Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (9 page)

I'm heading back past the old administration building. It's not the most direct route to Velma's house, but I have a kind of urge to make contact again with Dr Klagfarten, if only in the most glancing way. Looking up, I see that a drape or curtain has been pulled across the window of his office. It reminds me of Dave's egg. If a fork like a prop for a Magritte painting were to be plunged through the window of Dr Klagfarten's office, a gush of yellow neurosis would undoubtedly ooze out.

My route to Velma's takes me across the park. As I enter, between cast-iron gates, the sun at last begins to seep through the clouds. I keep my speed up, concentrating on the internal dispositions of muscle, flesh and bone; feeling my shoes as flexible, overall calluses, attached at heel and toe.

By the brackish, oily carp pond, in the very centre of the park, a small wooden bridge is marooned on the impacted earth. Squirrels flow about, grey rivulets of rodent. The hacked and husbanded woodland here is filtering the lax sun, making for bad dappling. At a fence of waist-high, wooden palisades, two young men stand, feeding pigeons and crows.

If not foreign – they ought to be. They both wear expensive overcoats, of lamb's-wool, or cashmere. Their hair is too glossy, too dark, too curly. Even from some fifty yards away I can see the sideburns that snake down from hairlines to jawlines. They are both wearing gloves. I don't like birds at the best of times, and the pigeons and crows in this town are getting quite obese. We don't need types like these coming into our park and feeding them expensive peanuts.

The pigeons and crows rear up so. And they're so big. Today, their bipedalism makes them humanoid to me. In their greasy, feather capes of grey and black, they might be avine impersonators, hustling a sexual practice founded on fluttering and paid for in peanuts.

As I draw level with the two men, one turns away from the fence, scattering peanuts and pigeons from his gloved hands, ‘See you, Dave,’ says his companion, but not with any real feeling. Dave glances at me, once, but with an unexpected acuity, as if reading me. He strides away in front, kicking up small sprays of old leaves, mould and twigs. It's clear that he is uncomfortable, that he wishes to put some distance between us. I quicken my pace.

I caught him by the octagonal, wooden gazebo, used by the park staff as a place to brew up teas, and stash their tools. He was unexpectedly heavy-set, his body fluent like a waterfall beneath his soft overcoat. There was a nasty, ungainly struggle, which reflected badly on both of us. There was no symmetry, no choreography to our bestial growls and spasmodic cuffs
.
He went down to his knees, hard and fast, an enthusiastic convert to nonconsciousness.

There was mush on the mattock. I hefted it. It felt so light, so buoyant. I resisted an urge to hurl it up, into the bluing sky, to watch it rise to the heavens, rotating slowly on its own axis, like the transmogrified tool in 2001.

His wallet was made from slightly furry-feeling leather. Possibly pigskin. Credit cards, business cards, driving licence, kidney-donor card, all were in the name of Jonathan D. Sczm. I wondered about the D. Did it stand for David, or was Dave merely Sczm's nickname? Did it matter now?

Velma answers the door looking very grey, very drawn. She only opens the door a fraction, just far enough for me to appreciate how very grey, how very drawn she is. ‘You look rather rough,’ she says, ‘and your jacket's all torn.’

‘What's this?’ I reply, gesturing, taking in the crack, the vee, of Velma. ‘I'm not hawking anything here, Velma, you can take the chain off.’

‘I'm – I'm not sure I can do that, I don't think I want you to come in. Dave called me from the café – he said you were in a bit of a state.’

‘Oh, for fuck's sake!’ I lean against the brickwork, and awkwardly kidney-punch the intervening air. I'm doing my best to affect a manner of complete naturalness – but I have the idea it isn't working.

‘Dave said you had an appointment with Dr Klagfarten for three this afternoon.’

‘Yeah.’

‘After Dave rang, I called Dr Klagfarten, he says it would be fine if you wanted to go back there now, have a word now. He said –’

‘What? What did he say?’

‘He said you might be a bit upset – upset about me . . .’

‘You, Velma?’ I'm looking at her now, and I can see the tears swelling in her eyes. ‘You? Velma?’ She shakes her head.

