Lust. Geoff Ryman
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Jane’s chin thrust out, and her voice was chilled. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.’ It was the voice she used with New York lawyers.
‘Can you go back to your jungle?’ he asked. ‘I mean, does it exist somewhere?’
Jane’s face softened. Her voice quickened. ‘I think we can, yes.’
Back to the treehouse, with its Flintstone home conveniences, waterwheels driven by elephants. Back to a land where animals spoke and Tarzan could talk with them, where lions lived in forests, where chimps and gorillas mingled in the same tribes. A world where there was always another wonder, another lost tribe, another adventure.
Protectively, Jane took the arm of her innocent. ‘Come, Tarzan,’ she said, her voice cracking like an adolescent’s on the love she felt for him. ‘We’re going home.’
And Michael felt the same ache of yearning he had felt as a feminine boy. He yearned for love, for that particular love between them. He heard the MGM strings, swelling like his heart, like his adolescent sexuality, for them both.
So Michael sent them home. He sent them to their monochrome jungle full of giant trees with conveniently placed trapeze swings. Tired old predators prowled slowly, but were speeded up when anyone was looking. Where love filled their days in pre-lapsarian innocence.
The pub lights rippled again, and the two of them evaporated into fiction, reels of film that had never been shot.
Hypothesis: Angels are a kind of fiction.
Method: call up an Angel who is entirely fictional.
When Michael was sixteen years old there had been a hit movie called Dumb Duck, Detective. It combined live action with state-of-the-art animation, and it resurrected a great old cartoon character called Dumb Duck.
It was Michael’s fourth trip to California and he saw it in floods of tears, to escape. He had to get out of the house. The television was barred to him, and his favourite records had been broken. Michael had fled, wanting never to return, wanting to die.
He sat trying to follow the plot while crawling inside his own skin with anxiety. Dumb Duck was a detective and his partner was a real live human gumshoe played by Clint Eastwood. Dumb Duck asks his partner to follow his wife, Taffy Duck. ‘I’m too closssh to thisssh thing.’ Dumb Duck sprays everybody every time he talks. Only Clint Eastwood can stand it. Eastwood follows the wife, but she keeps giving him the slip, and you keep on hearing things about her: like she’s generous, like she’s a good-time girl, like she keeps you guessing. You don’t see her, so you assume she’s a duck, like her name.
Then suddenly, Dumb Duck is found murdered. He’s been partially erased. There are still crumbs of mingled eraser dust and ink on the floor. The wife shows up having spent the night elsewhere. She tells everybody she’s innocent. She looks like a combination of Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth, shoehorned into a dress that clings to her like a kid’s tongue to a lollipop. She hunkers down over the corpse and cries and her heaving boobs make a sound like rubber balloons.
Eastwood goes to her nightclub. He sits in the dark and watches her sing. Taffy sings like Marlene Dietrich. She rasps every word. She sings like somebody’s tickling your testicles. She’s a sex bomb married to a duck.
Gay men can desire a woman if she is caked in enough artifice. Young Michael forgot his trauma. He found himself yearning to bury his face in those huge soft perfect breasts. And sleep. And wake up somewhere else, as someone else.
It was a comedy about being wrongly accused of murder. Ho, ho. The weapon, a giant eraser – stamped: the Philadelphia Rubber Company – is found in the trunk of Taffy’s car. Tests confirm that the inkgroup is the same as Dumb Duck’s.
For young Michael, Taffy’s nightmare became his nightmare. At that age, he felt more affinity for fantasy than reality. When the film was over, it was back to reality, though in a curious way he felt the burden had been shared.
It was many years ago, but Michael still felt that affinity. The idea of calling up Taffy made Michael grin sideways. He didn’t fancy Clint Eastwood at all. You aren’t meant to fancy Clint Eastwood – you are meant to want to be Clint Eastwood. Eastwood had played the gumshoe like Humphrey Bogart. Michael went out to Jermyn Street and bought himself a trenchcoat and an old-fashioned fedora hat.
And then he wondered where you could go on a hot date with someone who was obviously an animated cartoon. It might cause comment at the Savoy.
A candlelight dinner à deux at home was the answer.
Phil, as always, was going to be out. Michael told him, I’ve got a hot date so come back late. Does this one jump out of trees as well, Phil asked. Ho ho.
Michael cooked a light meal of salmon with salad and cold Chablis. Light enough to assuage hunger, not heavy enough to weigh down desire.
Then Michael put on his trenchcoat and his 1940s hat and waited.
Go, he told the universe, at 6.00 PM.
At 6.00 PM the phone rang.
It was her.
‘Oh, Mr Shamus,’ she said breathlessly, helplessly. ‘Thank you for returning my call. I need help so badly, and I don’t know who I can turn to.’
‘Well. We can talk in private here. How soon can you make it over? I took the liberty of preparing a meal.’ Michael curled his upper lip inwards, talking American.
‘Oh thank you. But I couldn’t possibly eat. I’m too upset.’
‘I got a good bottle of Chablis growing dew in the cooler.’ It was like being in a role-playing game.
There was a pause. ‘Mr Shamus. I’m sorry. I’m afraid cartoons can’t drink wine. It dissolves the gouache.’
‘Forgive me.’
‘No, no. I know it’s hard for you to imagine what it’s like. I’m just so pleased that finally, finally, someone wants to listen to me.’
That damsel in distress routine. Standard forties stuff. The audience can read it like a peach, velvet skin and pit, and so can I. Under that svelte exterior pulses animal heat.
You spend most of the movie absolutely sure she did it and that she’s playing Eastwood for a sucker. You see, Eastwood falls for her, and if Eastwood falls for somebody, you do too.
She was the kind of woman whose high heels you hear ten minutes before the doorbell rings. You’re there waiting, trying to pretend you aren’t hanging on like it’s a liferaft. Where’s the shipwreck? You’ve got sweaty palms and the fettuccine aren’t cooked. The doorbell rings, you wipe your hands on your trousers, and you open the door. There should be a soundtrack, the kind with blowsy music played on a sax.
She’s delicious. She’s a cartoon, so her skin controls the light and shadow on her face. Right now she’s dramatic, backlit, lots of shadows, and she looks up mournfully, helplessly. An unlit cigarette sticks to a white kid glove. The white kid glove goes up above her elbow. The gown is strapless, showing acres of shoulder and collarbone. The white fur stole has fallen back down to her elbows, like she’s disrobing in public. Her red hair has a life of its own. It moves in a mass like a sexy octopus and there are no individual strands of hair.
Her way of saying hi is to hold out one long kid glove.
‘Oh, Mr Shamus. I’m so glad we finally meet. Now I can put a face to that kind, kind voice.’
Never in real life could a pink dress be cut that low around mammary organs that large and stay in place.
‘Come in, come in please.’ Like the gumshoe is a priest offering sanctuary.
Michael reminds himself.