The American Lover Read online

  Then, Beth’s unborn baby was gone. She was a new self, who had no baby and no lover. Her bones felt as brittle and empty as cuttlefish shells and her head as heavy as a heap of wet earth and stones. It was difficult to make this wet earth function as a brain. It needed some skilled potter’s hand to do it, but no such person was nearby.

  Beth had a friend called Edwina, whom she’d known since schooldays, and thanks to Edwina – a girl with very clear skin, untouched by life – who drove her to Stanmore and collected her again, she was able to hide the abortion from the parents. They thought she and Edwina had gone on a boating picnic that day with some friends in Henley. She told them she’d got the bruise on her face by being accidentally hit by an oar.

  On the way back from Stanmore, Edwina asked Beth what she was going to do now. Beth felt sleepy and sick and didn’t want to have to answer questions. She stared out at the night folding in on the long and terrible day. She said: ‘I’m going to become Jean.’

  ‘Who’s Jean?’ asked Edwina.

  ‘A kind of heroine, except there’s nothing heroic about her. I’m going to write her story and then try to sell it to a publisher.’

  ‘Do you know anybody in the publishing world?’ asked Edwina.

  ‘No,’ said Beth.

  The abortion ‘scene’ began the story, but wasn’t its beginning. It wasn’t even its ending, because Beth had no idea what the ending would be, or even if there would be a proper ending, or whether the narrative wouldn’t just collapse in upon itself without resolution.

  What mattered was writing it: the act of words.

  Beth began it in her Paris notebook. She let the words travel over the faces and bodies of Thad and Fred and over the window frame and the winged lambs beyond. To write about the abortion, about Thaddeus’s desertion, wasn’t difficult; what was difficult was writing about the happiness that had come before. But she knew she had to do it somehow. You couldn’t ask readers to care about the loss of something unless you showed them what that something had been.

  The story began in London, then moved to Rome instead of Paris. Jean and her American lover, Bradley, were loaned an apartment just outside the Vatican City. Their transgressive love with a third person, Michaela, took place within two blocks of one of the holiest places on earth. The ringing of St Peter’s bells tolled upon their ecstasy. In the apartment below them lived a lowly priest, whose life became a torment. Beth worked hard upon the sexual agonies he suffered. She wanted everything about the book to be shocking and new.

  Beth wrote every day. She thought her parents would nag her to find a job to replace her old one at the Harrods Gift Wrap counter, but they didn’t. It seemed that if you were a writer, you could get away with doing nothing else. Other people would go out to work and come back and you would still be there, unmoving in your chair, and they would make your supper and wash it up and you would collapse onto the sofa to watch Juke Box Jury. They would place forgiving goodnight kisses on your agitated head.

  The father sometimes asked questions about the book, but all Beth would say was, ‘You’re probably going to hate it. It’s about a girl going crazy. It’s about things you don’t talk about at Verity Life.’

  But this didn’t seem to make him anxious. It made him smile a tolerant smile, as though he thought Beth had underestimated him. And one Saturday morning, he took Beth to a second-hand shop off Tottenham Court Road and helped her choose a typewriter, and paid for it in cash. It was an old industrial Adler with a body made of iron and a pleasing Pica typeface and a delicate bell that tinkled when the carriage reached the end of a line. After Beth set the Adler on her desk, she felt less alone.

  A letter came from California.

  Thaddeus had that childish, loopy writing many Americans seemed to think was adequate to a grown-up life and his powers of self-expression were weak.

  When Beth saw that the letter began Dear Beth, she laid it aside for a while, knowing it was going to smite her with its indifference.

  Later, she took it up again and read: I tried to tell you several times that I couldn’t promise to stick around in London but I think you weren’t listening. When you are my age, you will see. Money is important. I have to be a man of the world as well as a lover. Tricia has inherited her mother’s house in Santa Monica. It’s a nice beach-house, which I could never on my own afford. You would like it. And I can bathe in the ocean most days and forget about the cold of Europe. You will be OK. If you go to Paris, see Fred and tell her the Old American has gone back to the sun. Love, Thad.

