“The built environment, Chuck. The human home.” He scratched his head: “Where did I read that?”
“You must be spending money like water but you seem to have more money than ever.”
“That’s the way money works.”
“Not for me it’s not.”
“Yeah, but you don’t understand money, Chuck, you think it’s a finite resource, but it’s really not. Everywhere you look there’s a fucking pile of money just waiting to be picked up, you just have to decide if it’s yours. Money doesn’t need to run out. Ever. You have to recycle it, spend it, and make it come back to you”
“Fascinating, Jimmy. Bloody fascinating.”
“So you want to meet my wife. She’s pretty spectacular. But not what you’re expecting.”
“What am I expecting?”
“American woman. Good body. Yoga, macrobiotic diet, full of Californian sincerity, ultimately not interesting, but a great body, which acts like a counterweight, even though half of it is fucking genetically modified. It’s always much easier to be interested in an attractive person, don’t you think? You end up playing this game with yourself, laughing at yourself, telling yourself what a simple guy you are because you’re prepared to put up with this dead-head who’s kind of dumb but nicely predictable. And there’s something very articulate about beauty.”
“You married a dumb woman because she’s beautiful?”
“No, no. I told you, you’ll never guess what she’s like. You won’t know until you meet her.”
“Okay. When am I going to meet her?”
“Listen Chuck, have another drink, something stronger than green tea, okay? Something like a caipirinha. Ask the girl downstairs to mix one up for you. Then sit in the whirlpool for a while. There’s one on the terrace right outside your bedroom, sit and watch the swifts until you’re slightly bored. Boredom is good, remember that! It sets you up for a good evening. Then put on some clean clothes and come down to the dining room. We’ll be waiting for you.”
“What’s her name?”
“It’s Archie.”
“Where’s she from? That’s a man’s name.”
“She’s British. Well, Indian-British. Punjabi parents. Now go and clean yourself up. You’re a typical Brit. You arrive off a plane, travel for another two hours in a taxi, arrive, crash, get up in the morning, slum around in a dressing gown, and by lunchtime you still haven’t had a shower. Go and have a shower. Please.”
“How do you know if I showered?”
“I know everything that happens in this house.”
I do what he says. I sit in the plunge pool, I watch the swifts and have a drink and start getting bored. The room is stark, not even a television in there. Just a bed, a lamp recessed into the wall, a cupboard recessed into another. One insanely uncomfortable chair made of moulded birch. The doors leading onto the terrace are partially shaded by overhanging eaves, again with carved dragons. The terrace is sharp-edged, and the plunge pool reaches to the edge so that when you’re in the water you feel you might tumble off. Peering down, you see another angular terrace just below, also with a pool, this one with dark green plants all round it, lending more shade.
Sardinia is a very hot place. When the sun gets too oppressive I climb out, go inside and top off my glass with whisky from the suitcase; cheap stuff, too aromatic for this heat.
Bloody swifts make a racket, but at least they keep themselves busy.
This is good, better than London.
For a moment I forget myself, and it’s a blessing.
II
Although there was no one else in the room I felt we were being watched, almost as if the table were on a stage.
Archie was quite impeccably presented. On her left, Jimmy was vigorously attacking his plate, with grinding jaws. For my part I concentrated on his wife, who unnerved me.
“So you’re Archie?”
“I’m not the cleaner.”
“Ha-ha! I’m Chuck, good friend of Jimmy’s.”
“I hope so. Otherwise what are you doing here?”
“Most people come to stay because they’re looking for something to bitch about,” Jimmy threw in. “Klaus is not like that.”
“So I see.” There was a pause while she transferred her attention to me. “Are you German?”
She was too damned charming, too much sex appeal. I swallowed my nerves and tried to sound casual. “No. I just had cruel parents with a strange taste in names. Call me Chuck, everyone else does.”
Archie’s eyes were black and inscrutable, yet also filled with consolation. It made me want to dredge up some long-gone hurt, and tell her all about it. She would have consoled me.
She was wearing a long red dress covered in tiny pieces of mirror-glass; it was cut low across her magnificent orbs, with a hint of glistening black brassiere offering a whiff of the wild country.
