by David Lodge
“Down there, down there to your left,” said Dr. O’Shea. “There’s Mr. Reilly at the door, looking out for us. God bless you, Mr. Zapp. It’s terribly good of you to turn out on a night like this.”
“You’re welcome,” said Morris, drawing up in front of the house, and fending off the attempts of the distracted Mr. Reilly, evidently under the impression that Morris was the doctor, to drag him from behind the wheel.
But it was good of him, uncharacteristically good of Morris Zapp. The truth of the sentiment struck him more and more forcibly as he sat in the cold and cheerless parlour of the Reilly house waiting for O’Shea to finish his ministrations, and as he drove him back through the shadowy streets, listening with half an ear to lurid descriptions of Mrs. Reilly’s symptoms. He cast his mind back over the day—helping Mrs. Swallow look for her husband’s book, letting the Irish kid watch his TV, driving O’Shea around to his patients—and wondered what had come over him. Some creeping English disease of being nice, was it? He would have to watch himself.
…
Philip decided it was not too far to walk home from the Hogans’ party, but wished he had phoned for a cab when it began to rain. He would really have to set about getting himself a car, a business he had postponed from fear of tangling with American second-hand car dealers, no doubt even more intimidating, venal and treacherous than their British counterparts. When he arrived at the house on Pythagoras Drive he discovered that he had forgotten his latchkey—the final aggravation of an evening already thoroughly spoiled by Charles Boon and Mrs. Zapp. Fortunately someone was in the house, because he could hear music playing faintly; but he had to ring the bell several times before the door, retained by a chain, opened a few inches and the face of Melanie Byrd peered apprehensively through the aperture. Her face brightened.
“Oh, hi! It’s you.”
“Terribly sorry—forgot my key.”
She opened the door, calling over her shoulder, “It’s OK, only Professor Swallow.” She explained with a giggle: “We thought you were the fuzz. We were smoking.”
“Smoking?” Then his nostrils registered a sweetish, acrid odour on the air and the penny dropped. “Oh, yes, of course.” The “of course” was an attempt to sound urbane, but succeeded only in sounding embarrassed, which indeed he was.
“Like to join us?”
“Thank you, but I don’t smoke. Not, that is…”
Philip floundered. Melanie laughed. “Have some coffee, then. Pot is optional.”
“Thanks awfully, but I’d better get myself something to eat.” Melanie, he couldn’t help observing, looked remarkably fetching this evening in a white peasant-style dress that reached to her bare feet, her long brown hair loose about her shoulders, her eyes bright and dilated. “First,” he added.
“There’s some pizza left from dinner. If you like pizza.”
Oh, yes, he assured her, he loved pizza. He followed Melanie down the hall to the ground-floor living-room, luridly lit by a large orange paper globe suspended about two feet from the floor, and furnished with low tables, mattresses, cushions, an inflatable armchair, brick-and-plank bookshelves and an expensive-looking complex of stereo equipment emitting plaintive Indian music. The walls were covered with psychedelic posters and the floor was littered with ashtrays, plates, cups, glasses, magazines and record sleeves. There were three young men in the room and two young women. The latter, Melanie’s flat-mates Carol and Deirdre, Philip had already met. Melanie introduced him casually to the three young men, whose names he promptly forgot, identifying them by the various kinds of fancy dress they wore—one in Confederate Civil War uniform, one in cowboy boots and a tattered ankle-length suede topcoat and the third in loose black judo garb—he was also black himself and wore sunglasses with black frames, just in case there was any doubt about where he stood on the racial issue.
Philip sat down on one of the mattresses, feeling the shoulders of his English suit ride up to nuzzle his ears as he did so. He took off the jacket and loosened his tie in a feeble effort to fit in with the general sartorial style of the company. Melanie brought him a plate of pizza and Carol poured him a glass of harsh red wine from a gallon bottle in a wicker basket. While he ate, the others passed from hand to hand what he knew must be a “joint.” When he had finished the pizza he hastily lit his pipe, thus excusing himself from partaking of the drug. Puffing clouds of smoke into the air, he gave a humorous account, which went down quite well, of how he had found himself left alone in the Hogans’ house.
