As Far as You Can Go

by Julian Mitchell

  “Well, why do you always hold back?”

  “I don’t know. How would I know? I didn’t know I did hold back, for Christ’s sake.”

  “And why do you always side with your grandmother?”

  “Grandma,” she said. She blew her nose. “Grandma brought me up. You don’t have to love the members of your family to feel tied to them. You can hate them, and they’re still yours, you’re still bound to them. And when you feel they’re threatened, you—I don’t know.”

  “I know exactly. You run to them, as you run to your grandmother, and you feel safer because you think you’re making her safer. It’s not her that you’re trying to protect, it’s yourself. You’re frightened to let go.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, stop being frightened. I’m not going to hurt you. I love you, even if I have to slap your face to make you realize it.”

  “You needn’t do it again,” she said. “I got the point.”

  He stopped the car beside the road.

  “Now, come on,” he said. “Let’s try it again, shall we?”

  But she pushed him away.

  “You’d better listen yourself,” she said. “You may love me. I don’t love you. And if you’re going to be brutal about it, I’m for Grandma against you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Grandma is the only person I have in the world. Mom doesn’t care about me, Pop doesn’t care, Uncle Henry doesn’t care. But Grandma cares. And I care for her, really care, whether it’s love or hate or plain living together for twenty years.”

  “How do you know you don’t love me?” said Harold. “You spend so much time locked up inside yourself, you never get out to see what real life is like. Up there at the end of the canyon, you’re living like a lady hermit.”

  His anger was gone. He spoke gently. “You know that’s true, Diane. Why not let yourself go a little? Why not forget about Grandma for a couple of hours, and live for yourself for a change?”

  “What makes you think I want to?” she said in a tired voice. “What makes you think I’m not happy as I am, Harold?”

  “Diane, I’m in love with you.”

  “That’s no answer,” she said. “That’s just corn.”

  “Well, darling, why are you always so restless? Why did you tell me, the first time we ever met, that you wanted to go out and punch a cop in the face? Of course you want to get out of your hermit cell.”

  “O.K.,” she said, mumbling slightly, “O.K., O.K.”

  “Diane——”

  But she was crying again, the tears streaming down her face, and she shook her head, and motioned him to ignore her, to drive on. He kissed her very gently, sliding across the front seat of the car till he was free of the wheel. She cried silently, her body stiff beneath his hands. He murmured to her, stroking her face, her hair, her shoulders, saying nothing, trying to soothe her.

  Gradually she relaxed, became soft and supple, and as his lips moved to hers, she ceased to withhold, he felt her giving, yielding, abandoning the barricade.

  When he moved from her, at last, she said, “O.K., Harold, O.K., O.K.” Her eyes were dry, rather feverish, her face flushed, her hair disarranged.

  “Let’s drive on now, shall we?” she said.

  “I’m sorry I hit you. I don’t know why, but I suddenly saw everything clearly for the first time. It was when your grandmother snapped the lid of her jewel-box. It was like an insult, the way that snap sounded. And I knew a whole lot of things—that I wanted you, that I did love you, that I wasn’t fooling myself. And that I wanted the miniature, too, not for Dangerfield, or for England, but for myself.”

  “That sounds kind of corny, too, honey,” said Diane. She was tidying her hair. “I feel kind of shaky.”

  “I feel strong,” said Harold.

  “Let’s go, then,” she said. “Let’s see what Uncle Henry has to offer us.”

  “Diane, will you marry me?”

  She smiled at him, and at last the pupils of her eyes seemed to be larger, softer. “Gee, I don’t know,” she said. “We don’t have to decide anything like that right away, do we?”

  “All right,” said Harold. He was absolutely confident that she would marry him. “But don’t forget, will you? I love you. And I proposed. I want that to be clear to the children.”

  He slid back to the driving-seat, and she snuggled against him. He felt like a hero, indeed, with the warmth of her body pressing against his, the weight of her body leaning trustfully against him. But there was still a dragon to be killed.

