Victory

by James Lasdun

  ‘That’ll teach them to go after a Rosedale!’ he’d chortled, delighted at Marco’s account of that incident. He seemed to regard Renata Shenker, however, as a more dangerous adversary. ‘She’s a tough bird,’ he’d told Marco. He’d known her former business partner, who’d parted with her acrimoniously, and he used to run into Renata herself occasionally at social events in London.

  ‘I doubt she’ll back down as easily as the Messenger,’ he’d warned his son. ‘She’ll know, or her counsel will, that a jury’s going to look sympathetically on a spirited senior citizen running a high-minded little independent publishing company. It’ll be expensive to go to trial, of course, and I don’t imagine her pockets are deep, but they’ll award her costs if she wins, and she’ll probably have a bestseller on her hands too, what with the publicity these things generate, so she might decide it’s worth the gamble. I don’t mean to alarm you – I’m just thinking aloud – but we’re going to have a battle on our hands.’

  The battle was swift and, it appears, hard fought on both sides. Sir Alec, acting with a former junior from his days as a busy QC, as well as a team of solicitors and a private detective, had Cease and Desist letters sent to the Whitethorne Press and their printers, and an application for a preliminary injunction against publication delivered to the High Court. Marco’s correspondence with Mel Sauer, along with a copy of Gerald Woolley’s letter about Julia, were offered as a basis for the injunction, on the grounds that whatever compelling legal reasons had caused the Messenger not to publish, could be presumed to apply equally in the case of the Whitethorne Press.

  All this I learned from Marco at my weekly visits to his house and, increasingly, over the phone. He’d begun calling me frequently. Though I wasn’t his closest friend by any means, I believe I was still the only one he had confided in on this particular subject. My knowing Julia and some of the other people involved was obviously a part of it, but he was worried about gossip, and my not knowing anyone in his professional circle was probably just as important.

  I don’t think he talked about it much with Hanan either. He’d told me she and Alicia had listened sympathetically when he explained the situation after Julia’s phone message, but I got the feeling he wasn’t entirely confident in her loyalty. I assumed she must be weighing her options. On the one hand she’d just moved in with Marco – taken the plunge with their relationship – and reversing course would have been complicated at the very least. Also she was having visa problems, to which the simplest solution would have been marrying Marco, who’d acquired US citizenship himself through his first marriage, and I imagine she wasn’t ready to give up on that prospect just yet. On the other hand there was everything her instincts as a rational woman of the world must have been telling her: that if things went badly for Marco, she could find herself encumbered with a piece of irrevocably damaged human goods that she’d have to be constantly explaining and apologising for, and dragging around with her like an invalid with some highly noxious disease.

  It’s possible, of course, that her air of disengagement was just a more emphatic version of what I’d sensed earlier: an essential remoteness from the culture of New York, in this instance its anxious, obsessive interest in the subject of sexual conduct. It’s also possible my perspective on her was shaped by factors that had nothing to do with her at all. Earlier that year, for example, I’d seen the documentary about Anthony Weiner. I didn’t make any connection at the time, but as I write now it seems likely I was seeing Hanan through the lens of Weiner’s wife Huma Abedin. There were physical resemblances: similar black hair and large dark eyes; similar pale-olive complexion set off by bright red lipstick. Gestural similarities too, particularly a certain way of taking up position in a doorway or far corner of a room, arms crossed, gazing at their partner with a look expressive of both tenderness and cool appraisal. (No doubt, by the same token, I was also viewing Marco partly through the lens of Weiner himself; at the very least Weiner’s drama must have added a tint of its particular farcical goatishness to the general murk of errant masculinity shadowing Marco’s own.)

  I barely glimpsed his daughter during that time, though I’d sometimes hear her and Erin pottering around in the basement. The little grin on Erin’s face during Julia’s fateful phone message had struck me as faintly malicious, and I wondered if she was amusing herself in some devious way, turning Alicia against her father. That’s unfair perhaps, possibly even a bit crass, but I know that among the many kinds of pain Marco was experiencing during those days was a sense that his daughter might indeed turn against him, with or without her lover’s connivance.

