"Yeah, but what kind of thing?"
"Anything!"
Abruptly the room reminded Richard of the classroom in the crammer he had attended years ago, on Gwyn's street. Mostly it was the dimensions, he supposed, and the room's intransigently undomestic feel. Perhaps, too, the sense he had then, at eighteen, that he was being graded here for the rest of his life; that information about himself, welcome or unwelcome, was on its way, and getting nearer.
"Do you like doing this test on boys?"
"Yeah I really want to know it about people. What their favorite is."
"Because …"
"It tells you so much. About them."
"How many times have you uh, run this test on boys?"
She shrugged expressively-but not enlighteningly. Two or three times? Two or three times a day? Richard thought that there probably wasn't much point in trying to read her manner. Not much point in assigning adverbs to it, and so on (proudly, indignantly, flusteredly). As was the case with Steve Cousins, Belladonna had her feelings and reactions and affectations, but they played to a different and newer rhythm whose beat he didn't know.
"Give me an example. What was Darko's favorite?"
"Darko," said Belladonna (proudly, indignantly, flusteredly).
"… Okay. What's the most usual favorite? What do they usually want you to do?"
"Well, usually . . ." She paused-fondly, you might say. Her eyesopened wide, in all innocence. "Usually they ask me to go out of the room," she said, "and then come back in nude, and then do a little dance. And then like suck their cocks."
The room gained another magnitude of dark. Who else but lovers- and solitary depressives-would sit in light like this and make no move for the switch?
"I always think it's the trick I show them with my hand. That makes them choose that. So go on. What's your favorite?"
But Richard asked, "What was Gwyn's favorite?"
"Gwyn." And here the adverbs would say thoughtfully, wistfully, tenderly. She turned to him, her face still lowered in shadow. Her clothes, as you might expect, emphasized what she liked most about herself and her body, what she was best pleased with, not a body part (in her case) but a certain rotational quality in the waist and hips. She squirmed and smiled and said, "You know I've never actually 'met' Gwyn Barry."
Richard stood up. He was leaving. He was pretty sure he was leaving. "So you don't know him," he said, "mega-well."
"He loves me."
"You mean you think he loves you."
"It's the way he like looks at me."
"When does he look at you?"
"When he's on TV."
"Do a lot of people on TV look at you?"
"No. Only Gwyn," said Belladonna, staring straight ahead, as if conducting a conversation with Richard's trousers. Then she tipped her head back. "You think I'm all mouth, don't you," she said, and let it half-smile and pout and quiver. "I'm not. I'm not. What's your favorite? I want to know."
"Why?"
"So we can make Gwyn jealous."
And Richard was gone.
Gal Aplanalp didn't call.
"Gal Aplanalp is on the phone to me two hours a day," said Gwyn. "Foreign rights. She does it all herself. Alexander used to just give them away. But Gal gets decent bread even from the East Europeans. Gal's great. So much vivacity. So much exuberance. So much love of life."
It seemed to Richard that the maggot that lived in Gwyn's brain had got itself stuck in a corner or a U-bend between the two frontal hemispheres, causing its host to go on standing there (perhaps indefinitely) making faces of chaste and twinkly approval. The two men were in the outer bar of the Warlock, leaning on the quiz machine, or the Knowledge, as it was called hereabouts, even by the cab drivers, for whom the Knowledge had meant crouching for a year on a kid-sized moped with a clipboard up on the handlebars. Gwyn and Richard were not here to play tennis. They were here to play snooker (the Portobello Health and Fitness Center was closed for remodernization). This meant they had to wait for a table. At length, Gwyn's maggot freed its wiggling back leg. His face cleared, and then frowned, watchfully. He was wearing a new tweed jacket; the material was yellowish and tufty, like a lightly chewed corncob.
"Thanks for the first chapter of the new one," said Richard. "Mouthwatering. Is it all like that, more or less?"
"More or less. If it ain't broke, don't fix it-that's what I always say. Proofs will be ready next month. You'll get one."
"I can't wait."
A gum-chewing teenage girl in a hot-pink catsuit walked past, heading for the stairs and the aerobics room. They watched her go.
"Do you wonder," said Gwyn, "do you ever wonder, as you get older, about changing sexuality?"
"What the next batch is like?"
"Because that's progressing at the same rate as everything else. It's all speeded up. They're different now."
"Probably."
"But different in what way? My impression is … and this is only from the letters I get, mind .. . my impression is that they're more pornographic. More specialized."
"What letters do you get?"
"There's usually a photograph. And a broad hint at a certain- speciality.?
Richard realized that he had always found Gwyn erotically inscrutable. Who cared, when Gwyn was with Gilda? Not for the first time he wondered if-thanks to an impossibly humiliating complication-he was queer for Gwyn in some way. He thought about it. Richard didn't want to kiss Gwyn. It was surely inconceivable that Gwyn wanted to kiss him. Anyway, it wasn't going to happen, was it. And Richard didn't really care why he was doing what he was doing.
"Demi's young."
"Not that young."
And Richard felt power slowly absent itself from him as Gwyn said,
"She didn't really grow up in the sexual swim. Not sheltered, exactly. Between you and me, she's been around. Not that she remembers that much about it. This was in her cocaine phase. You know. Upper-class girls all have a cocaine phase. When they're born their dads put their names down for the smart dry out clinics. She's even been-she's even had several lovers of West Indian origin."
"You astonish me."
"I'm proud to say it. Good for her! But she's hardly your thoroughly modern miss. Now take fellatio. My impression was, years ago, that some girls did it and some didn't. Or they were like Gilda, and did it on your birthday. Well I bet they all do it now. It's not whether they do it. It's how they do it."
It was like a game when you lost the rhythm of dominance, and you never moved freely but always in reply. Richard said, "There's this girl who wants to meet you."
"Attractive?"
"Extraordinary mouth. She wants to ask you a question."
"What's my favorite color?"
"No. What's your favorite."
Richard then found himself giving Gwyn a gavel-to-gavel account of his experience with Belladonna. As he did so he thought: what was I playing at in there? Belladonna was barely seventeen, and out of her mind. Common sense demanded that he should have made her take her clothes off, at least, and do a little dance. Ever since that crepuscular encounter Richard had been adding to the large number of outrageous novelties that were, he discovered (now he came to think about it), his favorite. There was one favorite in particular: the kind of sexual intercourse that involved not an exchange of bodily fluids so much as a full transfer.
"Well," said Gwyn. "Send her over."
"What is your favorite??
"No, no. I just want to fill out the picture. Why knock yourself out for a hamburger when your wife serves Chateaubriand every night."
Yes, thought Richard, who had heard this line before: but a hamburger is sometimes just what you fancy. And do you really want chateaubriand every night?