Still Here (9780748112357), page 11
My Issie. The forward thrust of the knee, the suggestive placing of the hands in his trouser pockets, the lips flexing their muscles round the cigar - I wanted him to bury his Victorian cock inside me. I’d fuck him in a heartbeat, lying down on that bed of chains. No masseur or personal trainer or tennis coach has what turns me on, which is what Issie has, I mean the explosive force that can stand up to me. Only the man who engineered the nineteenth century in steel and iron could meet on an equal footing a woman who tried to face down a department of feminists determined to rehabilitate Myra Hindley.
Issie got into difficulties. The building of the Great Eastern was a fiasco. His imagination pushed far beyond the available technologies of his era, the mid-nineteenth century; the damned engines just didn’t give him the power he needed. Then the company foisted a collaborator on him, a man named Russell. What artist does not want to kill his contractor? It was a joke - bad management, intrigue, rumour, financial problems, poor quality control and in the end it was only because of Issie’s colossal energy that the ship was launched at all. Chains snapped on capstans, men died, a public-relations disaster, and it killed him. He was only fifty-three. He comes to me in the night and I hold him, my short, cigar-smoking engineer, dead since 1859. I take off his hat, put his cigar in the ashtray, remove his coat, unlace his boots, ease the stovepipe trousers off his tired legs. Exhaustion overcomes him and he falls asleep for a minute, and while he is dreaming I take his cock, run my finger along the length of the long dark vein. Still sleeping, he reaches for my breast and he is waking into arousal, his eyes opening on my face and we kiss. Then I suck him and then he fucks me. His bald head, sweating, is on my shoulder, his teeth clench on my neck. We each come in our own time (he waits for me) and then we lie back in my late-twentieth-century sheets and I pass him an ashtray and a lighter and he reclines, smoking his cigar, silent, thinking of Tarmac roads, viaducts, aqueducts, engines that replace horse-power, and I say, ‘Issie, listen, you want to know how to build a machine that flies?’ I tell him about houses veined with invisible wires, electricity coursing through the brick body, the whole place lit up, humming, radiating power. Heat and light are the properties of the new age he’s going to miss. ‘It’s all about energy, Issie,’ I tell him. ‘The world is running quicker and quicker, we overreach ourselves and come, if you have the energy, fuck me again.’
Dressing after the shower, after I had come so forcefully, as I always do when in my imagination I make love to Issie, I looked at myself in the mirror and saw the outline of a tall, ageing woman whose hips were too wide and whose arms had the familiar batwing flap of flesh beneath them and I thought, Oh, come on, who are you kidding? I sometimes fill myself with revulsion, never mind anyone else. My breasts are veined, the aureoles puckered. A few hairs grow from round each nipple. My pubic hairs are greying. Last year I menstruated a total of seven times. Oestrogen is draining out of my body, abandoning it like waters from a floodplain, leaving me high and dry, empty and arid. My vagina is drying out, the walls are papery. The collagen withers in my skin and I am deluding myself if I think that Joseph Shields, who could have a woman half my age, is going to want me.
There is a decent thing to do, according to some of my friends, which is to embrace celibacy. To end the pact I made at twenty, that I would reward myself with nothing less than my own pleasure, this is what they are proposing. How can they ask it of me?
I had vowed to meet no sexual demands other than my own. I would give no more and no less than I took, and I had planned to take plenty. I would never mortify my flesh, neither by abstinence nor by the modish compulsion of whips and handcuffs. ‘The whole business is overrated,’ some of my friends said. Not to me. Sex was always sublime, I came easily and still do. I never went to an orgasm workshop, or bothered with junky books like The Joy of Sex. I knew exactly what sex was, it was natural right from the beginning, and in my twenty-first year, never having heard the word fellatio, without even experiencing what became, later, the familiar pressure on the back of the head, it occurred to me to wonder what the cock might feel like if it was embraced in another damp place. The tongue was almost without limitations. From then on I saw the bodies of the men I loved as an erogenous zone entirely: the crook of the arm, the heel, the pleasures of the nape of the neck (which when my own was touched drove me to distraction, as if a divine creator - in which I don’t, of course, believe - had put its finger on the origin of the world), the anus, the cleft in the chin, the tender skin the tongue can reach just beneath the fingernails. But with a rent-boy? And a girl was out of the question. What draws me to men is my love of their cocks inside me. I am a very vaginal woman. I don’t deny that the idea of breasts is capable of exciting me and that a woman’s shape can be beguiling but, to be honest, when I look at a woman I am not seeing the outline of her body but, rather, am examining her clothes, her makeup, her hair, and thinking, Could I wear that colour lipstick? Or, Look at her neck, mine will go that way too, soon enough.
In Sam’s flat, sitting with the newspaper on my lap by the open window, I felt cold breezes blow off the water: rain was coming in from the Irish Sea. I was thinking about Italy, about a hotel I once stayed at on Capri, drinking prosecco and reading for the first time Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of the Thracian women who in revenge for attacking Orpheus were turned by Bacchus into oaks: their toes thrust down into the earth, their arms became branches and their hair leaves. I was trapped also in this veined, woody body.
