She cried out, falling back onto the bed, and then rolling off onto the floor. Blood seemed to be flowing from all ends of her. As she toppled she became aware in the dark of a fluttering in front of her face, and, at first, thought it was something brought on by the blow, like the stars that circled round the skulls of head-injured characters in The Beano; but then the light came on, and she saw that it was a page of Solomon’s Testament, one of a few that had risen up from the pile on the floor following her fall. Some more were strewn about the threadbare carpet, but the majority had remained in a block – the block that she had fallen on directly, and that she could feel still underneath her. At the edge of her vision she could see some of the words – words that Eli had forbidden her from reading while he was writing – but only the unfinished end of a page: and then turns, on his broad heels, into Times Square, where the ailing hues of a thousand different. She rolled a foot further, off the main block of paper, and looked round to see, as she had feared, the cover page and numerous other sheaves of Eli’s masterpiece-in-waiting streaked with red, some of it still dripping down the white sides like the daring strawberry icing she had once seen on an enormous wedding cake in the pages of Ladies’ Home Journal. Her mind filled with blood: she didn’t know whether the blood on the pages was from her nose or between her legs, and she wondered how that could be found out; wondered, too, how it was that paper could cut, and why it was that, when it did, it produced from fingers virtually no blood. She felt Eli’s shoeless steps behind her resonating up from the floorboards: it was him who had turned on the light. He would pick her up in his arms, now, just like her father; he would squeeze her, and, even though the squeezing of her in bed earlier in the night had been bad, this would be a good squeeze, a healing squeeze, like her father’s. It would stop the bleeding: his arms would be a tourniquet. Violet waited for the small rush of wind, and then indeed it came, wafting up her nightdress, but she did not come up with it. Instead, Eli crouched down and lifted the block of paper into his arms. He stood over her, naked, clutching the soiled Solomon’s Testament to his chest like a child: and it was, in fact, in its blend of her blood and his words, his brain and her body, the nearest they would get.
Violet lay there for some small time, listening to him breathing, not wanting to do so herself: wondering if it would have been better if she was dead. Then he knelt down and whispered, in a voice hoarse with relief: ‘It’s OK …’ and put his hand on her hair, stroking it away from her coldly sweating forehead. ‘Vi … It’s OK.’ Violet looked round to him. His face was compassionate – there seemed to be tears in his eyes – but even though she nodded, accepting his touch, she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure what he meant. It was an imprecation that she would continue to wonder about, much later, even into the time when these kind of things were no longer shrouded in mystery and you could read articles in newspapers, for heaven’s sake, insisting that sex during pregnancy was fine, and there was only a very small chance of a miscarriage from it – even then she would sometimes wonder whether Eli had been reassuring her, or forgiving her.
* * *
Harvey is in his hotel room looking for the optimum YouTube clip of Linda Ronstadt. This doesn’t mean, necessarily, the best YouTube clip of Linda Ronstadt: her performance of ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’ on The Don Kirshner Rock Concert, for example; her beautiful – if, on the tiny Sony travel speakers he has attached to his Vaio, acoustically challenging – version of ‘Blowing Away’ at a Lowell George tribute concert in 1979; or her 1969 appearance on The Johnny Cash Show, which, though clearly far too early for Harvey’s purposes, does distract him for a while, partly because Linda is so astonishingly gorgeous on it, and partly due to this dialogue she has while sitting on stage with Johnny:
JOHNNY: Where you from Linda?
LINDA: I’m from Tucson, Arizona.
JOHNNY: That’s wonderful country, I like to go out there and jack-rabbit hunt. Do you ever go rabbit hunting?
LINDA: I never could pull the trigger, you know?
JOHNNY: Well, I didn’t like to shoot ’em, I just liked to hunt ’em.
LINDA: It’s OK to shoot them.
JOHNNY: If you’re hungry, I guess.
LINDA: If you’re hungry, right.
JOHNNY: Hey, let’s do a song.
