4
The part about the bus-stop was true. He really was headed there. This was an unusual move, born of desperation. In general he didn’t catch his bus until close to nightfall, thereby minimising the portion of the evening that he would have to spend at home. But the events of today had numbed him into a strange kind of submission. He felt an unprecedented tolerance – a fondness almost – for the idea of walking up his front steps and boldly inserting his key in his front door. Nothing he would encounter behind it, on two legs or four, struck him at the moment as any worse than what the campus had spent all day serving up to him. The way he saw it, he would greet his housemates with the required minimum of fake civility, take a small to medium amount of shit from them, eat the two bits of leftover chicken that were currently located in his sector of the fridge – and then go to bed, whether night had fallen or not.
In the old days, he reflected bitterly, his house had always had at least one thing going for it, one thing that set it above the University – namely, the relative superiority of its masturbation facilities. His home, whatever else you said about it, was a far more acceptable venue for self-abuse than the campus was. You had to give it that. Granted, the constant presence of his housemates had always imposed quite serious limits on his repertoire. It had never been feasible, for example, to abuse himself in the television room. The violation of the ladies’ tennis match, the desecration of the home shopping show, the outraging of the aerobics hour – wanking on that scale was forever destined to remain out of the question, utopian. But there was something to be said for the toilet, as long as you headed in there with a no-nonsense, meat-and-potatoes attitude. It was marginally more hygienic than any of the cans on campus; and slender pieces of pictorial matter – advertorials, department store catalogues – could fairly comfortably be smuggled in and out of it from his adjacent bedroom. His housemates, as vigilant and scurrilous as they were, hadn’t yet introduced a regime of random body searches. And of course there’d always been his bedroom itself, with its lockable door and muffled acoustics.
But these considerations had all become tragically irrelevant, now that he loved her. Gone now, long gone, were those salad days when he could simply have a quick pull whenever he felt like it. Falling in love with her had played havoc with that whole scene. Because he couldn’t very well do it while thinking about her, could he? That quite clearly wasn’t on. It would have been a sacrilege, an abomination, like playing Mozart on an electric guitar. (Besides, every time he tried it his cock didn’t work.) By the same token, he felt that it wouldn’t be proper, it just wouldn’t do, to jerk off while thinking about someone other than her. It would let her down somehow. It would profane their sweet and sacred bond. And once again he had dick issues every time he tried it. The thing actually shrank. It was like trying to start a broken mower.
What was his penis playing at these days? Who or what did it think it was? It conducted itself, nowadays, as if it was the disillusioned protagonist of a highbrow spy novel, a burnt-out loner in a trenchcoat with no further interest in playing the game. It behaved as if its future lay exclusively in the field of urination. It didn’t even try to get involved in his dreams about her, which in consequence were all highly chaste affairs in which he never did anything lewder than hug her, hold her hand while she collected sea-shells in a bucket, and sit on a blanket watching her sing “Moon River” to the accompaniment of a gleaming Spanish guitar, which she strummed and fingerpicked with uncanny skill.
So that was all pretty much over, then. His career as a masturbator lay in ruins, and his attempts to bring himself out of retirement by force had uniformly ended in disaster. These days he was more or less through with trying. These days he tended to look to the future instead, channelling his energies into more constructive, longer-term projects, of which pretending to be a Maoist was the salient example. Of course, if that scheme ever met with success, he might one day be faced with the question of how his cock would conduct itself in her actual presence. But on the whole that was a problem he wouldn’t object to having. And anyway, he had to concede that that day still lay some way off.
We might as well, while we’re in this rather unsavoury territory, survey the full facts of what might very loosely be termed Fenton’s sex life. It won’t take us long. We have already touched, in a previous chapter, on the grim fact that he had never been fellated. As far as he could tell – and he’d done a lot of pained reading on this question – he was almost certainly the last adult male in the developed world in this deplorable position. But his sexual non-adventures had by no means been confined to the field of fellation. The fact was, he was a virgin. And let there be no mistake about how strictly, how completely, this term applied to him. This was another point on which he’d done a good deal of anguished research: and quite frankly he was appalled by how cavalierly certain elements of the mass media bandied the word “virgin” around. His eye, for example, had recently been caught by a magazine article entitled “Virgins and Proud of It,” which was devoted to the heartening premise that not getting laid was the latest cool fad among the young. With rising spirits he had plunged into the text: only to find that it dealt with a group of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds whose idea of being virgins involved “restricting” themselves, at this point in their lives, to the having of manual, dry, ziperless, phone, intercrural, or oral sex. Actual intercourse, defined in the classical sense, they were saving till they were a year or two older. And on this basis they had been classified as freaks of forbearance, monkish extremists of self-restraint! But if these little muffdivers were virgins, then what the hell was Fenton? He hadn’t even heard of the bulk of these practices. Intercrural sex? What in Christ’s name was that?
