Absolute Friends (15 page)

And I _have__ put it behind me, he reasons. Judith and Sasha had a bit of free love and I paid for it. And as Sasha so rightly says, without anger we are nothing.

Launching himself upon a career in journalism as a stepping stone to literary immortality, Mundy submits to a correspondence course and enrolls as a cub reporter with a dying provincial newspaper in the East Midlands. At first, all bodes well. His coverage of the decline of the local herring fleet is admired; his descriptions, sensitively embroidered, of the goings-on in the mayoral parlor are found amusing, and no colleague's wife offers herself as a Judith substitute. But when, during the absence on holiday of his editor, he files an exposé of underpaid Asian labor in a local canning factory, the idyll ends abruptly. The owner of the factory is the proprietor of the newspaper.

Transferring his talents to a pirate radio station, he interviews local celebrities and plays songs of yesteryear to Mum and Dad on their golden day until a Friday evening when the producer suggests they pop down the road together for a jar.

"It's the class bit, Ted," the producer explains. "The punters say you sound like some overfed geezer from the House of Lords."

Bad months follow. The BBC turns down his radio play. A children's story about a pavement artist who produces a chalk masterpiece and recruits a gang of street kids to help him remove the flagstone finds no favor with publishers, one of whom responds with unwelcome frankness: _We find the actions of your German police violent and their language offensive. We fail to see why you have set your story in Berlin, a city of unpleasant connotations for many of our British readers.__

But from the depths of gloom Mundy as ever sees a chink of light. In a quarterly periodical devoted to readers with literary ambitions, an American foundation offers traveling scholarships to writers under thirty who seek the inspiration of the New World. Undaunted by the prospect of venturing into the giant's castle, Mundy beams his charm at three kindly matrons from North Carolina over tea and muffins in an elderly hotel in London's Russell Square. Six weeks later he finds himself once more aboard ship, this time bound for the Land of Opportunity. Standing on the afterdeck, watching the imperial outlines of Liverpool fade into the drizzle, he has the unaccountable feeling that it is Sasha and not England that he is leaving behind.

The years of directionless wandering have yet to run their course. In Taos, a real writer at last, Mundy rents an adobe hut with a fine view of desert sagebrush, telegraph poles and a pack of shiftless pye-dogs wandered in from Murree. Seated at his window, he drinks tequila and rhapsodizes about the long mauve dying of each day. There are many such days and many tequilas. But so there were for Malcolm Lowry and D. H. Lawrence. The natives are not merely friendly, they are sun-soaked, benign and frequently stoned. He has no sense of the ravening world colonizers he deplored in Berlin. His efforts to raise a local drama group are balked not by unbridled aggression but differences of ethereal perception.

Achieving fifty pages of a novel about civil strife in a fictional European country, he packs them off to a publisher with the suggestion that he should advise him how to complete it. The publisher is not inclined to do so. Next comes a slender volume of poems to Judith, privately printed on handmade paper and entitled _Radical Love.__ Undiscovered talents like himself are unanimous in their admiration, but the cost is twice the estimate.

Time loses its impact. Ambling down the dusty streets on his evening pilgrimage to the Spanish Inn and Motel, Mundy wears a perpetual and slightly shameful grin. News of causes that were once dear to him reaches him like the Major's incomplete readings of Kipling. The Vietnam War is a continuing tragedy. All Taos says so. Several of its young have burned their draft cards and disappeared to Canada. The Palestinians have launched a campaign of terror, he reads in an old copy of _Time,__ and Ulrike Meinhof's Red Army Fraktion is giving them a helping hand. Is Judith the face behind the mask behind the gun? Is Karen? The notion appalls him but what can he do? _Karen subscribes completely to the words of Frantz Fanon that violence exercised by the oppressed is invariably legitimate.__ Well, I don't. And nor does Sasha. But you do, presumably. And your sexual liberation is not compatible with the moral standards of Rejectionist Arabia.

