by Martin Amis
For the next fifteen minutes the two writers were to occupy a sectioned area of the bar, where a group of journalists and academics had been gathered for them to hobnob with. Elsa Oughton stood among them. Richard was startled by her appearance. She was no longer the angular, Gina-like dryad of her jacket photograph: he wouldn't have identified her if she hadn't had both Gwyn's shoes sticking out of the back of her skirt. On the happenstance/coincidence/enemy-action principle, Richard had decided against any further defamation of his friend. But after Gwyn was done with her (in parting he gave Elsa the full PR handshake, two palms enfolding hers as if in joint prayer), she came over to where he was standing with his swollen face and his plastic beaker of white wine and Richard thought what the hey and said,
"Elsa Oughton? Richard lull. I wonder if you saw our review of Saddle Leather in The Little Magazine. A favorable and also a very interesting piece. I'll make sure you get sent a copy."
"Thanks. Good. How was your tour?"
What Richard was looking at here was a narrative of fat. The whole story: how she'd got that way, how she'd tried to get back. How muchshe hated it. He wondered whether it was in him to dream up something about Gwyn hating fat people-a taunt directed at a small child with gland problems, perhaps. But he didn't see how the subject of fat people could be smoothly raised. For a moment he felt pride in the shaming bloat of his own face. The only other stuff he knew about Elsa was that she wrote twangingly sensitive short stories about hikes and sleepouts and mingling with animals. And that she had recently married Viswanathan Singh, the Harvard economist.
He sucked in his chest and stuck out his gut and said, "Rather shocking, actually."
"How so?"
"Well. I've known Gwyn for twenty years." Richard didn't even bother to tell himself not to get carried away. "I know his foibles. Or I thought I did. Outrageous looks-snob. Loves his creature comforts. Hates animals. So what? Who cares? But I had no idea he was such an unreconstructed racist. Really. I'm flabbergasted."
"Racist?"
"Of course he did grow up in Wales, which is racially very homogeneous. And in London he and his wife-that's Lady Demeter to you- move in very select circles. But over here, in the great 'melting pot'…"
"What kind of thing?"
"For two weeks now I've had to endure a constant stream of snide remarks about geeks and slopes and wops and wogs and boogies and pakkis. Send them back to the hellholes they came from. You know the kind of thing." What next? Gwyn punching eye-slits in his hotel pillow slips? Gwyn with his blazing cross, thundering over … No. No horses. Richard made a serious effort and managed to mutter in his clogged new voice, "I tried reading him Dickens on the American South. No earthly use, of course. Oh no. Not with friend Barry."
"But his wofk's so bland. So bland."
"Yes, well this is often the way, isn't it."
"I can't stay for the reading. I… can't stay."
Elsa Oughton couldn't stay for the reading because a curtain-hanger was expected at the house, and Viswanathan refused to deal with tradespeople. The Singhs had moved, not so long ago, and something like this happened almost every day. Viswanathan would call and tell her to come home because there was a man outside trying to deliver a parcel. Late the night before he had caught her crouched over the icebox in the dark and announced his intention of moving into a separate bedroom. And a separate bathroom. That morning: another fight. She had crossed the room in front of his desk. In future she was to cross the room behind hisdesk. Even as things stood it seemed that she was only allowed to look his way every other Tuesday.
"At the airport just now," said Richard, "our porter was an elderly Asian gentleman and he accidentally dropped Gwyn's shooting-stick. And Gwyn called him a fucking monkey! I'm sorry. But can you believe that? I mean / don't care whether people are green or blue or polka-dotted …"
Oh sure, she thought. Come back to my place and try handling my fucking monkey. "Nice talking to you. I'll look again at his work."
"Do that."
