Ménage (29 page)

— Will he ever speak to me again?

I lied, said, — Maybe . . . We’ll see, sure. Let me try and smooth things out with him, OK?

— Would you?

— Sure, trust me, it’ll be fine.

But I knew that she had destroyed what we had, because it had been a secret we could not reveal even to each other,
and
she had filmed it with a video camera, for all the world to see.

Pills. I didn’t think she had any left, thought she had got rid of them all, but she had to take some to calm herself. There were two new large bottles in the bathroom, Valium and something else.

Saul returned with two boxes of sherry, and would not speak to me. I went to his door – it was locked – and whispered through the wood.

— Open up, we have to talk. Please, Saul.

After ten minutes I heard him hiss from the other side.

— We need to need to ditch the bitch! I told you she was sick. Months back and you wouldn’t listen.

— Please, try to be reasonable, and lower your voice.

I waited and waited, then his voice, dark and phlegm-filled: — If you can’t get rid of her, then you’ll be forcing me to take care of the situation myself.

I sat in silence on his doorstep. Then his hissing words came.

— So be it!

I couldn’t wait around worrying or let her worry for a second, so I made myself indispensable and kept us both furiously busy over the next few days, drawing up lists of to-dos, shopping for her, for extension cables and scarts and other video things, reassuring Dot that her TV on a plinth in the midst of the vast warehouse was a great artwork, that the thing with Saul would blow over. The frenzy of exhibition preparation, generated by the many artists fighting over exhibition space, distracted me from the fear of Saul’s smouldering scheming.

On the night of the opening as Dot and I prepared to leave without him (his door had been close to us for three days), Saul, to our surprise, asked if he could join us. He seemed perfectly benign. He’d even given her some hope,
talking
politely, about how important
Bug
must be for her and almost apologising for his mood of late, then excusing himself to get dressed. I tried to encourage her.

— See, he’s over it, it’s just his way. He hates being emotional and never likes picking up his own messes, he’d rather pretend nothing happened at all. Trust me.

His appearance when revealed was resplendent, head to toe in all of his leathers: trousers, waistcoat, gloves, with his overcoat with antique Nazi regalia. I told her it was his way of being funny, his sign of forgiveness, he was, after all, Jewish.

— Let’s just let him shock everyone and steal some posh wine and within the week he’ll have forgotten everything and we’ll be back to day one again.

She was still afraid to talk to him. She did not wear one of her new radical outfits but only jeans and a T-shirt, and it took her three hours to decide on even that. I heard her talking to herself from behind her door.

— It’s OK, it’s going to be OK. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

On the way, in the tube, Saul was silent, sitting across from us. I took Dot’s trembling hand and every time she jabbered her nervous sorry and thanks to him, I gripped her tighter.

— Thanks, Saul . . . You’ve no idea how much this means to . . . You’ll get to meet Sarah Lucas and take the piss out of Hirst if you fancy or . . . It’s not really my art but yours. I mean, you should be taking all the credit.

He simply nodded, staring out at the passing stations.

Inside, he marched ahead of us, up the many dusty stairs. There was a DJ playing a Happy Mondays/James Brown hybrid, and maybe two hundred people. She clung to my hand and so I led her on with encouraging whispers. Apart from her single TV screen showing our cross-dressing tape, the rest of the art was of little consequence: some things that looked like archery targets painted onto the walls; the usual
exhibiting
of banal consumer objects as if they were some damning indictment of our time, à la Jeff Koons – in this case, a cappuccino maker on a wooden plinth and some slogans on hand-painted cardboard on sticks as if made for a demonstration that said, ironically: ‘DON’T ASK ME’ and ‘I’M WITH STUPID’. There were some packing boxes that I’d seen before, assuming they contained art ready to be unpacked, which turned out to be the art themselves. There was some
tableau-vivant
diorama of a working-class domestic living room as an installation in the middle of the space, right next to Dot’s TV, which no one had seemed to notice.

— It’s great, I said, — maybe the TV’s a bit too small, but I’m sure folk will look at it later.

