Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [38]
“The act of darkness,” said Rock, causing Rodney to contemplate him strangely. “How sweet. And how retro. You’re getting to know each other first.”
“Well that’s just it. She doesn’t … We don’t …”
Rock and Rod were leaning backwards on a mahogany bar, drinking Pink Ladies, in some conservatorial gin-palace off Lower Park Avenue. Inspecting his friend’s anxious leer, Rock felt a protective pang and said suddenly,
“Have you done anything about your money yet? Talk to Mr. Jaguar about it. Soon. Americans are very fierce about tax. You could get locked up.”
They fell silent. Both of them were thinking about the four or five seconds Rodney would last in an American jail. Now Rodney stirred and said.
“I’m in a mood to celebrate. It’s all very exciting. Let me get you another one of those.”
“Ah. You’re a white man,” said Rock absentmindedly. “And do let me know,” he added, “when you’ve slimed.”
Rodney was one of those Englishmen who had to get out of England. He had to get out of England and grow his hair. Helpless against his mother, his grandmother, helpless against each dawdling, prating, beaming miladies they somehow conscripted him to squire. When he tried to break out they always easily reclaimed him, drawing him back to what was theirs. They owned him … Rodney had a fat upper lip which, during those soggy years, often wore a deep lateral crease of resignation—of vapid resignation. In the Chinese restaurants of Chelsea you might have glimpsed him, being lunched and lectured by a heavy-smoking aunt, his arms folded in the tightness of his jacket, his upper lip philosophically seamed.
“You get to my novel yet?”
“What?”
“Have you read my novel yet?”
“Ah. Pharsin.” Rodney collected himself. “The thing is, I’ve been trying to make time for it in the afternoons. But the thing is …” He gazed unhappily down Greenwich Avenue. Sunday morning, and everyone was staggering around with their personal burden of prolixity, of fantastic garrulity, of uncontainable communicativeness: The Sunday Times. “The thing is …”
The thing was that Rodney worked every morning and drunkenly socialized every evening, and in the afternoons—the only time of day he might conceivably pick up a book or at any rate a magazine or a catalog—he went to bed. With humming ears. And perpendicular in his zeal.
“Come on, man. This is getting insane.”
Rodney remembered a good tip about lying: stay as close to the truth as you dare. “I’ve been trying to make time for it in the afternoons. But in the afternoons … My lady friend, do you see. I, uh, ‘entertain’ her in the afternoons.”
Pharsin assumed a judicious air.
“For instance,” Rodney enthused, “on Friday afternoon I was just settling down to it. And in she came. I had your novel on my lap.”
This was of course untrue. Pharsin’s ruffled, slewing typescript had never made it on to Rodney’s lap. It was still under the piano, or in whatever corner or closet he had booted it into, months ago.
“She come every day?”
“Except weekends.”
“So what’s your solution, Rod?”
“I’m going to clear some evenings. Settle down to it.”
“You say Friday afternoon you had my novel on your lap?”
“Just settling down to it.”
“Okay. What’s the title?”
Pharsin stood there, skyscrapering over him. Each of his teeth was about the size of Rodney’s head. When he leant over to spit in the gutter, you’d think someone had voided a bucket from the third floor.
“Give it up! What’s the fucking title?”
“Um,” said Rodney.
Pharsin he had first encountered in the southwest corner of Washington Square Park, that inverted parliament of chess, where the junkies were all Experts, the winos were all Grand Masters, and the pizza-bespattered babblers and bums were all ex–World Champions. Rodney, who for a year had played second board for the University of Suffolk, approached the marble table over which Pharsin showily presided. In half an hour he lost a hundred dollars.
Never in his dealings with the thirty-two pieces and the sixty-four squares had