Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  So what was I doing? Trying to pair Vanessa off with Michael Ezra so I could have time alone in the Midland with her mother? Or was I simply interposing myself in whatever had been going on in order to claim authorship and control of it? Guy Ableman, ringmaster. Not nice, but it beat being Guy Ableman, the dancing bear.

  It would be satisfying to report that the four of us repaired to the biggest bed the Midland had to offer. And that I saw and did things there that would have made Satan’s devils howl with shame and envy. But the great Olympia Press debauch I had been waiting for from the minute the Eisenhower girls showed up in Wilhelmina’s – the rouging of nipples, the anonymous removal of wisps of lace, no one knew whose or by whom – failed again to materialise. Poppy made her excuses and retired soon after Michael Ezra turned up. ‘No, no, you stay down here and talk to your friend,’ she insisted, smiling at me sweetly. ‘I’ll be asleep when you come up.’ Vanessa, on the other hand, made free with the opportunity which not being thought of as the wife afforded her, throwing back her head, arching her throat, and on one occasion running her fingers along Ezra’s Egyptian moustache to see if it was as diabolically silken as it appeared.

  ‘Oh, it is!’ she said, withdrawing her hand and shuddering. It was as though she had put her fingers to a place the like of which they had never been before.

  Later that night, I knew, she would put them to my nose.

  She said she needed air and would see the croupier into a taxi. ‘Go to Mummy,’ she ordered me.

  Ah, if only.

  Michael Ezra and I clasped hands. ‘Fook me!’ he said, shaking his head.

  ‘Fook me!’ I agreed, shaking mine.

  Vanessa, standing watching us, shook hers.

  She took his arm and they left the hotel together. If it truly was a taxi she was escorting him to, she for some reason ignored those waiting outside the hotel.

  Was she unable to wait until they were out of sight before giving him one of her famous street blow jobs, or was she merely stooping to brush something off his trousers?

  How men deal with such uncertainties when they are not poets or novelists I have no idea. Do they, without the redemption of art, go mad?

  God knows what blind Homer supposed was going on in front of his nose, never mind behind his back, but we owe the Iliad to his ignorance and the Odyssey to his suspicions. What lesser writers who never made it beyond a couple of short stories would have given for a Vanessa and a Poppy to torment them into creativity! Never let it be said I am not grateful to them myself. Before they ruined me, they made me. And out of ruins, too, can come deliverance.

  18

  Going Cuckoo

  There was not time, not by so much as a preliminary shiver of a tremble, to gauge Poppy’s reaction to the hand I’d let descend on her tautened thigh like a falling star from the Monkey Mia night. I no sooner made contact than I was upstaged by a rival. Who, at such a hair-trigger moment in my relations with my mother-in-law, was not a rival? My other hand, had it stirred, would have been a rival. This intruder, though, was not fanciful. It was the powder-blue boatman from the parvenu yacht, the one who had a phone ringing in every pocket. He made a beeline for our table as though he had seen us while on deck and from that moment wanted nothing more from life than to be in our company.

  He came very close to us and bowed low. The gold chain he was wearing round his neck clinked against our wine bottle. He had sunglasses hanging from him too, which dangled in my drink. Purposely, I suspected, so that I would go to the bar and get another glass, and when I returned all three of them would be gone.

  Not fanciful?

  Well, he is no fancy of mine. Whether his outlandishness came out of a tropical sailor catalogue or simply his own imagination I cannot say, but his gold chain, the sunglasses he gratuitously dangled in my drink, his grossly obvious intentions, were no more of my making than was the extravagance of the night.

  To me he presented the closed face of an implacable rival. To Vanessa he was elaborately courtly. But to Poppy he was as a man who had taken leave of his senses. The impression he gave of having seen us, that’s to say having seen her, and then formed a desperate resolution to be among us, that’s to say among her, was precisely the impression he wanted to give. She was, however, even more lovely than he had been able to tell through his binoculars.

  ‘You’ve been looking at me through binoculars?’

  ‘All evening, madame. We both have.’

  She seemed not to hear ‘both’. ‘I haven’t been here all evening.’

  ‘All day, then.’

