by Martin Amis
"Guineas?" said Lucy Cabretti.
"A unit of currency. Favored by gamblers." He lurched on, raising his voice. "And so Gwyn forced Trelawney's hand. He nailed up her-he nailed up a section of her underwear onto the notice board of the Junior Common Room. With full details of the hazard."
"Then what? Trelawney pays up, right? Pays Gwyn the gwyn-the guineas. How much is a guinea?"
"Twenty-one shillings." He thought it had probably been a mistake about the guineas.
Lucy folded her arms and sighed. She said, "You know, your story is really hard to believe."
"Oh? Why's that?"
"He seems so nice and normal. And his books. That Amelior stuff. He writes like such a whuss."
"A what?"
"You know. A real pooch. As if all he wanted to do was not offend anybody. I mean it's pleasant enough, that stuff, but it's just dead."
Richard was happy and proud. But he could see that he didn't need to waste any more time on Lucy Cabretti. He stood up, saying, "It's been nice talking to you. And I hope you like that review."
"Thanks. You too. Wait. What happened to the girl?"
"What girl?"
"The serving girl. The foundling."
He paused. He actually had one foot in the air-about to begin its ponderous journey to the door. Pregnancy? Prison? Thrown out into the wind and the rain, naked, without a groat to her name? But she thought Gwyn's stuff was shit anyway, so all he said was, "Who knows? Once they've been used and cast aside-who knows what happens to these poor girls??
When he got back to the hotel Richard rang home and spoke to Lizzete, Marius and Marco, Gina being elsewhere … Then he sat down at the desk and coerced himself into facing up to something: biography. As he had long suspected, the ring road of his reviewing schedule was all freezing fog and black ice, all sideswipe and whiplash: he faced a catastrophe of deadlines. Richard was actually reviewing more books than ever before. It remained true that he was partly resuscitated as a novelist; but novels still showed no sign of earning him any money. This had taken a while-and many reminders from Gina-to sink in. He turned in his chair. Biographies were scattered . . . No. Biographies were stolidly installed around the room, each of them as heavy as a cinder block. Richard felt dizzy and that was strange, because he'd been very good at the party and had carefully counted his drinks: he'd had seventeen. There were several more biographies in his suitcase: his suitcase, which he would never unpack; his suitcase, gravid with heavy lives.
It was ten o'clock. Lucy Cabretti was home by now. And she, too, was reading. Richard was on page five of The Mercutio of Lincoln's Inn Fields: A Life of Thomas Betterton. Lucy was on page 168 of Come Be My Love. Within minutes she would finish Come Be My Love and would begin Magenta Rhapsody. Lucy read chain-store romances at a rate of three or four a day. This had no effect on the stern probity with which she fought for the Equal Rights Amendment; it did not color her speeches and lectures on economic equity; in no wise had it vitiated her non-anecdotal and dryly legalistic best-seller on sexual mores. But she read chain-store romances at the rate of three or four a day. Lucy was in bed, alone. Her handsome and sagacious boyfriend was in Philadelphia, visiting his sister. As she read on (with his cane, his snorting mastiff, Sir William was stalking Maria through the hayricks), her eyes swelled fearfully, and her hand sought her glowing throat. Maria was a serving girl, small, pretty, with dark ringlets.
Midnight. Richard was on page seventy-three. He was also drinking from the mini-bar, which sounds comparatively prudent of him. Given a free hand, he might have been drinking from something bigger. Richard was drinking beer from the mini-bar only because there was nothing else left in the mini-bar, except for mixers and snacks. Slowly Richard's head jerked back. He stared at his drink with indignation. The softly humming liquid seemed disturbingly bland to his tongue. The suspicion formed that it contained no alcohol. Under the light he peered closely at
the bottle until he found some small print warning that its contents
might rack up pregnant women. And so he drank on, calmly nodding, mightily reassured.
The next day they were flying south.
Clearly there was a spiritual bond-a covenant, a solemn sympathy- between airports and junk novels. Or so it seemed to him.