  He was in bad shape again; worse than before. With Sauer, he’d conducted his own defence, which at least gave him something to focus his energies on. Now, having effectively handed matters over to his father, he’d succumbed to a restless, powerless inertia. A manifestation of this was an uncharacteristically crude, even brutal, cynicism. He wasn’t someone who monitored his own speech very closely, at the best of times. On the plus side this gave his more generous sentiments, when he expressed them, a refreshing air of sincerity. But it also exposed his less worthy impulses. At times he could sound pettily angry or mean-spirited.

  ‘I’m beginning to think it’s all just a land-grab,’ he said at one low moment. ‘Land-grab, power-grab, money-grab, all this public accusation stuff … Yes, people get assaulted, and they deserve justice, but this isn’t about justice. It isn’t about mindless imitation either – I was wrong about that. It’s about business; plunder. Well, fair enough, we all want our share, and I’m sure I’ve had more than mine. But let’s not pretend this public shaming rigmarole has anything to do with justice or civil rights. I mean, am I seriously expected to feel a burning solidarity with those reporters, so-called, at Fox News, cashing in on having been treated like bunny girls all those years? Let them grab their millions in payback, and good luck to them. I’m all for it. But don’t tell me it has anything to do with righting wrongs, or healing wounds. It’s business! Pure and simple.’

  ‘But Julia isn’t demanding money, is she?’ I said.

  ‘True. Not yet. Not from me. But I’m sure if this memoir of hers comes out, she’ll find some way of leveraging it. It’ll be her official certificate of victimhood, which is money in the bank, as you know. It’s like what a cab medallion used to be.’

  ‘You really think it’s just money motivating her?’

  ‘Why else would she put all this effort into a lie? She’s been broke for years, and now suddenly she realises she has a nice, juicy, privileged, straight white male she can take down. I’m a bounty-hunting opportunity, is what I am. A scalp. So are you, by the way, so watch out.’

  Other times, however, in less rancorous humour, he’d admit at least the possibility of motives besides money for Julia’s behaviour, and he’d speculate on what they might be.

  ‘Could she be punishing me for not offering something more serious all those years ago?’ he said on the phone one morning. ‘Not pushing her to dump the boyfriend and ride off into the sunset with me? I know things fizzled out between her and Gerald Woolley in the end anyway …’

  I waited while he reflected on this.

  ‘So actually, maybe that’s what she’s angry about,’ he mused. ‘Not my casual attitude in itself, but the fact that our fling screwed up her relationship with the guy she might have married. Do you think that could be it?’

  ‘It’s possible …’

  ‘I was definitely careless about people’s feelings in those days. It never occurred to me not to make a move on someone just because they were involved with someone else. And then as soon as I was bored I’d cut out. That was the code back then: every man for himself. Every woman too, by the way. And Julia certainly gave the impression of being as tough as anyone else, in that department. But maybe she wasn’t. Maybe it wasn’t such a great code anyway. I’m certainly open to being persuaded that it wasn’t. I think I half-knew it was problematic even at the time, though I won’t p
retend that slowed me down. The truth is, I regret a lot of things I did when I look back. I could be charming when I wanted, and I’m pretty sure I was fun and interesting to be around. But I wasn’t kind. I wasn’t interested in kindness. Kindness was for people who couldn’t get laid, in my book. Sex was what mattered, not being kind. Maybe that’s what I’m really being punished for, karmically speaking …’

  On the legal front, meanwhile, things were moving fast. Within days of his father’s application, a temporary injunction was granted against publication of Julia’s book. Renata, who shared the high-principled, somewhat pugnacious temperament of that vanishing generation, saw this as a challenge to her integrity as a publisher, and vowed to fight it. A court date was set. Sir Alec and his team mapped out a dual strategy, mustering arguments in readiness for a trial, if it should come to that, while also taking steps to expedite their preferred solution, which was to get Renata to back down before proceedings began.

