Heavy Water and Other Stories Page 9

  When Vernon looked up his wife was sitting opposite him. She looked utterly normal. Her blue eyes searched for his with all their light.

  “Toast?” he bluffed.

  “Yes please. Oh Vernon, wasn’t it lovely?”

  For an instant Vernon knew beyond doubt that he would now have to murder his wife and then commit suicide—or kill her and leave the country under an assumed name, start all over again somewhere, Romania, Iceland, the Far East, the New World.

  “What, you mean the—?”

  “Oh yes. I’m so happy. For a while I thought that we… I thought you were—”

  “I—”

  “—Don’t, darling. You needn’t say anything. I understand. And now everything’s all right again. Ooh,” she added. “You were naughty, you know.”

  Vernon nearly panicked all over again. But he gulped it down and said, quite nonchalantly, “Yes, I was a bit, wasn’t I?”

  “Very naughty. So rude. Oh Vernon…”

  She reached for his hand and stood up. Vernon got to his feet too—or became upright by some new hydraulic system especially devised for the occasion. She glanced over her shoulder as she moved up the stairs.

  “You mustn’t do that too often, you know.”

  “Oh really?” drawled Vernon. “Who says?”

  “I say. It would take the fun out of it.”

  Vernon knew one thing: he was going to stop keeping count. Pretty soon, he reckoned, things would be more or less back to normal. He’d had his kicks: it was only right that the loved one should now have hers. Vernon followed his wife into the bedroom and softly closed the door behind them.

  Granta, 1981

  THE COINCIDENCE OF THE ARTS

  “THIS IS A FARCE, man. Have you read my novel yet?”

  “No.”

  “Well why’s that now?”

  “I’ve been terribly—”

  Across the road a fire truck levered itself backwards into its bay with a great stifled sneeze. Round about, a thousand conversations missed a beat, gulped, and then hungrily resumed.

  “The thing is I’ve been terribly busy.”

  “Aren’t those the exact same words you used last time I asked you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then how many more times do I got to hear them?”

  The two men stood facing each other on the corner: that mess of streets, of tracks and rinks, where Seventh Avenue collapses into the Village… He who posed the questions was thirty-five years old, six foot seven, and built like a linebacker in full armor. His name was Pharsin Courier, and he was deeply black. He who tendered the answers was about the same age; but he was five foot eight, and very meager. Standing there, confronted by his interrogator, he seemed to be lacking a whole dimension. His name was Sir Rodney Peel, and he was deeply white.

  They were shouting at each other, but not yet in exasperation or anger. The city was getting louder every day: even the sirens had to throw a tantrum, just to make themselves heard.

  “Find time for my novel,” said Pharsin. He continued to urge such a course on Rodney for a further twenty minutes, saying, in conclusion, “I gave you that typescript in good faith, and I need your critique. You and I, we’re both artists. And don’t you think that counts for something?”

  In this city?

  The sign said: Omni’s Art Material—For the Artist in Everyone. But everyone was already an artist. The coffeeshop waiters and waitresses were, of course, actors and actresses; and the people they served were all librettists and scenarists, harpists, pointillists, ceramicists, caricaturists, contrapuntalists. The little boys were bladers and jugglers, the little girls all ballerinas (bent over the tables in freckly discussions with their mothers or mentors). Even the babies starred in ads and had agents. And it didn’t stop there. Outside, sculptors wheelbarrowed chunks of rock over painted pavements past busking flautists, and a troupe of clowns performed mime, watched by kibitzers doing ad lib and improv. And on and on and up and up. Jesters teetered by on ten-foot stilts. Divas practiced their scales from tenement windows. The AC installers were all installationists. The construction workers were all constructivists.

