THREE
The Cross-Eyed Bear
Jack Lupton answered the door with a smouldering cigarette lodged in the side of his beard. He stretched his arms out, pulled Graham in, dropped a hand on his shoulder, belted him on the bottom, and finally propelled him down the hall bellowing,
‘Graham, you old cunt, in you go.’
Graham couldn’t help smiling. A lot of Jack was bullshit, he suspected, and that lot came under regular analysis among his friends; but in person he was so uncompromisingly amiable, so noisily open and so physical that you immediately forgot the precise terms of yesterday’s derision. The matiness may have been assumed, part of an act to make you like him; but if so, it worked, and as it continued without hesitation or change of key—in Graham’s case, for five or six years—you ended up not needing to worry about its sincerity.
The cigarette trick had started as a joky short-cut to character. Jack’s beard grew wirily enough for him to park a Gauloise in it safely, at a point halfway along the jawbone. If he was chatting up a girl at a party, he’d go off to fetch some drinks and free his hands by tucking his lighted cigarette into his beard (sometimes he would light one specially to set up the effect). On his return, a chunky blur of bonhomie, he’d adopt one of three courses, depending on his appraisal of the girl. If she seemed sophisticated, or acute, or even just alert, he’d casually extract the cigarette and go on smoking (this established him, he assured Graham, as ‘a bit of an original’). If she seemed dim or shy or charmproof, he’d leave the cigarette there for a minute or two, talk about a book—though never one of his own—and then ask for a smoke (this proved him to be ‘one of those clever, absent-minded writers with his head in the clouds’). If he couldn’t fathom her at all, or thought she was crazy, or was quite drunk himself, he’d simply leave the cigarette until it smouldered its way down to his beard, then look puzzled and ask, ‘Can you smell something burning around here?’ (this established him as ‘really a terrific character, a bit wild, probably a bit self-destructive, you know, like real artists, but so interesting’). When using this third ploy, he would normally accompany it with some serpentine inventions about his childhood or his ancestry. It did, however, have its dangers. He’d once inflicted a bad burn on himself in pursuit of an attractive but strangely enigmatic girl. He couldn’t imagine she hadn’t noticed the cigarette, and his rising incredulity paralleled his increasing pain; later, he discovered that while he’d been off fetching them drinks the girl had taken out her contact lenses: the smoke from his cigarette had been irritating her eyes.
‘Coffee?’ Jack bashed Graham on the shoulder again.
‘Please.’
The ground floor of Jack’s Repton Gardens flat had been knocked through, from front bay to back kitchen; they were sitting in the crepuscular middle section, which Jack used as a living room. In the bay stood his desk, with a piano stool in front of it; his electric typewriter was barely visible beneath the contents of an upturned litter bin. Jack had once explained to Graham his theory of creative chaos. He was by nature a very tidy person, he claimed, but his art demanded mess. The words simply refused to flow, apparently, unless they sensed that there was some sexy anarchy out there on which their ordered form could make an impact. Hence the litter of paper, magazines, brown envelopes and last season’s pools coupons. ‘They need to feel there’s some point in being born,’ Jack had explained. ‘It’s like those aboriginal tribes where the women parturate on to piles of old newspapers. Same principle. Same newspapers, probably.’
As Jack took his chunky form off to the kitchen extension he pivoted slightly on one leg and farted, quite loudly.
‘Not I, But the Wind,’ he muttered, almost to himself, but not quite.
Graham had heard that one before. He’d heard most of them before; but didn’t really mind. As Jack had gradually become a better-known novelist, as his fame permitted him self-indulgence and eccentricity, he’d taken to farting quite a lot. Nor were they the embarrassed exhalations of a senescent sphincter; they were rowdy, worked-at, middle-aged farts. Somehow—Graham didn’t even understand the process—Jack had made it into an acceptable mannerism.
And it wasn’t just that he made it acceptable once it had happened. Graham sometimes thought he planned it. Once, Jack had rung up and insisted that he help him choose a squash racquet. Graham protested that he’d only ever played squash three times—once with Jack, when he’d been sent scurrying around the court towards a heart attack—but Jack refused to accept his disclaimers of authority. They met in the sports department of Selfridges, and though Graham could quite plainly see the squash and tennis racquets over to their left, Jack had dragged him off on a tour of the whole floor. After about ten yards, though, he suddenly stopped, did his pre-fart pivot so that his back was towards a slanting row of cricket bats, and sounded off. As they walked on, he muttered sideways to Graham,
‘The Wind in the Willows.’
