Captain.Heroin
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I have to not love him though I’m just in it for the sex now
Head Over Heels in Love
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Captain.Heroin
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Nov 3, 2008
- Messages
- 94,868
This is why. It is about ~ 9 pages from Small World, and it's the best explanation I can use, though it is not verbatim how I am experiencing/feeling about this, and I would have tweaked the wording and do not have the gives-a-fucks to do it right now. Thank you in advance for reading this.
[the post below this will be the quote]
[the post below this will be the quote]
Captain.Heroin
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Nov 3, 2008
- Messages
- 94,868
“Is that all?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, is that the only time Philip has cheated on you?”
“How do I know? It’s the only time he’s been caught. But nobody I discussed it with seemed particularly surprised. And when I go to Department do’s I get a look that I can only describe as pitying.” They were both silent for a few moments. Then Morris said: “Hilary, are you trying to tell me that you’re unhappy?”
“I suppose I am.”
After another pause, Morris said: “If Désirée were sitting here now, she’d tell you to forget Philip, make your own life. Get yourself a job, find another guy.”
“It’s too late.”
“It’s never too late.”
“I took a postgraduate certificate of education course a few years ago,” said Hilary, “and as soon as I finished it, they started closing down schools in the city because of the falling birthrate. So there are no jobs. I do a little tutoring for the Open University, but it’s not a career. As to lovers, it’s definitely too late. You were my first and last, Morris.”
“Hey,” he said softly.
“Don’t be nervous, I’m not going to drag you upstairs for a trip down memory lane…”
“Too bad,” said Morris gallantly, but with a certain relief.
“For one thing, Philip will be back soon… No, I made my bed ten years ago, and I must lie in it, cold and lumpy as it often seems.”
“How d’you mean?”
“Well, you know, when the four of us were… carrying on. Philip wanted a separation, but I begged him to come back home, give our marriage another chance, go back to being where we were before, a reasonably contented married couple. I was weak. If I’d said, to hell with you, do what you like, I daresay he would have come crawling back with his tail between his legs inside a year. But because I asked him to come back, with no conditions, he, well, has me over a barrel, as you would say.”
“Do you still, ah, make it together?”
“Occasionally. But presumably he’s not satisfied. There was a story in the paper the other day, about a man who’d had a heart attack and asked his doctor if it was safe to have sexual intercourse, and the doctor said, ‘Yes, it’s good exercise, but nothing too exciting, just with your wife.’ “
Morris laughed.
“I thought it was funny, too,” said Hilary. “But when I read it out to Philip he scarcely cracked a smile. He obviously thought it was a deeply poignant story.”
Morris shook his head, and cut himself another slice of Brie. “I’m amazed, Hilary. Frankly, I always thought of you as the dominant partner in this marriage. Now Philip seems to be calling all the shots.”
“Yes, well, things have gone rather well for him lately. He’s started to make a bit of name for himself at last. He’s even started to look more handsome than he ever did before in his life.”
“I noticed,” said Morris. “The beard is a knockout.”
“It conceals his weak chin.”
“That silver-grey effect is very distinguished.”
“He has it touched up at the barber’s,” said Hilary. “But middle-age becomes him. It’s often the way with men. Whereas women find themselves hit simultaneously by the menopause and the long-term effects of childbearing. It doesn’t seem quite fair… Anyway, Philip managed to get his Hazlitt book finished at last.”
“I never knew about that,” Morris said.
“It’s had very little attention—rather a sore point with Philip. But it was a book, and he had it accepted by Lecky, Windrush and Bernstein just when the chair here became vacant, which was a bit of luck. He’d been effectively running the Department for years, anyway, so they appointed him. His horizons began to expand immediately. You’ve no idea of the mana the title of Professor carries in this country.”
“Oh, I have, I have!” said Morris Zapp.
“He started to get invited to conferences, to be external examiner at other universities, he got himself on the British Council’s list for overseas lecture tours. He’s always off travelling somewhere these days. He’s going to Turkey in a few weeks time. Last month it was Norway.”
That’s how it is in the academic world these days,” said Morris Zapp. “I was telling a young guy at the conference just this morning. The day of the single, static campus is over.”
"And the single, static campus novel with it, I suppose?”
“Exactly! Even two campuses wouldn’t be enough. Scholars these days are like the errant knights of old, wandering the ways of the world in search of adventure and glory.”
“Leaving their wives locked up at home?”
“Well, a lot of the knights are women, these days. There’s positive discrimination at the Round Table.”
“Bully for them,” said Hilary gloomily. “I belong to the generation that sacrificed their careers for their husbands. I never did finish my MA, so now I sit at home growing fat while my silver-haired spouse zooms round the world, no doubt pursued by academic groupies like that Angelica Thingummy he brought here the other flight.”
“Al Pabst? She’s a nice girl. Smart, too.”
“But she needs a job, and Philip might be in a position to give her one some day. I could see that in her eyes as she hung on his every word.”
“Most of the conference she’s been going around with our old friend Dempsey.”
“Robin Dempsey? That’s a laugh. No wonder Philip was making snide comments about him at breakfast, he’s probably jealous. Perhaps Dempsey has a job to fill at Darlington. Shall I make some coffee?”
Morris helped her stack the dishwasher, and then they took their coffee into the lounge. While they were drinking it, Philip returned. “How was the banquet?” Morris asked.
“Awful, awful,” Philip groaned. He sank into a chair and covered his face with his hands. “I don’t want to talk about it. Busby deserves to be taken out and shot. Or hung in chains from the walls of Martineau Hall—that would be more appropriate.”
“I could have told you it would be awful,” said Hilary. “Why didn’t you, then?” said Philip irritably.
“I didn’t want to interfere. It’s your conference.”
“Was my conference. Thank God it’s over. It’s been a total disaster from start to finish.”
“Don’t say that, Philip,” said Morris. “After all, there was my paper.”
“It’s all very well for you, Morris. You’ve had a nice quiet evening at home. I’ve been listening to two degenerate oafs shrieking obscene songs into a microphone for the last two hours, and trying to look as if I was enjoying myself. Then they put me in some stocks and encouraged the others to throw bread rolls at me, and I had to look as if I was enjoying that too.”
Hilary crowed with laughter, and clapped her hands. “Oh, now I wish I’d gone,” she said. “Did they really throw rolls at you?”
“Yes, and I thought one or two of them did it in a distinctly vindictive fashion,” said Philip sulkily.
“But I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Let’s have a drink.”
He produced a bottle of whisky and three glasses, but Hilary yawned and announced her intention of retiring. Morris said he would have to leave early the next morning to catch his plane to London, and perhaps he had better say goodbye to her now.
“Where are you off to, then?” Hilary asked.
“The Rockefeller villa at Bellagio,” he said. “It’s a kind of scholar’s retreat. But I also have a number of conferences lined up for the summer: Zurich, Vienna, maybe Amsterdam. Jerusalem.”
“Goodness,” said Hilary. “I see what you mean about errant knights.”
“Some are more errant than others,” said Morris.
“I know,” said Hilary meaningfully.
They shook hands and Morris pecked her awkwardly on the cheek. “Take care,” he said.
“Why should I?” she said. “I’m not doing anything adventurous. Incidentally, I thought you were against foreign travel, Morris. You used to say that travel narrows the mind.”
“There comes a moment when the individual has to yield to the Zeitgeist or drop out of the ball game,” said Morris. “For me it came in ‘75, when I kept getting invitations to Jane Austen centenary conferences in the most improbable places—Poznan, Delhi, Lagos, Honolulu—and half the speakers turned out to be guys I knew in graduate school. The world is a global campus, Hilary, you’d better believe it. The American Express card has replaced the library pass.”
“I expect Philip would agree with you,” said Hilary; but Philip, pouring out the whisky, ignored the cue. “Goodnight, then,” she said.
“Goodnight, dear,” said Philip, without looking up from the glasses. “We’ll just have a nightcap.” When Hilary had closed the door behind her, Philip handed Morris his drink. “What are all these conferences you’re going to this summer?” he asked, with a lain covetousness.
“Zurich is Joyce. Amsterdam is Semiotics. Vienna is Narrative. Or is it Narrative in Amsterdam and Semiotics in Vienna…? Anyway. Jerusalem I do know is about the Future of Criticism, because I’m one of the organizers. It’s sponsored by a journal called Metucriticism, I’m on the editorial board.”
“Why Jerusalem?”
“Why not? It’s a draw, a novelty. It’s a place people want to see, but it’s not on the regular tourist circuit. Also the Jerusalem Hilton offers very competitive rates in the summer because it’s so goddamn hot.”
“The Hilton, eh? A bit different from Lucas Hall and Martineau Hall,” Philip mused ruefully.
“Right. Look, Philip, I know you were disappointed by the turnout for your conference, but frankly, what can you expect if you’re asking people to live in those tacky dormitories and eat canteen meals? Food and accommodation are the most important things about any conference. If the people are happy with those, they’ll generate intellectual excitement. If they’re not, they’ll sulk, and sneer, and cut lectures.”
Philip shrugged. “I see your point, but people here just can’t afford that sort of luxury. Or their universities won’t pay for it.”
“Not in the UK, they won’t. But when I worked here I discovered an interesting anomaly. You could only have up to fifty pounds a year or some such paltry sum to attend conferences in this country, but there was no limit on grants to attend conferences overseas. The solution is obvious: you should hold your next conference abroad. Somewhere nice and warm, like Monte Carlo, maybe. Meanwhile, why don’t you come to Jerusalem this summer?”
“Who, me? To your conference?”
“Sure. You could knock off a paper on the future of criticism, couldn’t you?”
“I don’t think it has much of a future,” said Philip.“Great! It will be controversial. Bring Hilary along for the ride.”
“Hilary?” Philip looked disconcerted. “Oh, no, I don’t think she could stand the heat. Besides, I doubt if we could afford her fare. Two children at university is a bit of a drain, you know.”
“Don’t tell me, I’m bracing myself for it next fall.”
“Did Hilary put you up to suggesting this, Morris?” said Philip, looking slightly ashamed of his own question.
“Certainly not. What makes you think so?”
Philip squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. “It’s just that she’s been complaining lately that I’m away too much, neglecting the family, neglecting her.”
“And are you?”
“I suppose I am, yes. It’s the only thing that keeps me going these days, travelling. Changes of scene, changes of faces. It would defeat the whole object to take Hilary along with me on my academic trips.”
“What is the object?”
