Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [82]
Grove woke him, around four, as usual. He fought off his clothes and crashed down onto the bed—comfortingly redolent, as usual, of Tattoo and amyl nitrate.
In The New York Review of Books Cleve saw an ad for an “all-straight sea cruise,” Philadelphia to Maine. Why did this haunt him so? He found he no longer laughed when friends cracked straight jokes. How many straights does it take to change a lightbulb? He seemed to see more and more straights in the street now, not just in the immediate environs of Greenwich Avenue but over on Eighth Street, over on Washington Square. Cleve continued to put in the hours at the gym. The great bolts of his shoulder muscles now brushed the very lobes of his ears. His superb upper body: would it be truer to say it was under control or out of control? Cleve’s gym was called Magnificent Obsession. How often he would plod from Magnificent Obsession to the Idle Hour, from the Idle Hour to Magnificent Obsession …
His hypochondria took a turn for the worse—or did he mean for the better? Because his hypochondria had never felt hardier or more vigorous. Cleve was already an exorbitant devourer of health sections and medical columns and pathology pullouts in the newspapers and magazines. But now a fellow hypochondriac—and self-topiarist—at Magnificent Obsession kept feeding him more and more gear. These days Cleve was even reading The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. In its pages he had started seeing references to what they were now calling Straight Cervix Syndrome. And seeing the straights in the street Cleve would wonder if something was waiting for them, something of the same size as their newfound tautness and address.
Cleve broke up with Grove. Grove with his entirely unromantic untidiness, his intelligently selective consumerism, his dharmic trances, his foul temper, his plans for the afterlife, and his 2.7 nightly sexual contacts. For a while Cleve was two-point-sevening it himself. But now he had fallen for a talented young chinoiserist called Harv.
“Pride and Prejudice?” said Cressida.
Every winter Cleve reread half of Jane Austen. Three novels, one in November, one in December, one in January. Every spring he reread the other half. This was January and this was Pride and Prejudice.
“Yeah,” he said. “For like the ninth time. What I can’t get over is—every time I read it I’m on the edge of my seat, rooting for Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy. You know—will Elizabeth finally make it with Charlotte Lucas? Will Mr. Darcy finally get it on with Mr. Bingley? I mean, I know everything’s going to turn out fine. But I still suffer. It’s ridiculous.”
“I always thought Elizabeth would have been happier with the De Bourgh girl. What’s her name?”
“Anne. It’s weird Jane Austen never had a girlfriend. I mean she had all those babies, like you had to do. But she never got laid.”
“And she understood the human heart so well.”
“I want to know something Jane Austen couldn’t tell me,” said Cleve. “I want to know what he’s like in the sack.”
“Who? Drink your coffee.”
Cleve drank his coffee. Santos and Java: cappuccino.
Cleve and Cressida had met up here at the Idle Hour—oh, a whole bunch of times. He would say quite frankly, if asked, that he enjoyed her company. Perhaps, too, he felt it was by no means unsophisticated to number among his acquaintances an intelligent straight friend. “Mr. Darcy,” he said. “I have to know what Mr. Darcy’s like in the sack.”
“Mr. Darcy. So do I. Masterful.”
“Majestic. But gracious also.”
“Tender.”
“But kind of strenuous. ‘Fitzwilliam’ Darcy. That’s so Hot.”
“Presumably he …?”
“Oh, for sure.” Cleve hesitated, and shrugged, and said, “I think we can safely assume that it’s Mr. Bingley who takes it in the ass.”
“Absolutely. That’s a lead-pipe cinch.”
He considered her. Most of the women Cleve knew tended toward the extremes of high burnish or unanxious self-neglect. Little smocked refrigerators under pudding-bowl haircuts, like Deb and Mandy in the adjacent