‘I can’t see why we should keep you alive,’ she chuckles. ‘Give me two reasons. No — three, please, these are straitened times. I’m sure you know no one can live on just for the sake of it. Everyone has to demonstrate their use, and their ability to care for themselves. The world would collapse if we had billions of elderly people clogging up the hospitals. There can only be a few who will survive. Those who will get through have to be chosen carefully.’
‘Why is it always the rich?’
‘Because they have done so much to create our standard of living. You know that.’
‘Yes, I do.’
Talk about work; I wear myself out keeping Sabine’s mood even; she is more bitter and angry than Raymond, who has many other complicated liaisons, being interested in women in general, and even their stories. Having been together for fifteen years, my master and mistress have not one more word to say to one another, except about business. But I continue to spend time with her, improving her love for me. What I did notice, a few years back, is that Sabine has what they call ‘everything’: property, jewellery, power, a long life. But she lacks the one thing there really is to want: the fire of love — to be desired passionately. There is no remedy for the disease of desire, except for a rosy mouth on yours, a loving fulfilment, flattery, jokes, and a welcome in the other’s eyes. For a long time a boudoir Olivier, I have given her an approximation of that thing, and become a comrade, a companion, even. So, like Jesus, I am also a family therapist, but one who is never allowed to forget that every breath he takes he owes to someone else.
‘Where are you, boy? Come on! I wait!’
I hear his voice. Has he been calling for a while? I had become lost in my thoughts. He will be angry. Up I get and hurry towards him. I push the door.
‘At last,’ he says. ‘Where have you been?’
I see, to my surprise, in the corner, a young man washing his hands at the sink. I wonder if he’s one of my master’s new lovers. If he were, though, he wouldn’t be dressed. Raymond always insists on his lovers, whether male or female, attending to him naked since a remarkable and desired body is, these days, of course, an achievement rather than a blessing.
But this man, being younger than me, and with the sort of beauty which could set you dreaming, is clothed. I have to say, without vanity, that he is not unlike a younger version of me. He turns and gives a smooth smile. Then he nods at Raymond.
I am looking at this man, and back at Raymond, when two heavily built guards in uniform enter and take me by the arms. As they lead me away I say, ‘Master—’
‘Goodbye,’ he says, waving. ‘However old you are, the truth always comes too late. Goodbye, and thanks.’
A Theft: My Con Man
‘Silent, foul spiders spin their web in the base of our brain …’
I met a man who fed a worm into my ear, and it lived there for more than a year, where it became comfortable and began to devour my mind and eat into my brain. Colonised and infected, I was anxious and depressed, and, at times, a shell. I staggered about like a dying man and slept as much as I could; being awake was no fun. I understood hiding, denial and the passion for ignorance.
Sense is usually the last thing that anyone wants to see, but eventually the truth presses down until you have to open your eyes. I began to hate this man, whom I had only recently met, but who had led me on, and then deceived and stolen from me. At one point, it seemed, he even pretended to be me. After doing this, he disappeared but rang every day for months, with apologies, offers of help and mad promises.
I found my hate was so great that not only was it corrupting me — ruining my view of the world until I believed it was only foul — but, to my surprise, by some mysterious alchemy, it was turning into love. I was beginning to love my thief, a man I barely knew, but whom I had trusted and even liked, and who had taken my savings, amongst many other crimes. At one low point I was phoning him every hour. I was impatient with everyone else because I was thinking of him all the time. I was waking up at night to think of him more, and when he did call, my heart leapt. I would retreat to a quiet room where I could hear every tone of his voice. I would, I even thought, go to his house and see him in his privacy. I would become his stalker.
Freud wrote that love involves the undervaluation of reality and the overvaluation of the desired object. While the correct valuation of a person is an odd, if not impossible idea, we might say Freud meant something like this: for various reasons, many of them masochistic, we become involved with others who cannot possibly give what we ask for; we can wait as long as we wish, but they do not have it, and one day, if we can bear to abandon our fantasy and see clearly, we might face reality straight on. We will then look elsewhere for fulfilment, to a place where our needs can, in fact, be satisfied.
At the beginning of this business, one of my agents, the man who had recommended Chandler, had told me how impressive Jeff had been at meetings. Clever and decisive, Chandler had satisfactorily done my agent’s accounts, as well as those of my agent’s family. Chandler was on top of things. He knew what he was doing. Everyone felt in good hands. But, by the end, when everything had gone wrong, the truth was that Chandler did not have anything. However, he remained confident and liked to give the impression he did have it all. Or he maintained that he would have it soon: funds were on their way from Spain or Switzerland. And so I kept asking for it, but he knew, and I realised eventually, that he had lost everything. It would never come back, and this was a loss I would have to live with, think about, and attempt to integrate.
*
Pop and the theatre, my first cultural loves, are both, in form and content, games of deception, deceit and mischief, where there is nothing authentic or real behind the artificial front, except the desire to play and to be someone else. David Bowie knew that pop was a put-on; he lifted and modified everything that interested him. I’ve always been fascinated by the nefarious cleverness of hypnotists, tricksters, card sharps, mountebanks, con men, convincers, deceivers, big-mouths, bigamists, hiders and cheats; men who had three families living in one neighbourhood unbeknownst to one another, others who pretended to be doctors, pilots or Olympic swimmers, or who concealed an evil past as a Nazi. I like to think of the man who tried to sell the Eiffel Tower to an industrialist by convincing him it was to be used for scrap metal. I think of undercover agents, of anyone who has talked someone into something, someone with nothing who can persuade others, using words, that they have it all, or at least something desirable. The con man is the one who has the password to your hopes, who touches the G-spot of your wishes. Honesty and straightforwardness are dull; the con man makes you aware that life could be more gratifying than it is. He is everyone’s procurer, the sorcerer who conjures fantasy in you, the ever-flowing mother who will fill you up with good things, the one who can identify what you want even before you see it yourself. One shouldn’t forget that Hans Christian Andersen’s tale ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ is the story of an almost successful con, of a couple of weavers who convince an Emperor that he is more than he is. His vanity is their instrument, and they play on him until he is exposed and humiliated.
As many of us do, I come from a family of show-offs, fantasists and big-mouths, and I wanted to be big myself, once — bigger than I in fact was. Sometimes I even believed we big-mouths were all in the same game: isn’t a writer a kind of con artist or spellbinder, telling stories for their life like Scheherazade, drawing the other into a conspiracy of lies, convincing them to turn the page and believe in flapdoodle?