  Beth folded the letter into her notebook and went and lay down on her bed. She thought about the crocheted blanket that had covered them in Paris: the rich smell of it, which was both beautiful and tainted. She thought about the lens of Thaddeus’s camera pointed at her body and the shutter opening and closing, opening and closing, gathering her further and further into a prison from which there was no exit.

  There was only the book.

  It was written in eleven weeks. Everything that Beth had experienced with Thaddeus was relived through Jean and Bradley. The slow, exquisite way a single orgasm was achieved sometimes took a page to describe. Fred/Michaela became a male-to-female transsexual with handsome white breasts. Bradley became a painter. His own genitals, both aroused and dormant, featured repetitively in his art. Jean was a beauty, with a mouth men tried to kiss in the street and tumbled blonde hair. She was Desire Absolute. Bradley and Michaela screamed and wept over her and sometimes lost all control and beat the floor, while the poor priest lay in his narrow bed beneath them and jabbered his Hail Marys as a penance for his own sexual incontinence.

  It was typed out on the Adler, with a blotchy blue carbon copy underneath. Beth stared at this carbon copy. She thought, Jean is the smart top-copy of a person now, and I’m the carbon, messed up and fragile and half invisible. But she also understood that no book quite like this had ever been written by a twenty-year-old girl. The pages crackled with radioactive heat. Readers could be contamin­ated in their thousands – or in their millions.

  Beth now remembered that she knew nobody in the publishing world. She’d had no idea it was a ‘world’, exactly. She’d imagined there were just writers and printers and the people who paid them doing some slow gavotte together, which nobody else ever saw. All she could do was buy the Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book from Smith’s, choose an agent from its pages who promised ‘international representation’ and send off the book.

  Rosalita sometimes says how sad it is that most of what she and Beth talk about in the winter afternoons is concerned with endings of one kind or another. But she likes the next bit of Beth’s story. What happened next seemed to promise new happiness: Beth was taken on by an agent.

  ‘The agent was called Beatrice,’ Beth tells her. ‘After she’d read the book, she invited me round to her office in Canonbury Square. There was a bottle of champagne waiting. She said, “I can sell this novel in forty countries.”’

  ‘Forty countries!’ gasps Rosalita. ‘In Portugal, we probably couldn’t name more than half of those.’

  ‘Well,’ says Beth, ‘I probably couldn’t either. I never knew Panama was a country, I thought it was a canal. And I’ve forgotten the list of all the places where the book was sold. All I know is that money started to come to me – so much money I thought I would drown in it.’

  ‘And then you buy the red car?’ asks Rosalita.

  ‘No. Not that car. That was a gift, which came later. I bought another car, a Maserati. But a car didn’t seem much to own, so I bought a house in Kensington and then I drove to France with Beatrice and I bought a second house in St-Tropez.’

  ‘Were you happy?’ asks Rosalita.

  ‘No. I was famous. I made the cover of Paris Match and Time magazine. I perfected the way I looked. Not like I look now, Rosalita. It was my moment of being beautiful. I got letters from all over the world from people wanting to go to bed with me. I probably could have slept with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Marcello
Mastroianni, if I’d tried.’

  ‘Ah, Mastroianni. What a god!’

  ‘Yes, he was, I suppose,’ says Beth. ‘But I never met him.’

  As if to affirm the disappointment of not meeting Mastroianni, the lights in the flat go out suddenly and the afternoon dark presses in. Rosalita goes hunting for candles, but can’t find any, so she lights the gas fire and by its scented blue light changes the subject to ask Beth what her mother and father thought about the book.

  ‘Oh,’ says Beth. ‘Well, I remember the way they looked at me. Sorrow and pity. No pride. They told me I’d sold my soul.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘I said no, I gave my soul away for nothing. Thaddeus still has it. He keeps it somewhere, in a drawer, with old restaurant bills and crumbs of stale tobacco and discarded Polaroids that have faded to the palest eau-de-Nil green.’

  Rosalita doesn’t know what to say to this. Perhaps she doesn’t understand it? Her comprehension of English is known to falter now and then. The gas fire flickers and pops. Rosalita gets up and puts on her coat and before leaving places a kiss on Beth’s unwashed hair.