But her eyes were scouting around for Saul. Finally she found him and pointed him out to me – in the midst of a crowd at the free bar. Dot wanted to wait for him but I considered it better to mingle and let him find us and that would also be a sign of his forgiveness.

So Dot introduced me to so many artists and gallery owners. Adrian Searle, from the
Guardian
, was there, looking fashionably knackered but marvellously aloof. Dot got chatting with Tracey Emin about men’s underpants as if discussing Kant’s aesthetics. I wanted to butt in but there were so many people around them and my underpants were not a fit topic of conversation. I glanced over and some girls in seventies retro wedges were touching Saul’s leathers, giggling and whispering in his ear. I told Dot everything was going to be fine and tried to make her laugh. Pointing out the female performance artist walking round wearing nothing but a black plastic bin bag, asking people to give her their empties. Clinking around with empty beer bottles and plastic cups inside. Nipples exposed as the weight of crap increased around her. She was from Northern Ireland, she told everyone, it was an artwork all about the Troubles. Dot got the guts then to leave my hand and within minutes was in
the
midst of the throng, ranting about Saul’s ideas, how life itself should be an art form. The tall man with the retro glasses, Pierce I assumed, was flirting with her, telling her how wonderful she was and how rumour had it that one of Saatchi’s buyers was here tonight, undercover.

I looked around for Saul but he had abandoned the girlies. I presumed he was downing swift ones at the bar. It was the explosion that located him.

The space cleared rapidly around the commotion. He was standing in Dot’s space, bottle of wine in hand. The TV lay smashed on the ground. The man who must have been Pierce marched over to him.

— Please step away from the art!

Two hundred people fell silent.

— I don’t see any signs around saying don’t touch, Saul shouted back, flicking back his hair. — Really, if you’re going to put
objets d’art
on display you should at least make sure they’re securely fastened.

Pierce grew increasingly irate. Dot headed towards him through the crowds. Saul was smirking, waving the bottle. — So we’re in the Victoria and Albert, are we now?

Dot tried to quieten them both, taking Saul’s arm, all apologies to him and the strangers around.

— Get the fuck out of the art, Pierce shouted, as Saul wandered over to the next artwork, the realist diorama, and started picking at the fake authentic fifties wallpaper, pulling off a strip, smiling to himself.

— So this is art, is it? he pronounced sarcastically, loud enough for everyone to hear. Dot tried to pull him away but he shook her off violently. There were mutterings beside me of ‘drunk’ and ‘loser.’ Women in designer grunge turned away. Searle headed for the door. I was frozen to the spot.

— I must apologise to you all, Saul declared. — I was bored and simply wanted to watch TV, but then it fell over. I’m sure this is a wonderful radical work of art, and that we’re
all
having a lovely time being truly ‘out there’, I was just deconstructing, it all seems to come to pieces quite easily. You’re more than welcome to join me. Take a piece of art home.

And he tore off yet another strip of wallpaper. That was it. Pierce stepped inside the diorama and tried to remove Saul by force. Saul dropped the bottle. As he bent to pick it up, Pierce grabbed his arm and he staggered back against the fake wall. It fell to the ground with a bang, blowing dust into faces. Dot started shouting sorry, sorry, in the ruins, as Pierce struggled to try to lift the wall back in place, but he started sliding in the broken glass of Dot’s smashed screen, cutting his hands. The warehouse was rapidly emptying. The almost naked woman in the bin bag marched over to Saul, Dot and Pierce.

— No, he’s right, she shouted — this is all decadence, think of the starving in Bosnia!

Saul broke into hysterical laughter and the woman by his side was paralysed with confusion.

— Fuck Bosnia, he yelled. — Fuck Ethiopia! Bomb the lot of them! She clinked away from him, joining the throngs of the leaving. Pierce grabbed Dot’s arm, shouting, pointing a bloody finger at Saul.

— Is this cunt a friend of yours?

Dot stood there silent and Pierce headed for the door. She ran after him, and slid in the glass, tearing her jeans and skin, apologising, trying to explain. Someone had started taking flash photographs. My final glimpse was of Saul, throwing beer bottles to the floor, one after another as if listening to notes they made, singing along to some song in his head. Probably Wagner – Dah dahdey dah dah, dah dahdey dah dah.

