by Will Self
Ariadne's friends were mostly the usual faux bohos who congregated in the environs of SoHo, Greenwich Village and Tribeca; affecting the style of penniless, fifties, rive gauche students; while living on the income from vast tranches of AT & T stock. These types were always on the verge of exhibiting, publishing, constructing, filming or presenting something, but never actually managed it. At one of Ariadne's soirées, a young man with pigtails had even deliriously informed Karin that he was about to present a presentation. ‘What do you mean?’ Karin politely queried. ‘Y'know, make a pitch for a pitch, I guess . . .’
‘And if you get the pitch?’
‘Aw, hell, I dunno . . . I dunno if I want to follow through that far.’
Karin wandered away from this absurd reductivism. Later, she was pleased to see that the pigtailed pitcher had had to be carried out by his emoto, dead drunk, more incoherency falling along with the drool from his slack mouth.
But on the night of the wine tasting nobody much got drunk – and Karin met Travis. Travis, who seemed initially a little creepy in his immaculately cut English-retro tweed suit. Travis, who smoked, which meant he had to stand out on the fire escape, engaging her in flirtatious conversation through the window. Karin couldn't really approve of the smoking, but nor could she condemn it. In fact, she found something faintly racy and daring about Travis on that first encounter, certainly in comparison to the posing rentiers, who were swirling their wine glasses around in the studio as if to the château born.
Travis, it transpired, knew a great deal about wine; or ‘fine wine’ as he invariably referred to it. He could tell a Chareau-Carré Muscadet from a white Bordeaux by bouquet alone. He knew the names of all the varieties of phylloxera, their life cycles and their effects. He had once rafted down the Rhône, stopping for a bottle of wine in every vineyard he passed. But there was nothing over-bearing or self-satisfied in the way he retailed all of this knowledge and experience. Rather, it seemed to be an essential mannerism of the man to be tirelessly self-effacing, albeit with such an ironic inflection to his voice, that it was clear he had a perfectly healthy opinion of his own wit and talents.
‘I'm basically a wealthy dilettante –’ He paused, his long upper lip twitching with self-deprecation. ‘And not a very good one at that.’
‘How d'you figure that?’ Karin thought she sounded like some whiny co-ed – his diction was so studied.
‘Because I can't really settle to anything, the way you have. I just flit from one hobby to the next. But I enjoy my enthusiasms – if that isn't something of a contradiction in terms.’
Karin had told Travis all about the small dress-making business she ran. How she had turned her two-room apartment in the twenties into a miniature atelier, staffed by six deft Filipino seamstresses. How she had made a considerable name for herself selling near-couture to wealthy Manhattanites. And how she had now been offered, by an enormous fashion business, a prêt-à-porter range of her own.
Travis listened to all of this intently, nodding and gifting polite noises of encouragement in the correct places. When Karin finally faltered he asked exactly the right question: ‘D'you also make clothes for emotos?’
‘Oh sure, actually I'm really best known for my fashion wear for emotos. Some people, y'know, some people find it easier to do a bias cut using a bigger expanse of cloth –’
‘I guess that's to do with the weight and tensility of the fabric,’ Travis replied, in his rather tense, weighty fashion. Karin couldn't believe it – a presentable, youngish man in Manhattan who knew what a bias cut was.
‘Is your emoto here?’ Travis asked after a short while.
‘Yeah, Jane, she's the one with the long blonde hair, over there.’ She pointed to the section of the loft that had been set aside for the emotos. Suitably enough this was in the highest section, where a trapezoid skylight formed a twenty-foot-high roof space. A table had been set up for the emotos – a table that was to their scale, about six feet high – and on it were five litre jugs full of Kool-Aid and root beer and cherry cola, the kind of sweet, sickly drinks that emotos preferred. The emotos were supping these and engaging in the slightly infantile banter that passed for conversation among them.
