Zoo Time (20 page)

‘I most decidedly was not.’

‘There you are. He most decidedly was not.’

Sadist, I thought. Sadist and masochist. Though not easy to be sure which was which. Or why, if whatever it was they did they did to each other, Poppy was of such interest to them.

He turned out to be a film-maker, our Dirk de Wolff. Poppy wondered why he hadn’t, in that case, brought along his camera. Film-maker, not cameraman, he explained with great courtesy. If it was in regard to Poppy that the lackey had taken leave of his senses, he had clearly taken leave of them on his boss’s instructions. Poppy was the reason for all this, whatever all this was.

‘So which of your films will I have seen?’ she asked him.

‘I always say,’ he said with polite painstakingness, ‘that the only person who asks that question is a person who hasn’t seen any. But you aren’t alone. Millions haven’t.’

‘So which
should
I see?’

He took her hand. ‘There is no
should
about it. I am glad you have seen none and recommend you going on doing so. I am not a friendly director. These days I make films I don’t care if anyone sees or understands. It’s the privilege of early success.’

Fuck you, I thought.

We were sitting by this time, the four of us, Tim having ferried himself back to the boat. I would have liked it had de Wolff more decorously crossed his legs. But then he’d have liked it had I more decorously disappeared.

Vanessa looked accusingly at me. Why couldn’t
I
be so insouciant about my work? Why did I have to go on caring whether I was read or liked?

De Wolff picked up the looks we exchanged. ‘You think it’s wrong of me to have such an attitude?’ he wondered.

Vanessa answered for me. ‘My husband’s a novelist. Novelists want to be loved and noticed.’

He let out a small eruption of dry mirth. ‘Of course they do. That’s because no one any longer reads them.’

He waited for me to tell him I was wrong. But no words came.

‘Then I have to ask why you go on doing it,’ he went on. ‘The novel died a hundred years ago, didn’t it? Or whenever it was that people were given the vote and permitted to feel their opinions were of value. It is getting to be the same with film, but at least with film there is still the mystique of production. Though once everybody has a degree in media studies, that will be film finished too.’

‘I love films,’ Poppy said.

‘And you also love books,’ her daughter reminded her. It was humour Poppy time. But it was also notice Vanessa time.

‘Forgive me, but do you know what I think?’ de Wolff cut in. ‘I think that people who say they love film or books or art, in fact do not. I don’t mean you two lovely ladies – I am speaking generally. If you truly love film, you probably won’t go to any. Same with literature: if you care for it there is scarcely a book you can bear to read. The actuality of art always lets down the idea you have of it.’ He looked to me. ‘What is your opinion?’

I was surprised to hear myself appealed to. I had gone into self-hating reverie, angry to be envious of this big-balled Dutch nihilist with whom I somewhere in my soul agreed. What was I doing in a moribund profession? Why hadn’t I gone into film? Why hadn’t I read media studies at the University of the Fenlands instead of creative fucking writing? But Shark Bay with stars dropping from the sky and dolphins grinning in the Indian Ocean and Dirk de Wolff ’s yacht ablaze with noise and light was no place to discuss the rival advantages of Thetford.

‘The novelist Robert Musil,’ I said with some pomp, ‘once confessed that the more he loved literature the less he loved the individual writer. I make the same point. Don’t ask someone as serious about the novel as I am, I say, to name you a novel he likes.’

De Wolff made to high-five me. Before he stole my women he wanted me to see we were brothers under the skin. Unless he just wanted them to see how much longer his fingers were than mine.

‘But if actual art is always a let-down compared to the ideal thing,’ I said, showing him I was no pushover, ‘that’s no reason to despise the poor consumers of it.’

‘I didn’t say I despised them. I only said I don’t care what they think. Maybe it’s you who despises your readers.’

‘I don’t have readers. No one has readers.’

‘Then you confirm my point.’

‘He has thousands of readers,’ Vanessa said.

‘Tens of thousands,’ Poppy hyperbolically chipped in.

‘But they don’t understand you,’ de Wolff laughed. ‘I know all about it –’ he tapped his heart with his enormous hand, to suggest a commonality of suffering – ‘they want something to happen, and you don’t want to give it to them. I too. The more they want, the more I refuse. “You want something to happen,” I say, “then
you
happen! You want someone to change?
You
change! I hold my camera still.
You
do the squirming about.” You should make a film, my friend. You should make a film about these two beautiful women. Just point a camera at them. Allow the features of the one to fade into the features of the other. And let the audience do the rest.’

Vanessa, high on his compliments, wondered if his films were Warhol-like. More Antonioni, he told her with another of his explosive laughs. Antonioni, without quite so much concession to event.

I lapsed out of the conversation again. Was he right? Did I despise the readers I didn’t have?

Of course he was right. He had a boat and big balls. Doesn’t a boat make you right? Don’t big balls?

It was his boat he wanted us to see. No doubt his balls, too, but he wasn’t saying that. I told him we were tired, that we had been on the water for a large part of the day, that we were leaving early in the morning for Broome, that we were not sea-faring people.

‘That’s not true,’ Vanessa said. ‘Is it, Mother? That we aren’t seafaring people.’

She looked hard at Poppy, to be certain she was sober enough to conduct a conversation.

‘Lived half my life on boats,’ Poppy said, steadying herself between each word.

‘Come and have a dekko at mine then,’ de Wolff persisted, a master of the vernacular, looking from Poppy to Vanessa and back. Having ousted me in the matter of film versus the novel, that’s to say in the matter of realism versus sentimentality, that’s to say in the matter of success versus failure, he was now about to oust me in the matter of my women.

‘Shall I?’ Poppy asked, looking first at Vanessa and then at me.

