by Martin Amis
"Sounds good, though. It makes writing more accessible to people who work with their hands."
"Why do you want to make writing more accessible to people who work with their hands?"
A couple of weeks later Gwyn took Richard down to his basement to show him how the wine cellar was coming along. Richard noticed a workbench under the stairs. There was a vise, a plane, a saw, even a spirit level. There were also several blocks of wood which someone had perfunctorily savaged with chisel and mallet. "So you do do carpentry."
"No. I just got worried that some interviewer might ask to see the place where I did carpentry. Look. I even bought this handmade stool so I could say I made it.?
"Good thinking." "I even cut my hand." "How? Doing carpentry?"
"No. Messing around with that chisel to make it look like I did carpentry."
"Fucking up that chair to make it look like you made it." "Exactly."
It was midnight. Richard sloped out of his study and went to the kitchen in search of something to drink. Anything alcoholic would do. He experienced a thud of surprise, from temple to temple, when instead of the usual striplit void he confronted his wife. Gina was not a large woman, but the mass of her presence was dramatically augmented by the lateness of the hour. And by marriage, and by other things. He looked at her with his infidel's eyes. Her oxblood hair was up and back; her face was moist with half-assimilated night cream; her towel dressing gown revealed a triangle of bath-rouged throat. With abrupt panic Richard realized what had happened to her, what she had done: Gina had become a grownup. And Richard hadn't. Following the pattern of his generation (or its bohemian wing), Richard was going to go on looking the same until he died. Looking worse and worse, of course, but looking the same. Was it the kids, was it the job, was it the lover she must surely have by now (in her shoes, in her marriage-if Richard was married to Richard, he'd have one)? He couldn't object on grounds of ethics or equity. Because writing is infidelity. Because all writing is infidelity. She still looked good, she still looked sexual, she even still looked (you had to hand it to her) … dirty. But Gina had made a definite move toward the other side.
"I was thinking we might have a progress report," she said. "It's been a year."
"What has?"
"To the day." She looked at her watch. "To the hour."
Relief and recognition came together: "Oh yeah." He had thought this might have something to do with their marriage. "I got you," he said.
He remembered. A close and polluted summer night, crying out for thunder, just like this one. A late emergence from his study in search of drink, just like this one. A dressing-gowned and surprise-value manifestation from Gina, just like this one. There were probably one or two differences. The kitchen might have felt a little brighter. There might have
been more toys about. Gina might have looked a day or two younger, back then, and definitely un-grown-up. And Richard might have looked a bit less like shit than he looked now.
That time, a year ago, he had had a very bad week: the debut of Gwyn Barry in the bestseller list; the striking of Marco; Anstice; and something else.
This time he had had a very bad year.
"I remember."
He remembered. A year ago to the hour, and Gina saying, "How many hours a day do you spend on your novels?" "What? Spend?" said Richard, who had his whole head in the drinks cupboard. "I don't know. Varies."
"You usually do it first thing, don't you. Except Sundays. How many hours, on average? Two? Three?"
Richard realized what this reminded him of, distantly: being interviewed. There she sat across the table with her pencil and her notebook and her green tea. Pretty soon she would be asking him if he relied, for his material, on actual experience or on the crucible of the imagination, how he selected his subjects and themes, and whether or not he used a word processor. Well, maybe; but first she asked:
"How much money have they earned you? Your novels. In your life." He sat down. Richard wanted to take this sitting down. The calculation didn't occupy him for very long. There were only three figures to be added together. He told her what they amounted to. "Give us a minute," she said.
Richard watched. Her pencil slid and softly scraped, then seemed to hover in thought, then softly scraped again.
"And you've been at it for how long?" she murmured to herself: good at sums. "Right. Your novels earn you about sixty pee an hour. A cleaning lady would expect to make seven or eight times that. From your novels you get a fiver a day. Or thirty quid a week. Or fifteen hundred a year. That means every time you buy a gram of coke-which is what?" He didn't know she knew about the coke. "Hardly ever." "How much is coke? Seventy? Every time you buy a gram of coke … that's more than a hundred man-hours. About six weeks' work."
