Who's Sorry Now? (7 page)

‘This morning.'

‘After sex?'

Marvin Kreitman put his elbows on the table and supported his chin on his fists. ‘Charlie,' he said wearily, ‘Hazel isn't the person I do the deed with these days. Decent men don't badger their wives of twenty years for sexual satisfaction.'

Charlie waved away any imaginary imputation that he might be curious who, in that case, Kreitman
did
badger for sexual satisfaction these days. ‘The last time you smiled at anybody post-coitally, Marvin? Or even pre-coitally, come to that?'

Kreitman thought about it. ‘Do you want the year or the day?'

‘The year will do.'

‘Nineteen seventy-three.'

‘Then that was the last time you had nice sex.'

And in such a manner, had the discussion been about Kreitman's misery and not Charlie's, would the evening have ended. Go home and sleep on that one, Marvin. He was quite prepared to. Nice sex, eh? Well, why not. Two in a bed, no thought of a third, and a smile before and after? Thinking of the smile worried him by virtue of its unlooked-for allure. Forget the rest, but a smile wouldn't have gone amiss. Nineteen seventy-three was a lie. Kreitman had never smiled before or after sex. Or, if he had, he had forgotten, and where was the point of a smile you couldn't remember?

He sat with his chin still on his fists, staring into the blood-red lake of his wine glass, listening to the long silence of Charlie's triumphant refutation. He was head over heels in love with five women – discounting the other four he loved in a calmer
fashion – and he couldn't drag from the bottom of the wine-dark Brunello sea a single recollection of a sex-related, sense-drenched smile. Not on his part anyway. What he could see, if he concentrated, were sometime smiles directed to him. A fatalistic but comradely creasing of the eyes only the day before yesterday from Bernadette, mother of his wife's interior designer's former husband, registering the black folly of life. A playful grin after the theatre, because she scarcely knew him yet, from Shelley, nursing Kreitman all of a sudden when a violent cramp threw him howling off her. Did they count? If you inspired a smile did that mean you were the reason for nice sex in others, even though you were not a participant in it yourself? Could just one of you have nice sex?

What do you think, Charlie?

No, was what Charlie thought. No way, no how. Just as nice sex couldn't be for more than two, so it couldn't be for less.

‘You're a stickler for numbers,' Kreitman said.

‘Rich, coming from you,' Charlie said.

‘You know what this is all about?' Kreitman said, as though struck by it for the first time. ‘Sentimentality. Masculine sentimentality. We both love ourselves in the love women bear us.'

‘Wom
en
don't bear me anything,' Charlie said.

‘It comes to the same thing,' Kreitman said. ‘You love the image of yourself as a nice man which Charlie reflects back to you. I love the image of myself as a bastard which Hazel and the rest reflect back to me. That's why you can't betray Charlie – she has a sentimental hold over you. She is the monster guarding the labyrinth where your other selves are hidden.'

‘So I have to behead her to find out who else I could be?'

‘That's only if you want a fuck, Charlie.'

‘I want a fuck, Marvin.'

‘Then behead her.'

‘And you?'

‘I'm happy as I am.'

‘You aren't. You've let me see you aren't. You'd like to smile before you die.'

Would he? ‘Then who do I behead?'

‘That you must tell me. I don't know who's guarding your labyrinth.'

‘I have told you. They all are.'

‘Then behead them all.'

‘Ah,' Kreitman said, ‘I can't do that.'

‘Then choose one,' Charlie said, ‘and give her to me.'

Kreitman threw his head back and laughed. A waitress in a short black leather apron, whose pants you could see when she cleared a table, whose pants she was no doubt contracted to
let
you see when she cleared a table, came to check how they were for wine. ‘Gendemen?'

‘We're all right,' Kreitman said. ‘But my friend's in love with you.'

‘I'm not,' Charlie said, ‘I love my wife. I only take advantage of other women. And we'll have two brandies. Any. The best.' Then to Kreitman he said, ‘So?'

‘So what, Charlie?'

‘So which are you going to sacrifice?'

‘You're drunk, Charlie.'

‘Maybe, but I'm clear. If it's the women who are stopping us from doing what we'd like to – in my case from fucking someone else; in your case from finding out what it's like to be fucking only one – then we change the women. Exchange the women. What's wrong with that? You have Charlie, I have whichever one you're prepared to part with.'

‘I have
Charlie!
'

‘You don't want Charlie?'

‘What do my wants have to do with anything? Do you honestly envisage Charlie leaping into bed with me? Have you forgotten that she nearly had me arrested by the RSPCA? She blackmailed me out of my own cat. She thinks I'm a brute.'

‘You
are
a brute, Marvin. But I'm not offering you the cat …'

‘No, that's right, you're offering me Charlie. Who is of course renowned for her easygoingness in matters sexual. Look how she's taking Dotty's indiscretions. If she finds those silly, how's she's going to react to this? Sillier still, Charlie. A lot sillier still.'

‘Why don't you just leave Chas to me. I have a feeling you'll be surprised by her. Now who do I get? I'd be happy with Hazel but if you're not fucking her and she's not expecting you to, there might not be any point. I want whichever one will best reflect back to me the image of myself as bastard.'

‘Oh well, in that case, any one of them would do,' Kreitman said. ‘They all know about bastards. Why don't you take the lot?'

For the first time since the quick consumption of his
elicoidali
, the ever hungry prep-school boy with a gob full of lollies appeared in Charlie Merriweather's place. But only fleetingly. ‘No,' he said, after giving Kreitman's offer a decent period of consideration, ‘I think it's important you should choose. Make it equally costly. Who's it going to be, Marvin?'

‘Charlie, enough.'