I could not sleep through her screams at his locked door. Through the gap in my door frame I glimpsed her, on her knees, weeping: — Please, please, open up, I’m sorry for
whatever
I did . . . I don’t know what I did wrong . . . just please, open your door.

All she had left now was her degree show and it was such a cop-out and made her sick, sick, please, please, she repeated. I couldn’t bear it any more, got up and tried to take her from that place but she shrugged me away, her face weeping mascara, her fingers bloody, a smudge of it too on her cheek.

— Take your fucking hands off me! . . . You did nothing, you stood there and watched like a fucking . . . you did nothing . . .

I walked away. The whimpering resumed as again and again she pleaded I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please, please, please. I glimpsed her curled on his doorstep like an obedient dog. Back in my room, I heard the William Shatner album start up. His excruciating rendition of ‘My Way.’ Shatner was a failure. Saul was a failure, now she was. We all were as shit as Shatner. Saul once again had it all, his way.

I wanted to run but could not for fear of seeing her face in the hall. She ran past my door, slammed hers, then the noises were of things being thrown, crashing and smashing. I covered my head in my stinking pillow, knowing that she was right in her judgement of me. Once again, I did nothing.

All that long night her howling kept me awake as I tossed and turned and tried to find a way to save her. I would borrow money from her and we would leave together, that was the compromised plan. When I finally found sleep light was coming up.

Awake, I found the flat silent. I waited outside her door, listening for a noise inside. Then knocked. No reply. I opened the door and witnessed the aftermath. Her stereo was smashed and thirty or so records lay in pieces on the floor, littered among the thousand torn pages of his books.

In the toilet I found another, lying face down. The
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
, as if one of them had left it there for me to find. Many pages were earmarked. Quotations underlined in pen. As I leafed through I learned that the many aphorisms and epigrams Saul had spouted over the years were not his own. Valéry, Barthes Niezsche, Wilde, La Rochefoucauld, Cocteau, Chesterton.

‘The future is a thing of the past.’

‘Stop all this talk of equality. We only want to be equal with our superiors!’

The charlatan had sat there for hours each day memorising aphorisms to make himself sound intelligent. From a cheap book of quotations. It was even worse than his Duchess book – it constituted almost every word he had ever said. The plagiarist. I decided to write up my proof and present it to him, as a gift, on our departure. As he was out and she too, and I could do nothing, I sat and read all the underlined quotes and took apart the basic arithmetic of his so-called intelligence.

How to create a Saulism:

You take a simple proposition, widely accepted as a commonplace truth, say ‘work ennobles man’, then you swap the words around and invert the proposition, thus: ‘Work is noble but I have never seen a noble who ever worked.’

Or just take a word, say ‘desire’ and turn it against itself. ‘My only great desire is to cease desiring.’

Or: ‘Indifference seems to be the only thing I’m indifferent to.’

I had wasted years marvelling at his witty ripostes, and all of them were an equation, a formula, for ignorance, in fact.

‘There is nothing more ugly than the manufacturing of beauty.’

How piteous a character to always be just playing with words throwing them back in people’s faces, to make them laugh at the undoing of what they’d just said. But never to
progress
beyond reaction, as those you have played with are given pause and say, ‘How true, how true.’ And what a hollow victory.

‘I can think of nothing less natural than people communing with nature.’

Oh yes, I saw him clearly then, after years wasted worshipping his words. He would weep, I thought, when he read my analysis.

‘Staring into the void is greatly overrated.’

And people found him a wit.

‘Wilful stupidity seems to me to be the only intelligent course of action.’

‘Blind faith is the last refuge for those who have seen too much.’

And his other variations:

‘Never forget that we live in the era of forgetting.’

‘Ignorance is bliss is a thing I’ve only ever heard intelligent people say.’

‘I feel rather lured by the allure of failure.’

We had believed in him and he had trashed us, like so much rubbish. He could no longer pretend to a life without repercussions. Finally, he must have seen there was a cost. Finally I had the courage to spit in his face and leave.