The Dawn of Sexual Intercourse

SCHEHERAZADE IS TALL,

LEAN AND BUSTY. LILY IS

BLONDE, INTENSE

AND AVAILABLE. AND

KEITH IS HOLED UP WITH

THEM IN A PICTURESQUE

ITALIAN CASTLE FOR THE

SUMMER OF 1970. WHAT'S

A RANDY YOUNG

ENGLISHMAN TO DO?

A NOT-SO-SENTIMENTAL

EDUCATION FROM

THE INTERNATIONALLY

RENOWNED NOVELIST

AND MAN OF LETTERS

I

t was the summer of 1970, and time had not yet trampled them flat, these lines:

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(which was rather late for me)—

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles' first LP.

Philip Larkin, "Annus Mirabilis" (formerly "History"), Cover magazine, February 1968

But now it was the summer of 1970, and sexual intercourse was well advanced. Sexual intercourse had come a long way, and was much on everyone's mind.

Sexual intercourse, I should point out, has two unique characteristics. It is indescribable. And it peoples the world. We shouldn't find it surpris­ing, then, that it is much on everyone's mind.

Keith would be staying, for the duration of this hot, endless and erotically decisive summer,

in a castle on a mountainside above a village in Campania, in Italy. And now he walked the backstreets of Montale, from car to bar, at dusk, flanked by two 20-year-old blondes, Lily and Sche­herazade.... Lily: 5'5", 34-25-34. Sche­herazade: 5'10", 37-23-33. And Keith? Well, he was the same age, and slender (and dark, with a very misleading chin, stubbled, stubborn-looking), and he oc­cupied that much-disputed territory be­tween five-foot-six and five-foot-seven.

Vital statistics. The phrase origi­nally referred, in studies of society, to births and marriages and deaths; now it meant bust, waist, hips. In the long days and nights of his early adoles­cence, Keith showed an abnormal in­terest in vital statistics, and he used to dream them up for his solitary amuse­ment. Although he could never draw (he was all thumbs with a crayon), he could commit figures to paper, women in outline, rendered numerically.

34-25-34 (Lily), 37-23-33 (Scheher­azade)—and Keith. They were all at the University of London, these three, Law, Mathematics, English Literature. Intelligentsia, nobility, proletariat. Lily, Scheherazade, Keith Nearing.

SOCIAL REALISM (OR SLAG FOR LOVE)

Keith and Lily had been together for over a year—with a recent, term-long hiatus, variously known as the Inter­regnum, the Intermission or simply Spring Break. And now, after the trial separation, the trial reunion. Keith owed her a great debt of gratitude. She was his first love, in this particu­lar sense: He had loved many girls, but Lily was the first who loved him back.

Lily and Keith broke up because Lily wanted to act like a boy. That was the heart of the matter, really: Girls acting like boys was in the air, and Lily wanted to try it out. So they had their first big row (its theme, ridiculously, was religion), and Lily announced a trial separation. The words came at him like a jolt of com­pressed air: Such trials, he knew, were almost always a complete success. After two days of earnest misery, in his terrible room in the terrible flat in Earls Court, after two days of desolation, he phoned her and they met up, and tears were shed—on both sides of the cafe table. She told him to be evolved about it.

Why should boys have all the fun? said Lily, and blew her nose into the paper napkin. We're anachronisms, you and me. We're like childhood sweethearts. We should've met 10 years from now. We're too young for monogamy. Or even for love.

He listened to Lily—and of course he knew it already. Something was churn­ing in the world of men and women, a revolution or a sea change, a realign­ment having to do with carnal knowl­edge and emotion. Keith did not want to be an anachronism. And I think I can say that this was his first attempt at character management: Me decided to get better at not falling in love.

If we don't like it, we can always.... I want to act like a boy for a while. And you can just go on as you are.

Thus Lily had her hair restyled, and bought lots of miniskirts and cutoff culottes and halter tops and see-through blouses and knee-length patent-leather boots and hoop earrings and kohl eyeliner and all the other things you needed before you could act like a boy. And Keith just stayed the same.

He was better placed than her, in a way: He had some experience of act­ing like a boy. Now he took it up again. Pre-Lily, before Lily, he often encoun­tered a difficulty more associated with acting like a girl: his emotions. And he didn't always see things clearly. He got it completely wrong, for instance, about what everyone was calling free love—as a succession of horrified hip­pies could quietly attest. He thought it meant what it said, but it wasn't love that was on offer from the mushroom-pale flower daughters of the capital, with their charts, tarot cards and Ouija boards. Some girls were still saving themselves for marriage; some were still religious—and even the hippies were only very slowly going secular....

After Lily, post-Lily, the new rules of engagement seemed more firmly emplaced. The year was 1970, and he was 20: To this historic opportunity he brought his minimal handsome­ness, his plausible tongue, his sincere enthusiasm and a certain willed but invigorating coldness. There were dis­appointments, near things, there were some miraculous acquiescences (which still felt like liberties, in the shame-and-honor sense: involving impudence, overfamiliarity, taking advantage). Any-

way, the free-love business certainly worked best with girls who were acting like boys. New rules—and new and sin­ister ways of getting everything wrong. He acted like a boy, and so did Lily. But she was a girl, and could do more of it than he could.

