by Martin Amis
"You told Richard I couldn't write for toffee."
"Well you can't."
"Okay. That's it."
"Well you can't!"
"Okay. That's it."
"Well you can't."
"I suppose the next stage-is separation."
"But you can't. It just seemed so obvious."
"This now passes into the hands of my lawyers."
"If it was wrong to say it in public then I'm sorry."
"It'll take me a day or two to move out. I trust you will do me the common courtesy-"
"Wait. I honestly don't understand why you're so cross. Let me think." And again the commentary, the punctuation, provided by Demi's forehead: bracketings, underlinings. "We were talking about how much you got paid. Not just novels but magazine pieces. You know, so much a word. And Richard said it was a lot. And I said you couldn't write for toffee. Was that so wrong?"
"… Come and give me a kiss. Mwa. Mmm. You mean peanuts, love. Not toffee. Mwa. Peanuts."
Within seconds he was huskily promising that one day soon he would fill her with their sons. And he spent the night in the master bedroom, and might even have made love to her, tenderly, tearfully, absolvingly, if he hadn't been feeling so fucked out-and worried about getting her pregnant. Demi also told him something else about that weekend at Byland Court with Richard: something he was awfully pleased to hear. Like all writers, Barry was often at the mercy of his. Seeing that light in her husband's eyes, she would know that the. Hypersensitive, but quick to forgive, he could never . . .
Now Gwyn said, "Crash can't drive for toffee. Eh, love??
"Well his rates are quite high."
"Ah. Here he comes."
A minute later Richard was standing in the hall, in his shorts, in his mack, cruelly encumbered, with his racket, his cue case; he was carrying his street clothes in a cheap new sports bag which was clearly made out of plastic (if that). Demi kissed him. He looked lost.
"A lamb to the slaughter," said Gwyn.
"We're not going to do this, are we?"
Richard took his place in the back of Gwyn's Saab.
Up front, riding shotgun, was the bodyguard, Phil. It might have been pleasant, Richard supposed, to claim and savor responsibility for all this anxiety, expense, inconvenience, and preposterous exoticism. But the author of Amelior and Amelior Regained, dependably and adaptably insufferable, as ever, had too clearly thrown himself into bodyguard culture: here, in Phil, Gwyn had found another reality-softener-a publicity boy who pumped iron. It emerged that he even went to the gym and worked out with Phil's co-bodyguards: Simon, Jake. Gruffly, malely, Gwyn swore as he drove. He even wound his window down to holler at some affront to his territoriality. Another category mistake. Silence, please! We may think we are swearing at others, at traffic. But who is the traffic? The soliloquy is the appropriate form for such language, because what we are doing is swearing at ourselves. Richard didn't miss driving; he didn't miss being plugged into the city. But he missed swearing. He missed being yet another chump in yet another reeking ton of metal in yet another bronchitic defile, swearing at himself.
As they queued for Marble Arch, Gwyn jerked his head back and told Richard that Phil had been thrown out of the SAS for being too vicious. Phil grunted leniently. Phil? Lamp-tanned, rubbery, big-lipped, with capped teeth and clear eyes-their age. Phil's full name was Phil Smoker. Richard thought it might save a lot of trouble to be called Richard Smoker, particularly when you were in America. Or Richard Smoking. Phil smoked-so Richard smoked. Gwyn was now filling Phil in about their years of rivalry-on the tennis court, the snooker table, the chessboard.
"And today's the day I clean his clock."
"He's never beaten me at anything," said Richard.
"Sport," said Gwyn, "provides release. There aren't many areas of transcendence left to us now. Sports. Sex. Art.?
"You're forgetting the miseries of others," said Richard. "The languid contemplation of the miseries of others. Don't forget that."
Their destination was not the Warlock but the Oerlich. "I'm paying for all this," said Gwyn. "And I'll have to pay your guest fee. You can get the balls at least." Phil, who had done a lot of staring on their way in from the car park, now did some more staring before settling down with the newspaper. Staring, Richard decided, was what bodyguards were really good at. He bought the balls: they were Swedish, and internally pressurized, and cost a bewildering amount of money. On the way down the cold green tube to their court Gwyn came to a halt and said, "Look. I've arrived." There on the wall was a framed photograph of Gwyn in his whites (together with his semiliterate signature). Nearby there were framed photographs of a dress designer, a golfer, a boxer, and the great Buttruguena.
