Mantissa Read online

  “The unvarnished truth, yes?”

  “You know perfectly well why you were landed with fiction. It was nothing to do with picking the short straw. It’s just that you could always lie ten times better than all the rest of your sisters put together.”

  “What sisters? I haven’t got any sisters.”

  “Oh sure. And your name isn’t Erato and –”

  “No, my name is not Erato! And you’re absolutely right. Of course satyrs are pure myth. Of course that grotesque scene never took place. Especially as it involved not one, but two entirely mythical beings.”

  He stares down at her; she stares fiercely back.

  “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m calling your disgusting, prototypal male bluff, that’s what it means. And I’ll tell you what a modern satyr is. He’s someone who invents a woman on paper so that he can force her to say and do things no real woman in her right mind ever would.”

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to –”

  “I’ve fallen over myself to behave as you want so far. As well as I can without being physically sick. And all the reward I get is to be made fun of at the end of it.”

  “Erato!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I can’t be Erato. She never existed. And even if she had, if you think she’d have come within ten light-years of this hideous room, let alone taken her clothes off and let you… honestly. Grow up.”

  “Then who the devil do you think you are?”

  “I don’t think, I know. I’m just one more miserable fantasy figure your diseased mind is trying to conjure up out of nothing.” She turns her head to one side. “I wish to God you’d just bang away and get it over with. Then throw me on your next bonfire.”

  He stares down at the profiled face on the pillow.

  “Fantasy figures aren’t allowed wishes. I shall take as long as I like. Correction. As I fucking well like.”

  “I thought your type died out with the Ottoman Empire.”

  “Or even longer. As you aren’t real.”

  She looks angrily up at him again.

  “I only seem real because it is your nauseating notion that the actually totally unreal character I’m supposed to be impersonating should do so. In fact a real me in this situation would avoid all reference to the matter, especially as she would never have got herself into the situation in the first place. If she had any choice. Which she doesn’t. As she isn’t real.” She cranes and shivers her head at him. “You’re doing exactly what you always do: chasing your own tale.”

  “Very funny. And how do you know what I always do?”

  “I don’t.”

  “But you’ve just –”

  She turned her head sideways. “All I do is parrot whatever lines you give me. They’re yours. Not mine.”

  “Balls.” She remains disgustedly turned away. “You’re just my words? Mere wax in my hands?”

  “I should have thought cheap plasticine was more accurate.”

  He takes a breath. “Without a whisper of volition of your own?”

  “I’d have left this room hours ago if I had.”

  “I could do anything to you, and you’d just lie there?”

  “No such luck.” She sniffs. “Knowing the putrid harem of your imagination, you’d have me squirming about and egging you on.”

  He pounces. “How do you know my imagination?”

  “ ‘Know’ is an epistemological nonsense, in the circumstances.”

  “Never mind. You used it.”

  “Because it’s so crudely repetitive one has to be its victim for only a few pages to guess how it will always work.”

  “And how on earth can a harem be putrid?”

  “You should try living in one. Instead of just owning it.”

  He stares down at her. “I’m not putting a single word of this into your mouth.”

  “I wouldn’t be caught dead in your dialogue. Of my own free will. If I had one.”

  “If you ask me, you’re talking exactly as you want. I.e., as a perverse little bitch who’s about as straightforward as a right-angle bend and as chaste as a go-go dancer.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m not fooled for a moment. This is just the sort of situation you love. Turn up, then be willfully obstructive from the first word on. And what’s more, you know it. Don’t you?”

  “If you say so. That is, if you say ‘if you say so’ is what you want me to say. As it apparently is.”

  “I demand a proper answer.”

  “At last he speaks naturally.”

  “I consider I have a right to a proper answer.”

  “Then you’d better think of one.”

  “It certainly wasn’t that.”

  She shrugs. “Then try again. You’re the master.”

  He angrily contemplates her averted face. There is a silence, then he speaks.

  “I’ve just caught you.”

  “How?”

  “By telling you to do something. Which you haven’t.”

  “I’m not a mind-reader. Merely your inflatable doll.”

  “Very well. I want the inflatable doll to tell me she loves me. Passionately. At once.”

  “I love you. Passionately.”

  “Not like that. With feeling. Con amore.”

  “I don’t see how I can.”

  “Well well well.”

  She looks contemptuously up at him.

  “It’s not my fault that I’m equally the programmed slave of whatever stupid mood you’ve created. Whatever clumsy set of supposed female emotions you’ve bodged up for me. To say nothing of your character. I notice there’s not been a single word about his exceedingly dubious status. I wonder who’s pulling his strings?”

  “I am. I’m me. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  She gives him a sarcastic little smile, and looks away. “God, you’re so naïve.”

  “You’re the one who’s naïve. I wouldn’t tell my own character to suggest I’m not really me.”

  “Then why’s he being referred to as ‘he’ throughout? What are you trying to hide?”

  He is silent a moment.

  “Look, I’m not going to pursue this totally irrelevant red herring. You’re only trying to get out of explaining why you won’t do what I ask.”

  “I could probably simulate it physically. Start clutching and moaning. Would that do?”

  “It would not.”

