As Far as You Can Go (18 page)

“I’d like to have seen the parents that produced you,” said Robin.

“I was conceived on a cold night to keep my parents warm,” said Eddie. “They weren’t rich, there weren’t any jobs about then, they couldn’t afford to buy wood or coal.
So I was born. It’s always the same. If it hadn’t been for the old bastards with their stock exchange crashing and putting men out of work, my parents might have been able to afford some wood to keep them warm. A contraceptive, anyway. The only old people I can stand are the very poor ones: they’ve had everything so awful all their lives, they haven’t had time to get smug about it. You walk about down here in Venice, Harold, you’ll see some real old people, sick as hell, poor as hell. You know they’ve had it bad all their lives, so bad that they never even got offered the power by the smug ones, never had a chance to be anything at all except sick and miserable and old. They’re the only ones that don’t make me want to smash their faces.”

“I didn’t know you were a social reformer, too,” said Robin. “Jesus, Little Daddy has a soft spot for the poor and old.”

“Of course I’m a reformer,” said Eddie. “And I don’t have any soft spots. I just don’t hate those ones as much as I hate the others. At least, in theory I don’t. When I see them I want to throw up, they’re so miserable.”

“I think you’re a bastard,” said Teresa.

“I think you’re a whore,” said Eddie. “A nice pretty little chick who likes men, huh? That just about defines a whore.”

“I am not so a whore,” she said sulkily.

“Will you sleep with me?” said Eddie.

“Sure I’ll sleep with you. I want to sleep with the
Englishman
first. He’s sort of cute. The English have such good manners. You could learn a thing or two, Eddie.”

“Christ,” said Robin. “Who do I get to sleep with?”

“You can have Chuck,” said Eddie. “Or Chet, any of the boys. Or go out and get yourself a girl. They’ll be
bringing
some girls, anyway.”

They did.

About three in the morning, Harold said he wanted to
go home. He was virtually the only person in the room who was fully dressed, and he certainly hadn’t been at an earlier stage of the evening, he remembered. The room looked exactly like an orgy, and it may have actually been one, he wasn’t sure. He seemed not to be seeing things too clearly. Someone had brought some different wine, someone else had brought a good deal of violent alcohol masquerading as whisky, and someone else had brought a pile of beer cans, which now lay empty about the room. The floor was covered with various bottles and articles of clothing, too. He had a vague memory of having once said that he wished he’d been at an orgy. While trying to place the memory, he felt a hand tugging at his trousers.

“Come back here,” said Teresa.

He went back there.

H
AROLD FELT TERRIBLE
. Someone had taken him back to his hotel at six in the morning, and he remembered
fighting
whoever it was, and he was by no means certain of the sex, to make him or her go away and leave him alone. Then he had woken with an appalling hangover, and the feeling that he was dirty inside and out. He had a bath and cleaned his teeth, but still felt terrible, as though the lining of his stomach had gone furry, like pipes. He ordered toast and coffee, not feeling up to eggs, and found to his dismay that it was three o’clock in the afternoon. He was sick after his first mouthful of coffee, but managed to get the rest down, though the sight of the toast made him feel faint, and he covered it with a paper napkin. He had never enjoyed hangovers.

He went to lie beside the swimming-pool, but after half an hour he felt as though the sun was addling his head still further, and he went back to his room to be sick again. Then he rang the desk and asked for some aspirin.

“Any particular brand, sir?” said a cool female voice.

“Anything that’ll get rid of my hangover,” he said.

“I’ll ask the barman to send you something up, shall I, sir? He has some excellent remedies.”

“No,” said Harold, “I couldn’t stand it.”

“You should try it, sir,” said the voice, soothingly. “Our clients are often grateful to him for his truly wonderful ability to put them right with the world again.”

“Oh, all right,” said Harold. He hung up, angry that when you were down people always tried to kick you. Only a lunatic would think of offering a man who felt as he did another drink.

A waiter arrived with aspirin and a glass full of something yellow.

“No,” said Harold, “take it away, I just can’t, I’m sorry.”

“You ought to give it a whirl,” said the waiter, stirring the drink with a teaspoon. “It’s got an egg in it, a raw egg.”

Harold sat down and looked piteously at him. The waiter advanced mercilessly and stood before him with the glass.

“Gee, you don’t look so good,” he said.

“If this kills me,” said Harold, “my family will sue. I am very rich. My family will hire the best lawyers in the country. They’ll have this hotel closed.”

“That’s O.K. by me,” said the waiter. His face seemed vaguely familiar, but Harold did not try to place it.

He took the glass, smelt it, and put it back on the tray. He waved weakly at the waiter to go away.

“Ah, c’mon,” said the waiter.

Harold drank it at a gulp. It tasted of nothing very much, and was smooth and oily. There was a vague after-taste of peppermint. He felt exactly the same as before.

“Now will you let me die?” he said, giving the waiter a dollar. “I want to die alone, please.”

“Any last requests, Mr Barlow?”

“Yes. Get out, for Christ’s sake.”

