He knew about the tennis, and crowed at length over my humiliation. I assume he was glaring down from the glass gallery, having tailed me to the court. ‘Black socks,’ he said. ‘Man, did you look sick.’ His general theme? His theme was that I had ruined his life. I had tricked and cheated him many times. Nothing I could do would ever make it up to him. Only my own ruin could ever do that. I didn’t argue. I didn’t say much at all. I kept wishing he would ring when I had a decent drunk on: then I’d give him a piece of my mind. Sometimes he sounded big, sometimes he sounded small. Often he sounded damaged. If it came to it — who knows? With a few brandies down me I could probably handle him with my brief but nasty repertoire of sudden street stunts. You never can tell, though, with mad guys. I once got bopped by a mad guy and it was like no blow I have ever felt — qualitatively different, full of an atrocious, a limitless rectitude. Their internal motors are all souped up. They can lift buses and things if they’re feeling mad enough.
Fielding rang several times too. He was gentle and solicitous, and scolded himself for having run me ragged on the court. It was my own fault, and I said so. He wasn’t toying with me. He was just playing his natural game. Christ, he didn’t even break stride.
‘Hey,’ I said. Those guys at the court. In the gallery. Who were they?’
‘Why, I really couldn’t tell you, Slick. I think they can just come in off the street. Maybe friends of the players, I don’t know. Why do you ask?’
‘One of them rang me up,’ I said vaguely.
‘Who was he, Slick? A talent scout?’
‘Oh yeah,’ I said, and made a long arm for the scotch.
Fielding then offered to send over his personal physician to take a look at me, but I saw no good reason to put the doc through that ordeal.
Someone else rang. Someone else rang me here in New York. In my fever, out of the babble, one day, came a human voice.
By now I had learnt to think of the telephone as something hysterical and malevolent in itself, this dumb doll with its ventrilo-qual threats and wheedles. Do that, think this, pretend the other. Then came a human voice.
I was lying on the bed, hugely, malely, in my winded Y-fronts. Boy am I butch. I was just lying there sweating and swearing and searching for sleep. Then the telephone did its act, its number. One of my big beefs about Selina was that her disappearance obliged me to answer this thing whenever it rang. And it also might be Fielding, I supposed, aiming more and more money my way.
‘Hello?’ said the knowing voice. ‘John?’
‘… Selina! Ooh, right, you bitch. Now you just tell me where the—’
‘Bad luck. It’s Martina. Martina Twain.’
I felt — I felt several things at once. I felt the flinch of shameful unpreparedness. I smiled, and felt my facial flesh ease out of its recent mould. I felt my abscess for a second, lightly tickled by the strange creasing of my cheek. I felt my head-static quieten — and I felt that I really wasn’t up to this, not now, maybe never.
She laughed at my silence. The laugh somehow established me as a waster or gadabout—but not unkindly, I thought. By this time I was sitting up straight and smoking and drinking and generally pulling myself together. For I have to tell you right off that Martina Twain is a real boss chick by anyone’s standards — even by your lights and scales, your shadowy values and mores, you, the unknown Earthling, unknown to me. Pal, she’s class, with a terrific education on her, plus one of those jackpot body-deals whereby a tall and slender-framed girl somehow ends up with heavy tits and a big tush. She has a lively tongue in her lively mouth, and deep-flavoured colouring. American, but English-raised. I’ve always had a remote and hopeless thing for her, ever since film school.