Come with vie, said Lily, three months later on the phone, come with me to Italy for the summer. Come with me to a castle in Italy with Scheherazade. Please. Let's have a holiday from it. You know, there are people out there who don't even try to be kind.

Keith said he would call her back. But almost at once he felt his head give a sudden nod. He had just spent a night of almost artistic desolation with an ex-girlfriend (her name was Pansy). He was frightened and bruised and, for the first time, obscurely but intensely guilty.

How much will it cost ?

She told him. And you'll need spending money for when we go out. The thing is, I'm no good at being a boy.

All right. And I'm glad. I'll start borrow­ing and saving up.

His ridiculous row with Lily. She blamed him, basically, for confusing and therefore corrupting his younger sister Violet with Christianity when she was a little girl. Which was true enough as far as it went. / tried to de-convert when she was nine, he explained. / said, God is just like Bellgrow: your imaginary friend. And yet she stuck with it. Lily said, And you'd think religion would make her behave. And it's had the opposite effect. She's sure she'll be forgiven for everything because she believes in a fool in the sky. And it's all your fault.

Lily was of course an atheist—an open-and-shut atheist. Keith argued that this position wasn't quite rational, but then Lily's rationalism wasn't ratio­nal in the first place. She hated astrol­ogy, naturally, but she hated astronomy too: She hated the fact that light bent, that gravity slowed down time. She was particularly exasperated by the behav­ior of subatomic particles. She wanted the universe to behave sensibly. Even Lily's dreams were quotidian. In her dreams (this was rather shyly disclosed), she went down to the shops, or washed her hair. Openly suspicious of poetry, she had no patience with any work of fiction that strayed from the stern­est social realism. The only novel she unreservedly (continued on page 98)

"Except for 5F there, all the folks in this building are just as nice as they can be!"

THE DAWN

(continued from page 90) praised was Middlemarch. Because Lily was a creature of the middleworld.

Come with me to a castle in Italy with Scheherazade. It should be said that the Sche­herazade section of Lily's proposal, so far as Keith was concerned, was neither here nor there. Scheherazade, when he last saw her, around Christmas, was as usual the frowning philanthropist in flatties and spectacles; she did community service and drove a van for Meals on Wheels, and she had a loose-limbed boyfriend called Timmy who liked killing animals and playing the cello and going to church. But then Scheherazade awoke from troubled dreams to find herself changed in

her bed into a According to the famous

story, of course, Gregor Samsa (pron. Zamza) was transformed into an enormous insect, or alternatively a giant bug, or alternatively—¦ and this was the best translation, Keith felt sure—a monstrous vermin. In Scheherazade's case, the metamorphosis was a radical ascen­sion. But Keith couldn't fix on the right animal. A doe, a dolphin, a snow leopard, a winged mare, a bird of paradise.

Keith was assuming that social realism would hold, here in Italy. And yet Italy itself seemed partly fabulous, and the citadel they occupied seemed partly fabulous, and the transformation of Scheherazade seemed partly fabulous. Where was social realism? The upper classes themselves, he kept think­ing, were not social realists. Their modus operandi, their way of operating, obeyed

looser rules. He was, ominously, a K. in a castle. But he was still assuming that social realism would hold.

POSSIBILITY

We are trapped by the truth, and the truth was that it all built very slowly....

"There's one boring thing," Scheherazade said on the first afternoon as she led him up the tower.

But it wasn't boring yet. For some 15th-century reason, the steps were bracingly steep, and on the half landings, when she swiveled, Keith could see up her skirt.

"What's that?"

"I'll show you when we get to the top. We've got a while to go. It's endless."

High-mindedly Keith averted his gaze. Then he looked. Then he looked away (and beheld, through the slit in the stone wall, a pale horse with its flanks shuddering). He looked, and looked away—until, with an audible click of the neck, he locked into position and went ahead and looked. How was it that he had never taken due note of this—the beauty, power, wisdom and justice of women's thighs?

Scheherazade said over her shoulder, "Are you a great seer of sights?"

"I'm on for anything."

"What, mad keen?"

He already seemed to be in a film—a salacious thriller, perhaps—in which every line of intersexual dialogue was an irresist­ibly smutty pun. They kept climbing. Now he searched for a single entendre. "Keen

enough. I've got all this reading to do," he said. "Catching up. Clarissa. Tom Jones."

"Poor you."

For the record, Scheherazade's lower undergarment was workaday and pale brown. As against that, its hem was loosely neglectful of the right buttock, providing a slice of white in the crux of all that churn­ing bronze. She said,

"There's talk of the Passo del Diavolo."

"What's that?"

"The Devil's Pass. Very twisty and scary. So I'm told. Right. Now you and Lily are in this turret. And I'm in that turret." She ges­tured on down the passage. "And we share the bathroom in between. That's the bor­ing thing."

"...Why's it boring?"

"Lily refuses to share a bathroom with me. We've tried it. I'm just too messy. So she'll have to go halfway down the tower and turn right. But I don't see why you should. Unless you've got a thing about messiness too."

"I don't have a thing about messiness."

"Look."

The skylit bathroom was long and narrow and L-shaped, its left-hand turn presided over by a burnished towel rack and two wall-sized mirrors. They moved through it. Scheherazade said,

"We share. So here's the drill. When you come in from your room, you lock the door to my room. And when you leave you unlock it. And I do the same.... This is me. God I'm a slob."