Five minutes later, when Jack had decided that maybe after all he’d stick with the racquet he’d got, Graham wondered if it hadn’t all been planned that way; if Jack hadn’t simply found himself with time and a joke on his hands, and telephoned Graham to help him get rid of both.
‘Okay, boyo.’ Jack (who wasn’t Welsh) handed Graham a mug of coffee, sat down, took a sip of his own, plucked the cigarette from his beard and puffed on it. ‘Sympathetic novelist lends sensitive ear to worried academic. Fifteen pounds—make that guineas—per hour; unlimited sessions. And make it something I can, with all my transformational powers, turn into a two hundred quid story minimum, and that’s my little joke. Shoot.’
Graham fiddled with his glasses for a few seconds; then took a sip of coffee. Too soon: he felt some taste-buds getting burned out by the heat. He wrapped his hands round the mug and stared into it.
‘It’s not that I want you to give me specific advice. It’s not that I want you to confirm to me a certain line of action that I’m too timid to adopt without a second opinion. I’m just worried, I sort of can’t get over how I’m reacting to … to what it is I’m reacting to. I, well, I didn’t know about this sort of thing. And I thought, Jack’s got more experience of the whole caboodle than I have, may even have had attacks of it himself, probably knows someone who has, anyway.’
Graham looked up towards Jack, but the steam from the coffee had misted his glasses; he saw only a brownish blur.
‘Old matey, you’re about as clear as a bugger’s back passage so far.’
‘Ah, sorry. Jealousy,’ Graham said suddenly. Then, trying to be helpful, ‘Sexual jealousy.’
‘No other kind in my experience. Hmmm. Sorry to hear it, old darling. The little lady been playing with fire, has she?’ Jack wondered why on earth Graham had come to him—him of all people. His tone became even more familiar. ‘Never can tell, that’s what I say. Never can tell what you’ve got until it’s too late, and by then it’s tweezers round your tassle.’ He waited for Graham to continue.
‘No, it’s not that. Good God, that would be awful. Awful. No, it’s sort of … retrospective, it’s all retrospective. It’s all about chaps before me. Before she met me.’
‘Ah.’ Jack became more alert; and more puzzled still why Graham had come to him.
‘Went to a film the other day. Crappy film. Ann was in it. Some other fellow—won’t tell you his name—was in it too, and later it came out that Ann was, had, had been to bed with him. Not much,’ Graham added quickly, ‘once or twice. Didn’t—you know—didn’t go out with him or anything.’
‘Mm.’
‘I went back to see that film three times in one week. The first time I thought, you know, interesting to have another look at the fellow’s face: I hadn’t really paid him that much attention the first time. So I had another look, and I didn’t like the face much, but then I wouldn’t, would I? And then I found myself going back again, twice more. It wasn’t even a local cinema, it was up in Holloway. I even rearranged a class one day so that I could get out to it.’
‘And—and what was it like?’
‘Well, the first time—that’s to say the second time altogether—it was … funny as much as anything. The … bloke was acting some sort of minor mafia person, but I knew—Ann had told me—that he came from the East End, so I was listening carefully, and he couldn’t even sustain the accent for more than three words in a row. And I thought, why couldn’t Ann have gone to bed with a better actor? And I sort of laughed at him, and I thought, well, I may not be Casanova, but I’m a sodding better academic than you’ll ever be a good actor. And I remembered Ann saying she thought he’d been doing shaving commercials lately, and I thought, poor sod, maybe that film was the high point of his professional career and he’s all twisted up with failure and envy and guilt and occasionally he’s standing in the dole queue and he finds himself thinking wistfully about Ann and what’s become of her, and when I came out of the cinema I thought, “Well, stuff you, matey, stuff you.”
‘The second time—the third time—I suppose that was the puzzle. Why did I go back then? I just did. I felt I … ought to. I felt I had a hunch: a hunch about myself, that’s all I can say. I was probably in a funny mood, and I couldn’t work out why I was in the cinema anyway—this was when I’d rearranged the class—and I sat through the incredibly boring first half hour or so, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to feel but somehow I knew it wasn’t going to be the same as before. I suppose I should have left then.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Oh, some childhood puritanism about getting my money’s worth.’ Actually, that wasn’t right. ‘No, it was more than that. I tell you what I think it was: it was feeling I was near something dangerous. It was the expectation of not knowing what to expect. Does that sound—cerebral?’
‘A bit.’
‘Well it wasn’t. It was very physical in fact. I was trembling. I felt I was going to be let into a great secret. I felt I was going to be frightened. I felt like a child.’
There was a pause. Graham slurped at his coffee.
‘And were you frightened? Tumble-drier tum-tum?’