Philip sighed. “Who knows? It’s hard to put it into words. What are we all looking for? Happiness? One knows that doesn’t last. Distraction, perhaps—distraction from the ugly facts: that there is death, there is disease, there is impotence and senility ahead.”
“Jesus,” said Morris, “are you always like this after a medieval banquet?”
Philip smiled wanly and refilled their glasses. “Intensity,” he said. “Intensity of experience is what we’re looking for, I think. We know we won’t find it at home any more, but there’s always the hope that we’ll find it abroad. I found it in America in ‘69.”
“With Désirée?”
“Not just Désirée, though she was an important part of it. It was the excitement, the richness of the whole experience, the mixture of pleasure and danger and freedom—and the sun. You know, when we came back here, for a long while I still went on living in Euphoria inside my head. Outwardly I returned to my old routine. I got up in the morning, put on a tweed suit, read the Guardian over breakfast, walked into the University, gave the same old tutorials on the same old texts… and all the while I was leading a completely different life inside my head. Inside my head, I had decided not to come back to England, so I was waking up in Plotinus, sitting in the sun in my happi-coat, looking out over the Bay, putting on Levis and a sports shirt, reading the Euphoric Times over breakfast, and wondering what would happen today, would there be a protest, a demonstration, would my class have to fight their way through teargas and picket lines or should we meet off-campus in somebody’s apartment, sitting on the floor surrounded by posters and leaflets and paperbacks about encounter groups and avant-garde theater and Vietnam.”“That’s all over now,” said Morris. “You wouldn’t recognize the place. The kids are all into fraternities and preppy clothes and working hard to get into law school.”
“So I’ve heard,” said Philip. “How depressing.”
“But this intensity of experience, did you never find it again since you were in America?”
Philip stared into the bottom of his glass. “Once I did,” he said. “Shall I tell you the story?”
“Just let me get myself a cigar. Is this a cigarillo story or a panatella story?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never told it to anyone before.”
“I’m honored,” said Morris. “This calls for something special.”
Morris left the room to fetch one of his favorite Romeo y Julietas. When he returned, he was conscious that the furniture and lighting had been rearranged in his absence. Two high-backed armchairs were inclined towards each other across the width of the hearth, where a gas-fire burned low. The only other light in the room came from a standard lamp behind the chair in which Philip sat, his face in shadow. Between the two chairs was a long, low coffee table bearing the whisky bottle, water jug, glasses and an ashtray. Morris’s glass had been refilled with a generous measure.
“Is this where the narratee sits?” he inquired, taking the vacant chair. Philip, gazing absently into the fire, smiled vaguely, but made no reply. Morris rolled the cigar next to his ear and listened approvingly to the crackle of the leaves. He pierced one end of the cigar, clipped the other, and lit it, puffing vigorously. “OK,” he said, examining the tip to see that it was burning evenly. “I’m listening.”
“It happened some years ago, in Italy,” Philip began. “It was the very first lecture tour I did for the British Council. I flew out to Naples, and then worked my way up the country by train: Rome, Florence, Bologna, Padua, ending up at Genoa. It was a bit of a rush on the last day. I gave my lecture in the afternoon, and I was booked to fly home the same evening. The Council chap in Genoa, who’d been shepherding me about the place, gave me an early dinner in a restaurant, and then drove me out to the airport. There was a delay in the flight departure—a technical problem, they said, so I told him not to wait. I knew he had to get up early the next morning to drive to Milan for a meeting. That comes into the story.”
“I should hope so,” said Morris. “There should be nothing irrelevant in a good story.”
“Anyway, the British Council man, J. K. Simpson, I can’t remember his first name, a nice young chap, very friendly, enthusiastic about his job, he said, ‘OK, I’ll leave you then, but if the flight’s cancelled, give me a ring and I’ll get you into a hotel for the night."
“Well, the delay went on and on, but eventually we took off, at about midnight. It was a British plane. I was sitting next to an English businessman, a salesman in woollen textiles I think he was…”
“Is that relevant?”
“Not really.”
“Never mind. Solidity of specification,” said Morris with a tolerant wave of his cigar. “It contributes to the reality effect.”
“We were sitting towards the rear of the aircraft, just behind the wing. He had the window seat, and I was next to him. About ten minutes out of Genoa, they were just getting ready to serve drinks, you could hear the clink of bottles from the back of the plane, when this salesman chap turned away from the window, and tapped me on the arm and said, ‘Excuse me, but would you mind having a look out there. Is it my imagination or is that engine on fire?’ So I leaned across him and looked out of the window. It was dark of course, but I could see flames sort of licking round the engine. Well, I’d never looked closely at a jet engine at night before, for all I knew that was always the effect they gave. I mean you might expect to see a kind of fiery glow coming out of the engine at night. On the other hand, these were definitely flames, and they weren’t just coming out of the hole at the back. ‘I don’t know what to think,’ I said. ‘It certainly doesn’t look quite right.’ `Do you think we should tell somebody?’ he said. ‘Well, they must have seen it for themselves, mustn’t they?’ I said. The fact was, neither of us wanted to look a fool by suggesting that something was wrong, and then being told that it wasn’t. Fortunately a chap on the other side of the aisle noticed that we were exercised about something, and came across to have a look for himself. ‘Christ!’ he said, and pushed the button to call the stewardess. I think he was probably some sort of engineer. The stewardess came by with the drinks trolley at that moment. ‘If it’s a drink you want, you’ll have to wait your turn,’ she said. The cabin staff were a bit snappish because of the long delay. ‘Does the captain know that his starboard engine is on fire?’ said the engineer. She gaped at him, squinted out of the window, then ran up the aisle, pushing her trolley in front of her, like a nursemaid running with a pram. A minute later and a man in uniform, the second pilot I suppose, came down the aisle, looking worried and carrying a big torch, which he shone out of the window at the engine. It was on fire all right. He ran back to the cockpit. Very soon the plane banked and headed back to Genoa. The Captain came on the PA to say that we would be making an emergency landing because of a technical problem, and that we should be prepared to leave the aircraft by the emergency exits. Then somebody else told us exactly what to do. I must say he sounded remarkably cool, calm and collected.”
“It was a cassette,” said Morris. “They have these prerecorded cassettes for all contingencies. I was in a Jumbo, once, going over the Rockies, and a stewardess put on the emergency ditching tape by mistake. We were having lunch at the time, I remember, a perfect sunny day at 30,000 feet, when this voice suddenly said, ‘We are obliged to make an emergency landing on water. Do not panic if you are unable to swim. The rescue services have been advised of our intentions.’ People froze with their forks halfway to their mouths. Then all hell let loose until they sorted it out.”
“There was a fair amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth in our plane—quite a lot of the passengers were Italian, and you know what they’re like—they don’t hide their feelings. Then the pilot put the plane into a terrifying dive to put the fire out.”
“Jesus!” said Morris Zapp.
“He was thoughtful enough to explain first what he was going to do, but only in English, so all the Italians thought we were going to crash into the sea and started to scream and weep and cross themselves. But the dive worked—it put the fire out. Then we had to circle over the sea for about twenty minutes, jettisoning fuel, before we tried to land back at Genoa. It was a very long twenty minutes.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Frankly, I thought they were going to be my last twenty minutes.”
“What did you think about?”
“I thought, how stupid. I thought, how unfair. I suppose I prayed. I imagined Hilary and the children hearing about the crash on the radio when they woke up the next morning, and I felt bad about that. I thought about surviving but being terribly crippled. I tried to remember the terms of the British Council’s insurance policy for lecturers on Specialist Tours—so much for an arm, so much for a leg below the knee, so much for a leg above the knee. I tried not to think about being burned to death.
“Landing at Genoa is a pretty hairy experience at the best of times. I don’t know if you know it, but there’s this great high promontory that sticks out into the sea. Planes approaching from the north have to make a U-turn round it, and then come in between it and the mountains, over the city and the docks. And we were doing it at night with one engine kaput. The airport was on full emergency alert, of course, but being a small airport, in Italy, that didn’t amount to much. As we hit the ground, I could see the fire trucks with their lights flashing, racing towards us. As soon as the plane stopped, the cabin crew opened the emergency exits and we all slid out down those inflatable chute things. The trouble was they couldn’t open the emergency exit nearest to us, me and the wool man, because it gave on to the wing with the duff engine. So we were the last out of the plane. I remember thinking it was rather unfair, because if it hadn’t been for us the whole thing might have blown up in mid-air.
“Anyway, we got out all right, ran like hell to a bus they had waiting, and were taken to the terminal. The fire engines smothered the plane in foam. While they were getting our baggage out of the plane I telephoned the British Council chap. I suppose I wanted to express my relief at having survived by telling somebody. It was queer to think that Hilary and the children were asleep in England, not knowing that I’d had a narrow escape from death. I didn’t want to wake Hilary up with a call and give her a pointless retrospective fright. But I felt I had to tell someone. Also, I wanted to get out of the airport. A lot of the Italian passengers were in hysterics, kissing the ground and weeping and crossing themselves and so on. It was obvious that we shouldn’t be flying out till the next morning and that it was going to take hours to sort out our accommodation for the night. And Simpson had told me to phone him if there was any problem, so although it was by now well past one o’clock, I did. As soon as he grasped what had happened, he said he’d come straight out to the airport. So about half an hour later, he picked me up and drove me into the city to find a hotel. We tried a few, but no luck— either they were shut up for the night or they were full, there was a trade fair on in Genoa that week. So he said, look, why don’t you come home with me, we haven’t got a guest bedroom, I’m afraid, but there’s a kind of put-u-up in the living-room. So he took me home to his apartment, in a modern block, halfway up the mountain that overlooks the city and the sea. I felt extraordinarily calm and wideawake, I was rather impressed by my own sangfroid, as a matter of fact.
But when he offered me some brandy I didn’t say no. I looked around the living-worn, and felt asudden pang of homesickness. I’d been living in hotel rooms for the past twelve days, and eating meals in restaurants. I rather enjoy that nowadays, but then I was still a bit of a novice at the foreign lecture tour, and I’d found it quite a strain. And here was a little oasis of English domesticity, where I mild relax and feel completely at home. There were toys scattered about the living-room, and English newspapers, and in the bathroom St Michael’s underwear hanging up to dry. While we were drinking the brandy, and I was telling Simpson the whole story of the plane, his wife came into the room, in her dressing-gown, yawning and rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. I hadn’t met her before. Her name was Joy.”
“Ah,” murmured Morris. “You remember her first name.”