Me took it in, the white nightdress aslant the tousled bed, the heaps of shoes, the pair of starched jeans, trampled out of, all agape but still on its knees and still cup­ping the form of her waist and hips.

"It's very easy," she said, as they came back through the already significant bath­room, "to forget to unlock. Everyone does it all the time. There's even a little bell—see? If I'm locked out, I ring it." She rang it: a soft but determined purr. "You've got one too. I always forget. Which is boring of me."

Scheherazade gazed his way with her peculiar directness, the golden, idealistic eyes, the very level brows. When that look fell on Keith, he had the feeling that she had already dealt with every matter concerning him—birth, background, appearance, even stature. Important, too (he disconnectedly thought), was the fact that she called her mother Mum, and not Mummy (like all the other female members of her class). This spoke to Keith of her essentially egalitarian soul. But the strangest thing about Sche­herazade was her smile, which was not the smile of a beautiful girl. There was too much collusion in the softly rippled lids—collusion in the human comedy. The smile of a beauti­ful girl was a sequestered smile. It hasn't sunk in yet, said Lily. She doesn't know. And could that really be?

So here was the castle, its battlements kept aloft on the shoulders of the four fat-girthed giants, the four towers, the four terraces, the circular ballroom (with its orbital stair­case), the domed pentagonal library, the salon with its six sets of windows, the baro­nial banqueting hall at the far end of the

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'Well, Chadwick, we've taken your advice to streamline the

organization. And I want you to know that we're all

eoine to miss you very much."

"It's a real bargain. If you buy my painting, you can spend the weekend with my model."

from the barnyard-sized kitchen, all the antechambers that receded, like facing mir­rors, into a repetitive infinity. Above was the apartment; below was the dungeon floor, half submerged in the foundational soil and giv­ing off the thinnest mist of what smelled to Keith like cold sweat.

"There's an old word for the way she regards you, Scheherazade," he said to Lily in the pentagonal library. He was up on a ladder, almost at dome level. "You'll think it just means being patronizing. But it's a term of praise. And humble gratitude. Condescension, Lily." From eccles. L., from con- "together" + descendere "come down" ("together" was the important part). "Her being a Lady and all."

"She's not a Lady. She's an Honorable. Her dad was a viscount. You mean she treats you," said Lily, "for all the world as if you aren't a berk."

"Yeah." He was talking about the class sys­tem. But he was thinking about the looks system—the beauty system. Would there ever be a revolution in looks, where those who were last would now be first? "I sup­pose that's about the size of it."

He returned to the leather-decked dav­enport, where he was reading Clarissa and taking notes. Lily was on a chaise longue and had before her something called Inter­diction: On Our Law and Its Study. He said, "...Does Scheherazade act like a boy? Is she promiscuous?"

"No. I'm far more promiscuous than she is. Numerically," said Lily. "You know. She did the usual amount of necking and getting felt up. Then she took pity on a couple of dopes who wrote her poems. And regretted it. Then nothing for a while. Then Timmy."

"And that's it?"

"That's it. But now she's blooming and restless and it's given her ideas."

"What sort of ideas?"

"Oh, you know. Ideas. But she still doesn't know she's beautiful."

"Does she know about her figure?"

"Not really. She thinks it's going to go away. As quickly as it came. How come you've never read one?"

As well as a sexual trauma, Keith also had a suitcaseful of remedial reading ahead of him. "Never read what?"

"An English novel. You've read the Rus­sians and the Americans. But you've never read an English novel."

"I've read an English novel. The Power and the Glory. Vile Bodies. I've just never read Peregrine Pickle or Phineas Finn. I mean, why would you? And Clarissa's killing me."

"You should've thought of that before you changed subjects."

"Mm. Well I was always more of a poetry man."

Keith took to going up to the tower, around noon, to read an English novel—and to get a little peace. This visit to the bedroom he shared with Lily tended to coincide with the shower that Scheherazade tended to take before lunch. He heard it, her shower. The heavy beads of water sounded like car tires on gravel. He sat there, with the mor­bidly obese paperback on his lap. Then he waited for five pages before going in to wash his face.

On the third day he unlatched and pushed on the bathroom door and it didn't give. He listened. After a moment he reached for the bell with a ponderous hand (why did this feel so significant?). More silence, the click of a distant latch, a shuffling tread.

Scheherazade's warmed face now ema­nated out at him from the folds of a thick white towel.

"See?" she said. "I told you."

The lips: the upper as full as the nether. Her brown eyes and the balance of their gaze, her level brows.

"It won't be the last time either," she said. "I promise."

She swiveled, he followed. She turned left

and he watched the three of them retreat, the real Scheherazade and the simulacra that slid across the glass.

Keith remained in the L of mirrors.

As a child, he had more or less resigned himself to ugliness (and he stoically answered to Beak in the schoolyard). Then this changed. The necessary event came to pass, and this changed. His face changed. The jaw and especially the chin asserted themselves, the upper lip lost its niblike rigidity, the eyes brightened and widened. Later he came up with a theory that would disquiet him for the rest of his life: Looks depended on happiness. A disinclined, a hurt-looking little boy, he suddenly started to be happy. And now here was his face in the rippled and speckly mirror in Italy, pleasantly unexceptionable, firm, dry. Young. He was happy enough. Was he happy enough to survive—to live with— the ecstasy of being Scheherazade? He also believed that beauty was mildly infectious, given close and prolonged contact. It was a universal presumption, and he shared it: He wanted to experience beauty—to be legitimized by beauty.

