, is it? Would you be all right about it if I went indefinite.
A
cunt?
A
knish?’

‘Who’s talking about grammar?’

‘You are, D. You think the definite article is degrading to your sex. You think it objectifies them. But that’s not what the definite article does. Think of the the in
The
Holy Ghost, or
The
Lord, or
The
Ten Commandments. It gives them definition, doesn’t it, it confers the distinction of specificity on them. And
the
Lord (and no other) said unto
the
Israelites (and to no one else), gey gesunterhait, go forth and multiply and honour
the
knish – meaning
the
knish and nothing but
the
knish.’

‘A cunt belongs to someone, Frank.’

‘Does it? I’m not sure it does. A cunt is leased to someone, I’ll accept that. I think a cunt belongs to nature, and a woman is but the steward of it. But anyway I thought we were talking about
the
cunt, not
a
cunt – ‘

‘There is no
the
cunt. Just as there is no
the
shag, or
the
wife, or
the
bit on the side. You have to start again every time.’

Frank thinks about that. ‘You mean every shag is a new shag.’

‘It’s not a shag. It’s not
a
shag or
the
shag, it’s someone.’

‘So we are talking grammar after all. It’s the impersonal pronoun you really don’t like. It’s the
it.
What you’re actually against is that when our sex looks at your sex we think of giving it one. It’s the impersonal mirth you don’t like.’

‘Mirth!’

‘Dead right. Mirth. When we were kids we used to go on ynaf hunt. You won’t know what a ynaf is. You’re a London girl and London slang begins and ends with apple and pears. Where I come from, ynaf’s backward chat for fanny. Great name for a vagina, wouldn’t you agree? Ynaf. Wonderful to get your tongue around. Philosophical, to boot. It’s got why in it – the big question – and wine in it and naff in it, but mostly it’s got laugh in it.’

‘The laugh being
mostly
on whom, Frank?’

‘The laugh being mostly on us, D, we little Ahabs obsessively stumping over the great sperm-filled oceans of Wythenshawe and Droylsden. We knew what we were about. We knew the ynaf was making clowns of us.’