‘Sort of. It’s hard to explain. I wasn’t frightened of this fellow, I was frightened about him. I felt very aggressive, but in a completely unspecific way. I also felt I was going to be sick, but that was something separate, extra. I was very … upset, I suppose I’d say.’
‘Sounds like it. What about the last time?’
‘Same again. Same reactions in the same places. Just as strong.’
‘Did it wear off?’
‘Yes—in a way. But it just comes back whenever I think about it.’ He stopped. It felt as if he’d finished.
‘Well, since you don’t want my advice, I’ll give it you. I’d say, stop going to the movies. I didn’t know you liked them anyway.’
Graham didn’t seem to be listening.
‘You see, I told you about the film at such length because it was the catalyst. That was what sparked it all off. I mean, obviously I knew about some of Ann’s chaps before me; I’d even met a few of them. Didn’t know them all, of course. But it was only after the film that I started to care about them. It suddenly began to hurt that Ann had been to bed with them. It suddenly felt like … I don’t know—adultery, I suppose. Isn’t that silly?’
‘It’s … unexpected.’ Jack deliberately didn’t look up. Bonkers was the first word that had come to mind.
‘It’s silly. But I’ve begun thinking about them all in a different way. I’ve begun caring about them. I lie in bed waiting to go to sleep and it’s like Richard the Third before that battle … Whichever one it was.’
‘Not your period?’
‘Not my period. And half the time I’m wanting to line them all up in my head and take a good look at them, and half the time I’m too afraid to let myself do so. There are some whose names I know, but I don’t know what they look like, and I just lie there filling in their faces, making up identikit pictures of them.’
‘Hmmm. Anything else?’
‘Well, I’ve tracked down a couple of other films Ann was in and gone to see them.’
‘How much have you told Ann?’
‘Not everything. Not about going to the films again. Just bits about getting upset.’
‘And what does she say?’
‘Oh, she says she’s sorry I’m jealous, or possessive, or whatever the right word is, but it’s quite unnecessary and it’s nothing she’s done—it isn’t, of course—and maybe I’m overworking. I’m not.’
‘Anything to be guilty about yourself? Any little naughties you might be transferring?’
‘Christ no. If I was faithful to Barbara for fifteen years or whatever, I wouldn’t be thinking of straying from Ann after this length of time.’
‘You don’t say that very convincingly.’
‘No, sure. In your case—sure.’ He did sound convincing now.
‘So what do I do?’
‘I thought you didn’t want advice?’
‘No, I mean, where am I? Is any of this familiar to you?’
‘Not really. I’m not too bad on current jealousies. I’m terrific on adultery—my type, not yours: I’ve got a good line of advice on that any time you need it. Well, all right … But stuff in the past I’m not so hot on.’ Jack paused. ‘Of course, you could get Ann to lie to you. Get her to tell you she hadn’t when she had.’
‘No. Anyway, you can’t do that. I’d never believe her when she told the truth.’
‘Suppose not.’ Jack thought he’d been very patient. He’d scarcely talked about himself for a long time. ‘It’s all a bit rarefied for me. Won’t make a short story, I’m afraid.’ It was odd how much people, even friends, imposed on you: just because you were a writer, they assumed you’d be interested in their problems.
‘So you’ve no suggestions?’ And then—having told you they don’t want advice, of course they do.
‘Well, if it was me, I expect I’d go out and bang some tart for a cure.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Perfectly.’
‘How would that help?’
‘You’d be surprised how that helps. Cures everything. Everything from a mild headache to writer’s block. Very good for curing rows with the wife too.’
‘We don’t have rows.’
‘Not at all? Well, I’ll believe you. Sue and I row quite a bit. Always have—apart from the palmy days, of course. But then, we didn’t bother to make the bed in the palmy days; only rowed about who should go on top.’ Graham’s glasses had cleared; he could see Jack taking breath for anecdote. He should have remembered that Jack’s attention, however protracted, was always conditional.
‘With Valerie—don’t think you ever met Val, did you?—I used to have rows all the time. Still, that was twenty years ago. But we used to have rows right from the start. Not your sort of milieu, old cunty; it was all Room at the Top and A Kind of Loving stuff. Hand up in the bus shelters. Trying to unsnap a suspender with two frozen fingers of your left hand when you’re right-handed, while pretending you’re really just stroking her thigh, and kissing her at the same time, and dropping your other mitt over her right shoulder and feeling for goodies. Makes it sound like bloody Clausewitz, doesn’t it? Not too far wrong, either, now I come to think of it.
