by Paul Theroux
Of course, I heard my stupid voice saying, Don't be silly. I want to kiss you.
And I did, and the kiss was facile, tentative, clumsy, insincere, dutiful, all chilly lips, and made her frown. Her breath of burned tobacco and ashes and charred paper was moist and sooty.
"You need practice," she said. "Funny. One of my favorite scenes in literature is when you have that man in your novel kiss the woman and then fuck her in front of the fire."
In a single motion, flicking her fingers, she pushed her dress off her shoulder—there was no strap beneath—and slipped her hand down and inside, and moved it over her breasts. I could see her knuckles move against the silk as she traced her nipples.
"I know I'm no great beauty," she said. "I have small boobs and a biggish bum." She smiled teasingly because what she said defied me to glance at her body. "But honestly I think I could show you a thing or two."
She was still sipping her wine and moving her hand inside her dress, caressing herself, and still fluttering her fingers over her nipples.
"Do I surprise you?" she said. She moistened her lips. "I think I could surprise you in lots of other ways."
I was aware that I was leaning close to her when she removed her wandering hand, and she shrugged, straightening her dress. Then she was looking past me, as though at the window, listening hard—I could see it in the concentration of her eyes, the hint of their contraction. She was hearing something clearly that I heard only faintly.
"Wouldn't you know," she said with utter disgust, but not to me.
The front door creaked open—I heard the chink of the turtle knocker before the door slammed—there was a stamping in the hall, a sigh, our door was flung open, and a tall young girl stood smiling in the doorway. She had tumbling blond hair, and from the rosy glow highlighting her pale skin, her bright smacked cheeks, you knew she had walked home this frosty evening. She wore a dark cape and boots, and her standing there breathless and apologetic made her seem even more attractive. It was the daughter, Allegra.
"Hello, Mummy. Sorry to burst in."
"Shut that fucking door this instant, you silly girl, and go to your room!"
The girl reacted as though she had been hit, stepping back, and the pretty redness reddened to points of color on each cheek. Then she was off—the door was shut even before Lady Max stopped shrieking.
The spell was broken and all my ardor died. It was a tone I had never-heard her use before—a new voice, harsh, angry, pitiless, ignorant, more an animal's snarl than a human noise. That moment made a little welt on my memory. And I knew that after this I would never be able to look at Lady Max without also thinking of this ugly person inside her.
But she had gone quiet. She had moved her dress off her shoulder again, farther than before, and she was holding one breast like a Madonna in a Renaissance painting, proffering the nipple in her fingers for me to suck.
"Take it."
The bluish veins in her breast made it look as cool as marble, and the smooth whiteness of the skin and a suggestion of pale hair surrounded the russet-brown of the aureole and the nipple. Against the delicious softness of her breast, the nipple looked thick, like the cut stem of a fruit.
Seeing me hesitate, she said, "It's Allegra, isn't it?"
She held her breast, but casually, like an apple she was holding for me in case I might be hungry.
"She had arranged to meet a friend—that's what she told me. She never makes a plan and sticks to it. She's so selfish, the way she comes and goes."
Lady Max was so certain that her daughter's appearance at the door and her presence upstairs were the reason for my reluctance that I did not try to dissuade her. A shudder of gratitude passed through me. I was thankful to the daughter for showing up—for provoking the mother and revealing her. And I was touched by the daughter's humiliation.
"God, I hate the young," Lady Max said, and stroked her breast sourly before tucking it into her dress.
She looked older and unreasonable, though I could only think of the daughter's sweet, startled face in the doorway, her uncertain posture, her sudden fear, a deer caught in the headlights.
Lady Max glanced at me. I said nothing and felt I was a coward for not defending the daughter. But there was a deeper reason: I had been so moved by the daughter's hurt I felt I might betray myself, because in a sense I fell for the daughter then, for her wounded innocence. The injustice had more than roused pity and protectiveness—it had stirred something like love.
"I hate them for being young," Lady Max said. "I hate their talk."
Now, for my own self-respect, I felt I had to speak up for the girl. I began to say how the young seemed connected to the world—they lived close to the ground, they had access everywhere, they traveled light, and they were most alive in old, safe cities like London.
But all this while Lady Max was shaking her head.
"I hate the way the young tell you things you already know, as though it's news," she said. "They are forever discovering the obvious—that Soho is charming, that the King's Road is stylish, that Oxford Street's a bore. And in their little papers and magazines they write about it all in sickening detail. I hate the things they buy, I hate their music."
She lit a cigarette but without any flourish, simply snatched one from a silver box at her elbow and set it on fire and gasped on it.
Speaking through rags of smoke—and the smoke itself made the words visible—she said, "And as if that's not bad enough, they tell you things you know are wrong. You want to say 'Balls!' but you can't talk them out of it, so you listen, and in a month or so you have to sit through them contradicting themselves."
She tapped the ash off the cigarette and sulked as she inhaled more smoke, blowing it as though spraying poison, blighting the air with her breath.
"That's the worst of it, listening to them change their minds—watching the young grow up."
"It happens so fast, though," I said, thinking of my own children.
