Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [84]
Over their cups of hot chocolate they had a vehement, repetitive, and hideously ad hominem argument about who was better: Jayne Mansfield or Mamie van Doren. They made it up while Harv unpacked the goblets that Cleve had bought him. And went back to talking about Harv’s birthday … In the middle of the night Cleve woke up and went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and thought: I am in a desert, or a crystal world. Every few years I go and whack off into a tube of glass: It’s like jury duty. I was formed in vitro. I didn’t get born. I got laid. There is no biology here. There is zero biology here.
Spring came. Fashions changed. Cleve hung up his leathers and switched to painter’s pants and Pendletons. He started on the other three Jane Austens: Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion. Harv learned how to cook Japanese. They took a trip to Africa: they did Libya, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Uganda, Zaire, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, the Congo, Nigeria, and Liberia. Cleve broke up with Harv. He two-point-sevened it until he fell for a talented young macraméist called Irv.
Just when it seemed that it could expand no further (where, he wondered, was all this coming from?), Cleve’s upper body burst into a whole new category of immensity. Hooked over the twin tureens of his laterals, Cleve’s arms now felt uselessly short, like those of a tyrannosaurus; and his head appeared to be no bigger than a grapefruit, forming a rounded apex to the broad triangle of his neck. Cressida was growing, too. On the street, on Greenwich Avenue, nobody looked at Cleve, because everybody looked like Cleve looked, but everybody looked at Cressida, whose sexual destiny, every day, was more and more candidly manifest. No need to out Cressida, not now … They didn’t talk about it. They talked about books. But as he escorted her from the Idle Hour, west, to the brink of Christopher Street, he noticed how people stared and pointed and whispered. Oh, Cleve knew what they were saying (he’d said such things himself, and not so long ago): reproducer, carrier, bearer, spawner, swarmer. On Greenwich Avenue, one time, an old woman called him a fertilizer. So they weren’t just staring at Cressida: they thought Cleve was straight. Walking beside her, now, his protective instincts were regularly roused; he could almost hear them, his instincts, waking up, yawning, stretching, rubbing their eyes. But he also felt that he was in the end zone of his fair-mindedness, his tolerance—his neutrality. How could you protect Cressida from what was coming her way? He experienced abject and lavish relief when, late in the fifth month, she left for San Francisco, to join John.
The supermarket tabloids were calling it the straight cancer and the straight plague, but even the New York Times, in its frequent reports and updates, struck a note of heavily subdued monotony that sounded to Cleve like the forerunner of full hysteria. A spokesman for the Bay Area Network of Straight Physicians noted that certain unsanitary practices, including (unavoidable) recourse to backstreet obstetricians, provided a “breeding ground” for disease. A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Straight Women’s Health Crisis Center demanded prompt government funding to meet the emergency—a demand that was itself dismissed as an attempt to establish “the first straight pork barrel.” A spokesman for the Anti-Family Church Coalition predictably announced