by Martin Amis
“She has my sympathy. Still. Timmy’ll be along in a chapter or two.”
“Maybe. She just got a letter. He can’t tear himself away from Jerusalem. She’s cross with him now all right. And she has high hopes of Adriano.”
“Who’s Adriano?”
Lily said, “You’re not expressing yourself very clearly. Don’t you mean, Who the fuck is Adriano?”
“No I don’t. You’re following a false lead, Lily. Who’s Adriano? … All right. Who the fuck is Adriano?”
“There. It goes better with your scowl.” Lily laughed sharply and briefly. “He’s a notorious playboy. And a count. Or one day will be.”
“All Italians are counts.”
“All Italians are poor counts. He’s a rich count. He and his dad have a castle each.”
“Big deal. I didn’t realise until yesterday. There are castles everywhere in Italy. I mean, there’s one every few hundred yards. Did they have uh, did they have a long brawling-baron period?”
“Not particularly,” said Lily, who was reading a book called Italy: A Concise History. “They kept getting invaded by barbarians. Hang on.” Methodical Lily consulted her notes. “The Huns, the Franks, the Vandals, the Visigoths, and the Goths. Then the Keiths. The Keiths were the worst.”
“Were they. And when do we meet Adriano?”
“That’s what she needs. Someone of her own station. And did you thrill,” said Lily, “to the Devil’s Pass?”
In the back seat of the Fiat, he was placed between Prentiss and Scheherazade—while Lily rode in what was called the cabriolet (a smart red convertible) with Oona and Conchita. In the back seat Prentiss stayed exactly where she was, but Scheherazade swayed into him, swooned into him, on every tight turn. It was raining hard, and all they did, in the Passo del Diavolo, was steer through it and stare out at it. Keith, anyway, was attending to a riot of sense impressions: he was like the young men of Montale, each of his glands and hormones a Jocopo, a Giovanni, a Giuseppe. Her arm and thigh coming to press against his arm and thigh. Her golden aromatic hair gathering, folding, for a moment, on his chest. Was this usual? Did it mean anything? Hey, Prentiss, he wanted to say. You’ve been around. What’s all this then? Watch. Scheherazade keeps …
“It was good,” he said. “Very twisty and scary.”
“Mm. Scary. I bet. With Dodo wedged into the front seat.”
“And always on the side of the precipice—thanks very much.”
“God. You must’ve been terrified.”
In the car Keith was telling himself that Scheherazade was simply half-asleep. And for a couple of minutes, just before they turned back, she did go under—with her head resting trustfully on his shoulder. Then she snapped to, coughed, and glanced up at him through her lashes with her unreadably generous smile … And it all began again, her arm against his arm, her thigh against his thigh. What d’you think, Lily? Gaw, you should have seen her in the bathroom the other day. Another lapse with the lock, Lily, and there she was in blue jeans and bra. Is she trying to tell me something? Or maybe her habits of thought had not quite drawn level with the facts of her transformation. In the full-length mirror she still sometimes saw the mousy philanthropist in sensible shoes and spectacles. And not a winged horse in blue jeans, and a white brassiere with the narrowest trim of blue. He said,
“Whittaker seemed always to be fighting the wheel over to the left.”
“That’s why I went with Oona. Your front right tyre looked completely flat.”
“I kept thinking the car’d just give up and flip over. How was it for you, the Devil’s Pass?”
“All right. Conchita dozed. And the roof leaked.”
He closed his eyes. The bruiser bees twanged and fizzed. He sat up. A crouched fly on the stone tabletop was staring at him. He waved it away but it returned, and crouched there, and stared. Little skull and crossbones … In this matter of Scheherazade, the butterflies, as Keith saw it, took his side. The butterflies: party toys, doll-scale fans and hankies—hopeless optimists, twittering dreamers.
Unusually for a twenty-year-old (the privilege followed from his peculiar situation), Keith was aware that he was going to die. More than that, he knew that when the process began, the only thing that would matter was how it had gone with women. As he lies dying, the man will search his past for love and life. And this is true, I think. Keith was good on the big picture. But the immediate situation, the immediate process—this he often saw with unreliable eyes.
