The Great Pursuit (11 page)

'Should eat Wheatgerm and Vitamin E like I do. Helps get it up better than anything. What were
we talking about?'

'Bears,' said MacMordie avidly.

'Baby's got this thing about ecology and wildlife. Been reading about animals being human and
all. Some guy called Morris wrote a book...'

'I read that too,' said MacMordie.

'Not that Morris. This Morris worked in a zoo and had a naked ape and writes this book about
it. Must have shaved the fucking thing. So Baby reads it and the next thing you know she has
bought a lot of bears and things and let them loose round the house. Place is thick with bears
and the neighbours start complaining just when I'm applying to join the Yacht Club. I tell you,
that woman gives me a pain in the ass all the problems she manages to come up with.'

MacMordie looked puzzled. 'If this Morris guy went in for apes how come Mrs Hutchmeyer is into
bears?' he asked.

'Whoever heard of a fucking naked ape in the Maine woods? It's impossible. The thing would
freeze to death first snowfall and it's got to be natural.'

'Isn't natural having bears in your backyard. Not any place I know.'

'First thing I said to Baby. I said you want an ape it's okay with me but bears is into
another ballgame. Know what she said? She said she'd had a naked fucking ape round the house
forty years and bears needed protecting. Protecting? Three hundred fifty pounds they weigh and
they need protection? Anyone round the place needs protection it's got to be me.'

'What did you do then?' asked MacMordie.

'Got myself a machine-gun and told her the first bear I saw coming into the house I'd blow its
fucking head off. So the bears got the message and took to the woods and now it's all fine up
there.'

It was all fine at sea too. Piper woke the next morning to find himself in a floating hotel
but since his adult life had been spent moving from one boarding-house to another, each with a
view of the English Channel, there was nothing very surprising about his new circumstances. True,
the luxury he was now enjoying was better than the amenities offered by the Gleneagle Guest House
in Exforth, but surroundings meant little to Piper. The main thing in his life was his writing
and he continued his routine on the ship. In the morning he wrote at a table in his cabin and
after lunch lay with Sonia on the sundeck discussing life, literature and Pause O Men for the
Virgin in a haze of happiness.

'For the first time in my life I am truly happy,' he confided to his diary and that band of
future scholars who would one day study his private life. 'My relationship with Sonia has added a
new dimension to my existence and extended my understanding of what it means to be mature.
Whether this can be called love only time will tell but is it not enough to know that we
interrelate so personally? I can only find it in myself to regret that we have been brought
together by so humanly debasing a book as POMFTV. But as Thomas Mann would have said with that
symbolic irony which is the hallmark of his work "Every cloud has a silver lining", and one can
only agree with him. Would that it were otherwise!!! Sonia insists on my re-reading the book so
that I can imitate who wrote it. I find this very difficult, both the assumption that I am the
author and the need to read what can only influence my own work for the worse. Still, I am
persevering with the task and Search for a Lost Childhood is coming along as well as can be
expected given the exigencies of my present predicament.'

There was a great deal more in the same vein. In the evening Piper insisted on reading what he
had written of Search aloud to Sonia when she would have preferred to be dancing or playing
roulette. Piper disapproved of such frivolities. They were not part of those experiences which
made up the significant relationships upon which great literature was founded.

'But shouldn't there be more action?' said Sonia one evening when he had finished reading his
day's work. 'I mean nothing ever seems to happen. It's all description and what people
think.'

'In the contemplative novel thought is action,' said Piper quoting verbatim from The Moral
Novel. 'Only the immature mind finds satisfaction in action as an external activity. What we
think and feel determines what we are and it is in the essential areness of the human character
that the great dramas of life are enacted.'

'Ourness?' said Sonia hopefully.

'Areness,' said Piper. 'Are with an A.'

'Oh.'

'It means essential being. Like Dasein.'

'Don't you mean "design"?' said Sonia.

'No,' said Piper, who had once read several sentences from Heidegger, 'Dasein's got an A
too.'

'You could have fooled me,' said Sonia. 'Still, if you say so.'

'And the novel if it is to justify itself as a mode of inter-communicative art must deal
solely with experienced reality. The self-indulgent use of the imagination beyond the parameter
of our personal experience demonstrates a superficiality which can only result in the
unrealization of our individual potentialities.'

