by William Boyd
‘Um, I was wondering if you’d like to come and have some tea with me,’ he said.
Oh yes? I thought. But then he’d asked so politely so I said I would.
He took me to his college which wasn’t very far away. They’re nice these colleges that they live in – amazing lawns, not a weed in sight – and very quiet. We went up a little narrow stone staircase to his room. It was quite pleasant – a bit old-looking though and very untidy with lots of books and papers. I had a look through his bookshelves when he went out to make the tea but we obviously had different tastes in reading.
We had a few cups of tea and a piece of sponge cake (’Oh there goes me diet,’ I said and would you believe it he blushed). He said his name was Gordon and he told me a bit about his work and asked me some questions about the fair. He was slim and about medium height was Gordon, and I quite liked him. I kept wondering when he would make his move.
It took him quite a while, but eventually he worked it so we were sitting side by side on the sofa. But then someone knocked on the door and stuck his head into the room. It was another guy with specs and he said,
‘Oh! Jesus . . . sorry, Gord. Didn’t know you had company,’ and popped out again. Gordon had leapt to his feet and looked more embarrassed than ever. I’ve never known anyone quite like Gordon for going red, honestly. Anyway I put him out of his misery and told him I had to get back.
On the way to the booth he asked if he could meet me when the fair shut down. I told him we had to pack up tonight as we were setting up in Northampton tomorrow. He looked disappointed at this but said he’d still like to come and say goodbye. That was fine by me I said. He had nice manners had Gordon. He hadn’t once mentioned our little episode with the swimsuit.
Gordon was waiting for me at eleven o’clock when the fair began to shut down. I was carrying Arthur in a small parrot’s cage. I was a bit worried in case Trev might have shown up but there was no sign of him. I told Gordon he could carry Arthur to Reen’s car which was parked some way off. Gordon said he knew a short cut.
We walked through the fair. As usual Gordon wasn’t saying much. Stalls were coming down and the big lorries were backing slowly along the street. A few groups of young kids hung around watching it all. The ground was covered in litter, tickets, squashed toffee apples and bits of coloured paper and burst balloons. It always makes me a bit sad when the fair comes down so I just walked along quietly beside Gordon.
We turned up this narrow alley that led between two of the old colleges. It was dark as there was only one street light and huge black chestnut trees hung over us. It felt a bit spooky so I linked my arm through Gordon’s and you’d have thought I’d stabbed him in the back. His knee banged into Arthur’s cage and I could hear Arthur scrabbling around trying to keep his grip.
‘Hold on a sec, Gordon,’ I said. ‘Put Arthur down for a moment. Let him get settled.’
Gordon put the cage on the ground and I knelt down to peer in at Arthur. Gordon knelt down too and muttered something about Arthur being a fascinating creature.
We got up together and I thought poor sod and leant up against him ever so slightly. He put his arms round me and we sort of stood there for a while. I could feel him all shivery and excited and I ran my hands through his hair. It felt lovely.
The next thing I knew he wasn’t there. He’d been torn out of my arms and I gave a little scream when I saw it was Trev. Trev, who had him by the back of his jacket and was spinning him round and around. Then he let him go and Gordon careered into the wall with an awful thump that sent his specs flying to the ground.
Trev stood in front of him swearing and spitting. ‘Okay Trace,’ he shouted over his shoulder at me. ‘Where do I give it him first. You tell me, Trace.’
Christ, really, Trev looked amazing. He’s a big lad and he had tight black jeans on and a white T-shirt with ‘Kung-fu’ written on it. His chest was heaving up and down and his hair was sort of wild.
Gordon leant up against the wall half crumpled, as if he’d been pinned on to it. He didn’t stand a chance.
I didn’t say anything though. Gordon must have seen me standing there all excited because he tried to get to his feet. Trev gave him a push and he fell onto the ground.
‘Don’t boot him, Trev,’ I yelled, because I could see that was what he was about to do. ‘Get his specs, go on, get his specs.’
Then Trev saw Gordon’s specs on the ground and he just stamped on them. Bang. Once. Like he was squashing a beetle crawling across the floor. Then he kicked them up the alley.