Junk novels were sold in airports. People in airports bought and read junk novels. Junk novels were about people in airports, inasmuch as junk novels needed airports to shift their characters round the planet, and airports served, in junk novels, as the backdrop to their partings, chance encounters, reunions and trysts.
Some junk novels were all about airports. Some junk novels were even called things like Airport. Why, then, you might ask, was there no airport called Junk Novel? Movies based on junk novels were, of course, heavily reliant on the setting of the airport. So why wasn't one always seeing, at airports, junk novels being made into movies? Perhaps there really was a whole other airport, called, perhaps, Junk Novel Airport, or with a fancier name like Manderley International Junk Novel Airport, where they did them all. This wouldn't be a real airport but a mock-up on a soundstage somewhere, with everything two-dimensional and made of plastic and tinfoil and other junk.
Even when they found themselves in airports, characters in junk novels didn't read junk novels. Unlike everyone else in airports. They read wills and pre-nups. If they were intellectuals, connoisseurs, great minds, they were sometimes allowed to read non-junk novels. Whereas real-life people who read non-junk novels, even people who wrote non-junk novels, read junk novels if, and only if, they were in airports.
Junk novels have been around for at least as long as non-junk novels, and airports haven't been around for very long at all. But they both really took off at the same time. Readers of junk novels and people in airports wanted the same thing: escape, and quick transfer from one junk novel to another junk novel and from one airport to another airport.
Richard, as he made his way through all these airports, toting his mail sack of Untitledsand his burden of biographies, wouldn't have minded trying the odd junk novel, but he was too busy reading all this crap about third-class poets and seventh-rate novelists and eleventh-eleven dramatists-biographies of essayists, polemicists, editors, publishers. Would the day dawn when he reviewed a book about a book reviewer? Or a paper-clip salesman or a typewriter repairer. You didn't have to do much in the literary field, he thought, to merit a biography. So long as you knew how to read and write … Quite a few of the amblers and hurriers and sprawlers in these airports were sporting copies of Amelior Regained. This puzzled him. In Richard's view, certainly, Amelior Regained was junk. But it wasn't a junk novel. It was a trex novel. But it wasn't a junk novel. The heroes and heroines of junk novels, even when they were car-dinals or novitiates, remained ravenously secular. And look at Gwyn's little troupe of trundling dreamers, none of whom had any money or sex or facelifts or cool cars, and never went anywhere near airports.
Whatever junk novels were, however they worked, they were close to therapy, and airports were close to therapy. They both belonged to the culture of the waiting room. Piped music, the language of calming suasion. Come this way-yes, the flight attendant will see you now. Airports, junk novels: they were taking your mind off mortal fear.
Now, wearing woolen jacket, and bow tie, and two nicotine patches, and chewing (or sucking) nicotine gum, and smoking a cigarette, and feeling like something in a ten-gallon bag behind a nuclear power plant, humbly awaiting its next dreadful atomic declension, Richard lounged on a lounger: before him idled the uninviting Atlantic, in bayside calm; on either side the raked and watered sands of South Beach, Miami, stretched far away… Gwyn and the publicity boy were staying in a five-star citadel farther up the shore, whereas Richard was more informally lodged down here on South. And that was okay. Richard's snobbery was sincere snobbery; he didn't just pretend to be a snob because he thought it looked upper class. All right, he hadn't made it as a contemporary guy. He was a modern. But he wasn't a postmodern. So he
really didn't want to be wallowing and languishing, with Gwyn, in that twenty-first-century nautilus, that regency spaceship offish tanks and startling energy bills, where every room had three televisions and five telephones (American luxury having much to do with the irreducible proximity of televisions and telephones), and in which money flew off you every minute whatever you did. Solacing himself, too (as always), with the fixtures of neglect, he liked his flaking medium-rise on South Beach, with its shot early-morning smell of damp plaster and India. Kafka's beetle didn't just pretend to like lying around on unswept floors beneath items of disused and disregarded furniture. To paraphrase a critic who also knew about beetles and what they liked, Kafka's beetle took a beetle pleasure, a beetle solace, in all the darkness and the dust and the discards.
