He bought his seventh postcard and second catalog and said, "Do you like Lawrence?" And she looked up at him with eyes so great and clean that they were obliged to include some vapidity, some provincial vapidity, because there was room in there for everything. Gina was no English rose, dead the next day. This was subsoiclass="underline" Celt-Iberian, Northern-swarthy, gypsyish. Her eyes were set in dark loops of shadow, like badger, burglar, brawler, dramatically bruised by some internal suffusion (embarrassment always deepened these shadows); her nose was a Caligu-lan quarter-circle; her mouth was lean- wide, but not full.
"Do you like Lawrence?"
"Eh?"
"D. H. Lawrence. Do you like him?"
How do you mean, like? her eyes said, then. But her mouth said, "You had me there. My boyfriend's called Lawrence. Anyroad, I can tell you like him."
Richard laughed sparingly, grandly. (And she really did say anyroad. Just that once. And never again.) With his ears all gummed and humming, Richard explained. This was indeed his fifth visit to the museum in two days. But his interest was professional, was shrewd, was remunerative. Around them a temporary exhibition in honor of D. H. Lawrence had been mounted (his shaving brush, his fob-watch, his manuscripts, his surprisingly well-controlled paintings), here in the author's hometown. Richard was writing a piece about it-very much the kind of piece he wrote in those days: regional, marginal, with a flat fee for expenses. Richard in a room at the bunky boardinghouse; a half-bottle of whisky and the Selected Letters, the poems, Lady Chatterley, D. H. Lawrence, Novelist, A Selection from Phoenix, Women in Love. That kind of thing made him happy then.
"It's for the TLS. The Times Literary Supplement." That was good. All those prissy syllables were good. Richard knew that words were all he had. Not the words that would appear in the Times Literary Supplement. Nor the words that would appear on the pages of Dreams Don't Mean Anything, due out in the autumn. Just the words he would use on Gina Young. In speech, and of course in letters, in notes. Because Richard knew about women and letters, women and notes. He knew about women and words.
She said, "Where are you stopping?"
Ah: a local ambiguity. Stopping meant staying. And Richard wasn't stopping anywhere. He was going all the way. He said, " 'The Savoy,' 3 Stalton Avenue. Can I ask you if you'll do something?"
"Eh?"
"Come live with me and be my love."
"Bloody hell."
"And we will all the pleasures prove . .. Wait. I'm sorry. But what does one say? I've never seen anyone like you before. Your eyes."
She was looking around. Who for? A policeman. Or a critic, to come and help with the cliches. But we like cliches, don't we, in matters of the heart? Lovers are a mob. No detail, thank you, nothing too interesting in itself, if you don't mind, where love is concerned. That all comes later. Our tiring and fantastical requests and provisos, our much-humored peculiarities, our exasperating attention to detail.
"Get away," she said.
"Okay then. Lunch."
"I've a boyfriend."
"Yes. Lawrence. I bet. Long time? How long?"
"Nine years."
"Of course. And you like Lawrence. And Lawrence wouldn't like it."
"No he wouldn't. What would I tell him?"
"Nothing. No, not nothing. Tell him good-bye. Good-bye, goodbye."
He turned. A lady-her tolerant swallow, her habitual beam-had formed a one-lady queue behind him. Richard glanced at the postcard in his hand: Mexico. He paid for it. How sore his throat was. And her face, pointing up at him from where she crouched at the brown table, how swollen, how infused. We must remember the particular ghost (though Gina hadn't read him, and never would) who presided over the innocent triteness of their exchange. Not Henry James. Not E. M. Forster-oh dear me no. Look at Sir Clifford Chatterley, in his wheelchair: he wasn't man enough to call a cunt a cunt! But now behold the hot Lawrence with
Gina had slept with Lawrence, he assumed. She hadn't slept with any writers. Before very long, she would sleep with many.
"Can I meet you after work?"
"No."
This is the past. And so it's true.
In Washington there was a party for Gwyn at the British Embassy, co-thrown, it seemed, by Britain and the publicity boy.
Under a ton of chandelier Richard stood with ovals of light streaming at an angle across his face. This made him look like a creature on some riverine mission or vigiclass="underline" it imparted an amphibian-no, a reptilian- quality to his unvarying stare. And it was with reptilian patience, a croc-like consideration of the percentages, the rot-rates and backlash factors, that Richard watched and waited, and waited and watched. Gwyn was doing his thing on Lucy Cabretti: Lucy Cabretti, who in Richard's hearing had been referred to by the publicity boy (the publicity boy was big on game plans) as Profundity One. For the first hour or so they'd stationed Gwyn at the door, working the arrivals: a succession of sodden wayfarers (they seemed to form a subscription audience of the local sociocultural), with their snow-capped umbrellas and slithering galoshes. Effusive enough when introduced to Lucy in the hall, Gwyn was now concertedly loving her up-on a sofa beneath the mullioned window, against a galaxy of lamplit snow. She was laughing with her small head thrown back, a hand placed on Gwyn's arm to ward off further hilarity. Under the trembling chandelier Richard maintained his reptilian vigil. He wondered what Gwyn had going for him, these days, in terms of sexual charm. Gwyn never used to have any; but since then he'd thrown some money at his appearance (need Richard adduce the tinted contacts?), and of course he had the entree now. Success revamps you. It must keep you young. Because failure sure makes you old.
For largely accidental reasons (an international conference, plus culture week at the White House, according to the publicity boy), several American writers were present, none of Richard's outright heroes but a fair selection of middleweights, hallowed background figures, on cautious exhibit. Had they been here, their British counterparts would have been sitting in a clump, cheerfully monolithic and practically indistinguishable. Yet the carved idols of American letters kept their distance, the nuclei of their own inner circles. And Richard had circled these circles, earlier on, appreciatively sensing the repulsive force that kept them apart. Why did they hate each other? It was obvious. To exaggerate: here was a two-foot Alabaman with his face in a bucket of hooch: there was a towering Virginian belle with her mint julep and her honeysuckle
"Excuse me, are you Lucy Cabretti? Richard Tull. Literary Editor of The Little Magazine, in London. I wonder if you saw the review we ran of Double Dating."
"No! I didn't see that."
"I was told you'd be here so I brought along a copy of it. Look at it later. An interesting review, as well as a favorable one. / thought too that you found the most tenable position. You make the legal situation very clear, without losing sight of the fact that we're talking about real men and women."