by James Lasdun
‘In what way?’
‘Well … I suppose with some it’s just the fascination of hearing about appalling behaviour …’
He nodded gloomily. ‘And others?’
‘Maybe something more like a suspense novel? Guilty or not guilty? The mystery of what happens between two people in a room. I think I prefer that kind.’
‘Why?’
‘I guess because there’s no basis for an objective judgement, which means the onus of belief is entirely on the believer.’
I had a foreboding, as I spoke, of what he was about to tell me; the gist of it if not the details. It stirred an odd mixture of reactions: empathy, but also something more like self-protectiveness. Certainly I didn’t want to indicate any willingness to be recruited in support of some defunct male prerogative, if that was where this was going.
‘The onus of belief …’ Marco repeated, thoughtfully. ‘What does that mean, “the onus of belief is on the believer?”’
I’d blabbed out the words without thinking, but I did my best to make sense of them.
‘Well, you make a judgement one way or the other, because that’s how the mind works. It’s geared towards judgement, presumably because life requires decisions to be made, constantly and rapidly. But in these kinds of situations there’s no solid basis for judgement other than your own assumptions and prejudices. So you’re forced up against yourself, your own mysteries. I like that kind of story.’
We drove in silence for a bit. The wooded mountainsides either side of the state highway were coming into leaf: powdery sprays of pale pink and green. I’d always thought these spring colours, subtler than their fall equivalents but just as varied, weren’t properly appreciated, but I refrained from comment. Marco clearly hadn’t come up to talk about the scenery.
I want to be accurate about the nature of our friendship. It had begun ten years earlier, when I’d recognised him at a party in New York. I still had some vestige of my old teenage sense of him as a heroic figure, which made me deferential, which in turn seemed to make him comfortable. Anyway, we hit it off. The fact that I was no more successful in my sphere than he was in his, probably helped: he could be prickly with people doing obviously better than he was. For my part I was always glad, in my somewhat isolated life, to make a new friend. More positively, I liked his cast of mind, which was detachedly curious and cheerfully unillusioned. That our fathers had both been prominent figures in the London we’d left behind (mine was a well-known architect), gave us plenty to talk about. Also, we’d both been Englishmen-on-the-make in New York at one time, and some of the old fun of that game revived itself when we were together.
I began spending Wednesday nights at his house in the fall, when I taught in New York. These weekly stayovers were something I looked forward to, and I think he did too. In return for his hospitality I’d take him out to his favourite restaurant on Gates Avenue where they kept a taleggio risotto with chicken liver on the menu just for him (or so they told him), and we’d usually be nattering till long after they closed the kitchen. So in that way we were good friends; pals. On the other hand we’d connected too late in life to form the kind of really deep bonds that transcend all other considerations. There were limits – we hadn’t tested them, but they surely existed – to what either of us might be willing to endure or sacrifice for the other. It wasn’t an elemental relationship, in other words, though in a way this made it more interesting. One gets a taste for impure things, as one gets older.
‘Well, anyway,’ he said as we turned off the highway, ‘I have one of those stories for you. The mystery kind. Starring me.’
4
He’d sketched the outlines by the time we arrived at the house. Caitlin, my wife, was in the dining room, sorting through a delivery of wine. Rows of freshly unpacked bottles stood before her on the table, glittering in the sunlight. She liked organising things and she liked wine, so she was in excellent spirits. She liked Marco too. His good looks and slight air of dissipation brought out a sort of answering rakishness in her. She’d had a wild youth herself, before we got married, and she enjoyed being reminded of it.
‘I’m plotting out the drinks menu for today and tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I thought we’d build up to something really stellar. Maybe these Volnays?’
Marco was always pleased to see her, though I sensed he was wary of discussing his situation in front of her. He hadn’t told Hanan, for instance, his girlfriend of four years. ‘You don’t know how people are going to react,’ he’d explained in the car. ‘Hanan especially. She may be supportive or she may decide she has some obligation of sisterly solidarity with Julia. I don’t want to put her to the test if I can avoid it.’