“I apologized for disturbing her. She said it didn’t matter, but she didn’t look particularly pleased. She asked me if I would like something to eat, and I suddenly realized that I was ravenously hungry. So she brought some Parma ham from the kitchen, and some cake, and a pot of tea, and we ended up having a sort of impromptu meal. I was sitting opposite Joy. She was wearing a soft blue velour dressing-gown, with a hood, and a zip that went from hem to throat. Hilary had one just like it once, and looking at Joy out of the corner of my eye was like looking at some younger, prettier version of Hilary—I mean, Hilary when she was young and pretty herself, when we were first married. Joy was, I guessed, in her early thirties, with fair wavy hair and blue eyes. A rather heavy chin, but with a wide, generous mouth, full lips. She had a trace of a northern accent, Yorkshire I thought. She did a little English teaching, conversation classes at the university, but basically saw her role as supporting her husband’s career. I daresay she made the effort to get up and be hospitable to me for his sake. Well, as we talked, and ate, and drank, I suddenly felt myself overcome with the most powerful desire for Joy.”
“I knew it,” said Morris.
“It was as if, having passed through the shadow of death, I had suddenly recovered an appetite for life that I thought I had lost for ever, since returning from America to England. In a way it was keener than anything I had ever known before. The food pierced me with its exquisite flavors, the tea was fragrant as ambrosia, and the woman sitting opposite to me seemed unbearably beautiful, all the more because she was totally unconscious of her attractions for me. Her hair was tousled and her face was pale and puffy from sleep, and she had no make-up or lipstick on, of course. She sat quietly, cradling her mug of tea in both hands, not saying much, smiling faintly at her husband’s jokes, as if she’d heard them before. I honestly think that I would have felt just the same about any woman, in that situation, at that moment, who wasn’t downright ugly. Joy just represented woman for me then. She was like Milton’s Eve, Adam’s dream—he woke and found it true, as Keats says. I suddenly thought how nice women were. How soft and kind. How lovely it would be, how natural, to go across and put my arms round her, to bury my head in her lap. All this while Simpson was telling me about the appalling standards of English-language teaching in Italian secondary schools. Eventually he glanced at his watch and said that it had gone four, and instead of going back to bed he thought he would drive to Milan while he was wide awake and rest when he got there. He was taking the Council car, he told me, so Joy would run me to the airport in theirs.”
“I know what’s coming,” said Morris, “yet I can hardly believe it.”
“He had his bag already packed, so it was only a few minutes before he was gone. We shook hands, and he wished me better luck with my flight the next day. Joy went with him to the front door of the apartment, and I heard them kiss goodbye. She came back into the living-room, looking a little shy. The blue dressing-gown was a couple of inches too long for her, and she had to hold up the skirt in front of her—it gave her a courtly, vaguely medieval air as she came back into the room. I noticed that her feet were bare. ‘I’m sure you’d like to get some sleep now,’ she said. ‘There is a second bed in Gerard’s room, but if I put you in there he might be scared when he wakes up in the morning.’ I said the sofa would be fine. ‘But Gerard gets up frightfully early, I’m afraid he’ll disturb you,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind taking our bed, I could quite easily go into his room myself.’ I said no, no; she pressed me, and said would I just give her a few moments to change the sheets, and I said I wouldn’t dream of putting her to such trouble. The thought of that bed, still warm from her body, was too much for me. I started to shake all over with the effort to stop myself from taking an irrevocable leap into moral space, pulling on the zip-tab at her throat like a parachute ripcord, and falling with her to the floor.”
“That’s a very fancy metaphor, Philip,” said Morris. “I can hardly believe you’ve never told this story before.”
“Well, actually, I did write it down,” said Philip, “for my own satisfaction. But I’ve never shown it to anybody.” He refilled their glasses. “Anyway, there we were, looking at each other. We heard a car accelerate away outside, down the hill, Simpson presumably. ‘What’s the matter?’ she said, ‘You’re trembling all over.’ She was trembling herself a little. I said I supposed it was shock. Delayed reaction. She gave me some more brandy, and swallowed some herself. I could tell that she knew it wasn’t really shock that was waking me tremble, that it was herself, her proximity, but she couldn’t quite credit her own intuition. ‘You’d better lie down,’ she said, show you the bedroom."
“I followed her into the main bedroom. It was lit by a single bedside lamp with a purple shade. There was a large double bed, with a duvet half thrown back. She straightened it out, and plumped the pillows. I was still shaking all over. She asked me if I would like a hot water bottle. I said: ‘There’s only one thing that would stop me shaking like I his. If you would put your arms round me…
“Although it was a dim light in the room, I could see that she went very red. ‘I can’t do that,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t ask me.’ `Please,’ I said, and took a step towards her.
“Ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have walked straight out of the room, perhaps slapped my face. But Joy just stood there. I stepped up close to her and put my arms round her. God, it was wonderful. I could feel the warmth of her breasts coming through the velour dressing-gown, and my shirt. She put her arms round me and gently clasped my back. I stopped shaking as if by magic. I had my chin on her shoulder and I was moaning and raving into her ear about how wonderful and generous and beautiful she was, and what ecstasy it was to hold her in my arms, and how I felt reconnected to the earth and the life force and all kinds of romantic nonsense. And all the time I was looking at myself reflected in the dressing-table mirror, in this weird purple light, my chin on her shoulder, my hands moving over her back, as if I were watching a film, or looking into a crystal ball. It didn’t seem possible that it was really happening. I saw my hands slide down the small of her back and cup her buttocks, bunching the skirt of her dressing-gown, and I said to the man in the mirror, silently, in my head, you’re crazy, now she’ll break away, slap your face, scream for help. But she didn’t. I saw her back arch and felt her press against me. I swayed, and staggered slightly, and as I recovered my balance I altered my position a little, and now in the mirror I could see her face, reflected in another mirror on the other side of the room, and, my God, there was an expression of total abandonment on it, her eyes were half shut and her lips were parted and she was smiling. Smiling! So I pulled back my head and kissed her, full on the lips. Her tongue went straight into my mouth like a warm eel. I pulled gently at the zip on the front of her dressing-gown and slid my hand inside. She was naked underneath it.”
Philip paused and stared into the fire. Morris discovered that he was sitting forward on the edge of his seat and that his cigar had gone out. “Yeah?” he said, fumbling for his lighter. “Then what happened?”
“I slipped the dressing-gown from her shoulders, and it crackled with static electricity as it slid off and settled at her feet. I fell on my knees and buried my face in her belly. She ran her fingers through my hair, and dug her nails into my shoulders. I lay her down on the bed and began to tear off my clothes with one hand while I kept stroking her with the other, afraid that if I once let go of her I would lose her. I had just enough presence of mind to ask if she was protected, and she nodded, without opening her eyes. Then we made love. There was nothing particularly subtle or prolonged about it, but I’ve never had an orgasm like it, before or since. I felt I was defying death, fucking my way out of the grave. She had to put her hand over my mouth, to stop me from shouting her name aloud: Joy, Joy, Joy.
“Then, almost instantly, I fell asleep. When I woke up I was alone in the bed, naked, covered with the duvet. Sunlight was coming through the cracks in the window shutters, and I could hear a vacuum cleaner going in another room. I looked at my watch. It was 10.30. I wondered if I had just dreamed of making love to Joy, but the physical memory was too keen and specific, and my clothes were scattered round the floor where I had thrown them off the night before. I put on my shirt and trousers and went out of the bedroom, into the living-room. A little Italian woman with a scarf round her head was hoovering the carpet. She grinned at me, turned off the Hoover and said something unintelligible. Joy came into the room from the kitchen, with a little boy at her side, holding a Dinky car, who stared at me. Joy looked quite different from the night before—smarter and more poised. She seemed to have cut her hand and was wearing an Elastoplast, but otherwise she was immaculately turned out, in some kind of linen dress, and her hair was smooth and bouncy as if she had just washed it. She gave me a bright, slightly artificial smile, but avoided eye contact. ‘Oh, hallo,’ she said, ‘I was just going to wake you.’ She had phoned the airport and my plane left at 12.30. She would run me down there as soon as I was ready. Would I like some breakfast, or would I like to take a shower first? She was the complete littlish Council hostess—polite, patient, detached. She actually asked is if I’d slept well. I wondered again whether the episode with her the night before had been a wet dream, but when I saw the blue dressing-gown hanging on the back of the bathroom door, it brought the whole tiling back with a sensuous detail that just couldn’t have been imaginary. The exact shape of her nipples, blunt and cylindrical, was imprinted on the nerve-endings of my finger-tips. I remembered the unusual luxuriance of her pubic hair, and its pale gold color, tinged with purple from the bedside lamp, and the line across her belly where her sun-tan stopped. I couldn’t have dreamed all that. But it was impossible to have any kind of intimate conversation with her, what with the cleaning woman hoovering away, and the little boy round her feet all the time. And it was obvious that she didn’t want to anyway. She bustled about the flat and chattered to the cleaning woman and the boy. Even when she drove me to the airport she brought the kid along with her, and he was a sharp little bugger, who didn’t miss much. Although he was sitting in the back, he kept leaning forward and poking his head between the two of us, as if to stop us getting intimate. It began to look as if we would part without a single reference to what had happened the night before. It was absurd. I just couldn’t make her out. I felt I had to discover what had prompted her extraordinary action. Was she some kind of nymphomaniac, who would give herself to any man who was available—was I the most recent of a long succession of British Council lecturers who had passed through that purple-lit bedroom? It even crossed my mind that Simpson was in collusion with her, that I had been a pawn in some kinky erotic game between them, that perhaps he had returned silently to the flat and hidden himself behind one of those mirrors in the bedroom. A glance at her profile at the wheel of the car was enough to make such speculations seem fantastic—she looked so normal, so wholesome, so English. What had motivated her, then? I was desperate to know.
“When we got to the airport, she said, ‘You won’t mind if I just drop you, will you?’ But she had to get out of the car to open the boot for me, and I realized that this was my only chance to say anything to her privately. ‘Aren’t we going to talk about last night?’ I said, as I lifted my bag out of the boot. ‘Oh,’ she said, with her bright hostess’s smile, ‘you mustn’t worry about disturbing our sleep. We’re used to it in this job, people arriving at all sorts of odd hours. Not usually, of course, in burning aeroplanes. I do hope you have a less eventful flight today. Goodbye, Mr Swallow.’
