‘No. But you’ve ordered me another drink. And I’ll feel the need to finish it, once it’s here. And then I’ll feel sick, and later – because I’m forty-four, and masturbation has, over many years, inflamed and swelled my prostate into a prostate wearing a fat suit – I’ll spend all night going back and forth to the toilet.’
Bunce laughs, and Harvey smiles, although misgives a little inside, knowing that he has now started copying not just the accent but the speech rhythms of his alpha male friend. The fall in his stomach comes from a slippage of self, a knowledge that he is no longer quite his own man. The Harvey Goldness of him is vulnerable, easily contaminated.
The drinks arrive: Angela puts them down in front of the two men, and turns away swiftly in full, confident assurance of her invisibility to them. Harvey looks at it, finding as always the white froth more attractive than the urine-coloured liquid underneath. He wishes he had brought his last bottle of Extra Tart Sour Blast Spray with him. Perhaps he could have secretly gone into the toilet with it.
‘So what the fuck are you doing these days?’ says Bunce. ‘Apart from waiting for your dad to die. Are you writing?’
‘Yes. I wasn’t for a long time. But, yeah. I just got a job here.’
‘Here?’
‘In New York. I’m writing an autobiography for a pop star. Well, I will be writing it. Once I get round to it.’
Bunce drinks, a big male glug: he drinks as if he is going to wipe his mouth across his face afterwards.
‘Bono? Elvis Costello? Beyoncé?’ He says it in an exaggerated black voice, with a snap on the last syllable. Harvey registers that Bunce is being cruel – ironically, obviously; it’s all irony, everything is irony, the world is awash with irony – knowing that Harvey would never be in the frame to ghostwrite such people’s autobiographies.
‘No. Someone you’ve never heard of.’
‘Some indie faggot?’
‘No, but – you won’t have heard of – of her.’
Bunce drinks more beer. Harvey can feel that the word her has made him want to interrogate further. It was partly the way he said it, stumbling slightly: like it was a secret. Harvey doesn’t want to talk to Bunce about writing Lark’s autobiography. He is embarrassed about it, because she is nineteen and hasn’t done anything. But he also doesn’t want to talk about it because he has been thinking a lot about Lark recently: a lot more than he really wants to. She is slipping out of her container.
‘So anyway,’ Harvey says, before Bunce has a chance to follow up on this line of questioning, ‘how’s sex crime?’
Bunce nods thoughtfully, before saying: ‘I’ve really got to give it up.’
‘Well, you haven’t been caught yet.’
‘No, but it’s just a matter of time.’
Harvey smiles: this is the conversation he knew they would have. Bunce now works for the CSC, the Criminal Sexual Conduct unit of the Toledo County Detroit Prosecutor’s Office. Bunce is an assistant prosecutor in the unit. He really is.
‘No, but honestly – how the fuck did you end up in that department?’
‘I dunno. The job came up.’
‘What do you do all day?’
‘I fuck up paedos. I take paedos down.’
‘Great job description. Paedos? Not rapists? Flashers? Necrophiliacs? Horse-fuckers?’
‘Not often any of those guys. We see all the colours of the male sexual rainbow in my work, yes, but generally we’re dealing with the deepest, darkest black.’ Harvey sees a gear change in Bunce’s face, a shift away, amazingly, from irony, but not towards gravitas exactly; towards OK, we’re talking business now. ‘Say: rape. Sexual touching of children outnumbers it by at least fifteen to one. It is a fucking pandemic. Committed ten to one by men – overwhelmingly, white men. Also: ratio of touching by stepfather, as opposed to father, I’d put at about seven to one. There seems to be a taboo about one’s own children, though it’s often overcome. Stepchildren? Open season. Our office has five lawyers devoted full-time to prosecuting child molesters. And they are overworked.’
‘Wow,’ says Harvey, and then thinks how stupid a word that is in response to what Bunce has said. But Bunce has not noticed, has hardly paused for breath.
