Читать книгу Eat My Heart Out - Zoe Pilger - Страница 11

FIVE

What does it mean for a woman to submit?

To submit is to lose oneself. To want to submit is to want to lose oneself. I’m talking about consent. We can lose ourselves through religion, alcohol, sex, drugs, political fanaticism, or love.

Why would a woman want to lose herself in love?

In short, why would she want to fall?

Because it’s fun? Oh yes, it’s fun.

Or because it offers her respite from the pressures of the meritocracy?

The meritocracy demands that she alone is responsible—for her successes, yes. But also for her failures. Falling is a way of avoiding failure—or success.

Falling is a form of submission.

The modern woman senses that in order to win a man’s love, she must deny her capability and regress.

Marge had left her copy of Stephanie’s book under the table. It was signed:

Dear Marge,

Sending you love from my (rightful?) place of exile. It’s cold here but the sistahood can’t get me from all the way across the Atlantic. I’m sorry again—if it’s right for me to say sorry?

In solidarity, as ever,

Steph

I stroked the dust jacket, hoping to absorb the gravitas contained in those pages by the power of touch alone.

I was sitting on the front step of the closed Barclays next to Leicester Square station, working my way through a family-size bucket of fried chicken, which I had purchased from the fake KFC across the road.

A bachelorette party wearing angel wings and devil horns staggered out of the all-night pizza place, clutching a long train of torn white netting. Fiona! Fiona! they chanted. Fiona grabbed a man wearing a pin-striped shirt who seemed to be attached to the bachelorette party and shoved her clenched fist down the front of his trousers. He groped under her tube top. Her friends began to sing: Puuuuuurrrfect! The old Eddi Reader song. The man walked away.

Rickshaws carrying cargos of people fucked out of their brains swerved dangerously close to the night buses that swelled with yet more people cramming kebabs into their mouths, letting their sleeping heads knock against the windows on the upper deck, missing the view of this splendid city.

“Do you know, there is no direct translation for jouissance in English?” Toad Man was saying to me over martinis in the bar.

I had taken a night bus from Leicester Square to the ASH Hotel, which was situated between the City and the East district, combining money with creativity in an ideal cocktail of dynamic penthouse suites, stellar service, and conceptual art, according to the brochure that I was reading intently.

“I like to think of myself as French in spirit,” he went on. “Even though I’m English with only the faintest tinge of Scot.” He chortled and rubbed his belly. “So to sit with a French woman in the flesh is something of a minor miracle for me.”

“Minor?”

“Oh, they are hard to find in London. The French tend to stick together and close ranks. Unless I were to lurk outside the gates of the Lycée!”

“No, I mean why is it only a minor miracle? To find me?”

“Do forgive me! A major one! Salud!”

We clinked glasses; mine was already empty.

I sucked the olive on its stick. I stopped sucking it when I saw what Toad Man’s eyes were doing to my mouth. That tongue appeared. I crossed my legs. Then I uncrossed them. I rattled the cocktail stick against my teeth.

There was a long silence.

“But we don’t even know each other’s names!” I said with a laugh. I let my eyelids droop, seductively.

“Are you sleepy, dear?”

I opened my eyes as wide as possible. “No.”

“James.” He extended his hand. It was warm and soft.

“I’m Camille.”

“How erotic.”

“Yeah. My mother named me after my father’s courtesan. She was a chorus girl at the Moulin Rouge. She could kick her legs up extremely high.”

“And what does your mother do?”

“She . . . bakes croissants. But she was, like, photographed by Man Ray and all the surrealists back in the day.”

“Back in the day? As in the 1920s day?”

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s very old.” I gestured to the bartender for another drink. He was about my age. There was a dish of spicy green balls on the bar; I was crunching them at record speed. “Hm,” I said. “Japanese, I think. Try one?”

James shook his head. “What do you look for in a man?”

New drinks arrived. I said thanks to the bartender but he averted his eyes.

“I don’t look for anything.” I paused. “Do you know the song ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ by Velvet Underground? Yeah, I’m looking for that. The lyric goes something like, ‘when you think the night has taken over your mind and inside you’re unkind and twisted, I’ll show you that you’re not.’ I mean, I’m looking for a man who can see that I’m not horrible even if I act horrible sometimes.”

“So you’re looking for a punching bag?”

“No. That’s not what I meant.”

“Some men are very threatened by female strength.” He stared at my thighs.

“I know.”

