Bliss Read online

  He sat beside her and surveyed the motel room full of grey suits and striped carpet. 'Mmmm,' he said.

  She thought he was the most original person she'd ever met.

  'It's a beautiful suit,' she said. She was so tense her finger-nails ached.

  When he smiled, his eyes crinkled. 'Why are you wearing gloves?'

  She was nineteen. She said: 'My hands sweat.'

  A smile stirred beneath that vast moustache. 'Are you eccentric?' he asked.

  'Yes.'

  He called a waiter and ordered vodka. Then he undressed her hands and wiped them with a handkerchief dipped in vodka. He borrowed a towel from the waiter and dried them.

  'There,' he said, 'all you need is a splash of vermouth and you could have a very dry vodkatini.' He was twenty-two. He had read about vodkatinis in the New Yorker.

  She did not ask him what he did. She detested people who did it to her.

  'Ask me in three years,' she'd say.

  'Why?'

  'Because in three years I'll have something interesting to tell you.'

  Even the two men who ran Ogilvy & Mather did not know their secretary, receptionist and switchboard operator held ambitions to be an advertising hot-shot. She probably knew more about the history of American advertising than they did. She owned a total of fifteen annuals from the New York Art Directors' Club and she knew who had written everyone of the Volkswagen ads since the first ones Bill Bembach had done himself. She devoured the American trade papers and knew all the gossip. If there had been anyone to tell she would have told them funny stories about Mary Wells and Jack Tinker but there was only her father, bug-eyed on pills, scattering his own verbal garbage behind him: 'ten out of ten, number one son, go for it Gloria.' She lived in a wreckers yard of works.

  'I'm in advertising,' Harry Joy offered. 'Harry Joy.'

  It was enough information for her to be able to place him exactly. He was only twenty-two and he was the Joy in Day, Kerlewis & Joy. He had been made a partner after only eight months when Mr Kerlewis died suddenly. She knew how much he was reputed to earn, what commercials he had written, and the names of three women he had been seen with regularly.

  She did not want to tell him she was a receptionist at Ogilvy & Mather. She did not wish to be ordinary. Later, later, she would be exceptional, but now when it was important she was a little Miss Nobody with nothing interesting to say. She looked at him in despair as if he might, at any instant, be snatched from her and she acted quickly, with the outrageous courage of the very shy.

  She stood up and put her gloves back on.

  'Where are you going?' He looked hurt.

  'I'm going to dinner,' she said. 'Want to come?'

  'O.K.,' he said as though he was asked out by women every night of the week. Her hands were bathed in nervous sweat and later that night when she kicked off her shoes they stank of all the hopes and anxieties that had never once showed on that smooth olive-skinned face which had so beguiled dear Harry Joy.

  On the way to dinner he decided, without consulting her, that he needed petrol.

  'No,' she said, 'not here:

  But it was too late. They were already parked on the fore-court and Billy McPhee, a stinking rag in his back pocket, was bounding out of the office, his worn red head low, his arms swinging, whistling some piece of nonsense he'd misheard on the radio, and Harry was saying to her: 'Why did you say that?'

  'Nothing,' she said. 'It doesn't matter.'

  She tried to be invisible.

  'Fill 'er up,' Harry said.

  'Oil, water, Captain's Daughter?' Billy said, peering into the car but Bettina turned the other way. 'Fix your windscreen?'

  She never forgot it. Eighteen years later it could still mike her moan out loud. How could she have betrayed him? How could she, heartless cruel nineteen-year-old, have refused to acknowledge that the man looking at her through the wind-screen was her father?

  More than her father. Her mother too, because her real mother had left Billy and Billy had not missed a beat – he just brought her up, right there on the forecourt. He changed her nappies beside the cash register. He parked her pram between the pumps. While the gallons clicked over he talked to her continually. 'You were born into this business,' he told her. 'It's in your blood. You are one hundred and twenty octane.' He had been young once, keen, self-starting, go-ahead, with plans: But somewhere all his energy and his dreams got out of control as he gabbled around the forecourt making plans to buy a block of flats, then two blocks of flats, and then three. But he didn't even own their own flat. He stank of sweat and speed and perished rubber and his pale blue eyes bugged out his unnaturally white skin.