There were about ten emotos, and they were of all types: black, white, old, young. But Travis's and Karin's were easy to spot, for, naturally, they were both dressed identically to their grown-ups. Travis laughed. He turned first to Karin and then to Jane. He compared the trim, thirtyish blonde in front of him to the lissom, twelve-foot emoto at the far end of the loft. Both wore the same well-cut jackets that flared from the hip; and the same velveteen leggings tucked into snakeskin ankle boots. Both had their straight blonde hair cut into bangs, and Travis was even more amused to note that Karin had equipped her emoto with a heavy, scalloped silver choker necklace, the same as her own. This must have cost a great deal of money.
‘And that's . . . ?’ Karin pointed at the chunky, fourteen-foot emoto in the immaculately cut, English-retro tweed suit.
‘Brion – yeah, that's my emoto. We've been together a long, long time. In fact, he's the same emoto that I had when I left group home –’
‘Snap!’ Karin cried. ‘I've been with Jane since I was sixteen too.’
At this point the emotos concerned came over to give their grown-ups a much needed cuddle. Jane, coming up behind Karin, leant down and draped her flawless white hands over the grown-up's shoulders. Then she pulled Karin backwards, so as to nuzzle the grown-up's entire body against her crotch and lower belly. Brion did pretty much the same thing to Travis; so that the two grown-ups continued their conversation from within the grottoes of these massive embraces.
Perhaps it was the security of Jane's arms around her, or that Travis was – in his own eccentric fashion – almost alluring, which made the idea of them meeting again, perhaps enjoying a meal, a movie or a gallery visit together, seem a good one. Jane took Karin's organiser out of her shoulder bag – which for reasons of convenience also held her grown-up's shoulder bag – and Karin exchanged numbers with Travis. Brion had an outsize, Smythe's of Bond Street, leather-bound address book, in which he noted down Karin's numbers with an outsize, gold propelling pencil. ‘Wow!’ Karin exclaimed. ‘Can your emoto write?’
Brion laughed. ‘No-no, Karin, I don't need to write – Travis does that for me – but I like to make the shapes of numbers!’ Both the grown-ups laughed at this typical display of emoto naivety – and that too cemented their acquaintance.
They had both left the wine tasting shortly after this; and the last Karin had seen of her new friend was Travis's face, blooming, like some tall, orchidaceous buttonhole, above the solid tweed ridge of his emoto's shoulder, as Brion bore him off in the direction of Riverside Drive. That had been a fortnight ago. Travis called Karin a week after the wine tasting and with commendable dispatch suggested they have dinner together. ‘What? You mean like a date?’ She couldn't keep the incredulity out of her voice.
‘Erm . . . yuh . . . well . . . ‘ It was oddly reassuring to hear how discomfited he was. ‘I guess it would be a date, sort of.’
‘Travis, I haven't been on a date for four years –’ ‘Snap!’ He almost shouted down the phone, and that bonded them with laughter once more. ‘I haven't been on a date for four years; and I'll tell you something else, I can't stand the very word – it makes me think of fruit – ‘
‘Fruit?’
‘Y’ know – dates . . .’
This last little revelation hadn't struck such a chord with Karin, but she still agreed to meet Travis on the evening of the 29th April at the Royalton Hotel. ‘You're in the seventies,’ he'd said. ‘I'm in the twenties – we'll split the difference. Then if things are going well we can head downtown for dinner.’ He sounded a great deal surer on the phone than he felt. It was true, Travis hadn't been on a date for four years, and he hadn't slept over with anyone for nearing a decade.
Karen had had a sleepover more recently. About two years ago she'd met a man called Emil
at a weekend beach party out on Long Island.
Emil was small, dark, Austrian, in his forties. He'd been living in New York for eight years, and had an emoto Dave – for the last five. Emil admitted, frankly, that he'd been a procro in Salzburg, where he'd run a fashionable restaurant before deciding to emigrate. Karin took this in her stride. Emil was very charming, seemed absolutely sincere, and his relationship with Dave was unimpeachable – the big black emoto cradled his little grown-up with obvious affection. Lots of grown-ups had started out as procros and then decided that the whole messy business of sexual and emotional entanglement wasn't for them there was no shame, or obloquy in that. And just as many procros had found, after getting on in life a bit, that what they wanted more than anything else in the world was the absolute reassurance that an emoto would provide them with. If these procros were lucky the awakening would coincide with children growing up, leaving home, and they could slide without too much disruption from their procro-union to a proper, grown-up relationship with an emoto.
