Ugly.
Mortimer’s ugliness, first revealed to him by Ziggy Spicehandler, had come home most directly the night he had gone to see the first
Cassius Clay-Henry Cooper fight. How justified Clay had been to say, “I’m the most beautiful.” The glossy ebony body. The sensual face. The graceful manner of moving. All this pitted against – against, Mortimer thought, one of ours. Gray, doughy, fart-filled Henry Cooper. A body that was the lumpy sum of sausages and mash. Cooper absorbed one punch and instantly the flesh bruised, flooding red. Cooper’s flesh, like Mortimer’s, was Protestant: not made for the sun. On the beach it burns and blisters and peels.
Murder him, Mortimer had thought – identifying, to his astonishment, with Clay – destroy the ugly pink blob. Then the eye split, gushing hot thick blood, and Clay, ever fastidious, stepped back, appalled.
No more cigarettes. Mortimer went off in search of his jacket, dipped into a pocket, and came up with a small package. Rapani’s. God damn it. Mortimer found his keys, unlocked the hall cupboard, and –
“Mortimer?”
– stowed away the package, but didn’t have time to lock the cupboard again.
Joyce found him back in the easy chair, eyes shut. “Mortimer?”
“Mn?”
“There’s a lit cigarette in your hand. You’ll burn a hole in the chair.”
“Oh.”
“What are you doing in here anyway?”
“Thinking.”
Joyce waited.
“Would you allow,” he asked, “that there was such a thing as a
Negro
face?”
“Some of your jokes are in the worst possible taste.”
“Yes, I know. I happen to be cursed with what Hy calls a Gentile sense of humor.”
“Let’s go to sleep.”
“Sure.” Mortimer let Joyce lead the way back to the bedroom, swinging the offending cupboard door shut with a kick. It locked.
16
I
T HAD BEEN INSTIGATED BY THE WIDE BOYS AT
The Eight Bells, Mortimer’s office local – no, no, that’s not fair – the real reason behind the locked cupboard was Mortimer’s increasingly obsessive fear that he didn’t have a big one.
At last stocktaking, the embarrassing hoard in Mortimer’s locked cupboard had included more than a dozen tubes of vaginal jelly, a number of diaphragms (running from small to super large), a plentiful supply of Durex prophylactics and contraceptive pills, and bottle upon bottle of varied and perfidious sexual stimulants and erection-promising powders and herbs. The jelly wouldn’t burn with the autumn leaves and Mortimer was too ashamed to leave unused tubes for the dustmen. Oxfam, possibly, would have accepted the prophylactics, but when he had once been intrepid enough to try them with a phone call, he was passed from one party to another until a severe voice, unmistakably Pakistani, had asked him for his name and phone number, which he had refused. Even so, Mortimer might have mailed a parcel to Oxfam anonymously, if he hadn’t feared that Scotland Yard, which had its methods, might trace the parcel to him. From time to time, he lightened his stock of pills, dissolving some in the toilet bowl. Other days, his pockets bulging with packets of Durex, he’d gone to Hampstead Heath, strewing French letters here, there and everywhere. Still, the stuff tended to accumulate.
A sex maniac’s hoard, he thought, and what about the cost? The same money invested in National Development Bonds or Scot-Bits rather than Rapani’s astonishing variety of aphrodisiacs – but that’s neither here nor there. The truth was Mortimer had been driven to stockpiling the stuff because of his mounting anxieties about the size of his thingee. Yes, yes, he knew size wasn’t everything. Owing to vasocongestion, that is to say, swelling of the veins, it had been scientifically proved that a thin and puny one was bound to enlarge to a relatively greater degree than a whopping one.
All the same, mate, it’s still smaller, isn’t it?
Mortimer hadn’t been born with this feeling of inadequacy. Neither had it bothered him much in adolescence. If he ever overcame his shyness sufficiently in the showers after a basketball game to glance at somebody else’s rod, it never struck him as being outlandishly bigger than his. On the other hand, all men suffered shrinkage in the showers and so that may have been a faulty proving ground.
Digging even deeper into his Caribou, Ontario, boyhood, to Motke Shapiro, the only Jewish boy at Caribou High, he could remember him saying, “Do you know why Queen Elizabeth is disappointed in George VI?”
“No. Why?”
“Because she’s found out not every ruler has twelve inches.”
Twelve
. Did anybody actually have twelve inches, he thought, or, conversely, did everybody but me –?
