“Good.”
“Because—and I know this is a terrible cliché—it's shown me what I value. It's made me into a better person. I've been spending time with Harry; it's been wonderful. And I miss Sean.”
“Sean's not there?”
Ludo sounded suddenly hopeful. I thought for a moment he might be about to suggest something, but I also sensed that he was restraining himself, trying to be good.
“No, he … well, it's difficult to explain, but he's at the apartment. Nothing's going on; he's got things he has to do there. And you saw Bella and Magnus the other night. You can imagine that maybe he wasn't very comfortable here.”
“No.”
He laughed. I loved it when he laughed. For a second, I was back in the hotel room, back feeling the pull of him, but I shuddered myself free of the image.
“But you, Ludo, what about you and Katie?”
“I can't see we have a future, not after what I've done. It wouldn't be right for either of us.”
“You shouldn't be so hasty. I didn't realize that I had such strong feelings for Sean until all this blew up. I thought there was nothing much left for us other than a kind of cold war. You never know what you can find in a relationship, even after it looks like the cupboard's bare. Sean used to say something about there always being another nut in your pocket, if you search deeply enough for it.”
“Yeah, I've heard him say that. But usually he said it while he was actually looking for nuts, so I'm not sure he meant it metaphorically. More in a Forrest Gump way.”
“But I'm saying that if you still have any love for her, and I know that she still loves you, then you should try. Once it's gone, it's gone.”
“I never thought I'd get relationship counseling from you, Celeste.” His tone was grimly humorous.
“People always sound stupid when they try to give advice. Perhaps I'm just trying to salve my own conscience. I don't want to think that I've ruined it for you and Katie.”
“You always claim to be more heartless than you are.”
“I'd like it if we could still be friends, Ludo. You're a special person.”
For the third or fourth time, I cringed at what I was saying. Was it really impossible to say something original in this situation, something not worn smooth with use? But then, how many millions had been here before us, getting all the words when they were still fresh, still warm with life?
“I don't know. We'll see.”
“I think I hear Harry waking. I'll have to go.”
“Good-bye, Celeste. I'll always love you.”
“Good-bye, Ludo. I'll always fancy the pants off you.”
I cradled Harry, who was coming down with a cold. He clung to me and put his head heavily on my shoulder. “Mommy daddy mommy daddy,” he murmured over and over into my ear. I felt good. I felt that I had rescued something precious. But I also knew how close I'd come to messing up.
Sean's always been the one tangled up in moral theorizing. He thinks he can't know what the right thing is, and therefore can't do anything, unless he's got what he calls an ethical framework. When he was annoyed, he'd say that I don't have morals, I have whims, and so even when what I do is exactly what he would do, using his ethical framework as a guide, I'm not being moral at all.
“Morality means following a rule,” he'd say, “but your only rule is, Do what you want. If you want to be generous, you'll be generous. If you want to be kind, you'll be kind. But it's only moral if you do it even though you don't want to, if you overcome your natural inclinations and self-consciously choose to be moral.”
It was a horrible thought that he might have been right. Perhaps it was just the law of averages: even a lifetime devoted to talking bullshit must produce the occasional scrap of sense. Sometimes he'd try to bring God into the argument—his weirdo atheist-Catholic God. I don't know if he ever helped with anything. I've never really cared if God existed or not. I can see in the abstract that it's a biggie, but like the football results that Sean gets so worked up about, it just doesn't seem to bother me.
I wasn't getting very far with these thoughts, but I did decide to try in the future to think a bit more before I acted. Weigh up a little. Give my whims a bit of direction. Live a better life.
Or so I thought as Harry mommy-daddy-mommy-daddied on my shoulder, the snot flowing freely over my second-best silk blouse.
And then I started to feel sick.
SEANJOURNALTWENTY.DOC
THE FREE-FUCK DILEMMA
It was inevitable that once I started thinking about the betrayals of friendship, I'd end up with girls. I was in the Black Lamb with Leo and Andrew. Ludo said he'd try to join us later, but we weren't expecting him. A band was playing Irish standards in the next room: “The Rover,” “Peggy Gordon,” “Carrickfergus.”