My God, they’ve got everything here,” he said. He meant the library, from whose shelves he extracted a copy of Pamela (subtitle: Virtue Rewarded), by the author of Clarissa, and a copy of Shamela, by the author of Tom Jones. Shamela was a parodic attack on Pamela, and sought to expose its false piety, its penny-wise vulgarity, and its incompetently sublimated lechery—lechery, ult. of W. Gmc origin and rel. to lick.
“So Prentiss’s rich now,” he said. “Or richer.”
“Richer. I think,” said Conchita.
She got up from the desk and went and stood by the window. The shapely curve of her abdomen in the shapeless black smock. In her anomalously deep voice she said,
“I want to get the exact colour of the roses.”
Thea sacked collar … He said, “How did you come here from America, Conchita? I mean by boat or by plane. Plane? What class?”
“Prentiss in the front. Us in the back.”
“So how did Dodo manage? I’m thinking of the meals. The tray.”
The twelve-year-old returned to her desk and picked up the pencils of mauve and purple, saying, “Dodo pulls it down as far as she can, and fills the”—she made the shape of a V with her straightened hand—“and fills the gap with magazines. And puts the tray on that.”
Maga-sceence … Keith looked forward to passing this on to Lily (fatso know-how for the jets), but not as keenly as he would have done—before. He still owed Lily a great debt of gratitude. Gratitude was what he was good at. It was his one emotional talent, he believed. Sitting, now, he was grateful for the chair beneath him, the book before him. Grateful, and pleasantly surprised. He was grateful for the ballpoint in his hand, pleasantly surprised by the cap on the ballpoint. Conchita said,
“Then she eats everything. Even all the butter.”
As he had intended to say, he said, “I might not see you tomorrow before you go. Did you know I’m adopted? Being adopted—it’s all right.”
Her head didn’t move but her irises came up off the page, and he was immediately ashamed, because he realised that being adopted (as a minor existential burden) was not very high on the schedule of Conchita’s troubles. She said,
“It’s all right.”
“I meant later on.” For a moment he contemplated her, the lunar purity of her brow, the hectic dusk-and-rose of her cheeks. “I meant later on. I’m sorry about your parents. Goodbye.”
“Adiós. Hasta luego. I think we’re coming back.”
Ma’s out, Pa’s out, let’s talk dirt. Pee po belly bottom drawers. That’s what his mother and her sisters used to chant (she told him), back in 1935 …
“I can assure you I’m no stranger,” said Keith, “to Islamic talent. They’re the best-looking people on earth, don’t you think?”
“Yes I do. The whole crescent.”
He and Whittaker were playing chess on the sunset terrace—facing west. Whittaker had been telling him about the dos and don’ts of being in love with Amen. The don’ts were by far the more numerous. Keith said,
“Me, I went out with two Muslim chicks. Ashraf. And little Dilkash.”
“What nationalities? Or don’t you distinguish.”
“Ashraf from Iran, Dilkash from Pakistan. Ashraf was great. She liked a drink and she came across on the first night. Dilkash wasn’t like that at all.”
“So Ashraf was a do. And Dilkash was a don’t.”
“Yeah. Dilkash didn’t.” Keith twisted in his seat. The truth was that he had a bad conscience about Dilkash. “I never asked Nich
olas and I still can’t work it out. So I’ll ask you.”
Whittaker in fact bore close affinities with Nicholas. They both talked in formed sentences—even in formed paragraphs. They both knew everything. And at first you thought they looked not unalike. As a pupil for many years in a British boarding school, Nicholas had naturally had his gay period. But there was political will in Nicholas, now: what politicians, at least, called steel. And this didn’t hold for Whittaker, with his elbow patches and his thick glasses. Keith said,
“Ashraf, Dilkash. Iran, Pakistan—what’s the diff? I mean, they’re both Arabs. Aren’t they? No. Wait. Ashraf’s an Arab.”
“No, Ashraf’s not an Arab either. She’s a Persian. And the diff, Keith,” said Whittaker, “is that Iran is a decadent monarchy and Pakistan is an Islamic republic. At least in name. More wine. Oh, sorry. You don’t, do you.”
“I do a bit. Go on then … Round at Dilkash’s place her parents drank pop in the evenings. Can you credit it. A grown man and woman, in the evenings, drinking pop. Does Amen drink?”
