Now how's this gonna look? Andy asked himself.
Squaring blankly up to a long S/M session, a rugged humiliation session, a bestiality session, a session of haughty pretense that his failure to tumesce was yet another means of asserting himself, Andy flexed his shoulders.
But then Roxeanne dropped to the earth. She lay down, placed her hands behind her knees and guided her legs up until her ankles were hooked on either side of her neck. "See red?" she asked
Blinking, Andy stumbled toward her.
"Oh yes, baby. Ah, God, you were — you really meant it. Toward the end I was. God, you were beautiful."
"Shut up," said Andy.
Andy felt like crying. He rolled onto his back to face the lightening sky. "Leave me alone. Get out of here."
"So that's how it is to have your brains fucked out. Now— now I really know."
"Shut up. Get out of here. Get out of the house. And take those queers, too. It was that pill fuckin' Marvell gave me."
"Yeah."
"Well, maybe it's just that I don't like you. I don't like you. Maybe it's that."
"What's that got to do with fucking? You'd like me fine if you could've gotten a jack."
"Shut up. Get out of here."
"Yes, ma'm. Couldn't take that twice in a night."
She picked up her T-dress, waving it in the air as she walked naked across the field.
He looked on as she glided down through the windy grass. He sniffed. "Bitch," he said. Andy lay back and watched the stars begin to go out, his body sunk deep in the first dew.
29: silence and day
". and I still saw him but then it was all really over by then, or at least I don't think it was for him any more than it really was for me, but he seemed to want to pretend to think that if we went on not doing what we pretended to think were the most important things for us not to not do, then things wouldn't sort of. " Etc., etc., thought Whitehead.
: Keith could scarcely keep his little red eyes open. It was 5:30, and he had long relinquished any intention of — you had to laugh—"making a pass" at the white-haired girl in the bed over which he leaned. Unversed though he was in these matters, little Keith supposed he was right in thinking that a two-hour analysis of a past affair would not have been the gambit of a woman keen to go to bed with him. In addition, only her pillow-propped head was visible and she hadn't taken her eyes off the ceiling for better than ninety minutes.
". so we decided that if we just took it easy for a while and didn't try and hide the things that weren't mattering anyway, and so guess what, we—"
Whitehead started. "What?"
"Oh, Keith, I'm sorry. I'm speeding, and I always go on when I speed."
"Not at all."
"Maybe we'd better go to sleep now."
Perfunctorily Whitehead fluttered his eyelashes.
"Thanks for letting me bore you."
Perfunctorily Whitehead leaned forward, pursing chapped lips.
"Good night." She turned over away from him, pulling the sheet up above her ears. "Could you put the light out as you go?"
"Of course. Good night. Lucy."
He put the light out and walked toward the door. On the way be stubbed his toe viciously on the metal-based coffee table, but he was half in tears anyway, tears of tiredness and contrition and self-disgust, and didn't bother to register the pain.
Diana waited and waited in the kitchen, her fingers stitched tight in front of her. The invigorating coldness she had felt all evening had not dissipated into sleep, and when Andy had showed no sign of wanting to make love to her and every sign of wanting to make love to someone else, Diana had decided to let him get on with it, to let it happen. She had allowed half an hour to pass before coming downstairs,
listened at the door and heard Lucy's voice, entered the
kitchen, made coffee, smoked, and sat where she could see the drawing-room door. She looked at her watch and realized that not once all night had she thought about Johnny.
More or less simultaneously, Keith stepped out into the hall and Roxeanne emerged from the direction of the back door passage. Whitehead wiped his sore eyes and began to smile. Roxeanne folded her arms and looked away. Diana put down her cigarette and said, "Well, well. Aren't we a lot of night-owls? What have you been up to in there, Keith?"
"Merely chatting to Lucy."
"Oh — you mean to say you haven't been fucking her?"
"Oh no. Nothing like that. She was feeling a bit low so I thought I'd… chat to her."
"Really?"
"Just tried to cheer her up, that's all."
"How about you, 'Roxeanne'? Done anything good?"
"Nothing too great." Roxeanne folded her arms tighter. "And take that I-smell-shit look off your face."
"Haven't seen Andy by any chance?"
"Yeah."
Diana resisted it, but sadness entered her voice. "What happened."
"He — he. " Roxeanne unfolded her arms and sank down loosely on a chair. "Andy couldn't get a hard-on."
They were still laughing when Andy came in.
He beheld the kitchen with some diffidence. "What's up?" he asked.
"No — no hard-on!" shrieked Diana breathlessly, pointing at him as she rocked to and fro in her seat. "No hard-on!"
Andy blushed, frowned, traversed the room and hit a convulsed Whitehead as hard as he possibly could on the ear, and stalked into the hall.
One by one they followed.
Seven o'clock. Silence and day fall on Appleseed Rectory.
Marvell and Skip grunt and fart contentedly as Roxeanne slips in between them.
Diana joins an Andy fetal and taciturn.
His ear thudding like an earphone, Whitehead slaps a cache of glistening nude magazines onto his winded bunk.
Quentin smokes at the ceiling, Celia clinging to him tightly
in sleep.
And, out across the landing, the padded alarm buzzer sounds for Giles.
part two. saturday
XXX: GILES
Giles awoke with a short bark of displeasure. The Risen-shine buzzer faded, the radio hissed, and the machine clank-ingly set about preparing the crude Baby Bullshot — which Giles never drank anyway.
Out of bed seemed no place to be these days. It came on him sideways when he hit the floor, unraveled past him diagonally when he rushed the fridge, as if the whole house were on slipped land. Giles undulated against the refrigerator door. He was normally convinced that he would vomit before he could swallow so much as a half liter of vodka and tomato juice, but this morning, Saturday morning, his stomach felt scoured. Why? Friday night waved round his head like a fan of old curling photographs.
Both his hands closed on the wet glass and bore it deliberately to his lips. He drank it in one swallow, retched appallingly, and leaned to refill it.
"Glug glug," said Giles. "Glug glug glug."
Giles had recently fallen into the habit of sleeping in his clothes — or "ready-dressed," as he liked to think of it. All that needed to be done, then, in the half hour before his maxi-cab arrived, was to lower himself below the Plimsoll line of sobriety.
"Luigi, Luigi," mumbled Giles as the alcohol lapped at his smudged brain.
(Luigi was Giles's chauffeur. After three months of complete idleness in his lodgings at the Gladmoor public house, Luigi had motored the Daimler back to London and started a small car-hire concern with it, his overheads defrayed by Giles's continuing monthly checks. The chauffeur's name still came to Giles's lips whenever he had to get somewhere, but he no longer had any settled idea of what Luigi was supposed to be for.)