by Nick Laird
When David stepped out onto the gravel walk to smoke, he found Jess snapping shut her clam phone, having just finished talking to Ginny. The night was chill and dry. Moonlight dusted the paunchy clouds and as the wind changed tack, a faint thudding music from somewhere grew in strength. The Mall lay rigidly in front of them, the park beyond it steeped in darkness.
‘Exciting times for Ruth, huh?’
One floor above, someone’s arm crooked out through a window, a fat cigar dangling from it, then disappeared again. Jess replied, ‘Don’t you think the show’s a little cluttered? They should have taken fewer pieces and left—’
‘I meant the engagement.’
‘Oh yes, that.’ Jess nudged a cigarette from its packet. He lit it for her, and she took a step back, struck a Katharine Hepburn pose: one foot out and a hand on her hip. ‘Tell me: is it for a visa?’
It came as a pleasurable surprise to David, how little she understood.
‘No—he’s in love. James is very sincere—a God-botherer, in fact. Bible by the bed. Ruth was leafing through it the other day, so who knows…’
David laughed but Jess just looked up sharply, then she bit her bottom lip.
‘Last time I read a Bible…’ She looked at her leather boots and stopped. David did his bit and stayed silent for the dramatic pause. ‘Was with Ruth,’ she said finally. ‘In Sheep Meadow in Central Park. She’d bought it from The Strand to show me something. We’d been staying on Richard’s floor in Williamsburg—this was way before it was fashionable—almost entirely Polish then—and Ruth had been calling me Naomi for a few days and when I’d ask her why she’d only say, “For where you go, I shall go—”’
Larry’s laugh interrupted. ‘Aha, thought you’d be out here. What are you two plotting? Top-level talks, or can any fool join?’
Jess tucked one end of his grey scarf into the collar of his overcoat and David thought how close they were, how far he was.
‘Just a little engagement gossip.’
‘Oh, they’ll be very happy together…for a year or two at least.’ He gave an outrageous wink.
Jess ignored him and addressed David. ‘Doesn’t he want to go nightclubbing or skydiving or whatever? Doesn’t he want children?’
‘Ruth’s one of the last genuine aesthetes.’ Larry jerked his head back towards the door. ‘She never got the memo. She’s still into beautiful things.’
‘But why marry it?’ Jess said.
‘Maybe she loves it. Maybe it loves her.’ Larry offered the sentiment reasonably, cocking his head in a way that even David could tell was designed to irritate his old friend.
‘Oh, no doubt,’ she sighed, drawing her cigarettes again from some hidden pocket in her drapery. ‘He’s pretty enough to love.’
What on earth was David doing here among these people, with their casual manners and ironic patter, their insinuation that surface was depth, that appearance was content? And what was Glover? These were not their kind. Walter had no monopoly on being a collector. These people picked other people up and examined them and set them down, and laughed.
He trailed back through the corridors and found the hospitality suite again. The slot on the toilet door read ENGAGED, red letters on white, and his consciousness, associative and drunk, thought of Glover proffering his adolescent silver necklace, on one knee, divinely inspired, then supplementing that with the pinhead diamond ring. David thought of him naked, posed and exposed in the living room for her perusal and her Polaroids. A tableau of supplication, a catalogue of self-abasement…David had conjured him; Glover’s low, urgent voice could be heard from behind the door.
‘How could I not? You’re amazing. Amazing.’
Someone’s back bumped on the wood. There was silence. Then the lonely sound of other people kissing. David let his eyeline trace a path from the sink to the ceiling along the vertical and horizontal grouting of the rectangular white tiles. Then he started tracing it back down again. How banal we are, how repetitive, he thought, when we try to speak of love; hate, now that’s another matter. Let me count those ways.
Ruth made a puppy’s anaclitic whine, then said, ‘But aren’t you even a little worried?’
‘Why would I be worried about leaving?’ Glover dropped his tone, asked gravely, ‘Or do you mean about our wedding night?’
Ruth shrieked. There was a scuffle on the other side of the door, on the other side of the universe. He was tickling her or had lifted her up, something physical and intimate. David went out to find the toilets for the public, where he belonged.
