For all its offhand delivery, this speech had been pretty shrewdly rehearsed. I expected Martina to shrug and apologize and put me on to something harder. She would be impressed, a little stung and chastened perhaps, by the restless brainpower she had started to awaken. I met her gaze. Her bruised, active eyes were flooding with consternation, with delight. Fuck, I thought. Animal Farm was a joke all along.
‘You know it’s an allegory,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘It’s an allegory. It’s about the Russian Revolution.’
‘What is?’
She explained.
Now this was a shaker, no two ways about it. The Russian Revolution wasn’t exactly news to me — well, I gathered that they’d had a major rumble and rethink over there, early on in the century sometime. But this allegory deal had certainly caught me napping. I listened as Martina talked on. That big horse Boxer — he was the peasantry, if you please. Little Squealer—he wasn’t just a pig, he was the propagandist Molotov. Did I know that Molotov was a pre-Revolutionary editor of Pravda? I did not. To hide my panic (and it is panic, panic in the face of the unknown), I threw in my criticism, the one about the pigs.
For some reason Martina had a good laugh about this too. Like most people she has two laughs, the polite reflexive laugh, and the real laugh. Martina’s real laugh is the least ladylike I have ever heard — savage, childish, but symphonic, with competing levels and strains. Yes, she likes a good laugh, this Martina.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Actually pigs are cleverer than dogs. They have bigger brains relative to body size. That’s what counts. Pigs are nearly as clever as monkeys.’
‘You don’t say,’ I said. ‘Well I don’t know about you but it seems a hell of a way to live. I mean, if they’re meant to be so smart… I mean, you have seen pigs, haven’t you.’
‘I like pigs,’ she said.
She brought me a glass of white wine and parked me on the terrace as she went upstairs to change. It was my first drink of the day. I wasn’t hungover. I was in withdrawal — but there were shards of despairing hilarity among all the sourness and static. Martina’s terrace had a lot of flowers on it, in pots and tubs and wall-brackets, big ones, small ones, red ones, blue ones, supervised by corpulent bees, their shields as rich and shiny as dark pebbles in running water. Metallic, superdynamated, these creatures of the lower air moved about me like complicit demons, so heavy that when they hovered they seemed to be idling from invisible threads. I welcomed their company. They wouldn’t waste their suicide stings on me. Below lay the checkered decks of half-paved back gardens — fishponds and weak fountains, curlicued furniture, an overalled woman with ticking scissors. The birds of New York shivered and croaked among the bent branches. The birds of New York have more or less given up the ghost, and who can blame them? They have been processed by Manhattan and the twentieth century. A standard-issue British pigeon would look like a cockatoo among them — a robin redbreast would look like a bird of paradise. The birds of New York are old spivs in dirty macs. They live off charity and welfare handouts. They cough and grumble and flap their arms for warmth. Declassed, they have slipped several links in the chain of being: it’s been rough all right. No more songs or plump worms or flights to summer seas. The twentieth has been a bad century for the birds of New York, and they know it.
‘Are you all right down there?’
I tipped my chair back. Martina’s face, veiled by the hanging brushwork of her hair, inspected me from an upstairs window.
‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s heaven down here.’
The face withdrew silently. And so I sat out on the terrace in the hot dusk, drinking wine among the puppet bees.
We ate in. This spooked me somewhat. I had booked a fashionable table at the Last Metro on West Broadway, and was generally keen to push out some dough. ‘Cancel,’ said Martina. And I cancelled. She made dinner. Omelette, salad, fruit, cheese. White wine. The two-floor apartment presented itself as the ordered setting for healthy and purposeful lives. Books, paintings, desk surfaces, a typewriter, a chess set, a tennis racket standing easy against the closet door. Upstairs Ossie’s fresh clothes would be set out in lines and stacks… The tall Martina wore a V-necked jersey and a blue denim skirt. She has a useful hind-end on her, and she’s blessed up top too, though perhaps not as fulsomely as I imagined. No, it’s her own body, not built on any model. ‘Let’s stay in,’ she had said. ‘It’s just nicer.’ May I be frank? Are you sure you want to hear this? Well I’ll own up now and say that I have always secretly suspected that what Martina fancied was a bit of rough. That’s right — me, in the sack. It sounds unlikely at first, I agree. But people are unlikely these days. It’s happened. Twenty years ago she would have settled for her home, her interests, her burnished husband. She would have given me no headroom. But now? You just don’t know any more — you don’t know, they don’t know. Why has she persisted in my chaos? I mean, what am I here for tonight. My conversation?