"Not true. It takes too bloody long. I have been listening to this nonsense for years," she said. "And I hate the way they think out loud. I hate their ignorant opinions. I can't stand the way they change their mind."
Saying these things with such conviction, she seemed old and cranky, and I felt at a greater distance from her—young, or at least younger than she.
"Isn't it part of growing up?"
"Why can't they do it more quietly?" she said. And with menace in her eyes she glanced up at where Allegra's room probably was. "She was supposed to be with her friend."
It was the most passionate she had ever been with me face to face, sitting down, and though she could be a tease or an insincere mocker I knew she meant every word of this.
And her words were tainted by her breath. The dark whiff in her breath made me squint.
She was a heavy smoker and I was sitting near her. It was the odor of her lungs—not a rancid thing in her mouth, but deeper. It seemed especially odd and offensive because she was so lovely. She had stubbed out her cigarette but she smelled strongly of smoke, of black, clammy London, of sooty air and stale breath.
First her shriek, then her rant, and finally her breath again. She stank. And yet from a little distance she seemed so pale and fragile. In her rant she had lost interest in me, and she had emptied her glass. She looked peevish and distracted, though for a long while afterwards she sat there saying nothing. Then she saw me sneaking a look at my wristwatch.
"You're going to be late."
"It's all right."
"Your wife is going to wonder where you are."
I hated that. I said nothing. Seeing me squirm made her smile.
"Will I keep seeing your name everywhere?"
"Who knows?"
"I think I will," she said, and paused, and added, "If I want to."
***
Another London walk, homeward from Lady Max's, through winter streets. I needed that ritual to calm me. Each time I saw her I had to sort out where I was, and what did she mean, and
who was I, and who was she? Part of her witchery came from her power to spread confusion, and the rest of her witchery was her beauty. But I was still confused.
I had gained a measure of visibility. She knew that, and from what she said she might have even pulled a string or two on my behalf. But the writing was mine—I had done the work. Being appreciated stabilized me and made me happy at home. The routine of doing reviews made my writing easier, more confident and fluent. And she had revealed herself as rather a pest—it seemed she had been to those other parties I had stayed away from, and she apparently had lain in wait for me.
I was still walking through Chelsea, still remembering. There are certain awful sounds that enter your ears and penetrate your whole body. Her howl at her daughter was one of those. It startled me and made me fearful. Now I was bearing towards the river, walking south to Battersea Bridge and home. The odor of burning coal fires on these narrow streets reminded me of Lady Max's breath—the sharp chimney stink of her lungs.
Though I was flattered by her interest and her praise, her sudden sexuality threw me. She had made me feel like an idiot for not responding, but really, did she expect me to kneel and suck on her breast and then go home and kiss my wife?
By the time I reached Clapham I had worked myself into a state of grievance against her—feeling that she was presumptuous and unsubde. I hated her greed. And she was niggardly too—I had not forgotten that dinner at La Tour Eiffel.
The phone was ringing as I climbed the stairs to my house. The ringing stopped when I opened the front door. Alison was holding the receiver towards me.
"It's for you," she said. She covered the mouthpiece. "A woman. Frightfully posh."
It was Lady Max.
"I was just wondering whether you had any plans for tomorrow," she said.
"Just work." Writing at home gave me no convincing excuses. Being a freelance writer seemed indistinguishable from someone unemployed.
"Good. Then you can take the day off and have lunch with me."
But my walk home had filled me with resentment.
"Sorry," I said.
She hung on, she made me struggle, but at last I got her off the line.
A week passed. More invitations. My book was going so well that I accepted an assignment to write a piece the following week about Brighton, for a British travel magazine. Lady Max called on Monday.
"You weren't at the Heinemann party."
"I'm pretty busy. I have to go to Brighton tomorrow."
"I know. It's for Travel World, isn't it? I'll go with you."
She was not only blunt, she was quick. I couldn't think. I said, "I'm staying overnight."
"Even better."
Now she was making me work.
"It's not a good idea," I said.
"I think it's an excellent idea. Brighton's a marvelously scruffy place, and in the Lanes there are some splendid restaurants."
Feeling spineless and desperate, I said, "My wife might be going with me."
Lady Max did not hesitate. "I thought your wife worked."
"She does. But she's taking the day off."
She had made me squirm again, she had frightened me, and now she was making me lie. I hated her for that most of all. We had entered a new phase of the relationship, deeper and more treacherous, and the suddenness was like some of the streets she had shown me in London, the strange alleys and cul-de-sacs off wide and well-known thoroughfares. She was insistent, I was dithering. And she had a meddling interest. How did she know, and what business was it of hers, whom I was writing this Brighton piece for?
That night, after putting the boys to bed, Alison was chatty. "Everyone's talking about you these days. They ask me, 'Are you any relation to the writer?' That sort of question." She smiled. "I'm not sure I like it."
I was opening my mail in front of the fire.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"Nothing. Look at this—two publishers have written to ask about my new novel. It's not even finished and they're competing for it. And here's something from the Observer. They want to know if I can go to China."
Alison was looking puzzled. "Aren't you glad?"