‘So, first we’d have rows about where I put my hand when, how many fingers and so on. Then we finally had the Normandy landings, and I thought, well, okay, now the rows will stop. But they didn’t; instead we had rows about how often, and when and where, and is that a fresh packet, Jack, will you please check the date on the side. Can you imagine—switching on the light in the middle to check the date on the packet?
‘And after the Normandy landings, of course, we had the Battle of the Bulge. After we got married, of course. Then it was, should we, shouldn’t we, why don’t you get a proper job, look at this knitting pattern, and Margaret’s had three already. Five or six years of that was enough, I can tell you. Buggered off down here.’
‘What happened to Valerie?’
‘Oh, Val, she married a teacher. Bit of a wet-panter, nice enough. Likes the kids, which is useful for me. Checks the date on the packet every time, I’m sure.’
Graham wasn’t sure where Jack was leading, but he didn’t mind too much. He’d never been let into Lupton history before: Jack’s declared policy of living only in the present involved a stylized forgetting of the past. If asked about his early life, he would either refer you to his fiction, or invent a baroque lie on the spur of the moment. Of course, there was no knowing whether he wasn’t even now trimming a myth to fit Graham’s particular needs. Though always frank, the novelist was never wholly sincere.
‘I thought I’d left the rows behind, up there with Val. When I met Sue, I thought, this is nice. No problem with the Normandy landings; well, there wouldn’t have been—it was a dozen years later and London, and they’d built the bloody Channel tunnel by then, old matey, hadn’t they? And Sue seemed less spiky than Val, at first. So we got married, and then, after a bit, guess what, the rows started. She’d begin by asking me what my role was, stuff like that. And I’d say, I’d like a role in bed with a little honey, please. And then we’d have a big row and I’d go off and have a bit of consolation, and then I’d come back and we’d have a row about that, so eventually I thought, well maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m unlivable with. That was when we thought it would be better if I had the flat in town and she lived in the country. Well, you remember that—it was only a few years ago.’
‘And?’
‘And, guess what? We have just as many rows as before. Well, fewer in one sense, I suppose, because we see less of each other. But I’d say the number of rows per hour of contact with each other has remained completely stable. And we’ve got particularly good at having shouting matches on the phone. We have big rows about as often as when we lived together. And when we do, I take exactly the same course afterwards. I ring up an old girlfriend and get me some consolation. It always works. That’s the thing I’ve discovered about what for want of a better word we may as well call adultery. It always works. If I were you, I’d go off and find myself a nice married woman.’
‘Most of the women I’ve slept with have been married,’ said Graham. ‘To me.’ He felt depressed. He hadn’t come to hear a version of Jack’s life story; though he certainly hadn’t minded hearing it. Nor had he come to learn about Jack’s own private remedies. ‘You’re not seriously suggesting I go off and commit adultery?’
Jack laughed.
‘Course I am. Second thoughts, course I’m not. You’re much too much of a guilt-ridden granny for that. And you’d be bound to go straight home to Ann and blab it out on her shoulder, and that wouldn’t do either of you any good or solve anything. No, all I’m saying is, that is your cross-eyed bear. Every marriage has a cross-eyed bear, and this is yours.’
Graham looked blankly at him.
‘Cross-eyed bear. Cross You’d Bear? Cross I’d Bear? Okay? Fuckit, Graham, we’ve both been married twice, we’re both practically clear of brain damage, we both thought about the whole thing each time before plunging into it. Now, four marriages tell us the honey time can’t last. So what can you do about it? I mean, you don’t think your present situation is Ann’s fault, do you?’
‘Of course not.’
‘And you don’t think it’s yours?’
‘No—I suppose I don’t think about it in terms of fault.’
‘Of course not. Quite right too. It’s in the nature of the beast, that’s what it is. It’s in the nature of marriage. It’s a design fault. There’ll always be something, and the best way to survive, if you want to survive, is identify it, isolate it, and always make a particular response to it when it occurs.’
‘Like you calling up an old girlfriend.’
‘Sure. But you won’t want to do that.’
‘I can’t think of anything relevant I might want to do. All I want to do is take a holiday from being inside my head.’
‘Well, there are ways. Do something irrelevant if you like, but do it seriously. Have a wank, get drunk, go and buy a new tie. Doesn’t matter what it is, just as long as you have some way of fighting back. Otherwise it’ll get you down. Get you both down.’
Jack thought he was really doing quite well. He wasn’t used to acting as a problem page, and he’d been fairly convinced by the plot structure he’d presented to Graham at such short notice. He’d managed to impose some sort of pattern on both their lives as he went along. Still, that was his job, after all, wasn’t it: smelting order out of chaos, rendering fear and panic and agony and passion down into two hundred pages and six quid ninety-five. That was what he was paid to do, so this wasn’t too hard a sideline. The percentage of lying was about the same as well.