While Gina gave him, in monotonous declarative sentences, a precis of their financial situation, like something offered to test his powers of mental arithmetic, Richard stared at the tabletop and thought of the first time he had seen her: behind a tabletop, counting money, in a literary setting.
"Now," she said. "When was the last time you received actual payment for your novels?"
"Eight years ago. So I give them up, right?" "Well it does look like the one to go.?
There followed a minute's silence-perhaps to mark the passing of Richard's fiction. Richard spent it exploring his own numbness, whose density impressed him. There were surf sounds in his ear. Emotion recollected in tranquillity, said Wordsworth, describing or defining the creative act. To Richard, as he wrote, it felt more like emotion invented in tranquillity. But here was emotion. In his room across the hall, Marco was pleading in his sleep. They could hear him-pleading with his nightmares.
She said, "You could review more books."
"I can't review more books." There on the table lay a slablike biography of Fanny Burney. Richard had to write two thousand words about it for a famously low-paying literary monthly, by next Friday. "I already review about a book a day. I can't review more. There aren't enough books. I do them all."
"What about all this wow-fiction you keep agreeing to write? What about that Siberia trip?"
"I'm not going."
"I don't like to say this, because at least it's regular, but you could give up The Little Magazine."
"It's only a day a week."
"But then you spend forever writing those 'middles.' For nothing."
"It's part of the job. The literary editor has always written the middles." And he thought of their names, in a wedge, like an honors board: Eric Henley, R. C. Squires, B. F. Mayhew, Roland Davenport. They all wrote the middles. Richard lull. Surely you remember R. C. Squires's controversial attack on the Movement poets? R. C. Squires was still alive, unbelievably. Richard kept seeing him, in Red Lion Street, in the callbox, staring with terrible and illegible purpose at the crowded entrance of the language school. Or flapping around on his hands and knees in the passage behind the Merry Old Soul.
"For nothing," said Gina.
"Yeah that's right."
"No one reads The Little Magazine."
"Yeah that's right."
One of Richard's recent "middles" was about writers' wives-a typology of writers' wives. The pin was a biography of Hemingway, who, Richard argued, had married one of each. (Stoutly or fogeyishly resistant to clever headlines, Richard in this case submitted to the inevitable "For
Whom the Bells Toll.") How did they go? The Muse, the Rival, the
Soulmate, the Drudge, the Judge .. . Of course there were many, many others, Peer Wives like Mary Shelley, and Victim Wives like Emily Tennyson, and Virgin Saints like Jane Carlyle, and a great multitude ofFat Nurses like Fanny Stevenson . . . What type was Demeter Barry? What type was Gina Tull? Transcendence-Supplier, Great Distractor, Mind-Emptier in the act of love. Anyway it didn't matter. Gina was deciding to absent herself from the company. She wasn't leaving Richard, not yet. But she was ceasing to be a writer's wife.
"You can't give up the Tantalus thing, which is pretty decent as well as regular. You te
ll me. You could give up smoking and drinking and drugs. And clothes. It's not that you spend. You don't earn."
"I can't give up novels."
"Why not?"
Because . . . because then he would be left with experience, with untranslated and unmediated experience. Because then he would be left with life.
"Because then I'd just have this." The kitchen-the blue plastic tub filled with the boys' white pants and vests, the stiff black handbag on the chair with its upturned mouth open wanting to be fed, the bowls and spoons and mats laid out on the table for the morning and the eight-pack of cereal boxes in its cellophane: all this became the figure for what he meant. "Days. Life," he added.
And this was a disastrous word to say to a woman-to women, who bear life, who bring it into the world, screaming, and so will never let it come second to anything.
Her eyes, her breasts, her throat, showing him his mistake, all became infused. "The possible alternative," said Gina, "is I go full time. Except Fridays of course." She told him what they would pay her: a chastening sum. "That'd mean you getting the twins up every morning and getting them down every night. The weekends we share. You shop. You clean. And you cook."
