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Lust
Lust

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Lust

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Язык: Английский
Год издания: 2018
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‘Oooh, Adam!’ said the shop owner with enthusiasm. She turned back to Michael with narrowed eyes. ‘He owes me money.’ She joined the surge forward.

Michael stood alone. I am here because of Phil, he remembered, to show him.

Phil arrived an hour late. He was wearing bandages and a headdress hung with daisy chains of decapitated dolls’ heads. He looked like a serial killer’s chandelier. It’s all right for me to try too hard, Michael thought: I’m a nerdy scientist out of my depth. But you are supposed to be an artist. You are supposed to be cool.

Michael met Phil’s new friend. At very first glance, there was not much to see. He was a skinny young man wearing a brown sweater with holes in it. There was something familiar about his face; maybe he was an actor.

‘This is Henry,’ Philip announced, his eyes flicking back and forth between him and Tarzan. The dolls’ heads kept clacking against each other.

Henry looked up. He had large brown eyes that engaged Michael directly with a pre-emptive warmth and kindness. The eyes seemed to say I know this can’t be easy for you, but hi anyway. They shook hands, and Henry chuckled. God, he was handsome. His smile was sweet and broad and his skin was perfect, very pale but with flushed pink cheeks and a complexion as unblemished as shaving foam.

‘Nice to meet you, Henry,’ Michael said. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Why?’ Henry asked. His voice was surprisingly resonant, rumbling.

‘For not being bullied into thinking you’ve got to keep up with the rich and outrageous.’

‘I don’t have any money,’ Henry said, and smiled and shrugged. Educated, Michael decided, old family, possibly dropped out. At a guess, I’d say you were the son of someone landed with a big farm in Norfolk, that you live in the country and possibly have a pair of tame jackdaws that sit on your shoulder.

Michael liked him. ‘I don’t think you’re the type that would dress up anyway.’

Henry gave a very gentle bow of acknowledgement. ‘Probably not, no.’

Michael fancied him. It was the same old mystery. Even Michael didn’t think Philip was good-looking, but his boyfriends were always gorgeous. I’m forever fancying your boyfriends, Phil. Michael felt a thin strain of regret for his old marriage.

‘Are you going to introduce me?’ Phil asked, nodding towards Johnny.

‘Him Tarzan,’ said Michael. ‘Me Boy.’

‘Is Tarzan a paedophile then?’

‘He’s my lover, if that’s what you’re asking.’ Michael kept his gaze steady and open. He found how little it mattered to him.

‘Does he speak?’ asked Phil, who suddenly looked frail.

‘Not much. He’s Romanian.’

Tarzan spoke. ‘Tarzan loves Mikey.’

‘I hope you and Mikey are very happy. Maybe you’ll have a chimp together. Incidentally, Mikey, Henry is my lover too.’

‘You couldn’t find a nicer one,’ said Michael. ‘Really. Lucky old you.’ Michael couldn’t help reaching out and clasping Henry’s arm. ‘He’s very nice.’

Philip stared back at him with the strangest expression in his eyes, ringed round with red: tense, resolved, heartstricken, angry. ‘Henry is an animal rights activist, Michael.’ He swept off.

Henry walked away backwards, holding out his arms as if to say sorry. Michael apologized to him. ‘Sorry if we embarrassed you.’ Henry shrugged his shoulders, which could have meant anything from nothing embarrasses me to sorry, I can’t hear you.

‘Tarzan not understand,’ said Tarzan, standing alone.

‘Angels wouldn’t,’ said Michael.

Well, he had come here in order to assist Phil in the wrecking of their marriage. If that was accomplished, was there any other reason for him to stay?

He worked his way slowly through the crowd to where the booze was being served. A woman in a beige dress, with beige hair and beige fingernails said, as he passed, ‘I found the colour scheme of that film so irritating. All those reds.’ Her eyes trailed off to Michael’s left.

‘But Monica, it was in black and white!’

‘Oh, you know what I mean.’

It was strange. People looked distracted, even slightly out of balance, looking past him or around him. Michael began to be aware of something out of kilter, beyond his own unease.

The barman wore a turban and tossed the glass up in the air and caught it, like Tom Cruise, except that his eyes were fixed on something just to Michael’s left. Michael followed the barman’s gaze and finally understood.