"How long have you been a member here? What's it cost?"
"Thousands. Quite a while. This is where I play all my real tennis."
After the first changeover Richard said, "What happened to the fourth ball?" They searched for it, and failed to find it. This was an indoor court, and there was of course nowhere for the ball to go. But there were plenty of places for the ball to hide. And tennis balls long to be lost. It's their life; they long to be lost. .. After the second changeover Richard said, "Where'd the third ball go?" They searched for it, and didn't find it. Gwyn, in the keel of whose leather sports bag the two balls now nestled, asked Richard if he wanted to go and buy some more. But Richard shrugged, and played on.
He didn't understand how it was happening. Was it possible to hate too much? At all times he hated Gwyn on the tennis court, even when he was winning easily: even when he sent him from corner to corner like a lab rat (and then put him on his backside with a simple wrong-foot); even when, after a long alternation of lobs and dropshots, he had him gaping over the net, and, with big windup and loud puppy-yelp of racket on ball, drove a topspin forehand straight into his mouth. Hatred was part of his game but something had gone wrong with it-wrong with his hatred, wresting it beyond all focus and all utility. There were reasons for this.
Usually pretty matter-of-fact on court, Gwyn seemed to have converted himself, for the occasion, into a one-man band of affectations and tics-all of them hopelessly and inexpiably repulsive. Every time he won a point he clenched his fist and hissed "Yes" or, even more unbearably, gulped "Yup." Yes, the yup was very much worse than the yes. When they changed ends he could be heard to deploy a deep-breathingexercise: he sounded (Richard thought) like a pre-fire caveman warding off hypothermia. If Gwyn's first serve hit the net and plopped to the ground or rolled unobjectionably into the tramlines, he would reshape, as if to continue, then hesitate, then stand there for a couple of beats with his hands on his hips before trudging forward to retrieve it-while Richard said, for example, "What is this? The Princess and the Pea?" And Gwyn never knew the score. He kept asking what the score was: that tedious shibboleth-fit for hackers and literalists-called the score. "What's the score?" he would say. Or, "Where are we?" Or, "What's that now?" Or, more simply, "Score?" Finally and self-fulfillingly Gwyn was doing something else he had never done. He was winning.
After half an hour Gwyn had set point. Then, toddling forward on a typical piece of junk, he got an inch of racket handle onto Richard's skittish pass. The ball hit the tape, and climbed over it, and died.
"How's your thumb?" said Richard as they sat down. "Thumb all right?"
"It was an angled drop volley. And I was aiming for the tape."
"Don't worry about that thumb. Over the coming weeks that thumb will start to heal. Jesus, how could we lose two balls'?"
Gwyn didn't answer. He had placed a towel over his head-as they do at the Australian Open when the courtside temperature reaches 140 degrees. Richard lit his customary cigarette. Gwyn peered out of his tepee and told him that the Oerlich was no-smoking. Then he added,
"You can't play for peanuts."
"How do you mean?"
"Or for toffee." Gwyn explained. "By the way, did you ever wonder how you got that black eye, at Byland? Or are b
lack eyes just a matter of routine?"
"I did wonder. But given my condition …" And given the locale: an adventure playground for those in need of a black eye. If you were tumbling around it in the dark, on your hands and knees.
"You tried to get into bed with Demi at three in the morning. It was a right hook, I think she said."
"This is disappointing news."
"She doesn't hold it against you. And I think it turned out rather well."
Halfway through the second set the wall telephone rang. Gwyn answered it: Gavin, as arranged, calling to confirm the date of a pro-celebrity doubles tournament. For charity. And for Sebby.
"That was the manager," Gwyn said. "He said you've got to stopscreaming and swearing or they're going to sling you out on your ear. And I must say I think he's got a point."
Ten minutes later Gwyn said, "Score?"
