by Amis, Martin
Nude magazines
She said affrontedly, ‘You like nude magazines!’
‘Nude magazines, Phoebe, have their place.*7 But I don’t want to go to functions for nude magazines. Why’d they invite you anyway?’
‘Oh, I expect they’re asking all their…’
Her face shone out at him. And he was freshly startled by her eyes. Normally Phoebe’s snuff-coloured eyes seemed to address you through a lens of detachment, as fixed and unrevealing as damp brownstone. Now they had a glisten and a crackle, like caramelised sugar. She went on,
‘All their past stars, Mart. All their pets and playmates.’ She jolted to her feet and surged outward. ‘Don’t move a muscle. I’ve got an offering for you.’ And as she left the room she gave vent to a glissade of laughter…
He heard her next door – the snaps of the suitcase, the rummaging. Phoebe strode out of there and offered it to him like a waitress with a tray (and she curtsied when he took it). The nude magazine was called Oui.
‘My bit’s under a false name,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to keep some things secret…’
For a moment he thought she was about to sneeze; but now the head went back and she laughed again. And the sound of it, vaguely surprisingly, made him feel exhausted, physically exhausted; and he even felt that if she laughed again he might have to curl up and fade away, just from physical exhaustion…
‘Concentrate, Martin.’
Very much as if in an uneasy dream (the succession of strange challenges, the strange weakening of cause and effect, together with the proximity, well known to male dreamers, of a strange and equivocal woman), he mustered his urbanity…
The nine-page section bore the title ‘Tycoon Tanya’. And there she was, Phoebe, in the year – he checked the cover – 1971. So she was twenty-nine, but not looking qualitatively younger: the angular bonescape fully formed (fully and interestingly evolved and completed). Tycoon Tanya was to be seen methodically removing her businesswear in a narrow variety of settings: a penthouse roof garden, a softly lit boardroom, a brass-bright City office. Tycoon Tanya, ran the text, is a stratospheric financier who is also versed in the more intimate skills and arts. Sometimes she likes to cast off her burdensome responsibilities and relax in the…And what struck him and held him was her face. All along the way, unconcernedly shedding this or that article of clothing until there was nothing left to shed, Phoebe went on looking as though she had just punished the weak yuan, or approved that astronomical loan to the Argentinians, or pulled the plug on General Motors.
‘Mm. I thought you’d like that one.’
He had reached the page immediately following the centrefold (where Phoebe was up to her knees in an executive Jacuzzi). In the photo now before him she was in a luminous steel-ribbed kitchen wearing only a pair of white tights; and her pubic shield was the shape and size of a halved apple. Getting the picture? ran the text. Tanya has curves in places where other girls don’t even have places! Small wonder she’s decided to spearhead the much ballyhooed ‘Ess Es’ (turn to page 5).
‘And what d’you think you’re doing?’
‘Turning to page five.’
‘You certainly are not turning to page five. Hand it over. Now.’
‘…Well that was a classy shoot, Phoebe. Your expression is very good. Not all bashful or dreamy – or witchy. Serious. Mm. Serious.’
‘And you’re shocked.’
‘Hardly.’ Hardly, because even this wasn’t a new one on Martin: two earlier girlfriends, Doris and Aramintha, had posed in nude magazines.*8 Yes, but he wasn’t living with Aramintha, he hadn’t devoted two years of his life to Doris, and with neither were there presentiments of love…This last consideration pained him and made him jealous of other men’s eyes. But he wasn’t shocked.
‘Do I sound or look shocked? I’m not. I’m curious though. Was it just an impulse, or did you have a reason?’
‘Yes. There was a reason. I was under massive pressure at Ess Es.’
‘What is this Ess Es business?’
‘I’ll explain later.’ She turned to the window. ‘There won’t be any taxis – not in this muck. And if we took the Mini, where would we stick it? Anyway! Time to get ready. For the function for the nude magazine!
…Now what type of pants shall I wear?’