  For the trial strategy, he asked Marco for copies of a documentary he’d made for American TV in the nineties, about atrocities committed by Serbian forces against Bosnian Muslim civilians during the Yugoslav war. A segment of the film was about the notorious rape camps in Foča, and the lawyers seemed to think the footage might help cast Marco in a usefully ennobling light, illustrating an unimpeachable attitude to women. For the same reason, they also asked for copies of the segment about the girl being tarred and feathered, from the film he’d shot with Julia in Belfast.

  Marco wasn’t happy with any of this. He hated it, in fact: hated the suggestion it raised, that he had some ongoing morbid interest in the abuse of women; hated the idea of using his films for purposes of self-exoneration; hated being in the position of trying to censor a book in the first place.

  ‘I don’t seem to have much choice though, do I? Either I fight or I’m fucked, and these are apparently the only effective weapons I have to fight with. I have to win, too, obviously, though it’s possible I’ll be fucked even if I do.’

  We were at his house during this last conversation, having an early lunch before I caught the train back upstate. Hanan and the girls were out, which inevitably meant a torrent of talk about his case. I asked about the other part of his father’s strategy – getting Renata to back down. A pained expression crossed his face. Then he shrugged, and told me with the acid resignation that was increasingly his tone at that time, that his father’s team was looking for ways to discredit Julia.

  ‘Digging up dirt on her, basically. Apparently that’s what you do. The assumption is that Renata Shenker’s team will be doing the same on me.’

  ‘They’ve seen that letter from Gerald Woolley?’

  ‘Yes. But we need something stronger than that.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Anything that’ll make her look like she’s unhinged, or a liar. Other false allegations of assault would be helpful, I suppose.’

  ‘And what are they looking for on you?’

  ‘Oh, dodgy bedroom behaviour, I imagine. Other women willing to corroborate her story …’

  ‘Are they likely to find any?’

  ‘No. Not from anyone telling the truth. But …’

  ‘But …?’

  He tilted his head to the side, hawk-like, as if drawing a bead on some troublesome object.

  ‘Well, I can imagine one or two women revising the past. Not out of malice, necessarily. Maybe not even consciously …’

  He cleared his throat. An odd expression – pained but also faintly amused – came into his eyes.

  ‘Have I ever told you about my anthropology tutor at university?’

  3

  By this point in Marco’s saga, something like a tacit agreement had been established between the two of us, that I was going to be, if not its official chronicler, then at least a kind of semi-authorised literary witness. He knew that the subject interested me. On one occasion he’d said he was surprised I hadn’t already written a book about a predicament exactly like his. I’d explained the difficulty; that in a made-up story you’d have to clarify in your mind who was lying, the man or the woman, and that this would inevitably read as a larger statement about the relative truthfulness of men and women in general, which in turn would reduce the story to polemic or propaganda. In a true story, on the other hand (I’d added), the question would remain specific to the individuals concerned and the particularities of their situation, which would make it much more appealing, at least to me. He’d smiled as if to say: ‘Be my guest.’ Between that and various asides of his over the months, along the lines of: ‘I’m sure you’re taking notes on all this – just make sure they’re accurate!’ I got the feeling that he accepted the inevitability of my writing about it some day, and was okay with it.

  Needless to say, this complicated matters between us. He wasn’t so naive as to think I would take everything he told me as gospel. As he himself had said when he visited me and Caitlin in the spring: ‘You can’t not have doubts.’ He’d reiterated the sentiment many times since, and I took this to mean he understood that although I might be entirely sympathetic in my role as his friend and confidant, I was also going to be entirely dispassionate in my role as the teller of his story. Not a faithful amanuensis, in other words, but an appraiser of the truth.

  In all our conversations he was careful to signal this awareness of my – so to speak – judicial independence, and his respect for it. But at the same time I could feel the constant pressure of his desire to keep me in line with his version of events, and I realised I needed to be vigilant in maintaining my objectivity. I’m sure Marco was aware of this, and adjusted himself accordingly, which of course added yet more layers to the already complex and potentially treacherous transaction being conducted between us.