  And, for once, Sir Rodney Peel happened to be telling the truth: he was terribly busy. After many soggy years of artistic and sexual failure, in London, SW3, Rodney was now savoring their opposites, in New York. You could still see this failure in the darkened skin around his eyes (stained, scarred, blinded); you could still nose it in his pyjamas, unlaundered for fifteen years (when he got out of bed in the morning he left them leaning against the wall). But America had reinvented him. He had a title, a ponytail, a flowery accent, and a pliant paintbrush. He was an unattached heterosexual in Manhattan: something had to give. And Rodney now knew the panic of answered prayers. Like a bit-part player in a dream, he looked on as his prices kept doubling: all you needed was an aristocratic wag of the head, and a straight face. Under the floorboards of his studio, in brown envelopes, lurked ninety-five thousand dollars: cash. And every afternoon he was climbing into an aromatic bed, speechless, with his ears whistling like seashells.

  Rodney still felt that he had a chance of becoming a serious painter. Not a good chance—but a chance. Even he could tell that his artistic universe, after ten months in New York, had undergone drastic contraction. The journey into his own nervous system, the groping after spatial relationships, the trawl for his own talent—all this, for the time being, he had set aside. And now he specialized. He did wives. Wives of wealthy professionals and executives: wives of the lions of Madison Avenue, wives of the heroes of Wall Street. His brush flattered and rejuvenated them, naturally; but this wasn’t especially arduous or even dishonest, because the wives were never first wives: they were second wives, third wives, subsequent wives. They gazed up at him righteously, at slender Sir Rodney in his smudged smock. “Perfect,” he would murmur. “No. Yes. That’s quite lovely…” One thing sometimes led to another thing; but never to the real thing. Meekly, his lovelife imitated his art. This wife, that wife. Rodney flattered, flirted, fumbled, failed.

  Then change came. Now, when he worked, his paint coagulated along traditional lines, and conventional curves. In between the sheets, though, Rodney felt the terrible agitation of the innovator.

  “There’s been a breakthrough,” he told Rock Robville, his agent or middleman, “on the, uh, ‘carnal knowledge’ front.”

  “Oh? Do tell.”

  “Quite extraordinary actually. Never known anything quite…”

  “The fragrant Mrs. Peterson, mayhap?”

  “Good God no.”

  “The bodacious Mrs. Havilland, then, I’ll wager.”

  Twenty-eight, sleek, rosy, and darkly balding, Rock, too, was English, and of Rodney’s class. The Robvilles were not as old and grand as the Peels; but they were much richer. Rock was now accumulating another fortune as an entrepreneur of things British: holiday castles in Scotland, Cumbrian fishing rights, crests, titles, nannies, suits of armor. Oh, and butlers. Rock did much trafficking in butlers.

  “No. She’s not a wife,” said Rodney. “I don’t want to say too much about it in case it breaks the spell. Early days and all that.”

  “Have you two actually ‘slimed’?”

  Rodney looked at him, frowning, as if in effortful recall. Then his face cleared and he answered in the negative. Rock seemed to enjoy scattering these phrases of the moment—these progeriac novelties—in Rodney’s path. There was another one he used: “playing Hide the Salami.” Hide the Salami sounded more fun than the game Rodney usually played with women. That game was called Find the Salami. “We uh, ‘retire’ together. But we haven’t yet done the deed.”

  “The act of darkness,” said Rock, causing Rodney to contemplate him strangely. “How sweet. And how retro. You’re getting to know each other first.”

  “Well that’s just it. She doesn’t… We don’t…”

  Rock and Rod were leaning backwards on a mahogany bar, drinking Pink Ladies, in some conservatorial
gin-palace off Lower Park Avenue. Inspecting his friend’s anxious leer, Rock felt a protective pang and said suddenly,

  “Have you done anything about your money yet? Talk to Mr. Jaguar about it. Soon. Americans are very fierce about tax. You could get locked up.”

  They fell silent. Both of them were thinking about the four or five seconds Rodney would last in an American jail. Now Rodney stirred and said.

  “I’m in a mood to celebrate. It’s all very exciting. Let me get you another one of those.”

  “Ah. You’re a white man,” said Rock absentmindedly. “And do let me know,” he added, “when you’ve slimed.”