If Mundy feels the occasional pang of conscience because he isn't marching and being beaten up, a couple of tequilas can suppress it anytime. In a paradise where everyone around you lives for art alone, it's only civilized to do the same. But paradise has other snags that no number of tequilas can quite overcome. Shut out your past at the front door, and it creeps in at the back. Sit on the veranda of your adobe hut with a yellow pad on your lap watching the same damned sun disappear yet again behind the same damned mountaintop--prowl round your typewriter night after night glowering at the blank paper or the blank window and cranking up your genius with tequila--and what do you _hear,__ if not Sasha with his mouth full of garlic sausage lecturing you on the genesis of human knowledge? On your way to the Spanish Inn and Motel, when the desert loneliness hits you with the sunset and you start to count old friends--who if not Sasha hobbles along beside you over the Berlin cobble as the pair of you make your way to the Shaven Cat for Sasha to put the world to rights? And when you are in the arms of one of the many female painters, writers, transcendental meditators and truth-seekers whose road to enlightenment includes a detour in your bed, whose peerless body, plus or minus its long white woollen tights, presides over your dutiful endeavors?

And then--as Hemingway might say--there is poor little Bernie Luger, the bearded, rich, undersized action painter with his Cuban model Nita, who never poses for him, because how can she?--Bernie's not painting fucking female flesh anymore, he's way beyond that shit, man! His eight-foot-tall masterpieces are black-and-crimson infernos of the Last Day, his work-in-progress is a triptych of the Napalming of Minnesota, so tall he needs a ladder. Do all small painters paint large canvases? Mundy suspects they do.

Bernie--if you believe him, and you'd better--is the greatest libertarian and freedom fighter since Thoreau, whose work he reads aloud at his all-night parties, while he peers over the brown precipice of a Spanish pulpit that he claims was given him by Che Guevara in gratitude for services he may not name. Bernie has done civil disobedience in Memphis. He's been clubbed insensible by National Guardsmen more times than he remembers--see this scar? He's led marches on Washington and stewed in jail for insurrection. The Black Panthers call him Brother and the FBI taps his phone and reads his mail--or that's if you believe him, which few do.

So how on earth can Mundy put up with him, this loudmouthed rich boy, with his oily-thick spectacles, his awful paintings, gray ponytail and ludicrous pretensions? Perhaps it's because Mundy understands the state of constant terror Bernie lives in--one puff could knock him down. Nita understands it too. Fierce-eyed, rude and fearless, she sleeps with all male Taos in the name of human liberty, but protects her baby Bernie like a lioness.

"That shit you did in Berlin," Bernie declares late one night, raising himself on one elbow to bark at Mundy across the recumbent Nita stretched between them.

The scene is Bernie's dude hacienda, an old Spanish farmhouse at the meeting of two stony rivers. A dozen guests are sprawled round them, relishing the hallucinogenic wisdom of peyote.

"What about it?" says Mundy, already regretting that a few days back, in a moment of weakness or nostalgia, he confessed his radical past.

"You were a Communist, right?"

"Only with a small _c__."

"What the fuck does 'small _c__' mean, Limey?"

"Communist philosophically maybe. But not institutionally. A plague on both your houses, basically."

"So you were the _Middle Way,__" Luger sneers, starting to heat up despite the soothing tones of Simon and Garfunkel in the background. "A fucking _safe Liberal__ with a big L and a small dick."

Mundy knows from experience that it is best to offer no opposition at these moments.

"Well, _I__ was that person once," Luger goes on, leaning right across Nita now but lowering his voice. "I did Middle Way, the path of peace and fucking concord. And I'll tell you something, man. There _is__ no Middle fucking Way. It's a cop-out. When the chips are down, there's one way only. Do we jump aboard the fucking train of history, or do we stand at the trackside scratching our British candy-asses while we watch the fucking train go by?" Mundy remembers how Sasha posed much the same question in his letters, but keeps the thought to himself. "And _Jesus,__ man, am I on that train! I'm on that train in ways you could never dream of, ways you would never _dare__ to dream of--hear me, comrade? Hear me?"

"Loud and clear, old boy. Just don't know what you're telling me exactly."

"Then count yourself fucking lucky, man, because you could _die__ from knowing." In his passion he has seized Mundy's forearm with a trembling hand. Now he relaxes his grip and pulls a beggar's smile. "Just joking, okay? I love you, Limey. You love us. I never said it, you never heard it. Not if they pull out our fucking fingernails. Swear to me, man. Swear!"