‘Not Velma, not any more, not Velma, not –’ And she's sobbing now, the sobs slotting into a cycle, an hysterical cycle which she breaks, crying, ‘D-Davina! Davina! That's my name! Davina!’

I'm quite taken aback by my own sang-froid. I straighten up, adopt a conciliatory but vaguely imposing demeanour. Davina is still sobbing, but subsiding. ‘When you say your name is Davina now, do you mean that you've changed it by deed-poll?’

‘I've applied, yes.’ She's composing herself.

‘How long will it take?’

‘About six weeks.’

‘And until then?’

‘Well, you encourage the people who know you to address you as you would prefer to be addressed.’ She's regained her composure altogether. ‘In a sense that's what it is to have a name at all. A name is, after all, simply a certain common ascription.’

‘Which in your case is –?’

‘Dave.’

‘Dave?’

‘That's right.’

Dr Klagfarten stands with his back to me, looking out over the rooftops. The yellow-tinted glass imparts a slight, bilious whine to his voice, as he says, ‘You are finding this business of the ubiquity of the name Dave unsettling, hmm?’

‘Not exactly, no.’ I am, for the first time since I left Dr Klagfarten's office two hours ago, at ease. He turns from

the window and retreats behind his desk. He smiles at me and gives the endearing, lip-twisting moue.

‘How would you feel if I told you that the blackbird which flew down your chimney last week was called Dave?’

‘Both incredulous – and curious.’

‘So, this Dave thing isn't entirely awful –’

‘I just don't see why it has to be Dave.’

‘Well, Colin Klagfarten would be patently risible, like Ronald MacDonald. Dave Klagfarten has both resonance and assonance.’

I take some time out to consider this proposition. Dave goes on smiling benignly. He likes silences, he thinks that you find yourself in the context of silence, that whether or not silence is experienced as an absence or a presence gives you a litmus test for your own identity.

‘You aren't telling me,’ I say eventually, ‘that it all begins with you?’

‘No, no, of course not. This is a non-causal singularity – of that much I'm certain, although it jibes unpleasantly with your particular brand of alienation, of depersonalisation.

‘Still, the fact that the biblical David was the individual who most completely realised the theocratic ideal of the Israelites, and that the yearning for his return became a matter of almost messianic fervour . . .’ A shrug, another moue. ‘. . . Well, it doesn't seem to stretch the analogy that far to suggest that this new pattern of emergent Daves represents something similar, a secular ultramontanism perhaps?’

‘But it is
Daves,
not David.’ I know I'm nit-picking, but I can't help it.

‘Oh come on, what's in an id. Look, I think you'd feel a lot better, I think we could consider easing off on the Parstelin, I think it might be a breakthrough. You know, we could even collaborate on a paper –’

‘If I was –’

‘If you were –’ He's nodding, smiling, every fibre of his body exhorting me to say it, which I do:

‘Dave too.’

CARING, SHARING

W
hen Travis came out of the side door of the Gramercy Park Hotel – avoiding the guy who ran the concession stall, because earlier on he'd been embarrassed by his failure deftly to marshal the correct change – he felt pretty hollow. Brion was right behind him, and although Travis thought he really shouldn't need to, he couldn't help reaching back and clutching the emoto's forty-inch thigh.

Brion's response was immediate; he stooped down and grasping Travis by the generous scruff of his tweed suit, lifted him right up, drew him into his arms, and planted a series of wet kisses on Travis's face, while all the time patting his back and muttering soothing endearments.

Travis felt all the knotted tension in his neck and shoulders begin to ebb away. It was a palpable sensation, just as if the emoto had been rubbing some balm into his exposed skin. Travis sighed deeply and snuggled further into the warm-smelling gap between the brushed cotton collar of Brion's shirt and the prickly tweed of his suit collar. Travis always dressed his emoto the same as himself. He knew that some people found it intolerably gauche, like putting twins in matching sailor suits, but he loved Brion so much – the emoto wasn't
just
an emoto, more an aspect of Travis himself.