Phoebe had two types of pants, which she called cheap and dear: she bought her cheap pants in Woolworth’s, and her dear pants at a place in Mayfair called Mirage. Both had their own charm. He said,
‘Your very dearest. Tonight you’ll have some real competition for once.’
‘Ooh. I know what it is. You just don’t like it when I’m being friendly.’
‘No. When you’re being friendly, you’re not being friendly to me. It’s torture.’
‘Huh.’ She leaned into him and quickly and wetly licked his lips. ‘What makes you think you know the first thing about torture?’
She went next door and reappeared almost naked. ‘How about these?’
‘They’re not dear. They’re your very cheapest.’
‘Yeah. That’s rig ht.’
They were close, the two of them; he was there and she was there; they were near.
And tonight, he knew, he would get closer to that part of her which he had never been able to broach or breach – what was unnearable in her.
The Inn on the Park
Evening.
Now they splashed their way south from Marble Arch Underground, moving through shift after shift of hot rain – sultry, sticky rain. Sweaty rain: the black Saturday dusk was sweating, heavily sweating, in the form of rain. Under its shunting curtains they ducked and hurried; and all along Park Lane the wedged traffic, red-eyed or yellow-eyed, trembled and steamed. Martin had a soaked copy of Friday’s Evening News plastered over his hair, while Phoebe wielded her single-occupancy umbrella – a polythene sheath with a rectangular slit at chin height, like the mouth of a postbox, and through it she said,
‘Look at them. Already written off.’
She meant her high heels. Courtesy of which she was five foot eleven. To his five foot six (and a half). He was yawing along beside her.
Now wait. Suddenly there is an exchange of words (unstrident but earnest) and the man halts. The woman walks on, then swivels and lingers, like a mother with a sullen child; she reaches out a hand, and with hesitation he reaches out to take it.
‘Phoebe. What d’you mean? You were an escort girl. What d’you mean you were an escort girl?’
‘I was an escort girl. At Ess Es – Essential Escorts. You know what that means.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You went on dates with strangers and slept with them for money.’
‘Yup. Sometimes. Now pull yourself together, Martin. Stop carrying on like a bloody…Ah, good evening to you! We’re here for the –’
‘Quick! Ooh, you get yourself out of the filth, my lovely. Come on in here, the pair of you. That’s it! Quick!’
The vast puddles were aglow with the bone-white reflection of the pale hotel, whose beefeater doorman, a dark purply slab in his greatcoat, beckoned and then led them into a kind of sentry booth (with its fug of fagsmoke, Bovril, and BO).
‘This is more like it, eh? Now,’ he said. ‘How can I help you, young lady?’
Phoebe’s carapace (transparent but as steamy as the window of a fish-and-chip shop) was now unzipped and stepped out of…
‘Sweetheart, you’ve barely a stitch on!’ said Bumble the Beadle wonderingly. ‘You’ll catch your death.’
And both propositions seemed true…The pop-art umbrella, tradenamed the Drolly (which would go on being fashionable for another couple of weeks), had obvious design flaws, and Phoebe, with her frizzed hair, and her ridiculously short flower dress clinging to her torso in pockets of damp, looked leggy, wiry, and crazy, like a ravished rag doll. Martin thought that she also looked
driven, or cruelly coerced, as if she hated all this even more than he did.
‘And dear oh dear – you’re soaked through!’
‘What nonsense. I’m as sound as the mail. Now. We’re here for the party. The party for the nude mag called…Shit. The party for the periodical called Oui.’
‘Uh, let’s have a look.’ As he frowned over his clipboard (and as Phoebe frowned over his shoulder), Martin stepped back out.
Only three years earlier he had spent a couple of hours in this hotel: an interview with Joseph Heller. Just around the corner, on Piccadilly, loomed the hotel where, three years later, he was destined to interview Norman Mailer. Life would go on, and literary life would go on; Martin’s fourth novel was currently under way, and there was that long essay he had to write on – what was it? – ‘diversity and depth in fiction’…But for now here he stood, in full ordeal readiness (and additionally weighed down by his dripping corduroy suit). Once inside, he confidently foresaw, as Phoebe went about her work and as he himself short-arsed around trying to get himself drinks and then more drinks, he would be smelling of damp dog and chickenfeed.
