Money_ A Suicide Note - Martin Amis [108]
'Are you all right down there?'
I tipped my chair back. Martina's face, veiled by the hanging brushwork of her hair, inspected me from an upstairs window.
'No,' I said, 'it's heaven down here.'
The face withdrew silently. And so I sat out on the terrace in the hot dusk, drinking wine among the puppet bees.
We ate in. This spooked me somewhat. I had booked a fashionable table at the Last Metro on West Broadway, and was generally keen to push out some dough. 'Cancel,' said Martina. And I cancelled. She made dinner. Omelette, salad, fruit, cheese. White wine. The two-floor apartment presented itself as the ordered setting for healthy and purposeful lives. Books, paintings, desk surfaces, a typewriter, a chess set, a tennis racket standing easy against the closet door. Upstairs Ossie's fresh clothes would be set out in lines and stacks... The tall Martina wore a V-necked jersey and a blue denim skirt. She has a useful hind-end on her, and she's blessed up top too, though perhaps not as fulsomely as I imagined. No, it's her own body, not built on any model. 'Let's stay in,' she had said. 'It's just nicer.' May I be frank? Are you sure you want to hear this? Well I'll own up now and say that I have always secretly suspected that what Martina fancied was a bit of rough. That's right — me, in the sack. It sounds unlikely at first, I agree. But people are unlikely these days. It's happened. Twenty years ago she would have settled for her home, her interests, her burnished husband. She would have given me no headroom. But now? You just don't know any more — you don't know, they don't know. Why has she persisted in my chaos? I mean, what am I here for tonight. My conversation?
Mind you, she always appeared to like me. I used to see them around, in the Sixties, Ossie and Martina, the optimum couple. He would help her down from the running-board of the Landrover they went about in, and the tall pair would advance hand in hand into the marquee or theatre foyer or converted tramshed or through the doors of the favoured restaurant or speakeasy or eel-and-pie shop. They turned heads, those two. Part of their glamour lay in the firm fact they were so eminently and maturely a couple, rich but clean, while the groundlings were alleycatting around or blitzed on drugs: LSD, dope — yeah, and penicillin. Ossie was an actor then. He did Shakespeare. I wonder what she thinks, now that he's just a money-man, like everyone else. I knew Martina from way back at film school, and I used to amble up with whatever stylist or make-up girl I was squiring and say hi to the talented team. It did my rep a lot of good. Martina always seemed pleased to see me. Perhaps she fancied a bit of rough, even then.
So, towards the end of dinner, as Martina stood at my side pouring out the last of the wine, I rammed my hand up her skirt and said, 'Come on, darling, you know you love it'... Relax. I didn't really. In fact I behaved doggedly well all evening. You see, I'd figured it out by then. Oh, I knew what her angle was — I knew what this Martina Twain character was after. Friendship. Friendship: no sex or duplicity or complication, no money, just frictionless human contact. Well that's no fucking use to me, is it, I thought at first. I was out of my mind with sobriety, teetotalled — I felt lightheaded, I felt downright drunk, eating dinner up here with this sicko who saw nothing in me but myself. Jesus, what kind of pervert am I dealing with now? And yet I steadied, and the talk came freely enough. It takes all sorts, I concluded with a shrug, and resigned myself to the whole deal. Besides, I had this boil on my ass.
I did try a gimmick on her, though, as I took my leave at eleven-thirty.