Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [39]
They got talking as they loped together, serenaded by saxophones and sirens, past the bobbing dope dealers of the northwest corner and out on to Eighth Street.
“Do you, uh, ‘make a living’ at it?”
“Used to,” said Pharsin through the backbeat of nineteen different boom boxes and radios turned out on to the road. “Chess hustling is down with the economy. Forcing me to diversify.”
Rodney asked him what kind of thing.
“It’s like this: chess is an art. You can do one art, you can do them all.”
Rodney said how interesting, and toddled on after him. It seemed to Rodney that he could walk through Pharsin’s legs and out the other side. No, not enough room: muscles stood like heavies leaning against the tunnel walls. Pharsin’s head, perched up there on that body, could only look to be the shape and size of a car neckrest. Rodney experienced respect for Pharsin’s head. Whatever chess was (an art, a game, a fight), chess was certainly a mountain. Rodney strolled its foothills. Whereas the forward-leaning cliff face that closed out the sky had Pharsin halfway up it.
“You see this?”
Halting, Pharsin from inside his hoodie produced a fistful of scrolled paper: an essay, a polemic, entitled “The Co-Incidence of the Arts, Part I: The Indivisibility of Poetry, Photography, and Dance.” Rodney ran his eye down the opening sentence. It was the kind of sentence that spent a lot of time in reverse gear before crunching itself into first.
“Are you sure you mean ‘coincidence’? Not, uh, ‘correspondence’?”
“No. Co-incidence. The arts happen in the same part of the brain. That’s how come I hyphenate. Co-incidence.”
Rodney had a lot of time for coincidence. Everything he now had he owed to coincidence. It happened on a country lane half a mile from his grandmother’s house: a head-on collision between two Range Rovers, both of them crammed with patrilinear Peels. All else followed from this: title, nerve, Rock, America, sex, and the five thousand twenty-dollar bills underneath his studio floor. And talent too, he thought: maybe.
“You English?”
“Oh, very much so.”
“My wife is English also. The oppressiveness of the class system cause her to leave your shores.”
“I sympathize. It can be very wearing. Is she in the arts too, your wife?”
“Yeah. She does—”
But Pharsin’s monosyllable was quite canceled by city stridor—someone detonating a low-yield nuclear weapon or dropping a dumpster from a helicopter. “And yourself?” said Rodney.
“Sculptor. Mathematician. Choreographer. Percussionist. Essayist. Plus the art you and I engaged in some while ago.”
“Oh, I remember,” said Rodney humbly. “I’m a painter. With other interests.” And he said what he usually said to Americans, because it was virtually true, geographically (and what would they know?): “I studied literature at Cambridge.”
Pharsin gave a jolt and said, “This intrigues me. Because I’ve recently come to think of myself as primarily a novelist. Now, my friend. There’s something I’m going to ask you to do for me.”
He listened, and said yes. Why not? Rodney reckoned that Pharsin, after all, would be incredibly easy to avoid.
Pharsin said, “I’ll be in an excellent position to monitor your progress with it.”
Rodney waited.
“You don’t recognize me. I work the door of your building. Weekends.”
“Oh of course you do.” In fact, Rodney had yet to begin the task of differentiating the three or four black faces that scowled and glinted through the gloom of his lobby. “The coincidence,” he mused, “of the arts. Tell me, are you all a little family down there?”
“Why would we be? I don