He turned and looked at me. ‘See you at the car, girl,’ he says, all harsh and angry. ‘Bloody pronto.’ And he walks off just like that.
I felt my heart was going to punch itself out of my rib cage. My head felt all light. He can do that to me can Trev. Amazing sort of bloke.
I went and got Gordon’s spectacles. There was no glass in them and they were badly bent. When I handed them back to him I could see the red marks they had made on his nose. His eyes were all watery and blank-looking.
‘Sorry, Gordon,’ I said. ‘But it was better that he done your specs. He’s mean is Trevor, and he’s my boyfriend.’
Gordon nodded without saying anything and pushed his glasses into his pocket. I helped him up and straightened out his jacket. There didn’t seem to be much to say. Trevor must have seen us at the stall and followed.
‘I’d better go,’ I said. Trev would be waiting, I knew. I picked up Arthur and began to walk off.
‘Tracy,’ I heard Gordon wheeze. ‘Just a moment.’
I went back to him. He did look quite different without his glasses, sort of ordinary, not so intelligent.
‘Next year,’ he said. ‘Will you be back next year?’
I was astonished. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘I thought . . .’he began to say, then, ‘It’s just that I shall be here.’ Then he gave a grim little laugh. ‘In fact I shall probably die here.’
That made me feel all sorry for him – he had no excitement in his life apart from me – and so I decided not to tell him about Felaine la Strade and the Ecole de Dance. Better to let him dream a bit. He might be here still, but there was no way you’d catch me as bat-girl again next year, no chance. I’d be in London, the big smoke, a dancer or something.
But I reached out and patted Gordon’s arm. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Me and Arthur’ll be back. We’ll have tea again. See you next year.’ Then I turned away and walked back up the alley to where I knew Trev would be waiting. Just before I turned the corner I looked back, and there was Gordon, standing there – he hadn’t moved an inch – staring at me, just staring at me like the first time he had come into the booth. It still gave me the shivers. He was quite a nice guy, was Gordon. It was a pity really – yes, the whole thing was a pity.
Love Hurts
10 August 1973
It was sometime in the hot freedom of July that I introduced Cherylle to Lamar. I think it was at my delayed welcoming party that AOD were throwing. Cherylle was an out-of-work actress who rented the apartment below mine with two other girls. Quite spontaneously I had decided to invite one of them along – I had as yet made no friends since arriving here from England and felt I needed an ally of sorts at this gathering of off-duty American executives and their brittle, frosted wives. Cherylle was the only girl at home when I knocked on the apartment door. Such are the tricks time plays. She is marrying Lamar tomorrow.
Cherylle: tall, bony, a shock of wild blonde hair. Twenty-five years old? Typically Californian flawless skin. I find her an oddly attractive girl without really being able to say why – a product of the curious vectors of a face: the arc of an eyebrow, the prominence of a cheekbone. There is a simmering feral gleam in her gaze, a sense of coiled ticking energy within her which only truly strikes you on a third or fourth meeting.
Lamar, however, claims he spotted it instantly and it was this he found irresistibly attractive. I should say that Lamar has since beco
me my closest friend out here on the coast. Looking back through my diary I see I first described him as ‘a characteristically butch American businessman. Late thirties, handsome, tanned and stocky. Tough as a hill. Self-confidence surrounds him like a force field. The youngest vice-president in the company, responsible for sales and marketing. They say AOD will be his before the decade’s out.’ Now that I know him I would say that this is only partially true. Lamar still exudes this brash ease but it’s something of a façade. He is no typical VP; he works hard at his job because that is all his background and education have trained him to do. He has his idiosyncracies and I find him both stimulating and sad.
For example the fact that I write – albeit commercially – for a living has prompted him to attack the cultural lacunae in his life with the same vigour he chases after contracts. He sees me as some sort of intellectual guru, a source to be tapped and exploited. Quite early on in our friendship he suggested we read through Shakespeare together ‘because they say he’s the best’. To feed this new enthusiasm I gave him reading lists and drew up programmes for his educational self-improvement. He proved to be a sensitive and intelligent student, surprisingly perceptive. He would question me so endlessly I felt exhausted, victim of some nightmare seminar, dizzy from the rapacity with which he plundered my brain.
