Some days later, I boasted to him about a few imaginary conquests and what’s more with girls I’d only just met, which are the kind of conquests that win you most kudos and provoke most envy: I’d come on to a girl and she’d ended up sucking me off in a dark corner of La Riviera, or whatever it was called, which had a bit of a garden at the back; in Pintor Goya I’d got off with the drop-dead-gorgeous daughter of a government minister, who was known for both things, for being his daughter and for being gorgeous, anyway, I’d taken her home with me and fucked her twice. That was the kind of lexicon I used, or worse of course. None of that had actually taken place, but I told him it had happened on the nights when he hadn’t come out with us, because he didn’t always join us, partly because he was unable to keep up with our supposedly fast pace, but mainly because he had certain obligations, family and professional. I say ‘supposedly’ because, at the time, on many of the nights when I didn’t take him out with me, I simply stayed home or worked until late at Muriel’s apartment even if he wasn’t there (he had begun shooting the only film he made during my time with him, the Harry Alan Towers production based on a script on which I’d lent a helping hand), either compiling one of those exhaustive lists of authors or working on some other such minutiae, meanwhile discreetly keeping Beatriz and the children company, listening to her play the piano, not that she ever kept this up for long, for she soon tired of it. By then, it had become clear to me that the occasional ‘sacred’ meetings between her and Van Vechten were purely utilitarian for both parties. In his case, and having seen what I’d seen, he was hardly likely to turn down the chance of occasionally screwing a woman almost twenty years younger, the world of women thirty-five years younger having only just opened up to him.
The Doctor immediately took the bait and, despite his age, gave me a blunt description of what had happened. He had certain traits that were inappropriately juvenile, incorrigibly immature.
‘When I took her home the other night, she sucked me off in the car, right outside her parents’ house. What do you think to that?’
I gave an admiring whistle, not just congratulatory, but surprised too. There was always the possibility that his conquest might be as imaginary as mine, but I thought not.
‘Really? She went that far? To be honest, I would never have thought it. How did you manage that? I don’t mean to underestimate you, of course, because you look great, like some American or English actor, but you are old enough to be her father, if not more, and, forgive me, but I really can’t see her suggesting it. I’d imagined that, at most, she might have let you touch her tits or shown them to you without you touching them, because you asked her to. I don’t mean to offend, but you must have amazing powers of persuasion. How did it happen? Tell me. Did you offer her something in return? Lifelong medical care? Did you suggest listening to her chest and then one thing just led to another?’
I tried to adopt a light tone, a mixture of jocularity and amazement. Ever since that poker evening with Celia and all his blunt questions, I had got into the habit of sometimes gently pulling his leg. Perhaps I went too far this time. I saw at once that he was not amused, as if it really riled him to see that I considered he was not in himself seductive enough. His eyes grew cold and hard, and the rectangular smile he’d worn as he pinned on his metaphorical medal, as he told me of his triumph, vanished completely. He was one of those people who, because they look younger than they are, end up believing that nothing at all has changed since their youth. If they’re not stupid, they only believe this now and then and when alone, and they know it’s not true; and Van Vechten wasn’t stupid. He was proud of his fine appearance and made good use of it, but he wasn’t just a conceited fool or blind to what he could see in the mirror, or perhaps his mirror was the wife he saw each morning, who looked much older than him and reminded him of his real age. He was hardly ever seen out and about with her. Perhaps they lived separate lives, like Muriel and Beatriz, or even more so, perhaps they were just waiting for divorce finally to be made legal in Spain. There were an awful lot of such couples waiting impatiently or desperately, appallingly unhappy couples who had been forced to put up with their lot for more than four decades, if not centuries, because the brief truce of the 1930s hardly counted.
After a few seconds, his eyes softened and he recovered his smile, his principal charm and weapon. More than that, he even laughed, although whether this was a forced laugh or not, I couldn’t tell.
‘Lifelong medical care. Listening to her chest,’ he repeated. ‘Oh, very funny, very witty. I could also have offered to examine her for cysts, you forgot to mention that, although at her age, girls have other things on their mind. But like I said, I never offer anything in exchange. I’ve never paid for sex, and what you’re half-jokingly suggesting would be tantamount to paying. Albeit cheap at the price.’