I was not, I hasten to add, lusting over my friend’s wife. I was aware of her qualities, which is entirely different. Whenever I felt myself quickly tearing my eyes away from what she revealed, I felt her consolation washing over me, carried by a wistful, knowing smile. She was aware of the fact that men are hopelessly, mechanically drawn to a well-made woman, even if that woman is a merciless harpy.
Archie, incidentally, seemed perfectly pleasant. Not a harpy at all.
“So what do you think of my wife?” Jimmy blurted out, eager to hang his clothes-line through the middle of our conversation.
By now we were sitting down, and the maid had just plonked down big white plates with carpaccio of tuna and exquisite arragosto tails.
I smiled and said, with my mouth full: “I never use the third-person when the third person’s sitting there, but I think she passes with flying colors.”
“Why are English guys always feeding you bull?” Jimmy said, with an uxorious glance at his wife.
“The English are so good at platitude. They spend their lives in it. They get embarrassed if you stray off it,” she said.
“Fuck! The platitude of Englishness.” Jimmy shook his head. “Makes me glad I’m American.”
I cut in. “Look, the English are very passionate people. It’s just we’re passionate about saying as little as possible. We’re passionate about being reserved.”
“English men make the best lovers,” said Archie. “They’re so repressed that they end up being dynamite in bed. They go off like sodding warheads.”
“Anyway, you’re English,” I said. “Don’t let Jimmy make you the foreigner.”
“When you marry an American who has no country, you learn to deconstruct yourself. It’s even easier when you’re a second-generation immigrant.”
“And you’ve done it, have you? Deconstructed yourself?”
“Of course. I get to swan around in nice dresses while staff serve me delicious food. Next week we’ll be in our flat in Paris. Jimmy will be off working somewhere, maybe his shopping mall in China. Do you know where I grew up, Chuck? In Southall. You know where that is?”
“Of course. Best curries in London.”
“Yes. The best curries. That’s about it, unless you want a cheap sari.”
We ate. The windows were open, and swarms of swifts kept screaming as they darted over the tiled rooftops. I lit a cigarette without asking—guest’s privilege—and then sat quietly watching a sculpture in the middle of the table, a circular figure with a hole cut diagonally through the bronze, about forty centimeters high: probably a Henry Moore.
Jimmy put down his fork, drained his glass of wine and looked at his wife. “We haven’t told him the most interesting thing about our marriage. Have we?”
They looked at me. I stubbed out my cigarette.
“My wife’s a nice-looking woman, right Chuck? Most guys would think we have a great sex life, lots of action every night, no wonder we’re always making an excuse to get an early night. Right?”
“But we don’t.” Archie said. “We don’t have a sex life.”
“Do you want to rephrase that, honey?” said Jimmy.
“We don’t have a normal physical relationship, and by that I mean...”
“We’ve developed a concept of non-sexual coitus.”
I looked from one to the other. “So is this why you invited me down? To help you sort out your sexual issues?”
“Told you he’s great, Archie, you can always rely on him to say something fucking great like that! No, you stupid son-of-a-bitch!”
We smirked at each other, although I was feeling a bit puzzled, then compelled to fish for information. “Maybe you just need a long holiday together, so you can—”
“You don’t understand,” said Archie. “We have the best sex I’ve ever had. It’s just we don’t touch each other. At all.”
“It’s kind of a mental thing,” said Jimmy.
“Sex is too predictable,” said Archie. “Totally externalized, not holistic at all.”
I turned to Jimmy, and for an instant, I saw the sadness in him, revolving slowly like a dying star throwing out its wavering beams. Aha!
After the late lunch, I made an excuse and went to lie in my plunge pool, vacantly yet with thoughts circulating in my mind, much like the vultures I saw over the yellow mountain at the top of the valley.
III
Call me a simpleton, but if I had a wife like Archie with lovely dark eyes and beautiful curved eyebrows, and a sensual mouth like a jewelled half-moon, bright pearly teeth and long slim arms, her whole body light brown and velvety, fronted by swelling breasts, all borne up by legs of good length but not of the spaghetti variety (personally I have never liked women with limbs like pasta), I would certainly look forward to lying in bed with a book, looking up as she undressed, peeling off her garments one by one and then tiredly climbed into the bed, revealing her soft waist, curving hips and dark bifurcated triangle. I would wrap my arms round her, and we’d both start looking for release in each other’s bodies. I would watch her eyes swooning as she gradually lost touch with the night, the particularity of us lying there, the damp soft air, the frogs croaking outside from pools and the mosquitoes wailing like miniature pipes.