‘I have the whole set now, you know. The last two I bought, with the stars and without the stripes, and with the stripes but without the stars…’ Walter stopped, and turned his flattened nose to Ruth. ‘Did you know that? That I had bought the last two flags in Bonhams ten, maybe twelve years ago?’
She didn’t respond immediately. First, she lifted a glass of water from Larry’s hand and took a sip. Larry acted as if he hadn’t noticed; he didn’t stop talking or glance down. Then she smiled uncomfortably, keeping her gaze focused somewhere near the mobile phone by Walter’s hand. She genuinely seemed to dislike talking about her work. She genuinely seemed, David thought. That was it. Two words. Small song of the paradox of Ruth.
‘I knew, yes. I do follow my pieces out into the world.’
Jess whispered to David, ‘Larry sends her updates.’
At his angle, from just behind, a faint line of hair on Jess’s cheek was catching the light from the aluminium lampshade that hung low over the bar table. Her cheekbones were high, prominent, and intimated the skull beneath. David felt enormous goodwill for her but wasn’t sure why. He thought he might identify with her particular brand of hurt.
She continued, to him alone, ‘She says those early pieces are like college friends: she wants to know where they are and how much they’re making, but she doesn’t want to have to see them.’
As she leant closer in towards him, to lift her handbag from the floor, she added, ‘We met right after college.’
They brought some finger food out to the table and David was educated. He learnt: the ingredients of a mojito; that The Republic of Women was based on an understanding that the underlying symbol of nature was the unending, a circle, an egg; that this is opposed to male culture, which is founded on a necessarily linear world view; that this is to do with the arrow, the penis and the pen; that creating a gigantic papier-maché teapot with a door, and then covering it in silver foil, takes two and a half months and requires three assistants; that this was the spaceship for the Gynaeconaut; that Ruth and Jess had jointly made a bronze cenotaph of names for all the women in Jess’s hometown who had reported incidents of domestic violence in 1983; that Ruth had restaged some of the more famous publicity shots from Star Wars with female mannequins, replacing the light sabres with neon hula hoops; that Carrie Fisher, according to Jess, has one of the dirtiest laughs in show business; that Ruth had started the Republic in an attempt to create an alternative history, and not to present some kind of contemporary Utopia for Andrea Dworkin; that Ruth thought her work had suffered as a result of the media’s attention; that Jess disagreed with this; that Walter’s mother had been Macedonian; that Susan Sontag had been a fan of Ruth’s work, and that if she had been a fan, Jess didn’t exactly see how Ruth’s art could have been robbed of its subtlety.
Ruth insisted the party continue at hers, and since Walter, as usual, had vanished hours before, the five of them fitted in one black cab, although it was still quite a squash. After everyone had settled—with Glover and Jess on the jump seats—David leant across Larry and said to Ruth, ‘I didn’t know you knew Susan Sontag.’
‘Oh, only a little. Everyone knew her a little. We ran into each other a couple of times.’
‘Where was that?’ Larry asked.
‘Oh, some bar in New York.’
‘Which bar?’ Larry pressed. He was heavily resistant to the idea that two people could meet somewhere in the world and he not, in so
me way, be involved.
‘The Henrietta Hudson? I think…Jess, were you there?’
‘I was.’ Jess was unable to obscure entirely the note of satisfaction.
‘Strictly women only,’ Larry said, addressing the comment to Glover, who pulled his gaze from the pavements outside and back into the cab.
David could see from his face that Glover didn’t like the taste of the words forming in his mouth. He said, a little timidly, a little childishly, ‘It’s a lesbian bar?’
David wanted to laugh. Ruth threw Glover a micro-look but was saying something to Jess about Sontag on photography. Larry continued merrily, ‘Oh yes, a whole shrine to lesbiana. It’s down in the Village. Jess’ll know if it’s still there.’ He glanced at her but she was replying to Ruth.
‘…because that’s exactly what an image does, or at least the mass replication of an image.’
