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  DECEIT IS ONE BENEFIT OF LAZINESS

  for everywhere it seemed like nothing was happening

  Not that at this time it felt like mayhem, not precisely. It was only softness and the colours softness comes in: pistachio, vanilla, peach. That kind of softness was something I appreciated very much in those around me. Like one day we ran into our school friend Nelson. Nelson was often in the newspapers as an essayist in showbiz and the cinema. When the film stars came in by helicopter from the north or south, Nelson was there to greet them. And now here he was on some very sad backstreet, explaining to me happily how he very much appreciated that he could take part in his child’s breastfeeding. It was beautiful, the way he described it. He held the baby very gently so it could suckle at his wife’s breasts, because the one thing to avoid was specific roles for the mother and the father. As much as you could, he said, you should therefore do everything together. And I adored this happy thinking very much, and wondered if deep down this wide-eyed aura, the way this world we all inhabit is lit according to the pastel colour-palette of chemicals and candies, was an effect of our education. For our school was basically a country club, if by country club you can also imagine the hypereducation at a small Renaissance court. And also that it was devoted to the various halfies and mestizos, the octoroons and griffes: all the anxious children and grandchildren of immigrant peoples. Everything we were taught was to erase all differences between people – and here were its fruits in front of me in the sadsack figure of Nelson, and in our bright environment more generally. There were trips to watch the sailing boats, or frescoball or snooker, or to the park with its lemonade stalls. While Hiro and Wyman and I pursued sprezzatura pastimes like getting fat, or fatter, eating peanut-butter waffles and vanilla shakes, or sometimes both together, in some deliquescent form of sundae. And yet still, this was how the mayhem happened, as softly as it could, like the mayhem came in on tiptoe. Hiro for instance had taken to sporting a variety of wigs – the blonde, the retro, the goofily creative. Personally I found his energy liberating but not everyone saw it that way: they saw it as worrying, or dangerous, or other therapeutic terms. He was spending time on the Internet and comparing kinds of firearm, and if Wyman expressed his worries at this development, Hiro was unruffled and unconcerned.

  — You’re such a perfectionist, said Hiro, making his coffee very heavy with much sugar, then swallowing some pills. — Chill out a little.

  Or I would come downstairs and encounter strange vignettes and conversations, things like:

  HIRO

  I mean, what about when you’ve just had the worst haircut in the world before you meet someone for possibly the first and only time and you very much want to explain that this is not your usual look although of course you can’t? You are resigned to the real you being absent from the picture. You do not think the real you is the haircut but you cannot explain this –

  CANDY

  You OK?

  HIRO

  Well, sure.

  MY MOTHER

  That’s excellent.

  HIRO

  I mean, I don’t know how I’d know.

  While before each party Hiro would arrive from one of his outings with a selection pack for everyone, and it’s very possible the narcotics were primarily to blame for this whole sense I was having of entanglement and Fate. Like I keep forgetting to mention one strange message. Is this Danger Mouse? a stranger wrote to me, from an unusual country code. Am I talking with SuperTed? But then, you get a lot of mixups in this time with much available technology so I tried to think no more about it. Instead I made sandwiches consisting mainly of Kewpie mayo and around me happened the great arguments of the day.

  MY MOTHER

  He needs a job.

  MY FATHER

  Absolutely.

  MY MOTHER

  Why don’t you go back to your work and ask?

  ME

  I did ask.

  MY MOTHER

  And?

  ME

  You know this.

  MY FATHER

  He needs a job.

  For if you are very much not importing lapis lazuli to be sold in an airport concession, or supplying mini pretzels and other snacks to a hotel chain on the Pacific coast, then the time you would have spent in such activities will need to pass in other ways. Time was clumped and thick, like time was congee. It was a pocket or pause and when that’s the scenario it’s hard not to start experimenting with what’s most available, like how long you can drink a coffee, or how many gore movies you can watch in a row. And while I know I said I gave up work for this dream of art, I suppose I should also admit that I had so many doubts in that regard – doubts as to whether this was in fact too late, that this was the end of youth, the end of stories, the end of art, doubts which will enter this account, but not just yet – that such a method of occupying time was only the slightest tremor on the edges of my thinking. I preferred the idea that a life might be a work of art instead. For my new leisure, it turned out, permitted also the invention of new categories of phenomena – dark possibilities of fantasy and deceit.

