M/F

by Anthony Burgess

  – You get roughed a little or sumpn?

  – That’s right. Robbed and rumpled.

  – Tough titty, she said with little sympathy. I moved my stein and myself nearer to her. I had to get some money somehow.

  3

  She took me to her elfin grot, which was a third-floor apartment on Riverside Drive, but only after a long long session at a smeared table in a dark unsavoury corner of that bar. Her autobiography: a young and promising life smeared by dark unsavoury-cornered men. She was willing enough to buy many drinks for me, matching the many she bought for herself – mostly powerful mixtures like vodka and green chartreuse; rum, gin and grenadine; benedictine and cognac. She was well known to the management here: the bar’s more exotic stock was evidently laid in for her only. As for me, whom she called a pretty boy, it was not drink I wanted: I wanted to get in, on, in, out, off, out, off, with some of those high-denomination bills she had in her handbag. Loewe, or it might after all be key-carrying chance, had delayed me, but I did not propose to be delayed beyond the next available flight, which, I thought and would check soon, was at dawn. Dawn was, at that season, not really all that far off. Stupid Loewe, by hinting at a mystery and asserting a lack of urgency, had made the solving of the mystery very urgent. I could not delay finding out why delay, if enforced, was being enforced. I nearly forgot about Sib Legeru: he had become the mere oyster crab in a shell made margaric by Loewe. The point at present was: how much in hard cash would my little portion of hard manhood seem worth to this woman?

  Whose name was Irma.

  – So he said: Irma, you’re a tramp. That made me cry cos he knew it wasn’t true, you still listening?

  I was still listening. The men in her life were all swine before whom she’d cast the margaric treasures of her mind and body, and she had artistic talent, everybody had said so, she could stick things together as good as that guy Rauschenberg, and she had been thwarted by men. The connection was not clear. She had been married three times and they’d all been a shitty lot of bastards and now she was living off alimony (fat alimony I could tell) and still she was thwarted. There there, poor poor Irma.

  – And now there’s Chester and he’s good and he wants to love me but he can’t, you know what I mean?

  Yes, I knew: thwarted. She was about the same age as yummy-bit-of-protest Carlotta but brassy, fleshy, not at all tough-tittied. The tang of sweat from her was, in this phase of preamation, not unexciting – a sort of subdued dual growl.

  – Thwarted, that’s the word. His mother’s fault, a thwarted childhood, and now when he wants to do it, you know, normal, you still listening?

  – Try and stop me listening.

  – Something kind of gets in the way.

  She did not in the least stagger, despite her burden of spirit. We walked very steadily to Riverside Drive. In the little elevator she embraced me, as it were, functionally and said again that I was a pretty boy. When we entered her apartment she had to telephone and the telephone was in her bedroom. Those were her pictures on the wall, she said, you look at them and see the thwarted talent while I make this call. The talent, I thought in my uncompassionate youthful way, had been thwarted in the egg. She had stuck bits of old magazines on to canvas, chiefly photographs of astronauts, flexing beefcake, soldiers in First World War gasmasks, politicians and the like, and she had blended these elements with streaks of crimson and cartoon shouts (ZOOM and ZOWIE and so on) done bold with a Giant Jumbo Marker. But to my astonishment.

  But to my astonishment one of her cut-outs was a page of the book section from an issue of Seee, there though presumably not for the one column of letterpress but for the advertisement for Cherry Heering (on the rocks breaks the ice), and at the head of the one column was a photograph of the yummy protest woman herself, demure in sweater and pearls, with the legends CARLOTTA TUKANG (what nationality was that for God’s sake?) and An Upward Shift. I read:

  seems to be that, the human sex-urge taking fright as the population explosion reverberates westward, the center or centers of erotic gratification may become exclusively mammary. Novelist Tukang’s bathycolpous heroine Letitia is well endowed to cope with such an upward shift. It is a pity that the prose is no match for her sharply supported uberty. Swinging but slack, it lacks both point and contour. However fetching in conception or contraception, stylistically Bub Boy must be rated a flop repeat flop.