  ‘I haven’t been here at all today either, I’ve been out tickling the stomachs of dolphins.’

  ‘I know. We watched you. It can’t be necessary for me to tell you how envious we were of those fortunate creatures.’

  She inclined her head to him. A woman accustomed to receiving the most preposterous of compliments. But if she was deaf to the boatman’s salacious pluralising, this late into drinkies time, Vanessa most definitely was not. She signalled to a couple of empty chairs. ‘Won’t you join us?’

  He bowed again. ‘I, alas,’ he said, ‘cannot. But there is someone else who would like nothing more.’

  Vanessa touched her face as though she were carrying a fan. Intrigue bubbled up in her voice like some cheap sparkling wine. Lambrusco, was it? ‘And who would this “someone else” be?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Vee,’ I muttered, in operatic sotto voce. I, too, I wanted them to know, could descend into melodrama.

  He, however, did it better. He looked around to see if anyone was eavesdropping and dropped his voice. ‘My employer.’ It sounded sinister. Even sexual. Something made me think of those ambiguously homoerotic South China Sea desperadoes that crop up in Joseph Conrad’s novels. ‘The owner of . . .’ And he gestured with his shoulder to the boat Conrad wouldn’t have been seen dead in.

  ‘Ah,’ I said, with unaccountable satisfaction, ‘so it isn’t yours.’

  ‘Only to play with.’

  ‘And who, then, is your employer?’ Vanessa wanted to know.

  At which moment, as though he’d been hiding all the while behind a palm tree – I don’t know why I say as though: he had indeed been hiding all the while behind a palm tree as his employee broke the ice – there appeared a spectral figure, uncannily elongated but with big hands like a goalkeeper’s, dressed in a worn rugby shirt and long, discoloured baggy shorts through which it was impossible to mistake the bell-like sway of sexual organs even bigger than his hands. Had he been older I’d have said they had begun their geriatric descent; but as he was roughly my age, I took him to be preternaturally over-endowed, as was sometimes the case with emaciated men.

  ‘Dirk,’ he said, extending his hand to each of us, though he might as well have been extending us a choice of genitalia. ‘Dirk de Wolff.’

  Poppy threw her head back and laughed. ‘What’s your actual name?’ she asked.

  He allowed the parchment of his face to crease, though not quite into a smile. ‘What would you like my actual name to be?’

  Poppy looked to Vanessa for inspiration. I held my breath. They might say anything, these women.

  ‘Wolf de Wolff,’ Poppy suggested, uncrossing her thighs, but Vanessa spoke over her, answering de Wolff ’s challenge with a challenge of her own. ‘So why do you need someone else to do your dirty work?’

  ‘Was that what you were doing, Tim?’ de Wolff enquired of his lackey who had been stealthily backing away from us, the chinking of his jewellery growing fainter. ‘My dirty work?’

  ‘I most decidedly was not.’

  ‘There you are. He most decidedly was not.’

  Sadist, I thought. Sadist and masochist. Though not easy to be sure which was which. Or why, if whatever it was they did they did to each other, Poppy was of such interest to them.

  He turned out to be a film-maker, our Dirk de Wolff. Poppy wondered why he hadn’t, in that case, brought along his camera. Film-maker, not
cameraman, he explained with great courtesy. If it was in regard to Poppy that the lackey had taken leave of his senses, he had clearly taken leave of them on his boss’s instructions. Poppy was the reason for all this, whatever all this was.

  ‘So which of your films will I have seen?’ she asked him.

  ‘I always say,’ he said with polite painstakingness, ‘that the only person who asks that question is a person who hasn’t seen any. But you aren’t alone. Millions haven’t.’

  ‘So which should I see?’

  He took her hand. ‘There is no should about it. I am glad you have seen none and recommend you going on doing so. I am not a friendly director. These days I make films I don’t care if anyone sees or understands. It’s the privilege of early success.’

  Fuck you, I thought.

  We were sitting by this time, the four of us, Tim having ferried himself back to the boat. I would have liked it had de Wolff more decorously crossed his legs. But then he’d have liked it had I more decorously disappeared.