Behind him, between the beach and the main drag, where resort commerce convulsed itself against an innocuous proscenium of art deco, lay a halfheartedly vegetated area, bounded by low brick walls, in which Gwyn Barry, and others, were making a rock video. Gwyn's role was more or less a passive one, it had to be allowed. He wasn't dancing in it or singing in it. He was just sitting in it-at the request of the featured band's lead singer, an Amelior enthusiast. All Gwyn had to do was place himself at a table that had a globe and a book on it; behind him they had positioned a flapping tapestry where bent sheep grazed, wisely watched over by white-haired pards holding crooks and lyres, aeolian harps. A squad of young black dancers were then to move past him, dipping and straightening, like cookie cutouts. Richard had stayed to monitor an edi-fying conversation, duly recorded in his notebook, between Gwyn and the sleek publicity boy. Something like:
"Trust me. This'll help Regained. It'll groundbreak it." "Maybe," said Gwyn. "But it might hurt the Profundity thing." "We have their guarantee that it won't screen until after the Profundity thing."
". .. How much will it help Regained?" "Major. Come on. Just think who it'll reach."
After that Richard had fled, down toward the sand and the sea, the eye-hurting metal of the sky. It was not the spectacle of vulgarity or venality that hastened his departure. The reason lay inward, as everything, now, lay increasingly and irreversibly inward. Richard fled the black dancers and their grip and torque of life, their raised temperature of youth and health. These little black stars, teenagers, every inch of their bodies primed and juiced, were nonetheless the opposite of artists in that they did what other people told them to, and unreservedly accepted the time and place they were living in. They were still enslaved. Richard could claim as his forebears only free men and women, but he was a slave and a ghost in his own life; the only bit of him that acted freely was the bit that planned and typed his fiction. Then, too, the dancers were at the top of the chattels business, cosseted calves, priceless specimens, skittish and exquisite. Whereas Richard … Still, it wasn't his thoughts that had driven him over the wall and onto the beach, where the sky glistened and pulsed more heavily than the sea, his head down, one forearm bent beneath the two big books he carried, the other raised to soothe or steady his flinching face. It was the burn of their brownness, and the colder clarity of their eyes and teeth, the pulp salmon of their tongues-which made him feel that from now on all life and love would be harbored elsewhere. It seemed as if the atrocious doses of powerful medications that he soon must surely take were already in dour operation, bringing down a thick and wobbling penumbra of turbulent air, the kind which, in larger quantities, makes big jets quake, secluding him, roping him off from life and love. Before him on the beach Americans exercised, and played games. American health got everyone where it hurt, in the pocket, and had things so arranged that each disaster for the body was a multiple disaster for you and everyone around you in your life. Loved ones, and so on. But those with the money were Clearly getting a lot out of it, the health deal here, and Miami, with all the robot methuselahs of Miami Beach, was the holy city of its miracles. On the faces of those who leapt and limped and hollered and panted in front of him Richard was seeing something that he hadheard about only in discussions of American foreign policy (and then not recently): American resolve. Visible on the face of the fattest jogger. American resolve, which is like no other resolve, not the steeliest, quite, but always saying that their right to it need never be examined. Seriously considering the removal of his bow tie, Richard lit another cigarette.
He was heating up, and not just in his person. Also, apparently, as a commodity. Even the publicity boy, surveying Richard's situation, might have said without irony that all his prospectives were zeroing in. Once or perhaps twice every day Richard had called the Lazy Susan, deploying one or other of his strikingly talentless American accents (he was no better than the twins, who, when imitating Americans, pronounced yes as a trisyllable and put three ns in banana); and it seemed that Untitled was suddenly and unaccountably taking fire. Instead of having two copies in stock, the Lazy Susan now had one copy in stock. With his enhanced royalty deal, that meant he was a clear $2.50 to the good. More than this, much more than this, he now had something resembling a publicity schedule. He would be interviewed, the following afternoon, by Pete Sahl of the Miami Herald; in Chicago he would be the subject of the hour-long Dub Traynor interview; and in Boston he would give a reading-signing at the Founder Theater. All fixed or facilitated by Gwyn. The publicity boy had sent over a sheet of paper with all the details typed out on it.
