She said, "You're not like I imagined you."
"Really?" This was a novel idea: that anyone imagined him. He said lightly, "You mean I'm different from my book reviews?"
Belladonna looked for somewhere to sit down, and selected the sofa.
"You're not as I imagined you either.?
"Yeah?"
"You're so young. I don't know. You don't seem to be Gwyn's type."
"He's like … in love with me."
With a defiant shake or twitch of the head. On the word love.
"Is he now?" said Richard as he sat beside her. She was gazing down at her clasped hands: anchorectic Belladonna. He found himself entertaining the reckless hope that she was already pregnant. "And how do you feel about that?"
"Pleased, obviously. Proud. I know he's married or whatever."
"Are you .. .? I mean has this been going on long?"
She smiled secretively. "You know what my thing is? Read my lips." My thing, she said silently, is my mouth.
"Your mouth."
"That's what they call me: The Gob. The Mush. Ever since I was little I had this mouth." My thing is my mouth. I'm famous for my mouth.
"You're still little," said Richard.
Here, he thought, we had the second punk principle. Everyone their own artist. Everyone their own legend. That guy's thing is to have a kilo of old newspapers glued to his hair, that girl's to wear a clothespeg through her cheek. Belladonna's thing was her mouth. Richard felt the contradiction (or would later feel it: he was busy now), because the talent was still no-talent, still idly particular, with no claim on the universal. It picked on a contradiction of Richard's. He wouldn't mind having no genius, if no one else had any? No, not true. He did want people to have it, genius; he wanted it to be out there.
Come and look, Belladonna mouthed. Look closely. She leaned back and adjusted the head of the angle-poise lamp, as if she was her own dentist. Richard-a consultant, a second opinion-bent himself nearer. I've never had a filling, he saw her say, her lower lip answering, as in a dance, to the movement of the tongue. Her teeth were indeed pitilessly perfect. Look how long my tongue is . . . Belladonna's mouth: Richard almost had his nose in it. And he knew he would never feel the same way about women's mouths again, how internal they were, how red and pink and white and wet. Yes, that was right: like a lateral and platonically perfect pubis, containing thirty-two teeth. There was no confusion here. He knew where the teeth were and where they weren't. Before he sat back he let her breath register on him and he found its taste was sweet, but sweet like a medicine, not like a fruit.
"There are tricks I can do with it."
Her tongue appeared and arched up and settled its straining sting on the tip of her nose. Then it withdrew, and the mouth smiled, and said, "Or
He obeyed her. It was a normal hand, too, but he could hardly connect it with Belladonna, who was, as she said, as her mouth said, just a mouth.
Which said "Watch" as the free hand approached it and then disappeared into it, wrist-deep.
Richard turned away, in search of his identity. All he could find was some very worn old stuff. "You want to be careful," he said, "who you show that to."
"I am." Her whole face was looking at him with indulgent reproach. I am.
When she switched off the lamp Richard realized that the room had been smoothly and silently invaded by the adulterous light of dusk; the light that lovers know, intimate and isolating and flatteringly amber. In this particular spasm of his spousal evolution, adultery was a red-light district, and the red just meant danger. He had been in wrong rooms before. He had been in wrong rooms before, but they tended to be better appointed than the one in which he now lurked. The circumambient red was the red of Darko's gums, closing on the fruit vert. A year ago, with Anstice, he had shed his clothes in one of these wrong rooms. What saved him from technical adultery, on that occasion, was a mysterious inner strength, something mysterious even to himself (though he knew a whole lot more about it now): impotence . . . What starts to go, around now, he had decided, is not necessarily the hard-on but the sensation of the hard-on. And with the loss of that sensation (the hurting blood) goes the loss of the belief, the loss of the transcendence and, very soon afterwards (before you know it, in fact), the loss of the hard-on. Such as it was. In its stead, the little death, the little death of ruined powers, of dud magic. Anyway, sensation informed him that impotence would not save him now, if it came to it. Some other dynamic would be obliged to intercede. The most likely candidate, at present, was premature ejaculation. He thought: I'm here because I'm scared of dying. I didn't do it. Death did.
His life, his whole life, was approaching its third-act climax. There would be two acts to follow. The fourth act (conventionally a quiet act). And then the fifth. What genre did his life belong to? That was the question. It wasn't pastoral. It wasn't epic. In fact, it was comedy. Or anti-comedy, which is a certain kind of comedy, a more modern kind of comedy. Comedy used to be about young couples overcoming
"There's a test I do on boys," she said. Richard showing interest, she continued, "Just tell me. I'll go out of the room and then come back in again and do whatever you want."
"How do you mean?"
"It's simple. Just tell me and I'll do it."
"What kind of thing?"
"Whatever. Your favorite."
"My favorite what?"
"Don't be shy. You know: any little thing. Your favorite."
"Say I don't have a favorite."
"Everyone has a favorite. They're funny, these little things, sometimes. It tells you so much about someone."
"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 eyes