[70] To the Kimmerian lands

The same afternoon she’s going to Charlotte’s for luncheon, I walk to the Outer Orbit. How can one walk safely in this city? To the always next place? By walking with eyes open to the sun within you. Capitalism is a shadow over the world that surrounds, and so is socialism. How can one protect oneself from both except by demanding moments to see with your own light? To live uncorrupted, you have to choose by your own nature, which can be no one else’s.

There’s a lokal that’s still on this corner of Hail Mary and the Outer Orbit between the cavalry stables and the Marine Ministry. I order a heated mug of red.

‘I’ve been away,’ I tell the barman. ‘Three planetaria within a kilometre of here. The ones with the prettiest maidens. Where the admirals go.’

‘Good sir,’ he says. ‘The best one is upstairs, through the crimson door at the back. The other two I’d recommend are …’

I don’t expect him to point me back towards Sevenstars Lane. Those houses I already know about, from my uniformed days. There are things a lot I haven’t told you that probably I never will, because I wouldn’t tell Emma. No, I don’t tell her everything. She never got the pox from me, and that’s enough for her somehow. Here I am, standing in front of you, and this is one of the few things she need never know.

Cassie, when I meet her the first time across her Dutch door’s sill, has blond hair like frozen fire. I’ve woken her in the early afternoon, and she’s wearing a quilted housecoat thick as steel plate. Her voice is a cigarette croak.

‘We open at four,’ she says while she’s searching me for mental disease. ‘Well, never mind. Someone’s always around. You’re not a student, you’re not a working man. Cavalry hair and dispatch case but you’re not land forces. Try lying to me – I love it.’

We’re standing in the waiting room now, inside four pink walls, under a chandelier coated with tassels and dust, on a worn Turkey carpet.

‘What do I want? I want to do more of these.’

‘Oh, yes, right, them.’

She looks at a drawing I’ve done for the coffeehouse proprietor. Emma on a quilt, blue stockings, red cami, full of hope and lust.

‘Nice. I could use some of that, not that she’d look that way long. How would they look after a month? That’s what I have to picture. But if she wants a tryout, she can talk to me.’

‘My client wants a drawing of two women doing it. Her, she won’t go that way.’

‘Then she’s never tried it. Or someone did it wrong. The thing is, you don’t use your fingertip, oh no. You use the side of your second knuckle – more control that way. And don’t squeeze anything.’

‘We’ve tried everything.’

‘So your girl lets you sell birthday pictures of her, but she won’t drink from a saucer. That isn’t her face.’

‘No,’ I tell her. ‘I can draw her body for these, but not her face.’

‘She’s a carrot-top, isn’t she. You’ve put a brunette’s face on a redhead’s body, nipples like that. Not enough meat on her, for my clientele. But the point – you can’t get anyone to team up for free?’

‘That’s right. I need two women, one hour, touching each other. Whatever the rate.’

‘You could pluck them off the street.’

‘You come with a room.’

‘What do you get for these, and from whom?’

Whom? … I tell her. If you want to be believed, you speak right away. You have to punch your lines in this world.

She whistles. ‘Good contacts, him. He’s selling these to …’ And she names a string of people I’ve heard of, on the outer circles of Charlotte’s crowd. ‘The street behind his coffeehouse,’ she says, ‘your guy runs his own planetarium. So these go to his clients. We girls stick together, you know. The ones with certificates, anyway. The street trade, that’s nothing of my business. All right, come in.’

She points me through a door. An ogre is sitting on a stool at the kitchen table. He’s just shaved his dome, and his shoulders roll up and down with each breath. A black cudgel lies flat on the table in front of him. His look tells me, You’re disgusting, and no one here cares that you’re disgusting.

‘This is Tibor,’ she says. ‘You, do you speak Hungarian, you?’

‘Paul.’

‘Tibor keeps the soldiers in line. And when someone wants his back door kicked open, well, he doesn’t need his nightstick for that. You ever wanted to be a woman, Paul?’

‘No.’

‘And her? Your friend? Have you been through her back door?’

‘Once or twice. I like it that way sometimes, but she doesn’t get the point.’

‘Too much friction, that’s usually why not. You can never use enough jelly, back there. It’s her way of telling you she’ll do anything for you.’

‘She’s wanted to try everything with me.’

‘That’s love. I suppose you won’t be needing us for a few months. All right, Paul, I can show you what I’ve got, but I should warn you, the people who buy this kind of thing – ’

Tibor makes a sound like crushing boulders. She shows him the drawing, and he looks up at me with sudden discernment. All his teeth are gold. Now she’s taking me upstairs to the dormitory rooms.

‘– I was saying, the people who buy these, they want them fresh, and you don’t find that in a house like this. They want daughters – their own half the time, if you can guess what they look like. Girls spoil pretty quick in a house like this. I can get you the poses, I can supply you the party frocks and the white cotton knickers, but you want innocence for something like this and I never have any – no shelf life. Another thing – no mothers in these. Never, ever a mother. Two young ones exploring each other, never been touched except by each other. That’s where the biggest money is, but always hold something back so they can’t get their fill from one drawing. Don’t make them look too beautiful – that’s a threat. Dress them like sluts as much as you like, as long as they both look like choir girls from the neck up.’

We’re standing at the top of one flight of stairs, looking up at the next. The house is rocking slightly in the spring gale outside, unseen windows are keening passively. The air is clotted with nighttime smoke, weak coal lights throbbing yellow through it. I look down the stairs we’ve climbed, the twisting ochre passages on either side, up the next flight of steps. The sun will never know this place exists. Everything looks trapped in itself. No windows, and the city out there no more than a distant sigh. I look at her, then look again.

‘Coercion, dominance, exploitation,’ she tells me. ‘That’s what the world runs on, and it’s too easy to play by the same rules when everyone else is. That’s why men get more violent, the older the world becomes. It’s all a competition to see who can be cruelest, and progress makes it easier for everyone to play the cruel game. They come here, and whatever they end up asking for later, the first thing they want is simple – no decisions to make, no lies they have to make themselves believe. They come here to hide from the cruelty they don’t want to face from other people, even when they’re as cruel as everyone else.’

‘Art helps people force a system onto absurdity,’ I tell her. ‘Art is a privileged site where you can struggle against the powers. In a painting, if I work hard enough, levels of perception and reality collide that people can’t experience any other way. No one can stop a painting from expressing a truth to the authorities. I can show the world to itself in ways that no one else can, and the powers can’t stop me.’

‘People knock sometimes,’ she says, ‘ask whether they can take photographs. Call me old fashioned, but no one wants to look the way they do in a photograph. One of my girls looks at a picture of herself and all she sees is what she knows she isn’t. As if my girls don’t always know exactly who they are after a few nights with her back to the boards. Drawings like you? They show our experience. The world needs people like you, never mind what they try to tell you.’

‘It needs what art does even while it’s rejecting it,’ I tell her. ‘I tell you what. The drawings, that’s what I do. The poses, that’s what you and yours do. We both work the market.’

‘Fifty.’

‘Twenty. I can find girls anywhere, like you said.’

‘Forty-five. I know what men want.’

‘Twenty-five. I can get three hundred a sheet. What could you get?’

‘Tell you what, make it thirty-five, and I help you work the market. But you’re going to have to listen to what I know.’