Adam Thirlwell - Lurid & Cute

leading to difficult knowledge

As we sat there under the duvet, Romy had approached us in a kind and welcoming manner, with more drugs in her hand for us to take — and I was happy to take them because I needed to feel differently to this way I was now feeling. The problem however with narcotics is that if you take them with other people they will have effects not only on you but on others, and it’s very difficult to control how other people will react. It’s one more reason to add to these infinite files of papers why the ideal society is so far away and impossible. In a soft blurred cloud we sat there, maybe sharing jelly beans, maybe telling jokes, until I understood that what was happening beside me was that Romy and Candy were now kissing. And in my cloud and general blurred state I did understand that I was being called upon to exercise a grand restraint on my feelings — for if I had found difficult the simple sight of Romy, this interlacing with my wife was a new conundrum — and I was not sure I was equal to it. It was like watching a koan live before me. Not perhaps that this is new, not entirely. The basic effect of our many drugs is to enable things that were previously not possible, and while this is an advance I think it’s possibly also the reason why loyalty is more complicated for me and my camerados than it was for our happy parents. It’s one of the great achievements of the age in which we live, this oversharing vibe, but it also can be stressful. Already I had experienced similar dilemmas, like take something as minuscule as the general fact that if all three of us were talking and Romy needed the bathroom she could easily just naturally beckon us in with her, Candy and me, without anyone perhaps noticing that this could be novel. And once inside, it was like two time frames were overlapping. There was the old one where I pretended that nothing strange was happening, and the new more secret one where I was very softly getting excited as she did this — I don’t mean anything’s visible when a girl’s pissing, they just lean forward a little while they talk to you and presto you could be on some sleek banquette in a lovely out-of-town restaurant, but the scene still made me excited and none of this, of course, could be demonstrated to Candy. Just as now I was watching her kiss Romy and trying to succeed in finding whatever gaze might be appropriate, which was after all the gaze appropriate to Candy, since I had no wish for the veil of illusion to be torn from our eyes. But since I had no idea what the appropriate movements might be, whether Candy wanted me to join in or watch or be unimpressed, for no one wishes to be married to the man who is a maniac, and has some seedy over-obsession with girls who also like girls, I settled for the most neutral possible tone. I sat there, trying to smile. Sometimes a smile is not easy at all, like crying isn’t, but nevertheless I tried to do this for my wife, because I loved her very much. And in such a tone, it turned out, I think I could have continued for a very long while. I felt safe inside that tone. Candy and Romy were now naked together below me on the floor, with Candy’s head resting on the edge of the sofa where I sat, ensconced in duvet. But it was after a period of some minutes that I realised Candy was now talking to me and gesturing to me to join in. And this was now a problem beyond any simple problem of tone, or expression in one’s face — and one problem I have always had has been with my face, for not only is it one of the most youthful you will ever see, but also it is always so mobile and vulnerable to giving itself away. Thoughts promenaded freely all over it, fluttered about my eyes, reposed on my lips, then vanished completely. For how are you meant to make love to your wife, when naked with a woman who is your secret inamorata and obsession, too? It’s a difficulty and one that is not without its wider meanings. Or at least I thought it was. For I could not see how else I could have acted. I had seen no way in which I needed to tell my wife about what was happening with Romy, since I did not want anyone to be hurt, and yet it was precisely this good intention that was why I was now in such a false position — and it was this moment, I now think, that marked a before and after in my life, as definite as the difference between a telephone ringing or not ringing when you’re waiting all alone in a hotel room. My definition of what was possible was being stretched just very slightly, just distended until a whole new world emerged. For everyone thinks they know how things happen, they think they have reality understood, but that’s only because the portion of reality they experience is so policed by themselves they never think how easy it might be for gore to overflow. They never think that they will have this exercise of making love as if for the first time to their paramour or mistress, while that aforesaid mistress is pleasuring their wife. It’s an incredibly stressful situation and I think that deep down I was not successful — for in the end it’s very difficult not to show some kind of knowledge or just comfort with someone’s naked body, it’s very difficult to conceal that you know how to touch them, just as it’s also obvious in the way two people might stand together, or talk to each other, with just the minutest changes in their syntax. So that whether I was licking the inside of Romy’s thighs, while sometimes pausing to kiss Candy who was there beside me, or I was putting my penis inside Romy while Candy’s hand guided it in, there was this ease or accommodation that I did feel must be obvious to Candy if she only wanted to look. But it did however seem that she wouldn’t.

