“Unlock this,” she said. “I’ve had enough.” I admit she frightened me. I poured myself a drink and hurried out onto the balcony to watch the sun set. I was not at all excited. I thought to myself, If I unlock the chain she will despise me for being weak. If I keep her there she might hate me, but at least I will have kept my promise. The pale orange sun dipped into the haze, and I heard her shout to me through the closed bedroom door. I closed my eyes and concentrated on being blameless.
A friend of mine once had analysis with an elderly man, a Freudian with a well-established practice in New York. On one occasion my friend spoke at length about his doubts concerning Freud’s theories, their lack of scientific credibility, their cultural particularity and so on. When he had done the analyst smiled genially and replied, “Look around you!” And indicated with his open palm the comfortable study, the rubber plant and the Begonia rex, the book-lined walls and finally, with an inward movement of the wrist which both suggested candor and emphasized the lapels of his tasteful suit, said, “Do you really think I would have got to where I am now if Freud was wrong?”
In the same manner I said to myself as I returned indoors (the sun now set and the bedroom silent), the bare truth of the matter is that I am keeping my promise.
All the same, I felt bored. I wandered from room to room turning on the lights, leaning in doorways and staring in at objects that already were familiar. I set up the music stand and took out my flute. I taught myself to play years ago and there are many errors, strengthened by habit, which I no longer have the will to correct. I do not press the keys as I should with the very tips of my fingers, and my fingers fly too high off the keys and so make it impossible to play fast passages with any facility. Furthermore my right wrist is not relaxed, and does not fall, as it should, at an easy right angle to the instrument. I do not hold my back straight when I play, instead I slouch over the music. My breathing is not controlled by the muscles of my stomach, I blow carelessly from the top of my throat. My embouchure is ill-formed and I rely too often on a syrupy vibrato. I lack the control to play any dynamics other than soft or loud. I have never bothered to teach myself the notes above top G. My musicianship is poor, and slightly unusual rhythms perplex me. Above all I have no ambition to play any other than the same half-dozen pieces and I make the same mistakes each time.
Several minutes into my first piece I thought of her listening from the bedroom and the phrase “captive audience” came into my mind. While I played I devised ways in which these words could be inserted casually into a sentence to make a weak, light-hearted pun, the humor of which would somehow cause the situation to be elucidated. I put the flute down and walked towards the bedroom door. But before I had my sentence arranged, my hand, with a kind of insensible automation, had pushed the door open and I was standing in front of Mary. She sat on the edge of the bed brushing her hair, the chain decently obscured by blankets. In England a woman as articulate as Mary might have been regarded as an aggressor, but her manner was gentle. She was short and quite heavily built. Her face gave an impression of reds and blacks, deep red lips, black, black eyes, dusky apple-red cheeks and hair black and sleek like tar. Her grandmother was Indian.
“What do you want?” she said sharply and without interrupting the motion of her hand.
“Ah,” I said. “Captive audience!”
“What?” When I did not repeat myself she told me that she wished to be left alone. I sat down on the bed and thought, If she asks me to set her free I’ll do it instantly. But she said nothing. When she had finished with her hair she lay down with her hands clasped behind her head. I sat watching her, waiting. The idea of asking her if she wished to be set free seemed ludicrous, and simply setting her free without her permission was terrifying. I did not even know whether this was an ideological or psychosexual matter. I returned to my flute, this time carrying the music stand to the far end of the apartment and closing the intervening doors. I hoped she couldn’t hear me.
On Sunday night, after more than twenty-four hours of unbroken silence between us, I set Mary free. As the lock sprang open I said, “I’ve been in Los Angeles less than a week and already I feel a completely different person.”
Though partially true, the remark was designed to give pleasure. One hand resting on my shoulder, the other massaging her foot, Mary said, “It’ll do that. It’s a city at the end of cities.”
“It’s sixty miles across!” I agreed.
“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.”