His friendship with Cherylle did not affect the growth of our own. Indeed the three of us often went out together. And as the two of them became swiftly more infatuated my presence paradoxically seemed all the more essential. I became the talisman of their affair, as if they needed the constant reassuring presence of the catalyst that had started the reaction off.
I have, however, tried to talk to Lamar about the wisdom of this wedding – gently counselled delay. Cherylle is an incandescent but mercurial character, wayward, and I suspect, deeply uncertain of herself. But Lamar will not listen. He is in love, he insists, wholly in love for the first time in his life.
11 August 1973
The wedding. Lamar and Cherylle get riotously drunk. At the civic hall Cherylle arrived in thigh-length suede boots, jeans and a bright yellow windcheater. She dresses in a bizarre series of fashions – sometimes glaring lack of taste, sometimes shining with demure chicness. Hardly the wife for a rising vice-president I would have thought, but Lamar seems to accept her extravagances with a wide-eyed ingenuous thrill.
Now I know her better I take Cherylle’s lurid anthology of fashion styles to be evidence of a chronic insecurity in her personality. She teeters on the brink of moods with the practised equilibrium of the perennially schizoid. Lamar, somehow, responds to this. His marriage to Cherylle is the one publicly irrational event in his entirely ordered life. He told me once he understood her perfectly, could predict her moves and responses with a Pavlovian confidence. He underestimates Cherylle, I think, and I am a little concerned. He has never displayed such verve and elation, but this is no Platonic union of opposites. Lamar’s efficient diurnal parade has broken up to join Cherylle’s Mardi Gras – and it likes the headlong pace.
14 August 1973
Working steadily for the last two days in the beach house. Windless, lustrous weather. Postcard from Lamar and Cherylle honeymooning in Mexico. Lamar’s neat printed script overlaid at the foot of the card by some illegible felt-tip scrawl from Cherylle. Lamar says I would ‘love the art’. Is he being ironic? I suspect it’s a sop to our abandoned educational sessions – maybe he’s feeling guilty – they didn’t stand much chance against the potent lure of Cherylle’s callow hard-edged embrace.
18 August 1973
Lamar and Cherylle returned this morning, tanned and restless, deeply bored by Mexico. They stayed for lunch. Their evident intoxication with each other is off-putting to say the least. Lamar was unshaven and in a T-shirt, there were bags under his eyes. I’ve never seen him like this.
Their self-absorption has its curious aspects too. Judging from the hints Lamar dropped about their days in Mexico it seems that it only functions non-destructively when observed by a third party. He alluded to uncouth nights of violent manic rows and equally violent and manic reconciliations. He calls it ‘kamikaze love’ and describes it as a mixture of ‘laughter and pistol shots’ – which is quite good for Lamar. He claims he finds it entirely invigorating.
I suspect I am to be enrolled as resident third party: token voyeur of their lambent encounters. I’m not sure I welcome the role; I sense this self-destruct mechanism poised inside Cherylle and it makes me uncomfortable. For example she was quiet and affectionate all afternoon, then she swam worryingly far out to sea. ‘Trying for Catalina Island’ was all she said when she returned exhausted. They left about eight in the evening heading for some dim bar on the Strip.
19 August 1973
To the downtown offices of AOD to present the first draft of my package. Looked in on Lamar but his office was empty. His secretary said you could never tell when he’d be in these days. Over lunch with some of his colleagues I found that Cherylle was the prime topic of conversation. There’s a certain smug satisfaction evinced over the changes she’s wrought in Lamar; normally the paradigm of the totally committed company man, he now delegates more and more and his faultless punctuality has degenerated to amnesiac randomness.
23 August 1973
Drove up the coast with Lamar and Cherylle in their new car, a preposterously large white Buick convertible. An unusual vernal, sappy feel to the day – all the colours seem unfledged and new. Cherylle was at her most entrancing, telling us stories of her attempts to break into the movies. Looking at Lamar I see devotion lodged in every feature. He seems not to listen to her words, rather watches her forming them – noting every smile, eye gleam, pout and hair-toss like some fervent anthropologist.
