Al's Well

by Dark, Gregory

  “The analogy is not appropriate because you think of upper gears in a car as those where the drive is less laborious, the engine is coasting, not struggling so hard. That would not be my perception of what was happening to Michael and Petrova. There was no coasting for them. The gears always seemed to be whining. It was the pitch that changed; the whine, though, remained constant.

  “What I do think happened in Oslo … No. No, let me rephrase that …

  “What happened at the hotel is that they found they had a sexual rapport. Wrong again: They found out that what they had imagined would be a sexual rapport was a real one. And what happened in Oslo was that they found out their emotional rapport was a real one too.

  “There’s a big difference, after all, between being friends before you’re lovers, and being friends afterwards. They found out in Oslo that their friendship was able to transcend their lust. Well, perhaps not transcend it, thinking about it, but at least cope with it.

  “That’s what I inferred, of course. I knew Petrova but I was never really close to her. She wasn’t likely to confide in me. And Michael … Well, I was close to Michael, and he confided in me as much as in anyone. But almost never about those kinds of thing. Oh he was kind, Michael, considerate, generous to a fault – except of himself. Of his time, certainly, of his money, his concern, all that, certainly – and certainly to a fault. But of himself? Of what he was feeling, what was happening to him, no. He was a Scrooge in that department, a Shylock.

  “I’m so sorry. Where are my manners? Would you care for a drink of something?”

  +++

  “You’re going to think it real strange, what I’m going to say to you. It’s not, you understand, that I think of you as my counsellor or anything and it’s private. It is private, I know that. But it’s also relevant. … Indicative, maybe more than relevant.

  “I don’t know, though, can anything be indicative which isn’t relevant? Or vice versa? Your eyes, they’ve glassed over again. That means, I guess, I’m straying from the point. Again. It’s because … I’m embarrassed is what it is. Suddenly all sexually coy. God knows where that came from.

  “He wouldn’t, is what I’m trying to say … He found it hard, almost impossible, Mike, to … you know … blah-di-blah in my dah-di-dah … oh shit … slurp, let us say, in my strudel. Shit, you know what I’m saying.

  “And, ‘cause I know he’d be shy about it, I was shy – Jesus, was I shy! – about asking him. You know?

  “See, once or twice, myself I’d been too excited to … you know … ‘veni’. Yeah, I know that sounds weird. It’s only happened to me before, oh, maybe half-a-dozen times in my life. Maybe that’s happened to you too? Don’t give much away there, now do you? Maybe too I was actually, on those occasions, too uptight, I don’t know. It felt like I was too excited to ‘veni’. And I’d sort of apologised to him for that. You do, don’t you? So, when I finally plucked up the courage, he tried laying the same thing on me. He tried telling me he had been too excited too. If you see what I mean.

  “It had nothing to do with that, of course. What it was, it was what I called the ‘princess syndrome’. Or the ‘pedestal syndrome’: You … you know … slurp in the strudels of prostitutes; not of princesses. Never, in fact, in the strudels of princesses.

  “That’s one of those things which sounds very romantic, on paper all part of that heraldic love – do I mean ‘heraldic’? – that ‘love’ of the Dark Ages where knights stayed constant throughout decades of crusading to their chastity-belted beloveds. But the reality of that kind of love is that it’s not reality. And because it’s not reality, instead of flattering us, it cheapens us.

  “That kind of sex is a form of sex I find completely satisfying – as both giver and receiver. If I’m … you know … and he refuses to … – or his psyche won’t let him … you know … screw the implied compliment, all it feels like is that he’s rejecting the proffered gift. He’s also telling me that he doesn’t think I’m actually as sexy as he keeps telling me I am. Know what I mean?

  “See, I’m not a princess. Neither am I a prostitute. And the disservice rendered us by the Puritanism of our parents’ generation, its stigmatization of sex – its hypocritical Puritanism, I might add – is the inculcation into our minds that ‘nice’ girls don’t do such things. And I believe that notion was inculcated far more into the minds of young men than young women.

