There can’t have been many people alive with two pages devoted to them in On the Road, Kerouac describing how, in San Francisco, Slim free-associated-“Great-all-oroonie, oroonirooni”-while almost imperceptibly stroking his bongos with his fingertips for two hours, as Dean Moriarty yelled “Go!” and “Yes!” from the back. Slim was still handsome and graceful, with a true gentleman’s courtesy. Sheridan and I had dinner with him, but it was the ladies he liked-this was a man who’d known Little Richard and dated Ava Gardner, Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth.
But Ajita, when I told her about the brief return to Sheridan, seemed hardly concerned about my infidelity. If jealousy was the vindaloo of love, I’d imagined her tongue burning, and such a fire forcing her to spill her truth. But there was no noticeable heat. I could only suppose she had done the same as me. What I wanted were the details, to know where we both stood.
Wildly I was questioning her, asking her where she’d gained the experience she seemed to have. Who else was she doing it with? Was it still going on?
“Well, you know,” she said. “I’ve had other boyfriends, just as you’ve had other girlfriends. I know you don’t really want to hear about it. It will upset you, Jamal,” she said, stroking my face.
“I know,” I said. “But I’m upset anyway. Is it true that we’ve both been unfaithful recently?”
“In a way,” she said.
“Only in a way?”
“Yes,” she said.
“That’s confirmation, then,” I said. “So now I know. At last some truth! Thank God! Ajita, I guess that’s evens.”
“Not really.”
“What d’you mean?”
She said nothing.
Why didn’t she desire only me? What sort of infidelity had it been? How could she be with someone else when I was with her most of the time? When not with me, she was with her numerous girlfriends or family. How had it happened?
The more she wouldn’t tell me about it, the more I fretted. I had never felt this kind of vicious, penetrating unhappiness before. Certainly such cruelty had never been deliberately inflicted on me. I didn’t expect it from the woman I had fallen in love with. What sort of self-protection was possible? When Valentin and Wolf told me how much weight I’d lost or how tired I looked, I admitted I was having trouble with Ajita, saying, “I think she’s going with someone else.”
They liked her; they didn’t believe it, shrugging off my complaints as ordinary boy-girl stuff. They seemed to think I had been studying hard; and I had, indeed, begun to read a lot. But I wasn’t able to concentrate on my work. Why didn’t Ajita see how badly I was taking this? Where was her love for me?
When I begged her to tell me what was going on, she hardly paid any attention. She looked distracted. She certainly didn’t look as though she’d been caught out in some unnecessary betrayal.
I persisted with my questions as this dismal secret increased in size and pressure in my mind. But she wouldn’t tell me anything.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “Please understand that. I love you and will marry you, when you ask me properly. But there’s so much else going on at the moment, you know that.”
It was a nothing which had become a big something between us. As this hurt was developing, and Ajita and I had less to say to one another, my criminal career took an upturn. Wolf had introduced me to cocaine, and when I took it, talking and talking for the first time in my life, I fell into conversations which I shouldn’t have had.
Valentin and Wolf had always been planning “coups,” as they called them. But whether they kept me out of them, or didn’t tell me, or whether, as I suspected, they just didn’t happen, I never saw a “result.” One time, though, Wolf did turn up with a pink Cadillac, which he’d obtained in exchange for something or other. After a few embarrassing turns around the narrow West Kensington streets, it was “disappeared.” Another time they obtained some money from a woman whose husband was about to be sentenced, having convinced her they’d pay off the judge. When they absconded with the money, she vowed to pursue them.
I was aware that Valentin was trying to pull a coup at the casino-Wolf would go in there and Valentin would ensure he won at blackjack-but it seemed like a lot of talk. Mostly they discussed what they’d do with the money when they had it, which part of the South of France they’d live in; maybe they’d get a boat, but which sort? They even talked of how they’d decorate their apartments and how the day would be spent reading papers, eating, swimming, having sex and fraternising with other criminals. Once, when I was sarcastic about their ability as crooks (“very, very small time,” I called them), Wolf asked me whether, if I thought I was so smart, I had any better ideas. I said I had.
One morning I took Valentin and Wolf to Ajita’s. There, I pointed out the house which backed on to Ajita’s, and explained how the couple went away on Thursdays and returned on Monday mornings.
A few days later, on a Friday, when Ajita was at college, her father at work, her brother at school and the aunt at the market, we broke into the house and took a lot of stuff. Oddly, Wolf had insisted on taking a dust-pan and brush with him, in order to sweep up after. Valentin told me that a criminal they knew had informed Wolf that real villains are always careful. The loot was brought out of the back of the house, through Ajita’s garden and into the garage. When Wolf and Valentin were ready and it was starting to get dark, they took off.
The victims were an old couple. We’d ripped off their life savings, tearing the heart out of their lives, for nothing really. It wasn’t difficult; I was impressed by how easy it was. They didn’t even have window locks. Wolf had been a builder; he knew how to take a window out. I was small, I could get through it and let the others in. I hated being in their house, violating them. Burglars aren’t supposed to think of this, of what the people will think when they get home. To be a criminal, you have to lack imagination.
I wasn’t sure exactly what swag they obtained from the house. There were several bags full of stuff: clocks, watches, ornaments, pictures, as well as jewellery and silver, I guessed. I suggested to Valentin and Wolf that we still had time to put the gear back if they wanted. I can’t have been a natural gangster if I felt this much guilt about my crimes.
It was to be a villains’ carnival. They fenced the gear quickly and spent the day shopping for suits and shoes. They took me out to dinner before we went to the club, opposite the Natural History Museum, where Valentin had worked as a bouncer. I had drunk a lot and wanted to crash through all the laws, knowing at last the excessive pleasures of cruelty and corruption.
In the club a woman (who I considered to be an “older” woman, like a Colette heroine, because she must have been in her late twenties) came to sit beside me, slipping my hand up her skirt. At the end of the night, when I said I had to get the train back to the suburbs, she suggested we go back to the boardinghouse in West Kensington, where Wolf and Valentin would join us later. At the house she went into Wolf’s bedroom, saying she had to “get ready.” When she called me in, she was naked apart from an elbow-length velvet glove, and very willing to suck me off. Before she left, I asked if she wanted to see a movie the next afternoon. She said she couldn’t; she had “a client.”
I had already told Valentin and Wolf that things had been going wrong with Ajita, that she had been unfaithful to me and wouldn’t tell me who it was. Despite the whore, they liked Ajita and told me I should try to work it out with her. On the other hand, they didn’t like to see me getting hurt.
Ajita and I still made love when we met, but it was unhappy love, the worst sort, increasing my loneliness. My nerves crackled and popped continuously. I wanted to believe my mind was under my control, that I could persuade it to go in the direction I required, but it became obvious that this was a false belief.