‘And here’s a weird thing. It is really common – heartbreakingly common – for the natural mother of the abused stepchildren to battle the prosecution at every step. Typical scenario: sexual abuse is detected; the stepfather stands accused; the mother of the children defends the rapist and focuses all her fury on the police, prosecution and children. Even when faced with conclusive evidence of guilt. Given the choice between her children and her man, too often there is no choice. The children are sacrificed to the lover. To the man.’
‘But …’
‘What?’
Harvey doesn’t know what to say. He wants to say: But they are mothers. Bunce takes his silence as shock, which it is. Harvey shakes his head, and takes a sip of the beer: sour, of course.
‘I tell you, Harv, it must be the best sex ever, because I don’t think you can ever rehab a real chicken hawk …’
‘A what?’
‘Paedo. Child molester. That’s what we call them in the biz. Let’s say you lock one up for ten years, take everything away, stick him in a jail where he will be tortured every day as the lowest on the totem; beaten, spat at, pissed on, anally raped with iron bars, and that’s just the guards – it’s a fucking Hieronymus Bosch painting for them in there – and still: the moment he is released, he will not pause for food or rest or a hot shower, but will go right about the business of finding more young ass to penetrate. It is a drive unlike anything you or I will ever experience. My take? Easier to kick a fifteen-year crack habit than to curb your desire for young boys or girls. Harsh truth: the only thing we can do is lock them away. They haven’t the strength to stop.’
Harvey nods, but doesn’t feel entirely comfortable talking about this stuff. He knows what it is like to be driven and distorted by desire. He has no wish, however, to feel any kinship with these men. He shivers, repulsed by the thought.
‘But how do you deal with it? Having to look at – whatever it is that you have to look at?’
‘I deal with it by … I don’t know.’ For the first time, Bunce’s rhetoric falters. He shakes his head. ‘It is hard. Some of the things I’ve seen … I’ve been in rooms with people who like to think of themselves as the hardest of men – seen-it-all men, men who present themselves as having souls thick as lead – and evidence – films, fucking films, seized by the cops, that these scumbags have made of themselves with kids – has gone on the DVD player: and by the end, everyone – everyone – is crying.’
There is a silence. The image Bunce has conjured up has dried out Harvey’s mouth: he has to drink some beer to rehydrate. Its effect is dizzying, as if the alcohol has been injected directly into his brain. Bunce breathes in. Harvey can feel him returning to earth, or at least Planet Bunce.
‘And also,’ he says, ‘it doesn’t make for easy chitchat. “Oh, hi, honey, what did you do today?” “Oh, watched another video of a four-year-old getting fucked. What’s for dinner?”’
Harvey laughs, as he knows he has to. Laughter is the way of normalization; it’s how modern man says whatever it is, I can deal with it.
‘And what about sex – doesn’t it weird up sex? Looking at that awful shit all day? Although you were always a bit weird about it …’
Bunce does a face of mock outrage. ‘How so?’
‘Oh, y’know. The way you always …’ Harvey pauses, not sure whether he is straying into difficult waters.
‘What?’
‘Found fault. With women. You were always the guy who managed to find the fault. Even the most perfect looking women, you would scope it out somehow. Maybe that’s why you went into sex crime.’
Bunce puts his glass down and considers. He is silent for so long Harvey starts to wonder if he had been wrong in thinking of Bunce as one of those people who it’s impossible to
offend.
‘You’re right,’ he says, eventually. ‘And you don’t know the half of it. Not the quarter of it. Let me see. Reasons that I’ve broken off with women in my time include …’ he spreads the fingers of his right hand and marks off the numbers with the index finger of the left, ‘… stretchmarks; too fat; too thin; facial hair; too much vaginal hair; too much anal hair; bad breath; too many moles; pores …’
‘What about them?’
‘Too big and open. Which suggested to me a weird kind of alien sweat; which I then started to smell on her. It may have been psychosomatic. Irregular-shaped breasts. Irregular-shaped vaginal lips. Big hands. Veiny thighs. Protruding hips. Thin lips. I liked her.’
‘What?’
‘The thin-lipped one. She was great. Met her in a bar in downtown Detroit. I liked her a lot. But after about four dates, I was just thinking, so much: if only she had just slightly thicker lips. And I couldn’t be doing with that thought in my head all the fucking time for the rest of my fucking life.’ He sticks his left hand out now, and puts the right index finger on the left pinky. ‘Shortness of neck.’