  Bettina saw her father through the window. She looked right through him. Something, a spasm, a tic, wrenched Billy's mouth and then his eyes just clouded over and he finished wiping the window and filled up the tank.

  'Could you check the tyres?' Harry said.

  'Get fucked,' Billy McPhee told his future son-in-law. 'Give me the money and piss off before I punch your ugly head in.'

  Later when they knew each other neither of them ever got over the obstacle created by that night.

  Bettina McPhee hadn't expected to fall in love with anyone. She hadn't been able to imagine it and it had played no part in her plan. Later, perhaps, in America or somewhere else, but not here and now.

  But next thing she knew, she'd done it. Like that. Without even pausing to think. And then everything went out the window and she pursued her love with a reckless sort of enthusiasm and she suddenly didn't give a hoot about being a hot-shot or going to America because she was happy and her happiness seemed so perfect it needed nothing. She applied herself to marriage with wild enthusiasm, as if it might yield up treasures in exact proportion to the energy she plunged into it. She decided to find the town interesting. They bought an old stilted house in Palm Avenue and she became pregnant without even stopping to think if she wanted to be. She went along with the whole mad rush of it and, six months pregnant with David, she was still smashing out a central wall with a jemmy and a sledgehammer and ending her days with bloodied hands and plaster-covered hair.

  Billy McPhee's daughter, without a doubt.

  She did not abandon her interest in advertising; it was, after all, her husband's business. She read the American trade papers. She bought the new Art Directors' Annuals. She criticized Harry's work with a keen intelligence.

  She was shocked when she realized how complacent he was. 'It worked,' he said, defending a television commercial he'd written.

  'So it worked;' she said, 'so what. Was it great?'

  'Oh, come on, Bettina... '

  'Was it great?'

  'Alright,' he said, 'it wasn't great. But it makes us money.'

  'To hell with the money,' she said. 'I don't care about the money. All I care about is that you do witty, beautiful won-derful advertisements.'

  'You're right,' he said, and she tried to accept that he would never do great ads.

  She hadn't been quite so keen to become pregnant the sec-ond time. She was going to be a hot-shot. Each year she told herself that she was still young. And while she waited she became more American than the Americans. She supported their wars, saw their movies, bought their products, despised their enemies. Even their most trivial habits were adopted as articles of faith and there was always iced water on the table at Palm Avenue. She believed in the benevolence of their companies, the triumph of the astronauts, the law of the market-place and the twin threats of Communism and the second-rate, although not necessarily in that order.

  By the time Lucy was ten they were having arguments about whether Bettina could come into the business. In Harry's mind they had never been bitter arguments, and, in a superficial sense, he was right. But Bettina had been deeply offended by his refusal to consider it. It was a rejection more painful than any she had ever experienced and she could not forgive him for it.

  In Bettina's view, it was that rejection which had produced their present u
nhappiness. Yet, even now, in the midst of Harry' s madness, in the total ruin of their marriage, there. were days when they would find themselves, almost forgetfully, on the verge of having fun (although something would always go wrong, some irritation would creep in and everything would suddenly go sour and hatreds and resentments would come spilling out of her and lie in a nasty slippery mess along with the water from the sprouts and the spilt pieces of cabbage on the kitchen floor).

  'Who cleaned the shoes?'

  'Your idiot father.'

  Her daughter was the wild, untended variety of the same plant, loose like a dog, her dark hair curling in. masses, her movements still graceful but lackadaisical. She had her mother's almond-eyes but her olive skin was nearly black from the sun. She sat on the kitchen table and watched Bettina rubbing at the glass.

  'Have you been swimming again?' Bettina said, puffing a little.

  'Yes.'

  She worried about the size of her daughter'S shoulders. She turned and gave a crooked mascara look.

  'Don't worry, Mum, I'll marry a gorilla.'

  'You might have to,' she said drily. 'Have a shower.'

  'I can't. Daddy's cleaning out the bathroom.'