None of these are right, although the 1979 appearance is close. What Harvey is searching through the YouTube image wall for – as he has done in the past with Brigitte Bardot, and Debbie Harry, and Jane Fonda, and Audrey Hepburn, and Raquel Welch, and, more latterly, Meg Ryan, Joanna Lumley, and Felicity Kendal – even, once, Tessa Wyatt (from the ITV sitcom Robin’s Nest; used to be married to Tony Blackburn; unbelievably lovely to look at in 1983) but could find no matches for her – is the point at which this beautiful woman’s beauty peaked. And by peaked, Harvey isn’t thinking so much as maximized, although that’s sort of in the mix, as reached its tipping point: peak beauty as in peak oil.
With all these women – whose beauty at its height dismantles him; there is a clip of Jane Fonda from a black-and-white movie called Catfight that he cannot watch without holding his breath – he wants to find the point at which they lose it. This is not sadistic. He does not want, like some middle-aged male version of the Queen in Snow White, to revel in the downfall of their looks. What he wants is to see how far he can push his desire: how far down the line.
So the truer description would be to say that Harvey is looking for the point just before Linda Ronstadt became – in his eyes – no longer a great beauty. He is presently convinced that this point is an appearance on The Leo Sayer Show that Harvey estimates to be early 1980s, therefore making Linda, who Wikipedia dates as having been born in 1946, mid- to late thirties. In the clip, she undoubtedly still carries herself as an attractive woman, and is quite clearly fancied by Leo Sayer (a fancy, Harvey surmises, not obviously reciprocated by Linda, who can hardly bear to look at the gyrating Isro-haired monkey). They sing ‘Tumbling Dice’, and, in an eighties BBC kind of way, it’s meant to be sexy. All this helps, as Harvey can be influenced in this matter; if other men regard a woman as being sexually attractive, Harvey will take notice.
The point of all this is to train – retrain – his eyes. The novel thing that YouTube has given the voyeuristic billions – the ability to trace change in a person by seeing them in gobbets young and then old – is being used by Harvey to discover if desire is, as some of his therapists have insisted it is, malleable. This is not something he instinctively believes. Desire for Harvey is adamantine. Or, perhaps more precisely, it is fast: too fast to steer. The sight of female beauty makes Harvey a mirror. Beauty reaches his eyes and is returned as desire, at the speed of light.
But despite this Harvey tries. What else can he do? He will not leave Stella because her beauty has passed some imagined optimum, however much his father’s ghost may be pouring that poison continually into his ear. He will not read this anxiety as a mandate, forcing him away from his life. So he has bought into the possibility that you can consciously shift the coordinates of your own desire: you can lead it to where it’s best for everybody, to a place where it causes no trouble. And if one way of doing this might be to watch Linda Ronstadt in her late thirties singing with Leo Sayer on YouTube, in the hope of discovering that, although her face no longer makes him hold his breath like it does when she is on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1978, he still finds her attractive – then he will watch it and watch it again.
There are other ways in which Harvey uses the internet for self-medication. Pornography, for example: Harvey feels that, for him, it has a use beyond the obvious. It can be incorporated into the same Neuro Linguistic Erotic Reprogramming that might result from extended looking at mid-life clips of iconic female beauties. He feels that there is a political dimension to this. Harvey, still Joan Gold’s son, has made internet porn right in his head. Or, at least, while being aware of all the arguments against it, has come up with one in its favour, through remembering that one of the big
no-nos of porn is that it fosters the idea that only one type of woman – young, slim, smooth-skinned – is erotically acceptable. Well, Harvey thinks, say what you like about the internet, but it has fucking subverted that hegemony. Now women can be erotically objectified whatever state they are in: morbidly obese, mutant, severely disabled and, yes, old. This bar has been raised and raised again, in cyberspace. It has taken apart the whole under-twenty-six, under-120 pounds stranglehold on the erotic that pornography used to insist upon. Harvey has even put this argument to some women, and some of them have even listened.