‘Shortness of what? Are you mental?’
‘A long neck, fellow. That’s a great thing. Swan-like. You’re a great writer’s son, you should know. “Her neck was long, and finely tuned” – Henry Fielding, describing the beauty Sophia, in Tom Jones.’
‘Yeah. Obviously, I knew that.’
‘Cankles.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘Camel toe.’
Harvey frowns. ‘But surely she could just have bought a less tight pair of trousers?’
Bunce shakes his head. ‘No: it showed itself with every pair: I think maybe she had cloth-attracting labia. Spotty ass.’
‘This is a different woman, now?’
‘Yes. Unless I make it clear, each defect represents a separate reason for dumping a separate woman, OK?’
‘You never operated a two – or even – three strikes and you’re out system?’ Why am I asking all these questions, Harvey thinks. Is it because whenever I meet men who can do this – go through women quickly, apparently unscarred; as if all the scarring has been inflicted only on the women – no, that’s not quite it – as if all the scarring of women has not scarred them – I want to know how. I hate these men, and yet I admire them, Harvey thinks. I think of them, at some level, as courageous; as honest; as living a life close to the bone, the bad bone of what it is to be a man.
Bunce shakes his head again. ‘One’ll do it for me. BO.’
‘BO?’
‘Body odour. Smelliness.’
‘I know what BO stands for, I just can’t believe anyone’s saying it when it isn’t actually 1974.’
‘Fuck me, man, she smelt like she last washed in 1974. Weird toenails.’
‘Weird in what way?’
‘Dinosaur weird. In my head I would imagine her cutting them with secateurs.’
‘How many women have you been through?’
‘A lot.’
‘Is the dumping reason only ever physical?’
Bunce takes a sip of his beer; he chucks the liquid around his mouth before swallowing, to indicate consideration of this question.
‘Generally. Although the finding of a personality flaw is, in truth, often concomitant with the finding of a physical one. One woman I thought was great. Dated her no problem for a month. Then it turned out that her hero, her fucking intellectual mentor-giant-guru-person-she’d-most-like-to-meet was Hillary Clinton. Five minutes after she told me that I noticed her nostrils were slightly different sizes.’
‘Hmm.’
‘And when I first starting working in Toledo County, I split up with an intern I was fucking – and she was gorgeous, astonishing, and properly fucking dirty, the imagination of an Arab dictator’s harem-favourite combined with circus-level flexibility – because she told me there was a history of cancer in her family.’
‘Oh, Bunce … that’s terrible.’
Bunce does a Hey, I don’t make the rules face. ‘Breast cancer. You can’t be too careful.’
Harvey laughs, in spite of himself. He wonders, though, about a flaw that Bunce has not mentioned. He has not said: too old. I split up with her because she was too old. Harvey has been thinking he will say it in a minute, fearing the saying of it, in fact, knowing it will pierce him. But so far he has not. Harvey wonders if Bunce, too, is part of The Great Silence; and then realizes no, he has not been with any of these women long enough for them to get old.
‘You’re such a cunt,’ he says. Bunce smiles, pleased. ‘And so proud of your cuntiness. It’s incredible. What did you tell her?’
‘I said it’s not you, it’s me. Of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘I said it with real tears in my eyes.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Fuck, you’ve fucked a lot of women.’
‘I have.’
‘It’s making me feel envious.’
‘What did you think was the point of this conversation?’
Harvey laughs. ‘But these are all still basically physical things. Hillary Clinton, yes, but then there was the nostril thing. And the poor intern, you split up with her because a picture of her in your mind with a double mastectomy made your cock shrivel.’ He deliberately says cock, even though the word that appeared in his mind was dick: he is fighting the idiom, summoning his mental mujahedeen to resist America. ‘There must be one –’
‘Oh! Here’s one! Do you remember that woman Bryony, who I was fucking at college, the one with the blind dad?’
‘Yes! Fuck! Bryony! What happened to her?’
‘I split up with her because she refused to believe that the Romans were ever in Britain.’