“Drink? To him that’s just—oh, unbelievably gross. He smokes hash. On the other hand.”
“Ashraf was great, but with Dilkash I never …” Keith paused. “Now what’s this drama,” he said, lighting a cigarette, “about Amen and Scheherazade’s breasts?”
“Amen,” said Whittaker, with his face low over the chessboard, “is much queerer than I am. Much.”
“So there are degrees. Yeah, that makes sense. Of course there are.”
“Of course there are. And Amen’s very queer. Hence the seriousness of the problem he’s having with Scheherazade’s breasts.”
“I never see him any more.”
“Nor do I. It’s worse than ever.”
“The exercises.”
“The exercises.”
“Too thin.”
“Too fat. He was too thin until about Monday afternoon. Now he’s too fat.”
Whittaker ate most of his meals with them, but he was not a castledweller. He and Amen shared a modern studio further down the slope. Keith thought of Amen, eighteen years old, and piratically handsome with his missing upper incisor; and the fuzzy eyelashes that scrolled all the way up and over, like harem slippers. He didn’t want to say so—but Keith quite fancied Amen. Whenever he saw him he felt a fleeting pressure on his chest. It was nothing like the alpweight continuously applied by the presence of Scheherazade; still, it was there. Keith said,
“He’s such a lovely colour. And with those muscles, he looks like he’s wearing armour. Golden armour. Lily thinks she’s not thin enough. Puppy fat. Six months ago she had what she called a puppy-fat attack.”
“She should come over. Amen’s turned the whole upper floor into an orthopaedic ward. All these weights on strings. There are bits of his body he doesn’t like. He’s furious with bits of his body.”
“Which bits?”
“It’s his goddamned forearms, it’s his goddamned calves. It’s the proportions. He’s artistic and it’s the proportions. The relationship.”
“Is that his quarrel with Scheherazade’s breasts? The relationship?”
“No. It’s more basic than that.”
They sat under the shadow of their sister mountain. Above and beyond, the clouds sought the gothic colours and buffoonish configurations they would be needing, in readiness for the thunderstorm—now long-awaited. Whittaker said,
“It’s like with the gaping yokels in the bar in Montale. Only more extreme. Amen, Keith, grew up in the Sahara Desert. The women he’s used to all look like bowling balls. Then one afternoon he’s down at the pool, he comes up for air, and sees a six-foot blonde. Topless. And there they are, staring down at him. Scheherazade’s breasts.”
So it’s true, thought Keith. “Topless,” he said nauseously. “You’re kidding. I thought Lily was just teasing me.”
“No. Scheherazade down at the pool—topless as nature intended. And now, with Amen, it’s become a negative obsession.”
“Mm. I’m trying to see them from his point of view.”
“It’s complicated. He’s artistic and it’s complicated. Sometimes he says they’re like a terrifying sculpture called Female. And not stone—metal. And get this. Sometimes he says they belong in a thick glass jar. In a backroom at the lab. With all the other freaks.”
“That is—that’s formidably gay … Me, I expect to take them in my stride. I think I’m pretty clear-headed about breasts. I was bottle-fed, see. No topless period in babyhood.”
Corpulent raindrops began here and there to fall.
“It might be less trouble,” said Whittaker, “if we all looked like bowling balls. Amen’s sister, Ruaa, she’s not fat, I don’t think, but she’s … She looks like—what’s that horror film with Steve McQueen? Oh yeah. The Blob.”
The thirty-two pieces on the sixty-four squares were now reduced to seven a side.
“Draw?” said Keith. “Here’s a tip for Amen. The next time he sees Scheherazade’s breasts, can’t he just pretend they’re an arse? Are there bits of your body Amen doesn’t like?”
“He doesn’t like any of it. I’m thirty-one. You guys are all kids. Too big, too small, too this, too that. When are you ever going to feel good about your bodies?”