'Isn't that a bit limiting?' said Sonia. 'I mean if all you can write about is what has
happened to you you've got to end up describing getting up in the morning and having breakfast
and going to work...'

'Well, that's important too,' said Piper, whose morning's writing had consisted of a
description of getting up and having breakfast and going to school. 'The novelist invests these
events with his own intrinsic interpretation.'

'But maybe people don't want to read about that sort of thing. They want romance and sex and
excitement. They want the unexpected. That's what sells.'

'It may sell,' said Piper, 'but does it matter?'

'It matters if you want to go on writing. You've got to earn your bread. Now Pause
sells...'

'I can't imagine why,' said Piper. 'I read that chapter you told me to and honestly it's
disgusting.'

'So reality isn't all that nice,' said Sonia, wishing that Piper wasn't quite so highminded.
'We live in a crazy world. There are hijackings and killings and violence all over and Pause
isn't into that. It's about two people who need one another.'

'People like that shouldn't need one another,' said Piper, 'it's unnatural.'

'It's unnatural going to the moon and people still do it. And there are rockets with nuclear
warheads pointing at one another ready to blow the world apart and just about everywhere you look
there's something unnatural going on.'

'Not in Search,' said Piper.

'So what's that got to do with reality?'

'Reality,' said Piper reverting to The Moral Novel, 'has to do with the realness of things in
an extra-ephemeral context. It is the re-establishment in the human consciousness of traditional
values...'

While Piper quoted on Sonia sighed and wished that he would establish traditional values like
ask her to marry him or even just climb into bed with her one night and make love in a good
old-fashioned way. But here again Piper had principles. In bed at night his activities remained
firmly literary. He read several pages of Doctor Faustus and then turned to The Moral Novel as to
a breviary. Then he switched off the light and resisted Sonia's charms by falling fast
asleep.

Sonia lay awake and wondered if he was queer or she unattractive, came to the conclusion that
she was closeted with some kind of dedicated nut and, hopefully, a genius and decided to postpone
any discussion of Piper's sexual proclivities to a later date. After all the main thing was to
keep him cool and collected through the publicity tour and if chastity was what Piper wanted
chastity was what he was going to get.

In fact it was Piper himself who raised the issue one afternoon as they lay on the sundeck. He
had been thinking about what Sonia had said about his lack of experience and the need for a
writer to have it. In Piper's mind experience was equated with observation. He sat up and decided
to observe and was just in time to pay close attention to a middle-aged woman climbing out of the
swimming bath. Her thighs, he noted, were dimpled. Piper reached for his ledger of Phrases and
wrote down, 'Legs indented with the fingerprints of ardent time,' and then as an alternative,
'the hallmarks of past passion.'

'What are?' said Sonia looking over his shoulder.

'The dimples on that woman's legs,' Piper explained, 'the one that's just sitting down.'

Sonia examined the woman critically. 'They turn you on?'

'Certainly not,' said Piper, 'I was merely making a note of the fact. It could come in useful
for a book. You said I needed more experience and I'm getting it.'

'That's a hell of a way to get experience,' said Sonia, 'voyeurizing ancient broads.'

'I wasn't voyeurizing anything. I was merely observing. There was nothing sexual about
it.'

'I should have known,' said Sonia and lay back in her chair.

'Known what?'

'That there was nothing sexual about it. There never is with you.'

Piper sat and thought about the remark. There was a touch of bitterness about it that
disturbed him. Sex. Sex and Sonia. Sex with Sonia. Sex and love. Sex with love and sex without
love. Sex in general. A most perplexing subject and one that had for sixteen years upset the even
tenor of his days and had produced a wealth of fantasies at variance with his literary
principles. The great novels did not deal with sex. They confined themselves to love, and Piper
had tried to do the same. He was reserving himself for that great love affair which would unite
sex and love in an all-embracing and wholly rewarding totality of passion and sensibility in
which the women of his fantasies, those mirages of arms, legs, breasts and buttocks, each
particular item serving as the stimulus for a different dream, would merge into the perfect wife.
With her because his feelings were on the highest plane he would be perfectly justified in doing
the lowest possible things. The gulf that divided the beast in Piper from the angel in his truly
beloved would be bridged by the fine flame of their passion, or some such. The great novels said
so. Unfortunately they didn't explain how. Beyond love merged with passion there stretched
something: Piper wasn't sure what. Presumably happiness. Anyway marriage would absolve him from
the interruptions of his fantasies in which a predatory and beastly Piper prowled the dark
streets in search of innocent victims and had his way with them which, considering that Piper had
never had his way with anyone and lacked any knowledge of female anatomy, would have landed him
either in hospital or in the police courts.