Chill, moist clouds swirled above them and all around them—and even beneath them. Slivers of gray vapor detached themselves from the mountaintop and slid lollingly down the slopes. They seemed to lie on their backs, resting, in the grooves and culverts, like exhausted genies.

A week went by, and they had yet to avail themselves of the Olympian swimming pool in its grotto setting. Keith decided that it would do his heart good to see the girls enjoying themselves down there— particularly Scheherazade. Meanwhile, Clarissa was boring. But nothing else was.

Lily approached him as he sat at the circular stone table on the upmost shelf of the east garden. It was warmer now, but still over­cast, with the bilious, low-pressure light that augurs thunder. Scents were detectable in the sallow air: il gelsomino (jasmine), il giacino (hyacinth), I'ibisco (hibiscus) and narcissus, narcissus....

"You're going from one to the other," Lily noted.

"Well it's the only way of getting through it. Not Tom Jones. Tom Jones is great. And Tom's my kind of guy."

"In what way?"

"He's a bastard. But Clarissa's a nightmare. You won't believe this, Lily," he said (and he had, incidentally, decided to swear more), "but it's taking him 2,000 pages to fuck her."

"Christ."

"I know."

"But honestly, listen to you. Usually, when you read a novel, you go on about things like, I don't know, the level of perception. Or the depth of the moral order. Now it's just fucks."

"It's notjust fucks, Lily. One fuck in 2,000 pages. That's notjust fucks."

"No, but it's all you go on about."

There weren't any serpents in this garden, but there were flies: in the middle distance, vague flecks of death—and then, up close, armored survivalists with gas-mask faces.

"Shouldn't one of us be wearing; a dildo?"

And there were silky white butterflies. And great drunken bees, throbbing orbs that seemed to carry their own electrical reso­nance; when they collided with something solid—tree bole, statuary, flowerpot—they twanged back and away, the positive charge repelled by the positive. Lily said,

"Two thousand pages was probably how long it took. When?"

"Uh—1750. Even then he has to get her stupefied on drugs. Guess what she does afterward. Dies of shame."

"And it's meant to be sad."

"Not really. She goes out babbling about how happy she is. I'll be uh, rejoicing in the blessed fruits of His forgiveness.. .in the eternal mansions. She's very literal about it. Her heavenly reward."

"Her reward for getting fucked on drugs."

"Lily, it was rape. Actually it's pretty clear she fancied him something rotten from the start. They're all in a fever about violation." She was looking at him receptively now, so he continued, saying, "Girls can fuck in 76m Jones—if they're yobs or nobs. A milkmaid. Or a decadent hostess. But Clarissa's bour­geois, so she has to get fucked on drugs."

"Because then it's not her fault."

"Yeah. And she can go on claiming she didn't want to. Anyway, she did hold out for 2,000 pages. That's a million words, Lily. Did you hold out for a million words? When you were acting like a boy?"

Lily sighed and said, "Scheherazade's just been telling me how frustrated she is."

"...Frustrated how?"

"Sexually. Oiviously."

"She has my sympathy. Still. Timmy'll be along in a chapter or two."

"Maybe. She just got a letter. He can't tear himself away from Jerusalem. She's cross

with him now all right. And she has high hopes of Adriano."

"Who's Adriano?"

Lily said, "You're not expressing yourself very clearly. Don't you mean, Who the fuck is Adriano?"

"No, I don't. You're following a false lead, Lily. Who's Adriano?... All right. Who the fuck is Adriano?"

"There. It goes better with your scowl." Lily laughed sharply and briefly. "He's a notorious playboy. And a count. Or one day will be."

"All Italians are counts."

"All Italians are poor counts. He's a rich count. He and his dad have a castle each."

"Big deal. I didn't realize until yesterday. There are castles everywhere in Italy. I mean there's one every few hundred yards. Did they have uh, did they have a long brawling-baron period?"

"Not particularly," said Lily, who was reading a book called A Concise History of Italy. "They kept getting invaded by barbar­ians. Hang on." Methodical Lily consulted her notes. "The Huns, the Franks, the Van­dals, the Visigoths and the Goths. Then the Keiths. The Keiths were the worst."

"Were they. And when do we meet Adriano?"

"That's what she needs. Someone of her own station. And did you thrill," said Lily, "to the Devil's Pass?"

In the backseat of the Fiat he was placed between a family friend visiting from the U.S., Prentiss, and Scheherazade—while Lily rode in what was called the cabriolet (a smart red convertible) with Scheherazade's mum, Oona. In the backseat Prentiss stayed exactly where she was, but Scheherazade swayed into him, swooned into him, on every tight

turn. It was raining hard, and all they did, in the Passo del Diavolo, was steer through it and stare out at it. Keith, anyway, was attending to a riot of sense impressions.

"It was good," he said. "Very twisty and scary."

"Mm. Scary. I bet."

"And always on the side of the precipice— thanks very much."

"God. You must've been terrified."

