Forty-Seventeen (3 page)

Now she had diverted him from that appointment with the Hotel de la Gloria.

 

Compensation for angst.
He had told her once on a beach during one of her depressions that he'd found a lot of good things in life which compensated for angst. She'd said, ‘Oh yeah, what are they?'

He'd told her of the surprises and serendipity of the life of inquiry, the unimaginable twistings of sexuality, about the infinite imagination, endless storytelling and its works, about the weary exhilaration of negotiation, the lateral elegance of the deal, and about the revelations of hunting and of the camp.

‘But you once said
volupté
was the only solace!' she said, laughing at him.

‘That too.'

What would he be able to tell her now, now that he was forty?

He'd have to say that, while all those things were still true, on some days it was only a tepid curiosity and a tired-hearted buccaneering which carried him on. But maybe they could explore the discipline of
indiscipline together. And he could show her how their relationship had become two footnotes to a poem.

‘And what is a gutter slut?' he asked her.

Belle considered her reply, a frown of concentration coming to her face, the face of a woman in her late twenties but carrying still the pore-less baby face of a ten-year-old and the shining eyes of a teenager. And then she said, ‘A promiscuous person can sometimes be driven by a neurotic need for approval, for an affirmation through sexual contact that they are a “person” or that they are “a lovable person”. They are taking a poll of all the people of the world. I don't knock that. A slut, though, is a person who enjoys – well, “enjoy” may be too insipid a word – who seeks with a curiosity and vigour powered by lust – seeks to be lost, if only momentarily, in the full reaches of their generalised sexuality, if you follow me, sexuality in all its darkest, anonymous parts. This can be approached by promiscuity but that is not the only route. A slut may begin from a number of starting points, from being an unhappily promiscuous boy or girl or a person seeking defilement as a way of self-punishment. But a true slut has passed from these needs, while still being able to enjoy the theatre of these needs – say, of self-defilement – but has moved on to the larger journey to which there is no end.'

‘But I asked about gutter sluts,' he said.

‘I'm coming to that,' she said, with a tutorial tone. ‘A gutter slut –
nostalgie de la boue –
is the slut who prefers – or is at that point of the journey – which involves sexual life at its lowest, the dirtiest, the poorest, the most physically disgusting – either people or situations or even maybe just ambience …'

‘But why?' he broke in, ‘why is this part of the journey?'

‘… You are too impatient,' she said, ‘and if you don't understand it is because you have not yet reached this point. It is part of the journey because it is
there.
There are sexual ambiences which belong with social class and even with occupations. With butchers, for example. The slut is curious. The slut must go there.'

‘But didn't Gertrude Stein say that when you get there there is no there there?'

‘Believe me, pet, when you are sluttishly
there
you know you are there.'

 

Once after sex Belle began to cry and he was surprised.

‘Hey! I thought expeditioners didn't cry.'

‘Even sluts get the blues,' she said.

 

Belle laughed and said, ‘Good one!' when in the film
Outrageous
a white drag queen who picks up a black man in a bar says to the man, ‘I'm an equal opportunity slut.' Belle commented that sluts were into equal opportunity before any of the political people. You could say that a gutter slut was into affirmative action.

The drag queen in the film befriends a schizophrenic girl who wants to have a child by a Yellow Cab driver – any Yellow Cab driver.

‘For whatever reason,' Belle said, after the film, ‘schizoids make good sluts – and I said schizoids not schizophrenics. And I'm not romanticising mental illness either. It's a fact from my experience.'

 

Once in bed they were playing with a Luger pistol (Navy, Second World War). Belle liked the feel of the cold metal on her flesh, the gun-oil smell, the lethality, the sinister aura of German pistols. It had belonged to Belle's German father and she had given it to him. He asked about the Nazis and what she felt when she and he played Nazi games.