It was time. The lady organizer took his arm and with an indecipherable smile drew him away, ahead of Gwyn. As he was led down passages, and up stairways like fireman's drops with steps curled round the pole, Richard began to suspect that a disaster awaited him: not a literary humiliation but a disaster, with body counts. First a young woman on a stretcher came flowing past, borne by two health-industry freelancers in orange salopettes. There followed a policeman, another medic, and a genuine fireman, with an axe, and then a young couple seemingly brought together and sustained by deep shared sorrow. He turned a corner. The walls were lined on either side by leaning figures in attitudes of distress and exhaustion and qualified recovery. This was the entrance to Theater A, where Gwyn would be reading. Richard glanced inside and saw human congestion on a scale no longer imaginable in the civilized world. Perhaps in Japanese commuter trains, in crushed crowds in news footage, watched over by the sneer of calamity . . . He thought of deportations, slave-packing, the cages of Calcutta. The room gave off the thick insect buzz of coagulated youth-a hive of hormones. Richard's escort paused to reassure the two firemen who doubtfully flanked the doorway, and then turned to him and said, with ominous tenderness,
"I'm sure you're a beautiful writer too."
They walked on, to Theater B. Theater A sat 750 people, Theater B 725. Richard had agreed altogether readily, with much astute nodding of the head, in an airport somewhere, in a flickering coffeenook, on a cab chute of a hotel forecourt, that Gwyn belonged in Theater A. With a last nasal drool into his handkerchief, Richard stepped into the space and silence of Theater B.
Later, he would tell himself that the reading was the clear high-point of the afternoon. His audience might not have been large. But it was varied. One was female, one was black, one was Native American, and one was fat. And that was that. But wait. The fat man was fabulouslyfat-how his folds seemed to slur and slobber over two seats, over three! And the black man was as black as the bedroom of Dominique-Louise: as black as Adam. And the Amerindian wore cowboy boots, and had one leg up over the aisle armrest with the spur lolling in pluralistic suspension. And the woman, beneath the quilted lodge-skins of her smock, was all woman, Richard was sure. Fat man, black man, cowboy and Indian, womankind . .. He took the lectern to a Krakatoa of applause: from next door. It sounded like an espresso machine going off an inch away from his clogged right ear. Instead of fainting, he started reading, from the early pages of chapter eleven: the description of the coven of tramps, rendered as a burlesque of The Idylls of the King. Immediately he lost a quarter of his audience when, with a primitive ululation, the Native American got to his feet and started walking backwards up the steps. Richard raised his head. Their eyes met. The Native American was severe and vain and stupidly lissome in his cowboy boots. Cowboy boots? The boots of your slaughterer? With a rush of hurt and hate Richard knew that this was his comrade from Bold Agenda: John Two Moons. Three listeners remained. As he got going again Richard found he was becoming increasingly and then entirely absorbed by the question of their tenuous equanimity, their whims and mood swings. What he was reading was no use at all: he needed paragraphs that praised fat people, black people, smocked women. Causing intolerable suspense, the fat man was now making successively enfeebled attempts to get out of his seat. He flailed, and failed, and eventually subsided into a troubled sleep. The African American, too, was providing conflict and drama: ever more energized by his private agenda, he began to mouth, mumble, intone and holler, louder than the man at the mike. Only the woman-thickly made-up, unblinking, flatly smiling, his age-maintained an undivided composure: the dream audience of one.
And the reading was the clear high point of the afternoon. After that it was all downhill.
During one of the many intermissions, caused by the stridor from Theater A, Richard fell to the perusal of his handkerchief. A handkerchief the likes of which no American had set eyes on since the invention of paper tissues. (The publicity boy, Richard knew, just couldn't
believe this handkerchief.) Some bits bunched, infinitely parched and crackling to the touch; others as glutinous as the white of a half-boiled egg: the whole seeking a strange shape-definitive asymmetry. He moistened his nose with it. Yeah, a real old snot-rag. Such as the schoolboy he once was might have found in his blazer pocket, after a term of flu. The shape and color of London skies.
Boston was burning behind them in its brick-red dusk as they walked out of the gate and headed for the plane-the light aircraft. Richard turned. The rust and dust of the Logan evening contained something lurid, something brothelly and lewd. And you could hear the primal moan over and above the ordinary wind.
Gwyn said, "Reassure me."
"It's a hop," said the publicity boy. "Like a half hour. We'll beat the storm. They guarantee we'll beat it."
"We're not going up in that. Jesus. It's the Wright brothers."
"Orville and Wilbur," said Richard ramblingly. "The Kitty Hawk."
"I've done it like a thousand times. It's a breeze."
"It's not a breeze. It's a hurricane."