  I was more than usually aware of all this during our conversation about his affair with his tutor at Cambridge. I’d heard rumours of this as a teenager, when it formed part of the general legend of conquest and precocious charisma that trailed after Marco even then. I hadn’t known the details though, and what he told me now fleshed out the story in unexpected ways.

  The tutor’s name was Maeve McLanahan. She was twenty-nine; quite a bit older than Marco at the time. She’d written a book about a matriarchal Amazon tribe she’d studied for her doctorate, which had found a wide general audience owing to its graphic details of sexual customs in the primeval rainforest. From Marco’s description she was a tumultuous character; easily moved to raucous laughter, though also easily angered, with a fondness for drinking brandy during tutorials, which she conducted wearing jeans and sweaters and an old sea-captain’s hat.

  ‘She wasn’t what I thought of as my type, which was pretty conventionally feminine at that time,’ Marco said. ‘Anyway, it wouldn’t have crossed my mind to think about a teacher in that way. That wasn’t a fantasy of mine. She was the one who initiated things.’

  ‘She seduced you?’

  He paused a moment.

  ‘I’d say more like helped herself to me. There was nothing slow or simmering about it. She basically ordered me back to her flat one afternoon, told me she fancied me, and took me up to bed.’

  He paused again, as if to let some implication sink in, and this time I felt that slight controlling pressure exerting itself against me, along with a corresponding stirring of my own defences.

  ‘Not that I wasn’t into it,’ he continued. ‘I was just a bit surprised. I’d never been with a woman that frank about what she wanted. It was confusing at first because what she wanted turned out to be the opposite of what you might expect, or at least there was something deeply paradoxical about it. She wanted to be totally in control and yet at the same time she wanted the sensation of being taken by force.’

  Again I felt a sharpened attentiveness bristling inside me.

  ‘I’d never encountered that before, and it took me a while to get the hang of it. But she was a very determined teacher. She’d get furious if I overstepped some invisible mark, or equally if I underste
pped it. But when I got it right, the results were spectacular. I’ve never had sex like that with anyone, before or since. It was delirious.’

  ‘For her too?’

  ‘I think so. She used to call me her Nijinsky.’

  ‘After the horse?’

  ‘No! The Russian dancer. I reminded her of some ballet he was in. Something about a faun.’

  ‘Afternoon of a Faun?’

  ‘Yeah. What is that?’

  ‘It’s a poem by Mallarmé. It was made into a ballet with Nijinsky. I think Debussy wrote the music. I sometimes have it on my syllabus, actually – the poem.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  I told him it wasn’t exactly ‘about’ anything. ‘I mean, there’s a story of sorts, but it’s highly ambiguous. A faun wakes from an afternoon nap and remembers an erotic dream about a nymph. A couple of nymphs, actually. And it’s not clear whether the encounter was what we would call consensual, or even whether it was in fact a dream – it’s possible he’s remembering something that actually happened. Basically, it’s a celebration of a certain phase of male desire where the intensity of feeling dissolves all the usual categories of reality. I teach it alongside Sylvia Plath’s journals and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet about female desire, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways …”’

  ‘It’s about rape?’

  ‘No … I don’t think so … It’s very tender and delicate. Paul Valéry thought it was the most beautiful poem ever written, at least in French. There are flashes of brutality, but the language creates a kind of pagan, pre-moral atmosphere in which—’

  ‘What is a faun anyway?’ Marco interrupted. He never had much patience when I waxed pedagogical. ‘Is it the same as a satyr?’

  ‘No. Those are cruder—’

  ‘They’re the ones with the hairy goat legs and the enormous rampant dicks?’

  ‘Yes. Fauns have something more shy and elusive about them. They live in enchanted forests, as far as I remember. You could say they represent male desire in its youthful, innocent form, when it’s all just wonder at the magical new kinds of pleasure that arrive with puberty. Whereas satyrs embody something worldlier, more corrupted. Lechery, I guess, as opposed to desire.’