‘Oh,' she said, choosing her words carefully, acknowledging the sensitivity of it, while, he thought, not wanting to leach away any of the game's spirit, ‘oh Nazis are useful. They gave us a lot of good sadomasochistic imagery – they were good with costume, very good, they understood leather – but they didn't
invent
the gothic. And they were into the barbaric – not the sensual – and therefore got it all very wrong.'

‘How does it fit with sluttishness?'

‘It fits with sluttishness because sluttishness steals from the Nazis. Sluttishness steals fantasies and paraphernalia from anywhere. It can take items of evil and make them accessories of sensuality, turn them to things of play.'

‘I am not a tart,' Belle said, playfully, when he asked her about the difference between a tart and a slut, ‘I'm a flan.' And added, ‘I also possess
flâneur
.'

She did not bother with the question.

 

‘A slut can never betray another slut,' Belle announced over dinner at the Hydro Majestic Hotel.

They were searching for psychic traces of his great-grandmother in the depressed, run-down, turn-of-the-century health resort district around Katoomba, ‘because between two sluts all things are permitted. To revel in the recounting of one's deeds is an act of sluttishness itself. In a close relationship between two sluts it must be expected that each will want to now and then go off on an adventure. But the adventure must be brought back into the lore of the relationship.'

 

They were walking back along a Katoomba street past the once fashionable guest houses where his great-grandmother had operated. They saw a blonde woman checking her mail box.

‘She's a slut,' Belle said, cautioning.

The woman's face was hardened by the Australian sun. Her long blonde hair was trained around her face to reduce the visible skin, to conceal the sun-damaged skin. But she used her hair tantalisingly like a veil so that it became an invitation to her suggested charms. The woman's eyes slyly roved them, almost molesting them, as they approached. He saw immediately what Belle meant.

‘She's a beach slut,' Belle said,
sotto voce
, ‘it's not only the way she uses her hair but sunbathing makes people very aware of their skin. Beach sluts move differently inside their skin. And she's aware of us – two other sluts. Like a dog she doesn't have to look closely, she senses us.'

Belle's voice had dropped to a hush and she touched his arm in warning. ‘Avoid making eye contact with her or the three of us will end up rutting right here and now in the gutter.'

They kept their eyes averted and passed by.

When they were clear, Belle said, ‘It would have happened in a flash if our eyes had met, we would not have known how it happened, it would have been a conflagration of souls. But I'm not up to conflagration of souls today.'

‘I believe you,' he said, feeling that he had passed by an invitation of unspeakable consequence.

‘You'd better believe me,' Belle said.

 

Belle and he stopped and peered into the run-down, vandalised lobby of a former guest house of the twenties.

Flaps hung off the mail boxes, human turds littered the floor, and the place had the odour of human urine.

A disused office with a frosted glass door with the word ‘concierge' and wall lights behind picket panels of pink and green pastel glass – mostly missing – were reminders of the guest house's time of grandeur.
Declined grandeur in old buildings gave him a delightful apprehension. ‘It's a door to the past which I feel I can almost squeeze through. Certain buildings and their contents should be designated to be left as they were, completely untouched.'

‘These old “guest houses” are of course a metaphor for this great-grandmother who has so bewitched you,' Belle said.

She looked at him then, seductively, there in the lobby of the vandalised guest house amid the urine and excreta smells.

‘Let me embody that metaphor.' She raised her skirt.

Leaning against the door they had sex, and after she wiped herself with a tissue and threw it into the lobby.

‘In Egypt,' he said, as they walked back out into the street of depressed curio shops and closed-up spas, clattering with his great-grandmother's carriage and the last days of laughing tour parties, ‘I was carefully keeping my rubbish inside the car – in those Hertz rubbish bags – and I kept all my empty beer bottles and Evian water bottles inside the car. One day I stopped at what appeared to be a splendid Mediterranean beach but when I went onto the beach I found it totally littered. I looked around the countryside for the first time and realised that the whole of Egypt was a rubbish tip many thousands of years old. It is a completely littered country. I then took the rubbish from my Hertz bags and my empty bottles and dumped them out in the desert with all
the other rubbish. It gave me a liberating pleasure to be untidy.'

