Vac (6 page)

M
ANY ROOMS.

I called round to see Conrad.

I have a composite image of the visit, doubtless assembled from several which I am unable to separate distinctly in memory. Conrad is standing up in his bedroom. Behind him is a small stone idol which I incorrectly identify as a Cycladic fertility goddess. Another small stone sculpture is on the chest of drawers. It is an alabaster worm. Conrad is standing up wearing nothing but a string vest. The dense black shag on his chest glistens through the coarse mesh. He comments
enthusiastically
on the hygienic properties of the garment.

This tall, dark man, whose mouth seemed always to be ejecting an ‘o’ of heavily-qualified interest, stands erect in his bath-tub. This image is doubtless imaginary for I seem to be standing beside him in the tub. I am fully-dressed and he is nude. Peeping through the curly fleece of his pubic and
lower-abdominal
hair shines the tiny dome of his circumcised prick.

Then, leaving insufficient pause for me to reply, he adds:

I nod politely. He continues:

In the next frame, Conrad is dressed. The large living-room is ostentatiously bare. The rat-coloured sofa has tasted the
urine of cats and children. Bright shards of toys litter the floor. The glaucomatous eye of the television set, gleaming with elaborate and alien purpose, picks out the milky morning.

Our encounter is geometrical.

This sense of formal structure, which I dimly perceive has always characterized my relations with Conrad, invites whimsy. Thus I might write:

When Conrad and I discussed politics, sex or the arts, the air became thick with conic sections. Spectral solids reared and reeled about us. Angles gaped or clapped their infinite limbs enthusiastically.

The nucleus of validity, without which metaphor is
abhorrent,
resides in the fact that our conversational exchanges rarely generated understanding. We would set side by side little blocks of information, deposit units of feeling or observation, and then inspect the resulting patterns. Meanwhile I would think: he has become guarded, is ashamed of being a dealer. The more money he makes—and he makes mounting piles—the guiltier he feels. He is unwilling to acknowledge my authority and therefore he asks questions and feigns lack of interest in my replies. He bolts from topic to topic in order to peg out the considerable tracts he has colonized. But nothing spontaneous remains free in that breast.

The door flies open and two little boys, yelling hysterically, discharge themselves at Conrad.

— What? Haw! My word, what’s this? Down, sir. Stop that! Haw!

Repeatedly detaching an infant from his neck, or shaking one from his leg, Conrad asks:

I do not see the being called Dorothy. She had been tugged from the Kentish lanes, through the silver mesh of nocturnal Soho, to Conrad’s side. In Cardiff gasped Conrad’s cardiac mother, so bitterly steeped still, after the mire of Auschwitz, in racial arrogance that her son had never dared admit to her that he had married a ‘goy’.

Intimacy breeds an intimate environment which then stifles the man. The man weaves a cocoon around his lovely bride and then, gasping, claws rents in the silken walls in order to breathe.

I ask abruptly:

Conrad and I talked most often about sexual frustration. He confessed that he suffered acutely from this. We stood in the baby-sitter’s room in order to escape the children. The
baby-sitter
was out.

Conrad conferred with agents and customers in Zurich, New York, Paris. He stood in the hall, by the wobbly shelf, his blue dressing gown flapping around his hairy legs, and organized the movement of paintings through the skies and across oceans. Often the work of art never came near him but later the
commission
arrived at the door.

So I moved into the cupboard and was tolerably
comfortable
there. I shared the cupboard with disagreeable surrealist paintings and refused to share it with a cat. For some time I suspected I might be sharing it with other organisms and often I pulled back the covers of the big bed and peered at the sheets. I probed black specks but none of them jumped. And yet something was biting me.

Light reached the cupboard both from a single, unshaded bulb and through a glass window high up in the partition that divided the cupboard from Conrad’s and Dorothy’s bedroom. Acoustically I slept in the same room as they did and whenever I farted feared their bed must tremble. Each night I wound home, after the pubs had closed, to my cupboard. I
exaggerated
my drunkenness and general air of dissipation. I was in training to be a buffoon.

Many rooms.

What could I do?

I had lost a large chunk of myself. I kept asking for it in pubs but no one had handed it in. Whenever I met you, even saw you, I became whole again and disintegrated as soon as we parted. I observed that you often had a nice-looking little boy with you. I noted that the two of you seemed to compose two-thirds of a happy family.

Many rooms.

Conrad flew off to Amsterdam to buy paintings and commit adultery. Dorothy, the baby-sitter and the babies hummed down to Cornwall in the new mini. This left me alone in the flat. No not quite alone for there was a living cat and a rather
more living painting by a modern English master who paints boneless people. This one showed an amorphous female with a leprous head sprawling on a maroon sofa. Formally, it was a most elegant painting. Mornings, I would wander nude out of my cupboard into the living room and uneasily contemplate the painting.

Why did this man paint this kind of painting? Did it reflect a homosexual’s revulsion from fertile flesh? I had read this interpretation and been unconvinced. My own feeling was that in a welfare world of guilt-free sex Ham painted the spiritual bankruptcy of nuclear man. Nietzsche suggested that our suicidal guilt at having murdered God would compel us, even as we celebrated humanity and devised ever more
impressive
institutions for human welfare, to construct behind our back the instruments of human destruction. He painted the somnambulist, sybarite workers in the global death factory.

