No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (23 page)

‘Why would they give you a bull’s eye?’

‘Why would they give me anything?’

She throws him one of her waiting for a heckler to hang himself looks, lips cockled, neck sprung, what are we going to do with someone as slow as you. Wait no longer, is the answer. ‘It’s an anus, dickhead,’ she shows him. ‘They’ve made you a sweet little milk and chocolate anus.’

Have they? He peers in. Is that an anus? How would he know? How would she know, come to that?

Sounds of strangulated manly mirth emanate from the kitchen. Frank looks up in time to see the waiter with the cratered complexion peering through the porthole in the swinging door, gasping for air.

It’s an anus.

But that’s just for starters, isn’t it? The next part of the joke will come when Frank lowers his lips to it. Gets froth on his lips. Browns that nose.

He pushes the cappuccino from him. Spoilsport. ‘Did you put them up to this?’ he asks.

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Why would
they
do
that?’

‘Maybe they fancy you, Frank.’

‘Poofs don’t fancy me. Poofs have never fancied me. They never did when I was young and rangy; why should they bother now I’m old and slack?’

‘Maybe you excited them with your description of what you look like tugging at your todger. Maybe they found the picture of you on your knees with your cheeks red irresistible.’

It
was
her. Getting her own back. For being found in bed in the middle of the afternoon cheerfully re-discovering her own body parts. She’s paying him out, measure for measure, diddle for diddle. But just in case it wasn’t her, or wasn’t
only
her, he requests that she sees to the bill. He’ll put in his share. He’d rather not be involved in the transaction, that’s all. In fact he’ll wait for her in the street.

‘Fancy you … !’ she says, as they walk home. ‘Fancy you being embarrassed!’

They return to her room to find a tribute to the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald on the telly. They keep the box going twenty-four hours so they can walk in and out of it. Wallpaper. Ella’s almost finished, but they just make
Every Time We Say Goodbye.
They smooch. One hand on the small of the back, the other hand grasping a bottle of brown ale by the neck. Frank dodging the Cio-Cio-San chopsticks which protrude dangerously from D’s coiffure. Moonlight on Tor Bay. They die, little by little. The fat lady sings and it’s all over.

They both know it’s all over. Or rather, what they both know is that it’s never going to start.

He’s too heavy for her. Too touchy, too censorious, too pedantic. She says tomato and he says she’s missed the point.

And she’s not serious enough for him. Sure, she’s a comedian, but a comedian, of all people, you expect to be
serious. There’s not the whiff of death about her that he needs in a woman. You can’t smell the grave when she laughs and you don’t fear for your life when you fuck her. Of course he wouldn’t know what you feel when you fuck her. But then that too is part of the problem. It’s not the fuck he misses, it’s the trip to the underworld that accompanies it.

She has to be in St Austell for a show tomorrow night. He’ll drop her there and call it quits. He’ll have a few days on his own in Cornwall, remembering the time he spent there with Mel, going placid amid the din, then he’ll have to think about returning to town, dumping his stuff at the Groucho, going round estate agents, finding an apartment with enough plugs, all that. Charming, to have come to this at his age. Thanks, Mel. Thanks, girls.

And thanks, boys?

Back in his own room – for that’s the rule: beddy-bye byes time and he has to tinkle back to his – he frets about the scummy chocolate anus bobbing on the surface of his cappuccino. What if it wasn’t D’s idea? What if the gay caballeros were whispering him a message on their own say-so? Passing him their calling card because they believed he would not be altogether unreceptive to it?

What he told D was true. He had never been an object of deviant attention. He had so
not
been an object of deviant attention, in fact, that it sometimes hurt him, not where he was hungering or needy, let it be clearly understood, but in the area of cold commodity valuation, in his idea of himself as an aesthetic object. As far as conscious desire went – as far as
his
conscious desire went – he had never come close to understanding what anyone could want with something that didn’t have a cunt. He had no principled objection; he just couldn’t see the point. But he is a little more than half as old as the century, five per cent of the millennium; lay twenty men his age end to end and there’s a wait before William the
Conqueror arrives – you can’t go all those years and not occasionally wonder about yourself. As when a pitted waiter sculpts a chocolate anus in your coffee, for example, or when you dream of having someone’s penis in your mouth.