We talked about other things at lunch, mainly what Caitlin was going to do with her life now that our kids had left for college and the demands of motherhood were tapering off. Marco, who’d always seemed genuinely intrigued by her decision to become a full-time mother, participated valiantly. But as he was quizzing her on her various pre-motherhood jobs, she interrupted him, putting her hand on his arm.
‘It’s nice of you to be interested, Marco, but what’s going on with you? You don’t seem happy.’
He hesitated, before nodding.
‘You’re right. I’m not. I’m about to have my life destroyed.’
The three of us spent the rest of the day talking about it. When it grew chilly in the kitchen we moved into the living room and lit a fire. At intervals Caitlin went over to the dining room table, and, after carefully reinspecting the bottles, chose one to suit the drift of conversation, and refilled our glasses.
In concrete terms, what had happened since Sauer’s email inviting Marco to write something to ‘defend’ himself, was a protracted stand-off.
‘The invitation smelled like a trap to me,’ he said, ‘a way of getting my implied consent to publish the excerpt. My instinct was still to say no. They’re nervous of being sued, I could sense that, and I didn’t want to do anything to make them less nervous. Also I didn’t want to give any legitimacy to the idea that there really are two sides to this story, which there are not. I know I can’t expect anyone, including you guys, to just take that on trust. You can’t not have doubts. I understand that. I’m not asking for belief anyway, just advice. And maybe some pity! But I certainly wasn’t going to give any ground on it. On the other hand, I felt I should keep my options open in case they decided to print the fucking thing anyway …’
He’d skirted the issue, ignoring Sauer’s invitation and simply restating that the article was defamatory. His curt email produced another promising silence. Two whole days passed, and then Sauer wrote: ‘Marco, I hear your concern. Definitely don’t want to publish anything defamatory. Running the piece through legal and will get back to you. Thanks ever so for your patience!’
‘He sounds kind of creepy,’ Caitlin said.
Marco nodded.
‘Anyway, a couple more days pass and then he sends this.’
He read from his phone: ‘Marco, Legal feel the piece is not defamatory and so we want to go forward with publication. Have you by chance given further thought to writing something from your side? We want to offer you every opportunity to put your own case if you dispute Julia’s version of events. Think our readers will find the two perspectives on this fascinating. As said, we’re happy to give you equal space, and can assure you we won’t edit (though just bear in mind we’re a “family” newspaper!!).’
‘How could their legal department just unilaterally decide it wasn’t defamatory?’ I asked. ‘It’s not like they have any way of proving it, I assume?’
‘Of course not,’ Marco said, frowning. ‘Frankly, I thought they were bluffing. I still do. It doesn’t make sense. This is the kind of thing juries award millions in damages for. I might come out of this a pariah but there’s a good chance I’ll be an extremely rich pariah.’
‘You could move up here, Marco,’ Caitlin said. ‘We’d still socialise with you.’
He smi
led. ‘On the other hand maybe there’s something I’m just not seeing. I’m not a lawyer, after all. I’d have asked my dad for his advice, but I don’t want him dragged into this … But I did draft a long email to this outfit in London that deals with complaints against the press. I haven’t sent it yet because I don’t want to spread the story around, even to them, if I don’t have to. But I thought it wouldn’t hurt to drop their name to Sauer, so I emailed saying I was going to ask Ipso – that’s their name; Independent Press something or other – what they thought about my writing this riposte, and that I’d get back to him.’
‘Good move,’ I said.
‘Well, it did seem to rattle him.’
Sauer’s reply offered a minor concession: after further consultation with ‘Legal’ he’d asked Julia to take out the sentence about lying naked underneath Marco on the hotel bed, and she’d agreed. ‘Less explicit that way,’ Sauer wrote, ‘and we hope you feel that makes it acceptable. Planning to go to press end of month so you have another three plus weeks. Very hopeful you’ll send us something to accompany this light-hearted but important article. Think it over!’