  That was all. The beginning might be on the other side, which was stuck to the canvas. The rest of the page started off an equally waspish review of The President’s Nephews (652 pages. Einbruch. $9.95), a book in which Author Blutschande had a hard long bang at, as the title indicated, nepotism in the state. It was not possible to tell how old the issue of Seee was, but Carlotta had looked that night much as she looked here, bathycolpous too. To have indulged in an act of sexual protest with a real woman novelist whose picture had been in Seee – well, I was awed, proud, uplifted. And she had not been a bit like this man said her prose was.

  – When you are.

  That was Irma throating from the bedroom while I was looking at her bookshelves. Michener, Robbins, Mailer, Henry Morton Robinson, The Rolled Gold Notebook, but nothing by Carlotta Tukang. Well, there was time, I was young, the world was before me. And so I entered the bedroom and found Irma before me, lying fully clothed on the bed, a quadruple one. The room had a pleasant mixed smell of cognac, cocoa-butter, female sweat and Calèche. I stripped myself totally and then set about stripping Irma. I know that the reader claims a right to be let in as voyeur of any sexual encounter required by the action of a story (this was very much required, since my getting to Castita depended on it), but I have always been shy of, to use Professor Keteki’s heavy whimsy, lambdacizing pubic activities. All I can do is give you vulgar frigidities of symbolism, debased Blake, saying that she lay on that bed like Long Island, the sheets being blue, and that I caressed such areas as Wantagh and East Norwich till they were flaming with light, and then my calm lapping like the waters of Flanders Bay provoked by a miracle riot in Riverhead. Not, of course, the Amherst Riverhead, but there was a coincidence. Eventually it was her wish more than mine that Manlingamhattan, though keeping its rightful place on the map, should have its isolating rivers sucked away, to be embraced by membranous Jersey City and South Brooklyn. Guns were ready to fire in Battery Park when I became aware that the groans of male joy were not mine, since they emanated from well beyond Irma’s feet. Ships in Upper Bay sent up their jubilant flares and boomed multiple thanksgiving, then I swam to land in two strokes to see a naked man coming into the bedroom from the bathroom. Irma flicked my body away with large strength, then held out both her arms to this man. He held out both arms to her. She cried:

  – Chester honey. It was so so good.

  – Irma my heavengiving little baby.

  Then they were squirming and yumyumming in each other’s arms on the bed, and I saw how I had been used. Chester, so called I thought from the size of his chest, considerable, had entered the apartment with his own key, gone into the dark bathroom by its living-room entrance, and then got down to literal, not literary, voyeurism. His glans glistened wetly in the rose bedside light as he nestled next to Irma and enjoyed the languor of afterlove. Being an exhibitionist, I had to fight against being gratified in order to feel properly angry. I had been a dildo; I had been one of those complicated Japanese sex-robots that cost so much; I had been Chester’s expendable emanation, sexed but nameless. I would have hit both of them, lying there only marginally aware of me as though I were something on the Late Late Show, had not Chester been so large and muscled, though bald and not young. As it was, I had at least the right to cry:

  – Money, I want money.

  Chester was appalled. He looked up at me from large dark eyes, his arms round Irma, and cried back:

  – You’d desecrate? You’d make our love all dirty? You’d be a desecrating dirty little male prostitute?

  Despite the fine rhetoric and the high sentiment, there was
an endearing low touch in that dirty, which he pronounced almost, but not quite, as doidy. I said:

  – Ah, balls, if you know what those are.

  I tucked my own away in their Y-front. I was dressing quickly, dissociating myself from that bare and sentimental squirming. Shut-eyed Irma said, in a superior lazy tone:

  – Some men, Chester, do not know what love is.

  – I guess you’re right at that, honey.

  – They deserve our pity.

  – So they do, I guess.

  – He can have whatever’s in my bag. Friday is alimony day.

  – I want something out of Chester too, I said. It’s only fair. He got plenty out of me.

  – I resent that, Chester said unresentfully.

