No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (9 page)

And what am I worth as an element of surprise?

You, Liz? You’re incalculable.

They have started to meet. Once a month, that’s all. In restaurants. When she comes to London to see her gynaecologist. Frank has left Oxford. It hurt, but he’s out. He has found a flat in Kilburn. North London is what you say. He is patching a living together with a bit of supply teaching and some GCE examining and occasional reviews for small magazines. Kurt and Liz are in Cheltenham. Kurt is already head of media studies in a teacher’s college. He speaks in tongues and looks like Al Pacino. There are rumours that he has a mistress. A student. What other kind is there? Liz is having babies, losing babies, and coming to see him. He makes her laugh. Tells her about his adventures in the big smoke. Where he goes at night. Who he meets. How much sperm he’s making. If it were oil, he tells her, I’d be rich, I’d be a Sheik. Her green eyes narrow to pricks of emerald light. She laughs and laughs. That’s all.

They correspond. She writes to his flat. He writes to Gloria, poste restante, Cheltenham. Just to be on the safe side. When a partner moves in with him she writes to Errol, poste restante, Trafalgar Square. Also to be on the safe side.

Sometimes he tells her he has someone living with him when he hasn’t, just so that he can go on collecting her letters from the post office. He loves the palpitating tube ride under London. Has she, hasn’t she? Loves coming up out of the smoky underground, like Don Juan returned from hell. Bearing his exceptional secret through the crowded square. Joining the itching queue of aliens watching as the clerk goes through the mail. Striped envelopes worn thin with distance, queer brown paper packets done up with string and wax, the same ones there week after week after week, stale news from Kingston, Auckland, Izmir –
Ibrahim. War over. Come home
– Cape Town, Lima, Kabul, maybe Cheltenham, maybe not. The sting of disappointment. Another day of waiting.

For what? They no more than gossip to each other. Make jokes. Try out popular philosophy. Pass on hearsay, tidings, tittle-tattle. Films, books. What Kurt’s up to. No reason not to mention Kurt, is there. Love, Liz. Love, Frank. Not even much love, or lots of, or all my, or undying. Or you. Love you.

One day he receives a letter in which she tells him of a dream. He knows this is the one. Last night I dreamt I.

Steady. Hold steady.

Normally he rips open her letters and reads them where he stands, stock still like a hare in the middle of the post office floor. Not this time. This time nothing is still. His hands do battle with his eyes. Last night I dreamt I … No, not yet. He snatches the page from his own scrutiny. Strikes his thigh with it. Anyone watching must assume he has received the most appalling news.
War raging. Family wiped out. Stay where you are.

Should he have stayed where he was?

Liz!

He puts the paper back into its envelope and conveys it through the crowds into the great squirting square. Holds it tight against his chest, so that the pigeons can’t steal it. But the pigeons don’t come near him. They can sense his agitation. They can hear his heart. His kishkes going klop. He stands under a lion and reads. Skipping the preliminaries, the night, the moon, the poplars, the symbolism. He knows what he’s looking for. Knows it’s in there. And then I dreamt… It’s here, this is it. And then I dreamt… He turns his head away, as though to look back down the corridor of his old life one last time. Then he plunges in.

And then I dreamt you fucked me.

Silently, all the Trafalgar Square pigeons converge on him.

Back in Kilburn he carefully folds the letter over and over until he has a little parcel, almost a cube, the uppermost face of which reads ‘fucked’. The u of ‘you’ is just visible, as is the m of ‘me’, but they aren’t distractions. ‘Fucked’ pure and simple is what he wants and ‘fucked’ pure and simple is what he gets. How long does he sit and stare at that single word? One hour. Two hours. He undresses. How many times does he come reading it? Three times. Four times.

What he feels is a mystery to him. He has wallowed in sperm for half his life. He has waded up to his eyes in cunt. What can a little word like fucked hold for him?

They decide against Kilburn as a sacred site. If they’re going to do it, they’re going to do it well. They arrange a long weekend in Paris. She tells Kurt she is going away with a girl friend. Needs a break. Kurt understands. More time with the mistress, Frank thinks. They stay in a hotel in Montmartre. Why shouldn’t they? Are they not, in every sense of the word, tourists? Just visiting.

They don’t wait to unpack. The view their room enjoys
of Paris is an intrusion of sexual outrage in itself, but they don’t have eyes for it. They stretch out alongside each other on the bed, their toes touching, their bellies touching, their foreheads touching. How long have they known each other? Five, six years?