Let us, then, be brutally specific about it: during the whole course of his life, Fenton had participated in only one sexual act at which someone other than himself had also been present – and that had been his sandpit encounter, some fifteen years ago, with a youthful Pamela Scratch.
That was it.
But in a curious way, all that was beside the point. Sex itself was beside the point if it wasn’t with her, with his love. Recently, watching TV, he had seen a female zookeeper manually obtaining a sperm sample from a strangely stationary rhinoceros. A feeling of vague wistfulness had come over him, but no envy. He wished the rhinoceros well. Full credit to it. Only if the zookeeper had been Charmaine would it have occurred to him to draw any contrast, unfavourable to himself, between the rhino’s sex life and his own.
He had emerged from the shade now. He was headed up a wide brick pathway that was straddled, about twenty metres ahead of him, by a door. Or rather by two doors: two heavy glass doors with solid metal handles, standing in a sturdy aluminium frame that glittered in the heat. This was a conceptual sculpture called The Door, and it had been put there, or installed there, by the University’s Conceptual Sculptor in Residence, whose name was Vladimir Vonk. On the far side of the glass, the path continued indifferently on its way. The Door was designed to illuminate the fact that one’s “normal” method of walking along a path, apparently so natural and value-free, in fact relied on certain fundamental assumptions, including the assumption that one was unlikely to encounter a large glass door, unattached to any kind of wall or building, standing in one’s way. Speaking at the work’s official unveiling, Vonk had averred that The Door would present a “witty challenge to the spatial complacency” of the numerous students, academics, and Artists in Residence who walked along the path every day. “The piece,” he had said, “shall oblige its users to pause and push it open before moving onward, thus engaging them in a play with traditional notions of space, while blurring the conventional distinction between the ‘indoor’ and ‘outdoor’ environments.” A transcription of Vonk’s remarks could be found on a plaque – a very large plaque – that was staked into the ground at the work’s side. The surrounding area of lawn had been worn bald over the years by people who had elected to walk around the sculpture instead of through it.
Briskly Fenton pushed the piece open. Shutting it behind him, he had a legitimate excuse to glance back down the path.
Pamela Scratch was nowhere in sight.
He relaxed his pace, but only slightly. He followed the path up a brief set of steps, at the top of which it opened out into a broad flagstoned plaza where lightly dressed students milled and sat, and where, come to think of it, one almost always saw at least one dog, trotting hopefully from person to person or nosing at a dropped food wrapper. Along one side of this square, to Fenton’s left, ran the front of the University Library. To his right lay the controversial structure that housed the department of socioliterology. This was a three-storey building that gave every appearance of being unfinished, still under construction. Only three of its outer walls were white-washed. The fourth was of naked grey concrete, and was lined by a messy grid of scaffolding. Beside the main entrance was a roped-off area containing an array of grit-coated building materials: wheelbarrows, sheets of gyprock, ripped bags of cement, a shovel. But the facility was of course complete, and had been fully operational for more than a year now. Its architect, working in close collaboration with Ivan Lego himself, had designed the building to look unfinished, in salute to the principles of socioliterology, which stressed the merely provisional nature of all human knowledge and enterprise.
Fenton was just about level with the department’s main door when a man stepped out of it, clasping a large cardboard box to his cardiganned chest. It was Robert Browning, former convener of the Undeniable Classics course. His face, which for the moment was not looking Fenton’s way, appeared defiant; but his body looked fatally defeated, all floppy, like that of a puppet whose operator has let the strings go slack. The cardboard box he held was open at the top: protruding over its brim were some files, some parched-looking paperback novels, and a few teetering office supplies – a stapler, a roll of sticky tape. Fenton, in line with his new policy of avoiding Robert Browning for the rest of both of their lives, banked sharply towards the front of the library, and concealed himself behind one of the thick pebble-dashed pillars that ran along its facade.