And Brion smelt good. He smelt of Imperial Leather soap and Ralph Lauren aftershave. He smelt of sweat and cocktail fish. He smelt of flannel and cigarette smoke. He smelt – in short – very much like Travis himself. Even Brion's kisses smelt good; Travis could feel a slick patch of the emoto’s saliva on his upper lip, but he had no urge – as he might with any other individual's secretions – to wipe it off. Instead, he gently scented the enzymic odours, while idly considering whether or not emotos had the same chemicals in their bodies as other humans. They couldn't be exactly the same, because emotos couldn't drink alcohol – or smoke for that matter; and that implied some different oils, boiling in the pullulating refineries of their massive bodies.

Travis didn't like thinking about the inside of Brion's body – it made him distinctly queasy. So he cancelled the observation and snuggled still deeper into the sheltering arms. The emoto's vast hands smarmed over Travis's back, over his shoulders, smoothed down his hair, so gentle, yet so firm. Travis heard Brion's voice rumble in his chest before the words reached his muffled ears, ‘Are you worried about the date tonight, Travis?’

Travis stiffened. The word ‘date – how he hated it. It put him in mind of the fruit, not two adults enjoying each other's company. ‘You don't even like the word, do you?’ The comforting hand almost completely encapsulated Travis's head, as if it were a helmet of flesh and tendon and bone. The voice was beautifully modulated, sonorous even. The emoto's words seemed to come zinging straight to ‘Travis's heart, each one with a top spin of sympathy.

‘It makes me think of the fruit . . .’ he muttered. Brion chuckled in a rumbly sort of way and hugged him still harder. Hugged Travis and lifted him high up in the early evening air, twisting the grown-up's body as he did so, gifting Travis a few seconds of Gramercy Park upside-down. Travis noted an old douche bag, clanking with jewellery, walking her miniature Schnauzer on the roof of the world. Then Brion deftly lowered him, and bestowing one, final drooly kiss on Travis's forehead, set him back neatly on his feet.

‘You shouldn't worry so much,’ Brion admonished Travis. ‘I'm sure Karin is just as anxious about the whole thing as you are. She probably thinks of the fruit too. Now come on, we better get going if we've got to head uptown.’ Brion's armchair hand descended once more and cupping Travis's back, the emoto pushed his grown-up gently in the direction of Madison Avenue. As they walked under a canopy tethering a townhouse to the sidewalk, Brion had to duck down, but then he straightened up, and the two tweed-suited figures, one about six feet tall, the other closer to fourteen, ambled away and were presently engulfed by the croaking roar of Manhattan.

Three miles to the north, in the West Seventies, Travis's date for the evening, Karin,
was
feeling just as uneasy. She was even on the verge of cancelling altogether. Karin had met Travis a couple of weeks ago at a wine tasting arranged by her friend Ariadne. The event was a pure snob thing – Ariadne wanted to show off her wine cellar and her new SoHo loft apartment-cum-studio; which was big enough – Karin had reflected – to enable Auguste Rodin, Henry Moore and Damien Hirst to work alongside one another, with little danger of them muddling up tools, or materials. Really, an exorbitant waste of space when you considered the further fact that Ariadne herself was a miniaturist.

Ariadne's friends were mostly the usual
faux
bohos who congregated in the environs of SoHo, Greenwich Village and Tribeca; affecting the style of penniless, fifties,
rive gauche
students; while living on the income from vast tranches of AT & T stock. These types were always on the verge of exhibiting, publishing, constructing, filming or presenting
something,
but never actually managed it. At one of Ariadne's soirées, a young man with pigtails had even deliriously informed Karin that he was about to present a presentation. ‘What do you mean?’ Karin politely queried. ‘Y'know, make a pitch for a pitch, I guess . . .’

‘And if you get the pitch?’

‘Aw, hell, I dunno . . . I dunno if I want to follow through that far.’

Karin wandered away from this absurd reductivism. Later, she was pleased to see that the pigtailed pitcher had had to be carried out by his emoto, dead drunk, more incoherency falling along with the drool from his slack mouth.