‘Been worth waiting for?’ she asks him.

‘This,’ Frank says, ‘is the fleshly experience of my life.’

He means it. He can sense every particular hair on her body. Give him the time and he could count them with his eyes closed. There is a fibrous magnetic field between them. He feels he is floating a couple of centimetres above her, and she above him. Some rare phenomenon of temperature variation is also at work. Wherever they meet they are five degrees hotter or colder than each other.

‘You know what I like,’ he says. ‘The way we don’t meld.’

‘Aren’t we supposed to meld?’

‘No. It’s a fallacy. You can mix but you shouldn’t meld. You don’t want to feel that you’re fucking yourself.’

‘You’ve told me that you like fucking yourself.’

‘Not in company, Liz. And not any more. I won’t be fucking anyone any more who isn’t you.’

He means it. He has never experienced a more exquisite penetration. One way or another, penetration itself is usually a let down. The word flatters the deed. Either it’s a bruising struggle to enter or you are swept in like a salmon awash in a waterfall. Today it is like cutting into a gateau.

The moment he begins to cut she raises her hips to him, brings her feet up, and locks him into place with her ankles. That’s how you know if you belong together – if the cake cuts and the ankles lock.

They walk hand in hand to a restaurant where a gypsy violinist plays to them and an Algerian sells them a rose. Why shouldn’t they? Are they not tourists?

On the way back to the hotel he drapes his arm around her shoulder, then brings his hand up to her neck.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I like that.’

He tightens his grip.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘do that.’

They walk along in silence, the wind blowing her skirt, her heels sparking the cobbles, her neck hot under his fingers. Everything smells foreign.

They go out on to their balcony to breathe in the view. The entire sighing city submissive to their contemplation. Submissive but not meek. She raises her skirt from behind. And inclines towards the city. He moves into position.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Use something.’

He dithers. Use something? He hasn’t used something since he was sixteen. No one uses them any more. And he has already come into her twice today without.

‘In my bag,’ she says. ‘My hair brush.’

He finds her hair brush and returns with it. She is further forward than before, one hand on the the balcony rail, the other clawing at her buttocks, pulling herself open. She hasn’t bothered to remove her pants. They’re nothing. Not to be respected. Nothing is to be respected. In the distance he can hear Paris roaring. Closer to home, all is silent.

He eases the handle of the brush into her.

‘Not the handle,’ she says.

He wonders if he has it in him to go through with this. But he only wonders for a second.
You’re a sadist, Frank.
He reverses the brush, bristles first, and pushes.

‘Harder,’ she says. ‘Rougher. And hold my neck. Hurt it.’

She doesn’t moan. Women only moan in Mel’s novels. She grimaces. She bites her lip. She grunts, yips, coughs, makes a series of rasping sounds from the back of her throat.

‘Harder?’

‘Mm.’

‘Harder what?’

‘Harder please.’

‘Please who?’

It doesn’t come naturally to him. He isn’t at his ease. But he’s read the literature.

And so has she. ‘Please sir.’

‘Do you love me?’ he says.

She falls quiet.

He pushes violently. Twists the brush. ‘Answer me.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I love you.’

He could throw her off the balcony. She wouldn’t stop him. He could replace the brush with himself, fuck her and throw her off. Does he want to do that? No. But it’s academically interesting that he could. Academically interesting that she would let him. Who is she? What is she playing at? And another question: does she do this –
did
she do this – with Kurt?

And still another: is she in any sense that matters doing it with him?

‘I want you inside,’ he says.

She doesn’t demur. He twists the brush out of her and leads her in by the neck.

‘Kneel,’ he says.

She kneels.

He pulls off his belt and ties her hands behind. He puts the handle of the brush in her mouth. ‘Taste yourself,’ he says.

He undresses and sits in the little pink velvet bedroom chair. A nice thought of the management’s, a honeymoon touch. Like the pretty matching valance round the bed. Like the vase waiting for the single rose they would inevitably buy. Romantic. Strange they don’t provide the brush that goes up the cunt as well.

‘Come over here,’ he says. ‘On your knees, stay on your knees.’

She does as he tells her.