“We'd all look on ourselves as being the good guys, wouldn't we?” I began.
There was general, ironically modulated, consent. Andrew said, “Here we go.”
“Given that—and I don't know about you, but I'd say that— beginning with Louise Craggs when I was twelve, I've betrayed every girl, every woman, I've been out with.”
“Seems a slightly harsh way to put it, unless you mean that you gave them up to the gestapo or the Spanish Inquisition,” said Leo.
At the next table, a small, round fellow, who'd made one of the worst attempts at having a shave I'd ever seen, was talking to what might have been his great-great-grandfather, whose face seemed not only to be toothless but largely boneless as well.
“And anyways, what is custard powder made from?”
“That'll be dried-up custard.”
“But, then, if custard's made from custard powder, how did it all begin?”
“It's a chicken-and-egg situation all right.”
These weren't ideal conditions, but I kept on trying.
“You know what I mean. Two-timed or dishonorably dumped, or deliberately behaved badly so that they had to dump me, thereby saving myself the trouble and guilt. That sort of thing.”
“You did all that to Louise Craggs when you were eleven?”
“Twelve. No, well, she was a special case. I let her down by not being cool enough. I remember I asked her what her favorite record was, and she said ‘I Feel Love,’ by Donna Summer, which, however you look at it, is a classic, and I said mine was ‘Let's Have a Quiet Night In,’ by—”
Leo shook his head sadly. “David Soul. Jesus. She was right to dump you.”
“Exactly.”
“But I don't think you betrayed her in any meaningful sense.”
“I don't want to get bogged down at the beginning. I loved her, and I should have tried harder not to be such a dork. But that was the last ambiguous case. Since then, it's been pretty black and white, and I've been black.”
I was thinking about Jane Hyde, whose blouse I'd spent two years looking down but then never had the courage to ask out, even though I knew she wanted me to. I was thinking of a funny little girl called Gillian whom I'd necked at a party after I'd been sick. I was thinking about Suzanna and Georgina and Titania, whom I'd gone out with simultaneously in my first term at Manchester. I was thinking about Clare and Melisande and Francine, whom I'd gone out with simultaneously in my last term at Manchester. I was thinking most of all about Samantha, who longed to marry me and who got instead an appointment with a gynecologist in an out-of-town clinic. I was thinking about how I'd visited her, and it was one of those rare London days when it snows, and the snow stays, and the white roofs turned into white fields as we left the city behind. I was thinking about her face, the way her eyes said, “Look, I've done even this for you. Is this enough?” And to make the visit easier, I let her think that it might be.
And I was thinking about Celeste and about Uma Thursday.
“Haven't you always argued,” said Andrew, “that you have to take a utilitarian approach to sexual morality? You've got to maximize the pleasure and minimize the pain. Two-timing only becomes bad if they find out about it.
”
“Yeah, I've said that. I think it, but I don't know if I believe it. But I suppose it's all linked in my mind to what I was saying a couple of weeks ago about betrayal. There seems to be a pattern here, and I don't like it.”
“You need another drink,” said Leo. “I don't know how serious you're being here, Sean, but we've all messed about a bit in our time. Or tried to. When you're a kid, none of it really matters. Even when you're at college. You're not a mature moral being at that stage. It's all different when you get older, and people depend on you, and when you've acquired the experience to go with the theory. And as for patterns, well, as far as I can see, talking about patterns in human behavior always turns out to be bullshit. The only people who follow patterns are serial killers in detective fiction, the ones who only kill people whose initials spell out the books of the Old Testament, just so that the detective can play smarty-pants and figure it all out.”
“Let me make this a bit more real,” I said. “Andrew, you love Alice; Leo, you love Odette. But if you had the chance for a completely free fuck, a fuck where there was no chance at all of anyone's finding out and where there were going to be no unpleasant hangovers, and the woman concerned was appropriately beautiful, would you say no?”