Motke Shapiro was the only boy Mortimer remembered as being singularly well-endowed and consequently, perhaps, a show-off. He was forever entreating the other boys to join him in a communal pee. “See this,” he’d say, shaking it at them. “This is a Jew’s harmonica.”
Or,
“Tell your sisters what you saw here. And if they don’t believe it,” he’d add, zipping up, “well, here I am, eh, guys?”
Right there, Mortimer felt, was planted the corrupting seed of his discontent, his suspicion that minority-group pricks (Jewish, Negro)
were aggressively thicker and longer than
WASP
ones. And yet – and yet – though he had never cohabited with a colored girl, Mona Capelovitch, the one Jewess he’d had, never made denigrating remarks about him. His fear of derisory size, lying in wait in his unconscious for years, was released by literary experience. Book learning from Baldwin, Mailer, LeRoi Jones.
It seemed to be the philosophical contention of these talented, decidedly outspoken writers and thinkers, however much they differed in style and argument, that the average male Negro had a bigger cock and more thrust power than the average
WASP
. Furthermore this Holy Grail of a Negro cock was lusted after, consciously or unconsciously, by white women and created fear and trembling among white men, which was why Negroes were not wanted in white neighborhoods. Something else. While it offended Baldwin, Jones, and other Negroes no end to be told they were naturally musical or athletic, they were willing to allow that they did share one racial characteristic: big pricks.
Well, maybe yes, maybe no, Mortimer thought, but couldn’t they be more scientific about it? Take James Baldwin, for instance. Clever dick that he undoubtedly is, how does he know Negro cocks are bigger than white ones? It isn’t the sort of thing one can comparison-shop, is it, and in the natural order of things a guy simply doesn’t get the opportunity to measure one against the other. How in the world would he or, come to think of it, Mailer or LeRoi Jones ever get to see so many pricks, regardless of race, color or creed? It’s not as if they were the sort to hang around public conveniences, spying. Mortimer didn’t get it. His problem was he
suspected
he was small, but he couldn’t tell for certain. He had seen other cocks, bigger cocks, on statues, yes, but this could have been a case of art improving on life. Like Andy Warhol making his Campbell’s soup tins larger than they were in the supermarkets. At the same time, Mortimer had to allow that these writers were more gifted and intelligent than he was and so they must know whereof they spoke. Possibly the knowledge was
intuitive. An insight. Like Mailer’s discovery that cancer in America was caused by Protestants. Protestants like me, he thought.
Goddamn it, Mortimer thought, he didn’t even know how many inches Hy, his best friend, had, and it wasn’t the sort of thing he’d ask him. Or Diana.
Which brought him round to thinking about Joyce.
Not to brag, Mortimer would still say he satisfied her. Naturally there were times when he ejaculated too quickly and other occasions when he botched it through drunkenness, but, on balance, he’d hazard Joyce was not a frustrated wife. And yet – and yet – she might have no enormous need for sex or, conversely, her desires might be profligate but unfulfilled. Is our marital life full, Mortimer thought, or is it niggardly? Here again he had to confess to inexperience; he simply didn’t know what other couples said or did in bed. Once more he was indebted to Ziggy and literary experience, both of which made him fear inadequacy, a lack of imagination.
Ziggy and the chicks: Migod, he certainly never failed for them, did he? Fondly, warmly, Mortimer recalled his first meeting with Ziggy, shortly after the war, in the Red Lion pub in Soho, where Ziggy, his first adolescent poems out in
New Writing
, was a legend. No sooner had Mortimer been introduced than Ziggy invited him to join his group. My round, Ziggy insisted, doubles for everyone, discovering too late that he had forgotten his bloody wallet at home. Mortimer happily paid for the drinks and several rounds later he was flattered to be asked to continue with Ziggy and his bunch to a party in a squalid basement in Camden Town. Those were the days, Mortimer reflected, remembering how he literally bumped into Ziggy feeling up the prettiest girl at the party in a dark damp corner. The girl was especially exciting to him, Ziggy explained later, because she was pregnant by his best friend.
Embarrassed, groping for any excuse to retreat, Mortimer noticed the girl’s pint-sized beer mug was only half full. “What are you drinking?” he asked, reaching for the glass.
“His,” the girl replied, her eyes seething.
Mortimer hadn’t grasped the full import of what she meant (after all, British beer was notoriously flat) until Ziggy began to chortle at his discomfort.