  They began to talk quietly about themselves.

  Diane said, “You know, it’s a funny thing, but you’re right, I always did feel a kind of—I don’t know, a kind of hopelessness whenever a boy kissed me. I never enjoyed it like I was supposed to. I always felt kind of baffled.”

  Harold told her about Helen, about the despair he always felt about her. It was the first time he had ever told anyone about his bafflement with her. It seemed strange to be telling the girl he loved about the girl he’d slept with, but in their new harmony it was natural, and right, and good; and she listened as though he was talking about another person and another girl, and all she said when he stopped was, “I’m sorry for her, Harold. Gee, I’m really sorry for her.”

  They were coming to Harold’s hotel, and he said, “Damn your Uncle Henry and Eddie Jackson. I should have liked to spend the whole evening just with you, darling.”

  “Never mind. There’ll be others.”

  They smiled at each other.

  “Hi,” said Eddie, as Harold stopped next to him. He was standing by the gate of the parking lot, and he wore dark glasses as usual, only this time, instead of jeans, it was a pair of very tight white pants and a peacock-blue sweat-shirt, neither very clean. He had a deep tan, and his teeth shone brilliantly white when he gave his straight smile. He didn’t look like the man in the miniature after all, Harold decided, but he had the same casual arrogance and sexuality. It was a type that never died out.

  He got in next to Diane, and this allowed her to squeeze even more close to Harold. Her arm was round his shoulder, and her other hand lay gently on his thigh. Enjoying the closeness, the private aura that seemed to enclose them, he thought of what Mrs Washburn had said. She was right: when you were young you thought you were the only person in the world who had any feelings, and that your feelings were the most important single fact about the universe. Where Mrs Washburn went off the track was to suppose that knowing you were slightly ridiculous and very arrogant made you feel any shame. Not shame, not at all: pride. It was good to have someone else in the car beside you to see how happy you were, and to envy you.

  “How’s things?” said Eddie, after introductions.

  “I love things,” said Harold.

  “You mean that?” said Eddie.

  “I meant they were fine, thanks.”

  “It depends how you look at them,” said Diane. “If you’re happy, things look O.K. If you’re mad at the world, they look ugly and terrible.”

  “Then I guess I’m mad at the world,” said Eddie. “I hate things. I hate people, too. But things most of all. You can’t do anything to a thing. Did you ever think of that?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Well,” said Eddie. He frowned and prepared for a speech. “It’s like this. You can hurt people, you can get your own back at them, you can sneer at them and make them feel miserable, you can make them cry, you can get some kind of reaction out of them, right? But you can’t do any of that to a thing. You can’t make a thing cry, right? You can kick it, but you’ll only hurt yourself. You can tire yourself out raging against a thing. But your mind wants some kind of response.”

  Diane started to protest, but Eddie silenced her with a quick irritated gesture.

  “You can kick an old tin can, kick it as hard as you like, really knock it around, dent it. But it won’t respond. And your mind wants something that responds; even if it’s only a
white-faced, frightened, mean little response, it’s something. You can get a real kick out of making someone mad at you. And you can despise him, that’s good, too. But you can’t despise a thing, not properly. A thing is smug, effortlessly smug, right? So you can smash it, or tear it up or something. But that’s no good. Smashing it, you kill it. And you don’t want to kill your enemy, you want to make him suffer, you want to watch him in pain, you want to humiliate him. You want to see him grovelling, right? If you kill him he beats you, because he’s dead, and the dead don’t make any response. Like the way the Jews beat Hitler. The more he killed, the more he hated them, right? You gotta have a live person to hate. But you can’t get any response out of a thing, the more you kick around that old tin can, the more it laughs in the toe of your boot, because it can’t feel, it can’t be hurt. Take money. You can burn all your dollar bills because you hate money. I hate it, I really hate the stuff. But you haven’t hurt it by burning it, you’ve only hurt yourself, right? A couple of days later you’re stealing the stuff to buy food. And food, that’s another thing. You need it all the time, and it knows it, it laughs in your face because it knows you have to have it. I hate it, I hate the idea of it.”