There was a pause.
Andrew whistled. “Ah, the old free-fuck dilemma. Can't say it's not a tough one.”
“I think I'd pass the test,” said Leo. “But you never know until you're in it.”
There was another silence as they thought about it.
“The only hope, I reckon,” said Andrew, “is to make sure you never get in that situation. I find that making myself as unattractive as possible works well.”
Then Leo looked at me. “Are you in it? I mean the free-fuck dilemma. You are. It's that woman from the playgroup, the one who came to your dinner party. Uma.”
He smiled despite himself.
“I'm not in it yet. I don't know if she wants to. I don't know if it would be … free.”
“Can I have first call on Celeste, if she finds out?”
“That's not funny, Andrew,” said Leo. He turned to me. “My honest advice, old friend, is don't do it. Never see her again, at least never alone. You're as weak as a baby, and you'll fail the test, and you'll lose everything that you've got.”
“The Master has a point,” said Andrew. “I mean, I thought that Uma was a fox all right, but, well, while she's the same sort of idea as Celeste, she's not as nice and not as pretty.”
Just then, Ludo appeared.
“Hello, boys. Hoped I'd find you here. Looks to me like you're ready for another round of sweet sherries and crème de menthes.”
He looked happier than I'd seen him for a long time.
“My news!” said Andrew, when were all sitting, pints before us. “I forgot my news. Alice is back next week, back for good.”
“Thank Christ,” said Leo. “You've already got the right arm of a circus strongman on the body of Mahatma Gandhi.”
Moral debates took a backseat from then on as we drank beer and got drunk and grew in love for one another until they made us go home.
PRADAPRADAPRADAPRADAGUCCI 21
Blue. The line was blue.
SEANJOURNALTWENTYONE.DOC
I HAVE HEARD THE MERMAIDS SINGING
I met her in the Czech Club. It was my idea. I thought it might be something a little different for her. The Czech Club, on West End Lane, looks like an ordinary house. Even after you've passed through the door, it takes a while to recognize that this is not a family residence but a place to eat and drink. Set up sometime after the war for Czechs fleeing the Russians, it's probably been redecorated twice since then. To the right, there is a dining room, where in one fell swoop you can get as much boiled pig and dumplings as you could want in a lifetime or, more wisely, about the best roast duck in London. To the left, there's a bar area, with gashed vinyl seating and old Czech warriors and superb Czech beer and a man with a square foot of mustache behind the bar who smokes and drinks and scrapes the foam off your pint with a special stick. On the wall are two pictures, one of the queen circa 1960 and another of a (presumably) Czech general, looking proud but recently invaded and overrun by a much more powerful neighboring state.
“What an … interesting place,” said Uma.
Her tone didn't suggest that this was one of those cases of “interesting” meaning “good.” It was more like the old Chinese curse of “May you live in interesting times,” meaning war, plague, and famine.
“Oh, sorry. I thought you might appreciate its … charm.”
“Mmm.”
“Let's go, then.”
“Fuck it,” she said, smiling sweetly. “We're here now. Let's have a drink. Do they serve wine?”
“They've got wine, but, well, unless you like it sweet, you're better off with a gin and tonic.”
“That'll do. What's through there?”
“There's a sort of terrace thing. Do you want to … ?”
She did.
So we sat out on the terrace. Out here it was mainly foreign-language students, the other major component of the Czech Club mix. Why, I don't know. Must have got itself into some guidebook or other. It was a warm night, and Uma shuffled out of her jacket. She was wearing a cheap, glittery top, which had the look of fish scales about it. Its cheapness didn't stop it from being sexy. At all. Whenever she reached forward for her drink, the space under her arm opened up, and I could see the entire flank of her breast. Unless it was some new cunning bra, engineered for near invisibility, she was naked beneath the scales.