“You were trying to make out with this woman?” asked the black wrestler.
“No, no, I got trapped. As a matter of fact, she’s the wife of the man I’m replacing here. Professor Zapp.”
Melanie looked startled. “I didn’t know that.”
“D’you know him?” Philip asked.
“Slightly.”
“He’s a fascist,” said the Confederate Soldier. “He’s a well-known campus fascist. Everybody knows Zapp.”
“I took a course with Zapp once,” said the Cowboy. “Gave me a lousy ‘C’ for a paper that got an ‘A’ the last time I used it. I told him, too.”
“What did he say.”
“Told me to fuck off.”
“Man!” The black wrestler dissolved into giggles.
“How about Kroop?” said the Confederate Soldier. “Kroop lets his students grade themselves.”
“You’re putting us on,” said Deirdre.
“It’s true, I swear.”
“Don’t everybody give themselves ‘A’s?” asked the black wrestler.
“It’s funny, but no. As a matter of fact there was a chick who flunked herself.”
“Come on!”
“No bullshit. Kroop tried to talk her out of it, said her paper was worth at least a ‘C,’ but no, she insisted on flunking.”
Philip asked Melanie if she was a student at Euphoric State.
“I was. I sort of dropped out.”
“Permanently?”
“No. I don’t know. Maybe.”
All of them, it appeared, either were or had been students at the University, but like Melanie they were vague and evasive about their backgrounds and plans. They seemed to live entirely in the present tense. To Philip, who was always squinting anxiously into his putative future and casting worried glances over his shoulder at the past, they were scarcely comprehensible. But intriguing. And friendly.
He taught them a game he had invented as a postgraduate student, in which each person had to think of a well-known book he hadn’t read, and scored a point for every person present who had read it. The Confederate Soldier and Carol were joint winners, scoring four points out of a possible five with Steppenwolf and The Story of O respectively, Philip in each case accounting for the odd point. His own nomination, Oliver Twist—usually a certain winner—was nowhere.
“What d’you call that game?” Melanie asked Philip.
“Humiliation.”
“That’s a great name. Humiliation…”
“You have to humiliate yourself to win, you see. Or to stop others from winning. It’s rather like Mr. Kroop’s grading system.”
Another joint was circulating, and this time Philip took a drag or two. Nothing special seemed to happen, but he had been drinking the red wine steadily enough to keep up with the developing and enveloping mood of the party—for a party was what it appeared to be, or perhaps encounter group. This was a term new to Philip, which the young people did their best to explain to him.
“It’s like, to get rid of your inhibitions.”
“Overcome loneliness. Overcome the fear of loving.”
“Recover your own body.”
“Understand what’s really bugging you.”
They exchanged anecdotes.
“The worst is the beginning,” said Carol. “When you’re feeling all cold and uptight and wishing you hadn’t come.”
“And the one I went to,” said the Confederate Soldier, “we didn’t know who was the group leader,
and he didn’t identify himself, like deliberately, and we all sat there for an hour, a solid hour, in total silence.”
“Sounds like one of my seminars,” said Philip. But they were too engrossed in the subject to respond to his little jokes.
Carol said: “Our leader had a neat idea to break the ice. Everybody had to empty their purses and wallets on to the table. The idea was total self-exposure, you know, turning yourself inside out, letting everybody see what you usually keep hidden. Like rubbers and tampax and old love letters and holy medals and dirty pictures and all. It was a revelation, you’ve no idea. Like one guy had this picture of this man on a beach, completely naked except for a gun in a holster. Turned out to be the guy’s father. How about that?”
“Groovy,” said the Confederate Soldier.
“Let’s do it now,” said Philip, tossing his wallet into the ring.
Carol spread the contents on the floor. “This is no good,” she said. “Just what you’d expect to find. All very boring and moral.”
“That’s me,” sighed Philip. “Who’s next?” But no one else had a wallet or a purse to hand.
“That’s a lot of crap anyway,” said the Cowboy. “In my group we’re trying to learn body-language…”
“Are these your children?” Melanie asked, going through his photographs. “They’re cute, but they look kind of sad.”
