Intimacy Read Free Page A

certain that I am able to speak to women without being afraid of wanting them, I am not sure that I can touch someone as I used to – frivolously. After a certain age sex can never be casual. I couldn’t ask for so little. To lay your hand on another’s body, or to put your mouth against another’s – what a commitment that is! To choose someone is to uncover a whole life. And it is to invite them to uncover you!
    Maybe that is what happened with Nina. One day a girl walks past and you want her. I’ve examined the moment a score of times. She and I would go over it repeatedly, in joy and in puzzlement. I can remember how tall and slim she was; and then there was the jolt, the violent jolt, when we met, and met. Something about her changed everything. But I had wanted people before, and I knew nothing about her. She was from another world. After a certain age you don’t want things to be so haphazard. You want to believe that you know what it is you are doing. Perhaps that explains what I did.

My young gay friend Ian
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    My young gay friend Ian liked to stand with me outside tube stations where I would watch the flocks of girls in the summer, after I had finished work for the day, around lunch time. There were certain locations that guaranteed more interest than others. ‘A picture of impotence,’ he called it. With him, looks would be exchanged and off he would go, while I waited, having coffee somewhere. Sometimes he fucked five people in a day, shoving his arm up to the elbow into men whose faces he never saw. Every night of the week there were orgies he might attend.
    ‘I’ve never understood all the fuss you straights make about infidelity,’ he’d say. ‘It’s only fucking.’
    ‘Fucking means something,’ I’d reply. But what? I’d add, ‘Surely, for there to be beauty there must be mystery too.’
    ‘When there are other people there is always mystery,’ was his answer.

Susan has already laid the table
    Susan has already laid the table. I open the wine and pour it. The man in the off-licence said it is an easy wine to drink. These days I find anything easy to drink.
    Susan brings the food in and sets it down. I glance over the newspaper. As she eats, she turns on the TV, puts on her glasses and leans forward to watch a soap opera.
    ‘Oh my God,’ she says, as something happens.
    The noise presses into my head. You’d think, if she wanted domestic drama, she could look across the table.
    But I am looking away, at a tree in the garden, at a print on the wall, longing for something beautiful or made with care. I have begun to hate television as well as the other media. I was young when the rock-‘n’-roll world – the apotheosis of the defiantly shallow – represented the new. It was rebellious and stood against the conventional and dead. Television, too, remained a novelty throughout my youth – all those flickering worlds admitted to one room, Father making me hold the aerial up at the window on tiptoe. Every few months something new and shiny arrived: a car, a fridge, a washing machine, a telephone. And for a time each new thing amazed us. We touched and stared at it for at least a fortnight. We were like everybody else, and ahead of some people. We thought – I don’t know why – that things would be enough.
    Now I resent being bombarded by vulgarity, emptiness and repetition. I have friends in television. They talk constantly of their jobs and salaries, of the politics in which they’re enmeshed, and of the public, whom they never meet. But if you turn on the TV and sit down hoping to see something sustaining, you’re going to be disappointed – outraged, in fact, by bullying, aggression and the forcible democratization of the intellect. I am turning off; rebelling against rebellion.
    A nerve in my eye is throbbing. My hands seem to be shaking. I feel hollow and my nerves raw, as if I have been pierced by something fatal. My body knows what is going on. If I