He has had the penis dream twice that he knows of. He’s prepared to accept that he may have had it more than twice and has wiped the memory. It is always possible, though he thinks unlikely, that he dreams it every night and wipes it every morning. More pertinent to his state of mind is his fear (if fear it really is) that he is about to have it again. This is an entirely rational expectation, quite separate from the cappuccino incident, based on his conviction that the two dreamed penises were in fact the same penis, that they were not fictional penises but strict representations of an actual penis, and that he has seen the actual penis of which they were representations dripping shower water only recently in the bathroom of an undistinguished cottage in Lynton, unless it was Lynmouth, but in a place he had no right to be in either way. When Frank says he dreams of putting someone’s penis in his mouth he means he dreams of putting Kurt’s penis in his mouth.

There is a very ordinary explanation for this. Though it is based on a most wonderful fact. Referring only to aspect now, and setting everything to do with emission and flavour aside, Frank and Kurt have identical penises. Alike in the challenge presented by their length, in the consideration shown by their thickness, in the divine harmony suggested by their curvature and colouration, the penises of Kurt Bryll and Frank Ritz could have been swapped in the night, whether by a skilled surgeon or a bad fairy, without either party, or any party to either party, being the wiser in the morning. In the parlance of the times when Frank and Kurt routinely had their penises out in company, their own grandmothers wouldn’t have known the difference. Speaking
ordinarily, then, when Frank dreams of sucking Kurt’s penis, he is only dreaming of sucking his own. And there’s nothing deviant about that.

What an ordinary explanation fails to honour, though, is the immensity of the grief Frank experienced when he awoke from the dreams and found his mouth empty. The first time, he was sleeping alone. He knew the minute he came out of the dream that he was mistaken, that the bed was cold around him, that he had been on an exciting and unaccustomed journey and would have to lie there a long time to recover from it. He had loved the sensation, he couldn’t deny that. He had loved opening his mouth and receiving. The texture of what he had received shocked him, but the experience of recipience itself shocked him even more. This was what was new – opening, waiting, submitting, being filled, taking not giving. Sucking, not pushing. Very interesting. Very. Whatever else he was going to get up to that day, or for the rest of his life come to that, there was no question of him allowing his mouth to be used in quite that fashion again. No sir. Absolument pas. So he’d had a contrary experience – so what? You can’t pursue every fugitive bodily whim that seizes you in your sleep. He’d murdered in his dreams on occasions. That too had left him feeling pretty good. Was he to arm himself with an axe and get cracking as a consequence? No. No to the mouth. He was sure about that, but lying there in the penumbral aftermath of the dream, he was sad about it too. Very.

The second flight from conformity was even more turbulent. Mel was with him that night. What had been given him in the dream he never remembered, only what was taken away; so the dream and the waking spilled dangerously into each other. The dream had done with him, wanted to beach him, wanted to spew him out. His desperation to stay in it became the nightmare. There’d been
a dick in his mouth and now it was gone. So where was it? He writhed in the bed, scouring Mel’s body with his lips. He was bereft, but he was also angry. Where was the bastard thing? His mouth found her belly, coils of snapping hair, the swampy moistness of that bourne from which no traveller wishes to return. It had to be down there, there was no other place it could be. But it was gone. Forever gone. Nothing was down there. Nothing but loss. He hung from the dream like an injured climber clinging to a rock face. If he woke, he fell. If he woke, the person by his side fell with him. For she too had been brought into the shadowland of loss. The dick that was missing was missing between them. Their child. He cried to dream again.

She woke irritably, to find him the wrong way round in the bed, mewling. He lied about the cause. He said he’d been dreaming a death. He would rather not say whose. He preferred not to talk about it.

Hardly surprising. What if he’d been dreaming about the death in his heart of heterosexual love?

For one whole week he sat abstractedly in his office, surrounded by his neutered machines, unable to push out any work that pleased him. Had there been a litmus test for these things he would have braved the doctor’s surgery, shown him his tongue, and allowed science to decide. Blue you’re straight, pink you’re gay. When he finally ventured into the waking world it was with no other intention but to look at men.