But on the night of the wine tasting nobody much got drunk – and Karin met Travis. Travis, who seemed initially a little creepy in his immaculately cut English-retro tweed suit. Travis, who smoked, which meant he had to stand out on the fire escape, engaging her in flirtatious conversation through the window. Karin couldn't really approve of the smoking, but nor could she condemn it. In fact, she found something faintly racy and daring about Travis on that first encounter, certainly in comparison to the posing
rentiers
, who were swirling their wine glasses around in the studio as if to the château born.

Travis, it transpired, knew a great deal about wine; or ‘fine wine’ as he invariably referred to it. He could tell a Chareau-Carré Muscadet from a white Bordeaux by bouquet alone. He knew the names of all the varieties of phylloxera, their life cycles and their effects. He had once rafted down the Rhône, stopping for a bottle of wine in every vineyard he passed. But there was nothing over-bearing or self-satisfied in the way he retailed all of this knowledge and experience. Rather, it seemed to be an essential mannerism of the man to be tirelessly self-effacing, albeit with such an ironic inflection to his voice, that it was clear he had a perfectly healthy opinion of his own wit and talents.

‘I'm basically a wealthy dilettante –’ He paused, his long upper lip twitching with self-deprecation. ‘And not a very good one at that.’

‘How d'you figure that?’ Karin thought she sounded like some whiny co-ed – his diction was so studied.

‘Because I can't really settle to anything, the way you have. I just flit from one hobby to the next. But I enjoy my enthusiasms – if that isn't something of a contradiction in terms.’

Karin had told Travis all about the small dress-making business she ran. How she had turned her two-room apartment in the twenties into a miniature atelier, staffed by six deft Filipino seamstresses. How she had made a considerable name for herself selling near-couture to wealthy Manhattanites. And how she had now been offered, by an enormous fashion business, a
prêt-à-porter
range of her own.

Travis listened to all of this intently, nodding and gifting polite noises of encouragement in the correct places. When Karin finally faltered he asked exactly the right question: ‘D'you also make clothes for emotos?’

‘Oh sure, actually I'm really best known for my fashion wear for emotos. Some people, y'know, some people find it easier to do a bias cut using a bigger expanse of cloth –’

‘I guess that's to do with the weight and tensility of the fabric,’ Travis replied, in his rather tense, weighty fashion. Karin couldn't believe it – a presentable, youngish man in Manhattan who knew what a bias cut was.

‘Is your emoto here?’ Travis asked after a short while.

‘Yeah, Jane, she's the one with the long blonde hair, over there.’ She pointed to the section of the loft that had been set aside for the emotos. Suitably enough this was in the highest section, where a trapezoid skylight formed a twenty-foot-high roof space. A table had been set up for the emotos – a table that was to their scale, about six feet high – and on it were five litre jugs full of Kool-Aid and root beer and cherry cola, the kind of sweet, sickly drinks that emotos preferred. The emotos were supping these and engaging in the slightly infantile banter that passed for conversation among them.

There were about ten emotos, and they were of all types: black, white, old, young. But Travis's and Karin's were easy to spot, for, naturally, they were both dressed identically to their grown-ups. Travis laughed. He turned first to Karin and then to Jane. He compared the trim, thirtyish blonde in front of him to the lissom, twelve-foot emoto at the far end of the loft. Both wore the same well-cut jackets that flared from the hip; and the same velveteen leggings tucked into snakeskin ankle boots. Both had their straight blonde hair cut into bangs, and Travis was even more amused to note that Karin had equipped her emoto with a heavy, scalloped silver choker necklace, the same as her own. This must have cost a great deal of money.

‘And that's . . . ?’ Karin pointed at the chunky, fourteen-foot emoto in the immaculately cut, English-retro tweed suit.

‘Brion – yeah, that's my emoto. We've been together a long, long time. In fact, he's the same emoto that I had when I left group home –’

‘Snap!’ Karin cried. ‘I've been with Jane since I was sixteen too.’

At this point the emotos concerned came over to give their grown-ups a much needed cuddle. Jane, coming up behind Karin, leant down and draped her flawless white hands over the grown-up's shoulders. Then she pulled Karin backwards, so as to nuzzle the grown-up's entire body against her crotch and lower belly. Brion did pretty much the same thing to Travis; so that the two grown-ups continued their conversation from within the grottoes of these massive embraces.