After dinner he played an hour of cards with Scheherazade on the thick-rugged floor of a distant chamber (the den or the gunroom, with its moose’s head, its crossed cutlasses, its miniature cannons on either side of the grate). Keith had spent most of the evening in conversation with her mother, so he was now well placed (Scheherazade’s fanned cards were six inches from his chin) to see what youth was. Her face was actually narrower than Oona’s, but the flesh itself was full and plump. And it had a self-magnifying quality, her flesh—the plump peel of youth … There was much laughing and, on her part, some beaming; every now and then she beamed at him. Just before twelve they climbed the tower by lanternlight.
“I’m Scheherazade,” said Lily in the dark. “This is Scheherazade lying here. But she’s been drugged. She’s completely at your mercy. She’s helpless on drugs.”
“What kind of drugs?”
“She can’t speak. She’s helpless. Do your worst!”
Later Lily said,
“No. Stay. Have it by the window. Lean out.”
He leant out, and smoked. The night was starless, with silenced cicadas … Seventeen years ago to the hour, on July 15, 1953, he was allowed down to see the stranger in his parents’ bedroom. Karl was now also present, and there was a midwife packing up, and his mother’s face on the pillow was flushed and moist and wise. Keith was not quite four. With a suddenly flaring heart he approached the cradle—but no, in his mind it wasn’t a cot or a basket: it was a bed, and on it lay a creature the size of an established infant, with thick, damp, chest-length blonde hair, and warm cheeks, and the knowing smile of sleep. A false memory (or so he always assumed), touched up or restored by facets and lustres that awaited her in the future—because he had seen a newborn baby or two, meanwhile, and he had no illusions about how they looked. But now (leaning out, smoking, thinking) he decided that this impossible vision, his formed sister, was what he actually saw, in his hallucinatory state, smashed on love and protectiveness.
No stars and no cicadas. Just a quarter-moon, lying on its back and at an expectant angle, like a baby girding itself for the bottle or the breast.
“Where’s our storm?” said Lily as he joined her.
Keith sank back. Lily too was like a foster-sister to him … All will be decided here, he thought. All will be decided in the castle in Italy. Right from the start, as he scaled the tower with his bags, three steps below Scheherazade (the segment of white in all that churning bronze), he strongly intuited that his sexual nature was still open to change. For a while it worried him: he would go gay and be swept off his feet by Amen; he would fall for one of the prettier ewes in the field beyond the paddock; at the very least, he would develop a sick thing for, say, Oona, or Conchita—or even Dodo
! … This is the climax of my youth, he thought. All will be decided here.
Then it came, an hour later, two hours, three hours. Amateurish, tinny, like a pantomime shotgun. You could almost see the bearded villain in his frock coat, and the flabby smoke ring widening over his blunderbuss. Amateurish—and neolithically loud.
“You?” Lily suddenly said.
“Yes,” he said. “Me.”
“Mm. Tomorrow all your dreams will come true.”
“How’s that?”
“After the storm. We display ourselves. Her. Down by the pool.”
FIRST INTERVAL
The Me Decade wasn’t called the Me Decade until 1976. In the summer of 1970 they were only six months into it; but they could all be pretty sure that the 1970s was going to be a me decade. This was because all decades were now me decades. There has never been anything that could possibly be called a you decade: technically speaking, you decades (back in the feudal night) would have been known as thou decades. The 1940s was probably the last we decade. And all decades, until 1970, were undeniably he decades. So the Me Decade was the Me Decade, right enough—a new intensity of self-absorption. But the Me Decade was also and unquestionably the She Decade.
It was all being arranged, history was arranging it—just for Keith. Or so he sometimes felt. It was all being done with Keith in mind.
Among the poor (according to a distinguished Marxist historian), women went out to work after 1945 because, to put it crudely, children no longer did so. Then higher education, with the female share of university places set to double from a quarter to a half. Also, and never for a moment forgetting Keith’s needs: antibiotics (1955), the Pill (1960), the Equal Pay Act (1963), the Civil Rights Act (1964), the National Organization for Women (1966), “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” (1968), the National Abortion Rights Action League (1969). The Female Eunuch (love and romance are illusions), Women’s Estate (the nuclear family is a consumerist hoax), Sexual Politics (bottomless insecurity drives the man’s will to dominate), and Our Bodies, Ourselves (how to emancipate the bedroom) all appeared in 1970, back to back, and with perfect timing. It was official. It was here, and just for Keith.