  which allows our hero to develop new desires

  No wonder that the principal way I spent my time when I was not with Hiro was therefore in pursuing my adventure with Romy. As a way of spending time it was definitely one of the most intensive, involving as it did so much composition of email and other messages, and framing of photos, and then the timing of how or when to send them. And then waiting for all the various replies. Or if there was in fact no reply, then obsessive consideration of the reasons for this absence. I understand, this way of spending time, in at least the language of the Churches or any other orthodox synagogue and ashram, does make me a no-good person. But show me the soul that is not a trash vortex, gathering its plastic in the otherwise bright blue sea. For the deep temptation of massive leisure time that is perhaps not obvious to you as you read this on the metro, is that leisure time gives you all the means you need to deceive other people: it is you who are commuting and hard-pressed with deadlines who are going to be luckily limited in your interior life, and therefore unavailable to temptation. Whereas the unemployed have so much time at their disposal. When a person needs a secret phone call or long meeting it is always possible to arrange. Not that I don’t understand the potential priestly disapproval of such lies and infidelity. But once you discover how pleasant are the acts which hurt another person without them knowing, and how easy it is to do, then it’s difficult to resist, for the knowledge is then forced on you against your will that the terms of this world are much softer than you ever assumed. I think that Romy knew this, too. She liked Candy and did not want to hurt her either, but why, we used to discuss with each other, should anyone ever be hurt? The ideal was just pure lightness.

  shielded by the alibi of his sadness

  Such purity in a boy! You generalissimos and judges who deplore this state of affairs, that I enjoyed myself in this rainbow bubble while my wife worried about me very much, and encouraged me to enjoy myself in any way I wanted, thus making her an accessory in her own cuckoldry, or whatever old-fashioned word is necessary for such actions – can you not see that we had no other choice? It was our general rule. If Candy ever showed she was worried about my domestic state, then it would show she did not believe me and my confession that I was sad, and since she had to show she believed me, that she was convinced that my sadness was so great that it led to my leaving parties and sitting alone as nighthawk or madman in the diners and cafes of this city, she therefore also had to be now all compassion and disquiet. She encouraged me to spend any time I wanted in nocturnal excursions, since she wanted me to be happy, and she did this with so much tenderness that I started to believe her, and imagined myself heavy sad. But then, perhaps this is not so insane. I mean, how ill is ill? If you imagine something afflicts you that is in fact not afflicting you, how can you ever tell the difference? Inside the thought balloon it is absolutely as bad as the medical textbook thinks
. Just as when we try to itemise our feelings the problem is that, given how many feelings can be inserted between our thinking and our worst motivations, is it really dishonesty in a person when they do not acknowledge their obscene and gorgeous urges? In such an impasse I would stand there in the kitchen making doughnuts or other treats, while Candy stood there in her suits, trying to understand my difficult emotions.

  CANDY

  How’s things, baby?

  ME

  Not so good.

  CANDY

  You think?

  ME

  I do.

  CANDY

  Well, you don’t rush yourself, OK?

  Such power does lying have! It really can do anything. And maybe this word power is not untrue. I think it might be true that in this world I am blessed with an entirely unmerited power.

  but which creates upsetting nocturnal fantasies

  But while I did enjoy myself very much, exploring my conversations with Romy which were now heavy with the talk of apertures and openings, or if not direct talk then the intimation that such talk was on the brink of substitution, it was also true that there was this darkness I could not ignore, among the brightness, like the black circle left in your eyes if you’ve been suddenly just dazzled. To be thinking about two people at once was very difficult, and its effects could be seen in my secret nocturnal thinking. For at this time as well as picturing Romy in various undressed postures, I also sometimes pictured her dead or at least just gently disappeared. It happened not only in my dreams but also very consciously. Or instead I imagined it the other way round and it was Candy who was dead, thus leaving me alone with Romy, which was in some ways good and in some ways not so good. Although of course I have never really known any aloneness of any kind, nor ever experienced in any form what it feels like for the people you love to be dead; there is no major death in my family or among my friends or lovers or really acquaintances – until the events I am describing, my life had been marked by an absolute absence of blood – and I think that’s also true for many of the people around me, like Wyman or Nelson and their cartoon families. It makes me comical and innocent, absolutely, but perhaps it also offers a perspective on the death of other people that usefully has no emotion in it. For although ever since I was young I was taught by my mother that you should never wish anyone dead, still, surely it must be usual to consider the death of someone else – it must happen even if you are a woodsman or bond trader? A death can be a definite solution for some otherwise impossible situations, and one such situation was this scenario where I pursued multiple lives when really you are meant to pursue no more than one at a time. I could not see how the various lies would be resolved and it upset me, and so I was often given to conversations with Romy in my head, where I would say: Romy, qué pasa? And she was tearfully saying to me goodbye, as I softly poisoned her. At the time I did feel guilty about this and thought that such thoughts were shameful, but I wonder now if the fault was really mine or instead belonged much more widely and to society, for should it really be true that such a multiplication of one’s affections must be always circumscribed? All I was trying to do was solve an infinite conundrum.