In the car Keith was telling himself that Scheherazade was simply half asleep. And for a couple of minutes, just before they turned back, she did go under—with her head resting trustfully on his shoulder. Then she snapped to, coughed and glanced up at him through her lashes with her unreadably generous smile.... And it all began again, her arm against his arm, her thigh against his thigh. What d'you think, Lily? Gaw, you should have seen her in the bathroom the other day. Another lapse with the lock, Lily, and there she was in blue jeans and bra. Is she trying to tell me something? Or maybe her habits of thought had not quite drawn level with the facts of her transformation. In the full-length mirror she still sometimes saw the mousy philanthropist in sensible shoes and spectacles. And not a winged horse in blue jeans, and a white brassiere with the nar­rowest trim of blue.

WHERE WERE THE POLICE?

Under the burning axle of the parent star he sat topless, poolside, his face inclined over the pages of The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. Peregrine had just attempted (and failed) to drug (and ravish) Emily Gauntlet, his wealthy fiancee.... Keith kept looking at his watch.

"You keep looking at your watch," said Lily.

"No I don't."

"Yes you do. And you've been down here since seven."

"Eight-thirty, Lily. Beautiful morning."

He stood up and strolled to the water's edge. He wondered at it, this gray new world of glass and opacity, and not the wob­bly, slippery, ribbony blue of the pools of his youth.

"Here she comes," Lily said.

Scheherazade was decanting herself downward through the three tiers of the terraced gradient, and now moved through a bower-and-hothouse setting as she neared the water, barefoot but in ten­nis wear—a quilted skirt of pale green and a yellow Fred Perry. She twirled off the lower half of it (he thought of an apple being pared) and tugged herself out of the upper; and then she made wings of her long arms and undipped the upper half of her bikini (and it was gone—with the mer­est shrug it was gone), saying, "Here's another boring thing." Of course, this wasn't boring either. On the other hand, it would have been disgrace­fully callow and bourgeois (and uncool) to take the slightest notice of what was now on view; so Keith had the difficult task of look­ing at Lily (in housecoat and flip-flops and still in the shade) while simultaneously com­muning with an image that was fated, for

"Sorry, Joey! I gave that up for Lent."

now, to remain in the loneliest wilderness of his peripheral vision. After 30 seconds or so, to ease the trapped nerves in his trapped neck, Keith stared up and out—at the gold slopes of the massif, echoing in the pale blue. Lily yawned, saying,

"What's the other boring thing?"

"Well, I have just been informed "

"No, what was the other boring thing?" Lily was looking at Scheherazade. So Keith did too ... And this was the thought, this was the question, they awakened in him, Scheherazade's breasts (the twinned circumferences, interproximal, interchange­able): Where were the police? Where on earth were the police? It was a question he was often asking himself, in these uncertain times. Where were they, the police? Sche­herazade said,

"Sorry, I'm not with you." "I mean, what was the first boring thing?" "The bathroom," said Keith. "You know. Sharing it. The bell."

"Ah. Now what's the second boring thing?" "Let me just get wet." Scheherazade stepped forward and kept going and dived.... She surfaced and climbed out with tensed tendons and came forward again, covered in bright beads of water. And it was all laid before you. Top­less as nature intended. And yet to Keith the spectacle seemed antinatural—seemed

unsound, like a slippage of genre. The cica­das turned their volume up, and the sun glared. She said,

"Just cold enough. I hate it when it's soupy. You know. Blood heat."

Lily said, "Is the second boring thing more boring than the first boring thing?"

"About the same—no, more boring. We're being joined. Oh well. These things are sent to try us. Gloria," said Scheherazade, lying back with her hands behind her head. "Glo­ria. Jorquil's great throb. She's in disgrace and she's being packed off to purdah—here. With us. Gloria Beautyman. She's older than us. Twenty-two. Or twenty-three. Oh well, what can we do? It's Jorq's castle."

Keith had encountered Jorquil, or been in his presence for a minute or two—Jorquil, Scheherazade's 30-year-old uncle (it was that kind of family). Now Keith said, "Good name. Gloria Beautyman."

"Yes it is," said Lily cautiously. "But does she live up to it? Does she carry it off?"

"Sort of. I don't know. I think she's an acquired taste. Rather peculiar figure. Jorq's besotted. I don't quite get it. Jorq's normal girls look like film stars."

>rq?"

"Yes I know. He's no Adonis, Jorq, but he is very rich. And very keen. And Gloria.... She must have hidden depths. Still. Poor Gloria. After two weeks at death's door from

a single glass of champagne, she can almost sit up in bed."

"What's she in disgrace for? What kind of disgrace? Do we know?"

"Sexual disgrace," said Scheherazade with a greedy look as her teeth caught the light. "And I was there."

"Oh do tell."

"Well I did vow not to. I really oughtn't. No, I can't."

"Scheherazade!" said Lily.

"No. I really can't."

" Scheherazade!"

"Oh all right. But we mustn't God, I've

never seen anything like it. And it was so out

of character. She comes across as a bit prim.

She's from Edinburgh. Catholic. Ladylike.

And she almost died of shame. The thing

was, she did these paintings for a sex tycoon.

And we "

"No, wait," said Lily. "How do you mean, a sex tycoon?"

"The one who does sex revues but not Oh! Calcutta.'.... You see, Gloria's mainly a dancer. Royal Ballet. But she's also a painter. And she did these little paintings for the sex tycoon. Ballet dancers at it in midair."

"In midair?" said Lily, with some impa­tience. "In midair?"

"Ballet dancers at it in midair. And the sex tycoon had a big lunch party in Wiltshire, and Gloria was asked, and we were only 60

miles away, so we went. And she disgraced herself. I've never seen anything like it."