Glover pushed himself back on the jump seat and set his head against the partitioning glass. He knew about Ruth’s taste—that tiny, unwilled adjustment—and he knew that Ruth and Jess had once gone out, but still his face had hardened. David could see he hadn’t begun to come to terms with the facts, with the anecdotes and dates and debts of her pre-Glover past. He knew they all knew, but he couldn’t believe they were supposed to just casually talk about it. David wanted to pat the poor bastard’s knee and whisper, Everyone wants something to lie on. It makes no difference what sofa they go for. Taste is not morality.
The conversation started again. Larry told a story about airport security at JFK and how he’d had to be driven to the gate on ‘one of those golf carts for old people’ because he was about to miss his flight. David made sounds denoting amusement; Glover made no sounds at all. His withdrawal became total. He turned back to the window and stared outside at the homeward human traffic, the twenty-somethings spilling from the pubs and bars, joking about girls and football and where to go next. At the Barbican he stalked in through the lobby and said nothing as the group ascended in the lift. Jess and Larry kept the conversation going but everyone was aware of the tension. When the doors slid apart at the twenty-third floor, Glover waved all of them out before him, and once in the flat disappeared into Ruth’s bedroom. Without meeting anyone’s eye, Ruth murmured, ‘Give me five minutes,’ and followed.
Standing beneath the lit pears, Larry whispered, ‘What was that about?’
‘Actually,’ David replied, ‘I think it might have been you, mentioning that lesbian bar.’
‘Noooo,’ Jess said from the sofa, the half-lids of her eyes flipping back like a doll’s. ‘I thought it was that and then I thought it couldn’t be. Why does he care? Ruth says he knows all that stuff and is fine with it…God, he must loathe me.’ She relished the word, and slid a chunky ring like an abacus bead up and down her index finger.
‘No, of course he doesn’t.’ David moved beside her and patted her shoulder awkwardly. ‘I think that maybe he just thinks he’s fine with it, but when it actually comes up he freaks out. He’s very young.’
‘Well, look, we’re here now,’ Larry said. ‘There’s no point in letting it spoil everyone’s evening. Shall we be of good cheer? Anyone fancy a line?’ Jess looked up at David, who nodded, making a Why not? face, although his stomach stiffened. This was uncharted territory. After retrieving a dinner plate from the kitchen, Larry sat at the dining-room table and magicked a wrap from an inside pocket, which he lovingly opened and set on the china. David watched as it refolded in on itself like some exotic flower at dusk. He had left his wallet on the table and Larry lifted it, extracting his Visa card and expertly chopping out three plaque-coloured, inch-long lines. Then he plucked out the single note, David’s last ten, rolled it and offered the plate to David.
It was disgusting: a viscid chemical slick on the back of his throat. But the rush was almost immediate. He felt, yes, joyful, if perhaps a little silly. The other two took their turns. He heard himself talking loudly and very fast. Jess’s pupils had dilated so much that they almost eclipsed her irises, which David noticed now were the same tense blue as Microsoft Word. She was biting her lower lip and trying to tell the two men about renting a villa in Tuscany with Ginny but they kept interrupting. All at once David was pleased to be David. It was an unusual sensation. He was pleased that Larry was Larry and Jess was Jess, but mostly he was pleased to be David.
Ruth entered some time later carrying champagne, two fogged-up bottles from the fridge. She had reapplied her citrus perfume and set the drink on the table heavily, with a casual ‘There,’ as if she’d only been gone a moment and not twenty minutes.
Larry, motivated now to tidy up the tabletop, lifted David’s wallet and it flapped open. Something fluttered out. Jess picked it up.
‘Ruth, who burst your balloon? You look so moody.’
It was the photo from Time Out that David had stuck in his wallet, before he’d gone to the Us and the US exhibition at the Hayward. Ruth stood with it under the lights in the living room as David started to explain how he’d had it for ages and had kept meaning to show it to her—but Ruth was much more concerned with the picture itself.
‘I look so much younger.’
Larry fluently unhooded the seal of a champagne bottle, and rolled the foil into a ball on the tabletop. He said quietly, ‘The past tends to do that.’