  “But you have to eat,” said Diane.

  “Oh, sure, you have to eat. You know what I think of sometimes? I think of the real human being that there’s going to be in a million years or so. The real self-sufficient man, who doesn’t need money, because he doesn’t need anything else, doesn’t need food, doesn’t need a car or gas. That’s the real superman, the guy who needs nothing, but nothing. Did you ever read Nietzsche?”

  “Never,” said Harold.

  “Well, don’t waste your time. He’s all wrong. The real superman, he’s the guy who depends on no one but himself, on no one and nothing. He just is. You get it?”

  “What does he do for a sex-life?” said Diane.

  “He’s got himself. Did you ever read Plato? The Symposium?”

  “Yes,” said Harold. He was amused. “Did you?”

  “Sure I did. You remember there’s a guy in that who gets up and says about the people, way back, at the beginning of things, who got cut in half, right? And that’s what human beings are, looking around for their other half all the time? Well, that’s how it’ll be with the superman. He’ll be back with his other half. It’ll be sex all the time, permanent copulation.”

  Diane laughed. “You have the craziest friend, Harold.”

  “But don’t you see that’ll be it, the millennium and all that jazz? No one will want anything at all? Peace on earth?”

  “I’d say,” said Harold, “that it was a real swinging idea.”

  “Far out,” said Diane, still laughing.

  “What do we do now, though?” said Harold.

  “We mess around. You know why there are so many queers about these days? Because the race is beginning to get the idea. If we were all cut in half, way back there at the beginning, we’ve got to be looking for somebody of the same sex, right?”

  “I don’t see why,” said Harold.

  “Read Plato, you’ll see O.K. And men and women, and having kids and all that, that’s to keep the world going while we get back to the original state. Once we’ve formed up again with our twins, no more fucking.”

  Diane laughed again, though a little uneasily, Harold thought. He didn’t like the idea himself, come to that. Eddie had finished, though, for the time being. He was sitting back on the seat with his arms folded, looking a little like Napoleon after a victory. Harold put his hand on Diane’s knee.

  “You sure are crazy,” she said. “If I had ideas like that, Eddie, I’d be inside, and glad of it.”

  “Everyone is inside,” said Eddie solemnly. “We are all inside and can’t ever get out because we can’t find our twins. We’re inside ourselves. For true liberty, we have to get out. But the only way we can get out is for our twins to unlock the doors. And we’re not ready for that, yet, physiologically.”

  “Did you ever go to college, Eddie?” said Harold.

  “Sure, off and on. They didn’t like the way I read the books, though. Thought I might take them seriously or something. You aren’t supposed to do that. You’re supposed to say what’s wrong with them.”

  “That’s American education for you,” said Diane.

  Harold hadn’t really been listening. He was thinking of nothing, letting Eddie’s words, the crazy swirl of fantasies, drift by, enjoying being alive with Diane beside him.

  “You know,” he said, “being Americans, you can’t either of you appreciate what an education America is. When I was driving west I spent quite a few days in the desert. There’s nothing like a few days in the desert for understanding things.”

  “What sort of things, honey?”

  “Well—I had a lot of great thoughts about man and nature. Things like that. When you live in a tiny little island with an equable climate, you don’t really have any idea of what the world is actually like.”

  “And you’re learning, huh?” said Eddie. He was grinning broadly. “Jesus, I always said all you had to do with an Englishman was to steal his umbrella, and then there was a real man underneath it after all.”

  “I’ve learnt a kind of freedom,” said Harold seriously. “It’s something you can only learn from being in a vast country. And with the freedom, you learn a sort of responsibility.”

  “Honey,” said Diane, “I just love you when you’re all serious.”