I was forty-nine, I had plenty of money, I had everything of everything except the column of fire inside me that was ignited by sexual passion, which had smoked and blazed through my life, scattering cinders and ashes, since I was seventeen. I was afraid of who I was without it. And this is what they want me to transcend in exchange for yoga, multi-vitamins, homeopathy, acupuncture, Reiki, meditation, peace of mind and even Nirvana? I might as well be dead.
Now, Joseph Shields. Melanie was right, as he made very clear over dinner: he is totally married. His wife is called Erica. They live in Chicago. Back home he drives a 1997 Chevrolet Corvette ‘because that car’s a classic, the best car the American automotive industry ever produced and you know why? Because the company allowed the engineers to control it, they wouldn’t let the sales and marketing people into the meetings. From a design point of view it’s just beautiful. Inside it was all leather at a time when American cars had plastic upholstery you could wipe with a sponge and plastic panels that snapped on with those plastic snappy things. It didn’t rattle when you drove down the road and if you’re going to drive an American car, this has got to be it. My wife, on the other hand, says the car is just an extension of my cock and I’m still trying to figure out what her BMW says about her and if any of you have any information’ (here he looked at me, detecting the feminist, I suppose) ‘I’d be glad to hear it.’
They have three children, aged twenty-two, nineteen and sixteen, two boys and a girl, the eldest just graduated in film studies from Berkeley, his dad’s old school; the next one down at Boston ‘with no idea at all what her major will be’ and the ‘baby’ wearing ‘his pants half-way down his ass and breathing and sleeping and dreaming the skate scene, which is skateboarding to you and me. I like to hope he isn’t smoking dope yet, but my wife says, why wouldn’t he be? At his age, I was. Which is okay, but I worry because the grass they get nowadays is a lot stronger than when we were kids and there are all these other drugs like Ecstasy that I don’t know much about.’ Erica is a lawyer. She is employed part-time for a firm that specialises in class action suits and did a lot of work on the Dow Corning breast implant ‘that caused some deaths a few years back, and her job is what’s left today of the combined sum of what used to be our political activism’.
The morning after I met Joseph Shields, waking in my white room in Sam’s flat and considering the impression that I made on him, I had to ask myself, Was I sarcastic, overbearing, argumentative, talkative, emphatic, opinionated, loud? I didn’t know how I seemed that night over dinner or at the shiva house. Since I had come back to Liverpool I had felt muted, apart from my outburst on the edge of the muddy river. Grief and sadness muffled me, and also the relatives, with the endless question: ‘So when will I dance at your wedding?’
Then, some days after that coffee we’d shared at the Tate, walking past his site office, I saw him coming towards me, his head bent against the metal wind blowing in from the sea.
‘Hey,’ I said, ‘what’s up?’
‘It’s what’s not up, that’s the problem. Someone broke in and vandalised the place last night. You know, I really am tearing my hair out here.’
‘What’s left of it.’ And could have cut out my tongue as I said it: you don’t make those kinds of remarks to men you want to attract. They don’t like that sort of thing, no one does.
But he continued without apparent offence, not seeming to notice, he was too enraged. ‘I really don’t know what’s with you people. I don’t mean you, I mean the kind of punks that would pull this kind of stunt. You want progress or you want a sewer? You should make your goddam minds up. I’ve got a hell of a lot of my own money sunk into this and I’m not doing it out of the goodness of my heart, I’m not a philanthropist. I want to see this city back on its feet, but not at any price, not if it’s me that gets screwed. Believe me, I have my own problems.’
‘What’s the situation at the moment?’
‘One way or another I’m three months behind schedule and every delay costs me bucks. I don’t know what to think, whether I should reconsider, cut my losses, get out.’
This alarmed me. ‘No, no, don’t be disheartened . . .’
‘I am not disheartened, as you put it. I’m a businessman. I have to take hard-headed decisions.’
‘Whatever. I was going to say that you simply need to see things in the context of how we operate here. Why don’t you show me what you’ve been up to? I’ll see if there’s anything I can do to help, and I’ll ask Sam what he thinks.’
‘You mean you want to come and look at the site?’
‘Yes. I would love to.’
‘I don’t have a lot for you to see at this stage.’
‘That’s okay.’
‘You’ll have to climb ladders.’
‘I can do that.’
‘You’ll have to wear a hard hat.’
‘I am prepared to wear a hard hat.’
‘Boots would be a good idea too.’
‘I have boots.’
‘Work-boots?’
‘No, not work-boots.’
‘I don’t want you to slip and fall because I do have insurance but I don’t relish the idea of my hotel opening with all the attendant publicity about how it killed off one of the city’s leading daughters before it ever received one guest.’
‘Yes, I get you. I promise I will dress sensibly. Now my rules.’
‘I have never met a woman who does not have rules.’
‘This is as it should be. You don’t patronise me by telling your crew to treat me like a lady. I am not incapable of putting up with whistles and crude remarks.’
‘I’ll bet. You know, you remind me of my old sergeant.’
‘Your what?’
‘Nothing, never mind.’