"Don't worry about it."
Richard unyoked his mail sack from his shoulder and lowered it to the ground. His mail sack was fractionally heavier than it had been before the Boston signing session. As if to prove and memorialize this fact, as if to give it chapter and verse, his mailsack was now going to be weighed. Weight, hereabouts, was much in the air. All the passengers, at check-in, were asked what their weight was, Gwyn disclosing a game 140, Richard an overparticular and outdated 167, the publicity boy eventually coming up with a regrettable 215. Tensing her legs, a young woman in a blue pants suit now hoisted Richard's mail sack on to the broad bucket of the platform scale. If his suitcase had raised eyebrows, his mail sack was the theme of candid debate. To get them through this debate, Richard had to smile. And if it hurts when you smile, you realize how often you smile when you don't want to-how often your smiles are smiles of pain. He knew from mirrors how his smiles made him look. They made him look as if he was recovering from a stroke. So these smiles, performed on behalf of his mail sack, in front of Gwyn, in front of the publicity boy, these smiles took from him everything he had. These smiles removed the change from his pockets. These smiles just cleaned him out … A couple of hundred feet away the light aircraft crouched self-consciously in its bay, spindly-legged but plump-girdled, and eloquent of aerodynamic ingenuousness. Looking at it, Richard thought not of the goggled smiles of Orville and Wilbur but of the spastic wrigglings of moustachioed hobbyists-riding off cliffs on buttressed bicycles and flapping their pantomime wings. His mail sack was skeptically returned to him, as hand baggage. He shouldered it once more, and turned to Gwyn. "Christ. Will you look at that." "Where?" he said, and looked to the south.
Night was ready to arrive, to roll over, but the day was not accepting this. Light was being displaced by dark, because the earth turned; but light was not accepting this. Light and day hadn't gone to bed. They were up after dark. In the core of the advancing darkness, light-talent, passion-feverishly struggled and would then rear up madly bright: hysterical day.
He wasn't worried because he was already dead. It was over. He went off with his mail sack and sat down on it, behind a staircase pointing upward but leading nowhere, and stuck a cigarette into the unfamiliar tautness of his lips, and let his death go slowly by.
It was the signing that had killed him. Keats was killed by a review. Richard was killed by a signing. Of the reading you could at least say that there weren't many people there to see it. But his audience for the signing was biblically vast. Submitting to demand, Gwyn had given a shortened reading-in three sittings. And everyone stuck around.
So while his friend and rival exhausted four whole ballpoints, signing Amelior Regained, Amelior, Summertown, signing programs, flyers, press photographs, signing autograph books, plaster casts, girls' forearms, girls' inner thighs, Richard sat at the other table for two hours doing nothing … In the past, and in various capacities, none of them exalted, he had hung around at fairs and festivals and studied, with casual enmity, the signing queues of writers. Each queue, like each book and each writer, had a genre it belonged to. The countercultural, the contentedly pedagogic, the straggly, the ramrod orderly, the playful, the earnest, as well as all the other emphases of class, age, sex and race. And Gwyn's queue, it had to be admitted, looked like the universal. Here they came, stepping up the gangway to the ark of the future.
While queueing (and where did this queue end? Where did it end?), the queuers had Richard to look at and wonder about-they had Richard to delectate. They didn't know it, but they were actors at his funeral, they were mourners, weepers, moving slowly past the corpse of his calling, the tinpot jackboot, numb and luminous in his death wax.