He had maintained his smile throughout this speech, but his tone had been ever so slightly more serious. I was quick to correct him, so that he wouldn’t take offence.
‘There was no half-joking about it, Jorge, it was a joke, pure and simple. Anyway, how did it happen? How was it? Did it just come out of the blue? To be honest, I’m staggered. I take my hat off to you.’ And I made a gesture as if doffing my hat.
‘You’re surely not expecting me to reveal my methods to you, Juan.’ He was smiling unreservedly now, flattery can soften anyone and often proves to be our undoing, our downfall. It encourages us to talk too much.
‘At least give me a clue. Lessons from the master.’ I immediately bit my tongue, I’d gone too far and he might get annoyed again. ‘Don’t play hard to get. After all, I’m the one who introduced you to all those girls.’
He hesitated. No, he wasn’t stupid, and couldn’t possibly hope to persuade me that whatever had happened with Maru had been at her instigation or had happened spontaneously without some trick on his part, some entreaty, some trap. Maru was quite a wild young woman, who laughed loudly at the slightest thing, regardless of whether it was funny or not, she might even have creased up at one of the Doctor’s ancient jokes. But there was a vast difference between that and fellating him while he was at the wheel of his car, in downtown Madrid. He shrugged and opted for an enigmatic silence, but I sensed in him a desire to crow about his methods, which he didn’t yet want to reveal. I was sure he would talk more freely on the next occasion.
‘It isn’t only a matter of how you get something, Juan’ — and he said this rather in the tones of a master, a maestro, so perhaps I hadn’t gone too far — ‘what matters is getting it in a way that gives you most satisfaction. And nothing gives one more satisfaction than when a girl doesn’t want to do it, but can’t say No. And I can assure you most of them do want to do it, once they realize they’re obliged to. They want it once they’ve experienced it, but they’re left with the memory, the knowledge, the resentment, that the very first time, they had no choice. And as I’m sure you know, it doesn’t get much better than that: new desire mingled with a touch of old resentment.’
What he had said was pretty nebulous, not to say cryptic, but it seemed worth mentioning it to Muriel, informing him. Van Vechten had referred to something that could be relevant to my boss’s first semi-explicit words, to the doubts possibly sown in him by ‘a spiteful, devious person who harboured an implacable grudge’ against Van Vechten, ‘the kind of grudge that never dies’. That is the defence Muriel imagined the Doctor would use if he asked him point-blank about the troubling story someone had told him, the story that had eventually led him to send me on this mission: ‘malicious lies or the product of some vile settling of accounts’, mere ill-intentioned rubbish. Those first words had remained engraved on my memory, as have so many other first words spoken to me by almost everyone: ‘What stops me simply dropping the matter, rejecting it as frankly unbelievable and not even worth considering, is that, according to what I’ve been told, the Doctor behaved in an indecent manner towards a woman or possibly more than one … That, to me, is unforgivable, the lowest of the low.’ Now Van Vechten had stated that he found nothing more satisfying than ‘when a girl doesn’t want to do it, but can’t say No’ and he’d spoken of them feeling ‘obliged’ to do it and of having no choice ‘the very first time’ and of an ‘old resentment’. I had taken pains to remember his words exactly, which is something I’ve always been good at, I’ve always had the ability to report verbatim what people say in my presence, with no summarizing, no paraphrasing, no approximations, as long as it’s not a long lecture of course. However confusing I found Van Vechten’s words, I was ready to repeat them to Muriel, and they would doubtless be more meaningful to him than to me, or he could perhaps throw some light on them. What I found most bewildering was this: if Van Vechten neither paid for nor offered anything in exchange, why on earth would Maru or any of my female friends say Yes when their first reaction was to say No? I didn’t think the Doctor would be capable of violence or of making physical threats. And if that had been the accusation, Muriel wouldn’t have used a subtle, moral term like ‘indecent’, which was too flimsy a word to describe any action involving force or rape.