But what was he meant to look
for?
He knew what aroused him in a woman. Everything aroused him in a woman. When it came to women he was in the last stages of chronic erotolepsy. Certifiable. For the thoughts he harboured about the tension of a skirt across a woman’s buttocks, for the labour he expended discerning the impression of a nipple through a bodice, a blouse, two cardigans
and a winter coat, he could be locked away for life. Now his dreams told him he was a lunatic in quite another direction, and yet he didn’t have the first idea where to direct his eyes. Muscles? Shoulders? Waists? Loins? Or was it a warm personality he was meant to be winkling out? What did daytime telly girls say they looked for in a man – a sense of humour? a tight bum?

On a blustery November Friday in London he set his senses loose. He strode along Oxford Street, eyeballing policemen, postmen, traffic wardens, bus drivers, cab drivers, van drivers, street-sweepers, builders, newspaper vendors, dispatch riders, delivery men, window cleaners, hot chestnut sellers, mock auctioneers, fly-by-night perfume pedlars, shoppers, husbands, lovers, fathers even; he sauntered through Covent Garden, sticky-beaking street clowns, jugglers, wine-waiters, silversmiths, potters, Africans, vegetarians, cheese-eaters, overdressers jabbering in fashion alleys; he took a cab to the Chelsea Barracks to get a load of dough-faced corporals in berets, knobby-headed privates in weekend civvies, lads with rifles at the ready, inchoate ruffians with hard chests and glistening moustaches of the sort Lawrence liked sitting next to in trains and who might just have given poor unconnected Forster the thick ear he forever craved; then up to Knightsbridge for the moneyed tourists, the Germans in their animal skins, the Iranians with their black-masked trains behind, the easily bruised Frenchmen in their existential scarfs – stereotypes, as D would have called them, but what was he to do? he didn’t design or dress them. He didn’t want to undress them either, that was the outcome of the exercise. Not with his eyes, not with his heart, not with his dick, was he attracted to a single person of his own sex.

Only to their wives and girlfriends.

Sitting in a cab in a traffic jam in Battersea he watched a
group of the spunk-filled body-built labouring young patch a six-inch hole in the road, one on a drill, another on a shovel, another in the cab of a heavy roller. They jerked and twitched and whistled and grinned and bawled and rattled and drove and shovelled and shook and larked and slipped and yanked and box-kicked and cuffed and goosed and nutted and scratched and yawned and farted and jerked and twitched … Sport with them? Might just as well, Frank thought, go skylarking with a colony of mud crabs.

Barely a woman went by whom he did not consider from some angle or imagine in some contortion. Neither decrepitude nor derangement stood in the way of his passing fancy. If she were old he re-conceived her young; if she were disordered he reassembled her. But for the male animal -whatever the age, whatever the colour, whatever the condition – he had no possessive or regenerative instinct. As they were they were. They were no business of his.

And neither, clearly, were his dreams. He read some Edmund White, just to be on the safe side. But the high falutin’ squiffiness, all the talk of the beautiful and the brave, and then straight into the old brown crack, only confirmed what he suspected. He wasn’t gay. He didn’t have what it took.

And now?

Say ah! and he’d still turn the litmus paper blue, he’s sure of that. But he has to concede that there’s a pattern to his socio-sexual preferences that isn’t all it should be. He’s too deferential. There’s too much docility in him. When he kisses the likes of Josh Green, he lets them make the running. They envelop
him.
When he smooches with D she hoists him up to her level. He allows whores to take liberties with him. He adopts the submissive posture. His recollections of Mel’s scarlet prose disturb him. It’s all very well laughing at Lorenzo; the truth is he, Frank, wouldn’t say no if some
Sabina with a throbbing cunt offered to chain his dick to the mouse of her computer. Not say no! He’d kill for the chance. Better still,
be
killed for the chance. Watching a late-night telly programme sympathetic to perverts, he has learnt that sado-masochists divide themselves into tops and bottoms. He’s a bottom. That’s what the gay vegetarians had intended by their mooning cappuccino – not that the bottom was his tendency, but that the bottom was him. He’d misread the nature of their gift. They’d presented him with his portrait -that was all.