Who's Sorry Now? (6 page)

Of all the things he thought about Dotty in the immediate aftermath of this, it never once occurred to Kreitman to ask how come the whore of the universe could be Mrs Charlie Merriweather's sister. And you pay for omissions such as those.

‘When somebody you're not sure you know seems to be smiling at you but might not be,' Charles asked, after the meal, ‘what's the sophisticated response?'

‘Keep your eyes down and your face straight,' Kreitman answered. ‘Why? Who do you think's smiling at you?'

Charlie Merriweather nodded in the direction of a woman whom Kreitman thought he recognised as someone his daughter admired, a sculptor like herself, only of a seriously older generation, say twenty-six, whose pieces were much in demand by public galleries though not, needless to say, by private buyers who couldn't run the risk of their cleaners doing what Charlie's mother used to do with Charlie's anguished letters from his freezing school and throwing them in the bin. ‘I'm not going to fall into the trap of asking by what aesthetic this is art,' Kreitman had joshed his daughter, ‘but why call it sculpture when she doesn't sculpt?' To which her reply was, ‘Oh, Dad, just leave it.'

‘Well, if she's who I think she is,' Kreitman said to Charlie, ‘she's one of Ooshi's.'

‘Ooshi's?'

‘A dealer. I'm not sure but I think her name's Nicolette Halliwell and she does things with trash.'

‘What does she do with trash?'

‘Conceals speakers in it, I think.'

‘Then what?'

‘Then she arranges it to look like trash again. Talking trash. You have the air of a man who would like her to do something similar with you.'

‘I wish,' Charlie said.

‘You don't,' Kreitman said. ‘You don't wish anything. You're happily monogamous and even if you weren't, why her?'

‘The slut thing.'

‘Oh, for God's sake, Charlie! Those are just cold sores.'

But Charlie was beginning, in a general way, to smile back. ‘Don't you think she's sexy?' he said, more to the air and its angels than to Kreitman.

‘Not to my eye,' Kreitman said. ‘To my eye she looks seasick. Queasy, like a half-drowned rat.'

‘Then there's something wrong with your eye,' Charlie said. ‘To mine she's drop-dead gorgeous.'

‘Do me one favour,' Kreitman said, ‘don't talk like your children. Dangerously close to whose age, incidentally, she is. So do you know her or not?'

‘Not.'

‘Then she isn't smiling at you. Turn away.'

Try telling that to Lot's wife. Still convinced her radiance was for him, and dangerously woozy now, Charlie Merriweather shone his countenance across the distance of three tables and gave Nicolette Halliwell the benefit of that trample-me expression which had served him so well with Charlie several decades earlier, and no doubt continued to prove useful, Kreitman thought, in keeping him in her favours.

In their day a mistake was a mistake and everyone was careful to help one another out of an embarrassment. Things were different now that there was no such thing as society. Public personalities come and go quicker than a burning match, but ideas take longer to blow out and reignite. Thatcherism had fallen off its patent heels, an absurd memory today, like trying to recall Mr Pastry; yet society hadn't, as a consequence, been fanfaronaded back inside. It suited everyone, even the new socialists,
especially
the new socialists, to pretend it had gone away of its own accord and wasn't coming back. Without it, we could be as charitable or as hurtful as we felt like being, for we weren't on any journey together. Hence Nicolette Halliwell's too loud snort, her dismissive wave of her bejewelled fingers – funeral rings, she collected, trash from the past, one on each finger – and her zonked ejaculation: ‘Not you, saddo!' And then, to her company, but for everyone in the restaurant to hear – ‘The leery old prick thinks I'm smiling at him.'

Sozzled? Freaked out? Who could say. Kreitman couldn't tell who was on what any more. His daughters came home not themselves for different chemical reasons every night of the week.
One of his lovers had taken to laughing during orgasm. Another to weeping on the lavatory. Only their mothers seemed to be together. For two pins he'd have marched over to the artist's table and beaten an apology out of her (his second imaginary assault that night), however forcefully the stubbly beards that grinned approval round her might have tried to stop him. But why draw even more attention to Charlie's mortification? He was drained of blood, the colour of mozzarella, and didn't seem to know what to do with his face.