Perhaps it was the security of Jane's arms around her, or that Travis was – in his own eccentric fashion – almost alluring, which made the idea of them meeting again, perhaps enjoying a meal, a movie or a gallery visit together, seem a good one. Jane took Karin's organiser out of her shoulder bag – which for reasons of convenience also held her grown-up's shoulder bag – and Karin exchanged numbers with Travis. Brion had an outsize, Smythe's of Bond Street, leather-bound address book, in which he noted down Karin's numbers with an outsize, gold propelling pencil. ‘Wow!’ Karin exclaimed. ‘Can your emoto
write?’

Brion laughed. ‘No-no, Karin, I don't need to write – Travis does that for me – but I like to make the shapes of numbers!’ Both the grown-ups laughed at this typical display of emoto naivety – and that too cemented their acquaintance.

They had both left the wine tasting shortly after this; and the last Karin had seen of her new friend was Travis's face, blooming, like some tall, orchidaceous buttonhole, above the solid tweed ridge of his emoto's shoulder, as Brion bore him off in the direction of Riverside Drive. That had been a fortnight ago. Travis called Karin a week after the wine tasting and with commendable dispatch suggested they have dinner together. ‘What? You mean like a date?’ She couldn't keep the incredulity out of her voice.

‘Erm . . . yuh . . . well . . . ‘ It was oddly reassuring to hear how discomfited he was. ‘I guess it would be a date, sort of.’

‘Travis, I haven't been on a date for four years –’ ‘Snap!’ He almost shouted down the phone, and that bonded them with laughter once more. ‘I haven't been on a date for four years; and I'll tell you something else, I can't stand the very word – it makes me think of fruit – ‘

‘Fruit?’

‘Y’ know – dates . . .’

This last little revelation hadn't struck such a chord with Karin, but she still agreed to meet Travis on the evening of the 29th April at the Royalton Hotel. ‘You're in the seventies,’ he'd said. ‘I'm in the twenties – we'll split the difference. Then if things are going well we can head downtown for dinner.’ He sounded a great deal surer on the phone than he felt. It was true, Travis hadn't been on a date for four years, and he hadn't slept over with anyone for nearing a decade.

Karen had had a sleepover more recently. About two years ago she'd met a man called Emil at a weekend beach party out on Long Island.

Emil was small, dark, Austrian, in his forties. He'd been living in New York for eight years, and had an emoto Dave – for the last five. Emil admitted, frankly, that he'd been a procro in Salzburg, where he'd run a fashionable restaurant before deciding to emigrate. Karin took this in her stride. Emil was very charming, seemed absolutely sincere, and his relationship with Dave was unimpeachable – the big black emoto cradled his little grown-up with obvious affection. Lots of grown-ups had started out as procros and then decided that the whole messy business of sexual and emotional entanglement wasn't for them there was no shame, or obloquy in that. And just as many procros had found, after getting on in life a bit, that what they wanted more than anything else in the world was the absolute reassurance that an emoto would provide them with. If these procros were lucky the awakening would coincide with children growing up, leaving home, and they could slide without too much disruption from their procro-union to a proper, grown-up relationship with an emoto.

Emil led Karin to understand that this had been the case with him: ‘My ex-wife and I met and married when we were very young, you know. We both came from poor families, the kind of background where there were very few grown-ups, very few emotos. I suppose we were happy in a way – we knew no better. But slowly, over the years, the relentlessness of being with someone the whole time . . . someone who you touch intimately’ – his voice dropped lower – ‘touch sexually . . . Well, you know the terrible things that can happen.’ He shuddered, snuggled deeper into his emoto's firehose-thick arms. ‘Eventually, after our daughter had gone – at her own request, I must say – to a group home, we were both able to become grown-ups. We're still good friends though, and I see her whenever Dave and I go back to Salzburg which is a lot. Dave and I even have four-way sleepovers with Mitzi and her emoto, Gudrun.’