"Of course."
"Then why do you look so haunted?"
8
Again I thought: Most writers are balder and smaller than you expect. I was entering the members' reading room of the London Library, passing among the men scribbling, some seated at tables, others hunched in leather chairs. There were women writing too, but they seemed altogether more efficient, tidier, less conspicuous. It was a warm room, but with an odor of leather and old bindings, and quiet except for the rattle of pages being turned and the hiss and ping of antique radiators.
With his back to the room, Ian Musprat faced a windowpane that was so black, so stippled with raindrops, it looked liquefied—like a tall, trembling sheet of water which diffused the yellow street lamps of St. James's Square. He clutched his head with bitten fingers. Peering over his shoulder, I could see his open notebook page — crossed-out lines and doodles and, A distant toilet flushing is like the sound of a human voice, a sigh becoming water and collapsing with a call into a pipe—always a little sad, and the scattered words and phrases Humptulips and distemper and How terribly reassuring.
They were the makings of a poem—I could tell from the way the lines were set out, not reaching the right-hand margin of the page.
Seeing this small, untidy man writing made me respect him, even like him again. Writing made him seem admirable and civilized. This was what he was made for, and I was impressed by his bravery. His posture gave him a look of concentration and struggle, and in his very plainness was an aura of strength. There was also something in his silence, and the way he wrote with the notebook on his lap, that gave him the appearance of a conspirator. He was so engrossed he did not notice me.
At his elbow was a plump volume, its spine printed Mythologiques— Vol. 3— The Origin of Table Manners.
Only when I stood blocking his light did he look up at me, with the scowling face of a hamster waking from a nap in its nest, and he said, "God, I'm sick of doing this."
"How about a cup of tea?"
"There's a poxy tea shop in Duke Street."
He tripped on the ruck of a carpet leaving the reading room and shouted loudly, "Knickers!" No one stopped writing, though one man looked over the top of his newspaper.
"How long have you been a member of this library?" he asked me on the stairs, under a portrait of T. S. Eliot.
"Since Lady Max insisted I join."
He said nothing in reply.
"What are you writing?" I asked him.
"A desperate piece of crap about hermeneutics."
"Could you elaborate?"
"It's actually an attack on Lévi-Strauss."
"The American blue jeans?"
"The French structuralist," he said. And he smiled. "But that's nice. I'm using that."
In the tea shop I said, "I want to ask you about Lady Max."
Musprat did not reply. He stared at the floor and then blew his nose with a stiff and wrinkled handkerchief that he held balled up in his hand. He then frowned at the thing and said, "I'm disgusting," and stuffed it into his pocket.
Stirring his styrofoam cup of tea with a wooden stick, he said, "I sort of hate her. Sometimes I'd like to punch her in the face." He sucked the tea from the wooden stirrer and said, "Sorry. I know you're a big fan."
"I'm not a fan at all."
He sipped his tea, then faced me with a little more confidence. "You write short stories. Want an idea for one?"
He began to gnaw his wooden stirrer.
"You meet someone early in your career, when you are weak and she is strong. She is bloody rude to you. Time passes. You get a little recognition, and you meet this person again. This time she is very pleasant. She doesn't remember that she was rude. She actually believes she was part of your success. Yet her rudeness is all you remember—the only thing."
He had reduced his wooden
stirrer to a mass of wet splinters. He lifted the plastic cup in his thin, anxious fingers.
"The first time Lady Max met me, she more or less mocked me. I knew she didn't fancy me at all. Anyway, why should she? I'm a pig. After I won the Hawthornden, she remembered my name and tried to be nice to me."
"And that's why you want to punch her in the face?"
"No. I think I envy her, actually. I'd like to have her money. I'd like to have a house in the Boltons. I'd like to go around saying, 'I never wear knickers.' That's her war cry, you know."
Having finished the tea, he began chewing the top edge of the Styrofoam cup.
"Her mother's a marchioness. Only a marquis or a marchioness can be addressed as 'the most honorable,'" he said. And he made a face at me. "I'm surprised you don't know that. That's the sort of thing that Americans tend to know."
"Musprat, you are such a dick."
"I hate it when people call me by my last name. It reminds me of school."
"What if Lady Max had fancied you?"
Now he smiled, he was strengthened, as though I had played the wrong card. He looked timidly triumphant. He said, "I should have thought you could tell me a thing or two about that."
That was another thing about the English. They could be so pompous and wordy when they felt they were in the right.
"I haven't touched her, Ian."
"I don't want to know about it," Musprat said, and made it sound like a teasing accusation. "But it's easy to talk about her, because she makes no secret of her life."
"Meaning?"
"She's been to bed with everyone," he said. "Didn't you know that?"
"I guessed," I said. Yet I had not wanted to think about it. "Heavage?" I asked.
"She had a fairly public thing with him," Musprat said. "Most editors have had a leg over her. Most writers in the news. Writing's a sort of aphrodisiac to her. She's very old-fashioned in that way."
"She mentioned Kenneth Tynan."
"They used to show up at parties wearing each other's clothes."
"Do you know a movie producer named Slack?"