After a while, and another gin, she decided that she quite liked the place. She flirted with the barman when he came round to collect the glasses and talked in Spanish to the noisy group at the next table.
“So say something funny,” she said, turning back to me.
“Jesus, I don't know. What do you call a fly with no wings?”
“A walk. I've heard it.”
“What do you call a fly with no wings and no legs?”
“Don't know.”
“A currant.”
“Ha-ha. I'll tell it to Oscar. Is that really the best you can do?”
“I don't usually tell jokes. I'm usually just generally funny. Or people tell me I am.”
“I hope you're better on paper than you are in real life or your book's gonna flop like a guppy.”
I told her some of the stuff in the book, which was nearly finished. She went “ha-ha” a couple of times but carried on doing her generally unimpressed bit. I was beginning to wonder what was in all this for me. She treated me with the contempt you might expect from a wife, not a flirty new friend. Then she said it.
“Look, Sean old thing, I'm having a jolly nice time here with the general on the wall and the cheap drinks and the smell of sausage from the kitchen, but can we go now?”
“Yeah, well, I didn't think you'd want to eat here, so I've booked a table at—”
“I don't mean that. I mean, can we go somewhere and, you know, … ?”
“What, dance?”
“Christ, no. Not dance. Fuck.”
“What!”
“Well, that's what this is all about, isn't it? All these months of chatting me up and looking at my tits.”
“It wasn't what I planned. I mean, I didn't know if you wanted to.”
“Don't worry, I want to.”
“I haven't been chatting you up. I didn't look at your tits.”
My voice had entered a register comfortable only to bats.
“So you just want to be friends?”
The sarcasm was so heavy mercury would have floated on it.
“I don't know what I want.”
“Well, why don't we go and find out?”
It was probably the best offer anyone had ever had in the fifty-year history of the Czech Club.
She picked up her bag and did the things you do if you're a woman and you're about to get up. This nearly always involves lipstick.
�
��My apartment. It's empty but in a mess. I've been living there, but all the furniture's piled up—”
“Is there a bed?”
“Yes, there's a bed.”
“Have you got any drink?”
“We can buy some on the way.”
“Let's have champagne.”
We picked our way though the builders’ mess at the front of the apartment. All the major work was finished, and now it was mainly a case of decorating. Another week should see it done. But there was filth and dust everywhere. I had a mixture of dread and excitement bubbling away inside my head and my loins.
“I've never got laid in a building site before,” she said.
I opened the door to the bedroom. It looked like a Dickensian junk shop; pagodas of stacked furniture and miscellaneous household goods towered above us. But the bed was clear. Or rather half of the bed was clear. A couch took up exactly half its width.
“Cozy,” Uma said.
“I'm sorry about this. I didn't anticipate having company.”
But I had anticipated exactly that. I'd tidied as much as I could, dumped the pizza boxes and tissues, aired the room to get rid of the fusty smell of man and furniture. I found two cups and opened the champagne.
“It's kind of romantic,” she said, looking around. “It reminds me of you. Cluttered, messy, fun.”
I've never been good at responding to compliments, even slightly backhanded ones like Uma's. So I stood there, looking vaguely startled, not knowing what to do. Uma helped out.
“Give me a kiss, then.”
She pulled me down to sit on the edge of the bed. I balanced my teacup on a pile of books and kissed her.
“That was a bit lily-livered,” she said, and laughed.
“Sorry. I'm not used to, er, adultery. Perhaps if we, ah, took our clothes off—”
“You've got all the smooth moves, haven't you?”
She shimmered and the fishy top was off. Then I couldn't stop myself. I took her and kissed her again, and held her by the nape of the neck, and kissed her breasts. She was unexpectedly meek. I had expected a tigress, but she was a pussycat. The surprise of it filled me with desire and tenderness. She even made little kitteny sounds, mewing and purring. I pulled down her skirt. She wasn't wearing panties. She didn't try to take off any of my clothes, but I pulled off my shirt.
The Marriage Diaries Page 24