” ‘Mr Swallow!’ This was the woman who just a few hours before had had her legs wrapped somewhere round the back of my neck! Well, it was very clear that, whatever her motives, she wanted to pretend that nothing had happened between us the night before—that she wanted to excise the whole episode from history, cancel it, unweave it. And that the best way I could convey my own gratitude was to play along with her. So, with great reluctance, I didn’t press for an inquest. I just allowed myself one indulgence. She’d extended her hand, and, instead of just shaking it, I pressed it to my lips. I reckoned it wouldn’t seem a particularly showy gesture in an Italian airport. She blushed, as deeply as she had blushed the night before when I asked her to put her arms round me, and the whole unbelievable tenderness of that embrace flooded back into my consciousness, and hers too, I could see. Then she went back to the front of the car, got into the driver’s seat, gave me one last look through the window, and drove away. I never saw her again.”
“Maybe you will one day,” said Morris.
Philip shook his head. “No, she’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“All three of them were killed in an air-crash the following year, in India. I saw their names in the list of passengers. There were no survivors. ‘Simpson, J. K., wife Joy and son Gerard.’ “
Morris expelled his breath in a low whistle. “Hey, that’s really sad! I didn’t think this story was going to have an unhappy ending.”
“Ironic, too, isn’t it, when you think of how we met? At first I felt horribly guilty, as if I had somehow passed on to her a death which I had narrowly escaped myself. I convinced myself that it was just superstition. But I shall always keep a little shrine to Joy in my heart.”
“A little what?”
“A shrine,” Philip said solemnly. Morris coughed cigar smoke and let it pass. “She gave me back an appetite for life I thought I had lost for ever. It was the total unexpectedness, the gratuitousness of that giving of herself. It convinced me that life was still worth living, that I should make the most of what I had left.”
“And have you had any more adventures like that one?” Morris enquired, feeling slightly piqued at the extent to which he had been affected, first by the eroticism of Philip’s tale, then by its sad epilogue.
Philip blushed slightly. “One thing I learned from it, was never to say no to someone who asks for your body, never reject someone who freely offers you theirs.”
“I see,” said Morris drily. “Have you agreed this code with Hilary?”
“Hilary and I don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. Some more whisky?”
“Positively the last one. I have to get up at five tomorrow.”
“And what about you, Morris?” said Philip, pouring out the whisky. “How’s your sex life these days?”
“Well, after Désirée and I split up I tried to get married again. I had various women living in, graduate students mostly, but none of them would marry me—girls these days have no principles—and I gradually lost interest in the idea. I’m living on my own right now. I jog. I watch TV. I write my books. Sometimes I go to a massage parlour in Esseph.”
“A massage parlour?” Philip looked shocked.
“They have a very nice class of girl in those places, you know. They’re not hookers.
College educated. Clean, well-groomed, articulate. When I was a teenager I spent many exhausting hours trying to persuade girls like that to jerk me off in the back seat of my old man’s Chevvy. Now it’s as easy as going to the supermarket. It saves a lot of time and nervous energy.”
“But there’s no relationship!”
“Relationships kill sex, haven’t you learned that yet? The longer a relationship goes on, the less sexual excitement there is. Don’t kid yourself, Philip—do you think it would have been as great with Joy the second time, if there’d been one?”
“Yes,” said Philip. “Yes.”
“And the twenty-second time? The two hundredth time?”“I suppose not,” Philip admitted. “Habit ruins everything in the end, doesn’t it? Perhaps that’s what we’re all looking for—desire undiluted by habit.”
“The Russian Formalists had a word for it,” said Morris.
“I’m sure they did,” said Philip. “But it’s no use telling me what it was, because I’m sure to forget it.”
“Ostranenie,” said Morris. “Defamiliarization. It was what they thought literature was all about.
‘Habit devours objects, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war… Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life.’ Viktor Shklovsky.”
“Books used to satisfy me,” said Philip. “But as I get older I find they aren’t enough.”
“But you’re hitting the trail again soon, eh? Hilary tells me Turkey. What are you doing there?”
“Another British Council tour. I’m lecturing on Hazlitt.”
“Are they very interested in Hazlitt in Turkey?”
“I shouldn’t think so, but it’s the bicentenary of his birth. Or rather, it was, last year, when this trip was first mooted. It’s taken rather a long time to get off the ground… By the way, did you receive a copy of my Hazlitt book?”
“No—I was just saying to Hilary, I hadn’t even heard about it.”
Philip uttered an exclamation of annoyance. “Isn’t that typical of publishers? I specifically asked them to send you a complimentary copy. Let me give you one now.” He took from the bookcase a volume in a pale blue wrapper, scribbled a dedication inside, and handed it to Morris. It was entitled Hazlitt and the Amateur Reader. “I don’t expect you to agree with it, Morris, but if you think it has any merit at all, I’d be very grateful if you could do anything to get it reviewed somewhere. It hasn’t had a single notice, so far.”
“It doesn’t look like the sort of thing Metacriticism is interested in,” said Morris. “But I’ll see what I can do.” He riffled through the pages. “Hazlitt is kind of an unfashionable subject, isn’t he?”
“Unjustly neglected, in my view,” said Philip. “A very interesting man. Have you read Liber Amoris?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s a lightly fictionalized account of his obsession with his landlady’s daughter. He was estranged from his wife at the time, hoping rather vainly to get a divorce. She was the archetypal pricktease. Would sit on his knee and let him feel her up, but not sleep with him or promise to marry him when he was free. It nearly drove him insane. He was totally obsessed. Then one day he saw her out with another man. End of illusion. Hazlitt shattered. I can feel for him. That girl must have—”Philip’s voice faltered, and Morris saw him turn pale, staring at the living-room door. Following the direction of his gaze, Morris saw Hilary standing at the threshold, wearing a faded blue velour dressing-gown, with a hood and a zip that ran from throat to hem.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “Then I realized I’d forgotten to tell you not to lock the front door. Matthew isn’t in yet. Are you feeling all right, Philip? You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”
“That dressing-gown…”
“What about it? I dug it out because my other one’s at the cleaners.”
“Oh, nothing, I thought you’d got rid of it years ago,” said Philip.
He drained his glass. “Time for bed, I think.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, is that the only time Philip has cheated on you?”
“How do I know? It’s the only time he’s been caught. But nobody I discussed it with seemed particularly surprised. And when I go to Department do’s I get a look that I can only describe as pitying.” They were both silent for a few moments. Then Morris said: “Hilary, are you trying to tell me that you’re unhappy?”
“I suppose I am.”
After another pause, Morris said: “If Désirée were sitting here now, she’d tell you to forget Philip, make your own life. Get yourself a job, find another guy.”
“It’s too late.”
“It’s never too late.”
“I took a postgraduate certificate of education course a few years ago,” said Hilary, “and as soon as I finished it, they started closing down schools in the city because of the falling birthrate. So there are no jobs. I do a little tutoring for the Open University, but it’s not a career. As to lovers, it’s definitely too late. You were my first and last, Morris.”
“Hey,” he said softly.
“Don’t be nervous, I’m not going to drag you upstairs for a trip down memory lane…”
“Too bad,” said Morris gallantly, but with a certain relief.
“For one thing, Philip will be back soon… No, I made my bed ten years ago, and I must lie in it, cold and lumpy as it often seems.”
“How d’you mean?”
“Well, you know, when the four of us were… carrying on. Philip wanted a separation, but I begged him to come back home, give our marriage another chance, go back to being where we were before, a reasonably contented married couple. I was weak. If I’d said, to hell with you, do what you like, I daresay he would have come crawling back with his tail between his legs inside a year. But because I asked him to come back, with no conditions, he, well, has me over a barrel, as you would say.”
“Do you still, ah, make it together?”
“Occasionally. But presumably he’s not satisfied. There was a story in the paper the other day, about a man who’d had a heart attack and asked his doctor if it was safe to have sexual intercourse, and the doctor said, ‘Yes, it’s good exercise, but nothing too exciting, just with your wife.’ “
Morris laughed.
“I thought it was funny, too,” said Hilary. “But when I read it out to Philip he scarcely cracked a smile. He obviously thought it was a deeply poignant story.”
Morris shook his head, and cut himself another slice of Brie. “I’m amazed, Hilary. Frankly, I always thought of you as the dominant partner in this marriage. Now Philip seems to be calling all the shots.”
“Yes, well, things have gone rather well for him lately. He’s started to make a bit of name for himself at last. He’s even started to look more handsome than he ever did before in his life.”
“I noticed,” said Morris. “The beard is a knockout.”
“It conceals his weak chin.”
“That silver-grey effect is very distinguished.”
“He has it touched up at the barber’s,” said Hilary. “But middle-age becomes him. It’s often the way with men. Whereas women find themselves hit simultaneously by the menopause and the long-term effects of childbearing. It doesn’t seem quite fair… Anyway, Philip managed to get his Hazlitt book finished at last.”
“I never knew about that,” Morris said.
“It’s had very little attention—rather a sore point with Philip. But it was a book, and he had it accepted by Lecky, Windrush and Bernstein just when the chair here became vacant, which was a bit of luck. He’d been effectively running the Department for years, anyway, so they appointed him. His horizons began to expand immediately. You’ve no idea of the mana the title of Professor carries in this country.”
“Oh, I have, I have!” said Morris Zapp.
“He started to get invited to conferences, to be external examiner at other universities, he got himself on the British Council’s list for overseas lecture tours. He’s always off travelling somewhere these days. He’s going to Turkey in a few weeks time. Last month it was Norway.”
That’s how it is in the academic world these days,” said Morris Zapp. “I was telling a young guy at the conference just this morning. The day of the single, static campus is over.”
"And the single, static campus novel with it, I suppose?”
“Exactly! Even two campuses wouldn’t be enough. Scholars these days are like the errant knights of old, wandering the ways of the world in search of adventure and glory.”
“Leaving their wives locked up at home?”
“Well, a lot of the knights are women, these days. There’s positive discrimination at the Round Table.”
“Bully for them,” said Hilary gloomily. “I belong to the generation that sacrificed their careers for their husbands. I never did finish my MA, so now I sit at home growing fat while my silver-haired spouse zooms round the world, no doubt pursued by academic groupies like that Angelica Thingummy he brought here the other flight.”
“Al Pabst? She’s a nice girl. Smart, too.”
“But she needs a job, and Philip might be in a position to give her one some day. I could see that in her eyes as she hung on his every word.”
“Most of the conference she’s been going around with our old friend Dempsey.”
“Robin Dempsey? That’s a laugh. No wonder Philip was making snide comments about him at breakfast, he’s probably jealous. Perhaps Dempsey has a job to fill at Darlington. Shall I make some coffee?”
Morris helped her stack the dishwasher, and then they took their coffee into the lounge. While they were drinking it, Philip returned. “How was the banquet?” Morris asked.
