Varying Degrees of Hopelessness

by Lucy Ellmann

  Now, that’s an achievement.

  Our Hero Feels Inspired

  Sensual Gail and California.

  Robert felt inspired.

  Gail would be his muse.

  He took the idea of her love out on walks and thought up topics for his lectures.

  He noticed trees.

  They seemed to be in agony.

  Their branches begged for help, as tormented roots ground their way through rocky soil.

  It was agony made beautiful.

  Like Gail when she came, loud like a California girl should.

  Why did humans build angular shapes to live in, plonking squares and rectangles down on the ground everywhere they went?

  He wanted to write a new treatise on beauty, a new Serpentine Line.

  Nothing approaches the grace of a tree clinging to a cliff, unseen for a thousand years.

  And Gail.

  Gail was clean and beautiful and familiar, like an old wooden bench beaten soft and warm by time.

  Gail was also into computers.

  She also had long blond hair that came to life in the sun.

  He loved that hair.

  He had always hoped, without thinking about it, that he would one day have and hold a woman with such hair.

  All of which got a little less alluring as the months wore on and the complexities of computing were thoroughly explained to him.

  But he liked Gail.

  He was fond of Gail.

  In fact, though they had less and less to say to each other, it never occurred to either of them that they were not in love.

  Gail’s Mother

  The author feels no interest in Gail or her mother at the present time.

  6,000-mile Abyss

  Robert had hesitated before telling Isabel about Gail. It was a serious step to take, perhaps a final step. But since he was fucking Gail every weekend, he wasn’t sure he should be hesitant. He broke the news in a letter accompanying the manuscript of his lecture on the relation of architecture to botanical structures, which he thought she might find interesting. He was quite proud of it.

  A terrible silence ensued. Not a molecule of their writing paper fell on the lonely Atlantic for months. She didn’t write, for fear of exposing her pain; he, to avoid her anger. He knew by her silence that she was angry. He had never known Isabel either silent or angry before. He had told her too much, lost her for ever, he thought one night sitting up late in his mother’s house, and it chilled him.

  And yet, how tenderly she handled his manuscript. Isabel, who had hidden her feelings for fear that they would overwhelm him, was not to know how much the poor fellow had wanted to be enveloped by love, how he had in fact travelled to the other side of the earth in the vague hope of being thus enveloped. Had taken himself home to beautiful Californian women, to his maniacally ill but still extant mother who in prehistory had so well regulated his body clock that in adulthood he always felt sleepy at three in the afternoon without knowing why.

  Bananas

  They had become exceedingly close.

  She was no doubt exceedingly beautiful.

  HE, who was too stiff to get close to anyone!

  He, whose stiffness I had hoped to mould to fit my own.

  His stiffness.

  They say you should tell a man you love him if you do.

  But I thought he knew.

  Everything had seemed so certain, after all of our bonding experiences.

  It was inevitable that we would eventually come together.

  And now it was too late to do anything.

  Who was I to alienate a man’s affections from another woman?

  I was nothing if not noble.

  Selfless.

  And resigned.

  I had all the British virtues.

  I was in love with my own pathos.

  I was in despair.

  I was fainting, freezing, dying from lack of love.

  Even the 391 novels of Babs Cartwheel could not sustain me.

  I was carrying home some bananas when it finally occurred to me that Robert must be sleeping with this girl.

  The bananas fell to the ground.

  I stepped on them by accident, and started to cry.

  I, Isabel, blubbered over bananas.

  A few women stopped and offered to help me.

  I shooed them away.

  I stood against a wall, my feet in banana, and blubbered.

  Having a horror of contact with the dead, with childbirth, with menstruous women, with murder whether wilful or involuntary, with almost any form of bloodshed, with persons or animals of inferior caste, with dead animal refuse, e.g. leather or excrement, with leprosy, madness and any form of disease, I performed my ablutions with care.

  My hands against the wall.

  Playboy of the Western World

  His home town was tumultuously dull for Robert, who had a horror of dullness. But it was a dullness he knew so well that it was part of him. Gail too was proving a bore. She was a product, a consumer product, of her times. She went shopping. What could be the purpose of this constant shopping, he wondered. The clothes certainly weren’t bought for his delectation. They were something to do with her social set, her vast network of friends which spoke so glaringly of the years he’d been away: he hardly knew any of them. And he hardly wanted to.

  Gail wasn’t so sure she wanted him to either. She reserved some of the male friends for herself alone. After the first glow of reunion had worn off, she began to notice how un-Californian Robert was, and this seemed to her a fault. He was weak, lethargic and prone to colds despite the sunny clime. He seemed to believe he was mortally ill or something. Gail was not used to such symptoms in a man. The only real point of common ground seemed to be that she fitted his notion of ideal womanhood. But was he her ideal man?