  given the obvious complications

  And I think this was all the more difficult because Romy was my friend. Had she been an acquaintance unknown to everyone I might have felt a little more relaxed. Whereas to think of the many ways in which Candy might find out! – which would for instance involve Romy telling someone we both knew, but this would only happen if Romy hated me or wished me harm, which I found doubtful, but then another possibility was some tiny slip where I would mention some detail of blood or hospitals, or perhaps could have been seen at the hospital by someone else we knew who had perhaps overdosed or become involved in a stabbing or altercation, because it’s difficult to know who might be anywhere. So I stayed awake at night and imagined Wyman or Shoshana – although Shoshana, true, was no longer in the city – watching me from the cafeteria, just seeing me arrive bloodstained with Romy and noting this, like some Gestapo stooge. And in remorse I leaned over in the night and kissed my wife very softly. Those were the thoughts I possessed in this time, and it requires a certain character to cope with them – for lying is a talent like any other, like eating or happiness or drug-taking, it’s one of those things where you think you can just do it but in fact it takes training, intuition, physical stamina. And of course I do not mean at all that I did these things without guilt, it is guilt precisely that I am trying to describe, but especially for all my other selves, the selves I might be losing if I never continued into these adventures.

  — You what? said Wyman.

  — Listen! I said.

  For what never gets said in these discussions of morality is the deeper problem of timing. If you have married so young, and Candy and I, we did marry very young, in full innocence and sincerity, then what then?

  — You stay together, said Wyman, — or you split up.

  — Is not so simple, I said.

  Because it really is true that everyone thinks they will not be there when someone dies, I mean when someone dies who is not their endless and married love. Or certainly I thought this was true about me. The only person I imagined ministering to at a deathbed was my adored wife, Candy, and even then I hoped I wouldn’t because my preferred option would be that the person who would be dying would be me and in her arms. In every possible future I ever imagine, my wife is there. That’s what I think inside although I know that on the outside it creates some difficult appearances, a possible carelessness about the feelings of other people – when in fact I think the opposite is true, I think too much about other people. If I can make anyone happy, I want to do that, however complicated the consequences, however much it leads to a way of thinking that expands itself in waves, or like the way the bees arrange themselves, inside their vibrating hives.

  whose structure reveals a universal sadness

  And sure, I said to Wyman, my most spiritual friend, as we smoked some preliminary chemicals in preparation for a night out, later on in this account, when I was nostalgic for such simple worries, I know that in human history the majority of sadness belongs to the dependent women. I know that the breakdowns have always been those of the bedridden woman – leaving the lunch table in hysterics, then setting up church bazaars and everyone pitying them. I totally know this but also now, I tried to argue, I knew what they knew. Me too I was the victim of my economic circumstances! I was like the heroine in the telenovelas. I was the woman cheating on her husband with her black gardener, and taking Valium or other pills while reading horoscopes in the tabloids. I don’t mean those examples are the only other examples of sadness in human history. In the annals of the Song Dynasty I’m sure there were husbands and wives who were also perplexed by their leisure time. I just mean that when you have this vastness at your disposal then it’s only natural to feel let’s say a little hopeless or unhappy even if, having said that, I can do the next part of the interview myself, as something like: But then what do you expect, kid, when you leave your place of employment? I know this is the one-dollar question. You also wanted meetings with your PA? You wanted to make art, sure, but also have a heavy schedule of appointments? Sure, I understood. But still, it was upsetting. Life! I wanted life! And really, was this so unusual? More and more I was convinced that the most urgent task, in every megalopolis, was how to use your time – how, in other words, will you reveal it as grander than it seems? It’s so easy to know what Beauty looks like in a statue or a painting, but what does it look like in a life? Me, I ask this question all the time and at least that’s an occupation like any other. Lethargy, I think, is a difficult accusation. For surely it’s possible to argue that the Zen master in his padded cell is doing more work than you. And if it is, well, sometimes so was I. I was very busy with my reflections –

  the lost art of happiness

  – like in particular one conversation with my friend Tiffany, who taught at the university, when
she berated me for even hinting at the wish for other lives. You ask for this and then you hate us for it? Is that it? This was basically Tiffany’s argument. You want to be looked after and have this wife who brings home the roubles and rupees and then it makes you also feel aggrieved? Well, maybe, snooks, she was basically adding, as she looked at me in scorn, you could just grow up for a moment. I totally did see the justice of how she was arguing but also I really did not, for the values by which she seemed to be judging were both unimpeachable and not my own. In many ways I feel let down by my friends. It’s like that film which Tiffany loves, where the black and white people begin an affair and then go back to their husbands and wives. Why, she once said to me, when I was not at all talking about this, should a possible future happiness be worth more than the present happiness of two people? And I wanted to assert that I really could not understand it. About happiness I am often wrong but at least I would like to believe it is the only question. You want what, she then added – a life without regret, is that it?