“That’s because I’m so uptight with them,” said Philip.
“And is this your wife?”
“She’s uptight, too,” he said. He found the new word expressive. “We’re a very uptight family.”
“She’s lovely.”
“That was taken a long time ago,” said Philip. “Even I was lovely then.”
“I think you’re lovely now,” said Melanie. She leaned over and kissed him on the mouth.
Philip felt a physical sensation he hadn’t felt for more than twenty years: a warm, melting sensation that began in some deep vital centre of his body and spread outwards, gently fading, till it reached his extremities. He recaptured, in that one kiss, all the helpless rapture of adolescent eroticism—and all its embarrassment too. He couldn’t bring himself to look at Melanie, but stared sheepishly at his shoes, dumb, his ears burning. Fool! Coward!
“Look, I’ll show you,” said the Cowboy, stripping off his suede coat. He stood up and shoved aside with his foot some of the dirty crockery littering the floor. Melanie stacked up the plates and carried them out to the kitchen. Philip trotted ahead of her, opening doors, happy at the prospect of a tête-à-tête at the sink. Washing up was more his scene than body language.
“Shall I wash or wipe?” he asked, and then, as she looked blank: “Can I help you with the dishes?”
“Oh, I’ll just leave them to soak.”
“I don’t mind washing up, you know,” he wheedled. “I quite like it, really.”
Melanie laughed, showing two rows of white teeth. One of the upper incisors was crooked: it was the only flaw he could detect in her at this moment. She was pretty as a poster in her long white dress gathered under the bosom and falling straight to her bare feet.
“Let’s just leave them here.”
He followed her back to the living-room. The Cowboy was standing back to back with Carol in the middle of the room. “What you have to do is communicate by rubbing against each other,” he explained, suiting actions to words. “Through your spine, your shoulder-blades—”
“Your ass…”
“Right, your ass. Most people’s backs are dead, just dead, from not being used for anything, you dig?” The Cowboy made way for the Confederate Soldier, and began to supervise Deirdre and the black wrestler.
“You want to try?” Melanie said.
“All right.”
Her back felt straight and supple against his scholar’s stoop, her bottom was pressed firmly and blissfully against his thin shanks, her hair was thrown back and cascaded down his chest. He was transported. She was giggling.
“Hey, Philip, what are you trying to tell me with the shoulder-blades?”
Someone dimmed the lights and turned up the sitar music. They swayed and pressed and wriggled against each other in the twanging, orange, smoky twilight, it was a kind of dance, they were all dancing, he was dancing—at last: the free, improvised, Dionysian dancing he’d hankered after. He was doing it.
Melanie’s eyes were fixed on his, but vacantly. Her body was listening to the music. Her eyelids listened, her nipples listened, her little toes listened. The music had gone very quiet, but they didn’t lose it. She swayed, he swayed, they all swayed, swayed and nodded, very slightly, keeping time, responsive to the sudden accelerations and slowings of the plucking fingers, the light patter of the drum, the swerves and undulations of tone and timbre. Then the tempo became faster, the twanging notes louder, faster and louder, and they moved more violently in response to the music, they writhed and twitched, stamped and lifted their arms and snapped their fingers and clapped their hands. Melanie’s hair swept the floor and soared towards the ceiling, catching the orange light in its million fine filaments, as she bent and straightened from the waist. Eyes rolled, sweat glistened, breasts bounced, flesh smacked flesh; cries, shrill and ecstatic, pierced the smoke. Then abruptly the music stopped. They collapsed on to cushions, panting, perspiring, grinning.
Next, the Cowboy had them do foot massage. Philip lay face down on the floor while Melanie walked up and down his back in her bare feet. The experience was an exquisite mixture of pleasure and pain. Though his face was pressed to the hard floor, his neck twisted, the breath squeezed out of his lungs, his shoulder-blades pushed nearly through his chest and his spine was creaking like a rusty hinge, he could have had an orgasm without difficulty—hardly surprising when you thought about it, some men paid good money in brothels for this kind of thing. He groaned softly as Melanie balanced on his buttocks. She jumped off.