Emil led Karin to understand that this had been the case with him: ‘My ex-wife and I met and married when we were very young, you know. We both came from poor families, the kind of background where there were very few grown-ups, very few emotos. I suppose we were happy in a way – we knew no better. But slowly, over the years, the relentlessness of being with someone the whole time . . . someone who you touch intimately’ – his voice dropped lower – ‘touch sexually . . . Well, you know the terrible things that can happen.’ He shuddered, snuggled deeper into his emoto's firehose-thick arms. ‘Eventually, after our daughter had gone – at her own request, I must say – to a group home, we were both able to become grown-ups. We're still good friends though, and I see her whenever Dave and I go back to Salzburg which is a lot. Dave and I even have four-way sleepovers with Mitzi and her emoto, Gudrun.’
They had spent most of that day chatting, both of them cuddled by their emotos; the childlike giants standing waist deep in the ocean swell, cradling their respective grown-ups in their arms. ‘There is nothing more sensuous,’ Karin had said to Emil in an unguarded moment, ‘than the smell of wet emoto skin, wet emoto hair, and the great wet ocean.’ Emil gave her a peculiar sideways look.
But Jane had taken to Dave, and encouraged Karin to see Emil. Jane had dinner with Emil twice; and he'd taken her once to the Met, to see Don Giovanni. On all three occasions he was charm itself, courtly and leisured; as if, Karin had thought, the Habsburgs were the patrons of taste, rather than Texaco. If later, Karin felt awful for not paying proper attention to the subtext of Emil's charms, it was because she blamed herself. Blamed herself for not paying attention and for putting her trust in Jane's emoto intuition. After all, emotos weren't meant to protect you from others – only from yourself.
On their fourth date Emil suggested that Karen and Jane might like to sleep over at his apartment. Dave nodded his great cropped head vigorously. ‘It'll be great!’ he said to Jane – and the rest of them. ‘We can play together in the morning!’ The grown-ups laughed, but it was really Jane who sealed the deal, crying out, ‘Yes! With pillows too!’
‘Isn't that typical of an emoto!’ Emil exclaimed when he and Karin were at last alone together. ‘They really can be just like kids –’
‘But they aren't.’
‘I'm sorry?’ Emil was momentarily querulous, shocked by the intensity of her reaction.
‘They aren't children. They don't grow – they're big already. They don't make demands on you – you make demands on them. They don't have to be dressed, fed, wiped or groomed in any other way. They have good intuitions – and good dress sense if you trouble to develop it . . . ‘ Karin tailed off, realising that she was beginning to sound oddly impassioned. She was, also, already missing Jane, although the two emotos had only left their grownups a few minutes before.
Emil's apartment was on the Upper East Side, and the last thing Karin had seen before going to bed that fateful night were the soaring piles of the Van Eyck Expressway legging over the river's rumpled pewter, so solid, so supportive, so emotolike.
Karin was sleeping in the main bedroom, Emil in the spare. The emotos were closeted in the old water tank on top of the block, which Emil had tastefully converted like many other financially clever Manhattanite grownups – for emoto use. But during the night, despite the friendly locks on the door of the bedroom (friendly because they were bolts), Emil managed to get into the room. Presumably he had a secret passage, or some even stranger means of entry . . .
These thoughts were thumping with awful inconsequence through Karin's mussed mind as she stared at the dapper little man who was sitting beside her, on the edge of the bed, entirely self-possessed, wearing black silk pyjamas, and with his dumpy, manicured hands arranged neatly in his lap. At least he never actually touched her–that was something. But the violation of his presence was enough. To have him, at night, alone, this close to her, this able to touch her was – terrifying. Karin didn't so much know that she wanted Jane – as scream it. The scream was the knowledge. Karin screamed and screamed and screamed; at the same time she groped for the emotopager she had slung to one side of the bed a couple of hours before. The first scream chopped off what Emil had been trying to say to her: ‘All I want's a little cud –’ For ever afterwards Karin wondered what exactly it was that he'd wanted, ‘a little cud’, it was strangely enigmatic, unlike the man himself, who had been revealed as no grown-up – but a potential rapist.