Graham decided, though without much optimism, to think over what Jack had said. He’d always considered Jack more experienced than himself. Was he? They’d both been married twice, they’d both read about the same amount, they were of about the same intelligence. So why did he consider Jack an authority? Partly because Jack wrote books, and Graham respected books in both an abstract and a practical way, acknowledged a gut deference to their jurisdiction. And partly because Jack had had millions of affairs; always seemed to have a new girl in tow. Not that this necessarily made him an authority on marriage. But then, who was? Mickey Rooney? Zsa Zsa Gabor? Some Turkish sultan or other?
‘Or … ‘ said Jack. He was rubbing his beard and looking almost as serious as he could.
‘Yes …?’
‘Well, there’s always one solution …’ Graham sat up straighter in his chair. This was what he’d come for. Of course, Jack would know what to do, would know the right answer. That was why he’d come here; he knew he was right to come. ‘… You should love her less.’
‘What?’
‘Love her less. May sound a bit old-fashioned, but it’d work. You don’t have to hate her or dislike her or anything —don’t go over the edge. Just learn to detach yourself a little. Be her friend if you like. Love her less.’
Graham hesitated. He didn’t quite know where to begin. Eventually he said,
‘I cry when the houseplants die.’
‘Come again, squire?’
‘She had these African violets. I mean, I don’t like African violets much, and neither does Ann. I think she was given them. She’s got lots of other plants she likes a lot more. And they got sort of plant chicken pox or something, and they died. Ann didn’t mind at all. I went up to my study and cried. Not about them—I just found myself thinking about her watering them, and putting that fertilizer stuff on them, and, you know, not her feelings about the sodding plants—she didn’t really have any, as I said—but her time, her being there, her life …
I’ll tell you another thing. After she’s gone to work, the first thing I do is take out my diary and write down everything she’s got on. Shoes, tights, dress, bra, knickers, raincoat, hair-grip, rings. What colour. Everything. Often it’s the same, of course, but I still write it down. And then occasionally, throughout the day, I take out my diary and look it up. I don’t try and memorize what she’s looking like—that’d be cheating. I get out my diary—sometimes when I’m teaching and pretend to be thinking about essay titles or something—and I sit there, sort of dressing her. It’s very … nice.
‘I’ll tell you another thing. I always clear the table after dinner. I go through to the kitchen, and I scrape my plate off into the kitchen bin, and then I suddenly find myself eating whatever she’s left on hers. Often, you know, it isn’t anything particularly nice—bits of fat and discoloured vegetables and sausage gristle—but I just scoff it. And then I go back and sit down opposite her, and I find myself thinking about our stomachs, about how whatever I’ve just eaten might easily have been inside her, but’s inside me instead. I think, what an odd moment it must have been for that food, when the knife came down and the fork pushed it this way rather than that, and instead of lying inside you it’s lying inside me. And that sort of makes me feel closer to Ann.
‘And I’ll tell you another thing. Sometimes, she gets up in the night and has a pee, and it’s dark and she’s half asleep and she somehow—God knows how she does it, but she does—she misses the bowl with the piece of paper she dries herself with. And I’ll go in there in the morning and find it lying on the floor. And—it’s not knicker-sniffing or anything like that—I sort of look at it and I feel … soft. It’s like one of those paper flowers that bad comedians wear in their buttonholes. It seems pretty, and colourful, and decorative. I could almost wear it in my buttonhole. I pick it up and shove it back in the bowl, but I feel sentimental afterwards.’
There was a silence. The two friends looked across at each other. Jack sensed a belligerence in Graham; the confession somehow managed to be aggressive. Perhaps too there was a touch of self-satisfaction about the recital. Jack felt almost embarrassed—so rare an occurrence that he began reflecting on his own internal condition rather than Graham’s. Suddenly he became aware that his friend had stood up.
‘Well, thanks, Jack.’
‘Glad to be of any. If I was. Next time you need to give the old psychocouch a pounding just give me a buzz.’
‘Yes I will. Thanks again.’
The front door was shut. Each had gone about five yards, in opposite directions, when they both paused. Jack paused while he gave a little pivot, a sort of fly-half’s side-step in the middle of the hall. He farted, not very noisily, and commented to himself,
‘Gone With the Wind.’
Outside, Graham paused, sniffed the dusty privet and the overflowing dustbins, and made a decision. If he cut out going to the good butcher, and did all his shopping at the supermarket, he could slip into The Good Times on his way home and catch Ann committing adultery again.