‘Let's go,' Kreitman said. ‘We'll pay at the desk.'

But Charlie couldn't, or didn't want to move. ‘Coffee,' he said. ‘I think coffee. And I think another bottle of wine. Oh, God!'

And over coffee and wine and more coffee and more wine he asked Kreitman what he thought the matter with him was, why he was so unhappy, why he was so prone to make a fool of himself these days, why he was forever catching his children giving him long anxious sideways looks, as if they feared he was going to run away or fall over or fall away or be run over the moment they took their eyes off him, why he was sleeping badly, why he seemed to be getting on Charlie's nerves, why he was ratded by what was going on in his sister-in-law's love life, why he wished sometimes that it was he who was knocking her off, except of course that he didn't, and why, in short, his life was fucking falling apart.

Kreitman put his fingers together. ‘Well now …' he said.

‘Don't take the piss out of me, Marvin. We've been talking about nothing for ten hours. Let's be honest, we've been talking about nothing for twenty years. Just this once, eh? Eh?'

‘All right, Charlie, then it isn't your life that's falling apart, it's your marriage that's fucking killing you.'

‘Well, you would say that.'

‘In that case don't ask me.'

‘You've been wanting to tell me that my marriage is fucking killing me since you first met me.'

‘You weren't married when I first met you.'

‘You know what I mean.'

‘Charlie, I don't know what you mean. I promoted your marriage. I would even say, were I given to like marriages, that I particularly liked yours. But this conversation has got nothing to do with what
I
want to say, or even with what I happen to think. I'm just watching you. You're behaving like a man whose marriage is fucking killing him. You've not stopped looking at women all day. Not even women, Charlie –
girls!
When a man of your years can't take his eyes off every under-age bit of skirt that flounces by, that hasn't even grown tits yet, it's fair to deduce his marriage is in trouble.'

‘That's different. Marriage in trouble is not the same as marriage killing me.'

‘Then go fuck one of these titless girls and get your marriage out of trouble. Give yourself a little leeway. I'll get up and have a word with the trash queen for you. I doubt she holds to any position for very long …'

‘If I were to “fuck one of those girls” Chas would never forgive me. It would break her heart.'

‘Don't tell her.'

‘She'll find out.'

‘How will she find out, Charlie?'

‘She finds out everything. She knows me backwards. I can't dream about a fuck without Chas knowing.'

‘There you are – your marriage is fucking killing you. And I'll tell you which part of it is killing you – the nice-sex part. Fantasy, Charlie. Sex isn't nice.'

‘Maybe not for you, Marvin.'

‘Leave me out of it. It isn't nice for
you
, otherwise …' Kreitman made a weary, exasperated gesture with his hands, taking in the waitresses, the sculptor and every other damn distraction that had made a monkey out of Charlie Merriweather this night. Made a monkey out of him as well, because even late
and in the company of men he hated marriage talk, wife talk, love talk, fuck talk. For he too was a good husband in his way, and believed he owed it to Hazel not to discuss her. Or her interior decorator. Or his daughter's curator. Or his one-time lover and her mother. ‘Look, Charlie,' he went on – in now, in for a penny, in for a pound – ‘why don't we have this nice-sex thing out once and for all? You think I don't get it. OK – I certainly don't get it. And if I don't get it we can't talk about it. You started this. You said your life's falling apart. I'm saying you can chalk that down to nice sex. So you go ahead and prove to me why I'm wrong. You explain to me what I've been missing all these years.'

‘Deprivation.'

‘Paradoxes now. I could surprise you, Charlie. I've done plenty of doing without.'

‘Yes, but not systematically. Nice sex is about
agreeing
to do without. It's a trade-off. In return for relinquishing everyone else – and that doesn't mean not having an eye for everyone else, Marvin – you enjoy a closeness you wouldn't otherwise have. I'm not talking about trust only. Partly the closeness is contingent on the sacrifice …'

‘You get hot thinking about everything you both haven't done? It's like talking dirty, is it? Only it's talking clean? Tell me about it, darling, whisper it in my ear – Who didn't you fuck today?'

‘Is that what you think?'

‘I don't think. About nice sex I have no thoughts. You're the expert.'