There was that odd, shadowing memory of the sexual assault, and there was another discrepancy which Karin kept stuffed to the back of her mind, lest it rock too much the frail boat of her own sanity. Karin knew that Jane and Dave had to have been asleep – that's what emotos did at night, just like other humans. What's more, the emotos were sleeping three storeys up, on top of the building – so it couldn't have been Karin's screams that had woken them; and at the time, even through the fog of fear, she had, with bizarre clarity, appreciated that it might take Jane many minutes to reach her. But in fact Jane was there in seconds. There, and cradling Karin to her massive breast. There, and palming off Emil. There and admonishing Emil in that peculiarly affecting way that emotos – creatures devoid of any vestige of aggression-promoting sexuality – have: ‘You've scared, Karin, why did you do it? Oh Emil- this ruins everything. Oh Emil! If you touched her we shall have to call the police –’ In the corner Dave cowered, unsure of whether it was safe for him to go and comfort his own emoto. Emil looked inscrutable – altogether beyond cuddling. Dave was naked – another anomaly Karin filed in a bottle.
‘It's OK,’ Karin nearly shouted, she was so relieved to be able to respond, to react, not to be just a thing under the Austrian's bland brown eyes. ‘He didn't touch me.’
Jane gave her a searching look and adjudging that this was the truth, scooped up Karin, her clothes, her bag, and before her grown-up had had a chance to respond in any other way, she found herself being borne north towards the corner of the park: ‘We can get a taxivan there,’ said the willowy emoto, still holding Karin tightly to her. Jane never said anything more about the assault – and nor did Karin.
Not until tonight, that is. Karin sighed again. It was too late to call it off now – Travis would be on his way; and he didn't look like the kind of man who carried a phone with him, more the type to use a liveried servant, porting a missive on a salver. Thinking of this aspect of Travis, his unforced anachronism, made Karen smile. With such an innately gallant man, surely nothing could go wrong? There was this sense of security and there was the tangible security of Jane's arms. As ever, the emoto had sensed her mood perfectly, sashayed across the room and taken the grown-up in her arms. Karen marvelled anew at the grace of the giantess, and her physical perfection. Some emotos were so gross: the genetic effect of pumping the human frame up to two or three times its normal size could have bizarre consequences. Some emotos had hair as thick as wire on their bodies; and if they got bad acne it was truly something to behold, like the Grand Can
yon at sunset.
But Jane was perfection. Her skin a delicate honey shade; the down that covered it universally white-blonde; and soft, so soft. Karin relaxed back into the down, allowed herself to be enfolded by the honey. She felt the lower belly and pubic mound of the emoto nuzzle between her shoulder blades. Funny how an emoto's touch was so intimate, so comforting, and yet so utterly devoid of sexuality -let alone eroticism. The idea of Jane's vast vagina being employed in the nonsensical, animal jerkings of copulation was unthinkable, like imagining Botticelli's Venus squeezing a blackhead, or a chimpanzee addressing both houses of Congress.
Karin relaxed. Jane went on squeezing her in just the right way, swaying gently the while. New effusions of greenery on the trees lining the block below struck Karin's eye with a fresh intensity. It was a beautiful spring evening, she was young, she was secure, perhaps she was even ready for some experimentation, for some fun. Karin broke from the embrace and turned to face Jane, her arms outstretched. ‘Carry?’ she asked.
The evening went far, far better than either grown-up could have hoped for – and as for the emotos? Well, they rubbed along pretty well, much as they always do.
Travis hadn't only seized on the Royalton for reasons of mutual convenience – it also made a good talking point. Well past its fashionable sell-by date, the hotel's décor retailed a series of dazzlingly crass decadences, which Travis knew provided salience for his own sepia image. To go anywhere more established, or timeless in its own right, would only set his own fuzzy grasp on contemporaneity off to lesser effect. But in the large, modernist lobby bar of the Royalton, with its primary curves and aerodynamically sound light fitments, he would be thrown into sharp relief, and he would be able to entertain Karin with his pointed remarks about the waxing and waning of status, of money, of beauty, of all things human.