“Awful, awful,” Philip groaned. He sank into a chair and covered his face with his hands. “I don’t want to talk about it. Busby deserves to be taken out and shot. Or hung in chains from the walls of Martineau Hall—that would be more appropriate.”
“I could have told you it would be awful,” said Hilary. “Why didn’t you, then?” said Philip irritably.
“I didn’t want to interfere. It’s your conference.”
“Was my conference. Thank God it’s over. It’s been a total disaster from start to finish.”
“Don’t say that, Philip,” said Morris. “After all, there was my paper.”
“It’s all very well for you, Morris. You’ve had a nice quiet evening at home. I’ve been listening to two degenerate oafs shrieking obscene songs into a microphone for the last two hours, and trying to look as if I was enjoying myself. Then they put me in some stocks and encouraged the others to throw bread rolls at me, and I had to look as if I was enjoying that too.”
Hilary crowed with laughter, and clapped her hands. “Oh, now I wish I’d gone,” she said. “Did they really throw rolls at you?”
“Yes, and I thought one or two of them did it in a distinctly vindictive fashion,” said Philip sulkily.
“But I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Let’s have a drink.”
He produced a bottle of whisky and three glasses, but Hilary yawned and announced her intention of retiring. Morris said he would have to leave early the next morning to catch his plane to London, and perhaps he had better say goodbye to her now.
“Where are you off to, then?” Hilary asked.
“The Rockefeller villa at Bellagio,” he said. “It’s a kind of scholar’s retreat. But I also have a number of conferences lined up for the summer: Zurich, Vienna, maybe Amsterdam. Jerusalem.”
“Goodness,” said Hilary. “I see what you mean about errant knights.”
“Some are more errant than others,” said Morris.
“I know,” said Hilary meaningfully.
They shook hands and Morris pecked her awkwardly on the cheek. “Take care,” he said.
“Why should I?” she said. “I’m not doing anything adventurous. Incidentally, I thought you were against foreign travel, Morris. You used to say that travel narrows the mind.”
“There comes a moment when the individual has to yield to the Zeitgeist or drop out of the ball game,” said Morris. “For me it came in ‘75, when I kept getting invitations to Jane Austen centenary conferences in the most improbable places—Poznan, Delhi, Lagos, Honolulu—and half the speakers turned out to be guys I knew in graduate school. The world is a global campus, Hilary, you’d better believe it. The American Express card has replaced the library pass.”
“I expect Philip would agree with you,” said Hilary; but Philip, pouring out the whisky, ignored the cue. “Goodnight, then,” she said.
“Goodnight, dear,” said Philip, without looking up from the glasses. “We’ll just have a nightcap.” When Hilary had closed the door behind her, Philip handed Morris his drink. “What are all these conferences you’re going to this summer?” he asked, with a lain covetousness.
“Zurich is Joyce. Amsterdam is Semiotics. Vienna is Narrative. Or is it Narrative in Amsterdam and Semiotics in Vienna…? Anyway. Jerusalem I do know is about the Future of Criticism, because I’m one of the organizers. It’s sponsored by a journal called Metucriticism, I’m on the editorial board.”
“Why Jerusalem?”
“Why not? It’s a draw, a novelty. It’s a place people want to see, but it’s not on the regular tourist circuit. Also the Jerusalem Hilton offers very competitive rates in the summer because it’s so goddamn hot.”
“The Hilton, eh? A bit different from Lucas Hall and Martineau Hall,” Philip mused ruefully.
“Right. Look, Philip, I know you were disappointed by the turnout for your conference, but frankly, what can you expect if you’re asking people to live in those tacky dormitories and eat canteen meals? Food and accommodation are the most important things about any conference. If the people are happy with those, they’ll generate intellectual excitement. If they’re not, they’ll sulk, and sneer, and cut lectures.”
Philip shrugged. “I see your point, but people here just can’t afford that sort of luxury. Or their universities won’t pay for it.”
“Not in the UK, they won’t. But when I worked here I discovered an interesting anomaly. You could only have up to fifty pounds a year or some such paltry sum to attend conferences in this country, but there was no limit on grants to attend conferences overseas. The solution is obvious: you should hold your next conference abroad. Somewhere nice and warm, like Monte Carlo, maybe. Meanwhile, why don’t you come to Jerusalem this summer?”
“Who, me? To your conference?”
“Sure. You could knock off a paper on the future of criticism, couldn’t you?”
“I don’t think it has much of a future,” said Philip.“Great! It will be controversial. Bring Hilary along for the ride.”
“Hilary?” Philip looked disconcerted. “Oh, no, I don’t think she could stand the heat. Besides, I doubt if we could afford her fare. Two children at university is a bit of a drain, you know.”
“Don’t tell me, I’m bracing myself for it next fall.”
“Did Hilary put you up to suggesting this, Morris?” said Philip, looking slightly ashamed of his own question.
“Certainly not. What makes you think so?”
Philip squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. “It’s just that she’s been complaining lately that I’m away too much, neglecting the family, neglecting her.”
“And are you?”
“I suppose I am, yes. It’s the only thing that keeps me going these days, travelling. Changes of scene, changes of faces. It would defeat the whole object to take Hilary along with me on my academic trips.”
“What is the object?”
Philip sighed. “Who knows? It’s hard to put it into words. What are we all looking for? Happiness? One knows that doesn’t last. Distraction, perhaps—distraction from the ugly facts: that there is death, there is disease, there is impotence and senility ahead.”
“Jesus,” said Morris, “are you always like this after a medieval banquet?”
Philip smiled wanly and refilled their glasses. “Intensity,” he said. “Intensity of experience is what we’re looking for, I think. We know we won’t find it at home any more, but there’s always the hope that we’ll find it abroad. I found it in America in ‘69.”
“With Désirée?”
“Not just Désirée, though she was an important part of it. It was the excitement, the richness of the whole experience, the mixture of pleasure and danger and freedom—and the sun. You know, when we came back here, for a long while I still went on living in Euphoria inside my head. Outwardly I returned to my old routine. I got up in the morning, put on a tweed suit, read the Guardian over breakfast, walked into the University, gave the same old tutorials on the same old texts… and all the while I was leading a completely different life inside my head. Inside my head, I had decided not to come back to England, so I was waking up in Plotinus, sitting in the sun in my happi-coat, looking out over the Bay, putting on Levis and a sports shirt, reading the Euphoric Times over breakfast, and wondering what would happen today, would there be a protest, a demonstration, would my class have to fight their way through teargas and picket lines or should we meet off-campus in somebody’s apartment, sitting on the floor surrounded by posters and leaflets and paperbacks about encounter groups and avant-garde theater and Vietnam.”“That’s all over now,” said Morris. “You wouldn’t recognize the place. The kids are all into fraternities and preppy clothes and working hard to get into law school.”
“So I’ve heard,” said Philip. “How depressing.”
“But this intensity of experience, did you never find it again since you were in America?”
Philip stared into the bottom of his glass. “Once I did,” he said. “Shall I tell you the story?”
“Just let me get myself a cigar. Is this a cigarillo story or a panatella story?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never told it to anyone before.”
“I’m honored,” said Morris. “This calls for something special.”
Morris left the room to fetch one of his favorite Romeo y Julietas. When he returned, he was conscious that the furniture and lighting had been rearranged in his absence. Two high-backed armchairs were inclined towards each other across the width of the hearth, where a gas-fire burned low. The only other light in the room came from a standard lamp behind the chair in which Philip sat, his face in shadow. Between the two chairs was a long, low coffee table bearing the whisky bottle, water jug, glasses and an ashtray. Morris’s glass had been refilled with a generous measure.
“Is this where the narratee sits?” he inquired, taking the vacant chair. Philip, gazing absently into the fire, smiled vaguely, but made no reply. Morris rolled the cigar next to his ear and listened approvingly to the crackle of the leaves. He pierced one end of the cigar, clipped the other, and lit it, puffing vigorously. “OK,” he said, examining the tip to see that it was burning evenly. “I’m listening.”
“It happened some years ago, in Italy,” Philip began. “It was the very first lecture tour I did for the British Council. I flew out to Naples, and then worked my way up the country by train: Rome, Florence, Bologna, Padua, ending up at Genoa. It was a bit of a rush on the last day. I gave my lecture in the afternoon, and I was booked to fly home the same evening. The Council chap in Genoa, who’d been shepherding me about the place, gave me an early dinner in a restaurant, and then drove me out to the airport. There was a delay in the flight departure—a technical problem, they said, so I told him not to wait. I knew he had to get up early the next morning to drive to Milan for a meeting. That comes into the story.”
“I should hope so,” said Morris. “There should be nothing irrelevant in a good story.”
“Anyway, the British Council man, J. K. Simpson, I can’t remember his first name, a nice young chap, very friendly, enthusiastic about his job, he said, ‘OK, I’ll leave you then, but if the flight’s cancelled, give me a ring and I’ll get you into a hotel for the night."
“Well, the delay went on and on, but eventually we took off, at about midnight. It was a British plane. I was sitting next to an English businessman, a salesman in woollen textiles I think he was…”
“Is that relevant?”
“Not really.”
“Never mind. Solidity of specification,” said Morris with a tolerant wave of his cigar. “It contributes to the reality effect.”
“We were sitting towards the rear of the aircraft, just behind the wing. He had the window seat, and I was next to him. About ten minutes out of Genoa, they were just getting ready to serve drinks, you could hear the clink of bottles from the back of the plane, when this salesman chap turned away from the window, and tapped me on the arm and said, ‘Excuse me, but would you mind having a look out there. Is it my imagination or is that engine on fire?’ So I leaned across him and looked out of the window. It was dark of course, but I could see flames sort of licking round the engine. Well, I’d never looked closely at a jet engine at night before, for all I knew that was always the effect they gave. I mean you might expect to see a kind of fiery glow coming out of the engine at night. On the other hand, these were definitely flames, and they weren’t just coming out of the hole at the back. ‘I don’t know what to think,’ I said. ‘It certainly doesn’t look quite right.’ `Do you think we should tell somebody?’ he said. ‘Well, they must have seen it for themselves, mustn’t they?’ I said. The fact was, neither of us wanted to look a fool by suggesting that something was wrong, and then being told that it wasn’t. Fortunately a chap on the other side of the aisle noticed that we were exercised about something, and came across to have a look for himself. ‘Christ!’ he said, and pushed the button to call the stewardess. I think he was probably some sort of engineer. The stewardess came by with the drinks trolley at that moment. ‘If it’s a drink you want, you’ll have to wait your turn,’ she said. The cabin staff were a bit snappish because of the long delay. ‘Does the captain know that his starboard engine is on fire?’ said the engineer. She gaped at him, squinted out of the window, then ran up the aisle, pushing her trolley in front of her, like a nursemaid running with a pram. A minute later and a man in uniform, the second pilot I suppose, came down the aisle, looking worried and carrying a big torch, which he shone out of the window at the engine. It was on fire all right. He ran back to the cockpit. Very soon the plane banked and headed back to Genoa. The Captain came on the PA to say that we would be making an emergency landing because of a technical problem, and that we should be prepared to leave the aircraft by the emergency exits. Then somebody else told us exactly what to do. I must say he sounded remarkably cool, calm and collected.”