  “I am, too,” he said. “You know what having travelled in this country, and having met you, and your grandmother, too, have taught me? That you have to be responsible to yourself. You have to do what you want, or there’s no point in doing anything. It’s not being selfish, really. Selfishness is different. What I mean is more a question of being tough, of knowing when to say ‘no’, of refusing to be dragged down to the tedious ordinary way people carry on. You can’t learn that in a small country. Or it takes longer to learn. Because there isn’t the sense of being free to get up and go—to Alaska or Florida or wherever you like. You see, when you have that sense of freedom, you have to know where you’re going and why, or you just drift.”

  “That’s right,” said Eddie, “that’s absolutely correct.”

  “And I’ve been drifting all my life. I drifted until this afternoon, Diane. And then, a simple thing, just the way your grandmother snapped that lock, it made me see. It made me want something—it made me want to defeat her, to do what I’m paid for doing, but for my own sake. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Don’t be cruel about it, Harold.”

  “What happened this afternoon?” said Eddie.

  “I stopped drifting,” said Harold. “Do you ever go into the desert, Eddie?”

  “Me? No, not if I can help it. I don’t like things. The desert is all things. I don’t mind it’s not being fertile—I hate the whole nature business. But I like to be around people.”

  “You are sick, Eddie,” said Diane. “How can you be against, just against, nature? That’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s the way I am,” said Eddie.

  “Where are you from, anyway?”

  “I was born in Bellingham, Washington, ma’am, and I’ve raised myself and a lot of dust the wide world over. I’m what the blues singers call a travellin’ man.”

  “Let’s go to the desert one day, Diane,” said Harold.

  “O.K.,” she said. If her meekness hadn’t been so glorious, it might have been suspicious.

  They came into Santa Monica, without noticing any difference between it and the previous suburb with which it merged. After a while, though, the houses became bigger, and Diane directed Harold to stop in front of a pleasant wooden house in the slightly incongruous style of New England. It had a long porch, and even two rocking-chairs.

  “Is this the place?” said Eddie. “I never saw it by daylight before. I only came here once. That was last night.”

  “You’re full of surprises,” said Diane.
r />   A man came out of the house and waved at them as they got out of the car.

  “That’s Pedro,” said Diane. “Hi, Pedro.”

  “Hi, Diane. Hi, weren’t you here last night? What’s your name?”

  “Eddie.”

  “That’s right, Eddie. That was quite a party. We must do it again some time. Hi, who are you?”

  “This is Harold Barlow, Pedro. Harold, Pedro Flamenco. It is Flamenco, isn’t it?”

  “Diane, you’re a wicked girl, spreading horrid rumours about my past. I was in show business, but I was never, never, a dancer. Oh, Henry, here are some people.”

  Henry Washburn wasn’t as bad as Harold was expecting. There was no sign of make-up, and he had close-cropped hair and blue eyes and looked little over Eddie’s dividing line. He was wearing a grey suit with a white shirt and a bow-tie that was perfectly all right, green with little grey spots. Rather smart, in fact.

  He shook Harold’s hand, kissed Diane, said “Hi, Eddie”, and “Pedro, why don’t you fix us all a drink?” Pedro went off to fix the drinks after asking what they all wanted, and they settled in the chairs on the porch.

  “I understand you’re interested in my mother’s little miniature,” said Henry to Harold. “It’s very pretty, isn’t it? I’ve often wondered whether it’s a Hilliard.”

  Harold wondered whether or not he should tell him it was, or at least that the Dangerfields were convinced that it was. There didn’t seem anything to lose by being honest at this stage of things.

  “It is generally thought to be a Hilliard,” he said. “The Dangerfields always thought it was, and wherever it’s been in a sale-room, it’s always been labelled as one.”

  “Is that so?” said Henry Washburn. “I’m afraid I know very little about these things. Why are you so interested in it, Mr Barlow, if I may ask? My mother told me quite a lot, but she was rather garbled. She is getting on, isn’t she?”

  “She’s a very remarkable woman,” said Harold. Then he told Washburn the story of the miniature. He left nothing out, and he didn’t embroider. Eddie listened raptly, and said, at the end, “Man, he must have been quite a kid.”