  “I was … what was I? … fifteen, I guess. Not even. To be fair, I looked closer to nineteen. Still and all. I was fully developed physically. And, sexually, I was quite savvy without being very experienced. Still and all … I was at a dance. There was a band. The lead guitarist noticed me. Probably not too hard to notice, I was all doe-eyed and cow-eyed and everything-else-eyed. Mostly what I was, when he clearly noticed me, I was flattered. Hugely flattered. Really. No, incredibly flattered.

  “He came off stage. He winked at me. And he tossed his head to indicate we should go outside together. Shit, what was I thinking of, thinking back on it? I was lucky I wasn’t killed or anything.

  “It was one of those real balmy Arizonan nights. And it smelled of … God, I don’t know, some goddamn plant and it smelled – this I remember so well – of cleanness. Yeah, it smelled of being big and open and clean. He kissed me, like, right off the bat. No ‘hi’s or ‘how you doing?’s. Just, you know, grabbed and kissed. Full-throttle. Tongue straight down the throat … straight down – for Christ’s sake – the oesophagus. And that lasted for, oh, about a second and a half before he had his hand pummelling my breast. Squeezing it, like, you know, we do in Europe when we’re buying melons, checking to see whether they’re ripe. That was foreplay. And foreplay extended over, well, maybe four seconds – maybe that’s why it’s called ‘foreplay’. Then he pushed on my shoulders, forced me to my knees. He unzippered himself, pulled on my hair, got my mouth open that way, and just … shit, you know what it is I’m telling you.

  “I was outraged. Outraged. I nearly bit the sucker off. As it was, all four foot nothing of me, I brought myself up to my full height, stood on my tippy-toes, and I gave him such a slap. A real good all-five-digits-embossed-on-his-cheek slap. And you know what? That outraged him. Outraged him. And you know what else, I’ll bet you any money you care to name, he don’t slurp either in his girlfriend’s strudel, that s-o-b. Because you slurp in the strudel of girls who’ll blahdi-blah you before they know your name, you do not slurp in the strudels of women you care about – or care for.

  “Finally, both syndromes – hookers’ and princesses’ –, they both abuse us as women. Where I parted company with certain of my sisters in the Women’s movement, I didn’t agree that, because we’re not only sex objects, we’re not at all sexual. It seemed to me, to deny our sexuality was to deny our humanity. And it’s my humanity which I want recognising as much as my feminism or femininity or anything else.

  “See, princesses don’t go to the bathroom or feel tired or scratchy or not want to go out to dinner one night or not want to talk to someone on the phone.

  “To Al I was a princess. No, Superwoman, more like. Which meant I had to do everything, sort everything. ‘Cause that to Superwoman is no problem at all. I can always go that extra mile because I’m Superwoman and I can travel faster, for Christ’s sake, than a speeding bullet. Going extra miles, that’s frigging child’s play.

  “Girlfriends of mine used to tell me how easy-going Al was. How lucky I was to have such an easy-going husband! You know how mad that used to make me? It drove me crazy. It wasn’t that he was easygoing. Oh, to be fair, I don’t think either it was laziness. Not, ‘least, in the conventional sense of the word ‘laziness’. But what, yes, it was: it was a sort of emotional cowardice. Because I was Superwoman, all the decisions, they were left to me. And because it was me who had made them, it couldn’t be him who had made the wrong one. ‘Don’t blame me,’ he’d be able to say. ‘You decided to do…’ whatever it was. About anything. And everything.

  “Frankly, I d
on’t believe men like war nearly as much as folklore tries to convince us they do. I don’t believe either that there is an unsuppressible urge in them to fight – leastways, not to kill. But one of the attractions of that kind of all-out conflict is that it makes heroism so easy. Or rather that it makes cowardice so hard. All you’ve got to do in a war to stop being a coward is to obey orders. You don’t have to invent orders or challenge them. Especially you don’t have to challenge yourself. You are not responsible for your own actions – not responsible for yourself, not even to yourself.

  “Getting killed is so easy. So frigging easy. It’s the staying alive that’s hard. The real heroes of war are not the poor suckers who get themselves killed, but the even poorer suckers who rely on the people who get themselves killed – the parents (My God, the parents!), the widows (and widowers), the orphans, those whose loss is made even greater by the apparent confiscation of their future. Those who have to start again. From day frigging one again. And who manage to do that and find along the way some crumbs of comfort, some untapped inner resource which enables them to do so with a degree about them of cheerfulness. Can you imagine the heroism of that?