The waiter left. Harold remained sitting in the chair, thinking it would serve the bloody hotel right if he vomited on their carpet. They carried solicitousness really much too far. Could there really have been a raw egg in that glass, a real raw egg? Impossible.

Fragments of last night began to assemble themselves in his head. There had been Chet, he remembered, and Mitch, and Chuck, and two girls called Susan (or had he been seeing and hearing double?) and a negro called Mike and people called Jay (boy or girl?) and Shaun and Peggy and Beth and even Emily. Emily was clearest: she’d had a man’s shirt open to the waist, he remembered, and absolutely nothing else.
But she couldn’t have arrived like that. No, she’d been
wearing
riding-breeches when she arrived. They had all sat around drinking and listening to jazz and making love, and drinking and making love to jazz, and jazzing to drink and making love, and making love to drink and jazz. That about summed it up. Weird, he thought, and not at all wonderful. Well, he must make a point of not meeting Eddie Jackson again. That sort of thing was a little bit rough for him. He was almost sure that someone had tried to rape him at one stage of the proceedings, and he had made it perfectly clear
beforehand
that he didn’t like that kind of thing. He liked it even less now. Dennis Moreland’s friends were all right in the Macaroon, but otherwise definitely unreliable. It was true that Eddie was interesting, and had some zany ideas which were rather appealing, but that was no excuse. The ideas were all immoral, anyway. And as for going round stealing people’s cars just for the hell of it, that was too much. Now he had a car, Harold felt quite differently about that sort of adolescent pranking around. And besides, there was
something
he couldn’t pretend he admired in himself, but it was there and angry, a relic of Puritanism, perhaps, a piece of moral lumber that had somehow stuck since school, but there: and it said quite firmly that orgies were splendid in the imagination, but that was where they belonged. An orgy denied the possibility of love. And love, for some reason he couldn’t remember, was better than lust. It was the same thing that had made him ashamed of the way he kept on with Helen Gallagher. It wasn’t—well, right—yes, that was the word, it wasn’t right to enjoy an orgy or even to be present at one which one didn’t enjoy. Orgies weren’t for him.

He wondered why not. A small counter-attack began from another corner of his brain, and he felt that it was absurd to keep up this pretence of morality when he wasn’t moral at all. All that Victorian bosh was no use to him, and he knew it.
But somehow, knowing that it was all Victorian bosh, or medieval bosh, or Christian bosh, or whatever other bosh it was, didn’t alter the fact that he now felt ashamed. It
annoyed
him very much, this feeling of shame, but it was
something
he had to learn to live with, because whenever he behaved really outrageously it came and got him, like a poisonous spider lurking in the turn-up of his trousers. It was there, and God or his education or his conscience told it when to nip out and sting him. He hated spiders, but this one was with him for life, they were married indissolubly.

He felt curiously light-headed, but not quite so ill. It was very odd, this business of the spider. They never met except when Harold was behaving in some mysterious way badly.
He
didn’t believe in “badly”, it was all a fraud: but the spider did believe in it, and it knew exactly the right moment to pounce. It was like having a bodyguard. He didn’t like having it at all, but it was always there, one step behind, or rather, exactly in step, hidden as it was in his turn-up. He wished very much it wasn’t. It stopped him doing all the things he wanted to do. Whenever he did have a chance for something glorious, like an orgy, the spider ruined it, or he got drunk (probably the spider’s sting was like a bottle of vodka, odourless, tasteless, but very strong) and when he woke up the spider got him again. It was terribly unfair, because the spider was perfectly calm about the way other people behaved: it didn’t in the least mind him meeting people he knew were given to orgies and other similar
delights
, in fact, it never even gave an opinion about them. It was his own bloody spider, damn it, and sucked his blood, probably, as well as stinging him. Why people hadn’t got around to making a proper moral insecticide yet, he did not understand.

But it was quite clear that Eddie, for instance, wouldn’t know what he was talking about if he told him about the spider. So not everyone had one. It was a handicap, like
being born without a head. He wished he had been born without a head, what with the spider and the hangover. Though it was true that the tasteless guck in the glass did seem to have made him feel a good deal better. Guck was a good word—it must have been Dennis that he’d got it from. It meant anything slimy and nasty. It was like viscous, only not sticky, which made it more widely applicable: certain poets, for instance, were gucky, as well as frying-pans after trying to make a white sauce.

Time passed while Harold let his mind wander and his hangover subside. Then he remembered that he was having a date with Diane Washburn, and the spider gave him a last sting to remind him that he ought to be ashamed to go out with a nice girl after what he’d done last night. But he answered back, saying that he didn’t know that she
was
a
.
nice girl yet.

She was, though, he decided a few hours later, as they finished their dinner in an expensive restaurant she chose. She was wearing a blue dress with a short skirt and a
tight-fitting
bodice that made him want to put his hand on its bulges. She was telling him about her family while he scraped at an ice-cream and watched her shoulders moving as she scraped at hers.

“Daddy’s a bit of a bum, really. He was the eldest, and no good for anything much. He calls himself a painter, but I wouldn’t let him paint the walls. He did those pictures in the drawing-room, did you see them?”

