Mamoon had taken it seriously. The pieces were falling into place. Mamoon’s father had had an arranged marriage, fought with his wife continuously, gambled most nights, and drank ferociously. But he never went with women and repeatedly told his son never to marry. Mamoon began to wonder if his weird adolescent sexuality was a picture of his father’s confusions.
Marion said, ‘Mamoon, as you might have found out, was something of a Nietzsche jukebox, with a quote for every occasion. And he particularly liked this: “That which is silent in the father speaks in the son.” We discussed it very intensely. At detumescence, after all, there is conversation, that is where love begins. Over a bottle of wine or three, we spent entire evenings talking, working everything out. We were very close, and living together, because he had been teaching in America.’
He asked her what that was like.
She laughed. ‘It was wonderful to spend time with him. But it was not unconflictual. Nothing with Mamoon was unconflictual. There had been the inevitable run-ins with the authorities, culminating in the accusation of misogyny and so on.’
Harry said he’d heard something about that and was going to look into it. He asked her what the details were.
‘I’d been living with him outside the university for a couple of months,’ she said. Mamoon made sure he was too maverick for the institution. But he knew how to interest people in ideas. ‘Then, unfortunately, there was the incident with the black feminist lecturer to whom he said, at a cocktail party, “Surely, being black isn’t an entire career these days, is it?”’
‘What happened?’
‘Big flatulent row. That, along with his remark that there was a high incidence of psychosis in the Afro-Caribbean community because of the fathers’ absence, did for him. It turned nasty. We had to pack up and get out of there fast. It was like being run out of town.’
‘Did it bother him?’
‘Of course he said he didn’t want to be deprived of the jouissance of racism just because he had brown skin and had suffered it himself. Clearly, he said, it must be one of the great pleasures to hate others for more or less random, arbitrary reasons.’
It meant he was never able to teach again. It cost him money. He was more bothered than he could own up to, because he had important things to say about the craft he had devoted his life to. Somehow he got himself tangled up in these fatuous debacles. He couldn’t understand it and needed ‘comfort’, he claimed.
‘Female comfort?’
‘I told him that as I had sacrificed so much to be with him, I couldn’t have him taking off with my best friends in front of me. He called me a bore, and sulked. He had the temerity to say I was no good at sucking cock.’
‘Oh dear. You have to take care with your teeth,’ said Harry. ‘I guess you know that. Perhaps you could have practised.’
‘Believe me, baby, I could suck your brain out through your ass and blow it down the can.’
He asked, ‘How was he at cunnilingus?’
‘Enthusiastic, at times. But inaccurate. And then—’
‘Then?’
She said, ‘When a man doesn’t want to eat you out, he’s done with you.’
‘That must be one of life’s hardest lessons.’
She went on, ‘Mamoon could really freeze you out, until I couldn’t bear the anxiety. Threesomes weren’t my thing, I had tried them. Men think they like them, but their eyes are bigger than their dicks. It’s rare for a man to satisfy one woman, let alone two. Still, I decided these women could join us, if they wanted to — one at a time. Why not? Hadn’t we had the sixties? Why be conventional, why say no to everything? And they were free women. We did it a few times. He said it was the most exciting thing he’d done.’
‘Why did the women do it?’
‘It was the first time, I guess, that he’d seen that he could use his power, position and charisma to seduce and use. As he said, being famous, witty and good-looking made him catnip to the menopausal. He was so interested in some things that the world seemed to vibrate around him. And these women were curious. But they had husbands, children and lives, and weren’t always available when he wanted. He had the bright idea of inviting professionals to join us.’
‘How many times?’
‘Almost every night, for a few weeks. We were so overtaken by it, we blew a big hole in his income, not that he cared. Why would he? I guess a lot of it was Peggy’s and he believed she owed him.’
‘Were you drinking and using drugs? Were there other men involved?’
‘He was very keen.’
‘How do I know this is true?’
‘There are letters.’
‘If we’re to skewer him, I have to see them.’
‘You do?’
‘Otherwise he can say you’re only a mad fantasist.’
She hesitated for a moment before getting up and leading him out of the room. In the corridor, she pushed open her bedroom door.
Ahead of him, framed on the wall, was a large print of Richard Avedon’s photograph of Mamoon, which Harry had only seen previously, the size of a postage stamp, on a book jacket. In a suit and tie, and wreathed in cigarette smoke, Mamoon must have been in his mid-forties, dark-haired, black-eyed, anguished, a man with the strength to endure, with a poet’s soul, an Asian Camus. In time, Mamoon, the radical transgressor — for whom accurate language was always revolutionary — would argue and fall out with fellow writers; he would be banned from various countries for political or religious opinions, pick up a clutch of fatwas, and numerous prizes and awards, at which he would chuckle; and he would write good books.
‘You see?’ said Marion.
With her behind him, Harry continued to stare: if he had forgotten why, as a young man, he’d loved Mamoon — the tough-guy, hard-living artist who looked into the dark without flinching, and spoke what he saw, putting truth and authenticity before safety — this picture of pride, self-knowledge and glamour should remind him.
It had to be true, as Rob liked to reiterate, that the writer, indeed every real artist, was the devil, rivalling God in creativity, trying even to surpass him. God was surely man’s most fatal creation, the devil’s kitsch bitch. It was God, with his insistence on being worshipped and admired, who made the argument of art necessary, keeping the fire of dissent alive in men and women. This dissident was the artist, who spanned with his imagination reason and unreason, the under and the over, the dream and the world, men and women.
Plato, along with the latest pope, recognised how dangerous it is to have an artist around making mischief, stirring things up with the spoon of truth and intoxicant of fantasy and magic. And so, for crossing the line, and for stealing God’s fire, artists were banned, imprisoned, condemned, silenced, killed — they always would be, these sometime Christs of the page.
It must have been the Faustian idea of Mamoon as hero and holy transgressor, as the one who took on God and the righteous, that Harry had fallen in love with, an image which had brought him to this room today, followed by this woman who had slept every night for years beneath the picture. It was, also, a picture of the man Harry had, at one time, wanted to become. Yet now he was only the illustrator, not the subject. In what way, he wondered, could he become more like the image? How brave or daring had he ever been?
Marion kissed her fingers and pressed them against the photograph.
Harry noticed there was nowhere else to sit except beside her on the narrow single bed. On the undusted shelf there were photographs of her children when young. He told her they were lovely kids.
‘Women must not bolt,’ she said. ‘The children punished me. When I went, one of them attempted suicide, and is still mad in an asylum. The youngest refuses to let me meet my grandchildren.’