People were staring past Michael at the same object. They were staring at Tarzan. The beige woman was intent, a cuddly woman carrying a tray kept turning in their direction, even the mango woman kept glancing through him. Michael himself was vapourware, but he was with the most overwhelming man in the room.

Right behind Johnny stood an old man. He was intent and pale and looked shaken as if he had seen a traffic accident. Cords of loose sinew hung down his neck. He wore a glass bow tie, blue with mirrors and a blue eye where the knot should be. He didn’t move, transfixed.

‘Hello,’ Michel said to him.

The old man’s face quavered like a flower in a breeze. Someone else out of balance. ‘It’s a miracle,’ the man insisted, as if someone had contradicted him.

Michael felt careless. ‘It is,’ he agreed.

‘It really is him,’ the old man said, in the hushed voice of someone visiting Chartres.

‘They’re both Romanian,’ said Michael. ‘Family resemblance.’ He realized he knew the old man from somewhere. Some old actor; some old impresario.

Very suddenly the old man wilted. He seemed to sink from the knees, and Michael had to catch him. There were further steps, a spiral staircase up to another floor. The old man shifted awkwardly like a collapsing ironing board. Michael lowered him down to sit on the steps. The old man took out an embroidered handkerchief.

‘Do you want some water?’ Michael asked.

‘Please,’ said the old man.

The turbaned bartender already had a glass of water ready. ‘Is your friend OK?’ he asked, American, concerned.

‘I don’t know. I think so,’ said Michael.

The old man was sweaty, his elegance outraged. He mopped his brow. Elegance was what he had left.

He took the water and sipped it, and sighed. ‘You keep thinking, you can just turn a corner, and you’ll find us all there, like we were.’ His rumpled old eyes suddenly went clear as if made out of glass. ‘Beautiful and at the height of our powers. Like all of you now. Tuh. It seems more real to me than this.’ He held up his hands. They were blue and crisp in patches and looked like melted candles. Eighty? Michael thought. Ninety?

The old eyes strayed back to Johnny. Johnny was standing tall, and still and distant, forgetful of himself. He was staring at the fig tree behind the glass wall.

‘Did you know him?’ Michael asked. ‘I mean, the real one?’

The old man shook his head, without moving his eyes. ‘Oh no. No. But I wanted to. People of my generation, you know we had never seen anything like it. For only a very few years, he was … It. A sensation. People don’t remember that now.’

He closed his eyes and shuddered. ‘The past is a chasm it’s as well not to look down,’ he said.

Michael sat next to him on the steps. ‘How old were you then?’

The old man’s eyes looked as if they ached. ‘I was twenty-two when I saw the first of his films. Of course in those days you thought you were the only one in the world, and so you dreamed. You know what I mean, I don’t have to spell it out. You lived in dreams, because you knew that you were a good person, or good enough, but you wanted things that everyone else said were evil. It was difficult. You ended up loving dreams.’

He shivered, gathering himself up. ‘You’ve been very kind,’ he said, and offered a hand. ‘I’m so sorry to have a been a nuisance. I used not to be. But age hits you, you know.’

‘Perhaps you’d like to meet him. His name is Johnny.’

A pause for about a beat. ‘It won’t embarrass him?’

‘I think you’ll find he is beyond embarrassment.’

Michael helped him stand up. The old man rose with a sudden fluidity that hinted at what he had been when young. ‘The terrible thing,’ he said, casually, as if making a general observation, ‘is that we feel more as we get older. Not less. The heart really ought to diminish along with everything else. Don’t you think?’

His eyes were ice-blue and not at all weak. At one time those eyes would have presided, gone flinty with the hard bargaining and constant politicking of putting on a show. He would have been cagey, cunning, enthusiastic, wise and probably indelibly handsome in an etiolated London theatrical way.

Without meaning to, Michael sketched with his own hands and eyes how the old man would have moved. In the joints of his hips, he embodied the way the old man moved now. Michael felt the bargain he had made with ageing, with the death of colleagues, the death of his world. Michael had seen that bargain collapse, because of him, because of the miracle.

Michael was moved by pity. He suddenly felt that something might be in his power. I know I can make them do what I want. Can I make them do it when I’m not there? With someone else? He stopped the old man and asked, in a low voice, ‘Do you know this place?’

‘Oh. Zoltan? He exhibits me as a piece of camp history, but it is good to receive invitations.’

‘I mean, do you know if there’s a bedroom. You can go there.’

The old face went limp, flesh as confused and blank as his understanding.

