Stories: All-New Tales

by Neil Gaiman; Al Sarrantonio

  Sociable, a little formal, a knowing catalyst, Rex introduced me to friends he had known at UT, including the talented fine artists Peggy Zorin, Jilly Cornish and her husband, Jimmy, as well as others who were yet to leave Texas en route for Mysterious and London. At last we had a full set of talented contributors who could give us a substantial inventory, interacting with increased gravity, attracting other writers who added superb stories to our contents list, the best anyone had read in ages, combining a sophistication and vitality taken for granted today but representing a quantum jump at the time and making us the most celebrated fiction magazine of our day. The debate was suddenly over. We could demonstrate everything we’d discussed. That was what Rex Fisch did for Mysterious and the rough-and-ready movement we’d always denied was a movement. We entered a golden age. Almost every story we published was anthologized. A good many won prizes.

  I knew of course that our little revolution would collapse rapidly once we achieved what we hoped for and our individual careers were made. Real life grew darker after those good years. The first tragedy was Jane Allard’s death on a trip back to the family home near Nantes. Billy moved to Streatham to bring up his kids. We drove over with our own to visit from time to time. Next, Rex took part in a poetry tour with several well-known poets, including the notoriously omnisexual Spike Allison. He came back gay (no surprise to his friends) and monstrously troubled about it after Spike dumped him on their return to London. Our relationships were only just surviving the divorces, rearrangements and general infighting. People join revolutions until they get what they want as individuals, then start quarrelling over the spoils, however imaginary. I was surprised by how many of our friendships remained intact. Writing mostly nonfiction, Jake settled down with a local girl, Daisy Angelino, in Portobello Road, near our offices. Rex met Chick Archer, who was from Maine, at an S & M bar in Paris. They fell in love, travelled for a few years, then bought their lovely freezing old house in the English Lakes. The place couldn’t be more Wordsworthy with its hard, driving cloud banks bringing relentless rain, rewarding you with bursts of sunshine, the whole fell moving like a living body in its contours and shadows, over which Rex presided with a rather proprietorial air at his huge sitting-room windows. Sometimes the wind bawled against the long scar of Wattendale Edge, creating waves across the black tarn. You can see those landscapes, beautifully drawn by Chick in their Mary Stone comic. They’re still syndicated. Almost nobody knew Rex wrote that great, gritty newspaper strip which made them more money than anything else and which explained why their home smelled so strongly of well-loved wealth.

  Rex and I still made each other laugh uncontrollably, much to Chick’s silent disgust. This of course drove the sadistic Rex to increase Chick’s discomfort. I suspect that’s why we didn’t get invited up so often. Harry went to live in Ireland with his Dublin-born wife, to look after her mother who lived on a miserable council estate just outside Cork. Stuck there, Harry grew increasingly depressed and began a long book on Nietschze. I saw him occasionally when he came to do research at the British Library. Jimmy and Jill Cornish settled near the old mill in Tufnell Hill. He wrote reviews, criticism for the LRB and nonfiction guides. She produced commercial posters to supplement her gallery shows. Others continued to get novels published and exhibitions arranged with increased success. Pete Bates disappeared on a cycling holiday in France. His bike was found at the bottom of a sea cliff in Brittany. Other good writers and artists came and went. Charlie Ratz joined us as our designer. I performed and made records with the Deep Fix.

  I thought we were extending the ’60s golden age but really it was the end. I continued to publish Mysterious but now it was edited by others as affairs and relationships collapsed dramatically across four continents. Gender roles rolled in every possible direction. Stable quartets became full orchestras; ramshackle duets became rock-solid trios. If you visited friends in San Francisco, you needed a complicated chart to know who was with whom, why, when and where. As he and Rex settled in to do the old Alan Bennetts, Chick now wore the slightly self-conscious air of a resting chorus boy down from London for the weekend. Rex had exchanged his Texan brogue for a rather attractive Cowardian drawl which disappeared on the few occasions he phoned home. Chick’s tones grew increasingly clipped. They were models of moral righteousness, so thoroughly faithful that when AIDS came it gave them no hint of anxiety. They adopted a very superior attitude to everyone else, of course. And particularly, it turned out, to me. With three much-loved offspring to care for, I weakly divorced Helena, married again and moved across the street with my child bride, Jenny.