  “Then I suggest your character try it. You make him tell me he loves me passionately.” She turns her head sideways again on the pillow. “I’m waiting.”

  “I know your trouble. You’re a classic spoilsport. As soon as you start enjoying it, you feel guilty. Sidle off into all this crap about reality and unreality.”

  “I shouldn’t start talking about that, if I were you.”

  “Meaning?”

  “My God, when I think in this day and age… it’s pathetic. The world’s full of highly pertinent male-female situations whose fictional exploration does subtend a viable sociological function – and yet this is the best you can come up with. Muses… I mean, Christ. It’s so embarrassing. As if any contemporary woman who actually existed would talk in that revoltingly fey, coy way about shepherds and pipes and –”

  “Women who talk about explorations that subtend viable sociological functions are just as bad.”

  “Oh, I know it’s very wicked of us. To show we can actually think. Whatever next.”

  “You are viciously and sadistically breaking all the rules.”

  Her face flares round. “Your rules!”

  “All right. My rules.”

  She looks away again. “I’m sick to death of them. Of having to pretend I exist in a way I never would, if I did.”

  “You damn well exist for me, anyway. Just as you are.”

  “Heil Hitler.”

  “Okay. For the sake of argument: Hitler says you exist. As you are.”

  “He can’t. You have to have certain elementary fre
edoms to exist.”

  “If you must know, if there was anyone here, they’d think you were real enough by now. And a bloody sight too real.”

  “And if you must know, I think you’re the most maladroit, unpleasant, and dishonest man I’ve ever been to bed with.”

  “That’s a perfect example of your asinine female logic! First you don’t exist. Then you’ve been endlessly screwed by other men. Come on, make up your mind – which is it, for heaven’s sake?”

  “I am perfectly capable of making the kind of comparison I might have made, had I existed as I actually am. If I was.”

  “You can’t not exist and actually be. They’re mutually contradictory.”

  “I see. Now I’m denied even an imagination.”

  “Oh God. I give up.”

  “I’m not even allowed to think of what I might have been if I hadn’t had the misfortune to be created by you. Not allowed to think of all the sympathetic, intelligent, fastidious artists who might have invented me first. Instead I have to pick the one rotten apple, the one born bungler, the one bull in a china-shop who couldn’t appreciate my delicacy and subtlety of mind in a billion years.”

  “You ungrateful… you’d be nothing without me!”

  “I wish to God I was. I’m worse than nothing with you.” She stares contemptuously up at him. “The honest and simple truth is that you don’t begin to understand my potential.” She turns her head away. “It’s not really your fault, I suppose. Given your technical hamhandedness, I don’t see how you ever could.”

  “What do you mean by that? What hamhandedness?”

  “It’s obviously escaped your notice, but it wouldn’t have escaped that of any unfortunate third party forced to be a witness to all this, that we remain in quite ludicrously inappropriate sexual congress together.”

  “That’s soon remedied.”

  He pulls abruptly back and stands off the bed; returns to the chair, sits on it and crosses his arms, then his legs. He stares studiously across the room at the wall. She gives him a pent look, then props herself up on an elbow and turns her back on him. There is a silence. At last she speaks in a small, flat voice.

  “If it’s not asking too much, I wonder if you’d mind inventing something practical for once. Like some clothes for me. Then I could put them on and leave. Anything will do. Just a dressing-gown.”

  “I have something to say first.”

  “Everything’s been said. Ad nauseam.”

  “Oh no it hasn’t.” The naked young woman gives a silent sigh and puts her clenched left hand on her hip, the elbow cocked, in a gesture of resignation under duress. He stares at her back, then speaks in a quieter voice. “I will concede that I have made one grave error. Not about you, but about her. All right, perhaps she doesn’t exist in a historical or scientific sense. But as you’re so subtle-minded I’m sure you’ll agree that she has acquired a kind of apostrophic and prosopopoeic reality.”

  “Do get on with it. And I wish you’d try to stop talking like a dictionary.”

  He draws a breath. “But as she doesn’t exist, and we both now agree that you aren’t her, I can speak frankly. My mistake was embodying, if she did exist, a totally immoral and persistent old tart like that in an at least outwardly quite attractive girl like you. I mean what would she really be by now – if she had existed? She’s been a hot night out for every pen-pushing Tom, Dick and Harry, a pair of ever-open legs, for four thousand years. I ought to have made her a raddled old syphilitic hag. At least that might have been within spitting distance of the truth. Don’t you agree?”

  “Are we finished?”

  “Moreover, she ought – if she did exist – to do a little market research on herself. Try knocking on a few doors. ‘Hi. My name’s Erato. I sell inspiration on the never-never. Can I interest you in an epithalamion? May I show you our new bargain line in personalized alcaics?’ They’d just laugh in her face. If they didn’t think she’d escaped from the nearest nuthouse.” He eyes the turned back. “Anyway, they can do all she used to do by computer and word-processor now, and fifty times better. I could even feel faintly sorry for her, poor old milked-out cow. If she did exist.”

  Now it is the girl on the bed who takes the deep breath. But she remains silently staring away into the corner of the room.

