Эдвард Докс - Pravda ['Self Help' in the UK]

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Okay, you are the artist.”

“I wish that were true. Unfortunately, I am merely yet another commonplace toiler in the mud.”

Then the old magic began to happen: as she sat up, she disappeared altogether as a model and became Chloe Martin once again—sometime actress, sometime real estate agent, once a little famous, twice divorced, an auburn-haired bob cut woman of a flat-chested forty-three, wide-wide mouth, all gum and marching molars when she smiled, freckles, crow’s feet, translucent skin (which she ill-advisedly exposed to sun whenever she could), and eyes as green as pale nephrite. And watching her rise, he felt desire surging back to reassert its hegemony over his emotions.

“I’m going to have a drink, Chloe. I think… something white and chilled. What would you like?”

“Apple juice first. I am thirsty. But bring me a glass of wine as well.” She smiled a smile that began sincerely but became false as she caught herself evincing impromptu sweetness and belatedly tried to capitalize—to witness that subtle transformation alone, Nicholas thought, worth the one thousand euros he paid her to be his model. Oh sweet Jesus, the hours he had spent covertly watching people as they so vigorously sought to disguise themselves, while their every expression and mannerism bellowed out the giveaways. It was almost funny. Just a shame there was nobody with whom to share the joke. Not anymore. He put down his brush and rag.

The drawing room was pleasingly Alessandro-less as he entered, and his irritation was further alleviated. The Italian was away in London, pursuing his ambitions in musicals: some audition for some piece of terrible shit based on the terrible shit of some terrible shit’s life in a shitty and terrible rock band. The evening’s rubber might even be enjoyable—untainted by moping, melodrama, or huff. Nicholas almost smiled as he entered the kitchen: Alessandro could not sing, could not dance, could not act, could not even mime… and yet, like more or less everyone under thirty-five he met these days, he firmly believed he had talent, a precious and precarious gift that needed sensitive nurturing in order to blossom into the hardy rose of genius. Dear God, who was telling the young all these lies about themselves? The poor fools had no chance. Their serfish heads so filled with false promise and misleading encouragement, their eyes wide with Hermès and Prada.

You are peasants, my friends, of peasant stock and loamy soul, only lately freed from your bonds—muck and ignorance cling to your every desperate venture. Desist. Relax. Go easy awhile. Ease into your emancipation. For I tell you this: the democracy you live by, this freedom, these rights, they are so many cruel jokes being played on you by your old rulers as they snigger and snort behind their latest disguises. They’re only pretending you are equal, for their amusement. They want to see you struggling with it all—too fat, too thin, crazed on exercise, crazed on junk food, bewildered and belittled, arms full of ghastly designer shopping (Cambodian tat, I’m afraid) from the pages of their ghastly magazines. It’s a cruel, cruel joke. And alas, those values you are so proud of, they’re no such thing; they’re but a confection of silly little sayings they smuggled in with primetime so that you could be mocked all the more for repeating them. They have you running in all the wrong directions again, my friends; they’ve set you off on the wrong track as surely as they ever did when they called themselves your bishops and your barons. You must hope for more insightful leaders or plan for another revolution. The world is yours awhile yet, if you would only seize it back. Oh yes—and you, my dear, dear, Alessandro, please try to understand: your gorgeous arse is your one and only card. You have nothing else. So be sure to use it well when Herr Direktor turns his gaze on you, my darling boy.

And yet, Nicholas reflected as he took out two clean glasses, who could blame Alessandro and the millions like him? What was the desire for celebrity but an age-old ache for some kind of externally verifiable significance? Testimony from somewhere other than the self—relief, reassurance, reinforcements—even if the testimony was a vapid and quick-vanishing lie. He bent for the Tokay, which he had been keeping in the fridge for the evening’s bridge but which now struck him as far too good to share with anyone but Chloe.

She had that particular female shape to her inner thighs which caused that certain little triangle of space to form between the tops of her legs when she stood up straight, as now, framed in the far doorway of the drawing room, shirt undone, naked otherwise; that certain space, just beneath.

Sexual chaos—that was the only way to describe it, the whole of Nicholas’s life from the age of sixteen. One long rolling, roiling, rollicking sea of sexual chaos; magnificent, frightening, awful, sickening, mettle-testing, perilous, heartbreaking, audacious, and glorious by turn. No, his was not the common journey. But, as he had always religiously maintained, who, on their deathbed, actually wished to say (with a satisfied sigh to ceiling and gathered loved ones), “Ah, mine was the common journey—excellent.”

The odyssey began in earnest in a grand but threadbare hotel room (that would never recover from the loss of the empire) when he was barely seventeen. He’d enjoyed a three o’clock lid-full of his mother’s secret scotch, and as ever, he was supposed to be studying quietly, waiting for the rest of his family to return, preparing himself to follow in his father’s footsteps straight into Cambridge (classics) and the Overseas Service. It was Easter, Max was back from Moscow and in London for the week (some reprimand or other), his mother was God knows where, and his little sister was out spending the money he had stolen from his father’s wallet precisely for the purpose of sending her out.

Antonia Grey, his little sister’s friend, however, was very much in… In his mother and father’s bed, to be dogmatically factual about it: freshly undressed, sixteen, and giving it the full actressy adolescent treatment. But not for Nicholas’s direct benefit. No no no: he’d already had quite enough of the straight stuff from Miss Grey, his first model. (“Toni, I think we should try something. You know we can’t paint it unless we see it, unless we experience it… so will you, if I promise to stay quiet?”) No. Instead, his sister’s friend was faking her way through her second orgasm of the session with Stephen or Jonathan or Benjamin or whatever his name was, captain of rugby or boats or some such. Young Nicholas Glover, meanwhile, captain of nothing but fucking, was stationed in the walk-in wardrobe, looking on from the darkness behind his mother’s favorite evening gown with the kind of unqualified attention more befitting a newly fledged heart surgeon taking final instruction from the senior consultant.

As he recalled later, he’d had thoughts even then that more conventional creatures might eschew. Thoughts along the lines of I like that she’s faking, I love that she’s faking, I like the way they look together, man and woman, woman and man, I love the way they look together, I like the geometry of their combining and recombining limbs, I love the movement, the struggle, the ache, the sound (ancient, ancient), their skin, the smell… the honest reality. I love the unequivocal reality of this.

And of course after a few minutes he’d had to slip out of the closet and join in… And Antino, to her credit, was almost okay with it. Almost. She caught sight of Nicholas from atop her charge as he tiptoed through her peripheral vision, and her wide eyes said, Oh. My. God. What are you doing? But they did not ask him to stop—not necessarily, not definitively, not so that he felt he should actually stop. On the other hand, as his fingers slid around her rocking torso and made their clever play with her girlish young breasts, and as the narrow eyes of Steve Jon Ben opened from their boyish pleasure to bear witness to this development, there occurred the most almighty eruption. A second for Ben Jon Steve to apprehend and process the undeniable evidence and then —you fucking bastard —the captain of boats, rugby, and so on exploded in a triple frenzy of orgasm, rage, and shame.