  Though I had suffered with Rex through his sexual transition and every minor treachery practiced on and by him, he chose to see my breakup with Helena as perhaps the most infamous deed since Eddie’s in Death of the Heart. My separation from Helena was reasonably amicable, I thought. I was still supporting everyone. I’d done it pretty straightforwardly. But the first time I took Jenny up to Wattendale to see them and a group of friends they’d invited, I thought the murmured commentary from Rex would never end. If Kim and Di Stanley hadn’t as usual conned me into giving them a lift up from Bury I would have gone back on the Saturday morning. I was furious and very close to ending our friendship on the spot.

  Jenny talked me out of it. “I love hearing you and Rex tell your stories.” She grinned. “You’re such great liars.”

  I hardly saw Rex or Chick for the next three years. Chick sent a card at Christmas with just his signature on it. Jenny sent one from us. But I’d had enough. Rex wasn’t the only moody bastard writing for Mysterious and I just didn’t have the energy to work at anything more. At least he was still sending his stuff in, via Charlie Ratz, the new editor. Charlie still saw him regularly. His parents had retired to a massive house outside Keswick, only a couple of miles from Rex and Chick. Whenever Charlie returned to London, he had a new story or two with him. Or Jake Slade would go up and bring something back.

  Rex knew the prestige of publishing in the mag. The public saw no ruptures. We were getting more praise than was probably healthy. In fact, a critic brought about our reconciliation. Julie Mistral, the NYT reviewer who had been our early champion, now lived about half the year in England. She threw one of her so-called A-list parties and we were all invited. The party was held in the huge rundown hotel restaurant she rented.

  Jenny and I were amongst the first to arrive. Rex and Chick were already there, sipping Jacquesson from dusty flutes. Rex spotted me, came over and greeted us with all his old, amused affection. The Great Big Hi as Jake called it. We were embraced. We were kissed. We were mystified.

  I was wise enough not to ask how or why this had happened but Jenny found out later from Chick. Rex had come across a review written by Helena for Tribune, which had a circulation of about twenty. She had failed to praise Lost Time Serenade, Rex’s Proustian parody, as much as Rex felt it should be praised. It wasn’t a bad review, given I knew she’d found the whole thing pretentious and unworthy of such a good writer, but with Rex you were expected as a friend either to praise him to the skies or not review him at all. Now I knew why Helena hadn’t been invited and since I’d never made that particular error of diplomacy I was back in favour again. Then Chick came up and gave me that look of wordless disgust, which was his way of maintaining friendships when Rex blew hot and cold. I was still unsure of him. I was a bit unsure of everything, in fact, because Jenny was just getting into what she’d call her experimental phase, which would enliven our sex life and destroy our marriage. Fourteen years younger than me, she felt she hadn’t experienced enough of the world.

  I have to admit our sexual experiments were funny to me at first. There’s not a lot of sexual pleasure to be got from hopping shouting around your bedroom having failed to wallop your wife’s bottom and whacked your own leg instead. I had no instinct for it. Eventually though I was able to play the cruel Sir Charles with reasonable skill. A bit like faking an orgasm.

  Ever since we’d
been together Jenny had a fantasy about me watching one of my friends fuck her. There were a thousand scenarios in her little head and scarcely one in mine. I think I used up all my stories while I was working. I didn’t dream either. I needed a rest from tale spinning at the end of the day. But I did my best. I hated to disappoint her.

  I had an idea of the scenario she planned one evening when Rex turned up holding a bottle of Algerian red in one hand and his dripping cap and overcoat in the other, beaming. “Hi!” A wild giggle at his own physical discomfort. Charming. On his best and happiest behaviour. He embraced us in his soft gigantic arms. He had some meetings with Universal Features and wanted to stay for a bit. I thought the evening was to be a celebration of our reborn friendship. Jenny was all over him, flirting like a fag hag, bringing Rex out all atwitter. So we dined. While I washed up, she whispered in his ear.

  It turned out Jenny loved threesomes but mostly with her looking on frigging herself blind while waiting to get fucked by the least exhausted bloke. Mostly that was me, as Rex jerked off. That image is no more appealing to me than to you. After three or four nights and days of this, I realised that Rex was getting most of his buzz from knowing Chick had no suspicion of what he was up to.

  Of course, to add to his own wicked relish Rex told Chick what he’d done with us. He had to. He never could resist a good story, particularly if he was telling it. Our few nights of passionless sex had become a means of manipulating Chick. This time Chick cut us.