"I can't cook."
"I can't either … That way," she said, "you'll be getting plenty of life. And we'll see what you've got left for the other thing."
There was a third alternative, Richard reckoned. He could fuck her twice a night forever and take no more shit. And have no money. Oh sure: do it that way. He looked at her face, its flesh lightly glazed in preparation for sleep; and her throat, with its weathered complexities of raisin and rose. She was his sexual obsession. And he had married her.
"I tell you what," she said. "How close are you to finishing the one that's on the go now?"
Richard creased his face. One of the many troubles with his novels was that they didn't really get finished. They just stopped. Unfitted was already very long. "Hard to tell. Say a year.?
Her head went back. This was steep. But she took in breath and said,"Okay. You've got a year's grace. Finish that and we'll see if it makes any money. I think we can hold on. Financially I mean. I'll do what I have to do. I'll manage. You've got a year."
He nodded. He supposed it was just. He wanted to thank her. His mouth was dry.
"A year. I won't say a word."
"A year," Gina now resumed. "And I haven't said a word. Have I. I've been as good as my word. What about you?"
Nasty repetition that, he thought: word. But it remained true enough. She had kept her promise. And he had forgotten all about it. Or he'd tried. They had held on, financially, though even the most perfunctory calculation told Richard that they were falling short by two or three book reviews a week. Marco was still in his boxroom, and still remonstrating with his nightmares.
"What's your progress been? Is it finished?"
"Virtually," he said. This wasn't quite true. Untitled wasn't finished exactly, but it was certainly unbelievably long. "A week or two away."
"And what are your plans for it?"
"I was thinking," said Richard. "There are these minor earnings from my novels that we didn't include. It all adds up, you know."
"What all adds up?"
"Things like PLR." He checked. Gina was staring at him with a new order of incredulity. "Public Lending Right," he went on. "Money from libraries. It all adds up."
"I know PLR. With all the forms. How much did you get that time? The time you spent the whole weekend lying down behind the couch. What was it? Thirty-three pee?"
"Eighty-nine pee," said Richard sternly.
"…Well, that's a big help!"
There was a silence during which he steadily lowered his gaze to the floor. He thought of the time when his PLR check had burst into the three figures: #163;104.07. That was when he had two novels in print and it was still the case that nobody was sure they were shit.
"I think I've got an agent. Gwyn's agent. Gal Aplanalp."
Gina took this in. "Her," she said. "Have you signed up?"
"Not yet. Maybe soon."
"Hey this is really going to happen you know. You don't care about money and that's a nice quality but I do and life is going to change." "I know. I know.?
"… What's it called anyway? Your new one."
"Untitled."
"When will it be?"
"No it's called Untitled."
"You mean you can't even think what to call it?"
"No. It's called Untitled."
"How can it be called Untitled?"
"It just is. Because I say so."
"Well that's a bloody stupid name for it. You know, you might be a lot happier, without them. It might help with the other thing too. It might be a big relief. Gwyn and everything, that's a whole other story." Gina sighed, with distaste. She had never liked Gwyn much even in the old days, when he was with Gilda-and they were all poor. "Demi says it's frightening the way the money comes in. And she's rich! I don't know if you still really believe in it. Your novels. Because you never … Because what you … Ah I'm sorry, Richard. I'm so sorry."
Because you never found an audience-you never found the universal or anything like it. Because what you come up with in there, in your study, is of no general interest. End of story. Yes: this is the end of your story.