There’d been a few more rounds of brinkmanship since then, but that was more or less where things stood that weekend. No commitment from Marco to write a response; no further concessions from Sauer except for an attempt at financial enticement (‘fee could be negotiable if that helps’) to which Marco hadn’t deigned to respond; and a clock apparently ticking.
I haven’t conveyed the discomfort Marco was in as he recounted all this. Despite the sardonic humour he maintained, it was clearly intense; present in his wracked expression, in the pitch of his voice, in the flinching, frowning, jerking-back motion that periodically seized him: a sort of excruciated recoil, as if from some unsavoury presence continually encroaching on his private space. He’d convinced himself that Sauer was acting out of purely cynical, gutter-journalism motives; that his claim to believe Julia’s article was ‘important’ was hypocritical crap; his proof being the half-heartedness with which Sauer actually made this claim. He believed this half-heartedness was intentional; a deliberate, jeering signal that Sauer didn’t in fact give a damn whether the piece was ‘important’, or even true; that along with the prospect of a juicily salacious story, he was enjoying himself making Marco writhe. There was the business about knocking his father also, Marco believed, and bound up with that, possibly, a class-war element, with Sauer, definitely not a beneficiary of a private education judging from his writing style, revelling in having got a son of privilege into his grimy clutches. Again, I wasn’t sure I agreed with every aspect of the analysis – Marco was always a little quick to read class warfare into his exchanges with other Brits – but I could see how Sauer’s oily pretence of concern could get under his skin.
‘Almost the worst of it,’ he said, ‘aside from not being able to sleep, is not being able to think about anything else. As you can see I’ve become a complete monomaniac. Even if my friends and colleagues don’t shun me for being a sexual predator, they’ll do it for being a crashing bore. Listen to me! I haven’t even asked about your kids! How are your kids?’
‘They’re fine,’ I told him, wincing at the sound of him using that terrible phrase ‘sexual predator’ about himself. It was as if he were trying to get used to it ahead of time, and I felt a burst of real sympathy for him. ‘And you’re not being a bore.’
‘Christ! What the hell are those?’
He was pointing towards the window. I looked out.
‘Wild turkeys.’
Two toms and a hen, part of a large flock that often came out of the woods for the spillage from Caitlin’s bird-feeders, had wandered onto the meadow beyond our lawn.
‘They look like dinosaurs!’
As they came close to the lawn, the larger of the toms raised his black tail feathers and fanned them into a tall, bronze-ringed semicircle. The three of us watched as he began moving in short, suave bursts towards the hen.
‘Speaking of sex …’ I said.
The hen moved off a few paces, seemingly indifferent, while the smaller tom hung back, observing. After a moment the big tom glided again towards the hen, tilting his enormous fan now this way, now that, while she wandered off again, pecking nonchalantly in the grass. The tom appeared to be readying himself for his next pass. His neck had turned bright blue. Stretching it forward, he made a tender, crooning, putt-putt-putt sound. The hen paused, faltering in her indifference. The smaller tom looked from one to the other, with an air of studious fascination. Then the hen stepped forward a few paces, and very matter-of-factly lay down in the grass. At once the big tom sailed forward, puffing out his chest feathers, fanning his dark tail like some strange satanic peacock, and climbed onto her back, his curved spike of beard waving at his throat as he trod her, the wattled skin above his neck engorged and red, his head gone entirely white, the long appendage of flesh over his bill dangling weirdly, his whole body swollen and immense, as if dilated into some billowing, fantastical and irresistible idea of itself. Scooping the hen’s tail feathers to the side with his own, he lowered himself and began thrusting. After a few seconds he stepped off and walked uncertainly away. The hen stood up and did the same.
A silence descended on us; some minor awkwardness in it that was perhaps our own voyeurism catching us unawares, or perhaps just the slightly too blatant connection to what we’d just been discussing. I made another joke, quoting from Julia’s article.