‘Are you sure you’ve got the correct venue, love?’
‘Positive. I mislaid the actual invitation but this is definitely the place.’
While this exchange continued on its way, Martin was free to receive two complementary thoughts: Phoebe dressing up as Eve after the Fall; and something from Humboldt’s Gift – I never saw a fig leaf that didn’t turn into a price tag…
‘A party for a magazine,’ Phoebe insisted. ‘Oui. French for yes. Christ, how many parties for magazines can there be? Oui.’
‘There’s a party for a magazine,’ said the doorman. ‘But it’s not called We.’
‘…What can you mean?’
‘It’s called IOU.’
Having taken this in, Martin bowed his head and followed her through the revolving doors.
Cocoa
Night.
It had been waiting in their future, perhaps inexorably. Perhaps for a certainty. Phoebe herself might have placed money on it. And here it was – the night of shame.
At one o’clock in the morning, London, as seen out of the windows of the black cab, was trying to look tranquil and blameless; it looked rinsed and brushed, too, as if the city trucks had just come and sluiced it all down; a wispy breath of mist now seeped from the terraced buildings, from the rooftops with their vague crenellations…
The first thing Phoebe did, on her return, was surge virtuously towards the cooker and the cocoa. After a while Martin came out of the bathroom and through the bedroom and across the sitting room and into the kitchen and said, defeatedly, and as he saw it reasonably drunkenly, deservedly drunkenly (and of course he said what he said tritely too, because the idiom of anger is always trite),
‘Phoebe, you surpassed yourself. That was your worst yet. How could you?’
‘What’s all this? I was just being sociable. God.’
‘Mm. And now – yes. After that kind of evening, what with so many changes of temperature,’ he said in the wheedling tone he knew she hated, ‘and you didn’t dress sensibly, as you yourself, Phoebe, were prepared to admit, and, after all that, what could be more wholesome, more restorative, than a nice cup of something hot?’
‘…No, don’t have another one, Mart.’ She had the kettle’s steam in her hair; she folded her arms while he clacked about in the high cabinet. ‘When I saw you on your fourth glass I thought, Well, he’ll go home singing.’ She looked him up and down with her blokeish sneer. ‘Sing? You can barely…It’s like you’re phoning me long distance. Hello, caller? I can’t hear you, caller. Is there anybody there?’
‘What the fuck were you doing down in that grotto? With that, with that, with that Californian wretch? What was his name?’
With her neck held straight she said, ‘Carlton.’
‘Okay. Carlton had your dress hoicked up over your ribcage!’
With quiet matter-of-factness, taking rightful warmth from her cup with both palms, Phoebe said, ‘He wanted to see it. So I showed him.’
‘Yes, completely straightforward. And logical. Carlton wanted to see it, so you hoicked up your dress and showed Carlton your…?’
‘My mandala. Luckily these pants are see-through so I didn’t have to take them down. I’ll explain,’ she said. ‘Now Carlton’s a corporate raider, but you have to understand that he finds himself drawn, he finds himself increasingly drawn, Martin, to Buddha.’
The Oui party had been ideal for Phoebe’s operations, an Ottoman-themed labyrinth of cushions and low sofas and lanternlight. The men were all European varieties of Carlton, and the women…the women were off the human scale, either radiantly enormous, like thoroughbreds and steeplechasers, or guardedly petite, like much-groomed toy poodles or papillon spaniels. It was among such that Martin roamed…
‘That tattoo of yours must’ve been on seventeen different laps tonight. And why were you down on your knees in that alcove?’
‘Perfectly innocent. I’d accidentally spilt powder on Jean-Paul’s trousers. And I was just brushing it off.’
‘Oh, why d’you do it, Phoebe? What’s it for?’
‘What’s it for? I collected, oh I collected a whole wodge of phone numbers. So I’ll be a busy girl when you’re off with that little poof in…What’s his name?’
‘Truman Capote.’