  “I’ve only to look at you lying there, in that Rokeby Venus pose, to see how ridiculous it was. Obviously by now she’d be some old biddy bundled in an overcoat fishing around dustbins and muttering… if she did exist.”

  This somewhat abrupt ending (or aposiopesis) is caused by a previous movement from the figure on the bed. At the mention of the Rokeby Venus, she has turned and sat up. Now, her arms folded, she regards the man on the chair with tight-pressed mouth and eyes gone as hard as obsidian.

  “Have you quite finished now?”

  “Yes.”

  “I bet she wishes she was a raddled old hag. Then at least she could retire. Somewhere where men don’t exist.”

  “But it scarcely matters, does it? As she doesn’t, either.”

  “I’m simply speaking on your own assumption.”

  “Which is laughably hypothetical.”

  “And typically chauvinist.”

  He tilts his head and examines the cocked toes of his crossed leg. “I’m surprised you should say that.”

  “That I take my own sex’s side?”

  “Just that if she did exist, yet wasn’t here, it would have to mean she was leaving all the dirty work to you. It’s your body that has to undergo the vile sexual humiliation of having to please mine. Which makes her no better than a procuress. No?”

  “I notice you’re very characteristically leaving out of account her whole historical situation.”

  “I’m not sure I like this purely theoretical element you’re introducing.”

  “Unlike you, I happen to have considerable powers of empathy. I am merely putting myself in her existential place.”

  “If it existed.” She raises her eyes to the ceiling. “Just as long as we’re both clear we are conducting a completely abstract and unreal disputation. Essentially in the same category as the old scholastic one about the number of angels who can play hopscotch on a needle’s point.” He opens his hands. “The floor is yours.”

  She stares at him. “I suppose it’s never occurred to you what a horror it would be, if it existed, to have to occupy a role and function that escapes all normal biological laws. All on her own. No outside help, never a day off. Constantly having to dress up as this, dress up as that. The impossible boredom of it. The monotony. The schizophrenia. Day after day of being mauled about in people’s minds, misunderstood, travestied, degraded. And never a word of thanks for it. Never –”

  “Wait a minute. What about –”

  Her voice rises. “Never a thought for her as a person, only for what can be got out of her. Never a moment’s consideration for her emotions. Never enough imagination to realize that she may be secretly dying for a little tenderness and sympathy, that she’s also a woman and can’t help it if certain combinations of circumstance and mood do make her need the services of a male body in an entirely natural female way – which has absolutely nothing to do with humiliation, by the way, and…” She takes a breath. “But what’s that matter if his lordship, whoever he is, wants something else. If he wants to play his games, leaving her –”

  “I did not start this.”

  “Screaming with frustration.” She looks away at the wall. “If she existed, of course.”

  He contemplates his cocked foot again.

  “This dressing-gown – is there any particular color or material you’d like?”

  “I hate you.”

  “How about green then?”

  “You’d just love that, wouldn’t you? She has the effrontery to object to being treated as a mere sex-object, so out with her. Toss her back to nothingness, like an old boot.”

  “You asked for it yourself, only a minute ago.”

  She st
ares furiously at him for a moment, then once more twists abruptly on her side, her back to him, facing the far wall.

  “I’m not going to say another word. You’re impossible.” There is silence for five seconds. “You’re like all men. Once that absurd bit of dangling tissue between your legs has had its fun, all you think of is how fast you can get rid of us.”

  “I’d have got rid of you long before now, if that was true. You’ve just convinced me I can do what I like.”

  “Exactly!”

  “Exactly what?”

  “I have absolutely no rights. The sexual exploitation’s nothing beside the ontological one. You can kill me off in five lines if you want to. Throw me in the wastepaper basket, never think of me again.”

  “I don’t think there’s much chance of that.”

  “Oh yes you would. Just like all the others.”

  “What others!”

  “Oh don’t be so absurd.” She darts a contemptuous look back over her shoulder at him. “Are you trying to suggest I’m the first?”

  “It’s… possible you’re not the first.”

  “And possible I shan’t be the last?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “So it’s more than possible that I’m just the latest in a series of wretched imaginary women who’ve had the misfortune to fall into your hands. To be kicked out the moment someone more attractive walks past.”

  “As a matter of record my relationship with them was and continues to be deeply human and rewarding on both sides. In every case we remain excellent friends.”

  “They sound like a first-class bunch of female Uncle Toms to me.”

  “I’m not going to reply to language like that.”

  “Surprise, surprise.”

  “Only the other day one of them told me she thought I’d given her far too much freedom in our liaison.”

  “Before you killed her off.”

  “I do not kill my female friends off.”

  “Much. You just collect and mummify them. Lock them up in a cellar and gloat over them, like Bluebeard.”

  “I find that a singularly offensive comparison.”

  “For a plurally offensive habit. Otherwise known as necrophilia.”

  He stands up.

  “All right. That’s it. You’ve just said you’d rather be nothing without me than worse than nothing with me. So okay. Your choice. There’s the door.” He flicks his thumb at it. “There. Now there’s a green bathrobe on it. Simple. You stand off the bed, you walk to the door, you put on the robe, you leave, we forget the whole thing. It never happened. Your move.”