‘You might not remember this, Marvin, but when we were first married and living in Market Harborough you and Hazel used to stay with us for weekends. You two weren't married yet. It's possible you weren't even thinking of getting married at that stage. One night we gave you our bedroom. I can't remember why, maybe you'd just got engaged or something, maybe it was Hazel's birthday. Maybe it was mine. Anyway, you slept in our
bed. We were both astonished by the noises you made. Like creatures in pain, Charlie said.'

‘You were
listening
to us?'

‘No, we weren't listening, we heard. We couldn't not hear. The dead would have heard. And when we got our bed back in the morning we couldn't believe what you'd done to it. You'd ripped the sheets. You'd mangled two pillowcases and somehow shrunk a third. You'd torn the headboard off the bed. You'd bitten chunks out of the mattress …'

‘I'll buy you another mattress.'

‘Marvin – just once in your life, shut up! Believe me, there were bloodstains on the ceiling. If that's what your friend does to someone he loves, Charlie said, I wouldn't want to be in the next room when he's with someone he hates. I know, I see it on your face – what right did we have to sit in judgement on sex Marvin Kreitman-style? But we weren't sitting in judgement. We were just frightened for you.'

‘Oh, come on, Chaiiie,
frightened?
'

‘You didn't hear yourself. Anyway, whatever the rights of it, whatever you meant by half-throttling Hazel or letting her half-throttle you, and whatever we were doing having any sort of attitude to it,
that
wasn't nice sex. I trust you will at least agree to that. Nice sex, Marvin, isn't about finding another form for murder. I couldn't have raised a hand to Charlie even in play, nor she to me. What is it Hamlet says about his father's lovingness to his mother – ‘he might not beteem the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly'? That was me. That was us. Even a vulgar slap and tickle would have been impossible between us.
Is
impossible between us. It's not for me to enquire about the hows and whys of it now, but you and Hazel used to make no bones about it – you fought like tigers, and then you fucked like tigers. Your own phrase, Marvin – the clash of mighty opposites. Well, Charlie and I didn't
feel
opposite, we felt the same. We weren't reconciling differences in sex, we were
confirming congruences. In bed together, sometimes, I wouldn't have been able to tell you where I ended and she began. My cock, her … What's wrong, Marvin. Why are you gagging?'

‘You know darn well why I'm gagging.'

‘Of course I do. I've drunk too much and you hate sex talk that isn't adversarial.'

‘You're wrong. What I hate is the word cock. Watcha, cock! Use dick, it's more respectful.'

‘Yes, yes, the famous Kreitman niceness around the organs. Nice around the nomenclature, less nice around the usage.'

‘You're the nice one, Charlie.'

‘Well, you're certainly not. Listen, you asked, so I'm telling you. Nice sex – it means what it sounds as though it means. Sex that is all consideration. Smug too, if you like. An expression of how much you like each other and everyone else can go to hell. And that's why I've always found it impossible to do anything if I'm away from home, in a foreign country or wherever – I know I wouldn't be able to think of anyone but Charlie. So what would be the point? Then when I got back I would be guilty, and when we made love I would be unable to think about anything but my guilt, lying there lewdly between us like a third party each of us thought the other had invited. Three in a bed. Something you're not averse to, I know. But not me. I don't judge it, I'm not against it, I just can't do it. So that's something else about nice sex – it's sex strictly for the two of you. Sex you don't go round experimenting with …'

‘Sex that's not sex, you mean?' Unbidden, Erica, his wife's interior decorator, sitting on his chest in nothing but black hold-ups, her hands crossed on his throat, saying ‘Make me!' Unbidden, but he bade the apparition go. ‘Sex that's no fun, you mean?'

‘Wrong. That wasn't fun you were having with Hazel all those years ago. That wasn't even play, Marvin. That was hang, draw and quarter. And you both looked like you'd narrowly escaped the
mob when you came down to breakfast. You've always looked like that after sex. Another close shave. Got away with my life again – just. Don't forget how many times I've
seen
you after you've been fucking. And you never once looked as though you'd been having fun. People smile when they're having fun. When did you last smile at Hazel, Marvin?'