Ian McEwan - In Between the Sheets

“It’s a thousand miles deep!” cried Mary wildly and threw her brown arms about my neck. She seemed to have found what she had hoped for.

But she was not inclined to explanations. Later on we ate out in a Mexican restaurant and I waited for her to mention her weekend in chains and when, finally, I began to ask her she interrupted with a question. “Is it really true that England is in a state of total collapse?”

I said yes and spoke at length without believing what I was saying. The only experience I had of total collapse was a friend who killed himself. At first he only wanted to punish himself. He ate a little ground glass washed down with grapefruit juice. Then when the pains began he ran to the tube station, bought the cheapest ticket and threw himself under a train. The brand new Victorian line. What would that be like on a national scale? We walked back from the restaurant arm in arm without speaking. The air hot and damp around us, we kissed and clung to each other on the pavement beside her car.

“Same again next Friday?” I said wryly as she climbed in, but the words were cut by the slam of her door. Through the window she waved at me with her fingers and smiled. I didn’t see her for quite a while.

I was staying in Santa Monica in a large, borrowed apartment over a shop that specialized in renting out items for party givers and, strangely, equipment for “sickrooms.” One side of the shop was given over to wineglasses, cocktail shakers, spare easy chairs, a banqueting table and a portable discotheque, the other to wheelchairs, tilting beds, tweezers and bedpans, bright tubular steel and colored rubber hoses. During my stay I noticed a number of similar stores throughout the city. The manager was immaculately dressed and initially intimidating in his friendliness. On our first meeting he told me he was “only twenty-nine.” He was heavily built and wore one of those thick drooping mustaches grown throughout. America and England by the ambitious young. On my first day he came up the stairs and introduced himself as George Malone and paid me a pleasant compliment. “The British,” he said, “make damn good invalid chairs. The very best.”

“That must be Rolls-Royce,” I said. Malone gripped my arm.

“Are you shitting me? Rolls-Royce make…”

“No, no,” I said nervously. “A… a joke.” For a moment his face was immobilized, the mouth open and black, and I thought, He’s going to hit me. But he laughed.

“Rolls-Royce! That’s neat!” And the next time I saw him he indicated the sickroom side of his shop and called out after me, “Wanna buy a Rolls?” Occasionally we drank together at lunchtime in a red-lit bar off Colorado Avenue where George had introduced me to the barman as “a specialist in bizarre remarks.”

“What’ll it be?” said the barman to me.

“Pig oil with a cherry,” I said, cordially hoping to live up to my reputation. But the barman scowled and turning to George spoke through a sigh.

“What’ll it be?”

It was exhilarating, at least at first, to live in a city of narcissists. On my second or third day I followed George’s directions and walked to the beach. It was noon. A million stark, primitive figurines lay scattered on the fine, pale, yellow sand till they were swallowed up, north and south, in a haze of heat and pollution. Nothing moved but the sluggish giant waves in the distance, and the silence was awesome. Near where I stood on the very edge of the beach were different kinds of parallel bars, empty and stark, their crude geometry marked by silence. Not even the sound of the waves reached me, no voices, the whole city lay dreaming. As I began walking towards the ocean there were soft murmurs nearby, and it was as if I overheard a sleep-talker. I saw a man move his hand, spreading his fingers more firmly against the sand to catch the sun. An ice chest without its lid stood like a gravestone at the head of a prostrate woman. I peeped inside as I passed and saw empty beercans, and a packet of orange cheese floating in water. Now that I was moving among them I noticed how far apart the solitary sun-bathers were. It seemed to take minutes to walk from one to another. A trick of perspective had made me think they were jammed together. I noticed too how beautiful the women were, their brown limbs spread like starfish; and how many healthy old men there were with gnarled muscular bodies. The spectacle of this common intent exhilarated me and for the first time in my life I too urgently wished to be brown-skinned, brown-faced, so that when I smiled my teeth would flash white. I took off my trousers and shirt, spread my towel and lay down on my back thinking, I shall be free, I shall change beyond all recognition. But within minutes I was hot and restless, I longed to open my eyes. I ran into the ocean and swam out to where a few people were treading water and waiting for an especially huge wave to dash them to the shore.

Returning from the beach one day I found pinned to my door a note from my friend Terence Latterly. “Waiting for you,” it said, “in the Doggie Diner across the street.” I had met Latterly years ago in England when he was researching a still uncompleted thesis on George Orwell, and it was not till I came to America that I realized how rare an American he was. Slender, extraordinarily pallid, fine black hair that curled, doe eyes like those of a Renaissance princess, long straight nose with narrow black slits for nostrils, Terence was unwholesomely beautiful. He was frequently approached by gays, and once, in Polk Street, San Francisco, literally mobbed. He had a stammer, slight enough to be endearing to those endeared by such things, and he was intense in his friendships to the point of occasionally lapsing into impenetrable sulks about them. It took me some time to admit to myself I actually disliked Terence and by that time he was in my life and I accepted the fact. Like all compulsive monologuists he lacked curiosity about other people’s minds, but his stories were good and he never told the same one twice. He regularly became infatuated with women whom he drove away with his labyrinthine awkwardness and consumptive zeal, and who provided fresh material for his monologues. Two or three times now quiet, lonely, protective girls had fallen hopelessly for Terence and his ways, but, tellingly, he was not interested. Terence cared for long-legged, tough-minded, independent women who were rapidly bored by Terence. He once told me he masturbated every day.

He was the Doggie Diner’s only customer, bent morosely over an empty coffee cup, his chin propped in his palms.

“In England,” I told him, “a dog’s dinner means some kind of unpalatable mess.”

“Sit down then,” said Terence. “We’re in the right place. I’ve been so humiliated.”

“Sylvie?” I asked obligingly.

“Yes, yes. Grotesquely humiliated.” This was nothing new. Terence dined out frequently on morbid accounts of blows dealt him by indifferent women. He had been in love with Sylvie for months now and had followed her here from San Francisco, which was where he first told me about her. She made a living setting up health food restaurants and then selling them, and as far as I knew, she was hardly aware of the existence of Terence.

“I should never’ve come to Los Angeles,” Terence was saying as the Doggie Diner waitress refilled his cup. “It’s OK for the British. You see everything here as a bizarre comedy of extremes, but that’s because you’re out of it The truth is it’s psychotic, totally psychotic.” Terence ran his fingers through his hair which looked lacquered and stiff and stared out into the street. Wrapped in a constant, faint blue cloud, cars drifted by at twenty miles an hour, their drivers tanned forearms propped on the window ledges, their car radios and stereos were on, they were all going home or to bars for happy hour.