Harvey gasps. ‘What? How could she not have known that?’
‘I don’t know, but the point is not that she didn’t know it – although, yes, obviously, that’s a sacking offence right there – but that having found it out – having had this piece of fundamental ignorance corrected, finally, at what, nineteen, twenty – she set her face against it. I tell you, I was still rowing with her and calling her a stupid bitch and telling her just to read fucking Gibbon long after I’d decided to split up with her. A voice in my head was saying, you don’t have to do this – just walk out the door – but I just couldn’t believe anyone I had ever been associated with could be so dumb.’
‘Anything more to drink, gentlemen?’
Harvey looks up: it is the woman behind the bar. How long has she been there? As Bunce has warmed to his subject, and Harvey, drunk, has been drawn in by the tangy thrill of this unfettered man-to-man banter, he has lost track of the outside world, the two of them on their own in their unwatched-by-women bubble. But now he worries that she has heard much of it; that she may have been counting how many of Bunce’s microfiche of female flaws she, a weighty woman in her mid-fifties, displays; and that therefore, any minute now, she will take a pair of bottles from the row behind her, smash their tops off and screw the zigzagged glass into each wrist, or, alternatively, his and Bunce’s faces. Her expression, however, is unreadable.
‘No, I’m OK, thank you,’ says Harvey.
‘Bring him one, would you?’ says Bunce.
‘Bunce …’ Harvey turns back to the woman: ‘No, thank you.’
‘You’ve got to drink. You have to toast me.’
‘Toast?’
‘I got married.’
Harvey opens his mouth in astonishment. His mouth is even more open than when, earlier, his nose had been crushed by silicon-impacted skin.
‘You’re joking.’
‘No.’ Bunce’s expression is flat, but his eyes sparkle with the knowledge that he is upending Harvey’s preconceptions. ‘To my ongoing astonishment, I am a married man.’
‘Who is she?’
‘Her name is Kelly. Here.’
Bunce flicks open his phone, a BlackBerry. On its main screen is displayed a fair-skinned woman, with short, sandy hair, and an expression that
says to the person with the camera: I’ve got your number.
‘She’s also a lawyer; a very unlesbianic tomboy, total extrovert, popular with women and men, unpretentious, non-neurotic, with good common sense that lapses far less often than with most women. I never wanted to be married – still don’t. I’m radically unsuited to it, but I liked her so much as a friend that it turned into love. So here we are.’
‘Fuck. For how long?’
‘Getting on for two years.’
‘What else are you going to surprise me with? Have you got kids?’
Bunce snorts. ‘Fuck no. Being with a child? It’s like hanging out with a drunk – the falling over, the incomprehensible crying, the even more incomprehensible laughing, the hitting, the shouting. But one you’re not allowed to walk away from. Childlessness – and for that matter, petlessness – is a non-negotiable contract term.’
‘What about her flaw?’
Bunce smiles. ‘I’ll find it eventually.’
Harvey glances back down to the phone, and thinks – based on an estimation that Kelly is about twenty-nine – in about ten years time, Bunce, you and your fascist eye will be spoiled for fucking choice.
‘The fact of my being married is, of course, why I’ve packed, for this trip, a number of identical shirts.’
‘Huh?’
Bunce is wearing what looks to Harvey like a 100 per cent cotton, white, button-down-collar, Brooks Brothers shirt. He raises his arm; The Material is streaked with brown.
‘Something you need to know. American Caucasian strippers cover themselves in spray tan. It’s happened to my buddies more than once: returning home to an accusing wife, standing in the foyer in hot denial, only to look in a mirror and see themselves covered in this brown chalky stuff nipple to knee, like they’ve just slid head-first into third base.’
Harvey immediately looks to his own clothes: the one pair of jeans he wears all the time, a dark blue Diesel pair he thinks don’t make his hips look too bulgy and womanly, and a nondescript grey Gap top.
‘You can’t really see it on your trampy wear in this light, but I promise you it’ll be there.’
Harvey brushes himself with his hand; sure enough, he feels the sticky dust clinging to his clothes. It sticks to his hand.
The Death of Eli Gold Page 25