‘I mean,’ said Michael, ‘you and he could go there.’

‘What an extraordinary thing.’

Michael felt a full heart. Full of victory perhaps in part and also guilt for hurting Phil, but full of what … abundance, too. These episodes, wherever they came from, were an abundance, a superabundance that ached to be shared.

I create them, Michael thought. I make them. He told Johnny what he wanted him to do.

Tarzan turned and climbed the steps, perhaps without even knowing why. Michael hoisted the old man around and helped him up the steps. Outside the bedroom door, the old man turned still in disbelief, and Michael had to give him a gentle shove. Then Michael stood guard. He sat on the top step, looking over a party at which he did not belong. He wished that he smoked. At least smoking would have occupied his hands.

Someone dragged open the big glass doors to clear the air, and the party moved out into the sheltered garden. Suddenly you could hear air move in trees.

He gave them twenty minutes.

Then the old man blurted out of the bedroom doorway like a coltish teenager. His glass tie was askew; his smile was wet and broad. It was a grin. He looked foxed, as if a shaft of God-light had blazed its way back into his life.

Michael had time to feel happy for him.

Then he saw Tarzan’s face. Tarzan was innocent no longer.

His face had curdled with disgust and outrage. His look said to Michael: I want to kill you.

He gave one animal growl and then hurled himself over the banister of the landing. People screamed. Tarzan landed catlike on his four padded feet. Then he jumped up onto the bar, bounded over the heads of the people.

Don’t hurt anyone! Michael commanded.

Tarzan jumped up into the fig tree, and gave one long backward yodel, the Tarzan cry. He scampered up the branches. The main trunk bent under his weight, then sprang back and he leapt up and over the brick wall. It was as if he were suspended for just one moment, against the stars.

Then he sank from view. Everyone in the room applauded.

Michael tried to leave.

‘But he was magnificent! Who was he?’ the beige woman asked. Michael thrust his way past her and through the crowd.

Billy stood back for him at the head of the stairs. He knew something was wrong. ‘What happened?’ he asked, walking with Michael down to the kitchen.

‘I made him do something,’ said Michael, and heard his own voice: shaken, sick at heart.

Billy’s high heels made a sound like Carmen Miranda, as he ran on ahead to fetch Michael’s coat.

‘Does he have any other clothes?’ Billy asked. ‘He’ll freeze out there.’

Michael stopped and turned and faced him. ‘He’s the real thing, OK? He’s not in costume.’

Michael stumbled out the front door. In the brick street, he could hear the murmuring of the party. It was cold and he felt lumpen and foolish in his leopard skin. It was a bleak place of old brick warehouses and a single closed pub with lights on and street lamps throbbing yellow like the aftermath of a burglary.

Yes, I can make them do what I want. I can violate them.

‘I’m sorry,’ Michael said, to the shadows and street lights. ‘Johnny? I’m sorry.’

‘Not Johnny,’ said a voice. It was fierce with pain, affirmation. ‘Tarzan. Me Tarzan.’

Michael stood and waited. He could see nothing. He walked forward, out of the light, to the side of the house, in shadow. Tarzan stood there. He hugged his arms and shivered and the top of his head was pressed against the wall.

‘I’m sorry,’ Michael said again.

Tarzan threw off his hand. ‘Tarzan want woman,’ he said, accusing.

Michael had made Tarzan let himself be sucked off by an 88-year-old man. It would have been the first time he had had sex, the first time in his fictional universe that sex had ever been present. Love for him had been sexless: kindness, tickling and caresses. It had been the sensuality of childhood. Michael felt the full crushing weight of what he had done.

The physical reality of sex is always a jolt. How much worse if it is the wrong gender, with loose jaws and crumpled flesh.

‘Sick. Old. Man,’ said Tarzan. All three things were out of kilter.

‘He loved you,’ Michael tried to explain.

Tarzan snarled in rejection. That? That was not love.

‘It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know.’

Johnny glowered at him. ‘You want that too.’

This was pushing certain buttons from Michael’s past. Those buttons pushed deep. ‘I didn’t touch you. I left you as you were. Did … did you want to do anything with me?’

Johnny/Tarzan considered. ‘I wanted what you wanted.’ He made a cutting gesture with the edge of his hand. Only that. To hold and be held. Johnny’s eyes, fixed on Michael, were now those of an adult. Michael had destroyed any trace of affection in them. That affection could only survive in innocence. Tarzan had grown up. He had wisdom.