It would be just like that. If I had a wife, I mean. I never had a wife of any description. Loneliness holds fewer perils than anything thrown up by togetherness, as exemplified by Jimmy and this gin-trap into which he had so willingly inserted his foot. Mental sex. What sort of nonsense was that? He just had to be suffering. Sure enough, he’d met the woman of his dreams, but this fabled meeting with the love object was not the end but rather the beginning of the quest. Archie had led him into a terrible adventure. Now, although he was bound to her, she was denying him her body, whilst at the same time consoling him and softening the loneliness of existence with her charms. He, brave fool, was making the best of it.
Why were women so corrosive, so dangerous to a man’s happiness?
All I could do was to lie there and, in Jimmy’s words, listen to the swifts until they started to revolt me.
IV
I was aware of an imminent boredom.
This boredom grew all day without cease. The streets were empty but for old women in their black glad-rags, working at lace-making in the doorways or leaning over bowls of still-steaming white ricotta cheese. No activity, no youth, no vigor, just the regularity of tolling bells, furtive priests and moss sprouting between the paving stones.
The plunge pool became my refuge, my blessing. I lay prostrate in it, a long-suffering look on my face. Heaven does not always conform to our expectations. It does not, for instance, necessarily take the form of a Le Corbusier vision of stark lines, cool vistas, and high-density concrete, nor does it have a New Tibetan influence of over-hanging hardwood eaves and carved beams. In the end, modern architecture is an attempt to overlook the basic human reality. Whether we like it or not we do not dwell in the halls of Olympus.
As I lay there looking up at the pair of elongated, carved serpents above my head, I heard a sound from the terrace below. Because of the angle of the eaves, the sound bounced with perfect clarity. It was a woman’s voice, probably Archie’s. I listened intently.
“Thank you, angel.” That was all she said for a while, but there was emotion in her voice, a nuance that I immediately recognized as sensualized gratitude. “Yes, good, you are finding it. There! Oh God!”
Finally I couldn’t contain myself any more. I paddled to the edge of the plunge pool and peered down at the oasis on the terrace below.
What did I see? Not Archie on a beach towel, semi-naked and writhing under Jimmy, vulpine, bursting with virility.
No.
In fact, what I saw was Archie wearing a chaste white toga fastened at her shoulder with a golden clasp, her hair fixed on top of her head, revealing the curvature of her spine and a gracefully arched neck. Jimmy, meanwhile, was in a thick-towelled dressing gown, a rather unfetching little number, dark blue with a sort of striated pattern down the sides.
They were facing each other across a small teak table.
Placed in the middle was the Henry Moore sculpture I had seen at lunch. Jimmy was stroking it with his hand. As he did so, Archie rolled her head and closed her eyes. Jimmy then gently pushed his hand into the hollow, stroking the edges with his fingers. All the time he watched her with an intensity like a boy spying on a woman as she takes off her bra. Archie reacted with a sharp intake of breath. Her nostrils flared, her lips opened in a grimace of pain, almost.
I had seen enough. Quickly I withdrew and lay in a state of incomprehension, breathing a little too hard. There was a measure of panic, even.
There is a moment when you lose emotional tranquillity. Even if what you had before was acrid and full of bitterness, even if you had nothing much to celebrate, still you miss it: that stasis when you had nothing and expected nothing.
Now I had the image of Archie, the curvature of her spine, her yearning mouth.
The boredom had gone and I missed it.
V
A few hours later I sauntered down an air-conditioned corridor towards the games room, where as usual I found Jimmy lining up a shot at the snooker table. He assumed an air of light-hearted sarcasm towards me, hardly even looking at me. “Chuck, you look wet. So you actually made it into the shower today? Did you find the soap as well?” His long red failed spectacularly, leaving the pot on and spreading the blue and pink disastrously. “Let me ask you something. You think my whole life is one big picnic, right? Just because I have money, a lovely home and an amazing wife? What you don’t get about me is that I’ve suffered. I’m a sufferer. I’m not just rich by accident, I’m rich because I fought for it. I planted this damned money-tree and watched it grow. For years.”