Paul Theroux - My Secret History

Sometimes Mrs. Mamalujian said, “You’re lucky.”

I hated that. It was when she was drunk and we were the only ones left in the restaurant. The waiter would be standing nearby and rocking on his heels — wanting us to pay up so that he could go home.

“Very lucky.”

Was I supposed to say yes or no? I just politely murmured through my nose, because I did not want to insult her by saying that I did not feel lucky at all most of the time. Sometimes I felt like a servant — her servant or anyone’s — because I had no other place in the world. I was a good servant — well-mannered, tactful, discreet, gliding in and out. Mrs. Mamalujian did not treat me like a servant, which was another reason I liked her. But when she told me how lucky I was, and I had to sit and listen, I felt trapped.

“You’re young—”

That wasn’t luck. I hated being young.

“You’re good-looking. You’re intelligent. You’ve got your health. It’s amazing you don’t have a girlfriend.”

That was what I had told her.

“But in a way I’m glad you don’t. A girl would just waste your time.”

When she said that I saw Lucy very clearly, sitting on her bed, at her window, smiling. This is my garden .

Mrs. Mamalujian only had a few conversations that she could hold when she was drunk. One began You’re lucky , and another Gin and tonic is good for you; and sometimes it was how she had been spoiled rotten in New York.

At the end she always did the same thing — reached across the table and took my hand. Her grip was bony and damp, but I let her hold on because I knew it was what she wanted me to do.

In ways I could not explain, knowing Mrs. Mamalujian helped me with Lucy. Was it a question of confidence, or belief? I needed Mrs. Mamalujian’s friendship to have Lucy’s love. I didn’t want to understand why. Understanding things made them go away. I wanted a mysterious tangle of secrets and, without putting it into precise words, I felt that no one must know me. In order to be strong I needed to have secrets. Neither Mrs. Mamalujian nor Lucy knew of one another. That was very important to me.

Lucy didn’t know what to make of the presents I passed on to her. But I loved her for not asking me where they came from. She was perhaps like me — thinking that if she asked too much the things would disappear.

Her father was dead, her mother lived just south of Plymouth, and having seen her driver’s license I now knew that she was almost two years older than me. I wasn’t old enough to drink in bars legally, but she was always asked to show her ID on the assumption that if she was twenty-one so was I.

I loved her because she was patient and never asked questions and because she liked sex. Sex most of all. In bed we talked about it, but only in bed. She said she didn’t know when she had lost her virginity because she was too drunk at the time. She had passed out and had just assumed it had happened.

“I’m terrible when I’m drunk,” she said in a naughty-girl voice. “Sometimes I break bottles or throw things out the window. Or I turn to jelly and sort of collapse.”

I had never seen her drunk and didn’t want to. I hated hearing people’s own versions of themselves: they were either much worse or much better than they ought to be.

Many times, after we had made love, I simply wanted to go home. I felt there was nothing more to do, nothing to say. Often it was the sense that we might make love one more time — after the bar or the movie or a walk around the block — that kept me from getting on the bus.

Lucy was at her most talkative just after we had made love, when I was still and silent. She said surprising things.

“When I started BU I was going out with a guy, and I kept asking him to make love to me. I didn’t love him and the sex was no fun, but I was, um, small, and I wanted him to stretch me.”

That shocked me, the way she said it.

“After a while I got bigger, and it was more fun. It used to hurt. Do you think I’m awful?”

“No,” I said, and I wondered whether I really believed it.

She said, “You can do anything you want with me.”

I couldn’t think of much and that was maddening.

She said, “That Henry Miller stuff.”

What did that mean? I reminded myself to have a closer look at the book. All I could remember was Miller with a pathetic prostitute, who was crying, and Miller saying Has no one been kind to you? Which sounded untruthful to me.

With Lucy I was so impatient I often made love to her before she took all her clothes off, and then I preferred it that way, remembering my the fantasies looking at the underwear section of the Sear’s Catalogue. I was in such a hurry the room seemed very small and hot. We were very careful not to make too much noise — breathe too hard or kick anything. There were other roomers at Miss Murphy’s. But I liked the thought that we were making love under Murf’s nose. It made me feel like a burglar, and when I left Lucy’s at eleven-thirty I pretended I was a thief sneaking successfully away from a house I had just robbed.

One day I tried out her sentence myself and said, “You can do anything you want to me.”

She pretended to be shocked, but she was smiling. She knelt and kissed my stomach. I could not control my penis. It throbbed and fattened with desire, and swung sideways and came to rest against her chin. In one movement she twisted her head and took it into her mouth. I was fascinated by the way she treated this stupid thing seriously: I had often looked at my penis and thought: You moron . She was sort of speaking silently to it for a while, and then she slurped it like a noodle. I was desperately afraid she didn’t like doing it, and that spoiled my pleasure at the beginning. But she did it again and again, and I didn’t want her to stop.

We had no word for that. I was too shy even to mention it. It was something we did in the dark.

I used to think of it when I saw her licking a Popsicle, or when she mentioned food she disliked — boiled carrots, or lima beans, or raw oysters — and said, “I could never eat that!”

Lucy knew I wanted to be a writer. She never saw what I wrote, but she used to ask me to tell her stories. Talking to her gave me ideas.

“It’s about a man who goes to a foreign country and keeps making mistakes,” I said.

“Like a Martian landing on earth.”

That was a good idea.

“When he wants to mail a letter he very carefully puts it into one of those trash cans that have a narrow opening at the top.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“And when he wants to throw away a scrap of paper—”

“He puts it into a letter box,” Lucy said.

“He squeezes a tube of oil paint onto his toothbrush, because it looks like toothpaste.”

“I like it,” she said.

But telling her took the place of writing, and it helped to see the merit of a story. This one was a dud, I was sure.

I saw Lucy three times a week, in the evening. We went for walks, we saw movies, we went to Harvard Gardens and drank beer. But every evening ended the same way. We went back to Pinckney Street and sneaked into the house, and into her room, and made love. Then I sneaked out, which was harder than sneaking in, and I walked to the bus stop. I always felt energetic after being released from her small room.

I saw Mrs. Mamalujian twice a week, in the daytime. One of the days we drank, the other we ate.

The women did not know about each other. But they mattered to me, and I needed them both. I often felt that Mrs. Mamalujian was overgenerous with me but that I justified it by passing it on to Lucy; so Mrs. Mamalujian was Lucy’s patroness, not mine. And if it hadn’t been for Lucy I probably wouldn’t have sat all those hours with this fifty-year-old woman; just being with Mrs. Mamalujian made me feel lucky to have this pretty girl, whom I could squeeze and kiss and tell stories to.