Lurid & Cute (13 page)

— Let me, said Hiro, — for once in my life have the presence of mind displayed by the hero of that movie who in the middle stopped and said:
I just want to let you know that being here is one of the pleasures of my life
.

Then he walked away again. Hiro was hyper like a genki drink. And that, I think, was how the tropical confusion began.

with potentially dark consequences

For afterwards, it was delicate – like it's always delicate after the first time you've had sex or at least just touched another person, but now exaggerated. It was that type of momentous thinking when future possibilities are now in the air, ludicrous like demons, or rather that you yourselves are the demons, flapping around in your stale and outsize costumes. I think I knew that none of us was exactly invulnerable or impervious to feelings, and that if this was happening then we should undertake some responsibility to try to prevent the tragic consequences. But that knowledge was so far away, like the merest lighthouse in the distance. So that however much I was aware – as Romy began to lick my by now quite tired penis while very gently cupping my balls in her warm hand, in a way that I felt was her mute method of reassuring me, and failing, that something other than playfulness was happening – that we had put ourselves in this situation where everyone was at risk, I could not pause and consider the question why. And if a story was taking on more elements than I expected, who was I to stop it? If things were leaking everywhere, my only duty was to examine the leak with care – whether or not I was the agent of catastrophe. I kind of thought I wasn't. I tended to see Hiro as the impresario in this case, although perhaps to find an impresario or a first cause is not important or even possible. Then a friend of a friend who was naked apart from a pair of ski boots wandered over and asked for a light. Her name could have been Gryphon or Maria or Kayley or something similar. I searched in my slumped jeans on the floor because I was glad to be busy with something that wasn't sexual and meanwhile she kept talking.

— It's been the worst comedown of my life, for like three days? she said. — My immune system's just this tiny piece of paper? I mean it's like I'm not myself any more?

That was the dialogue that was normal among my friends, with that whole offness and bizarrerie. In fact offness was the total territory we inhabited. That's the tone I think I'm doomed to record.

 

3. LOWDOWN, CLUMSY, SLY, UNDERHANDED

 

HAPPINESS IS POSSIBLE BUT DIFFICULT

leading to rumours of libertine exploits

The rumours that then circulated about our little band were gothic and other genres – the noir, the skin flicks, the hammer schlock – until eventually I answered my phone and there Shoshana was.
What shit is going on?
Shoshana would say, or one of those Fed-like questions. She wanted me to know what was being said – that we all slept together in the same bed; that we liked to sleep all day then spend the nights doing acid in some sexually combinatory situation; or that we would turn up at parties and instigate crazy effects that left people shaken and disgusted. It was also being said that I was becoming a part-time dealer, including various prescription and non-prescription drugs, with a sideline in web entertainments where Romy and Candy had sex, or Hiro and I would do anything we were asked by an online ensemble of paying spectators. Other people could swear that they had seen Candy at parties with her arms covered in bruises, or wearing handcuffs to which only I had the key. And of course, everyone, signore, is the subject of rumours, everyone exists as this series of misinformation and stories in the minds of others, this is what everyone knows all the time, but to
discover
that, to know it for real – well, that is an unusual fate which is usually only the merited preserve of the celebrity. To be notorious or scandalous in any way distressed me very much – not that I could deny, however, that such rumours corresponded with a certain new freedom in my way of life. To have been part of such a group activity seemed to have extended the basic thinking – this discovery that things I might have feared like orgies or infidelity in full view of my wife could happen as pristinely as the way avocados existed, or the postal system. I had finally realised that whereas I thought I was simply standing in the garden, among verdant streams and widespread birds, I had in fact pushed open a door and discovered the general abattoir, and everywhere there was gore staining the furniture and my delicate hands.