  Inevitably Jenny and I grew further apart as our games got more fantastic. Rex had already been through all that with Chick in Paris. Real-life fantasies are distractions for a working writer. Years before Rex told me that himself. “It’s as bad as going to law. The story starts to take over. Like falling in love. All sentimentality and melodrama. The scenarios are repetitive, conventional. All they offer are the comforts of genre.” He was right. Sex games are more boring than an Agatha Christie novel.

  Anyway Jenny, despite our investment in special clothing and sex aids, wasn’t getting a big enough buzz out of my efforts. It’s like horror movies or superhero comics, you either stop and give them a rest or you have to keep heightening the action. Even if the games didn’t bore me, our widening circle of acquaintances did. I wasn’t finding enough time alone. Individuals, couples, whole fucking communes got involved. If they gave me a good paragraph or two, I wouldn’t have minded so much, but there was an infantile sameness about their scenarios. Jenny and I were driven further apart by what the courts call intimacy. I tried to get to see Rex and Chick on their own, desperately needing to find out how they had rescued themselves from the crack of the crop, the smell of damp leather, the spell of repetition. Did you just grow out of it? Sometimes Jenny seemed to be flagging until some fresh variation on a familiar theme perked her up again. She was a natural addict. I’ve never been seriously addicted to anything. So I started trying to get her off the habit. It didn’t work. She made excuses, started doing stuff in secret. I hate ambiguity in my day-to-day life. There’s enough in my work. A writer needs routines and certainties. What can I say? As well as losing real intimacy with old friends, I lost it with Jenny. In a half-arsed attempt to restore our earlier closeness, she told me some of her new adventures. Then I got hooked for a while. I started pumping her for more revelations. She owed me that, I decided. They added nothing but did become pretty chilling. The seduction of underage girls. Things my friends liked to do. It amazed me how so many women took the odd rape for granted. Too many secrets revealed. Friendships frayed. Rex came back in the picture. I moved out.

  I took my kids, whom I’d been missing anyway, on a long trip round the USA. It made us feel better. To my relief we grew back together. Feeling my old self I got home, bought a short lease on a little flat in Fulham, just when Notting Hill turned into a gentrified suburb. I saw enough of Jenny to know it was thoroughly over. I didn’t like what she’d done to herself. She’d dyed her hair bright blond and her brown eyes had a vaguely dazed, mirrorlike quality, as if they only reflected and no longer saw anything. She’d lost her sense of humour, too, and was into various odd relationships, still searching for the good life. When I shifted the last of my stuff she made a halfhearted attempt to patch things up. She wanted to have a baby, she said, and get back into our old domestic routine. Even while she proposed this deal, a bloke I vaguely knew was sleeping upstairs in what had been our bed, where once, like Proust, I’d done most of my writing. From being a place of concentration in which I conceived stories it had become a place of distraction, where real stories died. I said she could keep the place. All she had to do was pay the mortgage.

  “But I love you.” She wept. She made an awkward attempt to remind me of the old days. “I love just lying in your arms at night while you tell me a story.”

  I was sad. “It’s too late, Jenny.” Those stories were over.

  I went up to Windermere, phoned Rex and Chick, but Chick was frosty. Did I know I had almost broken them up? I apologized. I said how much I regretted what had happened. Rex, just as distant and haughty, put the phone down on me. I saw them in Kendal once or twice and in Grasmere. They wouldn’t speak to me. Once, over his shoulder, Rex gave me the most peculiar leer. Did he wish we were still deceiving Chick? It made me shudder. Was something wrong with him?

  Of course I longed to be back with Helena but she’d settled down with a jolly Scottish chef and was doing her best work. Why would she want to change that?

  Even though our pillow talk inspired a couple of shorts, I really hated having been part of Jenny’s daisy chain. Some of those people I never wanted to see again, others I needed distance from; I wasn’t ready to see Charlie Ratz or Jonny Fowler yet. Pete was still missing in France, presumed dead. I gave up any interest in Mysterious, which was now doing fine without me, bought a house near Ingleton, West Yorks, and settled in first with Emma MacEwan, who couldn’t stand the rain and cold, and then started seeing a local woman who disapproved of central heating. I desperately hoped to restore my friendship with Rex, even after I met Lucinda, to this day the love of my life. Lu found my obsession weird, I know, until she eventually met Rex in Leeds, at a Ted Hughes literary weekend we’d all been invited to. Lu’s teenage daughter loved Rex’s work and wanted him to autograph her books. She was too shy to ask him, so Lucy, her fair hair flying and blue eyes blazing, marched up to the table where he was sitting and said: “I gather you’re Mike’s old friend. Well, I’m his new wife and this is my daughter, who’s read most of your work and loves it. I think it’s pretty good, too. So what about some autographs and while you’re at it why don’t you two shake hands?” And, that being just one of her powers, we did.