‘Come on, play the game. Which one … ?'

And so out at last, brandied, into the roaring Soho night, remorseless with clubbers, boys bald as missiles, girls gashed red across the face as though with razors, and Kreitman exclaiming, ‘Christ, these kids!' and Charlie swaying off the pavement, agreeing, ‘Yes, beautiful, aren't they, so much more sure of themselves than I ever was, splendid really, so come on, Marvin, who's it going to be?' and then the cyclist –
that
cyclist! – with his hands off the bars, pink and purple luminous under the street lights, crying, ‘Honk, honk, urgent delivery,' and Kreitman's chance, come sooner than expected, to unseat the cocksucker before he mowed down his jabbering friend, and the next thing flat out under the vomiting moon with tyre marks across his chest.

Not liking anything about the world when he came to in it, with a fright more nauseating than birth, back as though from hell with all its devils, only to find more of them waiting to pitchfork his soul, and Charlie not sobered, still with his big white jaw hanging open, wanting an answer to his crazy question – ‘Which one, Marvin? Who are you going to give me?' – Kreitman went to sleep again on the street.

When he came to a second time it was already another day and he was lying on a castored metal trolley in a corridor off Emergency.

‘Is this where they are laid who tangle with a faggot?' he enquired.

Whereupon someone smoothed his hair and said ‘Shhh!' And strike him dead – strike him dead again – if that someone wasn't Charlie, not Charlie his old chum but Charlie his old chum's wife. Charlie otherwise known as Chas.

That
Charlie!

So where was Hazel?

More to the point,
who
was Hazel?

‘I might not be anybody,' she warned Kreitman on their first date. ‘I have never had a father. And girls who have never had a father never really learn how to turn themselves into a resistant force.'

‘Then don't resist me,' Kreitman said. Though even he knew she wasn't talking about that.

They were sitting in a curry restaurant near his digs in Camden. They had noticed each other in lectures for months but their paths hadn't otherwise crossed until they'd met in a picture queue for
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
. Neither was alone, but neither exactly looked tied up either. Kreitman decided to ignore the feelings of their respective dates and gave her his card. No other student at the university had his own card. Hazel laughed when she read it –

Marvin Kreitman
B.A. Pending

– and the squishy-hearted Kreitman immediately fell in love with her because her laughter had such sadness in it. ‘Ring me,' he said in a dark voice, and she did. That was partly what she meant
by having no resistant force. When somebody asked her to do something she did it. And now here she was letting him choose what she ate, how many poppadoms, which sorts of pickle, not because she couldn't resist, but because she couldn't see any logical reason why she
should
resist.

She tried. For weeks after this first date she refused to see Kreitman, actually washing her hair every night for a month and once even sleeping with another man she hardly knew in order that she shouldn't have to lie to Kreitman when she made the usual excuses and said she was seriously seeing someone else. She was terrified of her own quiescent nature. The year before, holidaying in Israel at a friend's suggestion, she had let a soldier take her off the bus and strip-search her in the Negev. Yossi. She even told her mother about him. ‘Handsome devil,' her mother said, ‘I can see why.'

She lacked moral guidance. Her mother had worked in the House of Commons library in the fifties (the last good-naturedly fancy-free decade of the English twentieth century), where she dressed in pencil skirts which showed off her calf muscles and satin blouses which made her breasts float like pillows, and where she became intimate with any number of Cabinet ministers, all of them Tories (the only ones she liked: a social confidence, sense of humour thing), one of whom – though if anybody knew which, nobody was saying – had fathered Hazel. Given Hazel's mother's predilection for men who looked like Hazel's Israeli soldier – tiers of teeth, no-smoke-without-fire eyes, shoulders bristling with wool, moustaches like a sea lion's and a bazooka in his belt – it oughtn't to have been too difficult to whittle down the number of Tory ministers in contention; but Hazel never felt she'd got close (Harold Macmillan, no; Selwyn Lloyd, no; Anthony Eden, hardly) and maybe her mother was never dead sure herself. Whoever he was – or at least whoever he was
told
he was, and that did not preclude his being a cartel comprising every suspect on the list – he left the women well provided
for, with a flat giving out on to a Juliet balcony overlooking the British Museum, a blue-grey Austin A40, an inexhaustibly stocked drinks cabinet and a sufficient allowance to make Hazel's mother think twice before selling her story or asking for more. Which outcome, viewed all round, hardly disposed her to bring her daughter up a bundle of maidenly compunctions. She put Hazel on the pill at thirteen and advised her to let impulse be her judge. The only trouble with that being that Hazel could never decide which her impulse was or what it was telling her.

Enter Kreitman, spouting determined views. Later on, they both decided, he must have smelt fatherlessness on her, given how wide he opened his paternal arms – Come to Marvin! – and also given how much space he tried to take up in her company, filling all her needs; but at the time of his first wooing her she made him think more of the forest than the orphanage. There was some quality of feral shyness about her that fascinated him; she seemed to peer at him from behind trees, startled, wanting to snuffle him before she would come out. Even her face was snouty, pointed like a deer's, with piercing grey forestial eyes, suggesting indolence no less than timidity, and maybe not timidity at all so much as cruel reserve. In her dressing she chose to give the impression of floaty impermanence, tying her cascading lion's mane in ribbons too insubstantial to contain it, and favouring flighty dresses in filmy colours over the wintry denims most girls wore for lectures.

One warm spring day she turned up for lunch in the union twirling a damson-coloured parasol. And matching damson-coloured ribbons in her hair. When Marvin saw that he thought his chest would burst with love. A parasol!

‘You remind me,' he told her on their third curry date, ‘of a tropical butterfly.'