“It was a cassette,” said Morris. “They have these prerecorded cassettes for all contingencies. I was in a Jumbo, once, going over the Rockies, and a stewardess put on the emergency ditching tape by mistake. We were having lunch at the time, I remember, a perfect sunny day at 30,000 feet, when this voice suddenly said, ‘We are obliged to make an emergency landing on water. Do not panic if you are unable to swim. The rescue services have been advised of our intentions.’ People froze with their forks halfway to their mouths. Then all hell let loose until they sorted it out.”
“There was a fair amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth in our plane—quite a lot of the passengers were Italian, and you know what they’re like—they don’t hide their feelings. Then the pilot put the plane into a terrifying dive to put the fire out.”
“Jesus!” said Morris Zapp.
“He was thoughtful enough to explain first what he was going to do, but only in English, so all the Italians thought we were going to crash into the sea and started to scream and weep and cross themselves. But the dive worked—it put the fire out. Then we had to circle over the sea for about twenty minutes, jettisoning fuel, before we tried to land back at Genoa. It was a very long twenty minutes.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Frankly, I thought they were going to be my last twenty minutes.”
“What did you think about?”
“I thought, how stupid. I thought, how unfair. I suppose I prayed. I imagined Hilary and the children hearing about the crash on the radio when they woke up the next morning, and I felt bad about that. I thought about surviving but being terribly crippled. I tried to remember the terms of the British Council’s insurance policy for lecturers on Specialist Tours—so much for an arm, so much for a leg below the knee, so much for a leg above the knee. I tried not to think about being burned to death.
“Landing at Genoa is a pretty hairy experience at the best of times. I don’t know if you know it, but there’s this great high promontory that sticks out into the sea. Planes approaching from the north have to make a U-turn round it, and then come in between it and the mountains, over the city and the docks. And we were doing it at night with one engine kaput. The airport was on full emergency alert, of course, but being a small airport, in Italy, that didn’t amount to much. As we hit the ground, I could see the fire trucks with their lights flashing, racing towards us. As soon as the plane stopped, the cabin crew opened the emergency exits and we all slid out down those inflatable chute things. The trouble was they couldn’t open the emergency exit nearest to us, me and the wool man, because it gave on to the wing with the duff engine. So we were the last out of the plane. I remember thinking it was rather unfair, because if it hadn’t been for us the whole thing might have blown up in mid-air.
“Anyway, we got out all right, ran like hell to a bus they had waiting, and were taken to the terminal. The fire engines smothered the plane in foam. While they were getting our baggage out of the plane I telephoned the British Council chap. I suppose I wanted to express my relief at having survived by telling somebody. It was queer to think that Hilary and the children were asleep in England, not knowing that I’d had a narrow escape from death. I didn’t want to wake Hilary up with a call and give her a pointless retrospective fright. But I felt I had to tell someone. Also, I wanted to get out of the airport. A lot of the Italian passengers were in hysterics, kissing the ground and weeping and crossing themselves and so on. It was obvious that we shouldn’t be flying out till the next morning and that it was going to take hours to sort out our accommodation for the night. And Simpson had told me to phone him if there was any problem, so although it was by now well past one o’clock, I did. As soon as he grasped what had happened, he said he’d come straight out to the airport. So about half an hour later, he picked me up and drove me into the city to find a hotel. We tried a few, but no luck— either they were shut up for the night or they were full, there was a trade fair on in Genoa that week. So he said, look, why don’t you come home with me, we haven’t got a guest bedroom, I’m afraid, but there’s a kind of put-u-up in the living-room. So he took me home to his apartment, in a modern block, halfway up the mountain that overlooks the city and the sea. I felt extraordinarily calm and wideawake, I was rather impressed by my own sangfroid, as a matter of fact.
But when he offered me some brandy I didn’t say no. I looked around the living-worn, and felt asudden pang of homesickness. I’d been living in hotel rooms for the past twelve days, and eating meals in restaurants. I rather enjoy that nowadays, but then I was still a bit of a novice at the foreign lecture tour, and I’d found it quite a strain. And here was a little oasis of English domesticity, where I mild relax and feel completely at home. There were toys scattered about the living-room, and English newspapers, and in the bathroom St Michael’s underwear hanging up to dry. While we were drinking the brandy, and I was telling Simpson the whole story of the plane, his wife came into the room, in her dressing-gown, yawning and rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. I hadn’t met her before. Her name was Joy.”
“Ah,” murmured Morris. “You remember her first name.”
“I apologized for disturbing her. She said it didn’t matter, but she didn’t look particularly pleased. She asked me if I would like something to eat, and I suddenly realized that I was ravenously hungry. So she brought some Parma ham from the kitchen, and some cake, and a pot of tea, and we ended up having a sort of impromptu meal. I was sitting opposite Joy. She was wearing a soft blue velour dressing-gown, with a hood, and a zip that went from hem to throat. Hilary had one just like it once, and looking at Joy out of the corner of my eye was like looking at some younger, prettier version of Hilary—I mean, Hilary when she was young and pretty herself, when we were first married. Joy was, I guessed, in her early thirties, with fair wavy hair and blue eyes. A rather heavy chin, but with a wide, generous mouth, full lips. She had a trace of a northern accent, Yorkshire I thought. She did a little English teaching, conversation classes at the university, but basically saw her role as supporting her husband’s career. I daresay she made the effort to get up and be hospitable to me for his sake. Well, as we talked, and ate, and drank, I suddenly felt myself overcome with the most powerful desire for Joy.”
“I knew it,” said Morris.
“It was as if, having passed through the shadow of death, I had suddenly recovered an appetite for life that I thought I had lost for ever, since returning from America to England. In a way it was keener than anything I had ever known before. The food pierced me with its exquisite flavors, the tea was fragrant as ambrosia, and the woman sitting opposite to me seemed unbearably beautiful, all the more because she was totally unconscious of her attractions for me. Her hair was tousled and her face was pale and puffy from sleep, and she had no make-up or lipstick on, of course. She sat quietly, cradling her mug of tea in both hands, not saying much, smiling faintly at her husband’s jokes, as if she’d heard them before. I honestly think that I would have felt just the same about any woman, in that situation, at that moment, who wasn’t downright ugly. Joy just represented woman for me then. She was like Milton’s Eve, Adam’s dream—he woke and found it true, as Keats says. I suddenly thought how nice women were. How soft and kind. How lovely it would be, how natural, to go across and put my arms round her, to bury my head in her lap. All this while Simpson was telling me about the appalling standards of English-language teaching in Italian secondary schools. Eventually he glanced at his watch and said that it had gone four, and instead of going back to bed he thought he would drive to Milan while he was wide awake and rest when he got there. He was taking the Council car, he told me, so Joy would run me to the airport in theirs.”
“I know what’s coming,” said Morris, “yet I can hardly believe it.”
“He had his bag already packed, so it was only a few minutes before he was gone. We shook hands, and he wished me better luck with my flight the next day. Joy went with him to the front door of the apartment, and I heard them kiss goodbye. She came back into the living-room, looking a little shy. The blue dressing-gown was a couple of inches too long for her, and she had to hold up the skirt in front of her—it gave her a courtly, vaguely medieval air as she came back into the room. I noticed that her feet were bare. ‘I’m sure you’d like to get some sleep now,’ she said. ‘There is a second bed in Gerard’s room, but if I put you in there he might be scared when he wakes up in the morning.’ I said the sofa would be fine. ‘But Gerard gets up frightfully early, I’m afraid he’ll disturb you,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind taking our bed, I could quite easily go into his room myself.’ I said no, no; she pressed me, and said would I just give her a few moments to change the sheets, and I said I wouldn’t dream of putting her to such trouble. The thought of that bed, still warm from her body, was too much for me. I started to shake all over with the effort to stop myself from taking an irrevocable leap into moral space, pulling on the zip-tab at her throat like a parachute ripcord, and falling with her to the floor.”
“That’s a very fancy metaphor, Philip,” said Morris. “I can hardly believe you’ve never told this story before.”
“Well, actually, I did write it down,” said Philip, “for my own satisfaction. But I’ve never shown it to anybody.” He refilled their glasses. “Anyway, there we were, looking at each other. We heard a car accelerate away outside, down the hill, Simpson presumably. ‘What’s the matter?’ she said, ‘You’re trembling all over.’ She was trembling herself a little. I said I supposed it was shock. Delayed reaction. She gave me some more brandy, and swallowed some herself. I could tell that she knew it wasn’t really shock that was waking me tremble, that it was herself, her proximity, but she couldn’t quite credit her own intuition. ‘You’d better lie down,’ she said, show you the bedroom."
“I followed her into the main bedroom. It was lit by a single bedside lamp with a purple shade. There was a large double bed, with a duvet half thrown back. She straightened it out, and plumped the pillows. I was still shaking all over. She asked me if I would like a hot water bottle. I said: ‘There’s only one thing that would stop me shaking like I his. If you would put your arms round me…
“Although it was a dim light in the room, I could see that she went very red. ‘I can’t do that,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t ask me.’ `Please,’ I said, and took a step towards her.
“Ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have walked straight out of the room, perhaps slapped my face. But Joy just stood there. I stepped up close to her and put my arms round her. God, it was wonderful. I could feel the warmth of her breasts coming through the velour dressing-gown, and my shirt. She put her arms round me and gently clasped my back. I stopped shaking as if by magic. I had my chin on her shoulder and I was moaning and raving into her ear about how wonderful and generous and beautiful she was, and what ecstasy it was to hold her in my arms, and how I felt reconnected to the earth and the life force and all kinds of romantic nonsense. And all the time I was looking at myself reflected in the dressing-table mirror, in this weird purple light, my chin on her shoulder, my hands moving over her back, as if I were watching a film, or looking into a crystal ball. It didn’t seem possible that it was really happening. I saw my hands slide down the small of her back and cup her buttocks, bunching the skirt of her dressing-gown, and I said to the man in the mirror, silently, in my head, you’re crazy, now she’ll break away, slap your face, scream for help. But she didn’t. I saw her back arch and felt her press against me. I swayed, and staggered slightly, and as I recovered my balance I altered my position a little, and now in the mirror I could see her face, reflected in another mirror on the other side of the room, and, my God, there was an expression of total abandonment on it, her eyes were half shut and her lips were parted and she was smiling. Smiling! So I pulled back my head and kissed her, full on the lips. Her tongue went straight into my mouth like a warm eel. I pulled gently at the zip on the front of her dressing-gown and slid my hand inside. She was naked underneath it.”