‘I taught you the joy of throwing beer cans from car windows,' Belle said, ‘I taught you that it was not only rule-breaking but also a simple expressive physical act of exuberant disorder. It's physical haiku which says “we pass this way but once and to hell with it”.'

‘But we do pass that way again, usually,' he said.

‘Oh don't be wet,' Belle said. But a little later added, ‘It must be done with a feeling of exuberance. Not habitually. If you feel no exuberance, don't do it.'

Belle told him that she had known he was a slut from the moment she had looked into his face.

‘I knew you were too,' he said.

‘That did not require masterly powers of observation,' she said, ‘women sluts have many more ways of displaying it. You have to be a master-slut to pick men sluts. Since puberty – before puberty! – men have been able to look at me and tell – and I knew myself from an early age. Always look for a puffy, bruised look around the eyes or lips – it's a sort of tumescence –
embouchement –
an almost permanent tumescence of the labia which transfers itself to around the eyes and mouth. The pout. Do you know what the pout is? The pout is the face's way of mimicking the tumescent vagina. Deportment. See how I sit? That's the way a slut sits.'

‘And choice of jewellery,' he said, ‘there is a slut aesthetic.'

‘No,' Belle said, pedantically, ‘before that – I'm talking of school kids – you'll find all the signs at that
age. Admittedly girl sluts are the first into jewellery. But I could go along a line of boys and girls and pick out the sluts.'

‘And hence from photographs also.'

‘Yes, from all those photographs of your great-grandmother and her clients at the caves, I could tell. Oh yes, I could tell.'

 

Belle said that people were wrong if they thought all whores were sluts. Some whores were sluts, some sluts were whores. But sluts used sexuality to extinguish self, which could only happen when you crossed the lines into the dark country where the rules were either unknown or always reversible.

‘Sluttishness is a sexual insurrection of considerable degree.'

‘What about Severine in
Belle de Jour
?' he asked. ‘Was she a slut or just a whore or what?'

‘Thrill-seeking is a sufficient justification.'

 

‘You are capable of most sluttish things,' Belle said, ‘but you can never experience the rich.'

‘How so?'

‘It is because you came from a wealthy background – your great-grandmother's money – you cannot get the plummeting frisson of debasing yourself before the rich. You are denied the having of sex in the shadow of fear and bewilderment. The upper-class rich can intimidate me in a way that you will never know. But I am a collector and a connoisseur of intimidation and
its application to sensuality. Thus the upper-class rich serve me.'

They discussed the ‘banishment of the intellect' which has to occur in sluttishness.

‘One of the greatest joys of sluttishness,' said Belle with shining eyes, ‘is to be intimidated and used sexually by one's intellectual inferiors, to defile one's intellect by choice of sexual company.'

 

A still photograph of Marlon Brando from
The Wild One
caught his eyes and he thought, ‘Oh, oh – there's a slut all right. I must show this to Belle.'

In an article not in any way related to the photograph, on the same day, he came across the words, ‘Brando's heavy-lidded slut in
The Wild One
lusted after furtively by Lee Marvin and explicitly quoted in the erotic fantasies of Anger's
Scorpio Rising …
'

He and Belle had been looking for uses of the word ‘slut' applied to males.

Belle was very pleased and rewarded him.

 

‘It is not only the making of oneself sexually available to virtually anyone from an early age, it has to become the ability to pick the appropriate partner from among strangers on any given occasion for a given sexual sortie.'

‘But sexual invitation is sometimes deceitful,' he argued, ‘one can rarely be sure of what lies behind the invitation. Sometimes they want you to read their poems.'

‘A slut never uses a sexual invitation as a way of beginning quote a full relationship unquote or as a way of having one's poems read. A slut would use the mind to seek a fully rounded relationship, not sexuality.'

Belle said that this did not mean that when a slut was rejected by a lover he or she would not behave badly. ‘They are just as likely to burn your car or put a severed dog's head in your bed. But the motive would be deprivation not jealousy.'