  'Oh fuck him,' screamed Bettina and ran up the stairs. She gave Harry credit for greater deviousness than he was capable of. She had heard him tell his methods for dealing with difficult clients and she now felt some subtle net was being drawn around her. Why was he polishing the bath in his sarong? Why were there clean shoes' sitting in a line on the back door step? He made her feel like a tart, an adultress, a drunk, a failure. He was humiliating himself in order to humiliate her.

  She found him in the bathroom and after she had hit him with the mop she asked him to forgive her. She held him then, and in spite of all her resolutions, all her determination, her ambitions, she felt the old stirrings of a familiar love.

  'You won't let me love you,' she said to the man she had decided to leave, who drove her crazy and sent her into wild displays of rage.

  She felt him tremble. She liked his body since he had been sick: it was thinner and harder, She even liked the big silky scar on his chest.

  'You won't let me get close.' She was damn well seducing him, in the bathroom, with her hand up his sarong. She bit his ear. 'Harry, Harry.' She felt him resist, and then, without a word, he just unknotted, and it was like the old days, the old times when they had stayed in bed on Saturday morning, days before the invention of Joel, and with one hand he was locking the door and with the other he was tearing off her dressing gown.

  'Betty, Betty,' he said, 'is it you?'

  In the mythology of the family the McPhees were dark, dis-contented, poetic, and the Joys were placid and rather ordin-ary. In this classification it was necessary to forget Harry's eccentric mother and his wandering father. It was equally important to forget Bettina's sad bug-eyed father who had died of an overdose of amphetamines and anger, howling at a customer who wanted a dollar's worth of petrol.

  'Dollar's worth,' screamed Billy McPhee, literally jumping up and down beside the pump, 'you expect me to give you a fucking dollar's worth.' And Bettina, paying her guilty last respects, imagined she could detect, amidst the sweet-petalled aromas of funeral flowers, the more familiar perfumes of her youth: oil, petrol, and perished rubber. This pale dead man was not a McPhee.

  David Joy was a McPhee, and was teased by his sister because of it: 'How's the master race?'

  'You,' Bettina told Lucy, flying in the face of all physical evidence, 'are a Joy.' And, as if to compensate for this mis-fortune, it was always said: 'Lucy is going to be happy.' She made it sound as if there was something dreadfully wrong with being happy in this particular way.

  Her mother's elitist attitudes irritated Lucy. 'What's the mat-ter with being ordinary?' she said. 'Why do you want to be special?'

  'I couldn't bear to be second-rate.'

  'I wouldn't mind being sixth-rate, or tenth-rate.'

  'Can't you do something about your appearance?'

  'My appearance is fine.' She bit an apple. She accepted herself so completely that she could not help but be beautiful, and ven if her bum was already too big and her ankles too thick, there was something about her that made people calmer and better just to be with her. Men would always be attracted to her as boys were now. She liked fucking them too. Given her appetites it is a wonder – when you consider the provincial nature of the town – that she was not derided for them.

  'You are complacent,' her mother said (had said, would say, repeatedly). 'You are going to be a social worker and you'll just get your degree and end up with a line of children and a house in the suburbs.'

  'I don't want to be a social worker.'

  'Don't you ever say that to your father.'

  'Yeah, yeah. I know.'

  'What do you want to do?'

  But you couldn't tell Bettina McPhee that you were going to overthrow the Americans.

  Harry set the table in the dining room. It was Georgian, made from English Ash and imported by a sea captain from a certain Percy Lewis Esq., who surely could not have imagined his table in this room with this monstrously exaggerated view of a mountain like a sugar loaf and a tree that flowered flame. Now, as Harry placed the silver on the table, the clouds slid in over the flat mangrove swamps to the south and, as if aware of the almost unbearable richness of the view, wrapped themselves around Sugar Loaf and covered the gleaming bay beneath.

  It was drippingly humid. Lucy and David and Bettina sat out on the wide verandah and fought against or relaxed into the heat, according perhaps to the amounts of McPhee or Joy apportioned them. Bettina, certainly, did not enjoy the heat and collapsed back into her stockman's chair with her eyes shut. David affected the quality he thought proper for a Sunday Luncheon and although he wore a cashmere sweater, looked not in the least hot. Lucy sat on the verandah rail in a white cheesecloth dress and looked at the bangalow palms, which, in the absence of any wind, mysteriously rustled their fish-bone fronds, as if talking to each other.