‘Yeah. When you’re off oiling up to that little poof Truman Capote in New York.’
‘That’s not you,’ he said, and took a defiant pull on his (weak) whisky and water. ‘And stop going on as if this is like any other night. You just told me you were an escort girl for Christ’s sake.’
Phoebe smiled dangerously and said, ‘I heard you in there, turning on the taps. Sniffling and mewing…You want to go back in that bathroom, mate. And take Tycoon Tanya with you. And don’t have a weep, this time. Have a wank.’ She looked startled, and took a sudden step back – as if wanting a better distance to gauge the effect of her blow. ‘That’s what I’ve done. I’ve turned you into a wanker.’
She seemed about to laugh, and he flinched, and Phoebe’s hand flew to her mouth. As if remembering herself. He said as steadily as he could,
‘No, no laughter, Phoebe.’ He waited. ‘Jesus. Finally I see it. You want me to leave you, don’t you. Well instead of torturing me to death,*9 why didn’t you just say?’
‘Because it’s not in my power.’
‘Your power?’
‘That’s right. And it’s sad, it really is.’ She bowed down and bestowed a sisterly kiss on the side of his head. ‘It really is. And now, we two, you and I, must go to sleep…’
Aubade
At least an hour later in the dark he heard her sigh – and yawn – and he said,
‘Phoebe.’
‘What.’
‘A question…Tycoon Tanya.’ He was quite impressed to discover that his voice had cleared up – no longer the echoic croak. ‘Did Tycoon Tanya, did she get any other offers? Back in 1971?’
She half rolled over. ‘Oh, loads. Loads. Guccione, all of them. They wanted to fly me to the Playboy Mansion. First-class.’
‘Then why aren’t you driving down Rodeo Drive’, said Martin (who in 1985 – literary life continuing – would interview Hugh Hefner), ‘in a pink convertible?’
‘Yes, it’s baffling…Well. The thing is, they vet you. And they couldn’t have it come out, could they. That I was an escort girl.’
‘Bob Guccione couldn’t have it come out?’
‘Of course not. Are you serious? I’d be like one of those beauty queens who’re suddenly disgraced. Miss Paraguay, was it – the white-slaver? And around then I decided to go straight. I retired.’
‘You decided to become a retired escort girl.’
‘Yes,’ she said plainly. ‘A retired escort girl. It was
a long time ago.’
‘In those far-off days, then, Phoebe, when you were an escort girl…How much did the agency pay you per date?’
‘The agency? Ess Es? Well, the blokes pay the agency direct, and you only get your seven and a half per cent.’
‘How much was seven and a half per cent?’
‘Oh, sod all. A fiver.’ She moved closer and he could feel her radiation on his back. ‘Now don’t be bloody insulting and say a fiver was all it took. Things didn’t work like that. You made your own arrangement with the client. If they were all right…And a few of them were all right. Now shut up and go to sleep.’
He lay there in the dark. ‘A tenner for a kiss.’
She gave a sigh of the weariest disgust.
‘Plus the flat-rate fiver of course. Okay. Twenty-five for a proper snog. With tongues.’
She violently resettled herself.
‘Okay. Fifty quid for a wank. With you doing it.’
‘…Hah. Go up to Soho, mate. Windmill Street. You’ll find an old trout who’ll give you a wank for fifty quid.’
‘Two hundred for a blowjob.’
Silence.
‘Five hundred for a fuck. Six hundred.’ He sensed a stillness. ‘Seven-fifty. Okay, a thou.’
‘…Done.’ The bedside light came on. ‘Now how long for, Martin?’ she said as she glanced at her watch. ‘And what else? I warn you. Extras are extra.’
During the act there were little shouts of laughter as the values dipped and climbed, like the price of crude.
* * *
—————
The bedroom curtains were only half drawn, and he could make out a streak of pale light against the rosy tint of the sky. That pale streak reminded him of the scar, the snag, he occasionally thought he saw somewhere in Phoebe’s face, a disequilibrium giving that lawless slant to her smile. Her smile, her sneer, her snarl, with its defiance, its pain, its grief…