The ghost went on sitting there, at the table heaped with unsigned Untitleds. About forty minutes in, an old man wearing pressed jeans approached, his face archangelic with integrity: the ghost of Tom Paine. He produced a copy of Richard's novel from under his arm and smacked it down on the tabletop. Untitled snapped open on pages eight and nine, both of which were unmistakably stained and warped by dried blood; in the interface lay the distinctive bookmark of the Lazy Susan; the top corner of page nine had been forcefully turned down and bore the perfectcontours of a gory thumbprint. He didn't want it signed. He didn't want it… His only other visitor was a woman: the woman who had attended his reading. At the time, she had seemed to him to be the only person present who had paid the slightest attention to his words. With kittenish timidity she approached his table. Richard bade her welcome, and meant it, and went on meaning it as she extracted from her shoulder pouch a copy of a novel written not by Richard Tull but by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Idiot. Standing beside him, leaning over him, her face awfully warm and near, she began to leaf through its pages, explaining. This book too was stained, not by gouts of blood but by the vying colors of two highlighting pens, one blue, one pink. And not just two pages but the whole six hundred. Every time the letter h and e appeared together, as in the, then, there, as in forehead, Pashlishtchev, sheepskin, they were shaded in blue. Every time the letters s, h, and e appeared together, as in she, sheer, ashen, sheepskin, etc., they were shaded in pink. And since every she contained a he, the predominance was unarguably and unsurprisingly masculine. Which was exactly her point. "You see?" she said with her hot breath, breath redolent of metallic medications, of batteries and printing-plates. "You see?" . .. The organizers knew all about this woman-this unfortunate recurrence, this indefatigable drag-and kept coming over to try and coax her away. Richard wouldn't hear of it. Never had he found another's company so gorgeous. Never had he lived so deliriously. Never would he stray from her side. Together, in their dwindling years, with no kids of course but with new twin sets of highlighting pens, they would tackle the great texts, one by one. If he should falter, she would take up the blue. Should she grow weary, he would wield the pink. But life is short and art is long: would they ever exhaust the great Russians? Side by side, him with his pint jug and his painkillers, her with her zinc and her manganese.
Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories. The Greatcoat. Father and Son. A Hero of Our Time.
The Death of Ivan Ilych. The Gentleman from San Francisco. The Master and Margarita.
The Devil. The Double.
We.
Richard raised a palm to the spongey cladding of his face. He thought he could probably work it out, now-where his stuff stood, and where Gwyn's stuff stood, in relation to the universe. The publicity boy was calling. Up above, the sky was showing that it could do black holes. This imitation (the event horizon only roughly circular, with the standard drug-squeezed pupil at the eye's center-the kind of puckered blob you would find in one of the twins' astronomy booklets) needed more work.
They rolled forward, soon to go. The seven passengers sat with their necks bent almost sideways, in postures of tortured compression. It wasn't just the low ceiling: it was also the embarrassing proximity of the tarmac, only a few feet b
eneath the soles of their shoes. Richard assumed that the engine was so loud that it was off the human scale altogether, and all you felt was vibration, in your every atom. More or less engulfed by his mail sack, he sat jammed into the rearmost row, next to Gwyn. They were both assessing the pilot-a figure of unusually enhanced interest: tall, fleshy, ginger-blond, a big man with a light step, he deployed a feminine delicacy in the arrangement of his peaked cap, his flightbox, his earphones. Turning sideways in his seat, comfortingly perfunctory, he had run through the safety instructions in a voice perhaps incapable of modulation anyway, and then attended to his controls-the sort of dashboard appropriate to a prewar spaceship or a glue-and-balsa nuclear sub, dials, graphs, metal switches coated in worn paint. Richard realized that the dash contained no plastic. Was that good, he wondered, and tried to lose himself in silent tribute to durable and horny-handed craftsmanship and skills, now, alas, long vanished. The pilot wore a white shirt and lumpy cream trousers the texture of flock wallpaper. It was easy, somehow, to lose yourself in the expanse of his cream rump: firmly framed in the lower aperture of his seat, it filled its space solidly and proudly, soft-cornered, like a TV-like the shape of Richard's face.
So the little plane queued for take off. The little plane was a little plane, among all these big ones, and hoped it wasn't in the way. But it was. The passenger jets, dog-nosed (their noses black and damp in the dew or sweat of the coming storm), waited in line behind them like rigid pointers cocked for the hunt. Richard looked out through the propeller blades, which were moving invisibly fast, seeming to smudge the air or bruise it. Ahead of them, round the turn, were the tensed haunches of the important shuttles-to New York, to Washington-waiting to take Americans where they needed to go: around America. Over and above the compound anguish of the checked planes, all screaming at each other to get out of the way, you could hear the sky and the epic groan of the middle air. Darkness, night, was wheeling in from the north. But from the defiant south came a negligent and unanswerable demonstration of light, the electromagnetic: god's whips, knouts and sjamboks of solder and copper.