“Some men are appalled by the idea of performing cunnilingus ad nauseam. They regard the vulva as a Venus flytrap, designed to eat them alive.”

I downed the martini. Now I was getting really drunk. I put my hand on James’s shoulder and said: “What I love about you is that you’ve got a lot of progressive ideas about women. I love that about you.” I gave him a kiss on the cheek.

He acted quickly; his face jerked to the left and he tried to get that tongue in my mouth. I pulled back.

He looked sad, so I said: “But how rude of me! I haven’t asked you what you do?”

“I am in the pussy business.”

“Oh? That’s not what I meant.” I was slurring. “I mean—this is for free.” I opened my arms wide. “I am here for free. Because I like you.”

“Why, thank you, my wild orchid.” He touched the tip of my nose. “I like you too.”

“And I’m lonely.”

He pulled a BlackBerry out of his waistcoat pocket. “Look.” He showed me a picture. It was a cat with orange eyes and blue-gray fur.

“That looks like a cute alien!” I cried. I gestured to the bartender for two more martinis. He was wrapping the spirit bottles in layers of plastic wrap; they looked like silkworm cocoons. I told him so. He ignored me.

I hitched my pencil skirt up shorter.

“That’s Lola,” said James. “She is a Chartreux. I breed. One is not supposed to breed Chartreux on English shores according to the blasted CFA.”

“CFA?”

“Cat Fanciers’ Association. But to hell with them!” His face became angry. “They are the most sumptuous pussies in all the world as far as I’m concerned! In all of Europe. I’ve been obsessed with them ever since I came across one while backpacking through the Chartreuse Mountains, from whence they derive their name.” He stared into my eyes. “I was a young man then. That was before I met Margaret.”

I reached for the tiny green balls but they had all gone.

“There, the mountains are blue,” said James. “The monks make blue liqueur. Everything is blue.”

“I want to go there,” I said.

A white statue wearing nothing but a pair of jazzy Speedos and Ray-Bans was standing in the corner of the elevator, reflected a million times in the mirrors that fenced us in. James and I were reflected too: we looked hideous together. The statue was made of porcelain, not marble. Its hair was slicked back, American Psycho style.

“He reminds me of my father,” I slurred, pointing to the statue. We were heading up to the seventh floor: good luck. “’Cept my father was taller and looks more like Tom Cruise in Risky Business. Have you seen that film?”

James shook his head.

“Me neither. But I’ve seen the posters. There’s a photo of my mother and father on a cruise ship in 1984. That was the year they met. Actually, they met on the cruise ship. Because my father was making a noise in cruises. A big noise. And my mother was just . . . there. It was sailing from Portsmouth to Bilbao.” I looked at my million weathered faces in the mirrors. “They fell in love.”

There was a ding. The doors opened. The hallway was long and pale and candy colored. It was making me seasick. I touched the wall, and found that it was made of leather.

“Was your mother selling croissants on the cruise?”

“No,” I said. “That was in her muffin phase. She was selling muffins.”

James laughed heartily and grabbed my hand. He kissed my knuckles. I balled my fist. He pried my hand open and put my index finger in his mouth. He sucked it very slowly. I watched him, fascinated.

“I love a girl with imagination,” he said to my finger.

“But that bit about the cruise ship was true,” I told him.

James was in the bathroom grooming. The bathroom door was closed. I sat on the end of the king-size bed and stared at the cupboard containing the TV for a long while. Then I shouted loud enough for him to hear: “I love you!”

“I love you too!” he shouted back.

I opened the cupboard and stared at the blank TV screen inside. I opened the minibar and uncorked a bottle of champagne. It hissed. I filled two flutes.

A collage of insects hung over the candy-colored leather sofa, which matched all the cushions and all the curtains and all the sheets. On closer inspection, I saw that the insects were cutouts of vintage porn. This was confirmed by the framed text next to the picture. There was a stack of magazines on the coffee table: Frieze, Monocle, Dazed and Confused.

I turned on the TV. Come Dine with Me. A brunette was laughing and pointing at a mound of collapsed cream and banana.

James appeared, full of the joys of spring. I was full of something; not spring. The champagne had failed to go to my head. He looked about twenty years younger than he had in the bar. His comb-over was freshly oiled.

Now he opened the box of truffles on the pillow and pushed one into my mouth. It tasted too sweet. He unfastened my pencil skirt and rolled it over my legs. He rolled down my tights too. He rolled down my underpants. He was squatting in front of me like a toad.