"Hi."
Richard looked up. A young woman was standing over him. She wore cutoffs, tattoos, a plastic money pouch like a belt with a beer-gut.
"That'll be three bucks."
"What'll be three bucks?"
"The lounger you're lying on."
"I haven't got any money on me."
"Sorry, sir."
It was a nice idea, Americans calling everyone sir, addressing everyone-waiters, cabbies, toilet attendants, serial murders-as sir. The consequence was, though, that they made sir sound like Mac or bub or scumbag.
"Okay. I might just have it."
Bearing his two crumpled bills and a handful of his brown and silver change, she climbed back into her caddycart and whirred softly off on it, looking for other people who were lying on loungers. "Great job you got," said Richard quietly. Said Richard to himself. He lay back on his padded rack, and yawned, and briefly nursed his bubonic jet lag. Anyway, that was what he hoped it was: merely jet lag, rather than a no-surprises, by-the-book expiration from advanced old age.
His one concession to his surroundings was a Day-Glo yellow flexi-grip highlighting pen (found beneath the bedside table in his hotel room), with which he was marking passages of especial interest in The Character of Sir Thomas Overbury (1581-1613). But really he was reading two books at once, with one drooping and one auspicious eye. The book on his lap was a literary biography. The book in his head was his own, Unfitted, from whose pages he would read in Boston, Massachusetts. Which bits? The description of the escort-agency advertisement done as a chapter-long parody of The Romance of the Rose? That miraculously sustained tour de force in which five unreliable narrators converse on crossed mobile-phone lines while stuck in the same revolving door? Gwyn had given him confirmation of the engagement that lunchtime, backstage at the Miami Book Festival, as the seconds ticked away before "An Hour with Gwyn Barry." Touched by his friend's words, Richard hung around for the event, hoping it would simply be a severe disappointment as opposed to an unqualified flop. Annoyingly, about a thousand people showed up for it. Why? In Miami, for pity's sake, where there was so much else on offer. Why not the mall, the pool, the casino, the crack house? Didn't they have anything better to do? The only good bit came as Gwyn was leaving the auditorium, lingeringly, accepting congratulations and handshakes, and giving previews of his book-signing skills-soon to be deployed in greater earnest at the Gwyn Barry stand out on the mezzanine. Abruptly and with such marked address that the publicity boy interposed himself between them, a burly woman in jeans and tank top stepped up to Gwyn and said, "Nothing personal, but I think your books are shit." With
corporate calm and erectness the publicity boy steered Gwyn past this bejeaned embarrassment, this tank-topped glitch. And she called out after them, "Not everyone thinks you're wonderful!" Gwyn hesitated; he hesitated, half turning, half smiling, as if grateful for this salutary reminder-that America still contained one or two holdouts. The woman turned, and communicated with her companion, in sign language. She didn't pinch her nose with her fingers or anything, but it was clear that she was telling her deaf friend that Gwyn's books were shit. With pride and solidarity, Richard had already intuited who this must be: Shanana Ormolu Davis, of Bold Agenda. He watched Shanana shoulder her way out of there, content to admire her from afar.
The haze above South Beach was evaporating under its share of the sun's heat. Under that fraction of energy which our terrestrial star-a star on the main sequence but heavier than ninety percent of its peers, and just entering early middle age-radiated with such moronic munificence, not only earthward: in every other direction too. Every second,640,000 tons of mass were lost in the solar reactor and were multiplied, in (inefficient) obedience to the Einsteinian equation, by the speed of light squared: 186,282 X 186,282. Richard took off his jacket-a taxing task. He had never given a reading before. But he had spoken in public often enough. If you defined public freely enough. Dollis Hill tube, then 198B. Follow the walkway. You will be met near the ticket machines. What Price Modern Poetry? All welc. The invitations came in every other year. He always accepted. He could see himself, one day, being stretchered out of his deathbed to go and discuss the death of the novel. Would the novel have any last words? With a harsh groan he leaned forward and started unlacing his shoes.