“Dad?”
“Jet mate.”
“They’re ready.”
Mal kicked off his tasselled loafers and started limbering up: A! He was giving Jet his jacket to hold when his mobile rang.
“Lol! Been trying you all day, mate. Some Arab answered.”
Fat Lol said he’d had to flog it: his mobile.
“How come?”
His van got clamped!
“Tell me about it. They did me BM!”
You and all!
“Yeah. Look, can’t talk, boy. Got a race to run.”
Fat Lol said he was going to do something tonight.
“Yeah?”
Onna car alarms.
“Yeah?”
“Dad? They’re waiting. Boost it.”
“I’m on it, mate. Bye, son.”
“And don’t fuck up,” said Jet.
“When do I ever?”
“You’re a crap sprinter, Dad.”
“You what?”
“You’re a sad sprinter.”
“Oh yeah? Watch this.”
The dads were in a rank on the starting line: Bern, Nusrat, Fardous, Someth, Adrian, Mikio, Paratosh and the rest of them, no great differences in age but all at various stages along the track, waistlines, hairlines, worldlines, with various c.v.s of separation, contentment, estrangement, some of their dads dead, some of their mums still living. Mal joined them. This was the dads’ race. But dads are always racing, against each other, against themselves. That’s what dads do.
It was the gunshot that made the herd stampede. Instantly Mal felt about nineteen things go at once. All the links and joins—hip, knee, ankle, spine—plus an urgent liquefaction on the side of his face. After five stumbling bounds the pain barrier was on him and wouldn’t get out of the way. But the big man raced on, as you’ve got to do. The dads raced on, with heavy ardor, and thundering, their feet stockinged or gym-shoed but all in the wooden clogs of their years. Their heads bent back, their chests outthrust, they gasped and slavered for the turn in the track and the post at the end of the straight.
New Yorker, 1996
LET ME COUNT THE TIMES
VERNON MADE LOVE to his wife three and a half times a week, and this was all right.
For some reason, making love always averaged out that way. Normally—though by no means invariably—they made love every second night. On the other hand Vernon had been known to make love to his wife seven nights running; for the next seven nights they would not make love—or perhaps they would once, in which case they would make love the following week only twice but four times the week after that—or perhaps only three times, in which case they would make love four times the next week but only twice the week after that—or perhaps only once. And so on. Vernon didn’t know why, but making love always averaged out that way; it seemed invariable. Occasionally—and was it any wonder?—Vernon found himself wishing that the week contained only six days, or as many as eight, to render these calculations (which were always blandly corroborative in spirit) easier to deal with.
It was, without exception, Vernon himself who initiated their conjugal acts. His wife responded every time with the same bashful alacrity. Oral foreplay was by no means unknown between them. On average—and again it always averaged out like this, and again Vernon was always the unsmiling ringmaster—fellatio was performed by Vernon’s wife every third coupling, or 60.8333 times a year, or 1.1698717 times a week. Vernon performed cunnilingus rather less often: every fourth coupling, on average, or 45.625 times a year, or .8774038 times a week. It would also be a mistake to think that this was the extent of their variations. Vernon sodomized his wife twice a year, for instance—on his birthday, which seemed fair enough, but also, ironically (or so he thought), on hers. He put it down to the expensive nights out they always had on these occasions, and more particularly to the effects of champagne. Vernon always felt desperately ashamed afterwards, and would be a limp specter of embarrassment and remorse at breakfast the following day. Vernon’s wife never said anything about it, which was something. If she ever did, Vernon would probably have stopped doing it. But she never did. The same sort of thing happened when Vernon ejaculated in his wife’s mouth, which on average he did 1.2 times a year. At this point they had been married for ten years. That was convenient. What would it be like when they had been married for eleven years—or thirteen! Once, and only once, Vernon had been about to ejaculate in his wife’s mouth when suddenly he had got a better idea: he ejaculated all over her face instead. She didn’t say anything about that either, thank God. Why he had thought it a better idea he would never know. He didn’t think it was a better idea now. It distressed him greatly to reflect that his rare acts of abandonment should expose a desire to humble and degrade the loved one. And she was the loved one. Still, he had only done it once. Vernon ejaculated all over his wife’s face .001923 times a week. That wasn’t very often to ejaculate all over your wife’s face, now was it?
Vernon was a businessman. His office contained several electronic calculators. Vernon would often run his marital frequencies through these swift, efficient, and impeccably discreet machines. They always responded brightly with the same answer, as if to say, “Yes, Vernon, that’s how often you do it,” or, “No, Vernon, you don’t do it any more often than that.” Vernon would spend whole lunch hours crooked over the calculator. And yet he knew that all these figures were in a sense approximate. Oh, Vernon knew, Vernon knew. Then one day a powerful white computer was delivered to the accounts department. Vernon saw at once that a long-nursed dream might now take flesh: leap years. “Ah, Alice. I don’t want to be disturbed, do you hear?” he told the cleaning lady sternly when he let himself into the office that night. “I’ve got some very important calculations to do in the accounts department.” Just after midnight Vernon’s hot red eyes stared up wildly from the display screen, where his entire sex life lay tabulated in recurring prisms of threes and sixes, in endless series, like mirrors placed face to face.
Vernon’s wife was the only woman Vernon had ever known. He loved her and he liked making love to her quite a lot; certainly he had never craved any other outlet. When Vernon made love to his wife he thought only of her pleasure and her beauty: the infrequent but highly flattering noises she made through her evenly parted teeth, the divine plasticity of her limbs, the fever, the delirium, and the safety of the moment. The sense of peace that followed had only a little to do with the high probability that tomorrow would be a night off. Even Vernon’s dreams were monogamous: the women who strode those slipped but essentially quotidian landscapes were mere icons of the self-sufficient female kingdom, nurses, nuns, bus-conductresses, parking wardens, policewomen. Only every now and then, once a week, say, or less, or not calculably, he saw things that made him suspect that life might have room for more inside—a luminous ribbon dappling the undercurve of a bridge, certain cloudscapes, intent figures hurrying through changing light.
All this, of course, was before Vernon’s business trip.
It was not a particularly important business trip: Vernon’s firm was not a particularly important firm. His wife packed his smallest suitcase and drove him to the station. On the way she observed that they had not spent a night apart for over four years—when she had gone to stay with her mother after that operation of hers. Vernon nodded in surprised agreement, making a few brisk calculations in his head. He kissed her goodbye with some passion. In the restaurant car he had a gin and tonic. He had another gin and tonic. As the train approached the thickening city Vernon felt a curious lightness play through his body. He thought of himself as a young man, alone. The city would be full of cabs, stray people, shadows, women, things happening.