"Forty-love,"said Richard, coming to the net so that he wouldn't have to shout. "To you. Forty-love, and five-one. First set: six-two. To you. That means triple match-point. To you. That means that if you win this point or the next point or the point after, you will win the set and the match. Which you've never done before. Okay? That's the score."
"Gosh. Only asking," said Gwyn, who made that point too.
Richard took it like a man. "Well played," he said as they shook hands over the net post. "You're rucking useless and if I don't win love and love next time I'm giving up the game. Who'd you pay to teach you all that crap anyway?"
"Ask me no questions," he said, "and I'll tell you no lies."
The second set, like the first, had concluded with a dead net cord. Yellow ball hit the white tape: Richard had already forgotten who sent it there. Which didn't matter. The ball teetered on the high-wire of the net and even spun laterally across it for several suspended centimeters before it fell. In tennis, with the dead net cord, you want the ball to come down on the other side. Not your side. You are always wishing it away. But the ball fell toward him, and died. The ball never liked him. The world of the seamed and fuzzy ball never liked him anyway.
They drove back to Holland Park. Richard's tennis wear fumed softly of detergent and family wash, in opposition to the humid tang of Gwyn's cologne-and Phil's Man-Tan and Right Guard. Demi was out. "She's at Byland," said Gwyn. "Dad's dying." After a brief bonding ritual with his charge, Phil disappeared. Richard was shown into a basement toilet which had a shower in it somewhere, as well as various padded boilers and bouncing clothes-dryers. Then for a while, in his wet hair, he inspected the carpentry corner beneath the staircase. Nothing seemed to be under construction, but there was an antique bookrest whose varnish had been mostly scraped off with sandpaper: Gwyn, evidently, was trying to make it look like his own work. Richard went on up.
"Got your cue? Let's go."
"Won't we be needing Phil?"
In recent months Gwyn's wardrobe had been tending toward the softer and more capacious feminine fabrics, smocklike colored shirts, faux-naif knitwear, windblown scarves: the Will Ladislaw of Wll. Nowhe confronted Richard in a charcoal three-piece suit of tubular severity, plus rigid bow tie. He was adjusting his cufflinks and saying,
"This won't take a second. I want to show you something before we
go."
On the way to the top floor they passed Pamela, who withdrew with valedictory silence into the shadows of a distant doorway.
"You've been up here, haven't you?"
Richard had been up there, conducted by Demi, on a recent Profile-related tour. They were approaching the garden-site attic, which Demi had called the "childhood room." Painfully obviously, it was intended as a nursery: narrative wallpaper, Victorian toys (a rockinghorse with madamic eyelashes), Georgian cuddly animals, a Jacobean crib. Gwyn opened the door and stood aside.
The childhood room was no longer the childhood room. It was the snooker room. Cue trees, scoring rails, and a curved bar in the corner with four steel-and-leather stools for you to roost on.
"Amazing business. That thing weighs a third of a ton. They had to reinforce the floor.They came through the skylight-we had cranes outside. But the real challenge," Gwyn concluded, "was getting Demi to get rid of all her shit."
Richard lost 0-3.
They had a candlelit supper of smoked salmon, quail's eggs, and potted shrimp, prepared, or unwrapped, by Pamela and served to them in the dining room. Incapable of being struck by much, at this stage, Richard was nonetheless struck by her manner. You could not but be struck by it. Richard she served with cordiality; Gwyn, with melodramatic unceremoniousness.
"What's wrong with her? I mean apart from being your girlfriend. Is anything else the matter?"
"Not really. It's just that I'm getting on wonderfully well with Demi these days. And Audra Christenberry's in town." A door slammed somewhere. Gwyn flicked his napkin onto the table. "I suppose I'd better go and sort it out."
This took fifty-five minutes. Richard passed the time smoking and drinking. He had his hands full with that: with drinking and with smoking. When Gwyn reappeared in the doorway and made a gesture with his head, Richard said ordinarily,
"What about this??
He opened his hands over the dining table. He meant the soiled plates, the leftovers, the inevitable decomposition .. .
"Pamela'll get it."