that are in fact more domestic

And so I continued to descend the minor scale – even if it felt like I was moving the other way, in bright ascending arpeggios. In this new atmosphere where I began to articulate myself more freely, my pleasures became more baroque, like some cathedral with its death heads encrusted in the stone, and candles in smeared jars. With Romy I was now much less circumspect and reserved. For if once again we had slept together, and in the presence of my wife, it was as if an ancient interdiction had been lifted, and so we sought each other out more often, and it was difficult to stop this. But what I want to emphasise is that also now at home the actions between myself and Candy became more feverish, as if in instigating this orgy Hiro had demonstrated how easy it was to fulfil the simplest fantasy. There was this thing we had where Candy would sit there on the toilet, and begin to piss, but first of all she did this very shyly, like it wasn't easy for her to be so abandoned and she needed to concentrate, she needed to shut her eyes or look away and sometimes it never happened, sometimes I never did hear that gentle sound begin from under her like a mountain tarn but when it did then she would take my penis in her mouth – because I was there, standing in front of her, waiting – and it undid me, it was so gentle, and so messy. Nor would this kind of exploit have continued if Candy had not been very happy too – because while she has always been this person of grave intellect and serious mien, she never wanted the absolute married existence. It was Candy who had encouraged me to ask my parents if Hiro could stay. Like me, she had ideals of a more expansive existence, and I think for her this had its very precise political dimension – for why should any woman be defined or limited? She was wild precisely in proportion to the absolute repression she wanted to refuse. And I know that nowadays the combinations of girl and boy are so infinite it's sometimes confusing and depressing and hurtful, but also surely it can be delightful, the new combinations of what's normal and what's marvellous? Our domestic tone, if there was a tone, was something like Ominous Funk. For while earlier I would not have contemplated, say, hitting Candy in bed or slapping her breasts, I was now so assiduous in my attention to her that something had changed between us. Now a savagery or violence was among us. Everything with Candy and the bedroom was newly gorgeous and ornate and yet even here I was troubled because to do such things in privacy with Candy seemed in some way to be an injustice towards Romy. Such spirals! Such innocence!
That
is what you wanted, Mama and Papa, when you sent me to my secluded school, by a lake, in a forest, with many therapists and cooks? For there was this one time when uncertainly or tentatively at least I twisted one of Candy's nipples, and she gasped at me. I twisted more.

— Hurt me, said Candy. — Like really, totally.

And that was how I discovered this kink in my soul. It came from Candy, not from me.
A kink?
said Wyman when I got drunk and told him.
That's just a kink?
Well, sure, I replied. Because when she had said this I was looking in her eyes and meanwhile everything about me was getting more excited. I don't mean just my penis, although sure I mean my penis, I mean also my stomach and lungs and heart, I mean my nervous system. It was the excitement when you make a major discovery. So that in the weeks that followed Candy's cry of pleasure in her own pain, while my mother and my father sat downstairs at breakfast, eating their cereal, letting the coffee percolate, we would be upstairs where I would be tying her up with some rope I had bought in a ship's merchant in the city (a course of action I would not recommend to those easily susceptible to embarrassment, since it is difficult in such a ship's merchant to order only for instance a metre or so of rope without looking not at all like the tousled mariner you are trying to impersonate, but rather, as indeed you are – so perhaps it is no longer a case of impersonation, for if you are a thing then how can you resemble it? – the sexually deviant dauphin your parents have developed). And then I slapped her and hit her – although skilfully, so that my parents would not hear – until there were bruises on her arms and legs, and forced my penis in her while she turned her head from side to side. Or sometimes I would simply tie her to the bed and leave her while I breakfasted downstairs, engrossed in the conversation of my mother and my father. But mostly we would find ways to do this anywhere else, in the bathrooms of friends, or hidden by walls in public places, in the unisex toilets of museums: for who after all would want to be fucked in bed, like the mother of a family? And I should say: I did find these longings very arduous. I have grown up only wanting to do justice to the women around me. In the films I watch, I try very hard to watch an equal list of films by men and women, even if that's not easy to maintain. But if your wife wants you to hit her, in the breasts, and grasp her nipples very tight until she makes some noise or moue that very possibly means pain, then is it wrong to do this? I don't think it can be, and therefore I felt no remorse, were it not for a remorse at this very lack of remorse, because I could understand how this might be seen in other scenarios, that I was in this situation being the old-fashioned man. And I really did not want that to be true, that I would be as male in my desires as my father's generation, for although my father is a gentle man I find his friends very dispiriting, with their desires for women that only encompassed possession and disdain. But I think what was happening was much sweeter. Many people think we have it good, the children of my era, all milkshake and ice cream, but the atmosphere in general was grisaille and snow, like there had been a putsch and all of us were the worried chinovniks in the ruins of the winter palace system. I had friends who lived in threesomes but they didn't do it any more. I had friends who tried to live exactly as rabbinically Orthodox as their parents but that made them desperate too. The stories of the freakouts of my friends, these tended to be now finished. We might as well each morning have sat down for tea and fresh xiao long bao. So that if now in this period where no employment was in sight I had happened on this secret abandon, well, who was I to resist? There Candy would sit, at her dressing table, doing her email in her bra and knickers, with her hair in a band so that later she could wash her face, or let the moisturiser sink in, and it was this very calmness and security and efficiency that made me eager to unravel her. Naturally therefore there were miasmal smells. But just as my mother had always ignored my thefts and implausuble stories, so she ignored what was happening now. And it was very useful, this silence, when considering the fact that on our sheets there was now often blood and semen and sometimes urine, which my mother cleared up without advertisement, with just as much carefulness as she showed for our carpets or our clothes.

