by
Martin Amis
View all notes
Money
Money
by
Martin Amis
by
Martin Amis
Money
by
Martin Amis
by
Martin Amis
Out on the street the black Autocrat was waiting inexorably. The chauffeur stood ready – a different chauffeur, but a fellow member of the zooty, moustachioed, chauffeuring caste. Fielding waved a hand at him and took my arm for a turn around the block. No bodyguard this time. The second guy was a frill, an extra, and even Fielding economized sometimes, as all moneymen do. Yet the driver was wearing his piece: I saw the thickness in his armpit, like a superfat wallet. ‘Who’s out to get you, pal?’ I asked Fielding as we walked along. ‘Poor people,’ he said with a shrug. So I asked the second question – why the limo? He just looked at me drily. I know why, I think. The hug and glaze they give you is worth the street hate. Maybe it’s even part of the deal, the bluntness, the thrilling brutality of money. We turned, and talked a little more, and then Fielding climbed inside, falling slowly into the seat.
Just then, Shadow bobbed out on to the terrace. He made straight for me and started sniffing greedily at my dock. Now this was all very well, but hardly the most welcome comment on my personal hygiene. I raised an arm – in warning, no more – and with a crawling wriggle Shadow had rolled on to his back, his head averted, his legs crooked in supplication and fear. I knew then that the dog had once feared somebody very like myself, somebody big, tense and white. I knelt and patted his hot belly. ‘Sniff all you want,’ I said. ‘I won’t have you fearing me. I just won’t stand for it.’ As I straightened up I saw that Martina was watching from the doorway with curious eyes.
this is weirdly sweet
[...] I had to pick him up each day and ride downtown with him, an eighty-block journey at nine in the morning, during which Lorne talked all the time. I soon discovered that you could not do this with a hangover. It wasn’t possible. I had several shots at it, and got more and more certain that it just couldn’t be done.
‘Are you all right now?’ she asked as we settled. ‘You look shattered.’
‘No I’m fine,’ I said. But I wasn’t.
I was shattered. I couldn’t get the fucking cummerbund off. Jesus, was that cummerbund ever a bad idea. Under the attendant’s mirthful sneer I had skipped and cursed and twisted. In the end I merely tautened the noose around the molten melon in my bowels. Martina called from beyond and pausing only to wipe away my tears I blundered back through the door.
You won’t believe this. It’s the damnedest thing. Suddenly, it seems, half the girls in New York want to get in my pants – yes, my pants, the winded Y-fronts with the slack elastic. Is this success? Is this money? Is this promotion, the light shed by Martina Twain? Loafing around at the Blithedale, I am accosted by little crackers in the commissary and the games room. They come right up to me, packed tight in heatwave wear, and suggest pressing get-togethers at their place or mine. I sit in a bar drinking lite beer and marshalling my confusions – and a big bim will climb up next to me, steadying herself with a hand on my thigh. ‘Buy me a drink,’ she’ll tell me. ‘I’m hot.’ The other evening, I swear, as I walked up Forty-Third Street in the dusk, a New York woman stood spread-legged in my path and dropped a handkerchief – like so – as I loomed by. There are salacious notes waiting for me in the lobby of the Ashbery. There are salacious women waiting for me in the lobby of the Ashbery. What do you want? I say. ‘Can’t we discuss this in your room? I’d really like to discuss this in your room.’ I fend them off, full of fear and failure. Drink, deep drink, has never looked so sweet. But I get by on wine and Serafim. I look for clues in all this sex bloat and beriberi. And I sometimes think: I’m it. I’m the clue.
We went to bed. We went to bed in that grownup way – you know, as if it were just the next thing. No mood-qualifiers or tone-deepenings, no goatish grunts or frisky yelps and giggles, no props, brandy, brothel gear, thongs, thumbscrews, third parties. She stripped swiftly. Her pants are pretty talented, too, but you hardly ever get a decent look at them. On her long brown legs, the form of the inner thighs endearingly curved like the join of a pincer (the hips broad-banked, the back deep but unsturdy, raisined, rich), Martina strode to the bathroom. Then her return, full and frontal, the flesh showing the first interesting looseness, the first prints of time, of death, making you sure that if you were ever lucky enough to – you would certainly have been with a woman. That was a woman, no mistaking her. I said,
A pretty adult situation, no, wouldn’t you think, with Selina now tightening the belt of her sheer negligée (and gazing down disclaimingly – even she won’t forgive me), and Martina fixed in the frame of the doorway, in a suit of light-grey worsted, black shoes together (and what did she see? Brute hard-on, gut, the frightened face) – and me, the decked joke, flummoxed, scuppered, and waving his arms? I’ve had some naked travel but never quite as naked as this, not even in the Boomerang off Sunset Boulevard, sprawling under the pimp’s bat.
A pretty adult situation, and yet Martina looked like a child. She looked like a child who has suffered more reverses in a single day than ever before in living memory, and is now poised between refusal and acceptance of the fact that life might be significantly worse than she thought, that life was unkinder in its essence, and no one had given her fair warning.
‘You’ll notice we’re going into a wide turn at this time. It looks like I’m out of a job too, so . . . Ladies and gentlemen, I have to tell you that this is Airtrak’s last flight. They’ve pulled the plug on the whole operation. We’ll be re-encountering that turbulence on the way back to JFK. Please fasten seatbelts and, uh, extinguish all smoking materials. Thank you.’
I got back to my seat as we came lancing in over the bay, just in time to see the stretched arcs of silver and slack loops of gold, the forms and patterns that streets don’t know they make.
i really feel the melancholy here
‘In your different ways.’ The waitresses in this dark place had been obliged to squeeze themselves into wench outfits – bibs, stockings, all that again. Market research had no doubt established that this was the most common male fetish. They also said enjoy your meal and have a nice day and you’re welcome the whole time. People think that’s a natural American foible, a natural winsomeness. Don’t they understand? It’s just company policy. They’re trained to say it. They’re programmed. It’s all money. God I can’t wait to leave this moneyworld.
1.
Craft is a set of expectations.
2.
Expectations are not universal; they are standardized. It is like what we say about wine or espresso: we acquire “taste.” With each story we read, we draw on and contribute to our knowledge of what a story is or should be. This is true of cultural standards as fundamental as whether to read from left to right or right to left, just as it is true of more complicated context such as how to appreciate a sentence like “She was absolutely sure she hated him,” which relies on our expectation that stating a person’s certainty casts doubt on that certainty as well as our expectation that fictional hatred often turns into attraction or love.
Our appreciation then relies on but also reinforces our expectations.