Keith sank back. The sun, the cicadas, the

breasts, the butterflies, the caustic taste of

coffee in his mouth, the fiery treat of his

French cigarette, the narrative of sexual dis­

grace He said,

"Spin this out, Scheherazade, if you wouldn't mind. Any chance details. Don't stint us."

"Well. The first thing she did was almost drown in the indoor pool. Wait. Jorquil dropped us off. He said, You be chaperone. And for God's sake don't let her drink anything. Because she doesn't. She can't. But she seemed very flustered. And so of course I went to the loo, and when I came back she was finishing a huge flute of champagne. I've never seen anything like it. She was unrecognizable."

"Is she little?" said Keith. "That can some­times happen when they're little."

"She's quite little. She's not that little. After­ward she was violently sick for days and then completely bedridden. We really did think poor Gloria was going to die of shame."

"And I suppose the whole place anyway," said Lily, "was crawling with slags."

"Not really. I mean, there were a good few hunks and pinups round the pool. You know. People who look like they're made of pale chocolate. But there were rules. No toplessness. No sex. And Gloria wasn't top­less. Not topless. Oh no. She was bottomless. She lost her bikini bottoms just before she nearly drowned. She said they got sucked off by the Jacuzzi. So the chap, the polo pro, when he fished her out, he had to hold her upside down by the ankles and give her a good shake. That was a sight. Then the min­ute we got her clothes back on she was off upstairs. And on the dance floor they were swinging her from man to man and feel­ing her up. And she looked like someone in a dream. And they were feeling her up. I mean really feeling her up."

Keith said, "Really feeling her up how?"

"Well. When I went back in she had her dress round her waist. Not just that—it was tucked into her garter belt. To keep it there. And guess what. The man with his tongue in her ear was stroking her arse with both his hands inside her pants."

"In vino veritas," said Lily.

"No," said Keith. But he said nothing more. Truth in wine? Truth in Special Brew and Southern Comfort, truth in Pink Ladies? So Clarissa Harlowe and Emily Gauntlet, when drugged, were behaving truthfully? No. But when the girl raised the potion to her own lips, then you could claim that it was veritas. He said uneasily, "You'd think she'd know that about herself. Gloria Beautyman."

"You would. There's more. The bathroom upstairs with the polo pro."

Over the poolside a pensive silence formed.

They waited.

"Well they were only in there for a cou­ple of minutes. The polo pro said it was all perfectly innocent. You know, a bit of cocaine. I think they just had a snog. She cried her eyes out in the car. And she's been suicidal ever since."

Scheherazade rubbed her eyes with her

knuckles, childishly.... According to an Eng­lish novel he had read, men understood why they liked women's breasts—but they didn't understand why they liked them 50 much. Keith, who liked them so much, didn't even know why he liked them. Why? Come on, he told himself: Soberly enumerate their strengths and virtues. And yet somehow they directed you toward the ideal. It must have to do with the universe, Keith thought, with planets, with suns and moons.

LOOK HOW HE LIT HER

That afternoon they went down the steep little lane toward the village, to stroll and hold hands and be a couple together: Lily and Keith. The deep streets, the crushed cobbles, the fig-dark shadows, all silent in the siesta hour, which was given over to the faint trickles of digestion. The graffito, daubed in white: mlssoi.im iia skmi-rk ragionk! Musso­lini is always right! Above their heads, visible from almost any vantage, stood the arthritic neck of Santa Maria. It was five o'clock, and the bells wagged and swung. A chance to stroll and hold hands and be a couple, while there was still time.

Lily said suddenly, "They're playing on the court at his castle. He's meant to be

a great athlete. She says if she likes him even the tiniest bit she's definitely going to consider it."

Keith heard himself say, "No. Is this fair to Timmy?"

"Well it's Timmy's fault in a way. He ought to be here. I told you how frustrated she is. She's desperate."

"Desperate?"

They had started along the lane that scrambled up the slope (and ducked under the road and scrambled clear on the other side) when they saw Scheherazade, who was in the process of alighting from a cream Rolls-Royce. She briefly bent herself over the window frame, with her green skirt out-thrust; then she stood there waving at it as the machine surged onward. Keith thought for a moment that the car was driverless, but now a bronzed forearm appeared, and was lazily brandished, and then withdrew.

"So?" said Lily as they joined Sche­herazade at the gates.

"He told me he loved me."

"No. At what stage?"

"In the first game of the first set. It was 15 all. He's coming to lunch tomorrow. And he's full of plans."

"And?"

"He'd be absolutely perfect," said Sche­herazade, with a crybaby face. "Except for just this one little thing."

"Come on. What's wrong with Adriano?" he asked Lily, that evening, in the salon.

"I'm not telling you. You'll have to wait and see. All I'm saying is that he's very hand­some. With an exquisitely chiseled body. And very cultured."

Keith's eyes moved sideways in thought. "I know. He's got a terrible laugh or a very high voice." Solemnly Lily shook her head. He thought on, and said, "I know. He's nuts."

"No. You're nuts. And you're not even warm."

Keith went to the kitchen. "What's the thing that's wrong with Adriano?" he asked Scheherazade.

"I promised Lily I wouldn't tell."

"Is it uh, insurmountable? The thing that's wrong with him?"