a category that is complicated

It’s really difficult, to know what should or can be known. One thing that had always been true of Candy and which we argued over was this degree to which a person could ever confront or hold the truth entire in their head. Candy always believed in the expression of everything. She was this wild tricoteuse tough guy. Personally I found the horror movies and the Holocaust shows upsetting, I thought that never should we be shown the images of bodies being burned, or lifted lightly into wheelbarrows and other farming equipment, but Candy was sterner than I was — she thought that all the world’s pain was like the old Electronium, with all the massacres pre-recorded, and perhaps she’s right, perhaps it’s just laziness to think the way I used to think.

CANDY

So for example you have some Nazi planning how to kill people. Like how do you burn a hundred bodies if you only have the coal for ten?

ME

You cannot do it –

CANDY

You are just not thinking right. Like why not film a gas chamber?

ME

Darling –

CANDY

You think the gore isn’t possible to show? Like what about the porn? You think they are worrying like you worry in the porn shoots?

ME

Possibly not –

CANDY

I don’t mean you do the normal shots like women going into a shower. You want it like the porn moguls would like it –

ME

Hey, why not just starve all the extras?

CANDY

Now I like that. There’d probably be regulations but you are getting this, Toto. You are beginning to think intelligent –

And after all, this was one reason why I always loved the erotic home movies that are now available everywhere, I loved them because they showed everything there was, right down to the smallest bedroom ornament, the My Little Pony collection and sports medals, they couldn’t help it — at last there is this art form where not everything is artistic, where chance is an element of the absolute design. In films things happen and you do not cut away, or at least that’s what you want in an ideal movie, whereas in TV people cut away just when you want them to linger most of all, like all the execs are in some small cabal to frustrate all your noble instincts. And yet despite this tough-guy wildness that Candy taught me, I would also say that in our life together Candy had this gift for somehow not seeing things as they were. From our suffering she turned away, so that here we were in some increasingly harmful setting and something vast was not being said. But perhaps that’s normal. We tried to see the good in each other and wanted it to be true and in some way therefore it was, however imperfect it seemed. For obviously, despite our grandest efforts, there was still a doubt in Candy. She wanted and did not want to believe me, in this period when I often disappeared, or was preoccupied, or silent. I could see this in her. I knew that what she was saying to me was: Please do not become a monster. Please do not do the harmful things. I want to believe in your existence as a moral being . What else would any wife want? Very much therefore she wanted to think that everything could be explained by the sadness of my unemployment, rather than other loves, and I think in fact that she was right, that my behaviour was indeed much more explained by a sadness than any delinquency with Romy or with Hiro, and therefore this offer to join in here was perhaps a test, the way a knight was tested in the old stories. And if it was such a test, I wanted to pass it with courage. So to please her and to explain that really I would love her for ever I continued to lick at Romy while Candy lay back and watched. If it was gruesome it was no more gruesome than the rest of life, I was telling myself. Most of the time we are not saying the reasons why nothing should happen, why everyone should sit tight in their space bubble and let themselves be whirled around the sun. There are false positions in every moment of your day, when you are not telling someone about their untenable tattoo or you are telling your ex-boyfriend that absolutely one day you will travel together to Tahiti, just as friends, although you know that never will such a voyage occur but he seems so totally sad and lonely even six months after you left him. I just mean: up in the air there are planes taking business people to meetings that are doomed because their business partner is in fact corrupt, and also wives are travelling to be reunited with their unfaithful husbands. That’s just an average day in this small planet’s stratosphere.