Fay Weldon - Rhode Island Blues

The decision finally reached was that I was to recut the love scenes between Leo and Olivia to show an absence of passion rather than a surfeit, as both young people struggled to define their gender identity. This was no great problem for me, since it reflected the actuality of what went on between them on camera. The end was to be changed, which fortunately there was sufficient random footage around to do: a conventional happy ending became one rather less conventional but more convincing. Olivia went off into the sunset with her best friend: Leo with his. The suggestion that the same-sex friends were shortly to be lovers I was able gently and delicately to imply. The film could now be described as brave and edgy, pushing back the frontiers of contemporary experience, it no longer had to be a heart-warming story of young love. It would not please the overseas Islamic markets, but would do fine in the non-Catholic West. ‘The Studio’ were thrilled by their own decision, seeing it as, I quote, ‘seminal to a new generation of gender cinema’. We went into a London pub (their idea) to celebrate and they drank gassy water and managed to score some coke – the supply side in LA had recently run into some trouble, apparently – and got the last flight home.

Nearly everyone was happy about this new turn of events, except by all accounts Krassner, who bit my neck as I did what I was paid to do, and handsomely paid at that. Krassner’s artistic integrity was acknowledged to be under threat, though I had the feeling he would be laughing like the rest of us if he didn’t have a reputation to preserve. The writer was not particularly happy, either, but then writers never are, and Clive our producer, whose film was now going to come in way over budget, was white and exhausted, and in a state of shock, but this is what producers are paid to be.

‘Please do not bite my neck,’ I said to Krassner. But I had come to almost like the slightly sweaty, anxious, obsessive smell of his breath as he craned alongside me towards the screen, and it mingled with mine. Stray strands of black hair interwove with my red tendrils, which by sheer bulk and energy won any encounter. If I tossed my hair out of my eyes, as I did from time to time, a few strands of his would leave his scalp and end up in mine. There seemed an intimacy between us, the greater because we had failed to spend the night together. Matters were still all promise, no disappointment. My bed had held a companionable waft of Krassner as I snatched a couple of hours’ sleep before getting to the cutting room, and to my surprise I hadn’t minded one bit. He’d left a note saying he had wormed the cat: a homey touch, though he had not shaken out the duvet. But then, neither had I before he got under it.

‘I’m not biting,’ he said, now. ‘I’m neurotically gnawing.’ It was true, his teeth – all his, and perfectly capped or veneered or implanted or whatever they did with the teeth of the older man nowadays – slipped gently over the surface of my skin, his full lips following. You don’t get anywhere in film by claiming sexual harassment: that’s for people about to get out of the business anyway. You can get a handsome award but you never work again. For some it’s worth it. Not me. And I liked him gnawing me.

We were three hours into editing when Krassner got a personal phone call from LA. His turn to disentangle his hair from mine, leaving a few more of his strands behind. He took the call. ‘Why hello, darling,’ he said. ‘Yuh, the rumours are correct, we’re up shit creek again. I’m stuck here. Why don’t you fly over to me instead of me going over to you?’

I stopped listening: how stupid I had nearly been: I cut off all reaction. Any shoulder in a storm, that was all my shoulder was to Krassner. Someone nudged me and said that’s Holly Fern on the line – I’d heard of her, who hadn’t: she being the new talent on the block, singing and dancing, according to her people, just like a reborn Ginger Rogers – I thought that was pretty stupid because whoever these days had heard of Ginger Rogers – and with a degree in philosophy which publicity also foolishly did to death. It was from a crap college. ‘Against stupidity,’ my mother Angel once said to me, ‘the Gods themselves strive in vain.’

Nobody had hair as good as mine, but hair isn’t everything, and just because I got up ordinarily with mine in the morning, didn’t mean others couldn’t get the same effect out of a hair salon, if they were prepared to spend half a day achieving it. I wiped Krassner out of my mind, moved my shoulder out of his line. Back at the console he dug me in the ribs and said, ‘Whatzamatter with you?’ but I didn’t deign to reply. It doesn’t do to aim too high, the fall’s too hurtful.

That night I called Felicity. I tried to get her to tell me more about Aunt Alison but she wouldn’t.

‘I shouldn’t have brought it up,’ she said. ‘What’s the point?’ She quoted from Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters.

‘We have had enough of action, and of motion, we, Roll’d to starboard, Roll’d to larboard, when the surge was seething free,

Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.’

No, she hadn’t heard yet from the Golden Bowl but if they wouldn’t have her she would sell up anyway and go round the corner to the nearest residential house. Joy’s brother-in-law Jack had turned up and made an offer on the house and she had had to disappoint Vanessa.

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘$750,000,’ she said.

‘But that’s lower!’ I was shocked.

‘It’s all he can afford, I won’t have to pay agent fees and I don’t want to disappoint Joy.’

‘How do you know he can’t afford it?’ I asked. ‘Because Joy said so?’ ‘I don’t know what you’ve got against Joy. She’s a better friend than you ever were a granddaughter. Just because she’s a bad driver doesn’t mean she’s a bad person.’

‘No,’ I said bitterly, ‘she just prefers animals to people. Big deal. Is Joy’s sister moving in too?’

‘She died a year ago: Joy hated her, loved him.’ I asked if this meant there was romance in the air and Felicity told me not to be absurd. Joy hated sex but liked to have a man about the place to shout at.

Felicity was not moved by my anxiety that the house was sold, and the Golden Bowl had not yet confirmed her apartment. She said one room was much like another when you got older: one steak as hard on your teeth as the next. The I Ching had given her Biting Through, Chen Chi. She must bite resolutely through obstacles: then she would be rewarded with supreme success. I could tell these were mere delaying tactics: she would talk about anything at all except my lost aunt. I cut her short and asked her directly who the father of her first baby was. I pointed out that these days there is no family decision which can be made without consultation: if you gave away a family member you were giving away relatives for future generations, too, and you had to be answerable to them.

To which she replied tartly that I was a fine one to talk, since I was slipping out from under and having no children at all.

I said no, that’s why I wouldn’t be answerable to anyone, lucky old me. But she had, and so she was. You had to know your genetic background if only to keep the Insurance Companies happy.

She said don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs: she lived in Norwich, Connecticut. There were only two things to bear in mind. Death Only Insurance Policies meant they bet you you’d live longer than you thought you would, and annuities meant you bet them you’d outlive what they predicted. And they had whole departments working on it and you didn’t, and they normally won.