I thought he said sergeant, which didn’t make any sense because you couldn’t imagine a guy like him serving in the army. It didn’t fit at all. Or not with my idea of the military, which is guys with poker-straight backs who went to Sandhurst and are married to women who’d rather fuck their horse.
After I reported this meeting to my sister-in-law Melanie over dinner that night, she replied, ‘Don’t you need to be anywhere?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What’s going on with the Romania project?’
‘I’ve got all the paperwork with me, I’m working on it.’
‘Aren’t you due a visit there?’
‘No. Not just yet. The field trip is months away.’
‘Because I wouldn’t want to think you were hanging around here doing nothing waiting for Joseph to make a move.’
‘Why? Do you think he won’t?’
‘Will, won’t. What difference does it make? He’s a married man.’
‘You can be hard, Melanie.’
‘What, me? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Melanie - who let Sam and me rant and rave and hold forth on all the ills of the world while quietly looking at maps of the Lake District where she and her rambling club went for weekend walks in muddy boots and shapeless anoraks, and missed the garden of their old house where she had planted plum and pear trees and not seen them come to fruit - had a moral code that was Mosaic.
While Mamma was dying we were thrown together, as we had not been since our teens when we both went to the Jewish youth club and I, the bratty, clever, younger sister of her boyfriend, had to be schmoozed and made nice to and allowed to borrow her peach-coloured Woolworth’s lipstick - who found such lines excitingly tawdry as the child of a mother who only wore Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein. Now, between bedside vigils, I had dragged Melanie to Manchester to shop for clothes, told her the big-shouldered, long-line eighties black suit she would wear for the funeral was out of the question, she needed updating, a new image, she should look at Armani, she could afford it. And what about a manicure? Those nails! But she couldn’t stand spending her husband’s money, even though the Rebicks were rolling in wealth. She had made Sam donate fifty thousand pounds to a hatful of charities she selected, all carefully chosen because then they could demonstrate practically that they had a cast-iron track record of doing good. She demanded results, case histories; if food was sent to a war-torn land she needed proof that it had not been stolen or squandered or sold by a corrupt dictatorship in exchange for guns. She particularly liked a charity that helped the victims of torture and was wary of the ones that trumpeted windily their commitment to human rights.
‘Why her, Sam?’ I had asked, when it became obvious that my brother was determined to ‘throw himself away’ on Melanie Harris, to sample no other girl from the moment he laid eyes on her at sixteen, and they were so indissoluble a couple that he gave up the boyhood dream of America, failed to fulfil the plan that had been in operation since he was born, when marriage to Melanie had made him refuse to go illegal, to bring up kids on the run from the authorities without the right papers or the right stamps on them.
‘I don’t know,’ Sam had told me. ‘She’s got something.’
Not charm, not obvious sex appeal, but that biting intelligence of hers. ‘Listen, Alix,’ she said to me, years later, ‘if Sam hadn’t married me I don’t know if anybody else would have done. Nobody was interested. I wasn’t popular. Nobody was lining up to beg me for dates. I was the one who the pretty girl made her friend so she would look good by comparison. A few years on none of it would have mattered. I would have stayed on at school and gone to university but you didn’t do that in those days. Boys did, not girls unless they had parents like yours. No one encouraged me. I didn’t encourage myself. As far as my father was concerned to get married was enough, and to marry Saul Rebick’s son! You’ve no idea. It was an honour.’
Saul Rebick’s son, who like his father could have ‘had anyone’, it was universally agreed, had ‘wasted himself’ on Manny Harris’s daughter, a nobody whose mother bought her clothes off a stall at Garston market, and who lived in a two-up two-down off Smithdown Road that smelt of stale cooking oil. This was the Melanie Harris who had stood behind the chemist’s counter helping the pharmacist until my brother asked her out, brought her home and made dead certain that from that day forward she commanded nothing but respect. ‘Listen, Alix,’ he said to me, when they got engaged, ‘Mel didn’t go to a fancy school like you did but in her own way she’s smarter than any of us will ever be. Get it?’ ‘Okay.’ They had been married for nearly thirty years, since they were babies, hardly into their twenties when Sam led her up the aisle in 1970, while he was still a law student. ‘Do you still have sex?’ I asked her, one day over coffee before the hairdresser’s when I was trying to talk her into some amendment to the style she had stuck with since before the kids were born.
‘Yes, we still do it, not as often and maybe there are problems I won’t go into, but we get up to things, we fool around.’
‘But he’s attracted to you, he can still get it up for you?’
‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say up, not up exactly, not all the time.’
When we were kids Sam and I had experimentally kissed each other, long, tongue, French kisses. At thirteen, three of his front teeth were knocked out when he fell from his bike and my mother ran screaming, just screaming, into the street, when she saw him, blood smothering his face like a shroud. It wasn’t serious but from then on he had worn a plate (later an expensive bridge) and so we tried our kisses with teeth and without. I had tingled in my brother’s arms, felt something hard against me, seen him pull away, his face white, and heard him slam the bedroom door. My brother, at sixteen, was a potent sexual being, and I at fourteen was the same. We were rushing towards the sexual revolution, we were practising for it. And I was washed up at forty-nine, and at fifty-two, I was now hearing, utterly shocked, my brother was a Viagra case.