  After The American Lover, there would need to be another book, a follow-up, so Beatrice said. Did Beth want the world to think she was a one-book wonder?

  Beth replied that she didn’t care what the world thought. She was rich and she was going to live. She was going to live so fast, there would be no moment in any part of the day or night to remember Thaddeus. She would crush him under the weight of her new existence.

  She went to St-Tropez, to redesign the garden of her house. She drank most nights until she passed out and slept sometimes with a beach lifeguard called Jo-Jo, who liked to stare at pornographic magazines in the small hours.

  The garden progressed. In a shaded area of Corsican pines, Beth built a temple, which she filled with an enormous daybed, hung with soft white linen. She spent a long time lying on this daybed alone, drinking, smoking, watching the sea breezes take the pines unaware.

  News came from Beatrice that The American Lover had been sold in five more countries. A Swedish director wanted to turn it into a film. An Icelandic composer was writing The ‘American Lover’ Symphony. Pirated copies had reached The Soviet Union and a young Russian writer called Vassily wrote to say he was writing a sequel to the novel, in which Bradley would be executed by a KGB agent in Volgograd. This, he wrote, will be a very violent death, very terrible, very fitting to this bad man, and I, Vassily will smuggle this decadent book out of Russia to the USA and it will become as famous as your book and I will be rich and live in Las Vegas.

  In this cold, dark winter of 1974, Beth spends more and more time looking at her press file. There is not one picture of Thaddeus in it. He is the missing third dimension in a two-dimensional world. Beth’s vacant face, caught in the white glare of photographers’ flashbulbs, looks more and more exhausted with the search for something that is always out of sight.

  She can remember this: how she looked for Thaddeus in Iceland, in shabby, raucous nightclubs, in hotel dining rooms, in the crowd of tourists congregating at a hot spring. Later, she searched for him in Canada, on the cold foreshore of Lake Ontario, in a brand-new shopping mall, in the publisher’s smart offices, on the precipice of Niagara Falls.

  And then in New York, where, finally she went and was fêted like a movie star, she kept finding him. He was at a corner table in Sardi’s. He was standing alone in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria. He was in Greenwich Village, walking a poodle. He was buying a silk scarf in Bloomingdale’s. He was lying on a bench in Central Park. He was among the pack of photographers at her book launch.

  She thinks that he came back to her so strongly there, in America, because of all the voices that sounded like his. And one evening, as she was crossing Lexington Avenue, she heard yet another of these voices and she stumbled and fell down, slayed by her yearning for him. The man she was with, a handsome gallery owner of Persian origin, assumed she was drunk (she was often drunk) and hurled her into the first cab he could flag down and never saw her again.

  She sat in the back of the cab like a dead person, unable to move. The sound of the cab’s engine reminded her of the motor launch Thaddeus had once hired on the Seine. The day had been so fine that Thaddeus had taken off his shirt and she had put her arms round his thin torso and stroked his chest hair. And the ordinariness of him, the way he tried so hard and did so much with this fragile, unremarkable frame of his, had choked her with a feeling that was not quite admiration and not quite pity, but which bound her to him more strongly than she had ever been bound, as though her arms were bandages.

  In the screeching New York night, Beth wondered whether, after all, after living so hard to forget him, she wouldn’t fly to California and stand on the beach in front of his house at dawn, waiting until he got up and came to her.

  She imagined that when he came to her, they would stand very still, holding on to one another and the sighing of the ocean would soothe them into believing that time had captured them in some strange, forgiving embrace.

  When Beth came back from America, she got married. Her husband was an English aristocrat called Christopher. He was a semi-invalid with encroaching emphysema, but he was kind. He told her she needed someone to care for her, and she felt this to be true: she was being suffocated by the surfeits of her existence. Christopher said that, on his part, Beth would ‘decorate’ his life in ways he had often thought would be appropriate to it, but he reassured her that he preferred sex with men and would let her sleep alone. His house in Northamptonshire had a beautiful apple orchard, where he built her a wooden cabin. He suggested she might write her books in this cabin, and he furnished it with care.