A few strides outside the department’s smoked glass doors, Robert Browning came to a temporary halt. The doors slid shut behind him. He laid the cardboard box on the ground. His right hand proved to contain an unlit cigarette, over-ripe for ignition. He torched it, and took a number of greedy drags. His frayed olive cardigan looked as though it would emit, if slapped, a choking cloud of dust. He was bald the way Shakespeare was bald: a wispy but tenacious rearguard of hair clung on at the level of his ears, like a small curtain falling away from a shiny plaque. In Browning’s case this ragged hula-skirt of hair was nutmeggy in hue, and went all the way down to his shoulders, as if trying to compensate for its failure to go all the way up to the top of his head. The leggings of his faded jeans had their cuffs folded up. He wore sneakers whose brand-name was, for members of Fenton’s generation, a standing joke, a cruel byword for tragic obsolescence.
Relifting the cardboard box, Browning continued on his way. His way, oddly enough, seemed to be bringing him straight over towards Fenton’s place of concealment. This couldn’t be right. What could he possibly want over here? There was nothing over here except, right near Fenton in the library’s shade, a crowded rack of chained-up bicycles. That was all. And then with a scrotum-numbing flush of distress Fenton saw Browning’s unmistakably decrepit bike wedged among them, about three strides from where he currently cowered. It was far too late to take any serious evasive action. All he could do, as the disgraced humanist closed in on his position, was shimmy correspondingly around the pillar to keep himself shielded. Why hadn’t he, ten seconds ago, just walked straight into the library and let it swallow him whole? Sadly, there was no question of doing that now. Browning was right there on the pillar’s other side now, so close by that Fenton was inhaling his secondary smoke. He pushed his back harder against the textured stone, as though with just a little more effort he could shove himself into its core.
Browning plonked down the cardboard box next to his bicycle. No chain or lock secured this to the rack. The bike was a potent enough anti-theft device in its own right. Its mudguards were so flecked with rust that essentially they were rust, flecked by the odd scab of healthy metal. The machine’s eroded seat hailed from the era of brown leather, rather than black; it called to mind the word saddle, the word leathern. Having briefly rummaged in his cardboard box, Browning pulled out a pair of rubber luggage restraints with hooked ends. Apparently he planned to use these to secure the box to the metal rack above his rear mudguard. But first he would need to shut the box’s lid, and for the moment there was far too much stuff in the box for that. Accordingly, he now started removing some of its uppermost contents – the stapler, the sticky tape, some files – and conveying them to a garbage bin beside the library’s entrance.
With each fresh visit to the bin his body triggered, twice, the automatic sensor above the library door - once on his way there, once on his way back. Again and again, with unflappable politeness, the door slid open to admit him. Again and again Browning declined the offer. Now he was binning a perfectly good coffee mug. The more stuff he threw out, the harder it got for Fenton to sustain his hopeful theory that maybe Browning hadn’t been evicted from his office at all, that maybe he was just taking home some work in a box for the weekend. A lot of work. A shitload of work. On a Tuesday …
No, the truth was pathetically clear now. Browning was on his way out. He was history. Fenton was looking at him for the very last time, watching him fade irreversibly from the present into the past. This was a pity. On one level, Fenton had sort of believed that some day he would get to talk to Browning one more time, set things straight between them, clear the air. Yes, on one fanciful level he had sort of pictured them having this long and civil chat in which a future version of himself, one markedly more mature and courageous than the self he was now, would tell Browning that he’d always enjoyed his classes, and would assure him – why not? – that they’d instilled in him a lifelong passion for the classics, and would stress that his sudden departure to Lego Studies had had nothing to do with Browning’s teaching methods or personality. Part of him, in fact, had dreamed of telling Browning the truth: that he’d done it for love. Surely Browning would understand and endorse that motive. Weren’t half the novels he taught about pale young men driven to folly by passion?