And now in Sonia he seemed to have found a woman who appreciated him and should by rights have
been the perfect woman. But there were snags. Piper's perfect woman, culled from the great
novels, was a creature who combined purity with deep desires. Piper had no objection to deep
desires provided they remained deep. Sonia's didn't. Even Piper could tell that. She emanated a
readiness for sex which made things very awkward. For one thing it deprived him of his right to
be predatory. You couldn't very well be beastly if the angel you were supposed to be beastly to
was being even beastlier than you were. Beastliness was relative. Moreover it required a
passivity that Sonia's kisses proved she lacked. Locked occasionally in her arms, Piper felt
himself at the mercy of an enormously powerful woman and even Piper with his lack of imagination
could not see himself being predatory with her. It was all extremely difficult and Piper, sitting
on the sundeck watching the ship's wake widening towards the horizon, was struck once again by
the contradiction between Life and Art. To relieve his feelings he opened his ledger and wrote,
'A mature relationship demands the sacrifice of the ideal in the interests of experience and one
must come to terms with the Real.'

That night Piper armed himself to come to terms with the Real. He had two large vodkas before
dinner, a bottle of Nuits St Georges, which seemed to be appropriately named for the encounter,
during the meal, followed this with a Benedictine with his coffee and finally went down in the
elevator breathing alcohol and endearments over Sonia.

'Look, you don't have to,' she said as he fondled her on the way down. Piper remained
determined.

'Darling, we're two mature people,' he mumbled and walked unsteadily to the cabin. Sonia went
inside and switched on the light. Piper switched it off again.

'I love you,' he said.

'Look, you don't have to appease your conscience,' said Sonia.

'And anyhow...'

Piper breathed heavily and seized her with dedicated passion. The next moment they were on the
bed.

'Your breasts, your hair, your lips...'

'My period,' said Sonia.

'Your period,' murmured Piper. 'Your skin, your...'

'Period,' said Sonia.

Piper stopped. 'What do you mean, your period?' he asked vaguely aware that something was
amiss.

'My period period,' said Sonia. 'Get it?'

Piper had got it. With a bound the author by proxy of Pause O Men for the Virgin was off the
bed and into the bathroom. There were more contradictions between Life and Art than he had ever
dreamt of. Like physiological ones.

In the big house overlooking Freshman's Bay in Maine, Baby Hutchmeyer, née Sugg, Miss
Penobscot 1935, lay languorously on her great waterbed and thought about Piper. Beside her was a
copy of Pause and a glass of Scotch and Vitamin C. She had read the book three times now, and
with each reading she had felt increasingly that here at last was a young author who truly
appreciated what an older woman had to offer. Not that Baby was, in most aspects, older. At
forty, read fifty-eight, she still had the body of an accident-prone eighteen-year-old and the
face of an embalmed twenty-five. In short she had what it takes, the It in question having been
taken by Hutchmeyer in the first ten years of their married life and left for the last thirty.
What Hutchmeyer had to give by way of attention and bovine passion he bestowed on secretaries,
stenographers and the occasional stripper in Las Vegas, Paris or Tokyo. In return for Baby's
complaisancy he gave her money, indulged her enthusiasms whether artistic, social, metaphysical
or ecocultural, and boasted in public about their happy marriage. Baby made do with bronzed young
interior decorators and had the house and herself redone more times than was strictly necessary.
She frequented hospitals that specialized in cosmetic surgery and Hutchmeyer, arriving home from
one of his peripatetic passions, had once failed to recognize her. It was then that the matter of
divorce first came up.