Love (18 page)

Authors: Angela Carter

BOOK: Love

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He now lives a life of paranoid seclusion in a midtown penthouse, surrounded by a covey of leather-clad acolytes. His videos are spoken of with bated breath. He was early into graffiti and runs a specialist gallery on the upper East Side, besides the notorious performance-art venue in SoHo and a bondage joint in the East Village. Wim Wenders is rumoured to be considering a treatment based on the search Buzzz undertook for his father in the Apache reservations of the Southwest in early 1980, as a follow-up to
Paris
,
Texas
.

The brothers are no longer in communication. Their endless, pointless quarrel as to which of them was responsible for finally pushing Annabel over the edge was never resolved, became slurred and desultory on Lee’s part and was abandoned when Buzzz moved to London shortly after Lee was taken in hand by the young woman who later married him. Nevertheless, Lee is the only human being his brother ever felt one scrap for and he admits to himself, and occasionally to startled companions, that if there is one thing he would like to do before he dies, it is to fuck him. There is as much menace as desire in this wish.

The portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe reproduced in the Sunday colour supplements two or three years ago shows he has not changed, much, except for the ring in his nipple.

Lee
was rehabilitated from a slough of guilt, misery, impotence, self-pity and drug and alcohol abuse by a stern and passionate young supply teacher of English, who was at that time a member of the
SWP
(or
IS
as it was known then). He still believes it was his first name she found so irresistible; certainly little else about him was attractive at that time.

Rosie fought to reclaim his soul for the revolution and his body for the use of women with missionary zeal and by the time, around 1972, she reluctantly came to the conclusion that the revolution was not imminent in Britain, their first child was on its way. Her father, a south London newsagent, offered them enough money for the deposit on a small house if they legitimized the grandchild. So their fates were sealed. Lee lives in a street that is the twin of the one in which he grew up; his aunt would have approved of his wife. He vaguely marvels when something – Jimi Hendrix on the radio,
perhaps; a glimpse of his former philosophy tutor – reminds him of his hot, glorious, cruel youth.

Lee turned out to be rather a good teacher. He works extremely hard in a huge (2,800) comprehensive school, is active in the union and, at home, does most of the cooking as Rosie is not talented in that direction. He is too tired to be unfaithful, even if the opportunity arose.

When he and Rosie first lived together, they spent much time analysing the catastrophe of Lee’s relationship with Annabel. Initially, Rosie thought it must have been a simple tragedy of propinquity – three people who should never have had anything to do with one another forced together by circumstances beyond their control, such as birth and love. She did not want to blame Lee, nor Lee to blame himself. But, as she encountered and absorbed the women’s movement, she found she had no option but to do so, blaming him for sins of omission and commission, and, especially, for raising his hand to Annabel, that frail, tragic creature.

By the time of the three-day week, the ghost of Annabel was exerting such pressure on them that Rosie could endure it no longer, scooped up her little girl and left home. Lee endured their absence with unexpected stoicism, keeping up the mortgage repayments, staying away from drink and women; each night he stepped inside the empty room where the torn poster of Minnie Mouse in aviatrix’s garb still fluttered forlornly on the wall and stared at the empty cot with such intensity he might have been attempting to teleport its rightful occupant home by sheer force of will.

All the same, it takes a lot to make a man admit he has been a bastard, even a man so prone to masochistic self-abnegation as Lee. And, at the period of his very worst behaviour, he had no idea of how big a bastard he was being. Nowadays he can hardly bear to think his daughters might meet young men like him; he does not know that one of them already has.

Rosie finally resolved her argument with him to her own satisfaction by deciding that, yes, he
was
a hypocrite, but if she were to remain a heterosexual, then she could go farther and fare worse. Besides, the little girl adored her father and
made her mother feel dreadful about keeping them apart. So they returned home in the period of muted, and, as it turned out, illusory optimism following the Labour victory in the 1974 elections.

By then, Lee had recovered his looks and spirits. Even now, past forty and running somewhat to fat, he is still a physically glamorous man, or he would have no meaning. Rosie would never own up in public to the pleasure his blond, dishevelled presence gives her because, in their austere circles, it would not be considered a sound basis for a lasting relationship. But it has served its turn where Lee and Rosie are concerned. They quarrel a good deal, but he is always grateful to her, in spite of what he says, for bringing him out of his private chamber of horrors, even if sometimes he resents it; Buzzz has made a small fortune out of the very same chamber of horrors, after all.

A second little girl followed in due course after the family was reunited. (The third, a latecomer, is still in arms.) Lee was astonished by the violence of his passion for his children. Rosie got the job at the Community Centre. Lee moved to another school as deputy head of department. The minutiae of everyday life consumed them.

Why should Lee be rewarded with a stable relationship? Might it not be almost as much a punishment as a reward? What sane person would voluntarily choose a life of hard work, ideological integrity and compulsive domesticity in the English provinces over one of terminal chic in New York City? Rosie’s lips go thin and white when their lifelong disagreement takes this turn.
She
would, for one. She remembers how Lee drove his first wife mad and then killed her. She reminds him of this; she and Lee share a rare talent for the unforgivable. She suggests that degeneracy runs in Lee’s family. They row fiercely. The adolescent daughters in their attic room turn up the volume of the record player to drown the noise. Upstairs, the baby cries. The telephone rings. Rosie springs off to answer. It is the Women’s Refuge. She begins an animated conversation about wife-beating, raising two fingers to her husband in an obscene gesture.

The screaming baby is plentifully extruding a foul-smelling substance similar in colour and consistency to spinach purée. Lee inspects it anxiously, as a Roman soothsayer might have peered at entrails. He cleans her up, muttering to himself about Rosie’s shortcomings as a mother in order to obscure his worry. If this keeps up, the baby must go to the clinic first thing in the morning. He paces the room for a while, pressing her hot, miserable weight against his breast, on which there is still a tattooed heart; Rosie has grown so used to it she doesn’t notice it any more. Suddenly the whimpering baby yawns hugely, quiets and sleeps, looking all at once like a blessed infant.

Her father kisses her moist, meagre hair and lays her down upon her side. The older girls, trained in deference to her tyrannic sleeps, snap off their loud music but, cold-eyed strangers that they have become, continue to discuss in muted whispers their parents’ deficiencies as human beings.

Oh, the pain of it, thought Lee, thinking about his children, oh! the exquisite pain of unrequited love. The only authentic wound, the sweet curse they inflict on you, the revenge of heterosexuality.

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Epub ISBN: 9781448104420

Version 1.0

www.randomhouse.co.uk

Published by Vintage 2006

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Angela Carter has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

First published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971

Revised edition first published by Chatto & Windus Ltd, 1987

First published by Vintage in 1997

Vintage

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London SW1V 2SA