"Marry your sexual obsession," Richard had once been told. By a writer. Marry your sexual obsession: the one you kept going back to, the one you never quite got to the end of: marry her. Richard was interviewing, was profiling, this writer, so it more or less followed that he was neither famous nor popular. His obscurity, in fact, was the only celebrated thing about him (let's call him Mr. X): if everything went through okay, he had a chance of becoming a monument of neglect, like a Powys. How many Powyses were there? Two? Three? Nine? Your sexual obsession, he kept saying: marry her. Not the beauty, not the brains. Mr. X dwelt in a two-up-two-down back-to-back, in Portsmouth. The stuff he wrote was hieratic and recondite, but all he could talk about was sex. And sexual obsession. There they sat, at lunchtime, in the dockside pub, over their untouched seafood platters, with Mr. X sweating into his mack. Don't marry the droll brain surgeon. Don't marry the dreaming stunner who works in famine relief. Marry the town pump. Marry the one who does it for a drag on your cigarette. Richard felt his shoulders locking. By this point he had readied himself to face a full nervous breakdown of sexual hatred-a complete unraveling, an instantaneous putrefaction of bitterness and disgust. But it never quite happened. Marry the one who made you hardest. Marry her. She'll bore you blind, but so will the brain sur-geon, so will the dreaming stunner, in time .. . Dropping the writer off after lunch in the minicab, Richard hoped for a glimpse of his wife. Hoped for a chance to wonder what she was: rocket scientist? hysterical goer? The woman staring suspiciously down the damp dark passage, her small head half lost in the sprouty collar of her housecoat, didn't look like an hysterical goer. She looked more like a rocket scientist; and one whose best work was long behind her. And another thing: whatever life choice Mr. X had gone ahead and made, Mrs. X didn't strike you as too happy about it either, contemplating her husband's return, it seemed to Richard, with infinite weariness. He was forgotten now anyway, or reforgotten, silent, out of print. He never even made it into Neglect… Some of us, most of us, all of us, are staggering through our span with half a headful of tips and pointers we've listened to (or overheard). Use Cold Water To Soak The Pot After Making Scrambled Eggs. When Filling A Hot Water Bottle, Keep The Neck Of The Hot Water Bottle At Right Angles. Unless The Kettle Boiling Be, Filling The Teapot Spoils The Tea. Starve a cold, feed a fever. Banks do most of their business after three o'clock. Richard married his sexual obsession. He just did what he did.
Except in one important respect, the love life enjoyed by Richard and Gina, over the past year, remained as rich and full as it had ever been. There was still that sense of anticipation when nightdress and pajama conjoined, last thing, and, at weekends, when they stirred, and at other stolen moments,
such as they were, with two little boys in the house. Gina was a healthy young woman. Richard was in the prime of life. After nine years together, their amorous dealings were, if anything, even more inflexibly committed to variety and innovation than at any point in their past. The only real difference, I suppose you'd have to concede, was that Richard, nowadays, was impotent. Chronically and acutely impotent. Apart from that, though, things were just as they were before.
He was impotent with her every other night and, at weekends, in the mornings too-when those boys of his gave him half a chance! (The patter of tiny feet; the stubborn and inexpert worrying of the doorknob; the hoarse command from the bedroom met by puzzled whispers, puzzled withdrawal; the mind-filling silence before the sickening impact or collision-the scream, the wail.) Sometimes, when the Tulls' schedules conspired, he would be lazily impotent with her in the afternoons. Nor did the bedroom mark the boundary of their erotic play. In the last month
alone, he had been impotent with her on the stairs, on the sofa in the sitting room and on the kitchen table. Once, after a party outside Oxford, he had been impotent with her right there on the backseat of the Maestro. Two nights later they got drunk, or rather Gina got drunk, becauseRichard was already drunk, and on their return from Pizza Express stole into the communal garden, using their key, and Richard was impotent with her in a sylvan setting. Impotent in a sylvan setting, under some dumb blonde of a willow, with Diana above them, her face half-averted, feeling wounded or betrayed, and higher, much higher, the winking starlets of the Milky Way.
It got so bad that Richard talked-and even thought-about giving up drinking: he even talked-but didn't think-about giving up smoking. He knew, though, that his troubles were dully and intricately and altogether essentially literary, and that nothing would ease them except readers or revenge. So he didn't do anything, apart from taking up Val-ium and cocaine.
"It's hard on you. It's like an ultimatum," said Gina in the dark.
Richard said nothing.
"You're tired. And you've got a lot on your mind."