  I could see what he thought he ought primarily to be resenting: my familiar use of his name and him not easily able, since he was naked, to put on dignity. He was a mother’s boy, despite his bald muscle, and had been brought up on, I could tell, outmoded proprieties. He had not yet learnt social modes appropriate to his sexual needs. He should by rights be speaking very vulgarly to me now. But there was Irma there, and he loved and respected Irma. When I was dressed and ready to go and look for money in the living-room, he hugged Irma in a tightness that was protective, as though I might bring a gun or his mother in.

  In Irma’s bag I found less than a hundred dollars. Nor were there any odd bills tucked away in drawers or rolled into vases: I searched very carefully, even examining the thwarted collages to see if she’d incorporated the odd tasteful greenback in her vulgar designs. But no. Spitefully I tore off what was detachable of the Bub Boy review, and this was mostly, which I wanted, Carlotta’s portrait. Why did I want it? Youth, boastfulness, the working out of an epigram about tale and tail. The collage looked all the better for my rip. In Chester’s pant-pockets there were only odd dimes and nickels; in his wallet in his jacket there were two fives and a ten, also a Diner’s Club card which I toyed with the idea of taking, but I saw that that might lead me into awkward criminality. No, I had to be satisfied with $115.65, not a lot considering how much I’d done for them and their love as they called it. I went back into the bedroom and said:

  – Sorry to intrude on your epipsychidionizing, but I must use the telephone.

  They were recovering quickly from their languor. They looked up at me with eyes that would soon grow doggy and pleading. They would need my services again, but how could they pay for them? It is a hard world; the facts of economic life are desperately cruel. I sat on the edge of the bed at right-angles to Irma, and, while I looked through the telephone directory, she poked a sly finger in my rump-cleft. I ignored the gesture. I got through to Air Carib at Kennedy, found out that there was indeed a dawn flight, but, when I asked about the fare, learned that I had not nearly enough for a single economy class ticket. This made me tell Irma to take her finger from my ass and snarl at Chester’s shortage of cash. But Chester was mild in his response and also helpful. He said:

  – You want to get down to Miami and work your passage. There’s a lot of nice little millionaire boats there on the keys – Key Largo that they made the Bogart movie on and Pigeon and Lower Matecumbe. They’re always glad of some guy that wants to bum a ride to the West Indies if he’s willing and respectable. To do galley work, entertain their wives and etcetera.

  – You’ve worked your passage? I asked.

  – I’ve done galley work, Chester said. When I left home I went to Savanna la Mar. Then I came back again because I knew it would break my old lady’s heart.

  – Well now, Irma said, pumping my thigh with her fingers. How about you getting back there into the bathroom, Chester?

  – What you want to do, Chester said, is to call Unum Airlines at La Guardia. They run these very frequent flights to Miami. You could get one, I reckon, about 6.00 a.m. You call them and find out. They have what they call Pluribuses, jimbo jets, not jumbo, not big enough, but cashing in on the name, see. I was involved in that Pluribus. Patriotic, too. I used to help write their publicity.

  – That your job? Advertising?

  – Pardon me, Irma said old-fashionedly, for living. Shall I move out and then you two boys can be nice and cosy?

  – You’ll see one of mine in the subway, Chester said. His nakedness and limp prick (love in a man limps well behind vocation) were now properties of the changing-room. It’s Folly’s Fish Pickle, Chester said. There was the Pickle Mavin, then it was my idea to have Mawinski, Reginald Mavin-Pantiwaist, Van Mavin, O’Mavin and MacMavin, och aye.

  – My father would have liked that, I said.

  – Yes? Well, now they call me the Mavin mavin.

  – Chester, Irma said sharply.

  – Yes, honey, Chester said, patting her unseeingly like some monster chihuahua. How about some ham and eggs? All that exercise. Kind of hungry.

  He smiled at me and even sketched a wink. It was as if Irma had been the dildo or catalyst or engine for bringing him and me together. A biological urge wanted to be a society-building urge but could only achieve that through being sidetracked to a shameful onanism. These great structural machines throbbing away, those messages in code. Irma presented her aggrieved bottom to us and pretended to sleep. Chester cooked ham and eggs, dressed now and social, and told me about the failure of kosher ham, a synthetic venture that tasted only of cotton-wool and salt. He had not been in on the advertising.