On the beach Cherylle changed into a skimpy scarlet bikini and we took photographs of each other. Lamar had given her an expensive camera as a present and we played with its delayed exposure device taking endless reels of the three of us in absurd vaudevillian poses, throughout which Cherylle flirted shamelessly with me. Lamar – a little subdued I thought – later moved up to the dunes with the telephoto lens. I saw him up there, obsessively sniping shots of her as she oiled herself and sunbathed.
When we got back home I found myself drained and exhausted from the sun and the fervid high spirits. Lamar and Cherylle wanted me to come and ‘cruise bars’. Lately their favourite pastime, it lasts all night – an intoxicating carnival snaking through the seamier side of the city. I begged off – I scarcely had the energy for a shower – I don’t know how they can keep this pace up.
4 September 1973
Lamar phoned and asked in a morose voice if he could come round and have a talk. Alone. I hadn’t seen him or Cherylle since that day at the beach and I wondered what was going on. He looked something like his old self – neater, back in a suit. Apparently word had come down from the higher echelons that the honeymoon was over. The postures of his body, however, struck attitudes of despair and gloom. Things were not going well. Cherylle hated to be on her own now that he had to be regularly at work. On one of their bar-cruises they had met a young hippie-actor friend of Cherylle. He had stayed the night and was still there. ‘He’s a remarkable sort of guy,’ Lamar insisted, unconvincingly. ‘Only I wish he and Cherylle didn’t laugh so much together.’ Kick him out, I advised. No, Lamar said, no. Cherylle wouldn’t like that. My heart went out to him. We sat on and talked a bit longer, Lamar feigning unconcern, but with his strong shoulders slumped, his kamikaze love in a screaming death dive, the end of his fabulous amours, his brief bright horizon dimmed by valedictory clouds.
11 September 1973
I arrived home at the beach house this evening to find Lamar there waiting. I knew from his blank eyes Cherylle had gone. ‘Took the white Buick,’ Lamar said, his voice numbly monotone, ‘and everything in the house they could hock. No note, nothing.’
I poured him a drink. She was young, I said, headstrong. She’d be back soon, to apologize, wanting to be fo
rgiven. As he left Lamar gripped my arm fiercely. ‘You know,’ he said evenly, ‘I can’t face it. If she doesn’t come back.’ I reassured him. I’d lay odds I said, five days, ten at the most. Wait until the money ran out, the binge was over.
29 September 1973
Lamar looks pale and sick. He hardly sleeps he says. He has hired a private detective to look for Cherylle. Apparently everyone at work has been most understanding. Now that Cherylle has been away for three weeks sympathetic consolation has turned to worldly reasoning. You’re better off without her, his colleagues declare with firm logic. Think of your career – be objective – did she really fit in? Yeah, anyone could see there was something unstable there. Hell Lamar, they said, she’s done you a favour.
But Lamar, it was obvious, would never agree. He spent more and more time at my place tirelessly rerunning the scenario of his brief courtship and marriage as if he were trying to unlock some code the memories contained. A bleak dawn often broke on these disconsolate monologues: me in a half-doze; Lamar, his head in his hands, eyes staring emptily out to sea as if searching the sombre distance for an answer.
5 October 1973
10.30 p.m. A call from Cherylle. Would I meet her in the forecourt of a filling station not far from my house. Ah, I thought, I am about to be enrolled as mediator. However Cherylle was proud and unrepentant. The Buick was parked at the kerb. Her boyfriend leaned against it just out of earshot. Cherylle looked more wild and unkempt. She gave me the keys to the car and an envelope of money. ‘Tell him to keep away,’ she said. ‘I owe him nothing now.’ I was puzzled and a little angry. ‘What about an explanation?’ I said. ‘Why did you do it?’ She laughed. ‘Nobody could take that kind of a relationship,’ she said. ‘I was like some kind of dog, a pet dog. It would have killed me.’