Beyond the multitude of MILF sites and www.over50.com, however, lies the slightly more troubling area of granny porn. Harvey’s argument falters, he knows, in the face of www.oldgoats. com, www.uglyancientsluts.com, www.isitmymom.com. The other thing comes out, the possibility that the finding of the old and the crippled and the deformed erotic is just another form of degradation: that what the masturbating viewer is enjoying is the pure and final humiliation of decay. But fuck that, thinks Harvey: he never imagined that you can crack the egg of what men find erotic and find only goodness. Besides, his central project is not intellectual, but self-improving: he thinks that looking at these sites may be a type of familiarization therapy for him, acclimatizing him slowly to the ineluctable fact that women do age. Or, rather: that women who age can still be women you might want to fuck. He knows, obviously, that the idea that female fuckability lessens with age is shameful, but his first instinct is that it is true at least for his libido; what he is hoping for is that watching some of this stuff might lead him to a second instinct. It is a strange world, of course, where watching granny porn can be construed as being in the cause of love.
Trouble is, though, these sites don’t do it for him; not at all. He finds them disturbing psychologically, physically and, for all his intellectual sophistry, politically; the images of these ladies – he wants to use the word, ladies; that’s what their faces, age conferring its quiet dignity, still seem to inspire, even as the way their bodies are arranged violently rejects the word – invoke in him a seemingly impossible mix, an oil and water mix, of repulsion and compassion. They don’t stimulate Harvey’s erotic centre; at best, what they produce there is confusion – a kind of start-stop thing, whereby he can feel his libido responding initially to the basic coordinates of the image – it is a woman, she is in lingerie, she is opening her legs – but then halt, uncertain, distraught – when her age becomes, a split-second later, apparent. These sites profoundly disorientate his sexual self; and, for that, he is sometimes grateful, because what he wants most of all is to think that that self can be shifted.
Other times, he just endlessly Googles the problem. Ageing; ‘sex and ageing’; age partner anxiety getting older sex psychological; wife skin age time; on and on and on, desperately thinking that the right combination of words will unlock the cure. And what he has discovered is this. There is what he has come to think of as a Great Silence on this issue. That in all the billions of words on the millions of subjects that the web contains, no one has said anything on the subject of what it is like to fear the sight of your loved one growing old. There are sites – many – about how age doesn’t matter in love; discussion forums for people whose partners are fifty or sixty years older than they are, full of contributors making the point over and over again that ‘age is just a number’. There are sites for older women with much younger men, and vice versa; there are sites where women complain to other women about being dumped for younger women; and there are endless, endless sites about how to make yourself – if you’re a woman – look younger, all full of imprecations about how this, of course, is not important to one’s inner self but we all want to make the best of ourselves and hey why not and let’s do it but do it responsibly and look at this photo of this woman and how much younger she looks now and so therefore everything is now right with her world. But there are no sites that say: Are you like me? Do you love your wife/husband/partner but cannot bear the sight, or even the thought, of them growing old? Is their beauty so important to you, that for reasons that you don’t even understand, the loss of it from your gaze feels terrifying? And do you hate yourself for having these thoughts and these feelings but can’t stop them? That’s what Harvey wants, a site that says that. And then: Well, I can help you. Or at least: you are not alone.
He clicks off YouTube, glancing past a video grab of Linda Ronstadt as she is now. He doesn’t want any more self-help from the screen, but other temptations rear up from the empty Google box. Harvey can’t help himself, the rich colours of the word call to him: the bright blue Gs, the sapling-green l, the red and yellow Os like deliciously over-made-up eyes. He types it in. Harvey Gold. Twenty-eight thousand and two hundred entries. The same stuff as always, in the same order as always, starting with the Wikipedia entry for the other one. Harvey doesn’t understand why his entry doesn’t come up on the search page. Instead, he has to click on this other Harvey Gold, the one who, he knows only too well by now, is an American guitarist, bassist and organist turned keyboardist for the avant-garde rock/New Wave band Tin Huey. I really must download some Tin Huey at some point, Harvey thinks, before clicking on For other persons named Harvey Gold, see Harvey Gold (disambiguation).