  4

  Dawn not being for individual acts of violence, only the collective murder of disciplined squadrons, I walked without much fear to the East Side terminal. I tried to step out as briskly as Irma’s eventual snores, though I felt tired and was strongly aware of my general fragility. Inside me Chester’s decent breakfast settled comfortably enough, picking its teeth. Aurora, aurora, I was, I think, thinking – the right name for the thunder of the raider’s dawn, but how did you match in a word this marvel of fragile light over the city? Eolithic, yes – topless towers, rhodochrosite, rhodomel, touched by rhododactyls. A sad E-string must always sound in an early city-walker’s brain, knowing this innocent beauty to be as morally meaningless as Christmas and the violence and treachery and vulgarity of the day already to be warming up, or over, like yesterday’s cold hot cakes. Ah yes, I thought sadly. I was, you must keep on keeping in mind, very young.

  When I boarded the bus for La Guardia I felt that one of the male passengers was more interested in me than was proper for a stranger. Did we perhaps know each other? He wore a black lightweight suit as for a summer funeral; light shimmered from it like corinthians. His face was heavy, so that his jowls shook to the bus in a fractionally delayed sympathy; his eyes were pale and bulging, meniscal water. He sat just across the aisle, and each time I looked warily over he looked boldly down. On his knee was a paperback called Faggots for the Burning – a study of irregularities in high American places, significant exposure, very popular at that time. When we arrived at La Guardia he thrust the book in his sidepocket, looked at me somewhat balefully, then got off and got lost. Perhaps his funeral was not mine after all, I thought. Still, I was wary when I boarded the Pluribus jimbo jet for Miami, looking round for him. He was not to be seen: perhaps he had shuttled off to Boston or somewhere.

  This jimbo jet did not seem any bigger than any aircraft I had taken before: it just seemed to have more seats in it. But there were not many passengers for Miami, and I had a whole swathe of the economy cabin to myself. I was served my second breakfast – coffee, pineapple juice and a sticky pastry – and then I dozed. Because Loewe had mentioned her in our meeting of the previous day, I dreamed of Miss Emmett. She was tutting as she sponged slopped viscous white soup from a formica tabletop. She was using my pyjama-pants for the job, and even in my dreams I marvelled at the economy of the image. Dear Miss Emmett, with her severely corseted waist from which scissors always dangled, her ginger cat Rufa that, before its only pregnancy, had been called Rufus, her delight in chewing lump sugar and crunching buttocky meringues, her four Honeydew cigarettes a day.
In my dream she began to sing her one song, You will be my summer queen,* as she turned from the cleaning of the mess (why formica? We had had nothing but good tough deal and oak in our house in Highgate) to the packing of my bags for my return to St Polyerge’s Preparatory School or Amise’s College of God’s Deliverance (a Tudor establishment in Redruth, Cornwall). Into the bags she was shovelling loads of hardboiled eggs. The dream was reminding me of her one kitchen fault. She could never, no matter how I complained, serve a softboiled egg for breakfast: she would put the eggs on the stove before she called me, then forget about them. A hardboiled woman herself, a tough old faggot.

  Faggot? It seemed to me that a sense of the impropriety of the word, here anyway in America, disturbed me into waking, but the true cause was physical: the breakfast coffee was at its diuretic task. I got up and walked to the rear of the aircraft. In their galley the two vacuously pretty stewardesses, uniformed in turquoise, scarlet and offwhite, were dealing with refreshment orders: there were so few passengers to the hot South; their work was easy. Still, despite the fewness, one of the toilets had the engaged sign glowing, and it still glowed when I came out from my long piss and quick rejection of myself in the mirror (I must at least buy a razor in Miami: I must not look bummish bumming my trip on the keys). Going back down the aisle I saw on an empty seat a copy of that faggot paperback. I started. But, of course, the book was popular. Still, I was quietly disturbed as I returned to my place, wondering if the blacksuited man was coffined in that toilet, on my tail. An agent of Loewe’s, not averse to my getting to the American limit on my pilgrimage to Castita. Was it all perhaps a pre-inheritance test, written into my father’s will, of my intelligence and initiative?