The cat consumed one tin of slimy and perversely inviting meat per day. Every few days I conveyed a tray-full of
synthetic
litter, designed to receive the animal’s excrement, down to the rubbish bin and refilled the receptacle with pure grains. Unhappily the beast was imperfectly reconciled to its hygienic tray and finally my pledge to Dorothy to keep the flat in order triumphed over my revulsion. Entering the living room one morning and finding the nasal onslaught markedly worse I strode to the suspect sofa and, savouring the buoyancy of
conscience
that rewards the ultimate facing of a disagreeable reality, I shoved it to one side.

My olfactory instinct had been true. I set to work. The relatively fresh deposits, while offensive to handle, immediately clogging the soft-haired brush I unwisely used, were disposed of rapidly but the ancient crusts, testimony to feline diarrhoea and the remarkable bonding properties of its product with bare wood floors, actually required chiselling off and I crouched, breathing reluctantly, for nearly half an hour with my instrument. I then chivvied the cat out of the front door
and ignored its plaintive whining for readmission. I suffered only faint twinges of remorse and after a few days the cat disappeared entirely.

Here in this big, bright city, that’s where you’ve been living? You’ve been living all this time?

Take my hand, mummy. I wish I could fly. He has—jaunty. A cascade of neon letters. As I crossed the road, he swung jauntily out of a cavity in the night, under the blaring red. Wears very jaunty clothing.

Are you learning to live without love?

A coil of rooms.

Living in the boot of my car. Shirts get oily. Pitching up Thames Street the other day, saw wheel come off this lorry. Under the sooty brick towers of the gas-works—

Under the sooty brick tower of the gas-works, along a poetic street, came this big spinning wheel. Made straight for this woman. No one else on a half-mile of pavement and the wheel chased her down. Just saw her crumple as the traffic carried me on.

So I moved into the basement flat in Mortimer Road. I soon noticed, with mild excitement, that the writer was never at home. He had papered his lavatory with a collage of nudes. The flat was bare and sad but opened at back on to a little garden under a brewery. One day the sun shone hard on the
garden and I went out and sat on the grass. Before very long, however, I felt self-conscious, sitting alone on that square of grass and I went back inside to the shallow living room. In that room I slept, reluctantly leading a celibate life. Why wouldn’t Fay come to my bed at nights? The writer was never at home. He was in other beds in other parts of London. He was standing in the door of a club, fingering his lavender cuffs. I felt despised. Fay never got drunk any more. When we first knew her, three hundred parties ago, she was always
falling
.

Downstairs, flat on the pavement, always falling when a drop of alcohol ran amuck in her brain.

Fay wanted a writer.

In order to fit herself for so precious an acquisition she read difficult books. Out of her handbag rose collections of plays by avant-garde Catalonian dramatists, commentaries on
Finnegans
Wake
, volumes of poetry. She often toiled through these works but for all the discernible enlargement of
understanding
that resulted she might have restricted her reading to the labels on bottles.

She finally got her writer.

Her childhood years had been sad and sordid. There had been an orphanage, an abandoned mother, a traumatic rape on a vacant lot, or at least she said there had. Whatever the truth, it was clear that somehow, during those years, the figure of the writer had arisen in her thoughts as the antithesis to everything she disliked in experience.

Roy, whom she lived with when we first knew her, was not really a writer. He was an accountant but he had literary aspirations. Yorkshire had endowed him with the faint, harsh accent which clashed a little with his delicate, slightly decadent good looks. Roy observed Fay with intent but dispassionate interest, as if he considered her fascinating but not really his
subject. It is possible that in private he was capable of being provoked but in public his detachment was impressive. Fay screamed:

The opulent car eased through the nocturnal traffic. The youngish couple, inscrutable and rich, sat in front with Roy. We shared the back seat with a drunken Fay. Against the smoky rose and sapphire of the signs the profiles of Roy and the young woman turned to each other for long, appraising looks. Fay screamed:

Smoky fires, shore, rime in the morning. They’re rattling my cage. A steep street diving to the bay. Couldn’t we live on a hillside, red berries in the hedge? They’re rattling my cage. Burn the papers. The papers float in the oily swell by the jetty. The fishermen are snug in their cottages. We once had a cottage. They’re rattling my cage.

Many rooms.

I kept moving.

At Mickey’s there was a knot of writhing pink worms. In the bleak hive was a mad old Jewess from Ravensbruck
moaning
as she ran the bath. In the bare room above the shop was an Indian girl in a sari. This I unwound. She span slowly away from me to disclose a girdle and bra beneath it. I held her luscious brown body crouched above my head. An
exultant
gesture. But later I wondered if that was what had forced the loop of gut through my abdominal musculature. My lips brushed her shy yet provocative ones but before I could
consolidate
my ascendancy over her, prudence reclaimed the
Goan girl and she repackaged her clever self in the bright
filament
of her sari.