Philip paused and stared into the fire. Morris discovered that he was sitting forward on the edge of his seat and that his cigar had gone out. “Yeah?” he said, fumbling for his lighter. “Then what happened?”
“I slipped the dressing-gown from her shoulders, and it crackled with static electricity as it slid off and settled at her feet. I fell on my knees and buried my face in her belly. She ran her fingers through my hair, and dug her nails into my shoulders. I lay her down on the bed and began to tear off my clothes with one hand while I kept stroking her with the other, afraid that if I once let go of her I would lose her. I had just enough presence of mind to ask if she was protected, and she nodded, without opening her eyes. Then we made love. There was nothing particularly subtle or prolonged about it, but I’ve never had an orgasm like it, before or since. I felt I was defying death, fucking my way out of the grave. She had to put her hand over my mouth, to stop me from shouting her name aloud: Joy, Joy, Joy.
“Then, almost instantly, I fell asleep. When I woke up I was alone in the bed, naked, covered with the duvet. Sunlight was coming through the cracks in the window shutters, and I could hear a vacuum cleaner going in another room. I looked at my watch. It was 10.30. I wondered if I had just dreamed of making love to Joy, but the physical memory was too keen and specific, and my clothes were scattered round the floor where I had thrown them off the night before. I put on my shirt and trousers and went out of the bedroom, into the living-room. A little Italian woman with a scarf round her head was hoovering the carpet. She grinned at me, turned off the Hoover and said something unintelligible. Joy came into the room from the kitchen, with a little boy at her side, holding a Dinky car, who stared at me. Joy looked quite different from the night before—smarter and more poised. She seemed to have cut her hand and was wearing an Elastoplast, but otherwise she was immaculately turned out, in some kind of linen dress, and her hair was smooth and bouncy as if she had just washed it. She gave me a bright, slightly artificial smile, but avoided eye contact. ‘Oh, hallo,’ she said, ‘I was just going to wake you.’ She had phoned the airport and my plane left at 12.30. She would run me down there as soon as I was ready. Would I like some breakfast, or would I like to take a shower first? She was the complete littlish Council hostess—polite, patient, detached. She actually asked is if I’d slept well. I wondered again whether the episode with her the night before had been a wet dream, but when I saw the blue dressing-gown hanging on the back of the bathroom door, it brought the whole tiling back with a sensuous detail that just couldn’t have been imaginary. The exact shape of her nipples, blunt and cylindrical, was imprinted on the nerve-endings of my finger-tips. I remembered the unusual luxuriance of her pubic hair, and its pale gold color, tinged with purple from the bedside lamp, and the line across her belly where her sun-tan stopped. I couldn’t have dreamed all that. But it was impossible to have any kind of intimate conversation with her, what with the cleaning woman hoovering away, and the little boy round her feet all the time. And it was obvious that she didn’t want to anyway. She bustled about the flat and chattered to the cleaning woman and the boy. Even when she drove me to the airport she brought the kid along with her, and he was a sharp little bugger, who didn’t miss much. Although he was sitting in the back, he kept leaning forward and poking his head between the two of us, as if to stop us getting intimate. It began to look as if we would part without a single reference to what had happened the night before. It was absurd. I just couldn’t make her out. I felt I had to discover what had prompted her extraordinary action. Was she some kind of nymphomaniac, who would give herself to any man who was available—was I the most recent of a long succession of British Council lecturers who had passed through that purple-lit bedroom? It even crossed my mind that Simpson was in collusion with her, that I had been a pawn in some kinky erotic game between them, that perhaps he had returned silently to the flat and hidden himself behind one of those mirrors in the bedroom. A glance at her profile at the wheel of the car was enough to make such speculations seem fantastic—she looked so normal, so wholesome, so English. What had motivated her, then? I was desperate to know.
“When we got to the airport, she said, ‘You won’t mind if I just drop you, will you?’ But she had to get out of the car to open the boot for me, and I realized that this was my only chance to say anything to her privately. ‘Aren’t we going to talk about last night?’ I said, as I lifted my bag out of the boot. ‘Oh,’ she said, with her bright hostess’s smile, ‘you mustn’t worry about disturbing our sleep. We’re used to it in this job, people arriving at all sorts of odd hours. Not usually, of course, in burning aeroplanes. I do hope you have a less eventful flight today. Goodbye, Mr Swallow.’
” ‘Mr Swallow!’ This was the woman who just a few hours before had had her legs wrapped somewhere round the back of my neck! Well, it was very clear that, whatever her motives, she wanted to pretend that nothing had happened between us the night before—that she wanted to excise the whole episode from history, cancel it, unweave it. And that the best way I could convey my own gratitude was to play along with her. So, with great reluctance, I didn’t press for an inquest. I just allowed myself one indulgence. She’d extended her hand, and, instead of just shaking it, I pressed it to my lips. I reckoned it wouldn’t seem a particularly showy gesture in an Italian airport. She blushed, as deeply as she had blushed the night before when I asked her to put her arms round me, and the whole unbelievable tenderness of that embrace flooded back into my consciousness, and hers too, I could see. Then she went back to the front of the car, got into the driver’s seat, gave me one last look through the window, and drove away. I never saw her again.”
“Maybe you will one day,” said Morris.
Philip shook his head. “No, she’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“All three of them were killed in an air-crash the following year, in India. I saw their names in the list of passengers. There were no survivors. ‘Simpson, J. K., wife Joy and son Gerard.’ “
Morris expelled his breath in a low whistle. “Hey, that’s really sad! I didn’t think this story was going to have an unhappy ending.”
“Ironic, too, isn’t it, when you think of how we met? At first I felt horribly guilty, as if I had somehow passed on to her a death which I had narrowly escaped myself. I convinced myself that it was just superstition. But I shall always keep a little shrine to Joy in my heart.”
“A little what?”
“A shrine,” Philip said solemnly. Morris coughed cigar smoke and let it pass. “She gave me back an appetite for life I thought I had lost for ever. It was the total unexpectedness, the gratuitousness of that giving of herself. It convinced me that life was still worth living, that I should make the most of what I had left.”
“And have you had any more adventures like that one?” Morris enquired, feeling slightly piqued at the extent to which he had been affected, first by the eroticism of Philip’s tale, then by its sad epilogue.
Philip blushed slightly. “One thing I learned from it, was never to say no to someone who asks for your body, never reject someone who freely offers you theirs.”
“I see,” said Morris drily. “Have you agreed this code with Hilary?”
“Hilary and I don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. Some more whisky?”
“Positively the last one. I have to get up at five tomorrow.”
“And what about you, Morris?” said Philip, pouring out the whisky. “How’s your sex life these days?”
“Well, after Désirée and I split up I tried to get married again. I had various women living in, graduate students mostly, but none of them would marry me—girls these days have no principles—and I gradually lost interest in the idea. I’m living on my own right now. I jog. I watch TV. I write my books. Sometimes I go to a massage parlour in Esseph.”
“A massage parlour?” Philip looked shocked.
“They have a very nice class of girl in those places, you know. They’re not hookers.
College educated. Clean, well-groomed, articulate. When I was a teenager I spent many exhausting hours trying to persuade girls like that to jerk me off in the back seat of my old man’s Chevvy. Now it’s as easy as going to the supermarket. It saves a lot of time and nervous energy.”
“But there’s no relationship!”
“Relationships kill sex, haven’t you learned that yet? The longer a relationship goes on, the less sexual excitement there is. Don’t kid yourself, Philip—do you think it would have been as great with Joy the second time, if there’d been one?”
“Yes,” said Philip. “Yes.”
“And the twenty-second time? The two hundredth time?”“I suppose not,” Philip admitted. “Habit ruins everything in the end, doesn’t it? Perhaps that’s what we’re all looking for—desire undiluted by habit.”
“The Russian Formalists had a word for it,” said Morris.
“I’m sure they did,” said Philip. “But it’s no use telling me what it was, because I’m sure to forget it.”
“Ostranenie,” said Morris. “Defamiliarization. It was what they thought literature was all about.
‘Habit devours objects, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war… Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life.’ Viktor Shklovsky.”
“Books used to satisfy me,” said Philip. “But as I get older I find they aren’t enough.”
“But you’re hitting the trail again soon, eh? Hilary tells me Turkey. What are you doing there?”
“Another British Council tour. I’m lecturing on Hazlitt.”
“Are they very interested in Hazlitt in Turkey?”
“I shouldn’t think so, but it’s the bicentenary of his birth. Or rather, it was, last year, when this trip was first mooted. It’s taken rather a long time to get off the ground… By the way, did you receive a copy of my Hazlitt book?”
“No—I was just saying to Hilary, I hadn’t even heard about it.”
Philip uttered an exclamation of annoyance. “Isn’t that typical of publishers? I specifically asked them to send you a complimentary copy. Let me give you one now.” He took from the bookcase a volume in a pale blue wrapper, scribbled a dedication inside, and handed it to Morris. It was entitled Hazlitt and the Amateur Reader. “I don’t expect you to agree with it, Morris, but if you think it has any merit at all, I’d be very grateful if you could do anything to get it reviewed somewhere. It hasn’t had a single notice, so far.”
“It doesn’t look like the sort of thing Metacriticism is interested in,” said Morris. “But I’ll see what I can do.” He riffled through the pages. “Hazlitt is kind of an unfashionable subject, isn’t he?”