‘We’ll all come,’ Vanessa said. ‘Unless you don’t want to, Guido.’

‘Oh, don’t make him,’ de Wolff said. ‘There’s nothing worse than being shown around something you don’t want to see. I’m the same with other men’s work.’

‘No, come,’ Poppy murmured to me, as though it would be our secret if I did.

‘Best you stay and keep our seats warm,’ Vanessa said.

So I stayed. Why? Because I am a novelist and a novelist, now that the novel is no more, must experience every last ignominy. That could be the novelist’s final justification – on behalf of everybody else he drinks humanity’s humiliation to the dregs.

I waved them off. Poppy looked round and waved back. Even blew me a kiss. Unless she was just blowing for air, the way old ladies do when they are three sheets to the wind. But there was as much of the schoolgirl about her as the matron. She turned a second time, put her hand to her eyes in pretend shock, and mouthed something at me. I couldn’t be sure but what she seemed to be saying was, ‘I can see his knob.’ Vanessa, I thought, was going to have her work cut out.

She, of course, did not look round. No doubt she was annoyed with me. It was always my fault when her mother drank too much. And she wouldn’t have been impressed with my capitulation to de Wolff ’s lawless cynicism. I should have fought harder to stop them going. I should have defended more vigorously my manhood, my husbandhood, my son-in-lawhood, and my profession. She never liked it when I was aggressive – ‘A mad bull,’ she called me – but she liked it less when I played the submissive – ‘Faggot!’ she’d say. We shared that contradictory view of me.

Alone, I watched Dirk de Wolff in his indecent floaty ball-bag shorts position himself between my women, one on either arm, and then lead them from the centre down a wooden ramp, their cork heels clopping on the boards, their hips swaying, to where a small boat was waiting to transport them to the big boat which seemed to burst into even more magnificent light the minute they set off.

Mad bull or faggot? Faggot.

In accordance with Vanessa’s instructions I had not brought my notebook out with me. My pen I always carried, just in case. Even Vanessa couldn’t prise me from my pen. I called the waiter – an overtanned boy-man (orange, his skin was) in calf-length pants that seemed to be made out of straw. I asked him to bring me something to write on. He looked puzzled. ‘Like a drink mat?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘like a piece of paper.’ When he brought me what I’d asked for I sat in front of it, not writing a word. Was I going mad, I wondered. It was no longer existentially fashionable for a writer to be going mad, especially in Australia. But the last few weeks suddenly seemed chaotic and crazy. What was I doing here? What had I been doing in Adelaide reading my most obscene and antic passages to middle-class Australians who lapped up every word? You couldn’t upset Australians once they’d found literature. They listened obediently to you whatever you read them, or even if you read them nothing, if you sat there with your stomach hanging between your legs, saying not a word, they brought down the roof of Adelaide Town Hall with their applause. Australia was reputed to have more readers per head of population than anywhere but Finland. How was one to process that information? Philippa had put New Zealand up there as well. And what had I been doing with her? In accordance with my usual post-coital moodiness I had hated her in retrospect for a week, and had then, retrospecting on the retrospect, begun to fall in love with her. Vanessa had got wind of her, though I denied everything, and was now paying me back with Dirk de Wolff and maybe Tim too. Giving herself to either or to both of them, or giving her mother? Vanessa was a connoisseur of pain. She would have worked out to a nicety how to hurt me. But for her to have worked out how to do that she would have needed to know how I felt about her mother. So did she? And would she sacrifice her mother’s modesty – presumably even a woman in her sixties still has her modesty – just to hurt me? Was she laying her out on Dirk’s bunk like a sacrificial virgin, bedecking her with lilies, as he turned his camera on them both, watching the one metamorphose into the other, even as I sat there, mouth-writing?

My pen hovered over the paper. Write the book. Write the book of me.
Mad in Monkey Mia
. No story, fuck the story, fuck anything happening – de Wolff was right: if readers wanted something to happen, let
them
happen – no event, no action, no furthering or unravelling of plot, just the brain (which should be plot enough for anyone) rolling around in pain like one of the dolphins beneath our rowing boat. ‘One should go cuckoo!’ Henry Miller had written. ‘People have had enough of plot and character. Plot and character don’t make life.’

But what if people had had enough of life?

I
made life, anyway, whether they wanted it or not, I made life, going crazy over my mother-in-law whose knee I’d finally touched after nearly twenty years of thinking about it and who was now allowing a lascivious film-maker’s quasi-sodomitic lickspittle in powder-blue pyjamas to pull at the lips of her vagina while the stars fell out of the heavens in amazement, or shame, or rapture.

Henry Miller, the devil he was, once transcribed the sound the petal lips of a vagina made when you opened them.
Squish-squish
. ‘A sticky little sound,’ he called it, ‘almost inaudible.’

Squish-squish
.

Jesus Christ.

Try getting away with that today. Try getting the sacred music of the labia past Flora McBeth.

And try getting a moment’s peace, once you have heard it, yourself.

Squish-squish
. . .

The things one suffers when one is serious about one’s art.

19

The Baton of Literature

The first time I used the word ‘cunt’ in a book I lay awake imagining I would be struck dead. Not by Vanessa, by God.

In the morning I crossed it out.

The next day I put it in again.

In the morning I crossed it out.

It was my second book. I could never have used it in my first, whatever Archie Clayburgh’s teaching and J. P. Donleavy’s example. You need to grow into cunt.

In the end I asked Vanessa what she thought.

‘Is it used in a swearing context or a sexual context?’

‘Sexual.’

‘Is it used with love or used with hate?’

‘Well, certainly not hate. With desire.’

‘Then be bold,’ she said.