  “Mike’s grandfather volunteered for both world wars. He was thought of as a hero. Meantime, he drank his way into bankruptcy court. You want to know what Mike’s grandmother thought of him? Did he slurp, I wonder, in his girlfriend’s strudel? When he had sex with his wife, was he having sex with a woman or a princess?

  “The princess and the hooker, now I think about it, they have so much in common. I mean, so much in common. The hooker stars in pornography. But the tales the princess stars in, all that really is, it’s emotional pornography.

  “Despite what her brother asked at the funeral, the general perception of Princess Diana is one that is an icon – a figure far closer to Mother Teresa than to Diana Spencer. And because that is such a distortion, that is not revering a memory of her, but perpetrating an abuse. Perpetrating and perpetuating a myth. The memory of Mother Teresa is also iconic, I might add. More to do with myth than reality.

  “Do you think I could get a glass of water? I’m getting kinda dry here.”

  +++

  My darling Trove,

  I’m amazed that I’m amazed: Nothing about this amazing experience has not amazed me. So, being amazed again should by now be something I should accept as completely normal. But I am amazed. I’m amazed that you should want me to write any more of this; and I’m amazed that I’m glad you do. I’ve never thought of myself as much of a letter-writer … never thought of myself, in fact, as much of any kind of a writer. Not even a shopping-list writer.

  I have considered myself, though, as someone who was open and candid. A nothing-to-hide sort of a guy. And I don’t have anything to hide. Not from you. Which is not to say I don’t hide things. I do. It’s just that I don’t really know why I do. It’s not that they’re worth the hiding. The secretiveness with which I surround them, I mean, is not commensurate with their importance. It seems to me, the skeletons in my cupboard are so insignificant as not to be worth their de-cupboarding.

  What I’m not trying to say is that I intend to keep my secrets secret. What I am saying is that I can’t, conjuror-like, fanfare their arrival. Because that would be vastly to overrate their importance. It would give an impression from which you’d expect me to present, at least, a grizzly bear. And I’d produce a koala. (Is that how you spell ‘grizzly’? I have a habit of spelling it wrongly and changing the giant mammal into one which is aging and curmudgeonly.)

  We were taught not to speak. Both at home and at school. Maybe by the world at large, I don’t know. You didn’t cry. And you didn’t complain. In most households, there was still more than a residue of the axiom that children should be seen but not heard. As he did most things, my father took that both very literally and to its very limit.

  Well before all the nonsense spoken by the IT propagandists, my father knew that knowledge is power. But knowledge for him was a weapon. One which later on he could blackmail you with, or that he could use to belittle you or deride you or … Well, it had a thousand different uses, knowledge. Time after time after time again – I was a really stupid child and an even more stupid young adult – I’d tell him stuff. Secret stuff, you know – oh, not stuff of any importance – not to anyone but me. And time after time again – time after time after time again – six months or so later (maybe even a couple of years later), that confidence would be used to wound me: to score a point with his cronies, or for the sake of a cheap laugh at my expense, or to prove my fecklessness or my stupidity … or … or … or. I found out early on it wasn’t safe. I found out but, as you see, I didn’t learn. I think it was probably despite myself that I did learn that. It was a long struggle. Which means it’s also going to be a long struggle – it has to be a long struggle – to unlearn it.

  It wasn’t safe either with my mother. But her breaches of confidentiality tended to happen immediately. She didn’t squirrel knowledge away in the way my father did. Did I tell you they separated whilst I was still quite small?

  It’s a defence I’ve built up. I see that now. And it’s pretty efficient. I also see that. You saw through it. You see through me so efficiently. I appear to be so open, so full of self-exposure. But it’s a bluff. A feint with the left hand to disguise where the real trick is being performed, with the right.