“Unjustly neglected, in my view,” said Philip. “A very interesting man. Have you read Liber Amoris?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s a lightly fictionalized account of his obsession with his landlady’s daughter. He was estranged from his wife at the time, hoping rather vainly to get a divorce. She was the archetypal pricktease. Would sit on his knee and let him feel her up, but not sleep with him or promise to marry him when he was free. It nearly drove him insane. He was totally obsessed. Then one day he saw her out with another man. End of illusion. Hazlitt shattered. I can feel for him. That girl must have—”Philip’s voice faltered, and Morris saw him turn pale, staring at the living-room door. Following the direction of his gaze, Morris saw Hilary standing at the threshold, wearing a faded blue velour dressing-gown, with a hood and a zip that ran from throat to hem.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “Then I realized I’d forgotten to tell you not to lock the front door. Matthew isn’t in yet. Are you feeling all right, Philip? You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”
“That dressing-gown…”
“What about it? I dug it out because my other one’s at the cleaners.”
“Oh, nothing, I thought you’d got rid of it years ago,” said Philip.
He drained his glass. “Time for bed, I think.”
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atara
Bluelighter
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- Apr 1, 2010
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Just glad to hear that you're happy. Hope this optimism sticks around.
Obviously that's not true, you don't want to risk getting hurt, which is normal.
Maybe go sit on a hill overlooking a city and look at everything people have built, even though it could all fall apart.
Captain.Heroin
Bluelight Crew
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I'm happy with him, being with him, and having sex with him. And some other facets of my life.
Other facets are falling apart, are making me deeply depressed and suicidal. I could go into "why" but my "Sob story" is spammed everywhere and who gives a fuck, really. I have to stop giving a fuck.
No, I can't be hurt in this situation. I don't care if they're running around or perusing the market. We haven't put a label on anything yet. I WANT THE FUCKING TRUTH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I'll accept anything and likely still get w/ him, but the "not knowing" and "mystery" is part of this "social song and dance" heterosexual people do AND I AM SICK OF IT. That's not how I live my life. I'm honest. I say how I'm feeling. I'm an Inez. I know I'm in hell and at least can enjoy a few chuckles here instead of constantly being miserable or digging my head in the sand like the average American. I want the truth! Do you love me? Like me? Could love me one day? Or totally using me for the D? In the latter situation I would be TOTALLY FLATTERED AND NOT CARE. But KNOWING would help me adjust myself emotionally and know how to THINK about things.
"I don't want to get hurt" Too late. I'm mourning three losses this year of personal IRL loved ones, not including JA and Planet Earth, and situation (let's call it OPERATION SOCIALISM) is causing me so much stress my mind is going through splitting and black-or-white all-or-nothing panic-type reacting and I have to chronically ignore that impulsive thought stream.
I had the urge to do that today but I am running out of time on an IRL thing and quite honestly the PTSD, PDA type symptoms make me deathly afraid of doing that right now by myself and it's also because it will subconsciously trigger me as the last times I've been out to nature I had my ex with me (rip). Yeah what a shitty year.
PriestTheyCalledHim
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NSFW:
What is this text from? I made it NSFW for the people on mobile.
atara
Bluelighter
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- Apr 1, 2010
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This kind of excitement really is a good thing, you know.
Life -- real life -- life without using drugs as training wheels -- is full of stress and ups and downs.
I know this isn't the kind of suggestion you're thinking of, but you might enjoy smoking weed. Yes, you'll still be anxious. You're supposed to be anxious. But maybe you'll think a little less and smile a little more.
Captain.Heroin
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if you were on desktop just google a line and it'll come up (because I like helping ppl like that) but since you're on mobile no biggie i'll tell you, this shit-tastic read is
SMALL WORLD by David Lodge
It is personally a very rough read. Not dark. It's actually like... drab but well written and not dystopian or dark like I write. But it's making me break down, a lot, for personal reasons that neither the author nor the teacher could envision, I'm sure, I'm just damaged goods.
I bolded the parts that I found were applicable somewhat/completely to me or were just funny/etc
Lucy20
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I would have an extremely hard time being with someone sexually and trying not to love them. But I need strong feelings to have sex.
I hope it works out the way you want it to
Captain.Heroin
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I’m the one with all the problems. I should just find someone else or be alone.
nuttynutskin
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Challenging Negative Thoughts: Helpful Tips
We all experience negative self-talk from time to time. Learn more about why we do it and how to challenge negative thoughts.
psychcentral.com
Captain.Heroin
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This is where I'm going to devolve into philosophical diabribes (SLR mods can slap me in the face if need be) I have solid evidence AND DON'T GIVE A FUCK, have every reason to believe what I do and when I share objective reality with people they see things my way (much of this I am not divulging to anyone except IRL, I iknow, so secretive and stupid inner world you have CPT this is why you are LOSER with zero friends - NOTE TAKEN! (y))
Of course they are just my interpretations.
I am jumping to negative conclusions. My whole existence and world is a jump to a negative conclusion and somehow narrowly avoiding the metaphorical bullets coming toward me, like if Jack Bauer were on LSD.
It doesn't matter if the thoughts are actually true. "I think therefore there is no god" [I meant to post that in words super high like 3x now; a witty take on.... "I think therefore I am"; it's like a nihilist's inverted form].
Yes, many. Have been 100% open to other explanations. TOO PESSIMISTIC but too objective to totally reject them.
It means I AM THE PROBLEM
If I were positive I'd [insert random negative thinking here] what I was going to say was kind of dark. I need to cum or get high and I don't want to do either and it's making me bitter. IF I WERE A HAPPY PERSON I WOULDN'T NEED MEDICINE AND WOULD HAVE LOTS OF FRIENDS AND WOULDN'T BE A FUCK UP. There I said it in a neutral way.
YES and if it isn't THEN IT SHOULDN'T FEEL THIS WAY AND I AM THE PROBLEM (recursive goto line)
LOLNO. 0.0001% or less likelihood. Mind refuses to go there.
SAVING PLANET EARTH, oh you mean not for everyone or Americans in general, but for me personally? Dying happy and pain free. I've lived a rich life even if I can't currently enjoy it. I couldn't ask for more. THE BEST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN IS ME NOT WATCHING ANYONE ELSE I CARE ABOUT DIE THIS YEAR BUT LIFE WAS NOT KIND TO ME. Ah that sucks to type and cry out. I'll go to my cry closet for a while. I'm not kidding I need one on wheels I can drag around w/ me. 8(
Something positive not negative while I continually mentally act inward, trying to shut reality out one way or the other. It won't work.
My death wish will come true. I might help others along the way and make the world a better place. Maybe my friendship with this person becomes rich. I don't really have faith in a lot of those things though (EXCEPT THE FIRST YAY) but I'm trying.
The price of barbiturates in the third world country I find myself in. Alex Trebec: Judges? Yeah I got the daily double. I'm for sure not going to be going very far or making my "four year plan" in five years. Not all of us can be winners. [iknowthisbecausetylerknowsthis]
Take drugs, or not take drugs, eat more. Get everything done I need to in a few days.
Mentally shutting down though. Thoughts of death imminent but they are mildly amusing at worst (benign) and will pass.
A LOT OF TIME TO MYSELF I DON'T HAVE. HITTING THE PAUSE BUTTON ON LIFE. PRAYING THIS ISN'T REAL.
There's other nonsensical things I could say. Nothing works. Money/drugs isn't time/perspective.
I even have enough of the latter two and I'm just emotionally/mentally shut down.
I think perhaps I ought to have not aimed so high in some areas of life. At times I thnk, no, perhaps this should be and I'm just needing to use drugs to cope with grief. I like that idea but am just going to sleep and cry more..
hyroller
Bluelighter
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head over heels? AOT? my stern advice: run. run for the hills and even then don't stop. just keep running until there is no haphazard solution. running was my ultimate intuition the day prior to getting with my ex and given the countless hours I'd put in prior, I think I owed it to myself to get some new insoles and carry forth until "WRONG WAY GO BACK" became my ultimate by-way. trust me, it's a trap. boredom leads the mind down all kinds of unthought-of labyrinthine crevices that falling would make seem like sweet surrender. I refuse to give over to these satirical urges. no. no good. there is no good left in the human condition. can't you see? it's bereft. I wholly submit to this theory. he who is endowed is endowed. even a spritely swipe at the laissez-faire leadership condition leaves me breathless. but words are unfathomable, right? saaaaaaay what? I think, and I do know, that milli-theory is wrong and macrocosms are too disparate to penetrate with a merger between syntheses and synchronicity. both may as well be double-doomed. i'll have what he's having. allow me to demonstrate one I prepared earlier. don't touch that dial. tuning in and out to the non-ending surreal serenity that cloaks and defies morality is a shrill sound that one can bear to shake from time to time. this is the twenty-first century. better not to look back if a trail of destruction is ultimately what lingual had in mind before disseminating is what brought every one up on a sense of stubborn ethers. time is well worth conserving for times where resources are allayed to have been once deeply defiled.
if emotion was worth indulging in, I'll send everyone even remotely curious towards my ex and you'll see that no infertile ground remains untouched by the likes of him. one would therefore look beyond humanity should they be willing to engage in social sorority. it's too sordid for the uninitiated but I feel like leaving a mind-map so no one else bothers. it's each man to his stride I believe from here on in. run for the hills whatever you do. people are too engaging. try humouring them and count yourself out of that which is life-like. easy does it. go for the ones who pidgeonhole raw talent, an attitude hiterto unspoken or a way of life too dreamlike to entertain in a debacherous world known only for its inmates or outcasts from dither or hither. certainly the opportunist will wait until ye or ye unto wither.
if emotion was worth indulging in, I'll send everyone even remotely curious towards my ex and you'll see that no infertile ground remains untouched by the likes of him. one would therefore look beyond humanity should they be willing to engage in social sorority. it's too sordid for the uninitiated but I feel like leaving a mind-map so no one else bothers. it's each man to his stride I believe from here on in. run for the hills whatever you do. people are too engaging. try humouring them and count yourself out of that which is life-like. easy does it. go for the ones who pidgeonhole raw talent, an attitude hiterto unspoken or a way of life too dreamlike to entertain in a debacherous world known only for its inmates or outcasts from dither or hither. certainly the opportunist will wait until ye or ye unto wither.
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hyroller
Bluelighter
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- May 9, 2007
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I must admit, head over heels seems like a nice alternative to stony-faced sobriety. but my opinion is please god no. it's time to re-evaluate other life positions rather than immerse yourself in would-be emotional transits. it's just not the same unless two minds think alike. which no two do! not these days. too much dissolution and dying and dike and places to run, hide, manifest small-time salutary cerebral kooks, or just less of what there was circa 1700s.
Captain.Heroin
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So I am RIGHT to want to run FAR FAR away from these feelings and this person, hyroller? I'm in the right?
Captain.Heroin
Bluelight Crew
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P.S. I very carefully read all of this and, whoa, it is so breath-taking and stunning of a read. You ought to come to Words and share that.
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