Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

Up till now he hadn’t stared at her breasts. On the contrary: they had been staring at him. But now he stared at them, and they stared back. ‘Feel.’ What could he say — that he’d ‘prefer’ not to? Instead, to postpone it a second or two, he said, ‘I don’t know what fake breasts feel like.’

‘Yes you do. You’ve felt mine.’

‘Have I? But yours aren’t fake.’

‘But they feel fake. Feel.’

He felt. She held his hand in place with her wrist and powerfully inhaled.

‘If you put your cupped palm out of a car window and feel the air going past … Some breasts are thirty miles an hour. Some are fifty. I’d say mine are about seventy. Speed-limit breasts,’ she said, and let his hand drop. ‘Where was I? Yes. Five. I’m little.’

‘What?’

‘It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? I measure five foot and a credit card. I weigh eight stone sopping wet. I magnify the man. I’m a cock-puppet … Now that last point has a bearing on what happened at Pearl’s. I’m going to describe it to you, and then perhaps we’ll know where we are. And I think I will have that third Martini. You may have to help me to my suite.’

On screen, actors blink only when they mean to; and when Xan decided he wanted to be an actor he had spent a lot of time practising not blinking. ‘Stotaring!’ his mother used to say. ‘I’m not staring. I’m practising not blinking!’ Now, in the fat hotel, Xan was trying not to blink. Because whenever he did, he saw the two of them naked on the carwash of her bed … Yes, the world was going, was seeping away. He could feel bits of it closing down; they made a sound like a computer’s final sigh — a faint ricochet, a distant miaow …

‘It was about one o’clock in the morning. There was a hard core still at it in the sitting-room, but it was thinning out, and everyone was pretty far gone — except you, funnily enough. You weren’t drinking, but there was other stuff going around and maybe you’d had a puff or a toot, I don’t know. We agreed to meet in the garden. You know at the far end, through the arched trellis, there’s a hut or Wendy house that’s not actually on the property but you can get to it through the gap in the hedge?’

‘We called it the Monkey House,’ he said thickly. ‘It belonged to the little girls next door. But they grew up.’

‘Well, in we sneaked. It felt childish, and we were laughing quite a bit at first. You know: playing Doctors in the parkie’s shed. Then it happened. Oh, nothing very serious. This came down, and this came up, and you caressed me fairly thoroughly. Listen, at one point … I was getting rather tired, standing on tiptoe, and I said it wasn’t fair, your being so much bigger than me. And you lifted me up with one hand, so I was on your level. You used your other hand to steady me. But you lifted me up with one hand.’

‘How?’

‘How? It was the hand that was between my legs.’

There were too many monkeys jumping on the bed. One fell down and broke his head. They went to the doctor and the doctor said: No more monkeys jumping on the bed … Xan tensed himself, below. It was still there: like a section of solid cartilage.

‘A reconstruction, a reenactment of that moment,’ she was saying, ‘up in my suite, might bring it all back … Xan, I feel I may have alarmed you slightly, with all this talk of incest and pornography. Unstable things. Alien things. But as you see I’m in perfect physical and mental health. And I’m little. I know that after accidents people feel very fragile. But I won’t hurt you. How could this’ — she shrugged — ‘hurt anyone? And you deserve it, Xan. You’ve had a very hard time and you deserve it. You don’t have to touch if you don’t want to. You can just watch me glide around in my underwear for a while. Size zero. And then slip quietly away.’

His memory had got him into this; and now maybe his memory was going to get him out. The first instant, in the lobby, had been for Xan a sexual coup de foudre ; yet he still believed that he could muster some kind of counterforce to it — could avoid the occasion of sin. Thereafter a reptilian ponderousness had slowly spread itself over his body, coagulating into one purpose, one meaning. He was the slow-eyed crocodile who has watched and waited, who has watched and waited long enough. Simultaneously, for minutes on end, he felt like a heavenly body in space, urged towards another heavenly body of far greater gravity; he felt celestial attraction. Others, other things, the world: all of it was about to disappear … Then a memory came. A memory came, like a flare, bringing with it a series of forced deductions.

He remembered that on the evening of his injury, when he was on his way out of the house, on his way to Hollywood, to hospital, he had said to his wife: I have no secrets from you. And he remembered that he had meant it: he remembered the undesigning light of his own veracity. Every man has secrets from his wife, those letters, that photograph, the guest-appearances and thought-experiments that come as ghosts to the master bedroom. But Karla, with her dress around her waist: that qualified as a secret. In the last few minutes Xan had been hoping that what she said was true: that he had indeed lifted her off her feet. Because it was something well worth doing, and if you’d done it once, what was the point in not doing it again?

‘And, in the morning, I get on a plane and fly five thousand miles.’

He said abruptly, ‘If you’re not a friend, what are you? Do you know the name of Joseph Andrews?’

She seemed to take it like a tiny blow from a tiny enemy. But her voice was firm and cool: ‘Yes. It’s in your book. I assumed it was just a joke about Henry Fielding. “Lucozade”. Easily the best.’

‘Thank you. I think so too. And you’re not my enemy?’

‘Oh I’m your enemy all right. Come on. What do you think? That I’ve got … that I’ve got a motion-sensitive camera up there? And tomorrow morning, a liveried courier delivers the cassette to your wife? It would start in the lift: we’d wait for an empty one. Look at this place. You can feel it on top of you, tons and tons of it saying that the body should have it good. I’m offering you a modern temptation: one with no consequences. Come on up. It’s no more than what you deserve.’

The temptation, he considered, was implausibly extreme, and it would be ridiculous not to succumb to it. She was right. The fat hotel wanted it to happen. Before him, on the table, the two cocktail glasses were a pair of female thighs, and the two shots of unfinished booze, the slowly seething gin, were their hosiery … Against this luxury he could array only the luxury of uxoriousness — a luxury of the mind, merely. And Russia was far, very far, perhaps unrecapturably distant; and Karla was near.

Xan shook his head and at once she called for the bill.

‘In the dictionary,’ she said evenly, removing her key from her bag, ‘the third meaning of tempt is to risk provoking a deity or abstract force. That’s what you’ve just done. As a sexual temptation this was nothing. And now you’re going to have to watch me walk away.’

‘Wait. How do I — ’

‘Do what I did and call your agent. Now you’re going to have to watch me walk away. And it’s already too late to change your mind: this time. I’m going to leave you with a visual paradox. My mother was very feminine, but so was my father. And I’m a doublegirl. How does it go? Haunch touching haunch, breast touching breast, each touching each. Look at me walk away in my doubleskin. And you’re going to think: that’s my cock, walking away.’

She was on her feet in front of him: the sheer white dress with its pools and hollows. Now she swivelled, with the straw strap on her shoulder. She laughed harmonically and said, ‘It’s so sweet. Fathers have the ridiculous idea that …’