“Did I hurt you?”
“No, no, it’s all right. Carry on.”
“It’s my turn.”
No, he protested, he was too heavy, too clumsy, he would break her back. But she insisted, prostrated herself before him in her white dress like a virgin sacrifice. Talk about brothels… Out of the corner of his eye he saw Carol jumping up and down on the mountainous figure of the black wrestler, “Stomp me baby, stomp me,” he moaned; and in a dark corner the Cowboy and the Confederate soldier were doing something extraordinary and complicated with Deirdre that involved much grunting and deep breathing.
“Come on, Philip,” Melanie urged.
He took off his shoes and socks and climbed gingerly on to Melanie’s back, balancing himself with outstretched arms as the flesh and bone yielded under his weight. Oh God, there was a terrible kind of pleasure in kneading the soft girl’s body under his calloused feet, treading grapes must be rather like it. He felt a dark Lawrentian joy in his domination over the supine girl even as he felt concern for her lovely bosom crushed flat against the hard floor, unprotected, unless he was much mistaken, by any undergarment.
“I’m hurting you?”
“No, no, it’s great, it’s doing my vertebrae a whole lot of good, I can feel it.”
He balanced himself on one foot planted firmly in the small of her back and with the other gently rotated the cheek of each buttock in turn. The foot, he decided, was a much underestimated erogenous zone. Then he overbalanced and stepped backwards on to a coffee cup and saucer, which broke into several pieces.
“Oh dear,” said Melanie, sitting up. “You haven’t cut your foot?”
“No, but I’d better get rid of these pieces.” He slipped on his shoes and shuffled out to the kitchen with the broken fragments. As he was disposing of these in the trash can, the Cowboy rushed into the kitchen and began opening cupboards and drawers. He was wearing only jockey shorts.
“Seen the salad oil anywhere, Philip?”
“People getting hungry again?”
“No, no. We’re all gonna strip and rub each other with oil. Ever tried
it? It’s terrific. Ah!” He pulled out of a cupboard a large can of corn-oil and tossed it triumphantly in the air.
“Do you need pepper and salt?” Philip jested weakly, but the Cowboy was already on his way out. “C’mon!” he threw over his shoulder. “The party’s beginning to swing.”
Philip laced up his shoes slowly, deferring decision. Then he went into the hall. Laughter, exclamations and more sitar music were coming from the darkened living-room. The door was ajar. He hesitated at the threshold, then moved on, out of the apartment, up the staircase to his own empty rooms, one part of himself saying ruefully, “You’re too old for that sort of thing, Swallow, you’d only feel embarrassed and make a fool of yourself and what about Hilary?” and another part of himself saying, “Shit!” (a word he was surprised to hear himself using, even mentally) “Shit, Swallow, when were you ever young enough for that sort of thing? You’re just scared, scared of yourself and scared of your wife and think of what you’ve missed, rubbing salad oil into Melanie Byrd, just think of that!” Thinking of it, he actually turned round outside his door, debating whether to go back, but was surprised to find Melanie herself rustling up the stairs behind him to whisper, “Mind if I crash in your place tonight? I happen to know one of those guys had clap not too long ago.”
“Not at all,” he murmured faintly, and let her in to the apartment, suddenly sober, his heart thumping and his bowels melting, wondering, was this it?—after twelve years’ monogamy, was he going to make love to another woman? Just like that? Without preliminaries, without negotiations? He switched on the light inside the apartment, and they both blinked in the sudden dazzle. Even Melanie looked a little shy.
“Where d’you suggest I sleep?” she said.
“I don’t know, where would you like to sleep?” He led her down the hall, throwing open doors like a hotel porter. “This is the main bedroom,” he said, switching on the light and exhibiting the king-size bed that felt as big as a playing field when he stretched out in it at night. “Or there’s this other room which I use as a study, but it has a bed in it.” He went into the study and swept some books and papers off the couch. “It’s really quite comfortable,” he said, pressing the mattress with splayed fingers. “Take your choice.”