  So, here he was in the bosom or perhaps the hunky right thigh of America, surrounded by his mother and his first love, soon to begin a job he was eminently suited for, and Robert was not happy. He felt ill. He lounged about indoors, hiding from the ridiculous heat behind the protection of air conditioners. Lying in darkened rooms, roused by TV, he realized he was becoming his mother. He ate mid-morning a meal that sufficed for breakfast and lunch. And he tried to write his book on Giotto. People said this part of California was very like Tuscany, but he didn’t believe it. He felt very far away from Europe. He remembered a card trick that had gone particularly badly, cards tumbling all over his family. His whole life was like that card trick, he thought, as he shuffled through the house. ‘The Boomerang Card’.

  He met a few old friends from high school for a beer and tried to talk to them about something of mutual interest. But he knew nothing of baseball. He was beginning to feel appalled by the tastelessness, confusion and endless foreignness of his native land. Others have gone back, he knew, gone back to their old home towns and settled right back in. But within months of leaving the dishevelled streets of London, the disabling weather, the useless bathroom showers, the snobbery, the yobbos, he missed them. He was too old to adjust to the different sort of seediness of a culture he half-remembered having yearned to escape from years ago.

  He despaired of himself. He’d given up a healthy amount of struggle and despair in London for this weak and shameful retreat from the world. He did not even have his own place to live. He missed his flat, in which he had finally got everything the way he wanted it. He had taken pride in that. And now look at him. Home to Mommy. He’d forged his way into a new country and now voluntarily given it all up. Given up that dream for this dream. Given up a new dream for his oldest dream. And the point of the exercise? There were no arms after all eager enough to enclose him here. He’d taken on Gail to appease a need for warmth instilled in him by Isabel.

  He kept getting colds. His shoulders ached. He could not relax. He needed a massage. Gail stretched him out with professional skill, doused him with perfumed oils warmed in her palm, and rubbed him down. This excited her but not him. It made him feel
warm and loved. He did not dare ask for it again. Gail didn’t like him sleepy and impotent, and she was fierce when roused.

  All hope rested on his job. There he would make friends with people who were more on his wavelength. There he would feel part of the academic world. There he would be able to focus again on the things that mattered to him, instead of this nonsense of returning to the past, this ridiculous revisiting of childhood minus the hamsters and train sets. The plaid pyjamas.

  What he needed was a new toy, an adult toy to fill the void. A car, obviously. His own car would make him feel less directionless. He went to a second-hand car dealer that a friend of Gail’s had recommended. A vast car lot, with thousands of cars! He had never seen anything like it. He was definitely in a foreign country. And what he wanted was something small. No, maybe something fifties-ish, huge and phallic. But that was nostalgia again, which he had vowed to do without. He was trying to get a handle on the NOW. He did not need that old a car.

  He looked at the Toyotas and Hondas, nice little cars. He knew something about cars, although he’d never considered getting one when he lived in London. This thought entailed a pang of regret. He couldn’t help thinking that where he really wanted to be at that moment was not in the middle of a thousand Californian cars, but on a tube train going round and round on the Circle Line as he’d done when he first arrived in London and couldn’t figure out where to get off. A dark, dank, dirty old tube train full of sullen sour English people avoiding eye contact, studying each other’s footwear and vaguely envious of each other’s newspaper.

  He stood with hundreds of dollars in his pocket and a longing in his heart to buy a car, and couldn’t. It was hopeless. Gail would yell at him for his incompetence but in the end she would come up with somebody’s brother’s car which would no doubt be a nice old car and a lot cheaper. He had wanted to go off and buy his own car in his own way in his own time. But the Gail way would probably be better.

  Americans tend to see Europe in three weeks. It’s a small place to them. People were always asking Robert how many countries he’d covered there. And every time he mentioned Paris, he was forced to think of his pathetic, aborted play for Isabel. He wondered if her virginity had yet succumbed to some other guy’s onslaught. But then he reminded himself that Isabel talked non-stop and stuttered over the names of philosophers. He reminded himself that she had no breasts to speak of. He tried to forget her dazzling blue eyes, which she would have kept permanently shut had she known how beautiful they were. She was so obsessively PRIM.

  So he languished, he faltered, he longed. And he rebuked himself daily for it.

  Longing for a Man

  I, Isabel, was having trouble getting to the Catafalque.

  I, Isabel, was having trouble getting out of bed.

  Occasionally, I drank gin and tonics until I could not even find my bed.

  My grief lacked charm of any kind.

  I quite liked writing to Robert from my position of power-lessness.

  I wrote semi-mournful letters and got stiff replies.

  I had always liked his stiffness.

  He made me feel so feminine and vulnerable.

  Especially now that he had abandoned me.

  The thing about longing for a man.

  Any man.

  The longer you long for a specific one, the more unrequited you begin to feel about the whole lot of them.

  An impassable barrier arises between you and them, which you cross by means of day-dreams.

  Diverse visions of male splendidness beset me in my torpor.

  Men in still shots.

  Posed and handsome.

  Snapshots of men.

  Details of men.

  Single brushstrokes of men.

  I, Isbabel, no longer knew what I required of a man.

  They had all become equally promising.

  The Splendid Young Man’s neck.

  Robert laughing.

  Splutters, naked, pouncing on me.