  Today was to be a real family lunch, a re-enactment of some tradition they imagined they had always shared. It had been Lucy's idea; she had guessed, not incorrectly, at the healing power of the ritual.

  Harry drifted out on to the verandah with some more Veuve Cliquot and arranged himself in a large cane chair.

  'Ah,' he said, and sipped his champagne.

  Like a dog who keeps sneaking on to a sofa it is forbidden, it was the nature of Harry Joy that he would always seek out comfort. So here we have him two weeks after his vow to be Good, to fire his largest client, to save his colleague from the tortures of Hell. The client is not fired. The tortures of his colleague, if anything, have increased: now he loses sleep, tosses and turns in unemployed nightmares, and wanders around a house in which neither his wife nor his Pascal can provide him with any comfort. And as for Goodness, it seems to have degenerated into something as silly as setting the table for a Sunday Lunch.

  And Harry, meanwhile, can lie back on the verandah of his charming house at Palm Avenue and sip his Veuve Cliquot and wait for the rain to come and try to persuade himself that he may, after all, have been crazy.

  Lucy went to sit beside her mother who held her hand contentedly. The lunch might just work, if Betty didn't get too drunk, if Harry didn't start taking notes again.

  'What's the first course?' Harry said.

  'Escrivée Amoureuse.'

  'Ah,' he said.

  The rain began to fall, very gently at first, making loud slapping noises on the banana leaves, where it collected in tiny dams which dipped and broke and then reformed. The poinciana, like so many feathery hands held palm upwards, let the rain brush carelessly through its fingers.

  The Veuve Cliquot was old enough to have assumed a golden colour, and Harry was rot unappreciative of its beauty, nor was he ignorant of its cost, nor the contribution Krappe Chemicals made towards its purchase.

  He had reread his notebooks and found them a little extreme, a l
ittle frenzied, not to say unbalanced. And all their evidence, he thought, was insufficient to justify this terrible, risky strategy of Goodness which he viewed, just now, sitting before this gentle curtain of rain, in a little the same way as he might have thought of a slightly embarrassing sexual indiscretion.

  But he is not quite ready to deny his notebooks. Even now, as he yawns, stretches, and points his sandalled feet, he .has promised himself One Last Test.

  The bar wasn't quite right, but it would do. It was the best bar she knew but in no way equalled the bars she would have liked to sit in. The bars she would have liked to sit in had a chrome rail parallel to the smooth leather bar top. They had elegant art deco mirrors reflecting beautiful people carelessly dressed, and those little lamps with figurines by Lalique, each one valued at something like three thousand dollars.

  But here, at least, they did put pistachios on the bar instead of peanuts and they made the Tequila Sunrises from real orange juice and it was the best bar in this town and as long as nobody told her it was a chic and elegant bar (thus forcing her to disagree violently with their provincial judgement) Bettina was very happy there. She didn't mind that Joel was late. She wasn't even mildly irritated. She looked at the bottles on the shelf, felt the shiny dark envelop her, and wondered (raising her eyes to the mirror) whether she mightn't just pick up someone. She looked, she thought, interesting. She was satisfied with her sleek dark hair which now, thanks to Edouard, came in two sleek sweeping pincers beneath the high cheek bones of her rounded face. Her large mouth (Revlon Crimson Flush No. 7) was very red. She did not look nice, or easy, but she did look interesting. She could have been anywhere (Budapest 1923, Blakes Hotel London 1975).

  When she had finally gone through the agonies of leaving Harry, when she had her own business, she would go to Blakes Hotel in London and sit in the bar there.

  She sat at one end of the bar and watched the door with a wonderful sense of expectation as if, at any moment, the most beautiful man might walk through the door, three days' growth on his handsome face, a loose linen jacket thrown over his shoulders, a dark face, sensuous and violent, but an intelligent forehead.