Boy looked at Johnny. I don’t know what you are, but you have feelings of your own and a mind of your own and you have a right to be happy. Michael thought of Jane swimming naked in darkness in the jungle of innocence. Maybe, he thought. Maybe I just fancy her enough.

Suddenly, there were many urgent questions to be answered.

Do they have to be male? Can I make more than one at once? Where do they go back to?

The answers came quickly one after another.

There was a blurring of flesh as if reality had been dipped in turpentine. Flesh smeared like paint. Something flowed sideways out of Tarzan’s belly and ribs – skin and bone poured out of him onto the pavement.

Flesh sprouted like a plant in time-lapse photography, growing a leather skirt like leaves, long hair like flowers.

In the time it takes to pipe a musical scale, Jane had risen out of Tarzan. She stood beside him as if fresh from the depths of the river.

She was played by Maureen O’Sullivan. She was tiny, with a face as fragile as china under a mass of wiry hair.

Michael introduced them. ‘Jane, Tarzan. Tarzan, Jane.’

Click. They fitted together. They had been married in spirit from the beginning.

Michael spoke quickly to Jane, who always spoke for both of them.

Michael asked, ‘Can you go elsewhere?’

Jane’s chin thrust out, and her voice was chilled. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.’ It was the voice she used with New York lawyers.

‘Can you go back to your jungle?’ he asked. ‘I mean, does it exist somewhere?’

Jane’s face softened. Her voice quickened. ‘I think we can, yes.’

Back to the treehouse, with its Flintstone home conveniences, waterwheels driven by elephants. Back to a land where animals spoke and Tarzan could talk with them, where lions lived in forests, where chimps and gorillas mingled in the same tribes. A world where there was always another wonder, another lost tribe, another adventure.

Protectively, Jane took the arm of her innocent. ‘Come, Tarzan,’ she said, her voice cracking like an adolescent’s on the love she felt for him. ‘We’re going home.’

And Michael felt the same ache of yearning he had felt as a feminine boy. He yearned for love, for that particular love between them. He heard the MGM strings, swelling like his heart, like his adolescent sexuality, for them both.

So Michael sent them home. He sent them to their monochrome jungle full of giant trees with conveniently placed trapeze swings. Tired old predators prowled slowly, but were speeded up when anyone was looking. Where love filled their days in pre-lapsarian innocence.

The pub lights rippled again, and the two of them evaporated into fiction, reels of film that had never been shot.

Hypothesis: Angels are a kind of fiction.

Method: call up an Angel who is entirely fictional.

Who killed Dumb Duck?

When Michael was sixteen years old there had been a hit movie called Dumb Duck, Detective. It combined live action with state-of-the-art animation, and it resurrected a great old cartoon character called Dumb Duck.

It was Michael’s fourth trip to California and he saw it in floods of tears, to escape. He had to get out of the house. The television was barred to him, and his favourite records had been broken. Michael had fled, wanting never to return, wanting to die.

He sat trying to follow the plot while crawling inside his own skin with anxiety. Dumb Duck was a detective and his partner was a real live human gumshoe played by Clint Eastwood. Dumb Duck asks his partner to follow his wife, Taffy Duck. ‘I’m too closssh to thisssh thing.’ Dumb Duck sprays everybody every time he talks. Only Clint Eastwood can stand it. Eastwood follows the wife, but she keeps giving him the slip, and you keep on hearing things about her: like she’s generous, like she’s a good-time girl, like she keeps you guessing. You don’t see her, so you assume she’s a duck, like her name.

Then suddenly, Dumb Duck is found murdered. He’s been partially erased. There are still crumbs of mingled eraser dust and ink on the floor. The wife shows up having spent the night elsewhere. She tells everybody she’s innocent. She looks like a combination of Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth, shoehorned into a dress that clings to her like a kid’s tongue to a lollipop. She hunkers down over the corpse and cries and her heaving boobs make a sound like rubber balloons.

Eastwood goes to her nightclub. He sits in the dark and watches her sing. Taffy sings like Marlene Dietrich. She rasps every word. She sings like somebody’s tickling your testicles. She’s a sex bomb married to a duck.

Gay men can desire a woman if she is caked in enough artifice. Young Michael forgot his trauma. He found himself yearning to bury his face in those huge soft perfect breasts. And sleep. And wake up somewhere else, as someone else.