"I'm not really sure. I suppose we'll see."

"Is it because he's "

"No more questions. Don't tempt me. Or I'll crack. I've done it once before today already. Blabbed."

At dinner that night he conducted a thought experiment, or a feel experiment: I le looked at Scheherazade, for the first time, with eyes of love. As if he loved her and she loved him back. While he made himself agreeable to Lily and Oona, as often as he dared he looked at Scheherazade with eyes of love. And what do they see, those eyes? They see the equivalent of a work of art, they see wit and talent and gripping complication; for minutes on end he believed himself to be in a private screening room, bearing witness to a first performance of unforgettable spon­taneity. Behind the scenes of this motion picture, the director would be wisely sleep­ing with his great discovery. Of course he was. Look how he lit her. You could tell.

Keith dropped his head and gazed at the grainy murk in the bottom of his cof­fee cup. There was something in him that wasn't there before. It was born when Lily said the word desperate.

It was hope.

"Ah," said Adriano, addressing Scheherazade with an elegant undulation of his open palm, "—bring me the sunflower mad with light!"

The open palm withdrew, and closed on the bunny-eared bow of the silk cord that secured the waist of his creamy trousers (the creamy color, perhaps, was meant to match his car). Keith sat on a metal chair and watched—as il conte showily disrobed.

When he first got wind of Adriano, Keith imagined a grand seducer, a purple genius of the chamber and the boudoir—glutinously virile, with heavy lids, plump lips and sebum visibly pooling in every pore.

He disrobed, Adriano: Off came the snowy slacks, the bobbled loafers, the shantung shirt, all the way down to the curious ribbing of his sky-blue swimsuit, which, nonetheless, bulged eventfully.... Adriano was equipped with perfect English, or near-perfect Eng­lish: He sometimes said as instead of like.

Adriano would inherit an ancient title and a limitless fortune. Adri-ano was densely muscular and classically handsome, with something coinlike, something silvery and Caesary, in his noble brow.

On he came, to the sun bed of Scheherazade. Adriano sat, and with formidable insouciance he slid his hand between her moist­ened calves.

"Ah," he resumed. "I know how Tereus felt when he first spied Philomela. As a forest when a drought wind turns it into a firestorm."

It was not the voice of a small man, which was remarkable in its way. Because guess what. Adriano was four foot 10 inches tall.

So far, the new rhythm of the weather was answering quite accu­rately to Keith's inner state. For four or five days the air would steadily thicken and congeal. And the storms—the storms, with their African vociferousness, were timed for his insomnias. He was making friends with hours he barely knew, the one called three, the one called four. They racked him, these storms, but he was left with a cleaner morning. Then the days began again to thicken, building to another war in heaven.

/ don't know what you're complaining about, Lily was on record as saying. You still sit tip half the night playing cards with her. I saw you that once—down on your knees together. I thought you were getting married. Plighting your troth.

When we kneel, we're the same height. Why's that?

Because her legs are afoot longer than yours from the knee down. What d'you play anyway? said Lily, who hated all games (and all sports). Old Maid?

No, they played Pope Joan, they played Black Maria and Fan-Tan and stud poker. And now (better, much better), on the rug in the gun room (the rug was a sprawled tiger), kneeling opposite one another, they played Racing Demon.... Racing Demon was a kind of interactive Patience. As card games went, it was almost a contact sport. There was a lot of snatching and taunting and laughing and, almost always, a shimmer of hysteria toward the end. He wanted to play the games called Skin and Cheat. Is that what he wanted? He wanted to play Hearts. Hearts: That, perhaps, was the trouble.

Did they mean anything, those smiles and glances? Did they mean anything, those exhibitions in the shared bathroom, those exhibitions of riveting disarray? Keith read, and sighed, and wished he was a yellow bird. Because it would have horrified him beyond computation—to take her undesigning friendliness and smear it with his hands, his lips.

Keith grew up in cities, in small coastal cities—Cornwall, Wales. The only birds he knew- well were city pigeons. When they took to the air at all (and it was invariably a last resort), they flew for fear.

Here in Italy the black carnachi flew for hunger, the high magneti flew for destiny, and the yellow canarini flew for joy. When the wind came, the dervish tramontana, the yellow birds neither rode the gusts nor fought them; they didn't fly, they didn't float, they just hung.

BODY PARTS

The neck of the loved one resembled those cylindrical shafts of light you saw in uncertain weather, when the rays of the sun began to find their way though the colander of the clouds. Like a tall lamp shade of white lace.... This style of thought, Keith knew, was of no help to him, and he turned his attention elsewhere.

"It's too big," said Lily. "Much too big."

"I feel as if I'm seeing it for the first time," said Scheherazade. "And it's absolutely enormous, isn't it?"

"Absolutely enormous."

"...And you wouldn't call it fat exactly."

"No. And it's—quite high up."

"There's just too much of it," said Scheherazade.

Lily said, "Much too much."

Keith listened. It was good, hanging around with girls: After a while, they thought you weren't there. What were they talking about, Lily and Scheherazade? They were talking about Gloria Beautyman's arse.... On the exercise frame, utterly unregarded, Adriano coiled, whirled and stretched, his legs outthrust and rigid to the very nails of his toes.