‘“It was all over very quickly …”’
Marco laughed good-naturedly. ‘Now, now …’
Caitlin got up to open another bottle, a thoughtful look on her face.
‘But so what actually did happen that night?’ she asked when she came back. ‘Do you remember it at all?’
Marco looked at her, taking in the slight change of tone, and then nodded, as if to say he welcomed the question.
‘I’ve been trying to. It was a long time ago, so it’s never going to be crystal clear. It wasn’t the first time we slept together, I know that for sure. We’d done it before, in London, at least once. I remember because I remember her telling me she had a boyfriend who she was serious about, and we agreed it was just going to be a one-off. Belfast was maybe a couple of weeks later. We’d had a stressful day shooting with an ex-militia contact who’d brought us to a flat overlooking this back alley where a Catholic girl was going to be punished by some Provos for consorting with a British soldier. It was extremely gruelling to watch. They stripped her half-naked and tarred and feathered her, and we got the whole thing on camera. Julia and I and the camera crew went back to the hotel and had a few drinks to decompress. At some point the crew went off to eat but she and I stayed in the bar. We were drinking whisky, I remember that, and she was matching me shot for shot. We kissed a bit in the bar and like she says I invited her up to my room where I’m sure, knowing my twenty-something-year-old self, I was fully intending to get her into bed. I don’t recall her mentioning her boyfriend that time. I’m not saying she didn’t, but what would have been the point, since I already knew about him? But let’s say she did, and let’s say she did express some misgivings about being unfaithful again, even some outright reluctance, there’s still no way I’d have coerced her, and more to the point there’s no way she’d have let herself be coerced. You knew Julia in those days …’
He looked at me, and I nodded.
‘She was a force, right?’
‘She was.’
He turned back to Caitlin.
‘I mean, not in the sense of being extrovert or boisterous – she could seem quite reserved sometimes. But once you got to know her you’d realise she was someone who knew how to handle herself. She wouldn’t have submitted to anything she didn’t want to do, not without putting up a fight. She certainly wouldn’t have spent the entire night with me if I’d made her do anything remotely against her will, but that’s what she did. I remember that part very clearly, because we were both so hungover in the morning we almost
missed the taxi to the airport. The cameraman had to drag us out of bed.’
‘Are you still in touch with him?’ I asked. ‘The cameraman?’
Marco thought for a moment.
‘No. But I could probably track him down … That’s a good point.’
‘Not that it would prove anything even if he remembered,’ I said.
‘True, but still …’
‘And by the way, your word “reluctance” … I know you were just using it hypothetically, but it’s a dangerous word, at least in my world. If a student was accused of assault and admitted the girl was reluctant, he’d be toast.’
‘Oh, that’s ridiculous!’ Caitlin broke in. ‘People have sex reluctantly all the time. I certainly have.’
I looked at her, wondering whether to feel stung, but decided to ignore it. She was more than a little tipsy, as we all were.
‘Well, anyway,’ Marco said, ‘the point is she wasn’t reluctant and I wasn’t coercive. I can’t prove it any more than she can prove the opposite, but that’s the nature of these things. As you say, the onus of belief is on the believer …’
‘Why do you think she’s doing this,’ Caitlin asked, ‘if it’s not true?’
‘I assume to make money. She’s broke, I know that. Her career didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to. But whose does?’
‘And that was the last time you slept together, that night?’
Marco tilted his head. ‘Actually, you know, I’m not sure. We weren’t exactly a couple, so there was never a formal break-up. We just stopped at a certain point. But I have no idea if that was the last time. Maybe it wasn’t!’
‘But either way you went on working together?’ I said.
‘Absolutely. For at least another year. That I could prove, I imagine, for whatever it’s worth.’
‘And no bad feelings between you?’
‘None I was aware of.’
‘Have you tried contacting her directly?’ Caitlin asked.