  They will ALL do in the end.

  Romp in a Hotel

  He held my hand.

  He wore a troubled expression.

  Sometimes his mouth quivered as if he might burst into tears.

  ‘Finish it,’ I said.

  I was determined to end our affair before it had begun.

  ‘I don’t do this sort of thing,’ I murmured, without conviction.

  Holding my hand in a hotel, Splutters spoke of his past.

  His melancholy past.

  His nanny, who had left him to become a games mistress.

  His difficult, unfortunate, regrettable misalliance with The Wrong Woman, to whom he was still married.

  It was too funny.

  I erupted in helpless merriment.

  In the room he’d booked he gently tried to undo my dress with the one little button at the back of the neck.

  And failed.

  Then he tugged at it.

  He chased me round the bed.

  It was like a scene from some Swedish film about doctors and nurses.

  Saucy Sisters, Vaccinating Vixens, Heart-Throb Hospital.

  He was unwilling to forgo the pleasure of removing my green dress with the single button at the neck.

  When I pulled away from him, he lunged across the bed to catch the hem of my dress and pull me to him.

  He was very strong.

  There was a definite possibility of being ravished quite soon by the wrong man.

  It was shameful to tease Splutters.

  It was not that I fancied him.

  I did not love or respect Splutters, either as a tutor or as a man.

  I did not even much like him.

  I didn’t care for the construction of his flaccid lips.

  And every time he turned away from me, his back view looked like a girl’s.

  None the less, I enjoyed consorting with him.

  I liked pretending that I was in his power.

  As in all those Sheik books.

  I had to admit that I, Isabel, suffer from Rape Fantasies.

  These did not fit in too well with my feminist principles.

  Which tended to merge with my prudish principles.

  I was somewhat confused.

  I was shocked by my own indecorous behaviour.

  I managed to get out of the room, my dress and honour still intact.

  This had in fact proved reassuringly easy.

  Splutters’ Nanny

  Although his close encounters with Isabel demoralized and debilitated him, Splutters was ready for any amount of unconsummated arousal if only to be allowed to touch the object of his desire. He was used to rebuttal, anyway, and thrived on it. He had long known himself to be repulsive to the opposite sex, and he approached women with an open mind. From an early age, sexual excitement had been a one-sided affair.

  Whatever the weather, his nanny had always insisted on bringing the umbrella when they went out walking. There was a good reason for this. She made him hold up the umbrella to hide her when she needed to pee. His only hope on their endless walks together was that she would need to use the umbrella in this way. He could hear the pissing sound as she crouched on the ground. The sight of an umbrella had remained a powerful stimulus for him ever since.

  His nanny was heedless of the turmoil into which her micturation threw the young Splutters. His curiosity, obvious enough, had seemed to her merely innocent curiosity. As a result of which, he also found female displays of ignorance intensely exciting, which is why he had become a professor of Art History. Isabel, with her titters and her consternation, produced in him a perpetual state of priapic discombobulation. They both found each other’s hotel room manner strangely satisfying. But they had even more in common than that. Little did they know that it was actually Splutters’ nanny who had caused Isabel’s ping-pong accident, resulting in the stain on her left eye. The nanny, now a games mistress and increasingly severe, had yelled at Isabel for being too slow, and Isabel, attempting to move too fast for her own g
ood, fell and nicked her eye on the edge of the ping-pong table.

  A Decline in Relations

  Within months of Robert’s return, his mother was in the hospital. She had inexplicable pains which the doctors, as ever, were determined to investigate. Until your heart finally stops beating, they talk as if a cure could be achieved.

  Robert tactlessly brought grapes, forgetting that she was on liquids only, with a glucose drip in her arm. He did not want to get too involved in all this. It was an aspect of the past he hadn’t wanted to revisit. Even at his most nostalgic, he wanted no part of hospitals.

  He comforted himself with Gail. They heated things up together in the evenings. Gail didn’t prod or pry. She didn’t want to know. They didn’t talk about his mother. Gail was the antidote to all that, something totally separate.

  When his mother got out of the hospital, she was too weak to walk from the car to the house. He wondered if he was too weak to carry her. But he did. He carried her upstairs to her bedroom and helped her into her nightgown. He could be kind now. She feared he would quail at the sight of her poor old mutilated body. But Robert had always known that the mother he hugged needily was rotten with decay. A body as familiar as his own. He loved her still. He was gentle with her nakedness and made her comfortable in bed.

  But her weakness went on and on. ‘Illnesses are sent to try us,’ she murmured absently. And it was true, he thought. His love, his patience, his moral health were all on trial. She began to smell and wouldn’t let him wash her. He did not tell her she smelled, but the smell made him despair. It made him lose faith in himself. The miserable smell of her neglected flesh repulsed him. It was the smell of helplessness, the smell of cancer, the smell of these worries. It made him resent having to help her. With more than his usual stiffness he would put her slippers on her limp feet, walk her over to the commode, lift the nightgown and lower her down. Afterwards he would have to empty the pail. He ground his teeth in exasperation with it all.