"Bernie, I've forgotten already," Mundy insists and, wandering home, reflects uneasily that there are no lengths a deceived lover will not go to in order to disguise his frailty.

One day a letter reaches him, but it is not from Sasha. The envelope is of high quality, and this is fortunate since, having begun its journey in Canada, it has twice crossed the Atlantic and, while on dry land, passed through many hands. The sender's name is printed in waxy capitals in the top left corner: Epstein, Benjamin & Longford, suite something-or-other, assume grand offices in Toronto. Mundy duly assumes them, and assumes further that he is about to be sued by an outraged husband. Leaving the envelope to mature for a week or two, therefore, he waits until the right number of tequilas has brought him to the right level of insouciance, and rips it open. The letter inside is three and a half pages long. The home address and telephone number, also in Toronto, are unfamiliar. The signature, which he has not seen before, is an executive scrawl, one name, illegible.

Dear Teddy,

Well, I guess you will be surprised to hear from me after all these years, but what goes around comes around. I am not about to weary the shit out of you with an account of my travels (travails!) after we all split from Berlin--Jesus, who _were__ we in those days?--except to say that I have discovered that in life, if you take enough wrong turnings, at a certain age you end up right where you started, and I guess in a way, if I'm totally rational, which in my job I have to be, that's where I am now. From Berlin, I thought I couldn't go any further downhill but I was wrong, but maybe if I hadn't hit bottom I would never have realized just how crazy my life had become, and I would never have gone to the embassy in Beirut or called my parents and told them to get me the hell out before I killed someone, or got blown to fuckareens like Karen, making some fucking awful bomb in a Nairobi backstreet.

So what am I now? (A) I am a respected member of the Ontario Bar, a successful Toronto lawyer and (B) the mother of a cute little girl called Jasmine who is going to look _just__ like me, if you remember how _that__ was!! and (C) married to the sweetest, dearest man, a _great__ father, who adores his little girl and her mother, naturally, and is the creepiest, the most fucking boring and the most deceitful little shit in the world. And rich, which by Canadian middle-class standards we both are, except don't run away with the idea that Canadian lawyers get paid U. S. rates, which is a subject I could dwell on at considerable length! (Larry is kind of placid about LCD--Lawyers' Comparability Drive--but you know me: I'm right up there with the ringleaders!)

I left (D) to the end and I guess that's why I'm writing this, Teddy. Maybe it's a long shot, but I have a hunch it may not be. You know something? Jesus, Teddy, I love you too. All that hot talk you put into your letters--well, it _really__ chimed my bells, and not just my bells, but a few other parts of me that you know pretty well! One day, I thought, I'm going to write and tell Teddy just how hot I am for him! But well, fuck, I guess I'm just the world's second lousiest correspondent with no first prize yet awarded. So let's just say I _would__ have told you if I'd gotten around to it. Okay, you were my first straight fuck, you had my cherry if that means anything these days, but, dammit, Teddy, there's _more to it than that.__ Why did I go first for Teddy when I could have gone for Peter the Greatest Stud on Earth, or Sasha our charismatic Socrates (who later admitted me to his harem, I may add, to absolutely _no__ great effect) or for any of the pretty boys hanging around the Republican? Why did I go _wet__ every time I saw you strolling through the squat with everybody screwing and jawing and doping around you, and you not even fucking _looking__ at them, you were so cool! It's because you were something special, Teddy, and you for me still are. If I bitched at you from time to time, well, I guess that's just because you opened my mind and my something else to normality, which thank Jesus is where I am at these days...

But by now Mundy is doing what he did when he was reading Sasha's letters: hurrying through the rest to see what she wants. He doesn't have to search for long: she wants Teddy instead of Larry. She's checked Larry out, and she's confirmed what she long suspected: he's cheating on her. She doesn't handle divorces herself, but a partner in the firm who does has told her strictly off the record that he reckons that, with the evidence she has, a settlement could come in at around two to two-five. And she's talking millions, not peanuts.

So Teddy, here's what I propose. Like I said, it's a long shot. We have a cabin on Lake Joseph. Winterized. It's all mine. I made Larry buy it that way. He doesn't even get to own a key. I want you to take me there, and I want it to be our second Berlin. You remember how you called it our fuckathon? Well, let's have another, and take life from there. I have an excellent maid for Jasmine.