  Rodney was one of those Englishmen who had to get out of England. He had to get out of England and grow his hair. Helpless against his mother, his grandmother, helpless against each dawdling, prating, beaming miladies they somehow conscripted him to squire. When he tried to break out they always easily reclaimed him, drawing him back to what was theirs. They owned him… Rodney had a fat upper lip which, during those soggy years, often wore a deep lateral crease of resignation—of vapid resignation. In the Chinese restaurants of Chelsea you might have glimpsed him, being lunched and lectured by a heavy-smoking aunt, his arms folded in the tightness of his jacket, his upper lip philosophically seamed.

  “You get to my novel yet?”

  “What?”

  “Have you read my novel yet?”

  “Ah. Pharsin.” Rodney collected himself. “The thing is, I’ve been trying to make time for it in the afternoons. But the thing is…” He gazed unhappily down Greenwich Avenue. Sunday morning, and everyone was staggering around with their personal burden of prolixity, of fantastic garrulity, of uncontainable communicativeness: The Sunday Times. “The thing is…”

  The thing was that Rodney worked every morning and drunkenly socialized every evening, and in the afternoons—the only time of day he might conceivably pick up a book or at any rate a magazine or a catalog—he went to bed. With humming ears. And perpendicular in his zeal.

  “Come on, man. This is getting insane.”

  Rodney remembered a good tip about lying: stay as close to the truth as you dare. “I’ve been trying to make time for it in the afternoons. But in the afternoons… My lady friend, do you see. I, uh, ‘entertain’ her in the afternoons.”

  Pharsin assumed a judicious air.

  “For instance,” Rodney enthused, “on Friday afternoon I was just settling down to it. And in she came. I had your novel on my lap.”

  This was of course untrue. Pharsin’s ruffled, slewing typescript had never made it on to Rodney’s lap. It was still under the piano, or in whatever corner or closet he had booted it into, months ago.

  “She come every day?”

  “Except weekends.”

  “So what’s your solution, Rod?”

  “I’m going to clear some evenings. Settle down to it.”

  “You say Friday afternoon you had my novel on your lap?”

  “Just settling down to it.”

  “Okay. What’s the title?”

  Pharsin stood there, skyscrapering over him. Each of his teeth was about the size of Rodney’s head. When he leant over to spit in the gutter, you’d think someone had voided a bucket from the third floor.

  “Give it up! What’s the fucking title?”

  “Um,” said Rodney.

  Pharsin he had first encountered in the southwest corner of Washington Square Park, that inverted parliament of chess, where the junkies were all Experts, the winos were all Grand Masters, and the pizza-bespattered babblers and bums were all ex–World Champions. Rodney, who for a year had played second board for the University of Suffolk, approached the marble table over which Pharsin showily presided. In half an hour he lost a hundred dollars.

  Never in his dealings with the thirty-two pieces and the sixty-four squares had Rodney been so hilariously outclassed. He was a mere centurion, stupidly waiting, in his metal miniskirt, his short-sword at his side; whereas Pharsin was the career gladiator, hideously experienced with the weighted net and the bronze trident. After half a dozen moves Rodney could already feel the grip of the cords, the bite of the tines. In the third game Pharsin successfully dispensed with the services of his queen: things looked good until Black drove the first of his rooks into the groin of White’s defense.

  They got talking as they loped together, serenaded by saxophones and sirens, past the bobbing dope dealers of the northwest corner and out on to Eighth Street.

  “Do you, uh, ‘make a living’ at it?”

  “Used to,” said Pharsin through the backbeat of nineteen different boom boxes and radios turned out on to the road. “Chess hustling is down with the economy. Forcing me to diversify.”

  Rodney asked him what kind of thing.

  “It’s like this: chess is an art. You can do one art, you can do them all.”

  Rodney said how interesting, and toddled on after him. It seemed to Rodney that he could walk through Pharsin’s legs and out the other side. No, not enough room: muscles stood like heavies leaning against the tunnel walls. Pharsin’s head, perched up there on that body, could only look to be the shape and size of a car neckrest. Rodney experienced respect for Pharsin’s head. Whatever chess was (an art, a game, a fight), chess was certainly a mountain. Rodney strolled its foothills. Whereas the forward-leaning cliff face that closed out the sky had Pharsin halfway up it.

