Success by Martin Amis Read Free Book Online Page B

always rather taken aback to see them arrive here each day, still together, still arm in arm, still solicitously aware of one another as sexual beings. They are in their middle or late thirties; they have shared an office and a bed for ten years now, possibly even longer; they are both, by any reasonably humane standards, hell to look at. And yet — here they come again, and again, and again. They
leave
together too, which never fails to give me a special jolt. They leave together, they go home together; they drink and eat and drowse together; they turn in together; and they get up together again, and again. Phenomenal! ‘Ooh, it’s so
cold
today,’ says the thick-hipped woman to the disgustingly fit little unit of a man under whosewhippety pummellings she has staked herself out on the rack of bedroom boredom. ‘Not much warmer in here. I’ll check the Thermaco,’ says the pepper-haired man to the faintly moustachioed, pungently menopausal hillock of a woman through whose doomed forestry he has cantered baying for a decade of neuter night-times. I look on appalled as, even now, they reach out to steady each other while rounding the unspeakable 3D abstract by the door. My God, no wonder they’re
swingers
, no wonder they play pimp and whore, no wonder they’re desperate, absolutely desperate, for a taste of me.
    ‘I shall put out the OPEN sign,’ I suggest.
    The day starts with a vexing personal
fracas
. Corinthia Pope, an absurd girl whom I recently scorned after some vague fling we had — and who’s been pestering me for weeks on the telephone — takes the unprecedented step of bursting in on me here at the gallery! I whisked the fool outside again and smartly sent her on her way with a definitive rebuke. Returning to my desk, I felt quite ill with rage, and had to shrug my helpless apologies at the two sets of eyes watching me from the glass slit of their office.
    Talking of rejects, by the way, Terence is now claiming that he
didn’t
enjoy that Miranda after all. Amusing, you think. Well, I thought it was funny myself at first. But now he’s sticking to the story: he tried to, he says, and she wouldn’t let him. Curious business, because little Terry does enjoy a fair degree of success with the bashful shopgirls and aromatic students he used to bring back to my flat; if I returned late at night, and the kitchen tasted of smoke and human sweat, I’d almost bank on seeing some frizzy mat on the pillow next to his as I popped through his room to wash. Perhaps Miranda really wasn’t within his range. Perhaps, like so much else, it’s all a question of class. Has he said anything to you about it?
    The incident with the Pope girl is enough to trigger the usual morbid badinage. There’s no one in the galleryanyway, of course, save for the odd taciturn alien moving from frame to frame like an inspector at an ID parade.
    ‘I must say, Gregory,’ Mrs Styles is compelled to remark as I emerge from the downstairs lavatory, the hearty ballcock flushing resplendently in my wake, ‘I can see why all the girls are chasing you. You are a very elegant young man.’
    ‘And I must say too,’ I am obliged to reply, ‘that
you
are a very elegant Older Woman.’ In the nature of things there must be some who would think her handsome — sleek black hair, barmaid face, embarrassingly swelly breasts and behind (I don’t know where to look — they’re everywhere), decent though unacceptably flossy legs, tall.
    ‘Come on … have you ever known an Older Woman?’ She moves closer — it is impossible for me to duck past. Breasts teem inside her manly shirt.
    ‘No, I don’t believe I have, funnily enough — not in that special sense.’
    ‘They have so much to show one,’ she goes ahead and says — the trite horror.
    ‘Oh? For example?’
    She moves closer; so do seven veils of old make-up. A gargoyle jeers behind my slow diamond smile.
    ‘It would be simplest to show you,’ she says with a brazen nod towards