With his Iberian blood, Gwyn grew dark and sparkling in the sun. Richard's brief visits to the pool, in his nontransferable English flesh, gave him first-degree burns on his arms, thighs, neck, nose and forehead. When clothed he looked like a bit player in a cheap video, or in pornography, the repulsive patsy of slapdash makeup and deathwatch lighting. Naked, he felt he had the distinctive markings of a London pigeon. Even the skinny pigeon redness of his legs contributed to his homesickness. Other things were going wrong with him here in the Pacific city. He couldn't get his mouth wet, no matter what he drank. His tongue was curling up at the edges. Beads of information were traveling along his gum lines, information about the immediate future. In two locations (upper left, lower right) the pain fairies were already breaking little fairy eggs of fairy pain, at every second's throb. Then it would go away again. At night he reviewed biographies in his room, and marked up Untitled
for the reading in Boston, which was the end of the line.
Other things were going wrong with him here in the Pacific city, the city that went on being a city as far as the eye could see in every direction, forever and ever. A couple of times he accumulated the energy to bedriven out into it, when Gwyn did radio or TV, and he attended Gwyn's reading, in a mall somewhere. The city was like a city doing remarkably well so soon after that unfortunate all-out nuclear attack, after that Everest of a meteorite, that mile-high tidal wave; there were blips and glitches, square miles of them, but sun and enterprise and multicultural synergy were always getting the place back on stream. As Gwyn had truckingly told his audience, during the warmup at the reading, Los Angeles was Amelior .. . With differences. Nikita Khrushchev, flying in over the West's last stop and seeing all the swimming pools innocently open to the sky, knew at once that Communism had failed. And Richard's body knew that whatever it was Richard stood for-the not-so-worldly, the contorted, the difficult-had failed. Los Angeles sought transcendence everywhere you looked, through astrology or crystal or body-worship or templegoing, but these were stabs at worldly divination, tips and forecasts about how to do better in the here and now. What mattered was to prepare for the future. And Richard was not prepared for the future. Bodily knowledge of this seemed to pass in through his sinuses; knowledge of this presented itself not in the mind but in the ears and nose and throat.
Women, he thought, understood about time. (Gina understood about time.) Women could send their imaginations out over the future and situate themselves at certain points within it. Time is a dimension, not a force. But women felt it as a force, because they could feel its violence, every hour. They knew they would be half dead at forty-five. This information did not fall in the path of men. Men, at forty-five, were in "the prime of life." The prime? Prima (bora): first (hour)? They get the Change. We get the Prime. And this is the reason why our bodies weep and seep in the night, because we're half dead too, and don't know how or why.
"Wow," said the publicity boy. "Too bad about your face. Does it hurt a lot?"
Richard said, "Not as much as you'd think."
"Pardon me?"
"Not as much as you'd think."
"Pardon me?"
He shook his head no. That hurt a lot. Just before dawn Richard had got out of bed and moved toward the bathroom mirror with unusually intense disquiet. Sure enough, his face was the shape of a television. He looked like one of the Simpsons. He looked like Bart Simpson. In profile Richard resembled the joke figure in a newspaper cartoon about a den-tist's waiting room. Full face, though, he looked like Bart Simpson. Because he had two joke toothaches: lower right, upper left.
At the airport he sat with Gwyn while the publicity boy banged his head against the wall of a nearby phone booth, rearranging interviews. Their flight to Boston was delayed, and there were further complications. Following the mid-afternoon reading they were to make a short hop to Provincetown, over the bay, in Cape Cod, there to attend a party at the holiday home of the toiletry tycoon or burger king who owned Gwyn's publishers. The publicity boy returned, saying,
"The Globe guy and the Herald lady will meet us at Logan and we can do a double interview in the cab."
"Did you get Elsa Oughton?"
"I keep getting this jig who just bawls me out and won't take a message."
The publicity boy sat down heavily.
Gwyn was staring at him. "Try again. What is this? She's Profundity Three for Christ's sake."
On the afternoon of Gwyn's Los Angeles reading the publicity boy had pointed to the lone cloud in the sky-pink-fringed, chef's-hat-shaped, utterly lost-and predicted, drolly, and wrongly, that no one would show up, this being Los Angeles. In Los Angeles the sky had only one imitation it could do: that of the interstellar void. As for telling Los Angeles about the kind of day it was having, the sky, like Gwyn Barry when they asked him about the Millennium deal on Amelior, had no comment. The sky above Los Angeles was a no-comment sky.
The simultaneous or parallel reading was to be given in a converted theater in Boston's commercial midtown. Richard took it as auspicious when he saw the crowd outside, and the crowd in the entrance hall, and the crowd lining the passage, and the crowd in the bar where the simultaneous or parallel signing session would later take place. Gwyn's table was ready, hardly visible beneath the earthworks and palisades of his fiction: the stacks of Amelior Regained, the stacks of Amelior, and (Jesus) the stacks of Summertown in a bright new paperback original. Richard approached his own table, which was of course entirely bare, and started unloading his mail sack. Lifting out the first copy of Untitled, and catching the usual hangnail in the rough loom of its jacket, Richard watched Gwyn and tried to imitate his expression, benign, bemused, unsurpris-able. He was also endeavoring to take heart from the rampant and (by definition) laughably undiscriminating enthusiasm on display. In England, if your favorite living author who also happened to be your long-lost twin brother was giving a reading in the next house along, it would never occur to you even to stick your head round the door. But Americans clearly went out and did things.
For the next fifteen minutes the two writers were to occupy a sectioned area of the bar, where a group of journalists and academics had been gathered for them to hobnob with. Elsa Oughton stood among them. Richard was startled by her appearance. She was no longer the angular, Gina-like dryad of her jacket photograph: he wouldn't have identified her if she hadn't had both Gwyn's shoes sticking out of the back of her skirt. On the happenstance/coincidence/enemy-action principle, Richard had decided against any further defamation of his friend. But after Gwyn was done with her (in parting he gave Elsa the full PR handshake, two palms enfolding hers as if in joint prayer), she came over to where he was standing with his swollen face and his plastic beaker of white wine and Richard thought what the hey and said,
"Elsa Oughton? Richard lull. I wonder if you saw our review of Saddle Leather in The Little Magazine. A favorable and also a very interesting piece. I'll make sure you get sent a copy."
"Thanks. Good. How was your tour?"
What Richard was looking at here was a narrative of fat. The whole story: how she'd got that way, how she'd tried to get back. How muchshe hated it. He wondered whether it was in him to dream up something about Gwyn hating fat people-a taunt directed at a small child with gland problems, perhaps. But he didn't see how the subject of fat people could be smoothly raised. For a moment he felt pride in the shaming bloat of his own face. The only other stuff he knew about Elsa was that she wrote twangingly sensitive short stories about hikes and sleepouts and mingling with animals. And that she had recently married Viswanathan Singh, the Harvard economist.