Gloria Beautyman, in a petaled bathing cap and a slightly furry dark-blue one-piece, was under the pool hut's external shower: 5'5", 33-22-37. She was a dark, pained and grimly self-

sufficient figure, with a frown fixed above

the bridge of her nose like an inverted V

(lowercase and italicized). This one-piece

of Gloria's continued on downward for an

extra couple of inches, like a not very dar­

ing miniskirt, and its awkward modesty,

hereabouts, made you think of bathing

machines and dipping stools

"She's turning round again," said Sche­herazade. "Whew, it's a whopper, isn't it? She's lost weight and it really sticks out at you. Awful swimsuit. Virginal."

"No, spinsterish. What are her tits like?"

"There's nothing wrong with her tits. They're almost the prettiest tits I've ever seen."

"Oh are they now? Describe."

"You know, like the upper bit of those des­sert glasses. For um,parfait. Just full enough to have a touch of heaviness. I wish I had tits like that."

"Scheherazade!"

"Well I do. Hers'll last. And I don't know how long mine'll be able to keep this up."

"Scheherazade!"

"Well I don't. You'll see them when Jorquil comes. He'll be wanting to show them off. Poor Gloria. She's all atremble about Mum. Who doesn't know the half of it."

Adriano still twirled like a Catherine wheel or a propeller on the upper bar of the exercise frame. Keith thought, I'll wait till he comes down from there—then I'll go and tower over him for a while. And Lily, not quite prepared to leave things as they were, said conclusively,

"It's a farcical arse."

At 5:30 Scheherazade drove in the cabrio­let from castle to castle and returned after an hour, looking childishly contrite, with her shoulders raised and locked. Dinner unfolded, its surface tension, its meniscus. After Gloria had proudly taken her leave, Scheherazade told of Adriano, saying,

"He was very correct. Quiet. Rather angry, I think. I don't blame him. I asked him to keep coming over. I stressed that we're still good friends."

Keith watched as Lily went up to their

room

It was now just before midnight in the gun room. The moose, with its marble eyes, stared out inexorably. On the floor, on the tiger rug, Indian-fashion faced sidesaddle: Keith faced the forbidding approachability, the illegible openness of Scheherazade. What was this alphabet that he couldn't read? She wore a close dress of murky pink, with five white buttons down the front at six-inch intervals; she kept scratching at the little red swell on the paler side of her forearm where, the night before, a mosquito had inserted its syringe. Keith was in his usual state, which was this. Every other minute, he could hear heaven snickering at his forbearance, and every minute in between, he blushed white sweat at the thought of the sulfurous tar pit in his soul.

The night was probably about to end, and Keith was blithely (and ignorantly) saying something about the castle, about how the exterior sometimes struck him as more Transylvanian than Italianate (with a haunted slant to it), and he went on,

"The best bit in Dracula is when he climbs

down the rampart—headfirst. Coming down to feast on the girl."

"Headfirst?"

"Headfirst. He sticks to the wall like a fly. He's already done for Lucy Westenra. He savaged her—in the form of a wild animal. Now it's Wilhelmina's turn. He bites her three times. And he makes her drink his blood. And from then on she's under his control."

"I'm scared now." She lowered her voice. "What if I'm attacked on my way up?"

And his blood—it altered thickly. "But I'll protect you," he said.

They stood. They climbed the staircase that wound its way round the ballroom. On the recessed half landing she said,

"I suppose this is far enough."

"Wait," he said, and placed the three-branched candelabrum on the floor, and straightened slowly. "You stand betrayed. I'm the undead. I'm the prince of darkness."

So he was pretending to be Dracula (his hands were vampirically raised and tensed), and she was pretending to be his victim (her hands were clasped in obeisance or prayer), and he was moving in on her, and she was backing offand even half sat herself on the curved lid of a wooden trunk, and their faces were level, eye to eye and breath to breath. And now they were given a ticket of entry to another genre...the world of the heaving bosom and the drooling canine, of bats and screech owls, of fluids and straight razors and blinded mirrors, where everything was allowed. He looked down the length of her: The stretched gaps between her buttons were mouths of smiling flesh. From throat to thigh it was all before him.

She raised a palm halfway toward his chest—and, as if pushed, he staggered side­ways, and something clattered, and there were three rolling tubes of tallow with flick­ering wicks, and they laughed, fatally, and suddenly it was over.

Then Scheherazade went on up and Keith went on down. He crossed the courtyard under the ridiculous innocence of the moon. He climbed the tower.

And entered the insanity of night.

Oh, I know now what I should have said and done. Count Dracula would want your throat, your neck. But I—/ want your mouth, your lips. Then onward, and all would have followed and flowed. Wouldn't it?

Lesprit de I'escalier: spirit of the staircase, wishing you'd said, wishing you'd done. Yet how much more indelible it was when the staircase was the staircase that led to the bedroom....

Gathering, shadowing, boding, closing over Scheherazade, he felt a near-irresistible force. And an immovable object. What was the nature of the impediment, what was its shape and mass? He turned to the sleeping form at his side and whispered,

I low could you do this to me?

For weeks Keith had known that his cho­sen project was something like the opposite of self-improvement. But he honestly never dreamt that he had so far to go.

why should boys have All the fun? said lily. we're . too young for monogamy. or •

EVEN FOR LOVM^^l

When he first got wind

of Adriano, Keith imagined

a grand seducer, a

purple genius of the

chamber and the boudoir—

glutinously virile.

From The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf in May.