  Vanessa looked accusingly at me. Why couldn’t I be so insouciant about my work? Why did I have to go on caring whether I was read or liked?

  De Wolff picked up the looks we exchanged. ‘You think it’s wrong of me to have such an attitude?’ he wondered.

  Vanessa answered for me. ‘My husband’s a novelist. Novelists want to be loved and noticed.’

  He let out a small eruption of dry mirth. ‘Of course they do. That’s because no one any longer reads them.’

  He waited for me to tell him I was wrong. But no words came.

  ‘Then I have to ask why you go on doing it,’ he went on. ‘The novel died a hundred years ago, didn’t it? Or whenever it was that people were given the vote and permitted to feel their opinions were of value. It is getting to be the same with film, but at least with film there is still the mystique of production. Though once everybody has a degree in media studies, that will be film finished too.’

  ‘I love films,’ Poppy said.

  ‘And you also love books,’ her daughter reminded her. It was humour Poppy time. But it was also notice Vanessa time.

  ‘Forgive me, but do you know what I think?’ de Wolff cut in. ‘I think that people who say they love film or books or art, in fact do not. I don’t mean you two lovely ladies – I am speaking generally. If you truly love film, you probably won’t go to any. Same with literature: if you care for it there is scarcely a book you can bear to read. The actuality of art always lets down the idea you have of it.’ He looked to me. ‘What is your opinion?’

  I was surprised to hear myself appealed to. I had gone into self-hating reverie, angry to be envious of this big-balled Dutch nihilist with whom I somewhere in my soul agreed. What was I doing in a moribund profession? Why hadn’t I gone into film? Why hadn’t I read media studies at the University of the Fenlands instead of creative fucking writing? But Shark Bay with stars dropping from the sky and dolphins grinning in the Indian Ocean and Dirk de Wolff ’s yacht ablaze with noise and light was no place to discuss the rival advantages of Thetford.

  ‘The novelist Robert Musil,’ I said with some pomp, ‘once confessed that the more he loved literature the less he loved the individual writer. I make the same point. Don’t ask someone as serious about the novel as I am, I say, to name you a novel he likes.’

  De Wolff made to high-five me. Before he stole my women he wanted me to see we were brothers under the skin. Unless he just wanted them to see how much longer his fingers were than mine.

  ‘But if actual art is always a let-down compared to the ideal thing,’ I said, showing him I was no pushover, ‘that’s no reason to despise the poor consumers of it.’

  ‘I didn’t say I despised them. I only said I don’t care what they think. Maybe it’s you who despises your readers.’

  ‘I don’t have readers. No one has readers.’

  ‘Then you confirm my point.’

  ‘He has thousands of readers,’ Vanessa said.

  ‘Tens of thousands,’ Poppy hyperbolically chipped in.

  ‘But they don’t understand you,’ de Wolff laughed. ‘I know all about it –’ he tapped his heart with his enormous hand, to suggest a commonality of suffering – ‘they want something to happen, and you don’t want to give it to them. I too. The more they want, the more I refuse. “You want something to happen,” I say, “then you happen! You want someone to change? You change! I hold my camera still. You do the squirming about.” You should make a film, my friend. You should make a film about these two beautiful women. Just point a camera at them. Allow the features of the one to fade into the features of the other. And let the audience do the rest.’

  Vanessa, high on his compliments, wondered if his films were Warhol-like. More Antonioni, he told her with another of his explosive laughs. Antonioni, without quite so much concession to event.

  I lapsed out of the conversation again. Was he right? Did I despise the readers I didn’t have?

  Of course he was right. He had a boat and big balls. Doesn’t a boat make you right? Don’t big balls?

  It was his boat he wanted us to see. No doubt his balls, too, but he wasn’t saying that. I told him we were tired, that we had been on the water for a large part of the day, that we were leaving early in the morning for Broome, that we were not sea-faring people.

  ‘That’s not true,’ Vanessa said. ‘Is it, Mother? That we aren’t seafaring people.’

  She looked hard at Poppy, to be certain she was sober enough to conduct a conversation.

  ‘Lived half my life on boats,’ Poppy said, steadying herself between each word.