  “You see this?”

  Halting, Pharsin from inside his hoodie produced a fistful of scrolled paper: an essay, a polemic, entitled “The Co-Incidence of the Arts, Part I: The Indivisibility of Poetry, Photography, and Dance.” Rodney ran his eye down the opening sentence. It was the kind of sentence that spent a lot of time in reverse gear before crunching itself into first.

  “Are you sure you mean ‘coincidence’? Not, uh, ‘correspondence’?”

  “No. Co-incidence. The arts happen in the same part of the brain. That’s how come I hyphenate. Co-incidence.”

  Rodney had a lot of time for coincidence. Everything he now had he owed to coincidence. It happened on a country lane half a mile from his grandmother’s house: a head-on collision between two Range Rovers, both of them crammed with patrilinear Peels. All else followed from this: title, nerve, Rock, America, sex, and the five thousand twenty-dollar bills underneath his studio floor. And talent too, he thought: maybe.

  “You English?”

  “Oh, very much so.”

  “My wife is English also. The oppressiveness of the class system cause her to leave your shores.”

  “I sympathize. It can be very wearing. Is she in the arts too, your wife?”

  “Yeah. She does—”

  But Pharsin’s monosyllable was quite canceled by city stridor—someone detonating a low-yield nuclear weapon or dropping a dumpster from a helicopter. “And yourself?” said Rodney.

  “Sculptor. Mathematician. Choreographer. Percussionist. Essayist. Plus the art you and I engaged in some while ago.”

  “Oh, I remember,” said Rodney humbly. “I’m a painter. With other interests.” And he said what he usually said to Americans, because it was virtually true, geographically (and what would they know?): “I studied literature at Cambridge.”

  Pharsin gave a jolt and said, “This intrigues me. Because I’ve recently come to think of myself as primarily a novelist. Now, my friend. There’s something I’m going to ask you to do for me.”

  He listened, and said yes. Why not? Rodney reckoned that Pharsin, after all, would be incredibly easy to avoid.

  Pharsin said, “I’ll be in an excellent position to monitor your progress with it.”

  Rodney waited.

  “You don’t recognize me. I work the door of your building. Weekends.”

  “Oh of course you do.” In fact, Rodney had yet to begin the task of differentiating the three or four black faces that scowled and glinted through the gloom of his lobby. “The coincidence,” he mused, “of the arts. Tell me, are you all a little family down there?”
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br />   “Why would we be? I don’t associate with those animals. Now. I’ll bring you my novel early tomorrow. Casting all false modesty aside, I don’t believe you’ll have a problem falling under its spell.”

  “Um,” said Rodney.

  “Three months you been sitting on it, and you don’t even know the fucking title?”

  “Um,” he repeated. Like the novel itself, the title, Rodney recalled, was very long. Pharsin’s typescript ran to more than eleven hundred pages: single-spaced. Pharsin said it comprised exactly one million words—a claim (Rodney felt) that few would ever call him on. “It’s very long.” He looked up into Pharsin’s blood-spoked eyes and said, “‘The…’”

  “The what?”

  “‘The Words of…’” Wait. “‘The Noise of the…’”

  “‘Sound.’”

  “‘The Noise of the Sound…’”

  “Bullshit! The Sound of the Words, the Sound of the Words, man. The Sound of the Words, the Sound of the Words.”

  “Exactly. The Sound of the Words, the Sound of the Words.”

  “Commit the fucking energy, man. I say this because I’m convinced that your effort will be rewarded. The structure you’ll particularly relish. And also the theme.”

  After another forty column-inches of reproach, dissimulated threat, moral suasion, and literary criticism, Pharsin wrapped things up, adding, as an audible afterthought,

  “Thirteen weeks. And he doesn’t even know its name?”

  “Forgive me. I’m stupefied by, uh, ‘amorous excess.’”