I shifted away from him and turned the volume up loud. “I think it’s the voice-over,” I said. “That’s what makes this show so funny.”

The brunette was leading a conga line around her front room. A man who looked like an accountant was circling his hips, unevenly. The song changed to “Macarena.”

James pawed at me.

I said in a loud, assertive voice: “Sebastian’s parents would never let their kids watch TV. That’s why they grew up so creative. When Sebastian first came to my school, I’d only ever read The Baby-Sitters Club and Sweet Valley High.”

“Who’s Sebastian?” said James.

“But then he introduced me to all these books. Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.” I turned to James. “Have you read them?”

He shook his head.

“I thought Sebastian was a genius like Miller,” I went on. “He said he wanted to make my ovaries incandescent like Miller. But when we did it the first time, they didn’t go incandescent. So Sebastian.” I laughed. “Got really angry and started punching the wall and going insane. It was funny. Because he wasn’t really like that—he wasn’t insane.”

James lay back on the bed. Then he sat up again.

“He wasn’t really a genius either,” I said. “When we were about thirteen he told me that I wasn’t in love with him—I was in love with love itself. He said it was a privileged form of mania because apparently a lot of artists and writers had it. He said he didn’t have it, and he seemed really angry about that. But I was sure it was a curse—whatever he said I had. It must have been a curse because it meant my heart didn’t belong to—myself. It belonged to someone other than myself. It belonged to him.”

“So you like being owned?” purred James.

“No,” I said. “That’s not what I meant.” I laughed. “We ran away to Paris after our SATs. When we were fourteen. We left in the middle of the night and got the bus to Dover. Sebastian had stolen the money from his parents. Then we got the ferry. It was amazing—we went out on the deck in the pitch-black darkness and you couldn’t see the horizon. Everything looked black. We got wet from the water.” I laughed again. “Obviously. It was the sea. We stayed away for three days. My mother went fucking crazy but his parents didn’t even notice that he’d gone. They thought he was on a school trip that they’d forgotten about.”

“Hmm.”

“When we came back, there was this awful meeting with my mother and his parents. His mother said that we should give our children roots and wings, but my mother said that ambition is the best form of contraception and the French are notoriously sex mad.”

“Yes, you are.”

“She said that France is a sex mad country, but Sebastian’s father said: ‘But a lovely place for a romantic weekend away at this time of year.’ Sebastian said his father wanted him to die because he was too tall. My mother tried to stop me from seeing Sebastian, so I ran away to his house and lived there. I used to always feel so safe in his house. I only went back home when she said I could carry on seeing him, but she threw all the party invitations from his parents straight in the trash. She hated the whole family after that—because they were louche. His parents were always having parties.”

James was tugging at the ends of my pussy bow. He realized that it was stitched in place. He unzipped the blouse at the back. My hair got caught in the zip. I lifted my hair up and he told me that the nape of my neck was exquisite. I felt like I would cry—the way he was touching me was so gentle.

“Get off,” I said.

He paused. “All right.” He paced the room. The carpet was salmon pink. “I know you’re young,” he said. “I mean, I know I’m old.”

“You’re not that old.”

He had unzipped his trousers. I could see a swarm of Bart Simpson faces on his boxer shorts.

He knelt down before me and clutched my hands. “You’ve talked about your lost love,” he said. “Now let me talk about mine.”

I yawned. “All right.”

“When Margaret died, I thought I could never love again. I thought I would never see another woman’s face who I would know, just know. That familiarity is.” He closed his eyes. “What I miss the most.” His eyelashes were gray. “I know you were only joking when you said you loved me before, because you can’t love me, because we only just met.” He released my hands. “Why would you love an old man like me?” He stood up and fiddled with the iPod on the wall. He turned the TV off.

The song began: “I’ll Be Your Mirror.”

“Turn it off,” I said. “Please.”

We lay next to each other on the bed for a long time.

“It’s a coincidence that you like pussies,” I said, eventually. I had my back to him. “Because I once rescued some pussies from a refuge.”

“Where are they now?”

“Oh. I don’t know. I had to take them back to the refuge.”

An hour passed.

James heaved himself on top of me. He whispered in my ear: “I was always faithful to Margaret, right to the end. I cared for her for eight years. But she always said to me: ‘After I’ve gone, James, please feel free to impart jouissance to whomsoever you do wish. Otherwise it is a crime against women.’”

“A crime?”