requiring muteness

That's what I mean about beauty. To maintain any ideal it may become necessary to sacrifice or abandon other, smaller ideals, such as the ideal of decorum, or telling everyone everything, or not inventing falsities and untruths and lies, and not becoming violent and realising that violence can be delicious – and the fact that this is true in no way means that the larger ideal is wrong. The straight line of every romance may always have to get clouded by the other rightful objects of attention, or in the kung fu terms of my childhood movies, you always have to do the things that honour demands. And after all, long before this experiment with other people I knew how fun it was to disobey your own rules – like in secret I would very occasionally go to some hamburger kiosk and gorge myself on meat, despite all my vegetarian principles: I would sit in the dark in some basement at three in the afternoon and eat a hamburger that came with neither plate nor cutlery but only the greasy wrapper it lay on and an assortment of pinched napkins. In everything I did, I wanted happiness at all costs, and maybe this is all my mother's fault. Because in the cinema when I was very young my mother would do two things: she would offer me a commentary to explain what was going on, and also she would remove me if any unhappiness seemed to loom – so the movies from my infancy, I have either never seen them, like the one with the giant shark, because she knew before they began that they were terrifying and sad, or I have begun them but not seen them through to the end, like the one with the alien life form, where the sadness took her by surprise, and she hurriedly removed me. That's a powerful lesson in thinking that the only state to maintain is happiness. Very probably it leads to you doing things that other people might find hateful, or obscene. How vast it is possible to become! It's like some invisibility cloak or superpower – this discovery of the world of the secret. Because of course as soon as you have your own secrets you realise that secrets exist everywhere, in every person who ever sits beside you or to whom you talk: it can be as small as needing the bathroom very much when someone is telling you something important to them and moving, like the story of their psychiatric problems or near-death experience, and you are moved, too, but also thinking how much you are wanting to be enclosed just very briefly in that cool peacefulness of ceramic tile and light and silence and privacy. So that in fact I was amazed how rarely it occurred to me that anyone was lying to me in their turn, even as I constructed so many lies in the average day. And I know that Tiffany for instance would be asking a question that goes something like: but what you do not see in this is that everyone has the right to all the information. You talk of gore, I can hear her saying, so let us talk to you about gore. Here is someone being sent to whichever death camp scares you most: and if they do not know this, if they think they are on their way to some vacation idyll or just labour camp, this revolts us more than the death that occurs with their conscious knowledge. And OK, yes, I understand this. But I would also then reply: Tiffany, just tell me this: if you are going to die, do you prefer to be told, or die at once? Because me, I would like to die at once, with no one telling me anything. For in the end I prefer more happiness to more truth.