His short entry comes up; not, at least, a stub:
Harvey Gold
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Harvey Gold (born 2 March 1966) is a British-American writer. He is the son of the world-famous novelist Eli Gold. In 1996 he himself wrote a novel, Blah Blah Blah, which was neither a commercial nor a critical success. He has ghost-written a number of celebrity autobiographies. His name does not appear in any of these but it has been suggested that the celebrities may include Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, Jeremy Vine, Chris Noth, Glen Campbell, Simon Cowell, Jocky Wilson, Nicole Richie, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Natascha Kampusch.
Natascha Kampusch? That was a new one. The only biography Harvey has actually ghosted in this list is Chris Noth’s (of Sex and the City) Bigger Than Big: Harvey’s main memory of writing it now is the number of times he had to correct himself after writing his subject’s name as North, or Moth – but some Wikipedia-editing wag seems to take delight in adding to this list every time he looks at it. He had originally edited all the names out – he had thought about putting some whose autobiographies he had written, but knew it was against his contract – but they keep on coming back, different every time, and now he has given up.
He clicks back to Google, and then slides his fingers around the mouse square to bring the cursor to the bookmark Amazon, for the second stop on his daily cyber-round of self-immolation. The page comes up: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0349117462/ ref=ed_ra_of_dp/026-8296630-3788113. It is the page for Blah Blah Blah (paperback edition), currently standing at 239,767 in the bestsellers’ chart. He scrolls down. Two stars: seven customer reviews. They have shifted the order of these reviews around for some rebranding reason, so the first one is now gangstero (Isle of Man), who says:
** not a chip off the old block, 23 Jun 2002
By gangstero (Isle of Man, UK) – See all my reviews
TOP 1000 REVIEWER
Harvey Gold has got a lot to live up to, and if I hadn’t been expecting something at least in the ballpark of Solomon’s Testament and Criminality and The Compliance of Women, then maybe I’d have given it a few more stars. But even without the expectation set up by the Gold name, I’m not sure it ever really works. I just didn’t really like any of the characters. Especially the hero (?) and narrator, Jake, a self-obsessed and obnoxious character who, at the end of the day, just wasn’t a very pleasant person to spend all that time with. I finished it but only because I never give up books halfway through.
Although he’s read gangstero’s review a number of times before, it still makes Harvey furious. Like? You didn’t like him? Do you think you’re supposed to like Raskolnikov? Humbert Humbert? Portnoy? Solomon Wolff? Odysseus? He thinks these things, trying to absorb his
basic hurt that gangstero has not liked Jake, who is, in virtually every respect, him.
His eye glances down the other Amazon reviews, all bad, searching for the comfort of the one good one. It has been removed from the page itself, but he finds a link to it on the right-hand side:
* Amazingly funny and well written; could almost be by his dad, 17 Jan 2003
By chill
I don’t know what most of the other reviewers on this site are going on about. I loved this book. The characters, especially Jake, are really well-drawn, and, yes, they push the envelope a bit in terms of behaviour, but that just makes it all the more interesting. The story maybe droops a bit in the last third, but it stays funny and moving all the way through. The bit where Jake and Ella split up made me cry, too.
He wonders if there’s a way of getting this one shifted onto the main page. He wonders, too, if he should have added a bit about how clever the end plot twist is, to counteract the thing about it drooping in the last third, which he’d only put in so that no one suspected his authorship. Adding a drop of something negative hadn’t caused him as much pain, however, as the reference to his father. He knew, of course, that every single review of his book would begin by name-checking his father – he knew, too, that even good ones (had there been any) would have adopted a the-bar’s-been-set-pretty-high-for-this-guy tone – but he would’ve liked, he really would, just one review, even on Amazon, even written and click-posted, slightly sweatily, by his own hand, not to have mentioned Eli. He knew, however, that since all the others did, he had to.
The Death of Eli Gold Page 16