“But – but – couldn’t that be, well
unhealthy?”
“If you really want to know,” the girl said, “I’ve never felt so close to him before. Now bugger off, please.”
Mortimer had melted away gratefully, suppressing nausea. But come noon the following day he was seeking out Ziggy at the Red Lion.
“You want her,” Ziggy said, willing to arrange it for a fiver.
“No!”
“Quite right. She’s thoroughly middle-class, actually. What I mean is she goes with dogs, but stops at great Danes.”
Possibly, Mortimer thought, if our sex life is conformist, it’s not completely my fault. Joyce could be partially to blame. Not once, flooded with passion, had she ever bit his ear to make it bleed. Or called out to him, “Fuck me good, Daddy-o!” Why? Did he inhibit her? Would she make such licentious requests of other partners? He didn’t know. Once, only once, inspired by a novel he had just finished before they got into bed, had he walloped her on the buttocks, as they were enjoined in the most banal of love positions. There they were, he recalled, he thinking of Gordie Howe bearing down on the nets, she thinking of God knows what, when he had suddenly reared back and landed her an open-handed belt on the buttocks, but instead of releasing the animal needs in Joyce, it made her cry. She cried and cried, throwing him over and calling him names, not bracingly obscene, but clinical.
Bitch. She may be nonconformist-minded, he thought vengefully, but she undoubtedly had an establishment cunt.
Mortimer’s shrinking confidence, his wilting prick, assailed by minority-group litterateurs and conjugal doubts, had been further
abused in contacts with the hoi polloi. Two topics of conversation were all-pervasive at The Eight Bells: geegees and sex. Mortimer did not play the horses and to judge by the early and prejudiced reception he got from Donnelly, Rapani, Gregory, Taylor and Wzcedak, you’d think he had no sex life either; if only because he was undeniably middle-class, his manner reticent, his dress neat. Once, in the early days, Mortimer had entered a pub to find the men linked round Rapani, who was reading aloud from a paperback that had just been published:
He reached down with both hands and grabbed the front of her dress. The fabric came away with a rasping, tearing sound. He put his hands inside her brassiere and pulled her breasts up and out. She stared at him, a fear growing deep in her eyes as once more he stood over her. Slowly he lowered himself onto her breasts until he was sitting facing her.
He looked down at her and laughed. “Now, tell me. Examine it carefully. See, am I not the biggest man you ever saw?”
Despite his weight she managed to nod.
Donnelly clacked his tongue approvingly.
“Not bad,” Wzcedak said.
Gregory pulled his lower lip. “It’s Harold Robbins. I recognize the style. With that man, the words leap off the page.”
“Wait, wait,” Rapani said, turning to another page. “Here’s something even better.”
“You’re an animal.”
Dax grinned. “It isn’t that. What do you expect when you’re standing there naked?”
She stared at him for a moment, then squashed her cigarette in a plate and dropped to her knees beside the bed. Tenderly she touched him.
“Quelle armure magnifique,”
she whispered. “So quick, so strong. Already he is too large for both my hands to hold.”
She –
“Not bloody likely,” Taylor said, aggrieved.
“You think Rapani’s making it up?” Gregory asked.
Taylor stared coldly at Rapani over the rim of his beer glass.
“But he couldn’t. Rapani’s no writer,” Wzcedak said.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Finish the passage.”
“It says here, she says, quote: ‘Already he is too large for both my hands to hold.’ ”
She buried her face against him. He felt the warmth of the tiny edges of her tongue tingling his flesh. He crushed her head against him.
“Unquote.” Rapani looked up to notice for the first time that Mortimer was standing on the edge of the group. “Oh,” he said.
Embarrassed, Mortimer raised his glass to Rapani. Rapani slammed the paperback shut. “Good evening, Mr. Griffin,” he said.
It had been like that every time. Simply because Mortimer was always courteous and occasionally carried a furled umbrella, his entry into the pub, like a prissy schoolmaster’s into an unruly classroom, had been inhibiting to the regulars. If, for instance, Gregory was relating one of his endless run of dirty stories or Wzcedak, the taxi driver, was slowly unwinding another tale of an astonishingly obscene happening in his taxi, this being the rule with his fares rather than the exception, then they both clamped shut as soon as Mortimer stepped up to the bar, as if even talk of sex would embarrass him. Griffin, the signal for propriety.