But before she did that she brought them coffee and brandy-in the octagonal library, as they settled over the board-and lingered to plump Gwyn's cushions and assist him in the ignition of his cigar. All this she did with an air both secretive and devout. Richard kept his eyes on the pieces he was assembling. These pieces, with their divine heaviness. Even the pawns responded greedily to gravity; and you could feel their affinity with the center of the earth.
The door closed. They were alone. Gwyn said:
"Adolescence is the best. I'm glad I left it this late. It's the tops. Can you remember-all that sexual loneliness? Lying in a single bed, thinking: there must be a million women out there, feeling like me. Sexually lonely. Nothing really changes. Even Tolstoy thought that. Time happens to your body. But not to your head. You're still looking out of a window watching them all go by. I'm still fifteen. But there are differences. They aren't out there anymore. They're in here. Or they're on the preselect of my mobile phone. Audra Christenberry. Gal Aplanalp. Hey, I've switched. I'm with Mercedes Soroya. You were right. Gal's list is so tacky. Novels by couturiers. Novels by synchronized swimmers. And Mercedes. Man. You could just drown in those eyes. Guess what. Gal had a crush on you, way back. When we were kids. You know, I really lucked out, marrying a Catholic. They can't get away. Ah. E4. Wait.. J'adoube."
"Resign," sighed Richard, for the second time in half an hour.
He went on staring at the board. It wasn't anything Gwyn had done, particularly. The chess just followed from everything else.
This was his last shot. "You remember that weird little sister I brought round to see you-Belladonna?" He waited, with his head down. "What happened?"
"That would be telling now, wouldn't it." "Naturally." He waited. "You didn't fuck her, did you?" "Are you out of your mind? Or do you just think / am? A little spook like that. And someone of my visibility. All she's got to do is drop ten pee into a phone box. And tell Reuter's I raped her or got her pregnant. I need that. Not to mention the risk of disease."
On the whole Richard felt quite impressed by himself. His disappointment was mild.
"Come on" said Gwyn.
"Yeah. Well."
"No. I just let her give me a blow job."
Gwyn's face was open, was declarative: the face of a man keen to transmit information clearly. He said, "After she'd taken her clothes off and done a little dance. She asked me what my favorite was. And I told her. It was pretty amazing actually. You know when they're actually down there-one thing it does is shut them up. For the time being. But not her. She took it out every ten seconds to say something. Me on TV Her on TV. Holding it there, like a mike. It was kind of brilliant because it meant it lasted about two
hours. Very skilled she was. Very noisy all round. I bet you think you're going to put all this in your piece. But you won't. You won't."
"Not Belladonna. I'm not sure but I think … Deadly nightshade. I think she's got it."
"It?" Gwyn considered. "I'm not surprised. Going round doing everyone's favorite all day."
… The way the white pieces were configured, like a hairline, and the squares drifting in his milky gaze: the board resembled the image of a face, on TV; the smeared cubes of some wrongdoer, some child-murderer, pixelated-the face of Steve Cousins. As in the first game the position was far from conclusive. But the chess just followed from everything else.
"It's late."
They stood up. Suddenly and startlingly Gwyn turned and seized Richard by the shoulders. What was this? More adolescence? With an expression of primitive alarm, Gwyn said,
"You didn't fuck her, did you?"
"Who? No."
And they sagged together, over the chessboard.
Richard said, "I'm touched . . . It's strange. Whatever happens, we balance each other out. We're like Henchard and Farfrae. You're part of me and I'm part of you."
"You know something? I understand exactly what you're saying. And I couldn't disagree more."
With a gesture at the chessmen Richard said, "It's a blip." And he meant the whole day. "I'll be back. I'll get you next time."
"I think not. I think there just won't be a next time. I think we've got to
the end of one another, This'll do me, It's a wrap."
He walked home. In Calchalk Street, as he approached, he looked toward the rooftop. Two of the half-dozen stars that still shine on Lon-don (sufficiently fat or proximate) were burning; but no lights were burning at 49E. He went up the stairs, past the bikes. In the kitchen he drank a glass of water, a glass of milk, and a glass of sweet vermouth. With his head sticking out of his study window he smoked a final cigarette. Then he sat there, listening: no noises you could go ahead and locate. But the place was subtly unsilent.