“Yes. And let me tell you, there was crime in her jouissance too. The way she howled when she came. It reminded me of an animal caught in a trap.” He rolled off me. “It was the same sound that she made in the hospital bed during her last moments on earth. She howled like she was coming. She howled because she wanted more of life.”

His tongue slid into my mouth; I pulled away. He sucked on my nipple like an energetic little baby and I let him for as long as I could. Then I sat up and lit a cigarette. Out of the window, I watched the traffic circling around something in the distance.

“This is a nonsmoking room,” he said.

I put my cigarette out on the lid of the truffle box. “Would you say that Margaret was your muse, James?”

“Perhaps. I never thought of it before.”

“Because there was this one time that Sebastian and I were sitting on a bench outside Finsbury Park station and he was like: ‘I never believed in the concept of the muse until I met you.’ We were about eighteen. I had no idea what a muse was. He said a muse was a mythic woman who inspired men to make great literature. The men extracted her feminine essence. She couldn’t create anything herself. Sebastian said he was going to extract my essence. He sounded really mean when he said that. I got up and I was like—I remember that he was smoking a Marlboro Menthol—I’m not your fucking muse. Then I ran off. He caught up with me. He said that being a muse could be really sexy like Betty Blue. We had watched that film recently. I said: ‘But the woman goes crazy. She gouges out her own eye.’ And he said: ‘But the man writes a novel about it, so it’s worth it.’ And I was like: ‘It’s worth her losing an eye?’”

James stuck his finger inside of me.

“Yeah,” I went on. “So like a couple of months later, our teacher entered us both for this writing competition. We both got short-listed. We had to go to the Royal Festival Hall. It was really boring. The man who was a poet or something was going on and on and then he announced the winner of the prose category. Sebastian won it for ‘The Reluctant Muse.’ He went up to the stage like a fighting cock and read a bit of it—something like: ‘“I’m not your fucking muse,” she shouted into the biting North London wind.’” I laughed. “I was shaking because I was so nervous but it turned out I won the poetry category. So it was fine. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to look at him. My poem was called ‘I’m Not Your Fucking Muse,’ and there was a line in it which said: ‘I’ll fuck you up.’”

“That’s charming,” said James.

“On the way home, the teacher was going on about how Sebastian and I were going to be like Ted and Sylvia. ‘But Ted cheated on her,’ I said. ‘And Sylvia killed herself.’ The teacher said: ‘Well, you can be like Ted and Sylvia without the cheating and killing yourself parts,’ and Sebastian was like: ‘Don’t worry, Miss. Ann-Marie and I will be together forever.’” I stopped.

There was a long silence.

Finally James said: “Who’s Ann-Marie? I thought your name was Camille?”

“Oh—yeah. That was before I changed my name. Camille is my stage name. But I changed it legally, so it’s real.”

“So you’re an aspiring actress?”

“Yeah.”

James held my breasts from behind and murmured: “What really turns you on?”

I paused. “Offal.”

“Offal?”

“Yeah. Tripe in cream and onions and . . . hearts. Big, bouncy hearts that crunch like an apple when you bite into them and stuff kind of spews out. And kidneys, smelling of piss.”

“Piss?”

“Yeah,” I said with passion. “Piss.” I jumped off the bed. “Play, boy!”

James looked startled.

“Play!” My voice was imperious. “Why don’t you play?” I went back to my normal voice. “That’s what Miss Havisham says to Pip in Great Expectations.”

“Have you done a lot of community theater?”

“Yes. And professional stuff. RSC stuff. I played Miss Havisham—at Cambridge.”

“I can just imagine you in rotting white lace,” he said, lurching forward and grabbing me with both hands. His face looked full of hate for a moment. Then he pushed me backward on the bed and I couldn’t see his face anymore, but I could feel his mouth latch onto my Venus flytrap and eat it out like a little boy who’s terrified his plate will be snatched away at any moment. He ate and ate and ate. My heart was banging. I tried to push his head away, but his scalp was too well-oiled and my hands kept slipping off. He was good at it. I began to moan. I tried to sit up, but he pushed me back down. I had a terrible feeling of losing, as though he were taking the most precious thing I owned.

And then I came.

I lay there, limp and blank.

It seemed to blot out something there in the darkness. It seemed to blot out the darkness itself.

James’s face appeared, wet and triumphant.

I said thank you like a good little girl leaving a friend’s birthday party, dressed, and ran down leather hallways until I was alone again in the blue light of dawn. I staggered to the nearest trash can and was violently sick.