David too felt low, and realized this was his first comedown: a hypnotic decline, general despair, all sound in a minor key.
Glover appeared, wearing, to David’s eye, the sheepish, ruddy grin of the recently orgasmed male.
‘Who’s this?’ he said, joining Ruth under the lights.
‘I wanted to make sure I recognized Ruth before that exhibition at the Hayward last year. Time Out had printed it.’
Ruth plucked the picture back from Glover.
‘The light is very harsh. I look like a hooker.’
‘A hooker in the morgue,’ Jess purred, and stroked the back of David’s neck. He hadn’t felt someone else’s fingers on his body for so long that he groaned involuntarily and his head dropped an inch forward. Ruth retreated into the depths of the sofa and drew her legs up under herself.
‘I’ve left some out for you guys in the bedroom. Larry insisted on gifts.’
‘It really should be tax-deductible,’ Larry remarked, getting to his feet.
‘I’ll take you down,’ Glover said, which struck David as almost comically proprietorial. The bedroom was about eight metres away. He didn’t need a guide. Jess stood up and wrapped her pashmina round herself with two dramatic gestures—a bat arranging its wings to sleep—and settled in by Ruth. Soon they were talking about Jess’s sister divorcing, again, and in a manner so familiar David felt at a loss. He went down the hallway to the men and sat a little awkwardly by Larry on the bed, while at the desk Glover chopped out lines. David couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. He’d never even known Glover to roll a joint before, though he’d coughed his way through a couple. But with Ruth as his Eve he was evidently happy to eat whatever windfalls the Tree of Knowledge might provide.
‘You’ve never been?’
‘Never. I can’t wait.’
‘Oh, you’re going to have a blast. Her flat’s got views across the Hudson and on out to New Jersey. I envy you seeing it all for the first time.’
Larry sped up a fraction when he mentioned the Hudson, afraid, David thought, that he might remind Glover of the conversation in the taxi.
‘I mean, I’ve seen it on telly, of course, and in movies. I have some idea.’
‘When do you think you might go?’ David asked.
‘In the summer, probably, for good. There’s not that much to keep us here.’
‘There’s your friends. There’s me.’
‘I second that.’ Larry waggled a long white finger but Glover didn’t smile.
‘But you’re back and forward anyway, aren’t you, Larry? So we’ll see you, and David, you’ll always have photographs. I’ll leave you a couple and you can carry them round
in your wallet for the next ten years, maybe knock one out over our wedding picture…’
Larry quickly snorted his line then left for the bathroom, while David, furious, pretended to read the spines of the books piled by Ruth’s bedside. He had already explained the circumstances of the photos. He wasn’t going to apologize. Glover looked at himself in the mirror on the door, twisted a couple of the waxed spikes of his hair, seemed to approve, and turned back to David.
‘I’m sorry, but it needed to be said.’
After Glover left, David sat down in his seat at the desk and breathed, just breathed. He was very angry. His scalp felt too small for his skull and with both hands he massaged it, trying to ease it. James had done his best to make him feel as small as possible, and in front of Larry. Vacantly, his face burning, he let his gaze trail along the shelves in front of him, willing his attention to fasten on a detail, an object, a fact, a word. Ruth had moved her piles of books and photos from the living room to here. There was a leaning tower of DVDs on the top shelf—Truffaut, Fellini, Hitchcock, some musicals from the forties—and here were the scrapbook picture albums: like a child’s, their covers different primary colours, and all with purple, bulging pages. And here were a few loose photos, and on top of them sat the photo of Jess with the pour of dark hair, the columns of Californian redwoods. It was small and hard with laminate.
Larry and Glover were talking in the corridor. David peered around the door jamb; Larry was defensively posed against the wall. He had folded his arms and turned side-on to Glover, who was speaking earnestly to him—though quietly enough so Jess and Ruth wouldn’t hear in the living room.
‘I don’t have a problem at all with her past.’
Larry, plainly agonized, shook his head repeatedly. ‘No, of course—’
‘Her past is her past. I know it. She’s told me. We all have a few skeletons in our closets, right? Right?’