“Yes,” said Harold, congratulating himself on his
detective
work the previous afternoon.

“Well, I could do better than that myself. Anyway, there was Daddy and then there was Uncle Henry. And Daddy married Mom who had me, then lit out after some passing millionaire, only he wasn’t a millionaire at all, he was an Italian secondhand car dealer in San Diego, but by that time she didn’t care. She and Daddy got a divorce, and Mom
said she’d give up me if he’d give up some cash, so Daddy gave up the cash and Grandma brought me up here. Daddy can’t stand Grandma, though. He lives up the coast near Carmel. That’s nearer San Francisco than here. He bought himself a little shack and he pretends to paint, but really he just hits the bottle. He comes here sometimes, but he and Grandma fight all the time, and she hates him as much as he hates her. She never could stand Mom, and she never forgave him for marrying her. I guess Daddy seeks forgiveness in the bottle.”

“What about your uncle?”

“Uncle Henry’s worse than Daddy. He was a mother’s boy from the day he was born. He’s quite young—Grandma had him when she was over forty, so I guess that makes him
forty-one
or forty-two. He’s nice, though, even if he is awful. He lives down at Santa Monica and works for an aircraft
company,
some kind of executive. But he doesn’t have to work. It’s just an excuse not to live at home. He’s—you know—he doesn’t like girls.”

“God,” said Harold, “another.”

“There sure are plenty around this town,” said Diane. “I suppose they think some movie director will find them, like the girls in the drugstores. This place is just Sodom and Gomorrah. Half the boys don’t even ask before they’ve
undressed
you.”

“But your grandmother likes Henry?”

“Oh, sure she does. She worships him. He didn’t ever get married. He’s mamma’s little boy still. I don’t know how he gets away with it. He calls Grandma every day, and he comes to see us two or three times a week, and sometimes he brings people you didn’t even know existed they’re so far out. He has an apartment down in Santa Monica, like I said, and he shares it with this guy who’s Mexican, called Pedro
something.
They’ve been living together for years, but it doesn’t seem to stop Uncle Henry picking through the trash-can for new kicks.”

“Don’t you ever get to see your mother?”

“Yes. I go down to San Diego week-ends sometimes. I kind of like my stepfather, he’s big and fat, and they have about a hundred kids, and he’s always nice to me. But Mom can’t get up here much, with all the kids, and I can’t get down there much, what with having to look after Grandma. Not but that she can’t look after herself pretty well, but she likes to have someone around to make miserable. She’s what they call a strong personality. Did you know she’s only got one breast? She had cancer, and they cut off the other one a couple of years back. But you wouldn’t know. She has a kind of falsie she wears, but she doesn’t care what she looks like. You can see it half the time, over the top of her dress.
Grandma
doesn’t give a damn about anyone, least of all herself.”

“You mean she’s had cancer and she’s still around, at her age? I didn’t think it was possible.”

“She’s one of the wonders of modern science, Harold. The only thing that’ll kill Grandma will be a natural calamity. When Grandpa died she didn’t even pretend to be sorry or put on a black dress or anything. She’d never liked him, she said. He was her second husband. The first died after Daddy was born—I didn’t explain that, did I? Daddy and Uncle Henry are only half-brothers. It’s kind of odd, that, because she loves Henry and hated his father, but she loved Daddy’s father, my real grandfather.”

Harold made some mental calculations and then said, “Why are you called Diane Washburn, then?”

“That’s Grandma’s idea. She said she wouldn’t leave me anything in her will unless I changed my name. Daddy didn’t care what I was called. I don’t care. She’s an old woman, why not please her?”

“It’s a bit odd, all the same.”

“That’s not the oddest thing about my family,” said Diane. “I think they’re all nuts, except my stepfather. He’s got his head screwed on right. He owns one of the biggest
garages in San Diego now, and he started life as a poor kid in Brooklyn. He’s called Tony. I really like him. He’s human. The rest of the family are nuts.”

“Maybe I could take you down there one day,” said Harold. “It’s not far, is it, San Diego?”

“Gee, that would be marvellous,” said Diane. Her eyes lit up, and now they were in a dimly lit restaurant her pupils were big and black and, Harold thought, beautiful. He began to feel protective towards her.

“I’d really like to do that,” he said.

“You know,” she said, leaning forward, “it’s only when I’m staying with Mom that I feel really human myself. I love kids. And the place is running over with them. And here I sit up at the end of a goddam canyon with an old woman, and you never hear so much as a baby cry. I guess that’s why I get all kind of taut up there. But in San Diego, it’s just marvellous, and I feel relaxed and happy—you know, good. I like Mom, even though she was mean when I was a kid, selling me like that. She’s not hard or mean or anything now. She’s a real woman. I guess she’d never have had the chance being married to Daddy. He’s nice, all right, but he’s kind of a drip, too, if you know what I mean. All that drinking up there, and I don’t think he ever has a woman, he just sits up there and paints bad pictures and mopes. And he’s not moping about Mom, but about Grandma. Sometimes I wish I’d never taken psychology at High School. It makes you see things the way you don’t want them to be. I guess Daddy ought to be like Uncle Henry.”