It was a comedy about being wrongly accused of murder. Ho, ho. The weapon, a giant eraser – stamped: the Philadelphia Rubber Company – is found in the trunk of Taffy’s car. Tests confirm that the inkgroup is the same as Dumb Duck’s.

For young Michael, Taffy’s nightmare became his nightmare. At that age, he felt more affinity for fantasy than reality. When the film was over, it was back to reality, though in a curious way he felt the burden had been shared.

It was many years ago, but Michael still felt that affinity. The idea of calling up Taffy made Michael grin sideways. He didn’t fancy Clint Eastwood at all. You aren’t meant to fancy Clint Eastwood – you are meant to want to be Clint Eastwood. Eastwood had played the gumshoe like Humphrey Bogart. Michael went out to Jermyn Street and bought himself a trenchcoat and an old-fashioned fedora hat.

And then he wondered where you could go on a hot date with someone who was obviously an animated cartoon. It might cause comment at the Savoy.

A candlelight dinner à deux at home was the answer.

Phil, as always, was going to be out. Michael told him, I’ve got a hot date so come back late. Does this one jump out of trees as well, Phil asked. Ho ho.

Michael cooked a light meal of salmon with salad and cold Chablis. Light enough to assuage hunger, not heavy enough to weigh down desire.

Then Michael put on his trenchcoat and his 1940s hat and waited.

Go, he told the universe, at 6.00 PM.

At 6.00 PM the phone rang.

It was her.

‘Oh, Mr Shamus,’ she said breathlessly, helplessly. ‘Thank you for returning my call. I need help so badly, and I don’t know who I can turn to.’

‘Well. We can talk in private here. How soon can you make it over? I took the liberty of preparing a meal.’ Michael curled his upper lip inwards, talking American.

‘Oh thank you. But I couldn’t possibly eat. I’m too upset.’

‘I got a good bottle of Chablis growing dew in the cooler.’ It was like being in a role-playing game.

There was a pause. ‘Mr Shamus. I’m sorry. I’m afraid cartoons can’t drink wine. It dissolves the gouache.’

‘Forgive me.’

‘No, no. I know it’s hard for you to imagine what it’s like. I’m just so pleased that finally, finally, someone wants to listen to me.’

That damsel in distress routine. Standard forties stuff. The audience can read it like a peach, velvet skin and pit, and so can I. Under that svelte exterior pulses animal heat.

You spend most of the movie absolutely sure she did it and that she’s playing Eastwood for a sucker. You see, Eastwood falls for her, and if Eastwood falls for somebody, you do too.

She was the kind of woman whose high heels you hear ten minutes before the doorbell rings. You’re there waiting, trying to pretend you aren’t hanging on like it’s a liferaft. Where’s the shipwreck? You’ve got sweaty palms and the fettuccine aren’t cooked. The doorbell rings, you wipe your hands on your trousers, and you open the door. There should be a soundtrack, the kind with blowsy music played on a sax.

She’s delicious. She’s a cartoon, so her skin controls the light and shadow on her face. Right now she’s dramatic, backlit, lots of shadows, and she looks up mournfully, helplessly. An unlit cigarette sticks to a white kid glove. The white kid glove goes up above her elbow. The gown is strapless, showing acres of shoulder and collarbone. The white fur stole has fallen back down to her elbows, like she’s disrobing in public. Her red hair has a life of its own. It moves in a mass like a sexy octopus and there are no individual strands of hair.

Her way of saying hi is to hold out one long kid glove.

‘Oh, Mr Shamus. I’m so glad we finally meet. Now I can put a face to that kind, kind voice.’

Never in real life could a pink dress be cut that low around mammary organs that large and stay in place.

‘Come in, come in please.’ Like the gumshoe is a priest offering sanctuary.

Michael reminds himself. This is an animated cartoon. It’s walking across my hall carpet, and her stiletto heels leave no impression.

The white fur slips, trails. The assumption is that he will take it up, and hang it on (non-wire) hangers. He does.

Her head hangs down and she looks up coyly, the cigarette weighty on her lips. ‘Could I trouble you for a light?’

No one in the household smokes, and all Michael can do is offer a rolled-up newspaper lit from the gas-stove pilot.

This kind of blows his cool gumshoe exterior. She looks stricken as he holds up the torching newspaper. ‘I’m sorry, I should have asked if you smoked. How thoughtless of me.’

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