  She spent some time there, playing Bob Dylan songs, watching the apple blossom falling in the wind, but she knew she would never write another book. She had no life to put into it, only the half-life that she’d been leading, since writing The American Lover. And the years were beginning to pass. She was being forgotten. People knew that she was the author of what had come to be known as a ‘great classic about transgressive first love’ but times were changing, and they couldn’t quite remember what all the fuss had been about.

  Beth liked Christopher because he sheltered her. When her house in St-Tropez burned down, Christopher began on her behalf a long wrangle with a French insurance firm. But he couldn’t win it. The house had been struck by lightning, so the insurers said, and nobody could be insured against ‘acts of God’.

  Christopher lamented all the money Beth had poured into this house, but she found that she didn’t really care about it – either about the house or about the money. The person who got mad was Beatrice. She screamed at Beth that she was letting everything slip through her fingers. ‘You will soon see,’ she said, ‘that the money will dry up, and then what are you going to do?’

  She didn’t know or care. With Christopher, she had suddenly entered upon a period of quiet. It was as if her heart had slowed. She liked to work in the greenhouses with Christopher’s gardeners (one of whom, a handsome youth called Matty, was his most favoured lover), potting up seedlings, tending strawberries, nurturing herbs. Only now and again did some resistance to this quiet life rise up within her. Then she would get into the new red E-Type Jaguar that Christopher had given her and drive at terrible speed down the Northamptonshire lanes, screaming at the sky.

  ‘Were you trying to die?’ Rosalita asks her.

  ‘Not trying,’ Beth replies. ‘Just laying a bet.’

  ‘And you didn’t think, maybe you hurt or kill someone else?’

  ‘No. I didn’t think.’

  ‘This is not good,’ says Rosalita. ‘You were like the bull which wounded my brother. You had a small brain.’

  One time, she just went on driving until she got to London. She called Christopher to say that she was safe and then stayed in her Kensington house, doing nothing but drink. Her wine cellar was emptying but there were still a few cases of champagne left,
so she drank champagne.

  She’d intended to drive back to Northamptonshire the following day, but she didn’t. She was glad to find herself in a city. She found that if she went to bed drunk, Thaddeus would often visit her in her dreams. He would come into her room very quietly and say, ‘Hey, kid.’ He would remove the hat that he sometimes wore and sit on the bed and stroke her hand. This was as far as the dreams ever got, and Beth began to work out that this affectionate, silent figure was waiting for something. He would never say what. He sat very still. Beth could smell his aftershave and hear his quiet breathing.

  Then, one morning, she believed she understood. Thaddeus was asking for her forgiveness.

  She typed out a letter on the old Adler. She felt very calm, almost happy.

  She told Thaddeus that she’d been crazy with grief and this grief and its craziness just wouldn’t let her alone. She said: I guess the book said it all, if you read the book. Jean loves Bradley way too much and when he leaves her, she’s destroyed. I let Jean die, but I’m alive (in certain ways, anyway) and I have a husband with a very English sort of kind heart.

  But when it came to typing the word ‘forgive’ Beth faltered. Though in her dream, Thaddeus had been affectionate and quiet, Beth now thought that he would find the whole idea of ‘forgiveness’ sentimental. She could hear him say: ‘You’re way off, ma pute, way off! We had a few turns on the merry-go-round, or whatever the British call that little musical box thing that takes you round in a circle. And then one of us got off. That’s all that happened. There was no crime.’

  Beth tore the letter out of the Adler and threw it away. She opened another bottle of champagne, but found the taste of it bitter. She asked herself what was left to her by way of any consolation, if forgiveness was going to be refused.

  ‘After that,’ she tells Rosalita, ‘I gave up on things. I drove back to Christopher. His emphysema was beginning to get very bad. I stayed with him through his last illness until he died. I ran out of money. Christopher left his whole estate to Matty, his gardener friend, so I had to leave Northamptonshire. I missed the apple orchard and my little cabin there. The Kensington house was valuable, but it was all mortgaged by then. And after that there was the crash.’