  Later at the bar Rex told me Chick blamed me for the infamous “seduction.” At that idea we continued to laugh for the rest of the day, until the next, when Chick turned up, glaring when he saw us, and Lucinda, nearly six feet herself, took him in hand as well. “It’s all over,” she said. “If you’re going to blame anyone, blame that poor, barmy bitch Jenny. She got you all involved in her folly and now look at you.” And when Chick grumbled that Rex was still seeing Jenny, which surprised me, Lu said: “Well, she’s poison as far as I can tell, and he doesn’t need her now he has Mike back.” Chick teared up then. He told her I was the best friend Rex had ever had but I had betrayed them both. Which again I admitted. And the following weekend Lu and I went up and stayed with them. On our way home she said: “You two could make Jeremiah roll about on the floor laughing himself sick.”

  I didn’t know why Rex went on seeing Jenny, unless he simply enjoyed wounding Chick. He still had that cruel streak in him. Chick and I talked about it. Chick thought it had to be directed at him, too. He guessed Jenny was a substitute for me, especially when Rex dropped Jenny so soon after we were reconciled. She still phoned him.

  I saw Jenny myself a few times after that. She seemed more her old self in some ways. She’d had twins and was living with her mother in Worthing, on the Sussex coast. She had
the washed-out look of so many single mothers, said she was happy, if poor, and even suggested my “sexual conservatism” had dulled me down. Next time I bumped into her in Kensington High Street she was again pale, overpainted, dyed up. She looked as if all the vitality had been sucked from her. I thought she was doing junk. Her eyes were back to blank. Was she living in London? Did she have someone? She laughed and looked even more devitalized. “None of your business,” she said. I couldn’t argue with that.

  Of course, I was curious to know what she and Rex had been up to. I guessed she hadn’t accepted that he’d dropped her. At a party in Brighton a year or two later she looked worse than ever, clinging to Rupert Herbert, one of those new Low Tories on the Spectator. More makeup, too blond and getting through a packet of Gauloises a minute. I did really feel sorry for her. Then Rex turned up and snubbed her so royally he pissed me off, so I made a point of going over to talk to her but she snubbed me in turn. Lucinda came over and murmured “poor bitch” and meant it. Between us the Mysterious crew had ruined a nice, unimaginative girl, she thought. Not entirely fair. You could hear Jenny over the general buzz talking about some famous film producer she’d lived with. He’d been the one who bought The Vices of Tom from Rex and then turned it into that pot of toss. “The bastard…,” she was saying. You could guess the rest. Maybe Lu was right.

  For the next ten years or so life settled into routines nobody felt like messing with though Rex grew increasingly unreasoning in his arguments with editors, then publishers, then agents until almost nobody would work with him. His books didn’t sell enough for any editor to bother keeping him sweet. He took offence easily and frequently and, through his vengeful verse, publicly. Chick said he could no longer manage him. I would have thought this a good thing. I believed Chick’s natural leanings towards convention and literary respectability pushed Rex away from his saving self-mocking vulgarity. Balzac and Vautrin were less his models than Proust or Albertine. His work seemed to apologise for itself. He lost his popular touch without gaining critical prestige. Only Mary Stone went on making money for them. His short stories came out less frequently, but he kept his habit of phoning and often reading the whole thing to you. And he still enjoyed inventing a story when he got your answering machine. “Oh, I know what you’re doing. You’ve met that good-looking farmer again and gone badger watching with him.” Usually the time would be up before he could complete his fantasy. His new novels tended to peter out after a few chapters. I’d get frustrated and consider continuing them for him. They were wonderful ideas. Occasionally they would reemerge when a way of telling them occurred to him. His aptitude for ironic narrative verse never left him. I’d labour for hours to get anything close to what usually took him minutes. Chick helped him develop his taste for classical music, which is how he came to write his three operas, one of which he based on Kersh’s The Brazen Bull and another on Balzac’s Illusions Perdue but he became snobbish about popular music or he’d have written some great lyrics. I used a few of his verses in my own music stuff. I inserted another into one of my hack thrillers, its redeeming feature. His only opera to reach the stage was a version of Firbank’s Cardinal Pirelli. Rex delighted in upsetting Catholics, although his attacks meant little to most of us.