  I still cannot talk. It’s a huge weakness. Sorry. I’m really sorry. Because, however much I want to, I still can’t. I’m still so frightened of it. Oh, this is all subconscious stuff, Trove. I think I talk. I kid myself that I’m talking. And most of the time those listening think I am talking. And so do I. I’m caught up in the bluff quite as much as those listening to me. Probably more. In fact, almost certainly more. Usually an audience is only superficially interested in what you’re saying. You’re far more interested in your words than they are.

  I did an experiment once at a dinner party. I said nothing to the two strangers either side of me, merely prompted them when their concentration had lapsed, or when their train-of-thought was stuck in a tunnel. Both guests phoned the hostess the next day and, in thanking her for a wonderful evening, independently of each other commented to her on the brilliance and scintillation of my conversation.

  Oh, believe me, I don’t tell that story from any sense of superiority – and certainly not out of a belief in the brilliance or scintillation of my conversation. I’m sure on innumerable occasions the tables have been turned and it was me gassing away astounded by the charm and perspicacity of the person with whom I was engaged in ‘conversation’. I’m only saying, we all of us tend to think we’re having a good chat when what we mean is we’re having a good moan, or a good getting-it-off-our-chest, or a good opinionating, or a good soliloquy.

  “Tell me about you,” you said. Do you remember? We were in bed. In Oslo. It was getting late.

  I was quite indignant. That I remember. Wounded, probably. Yes, quite indignant. But I couldn’t show it, could I? You couldn’t be allowed to see that you’d touched a nerve.

  It’s the same ridiculous thing I do at the dentist. You know, when’s he’s poking at your teeth with that pointy thing, trying to find holes. You try, don’t you? … well, at least, I try not to wince. Not even to allow a flicker of pain to cross my face. Otherwise he’ll drill. And drilling hurts. The fact that the drilling is a fish-pond by comparison with the Pacific Ocean of tooth-ache is neither here nor there. If I leave the dentist’s without him having done anything, I think that’s a triumph. Even if my tooth is still hurting.

  Same deal, Trove. Same sodding deal. If I let you see me wince, then you’ll tell me to address the pain. No pain, nothing to address.

  “What do you want to know?” I raised myself on my arms, tried to bury myself deeper in you. Your eyes were closed. There was a spot of saliva on the left of your mouth. You obviously sensed it at that moment. Your tongue came out to lick it away. It couldn’t reach. You brushed it away with your
hand. You were smiling. Not a Cheshire Cat smile. Not even of the cat who got the canary. More of a cat who’d been promised canary-on-toast later that evening.

  “Whatever it is,” you said, “you don’t want to tell me.”

  “There’s nothing I don’t want to tell you,” I said. I kissed your eyelids. You wiggled a bit and ‘mmmed’ yummily.

  “Bullshit,” you said.

  “I lo- …” I started to say. And you put a finger to my mouth to shh me, and opened one of your eyes as a warning not to continue. We still didn’t in those days say we loved one another. All these charades we go through in life!

  “I want to know you,” you said. I tried to find that funny, tried to suggest that, as we had known each other for more than a decade and had just performed one of the most intimate acts possible between two people, there wasn’t (as you were aware) a lot left to know.

  “Right,” you said, “and I’m the queen of Sheba.”

  “Or, as Dorothy Parker would have it, the queen of Romania.”

  “Don’t you ever get sick of proving my points?” you said. To which, when I looked to you for an explanation, you added: “Classic avoiding-the-question technique, Michael.”

  “What question?” I asked, I thought in all innocence.

  “Avoiding the issue, then, for Christ’s sake. Jeez!” you said. And I was scared for a moment you were serious. And, you know what?, I was right to be scared. Because, just for a moment, you were serious. And then you grabbed my head and bussed me full on the mouth. It wasn’t a kiss. No tongues were involved. Not at that moment. But it was a big, one mother of a smacker of a buss.

  And then you pulled my head away. And you looked at me. You looked at me and looked at me. I was stroking your eyebrows, I remember. My other hand was propping up my head. You were holding my ears. Gazing at me, gazing into me, peering through the smear of the soul’s windows, having a good butcher’s at all the goods on offer within. Gazing at me as I hadn’t been gazed at for I couldn’t remember how long.