But now it seemed clear that there would be no further chance to say these things. If Fenton was ever going to say them, he would have to say them right now. Alternatively, he could stay cowering behind this pillar until Browning hopped on his bike and pedalled permanently out of his life. This option was not to be dismissed lightly. What, after all, was the point of clearing the air with a man you were never going to see again? And anyway, who said that such a conversation would remain civil on Browning’s side? Browning was a dangerously short-fused man. That fact was well established. It had to be borne in mind. Once upon a time, Pamela Scratch had presented Browning with an essay arguing that Madame Bovary – which she freely admitted to not having read – was a “privileged soap opera.” Browning had returned the essay to her in a shoebox, having converted it to confetti. Somebody had once asked him, during a lecture, why his syllabus contained only poems and novels, and no “anti-poems” or “anti-novels.” His reply was a searing, foul-mouthed, ten-minute diatribe to the effect that life was far too short to waste on reading shit, much less teaching it, and that any student wishing to read arid theory-driven tripe should betake himself without further delay to the lecture theatre of Ivan Lego, and that anyone who harboured an unquenched urge to be “challenged” or “confronted” should stop bugging literature about it and instead try walking around the campus late at night. Even when he wasn’t in a rage, the man had a tense, simmery quality that suggested he wasn’t very far from flying into one. The mere way he read out a poem – prowling the stage, jabbing the air with his free hand, articulating the lines with a force that sent spittle flying – was enough to hint at what might happen if you got on his bad side.
On balance, then, Fenton thought he might give the lifelong-passion-for-the-classics speech a miss, and keep cowering behind the pillar till Browning went away forever.
Browning was chucking out a pile of folders now, sagging manila folders fat with paperwork. The lumpy stonework of the pillar was starting to eat into Fenton’s back. A foul and substantial headache was gathering like a stormcloud behind his eyes. Glancing in slow motion at his watch, he discovered, fuck it, that he no longer had any realistic chance of making his bus. The next one wouldn’t come for another hour: and it’d be crammed, he knew from experience, with incredibly uncouth high-school girls talking at top volume about the prodigious sexual aptitudes of their boyfriends. That he could do without. The bus after that, then? No: that one would be packed with the boyfriends themselves. In other words, he would now have to kill three solid hours in the library before he could catch an acceptable bus. And in those three hours this gathering headache was going to evolve, no question about it, into an all-time classic.
At last Browning seemed to be done. He was closing the box up now, lashing it to his luggage rack. When that was achieved he walked the bike violently down the library steps. It rattled like a lagerphone. At the bottom of the stairs he wedged his still-burning cigarette into a purpose-built clip on his right handlebar. Then he mounted his leathern saddle and, gathering speed with the slope, rattled off towards The Door, which he swerved around with nonchalant contempt before rejoining the path and continuing on his rickety way.
Fenton felt compelled, on his way into the library, to look down into the bin. Browning’s manila folders were piled up to within about an inch of the rim. The top one had sprung open, so that the first document inside it was fully visible. It was a typed letter addressed to Browning. It said:
Dear Mr Browning,
We thank you for the enclosed poems, however, we regret to inform you that we are unable to accept them for publication at this time.
We hope, however, that this will not discourage you from submitting further work to Poetry Now in the future.
In order to enhance your chances of future publication, there are several factors of which you may wish to take note.
Firstly, it is observed that your work as it stands displays a strict adherence to old-fashioned notions of poetic “form” and “difficult” language, notions which have been seen to establish a relation of non-equivalence between poet and reader, leading to unhelpful perceptions of elitism and exclusion, and creating a range of possible access issues for a significant number of potential readers, particularly those of non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB).
Further, your references to the poet W. H. Auden in your poem “Letter to Auden” would be likely to strike many readers as obscure, as Auden is not a figure who is valued and recognised equally across all cultural groups.
In order to broaden the appeal and relevance of the poem, you may wish to consider recasting it as a homage to a living and more urgently contemporary writer, for example “Letter to --- -----”. [Here the document named a rumpled and angry journalist who authored a weekly newspaper column condemning the actions of the United States.]
Should you wish to revise your poems in accordance with the above concerns and suggestions, we would be more than happy to reconsider them for publication.
Good luck with your work in the future!
An efficient signature followed, on behalf of the editors of Poetry Now. Fenton, in lifting the letter to read its second page, had half-exposed the next document in the pile. As though passing the scene of a grotesque accident, he simply had to look at it. It was another letter of rejection: Dear Mr Browning, While we thank you for the enclosed … So was the one under that. So was the one under that. At that point Fenton, feeling somehow soiled, stopped looking. He tried to force down the folder’s front cover to hide Browning’s shame. But the sheer abundance of the contents kept making it spring back up. Finally he settled for flipping the top letter upside down, so that only its blank and harmless-looking underside was on show.
Then he took his deepening headache into the library.