In reality, in
fairness,
he has been doing what she tells him. She was the one who lifted up her skirt. She was the one who said use something. For his part he would have been happy to go on floating on their magnetic field, cutting into gateau. But he’s a grown man, a free agent –
it’s a free country, Frank –
and he’s not obliged to do anything he doesn’t in his heart want to do. One day, when I’m old, he tells himself, I will look back on tonight and I will not forgive myself. But old is still a long way down the track. ‘Now suck me,’ he says.

She seems surprised that this is all he has in store for her. Her eyes quickly register the abstemiousness of his expectations.
Suck him?
She’s come all the way to Paris with her husband’s best friend and a bag full of spiky brushes just to suck him!

He grabs her hair as her mouth is about to descend on him. ‘I think you should beg to suck me,’ he says.

She begs. ‘I beg you,’ she says.

‘Use my name.’

‘I beg you, Frank.’

Frank!

He comes copiously. In silence. Fingers through her hair. Fingers round her neck. Holding her head still. So that she can swallow everything.

‘Now I would like you to talk to me,’ he says, ‘about the taste of my sperm.’

And she does. At length. Omitting not a single detail, no matter how seemingly trivial. It isn’t difficult to ascertain from her, at the last, that she would rather swallow him than anyone.

Than anyone, Liz?

Than anyone.

Kurt!

Frank!

What are the chances? Arms opening to him, pulling him in, closing around him, boys, boys with greying temples, boys looking at early retirement packages, boys who haven’t spoken or heard from or alluded for a quarter of a century – what did you do? what did I? – what are the chances of a warm welcome?

Mel has never met Kurt. He was gone, stone cold out of the life, well before Mel got her turn. But she knows the story. Frank’s version of the story. And she recognises the symptoms of the
herzschmertz
that seasonally seizes him, usually at the beginning of spring, which is also when the dreams start, as a consequence of his cleaning out drawers and coming upon old photographs, or worse still, old letters. These days she doesn’t bother to wait for the wistful expressions of regret – ‘Funny how after a certain age you don’t make real friends again. It’s true what they say: no pals like old pals. Et cetera.’ ‘It’s just a tic,’ she tells him, refusing to look at the photographs. ‘If you’d wanted old pals you’d have worked harder at keeping them. You’d have respected the rules of palship more.’ But the fever has to run its course. Mamet plays. Buddy movies. Hands of poker, just the two of them. The sound of him on the phone to directory enquiries – ‘No, I don’t have their address, but there can’t be that many Brylls in Cheltenham.’ Before the business of life carries him on to some new repining.

What are the chances of a warm welcome? ‘I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole,’ Mel warns. Ezekiel.

And she doesn’t even know the whole story. She doesn’t know that drunkenly one night after a GCE examiners’ meeting – he must have been drunk, mustn’t he? – Frank spills the beans to a fellow examiner, a Cheltenham colleague
of Kurt’s, and a fellow admirer of Kurt’s wife’s green eyes. Maybe it’s the warmth of that particular admiration that sets him off. He hasn’t seen Liz for months. And no longer collects letters from her from Trafalgar Square. What is there to write about now she has told him – willingly or under duress, he will never know; but it was duress of her own designing, he knows that much – that she prefers the taste of his sperm to that of any man living? You can pack too much into a single night. You can cover too much ground. The new admirer – Billy Yuill (and the name doesn’t help his cause with Frank) – has the look of a man just starting out on the journey. But under serious misapprehensions as to the nature of the terrain. Like someone in flannels and a boater turning up at the foot of Kilimanjaro. ‘You’re dressed wrong for where you’re going,’ Frank wants to tell him. ‘Get out of those picnic clothes. And wipe that starry expression off your face.’ It’s the mother in Liz that Billy is soft on. He likes to see her with her kids. He’s been accompanying her to children’s playgrounds. He’s helped her put a sandpit in the back garden. You’re a vicarious pervert, chum, Frank wants to tell him. You’re a proxy paedophile. He’s not only worried for the children, he is affronted on Kurt’s behalf Men who are smitten by a woman’s wifely little ways, Billy Yuill, should leave her to perform her wifely little functions for her husband. And then there’s the insult to Liz herself to consider. We’re talking person here, Billy. Not mother, not shopper, not angel in the house. We’re talking woman. We’re talking laughter that tears you to tatters. We’re talking fibrous magnetic fields. We’re talking cunt that cuts like a gateau. We’re talking hair brushes. We’re talking cock-sucker.