  ‘Come and have a dekko at mine then,’ de Wolff persisted, a master of the vernacular, looking from Poppy to Vanessa and back. Having ousted me in the matter of film versus the novel, that’s to say in the matter of realism versus sentimentality, that’s to say in the matter of success versus failure, he was now about to oust me in the matter of my women.

  ‘Shall I?’ Poppy asked, looking first at Vanessa and then at me.

  ‘We’ll all come,’ Vanessa said. ‘Unless you don’t want to, Guido.’

  ‘Oh, don’t make him,’ de Wolff said. ‘There’s nothing worse than being shown around something you don’t want to see. I’m the same with other men’s work.’

  ‘No, come,’ Poppy murmured to me, as though it would be our secret if I did.

  ‘Best you stay and keep our seats warm,’ Vanessa said.

  So I stayed. Why? Because I am a novelist and a novelist, now that the novel is no more, must experience every last ignominy. That could be the novelist’s final justification – on behalf of everybody else he drinks humanity’s humiliation to the dregs.

  I waved them off. Poppy looked round and waved back. Even blew me a kiss. Unless she was just blowing for air, the way old ladies do when they are three sheets to the wind. But there was as much of the schoolgirl about her as the matron. She turned a second time, put her hand to her eyes in pretend shock, and mouthed something at me. I couldn’t be sure but what she seemed to be saying was, ‘I can see his knob.’ Vanessa, I thought, was going to have her work cut out.

  She, of course, did not look round. No doubt she was annoyed with me. It was always my fault when her mother drank too much. And she wouldn’t have been impressed with my capitulation to de Wolff ’s lawless cynicism. I should have fought harder to stop them going. I should have defended more vigorously my manhood, my husbandhood, my son-in-lawhood, and my profession. She never liked it when I was aggressive – ‘A mad bull,’ she called me – but she liked it less when I played the submissive – ‘Faggot!’ she’d say. We shared that contradictory view of me.

  Alone, I watched Dirk de Wolff in his indecent floaty ball-bag shorts position himself between my women, one on either arm, and then lead them from the centre down a wooden ramp, their cork heels clopping on the boards, their hips swaying, to where a small boat was waiting to transport them to the big boat which seemed to burst into even more magnificent light the mi
nute they set off.

  Mad bull or faggot? Faggot.

  In accordance with Vanessa’s instructions I had not brought my notebook out with me. My pen I always carried, just in case. Even Vanessa couldn’t prise me from my pen. I called the waiter – an overtanned boy-man (orange, his skin was) in calf-length pants that seemed to be made out of straw. I asked him to bring me something to write on. He looked puzzled. ‘Like a drink mat?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘like a piece of paper.’ When he brought me what I’d asked for I sat in front of it, not writing a word. Was I going mad, I wondered. It was no longer existentially fashionable for a writer to be going mad, especially in Australia. But the last few weeks suddenly seemed chaotic and crazy. What was I doing here? What had I been doing in Adelaide reading my most obscene and antic passages to middle-class Australians who lapped up every word? You couldn’t upset Australians once they’d found literature. They listened obediently to you whatever you read them, or even if you read them nothing, if you sat there with your stomach hanging between your legs, saying not a word, they brought down the roof of Adelaide Town Hall with their applause. Australia was reputed to have more readers per head of population than anywhere but Finland. How was one to process that information? Philippa had put New Zealand up there as well. And what had I been doing with her? In accordance with my usual post-coital moodiness I had hated her in retrospect for a week, and had then, retrospecting on the retrospect, begun to fall in love with her. Vanessa had got wind of her, though I denied everything, and was now paying me back with Dirk de Wolff and maybe Tim too. Giving herself to either or to both of them, or giving her mother? Vanessa was a connoisseur of pain. She would have worked out to a nicety how to hurt me. But for her to have worked out how to do that she would have needed to know how I felt about her mother. So did she? And would she sacrifice her mother’s modesty – presumably even a woman in her sixties still has her modesty – just to hurt me? Was she laying her out on Dirk’s bunk like a sacrificial virgin, bedecking her with lilies, as he turned his camera on them both, watching the one metamorphose into the other, even as I sat there, mouth-writing?