Whoring Around
A Novella
John Bryson
Published by John N. Bryson
First published as eBook 2013
© John N. Bryson
Whoring Around
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
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ISBN: 978-1-922219-44-2 (ePub)
Digital Distribution: Ebook Alchemy
Prologue
More and more we lunched at his tennis club. He had recently become its Honorary Treasurer. I remember an afternoon, with the washed blues and faint yellows of early winter, when we ate on the terrace. The stonework was damp where the sun had not touched it. The other tables were empty, so it was early in the week.
The grounds were set in a natural bowl. Although the city centre must have been less than a mile away, we looked over lawn courts, rose walks and a gazebo as displaced and untimely as a country club from the thirties. A groundsman began to tie together a new court with white strings and wooden pegs. On a slope below the graveled driveway, a gardener lifted dripping squares of turf to clear a collapsed drain which was, Humphrey told me, the single most disturbing item of unplanned expenditure facing the current year.
One court was in use. The two women were not playing well, and the sound of the ball was dissonant and irregular, but they laughed with the fun of it and the white pleating in their short skirts fluttered in the cold sunlight. The player at the closer end was younger than I had first noticed, a girl perhaps not yet eighteen. Her splendid hair swept about as she hit the ball.
The texture of the game suddenly roughened.
The older woman struck more firmly and shot often to the limit of the girl’s reach as though she had become aware we were watching. Her feet were light and her arm swung with the loaded memory of a once commanding player. Her hairstyle held fast in the cumulus fashion of that season, but the alpine tan on her arms and throat began to glisten and her breath misted at each sudden effort.
The girl fell back to the baseline. She mis-hit into the ground and high into the air. Her lucky shots were pointless and confused. Finally, she held up her hand and play stopped. As they walked together to the dressing-rooms the girl chattered incessantly and her laughter was careful.
I was glad that nasty little display had ended, but Humphrey must have been admiring the older woman throughout. He was smiling. Quality tells, he said.
I do not remember what pieces of his stories Humphrey told me then. He always told them readily and I had heard many before. But I know that when he began I thought his laughter, too, was careful.
During his first pauses we watched the groundsman stalk the periphery of his new court, pushing a paint-roller shaped like a broom, so he seemed to be sweeping away an opaque layer to expose the bright and indelible design he knew was already there.
*
Blowing It
Humphrey stood on the footpath outside the bar, pressed against the cardinal and gold panels by the troubled volumes of Chinese, and leaning away from them as if he were falling off some tireless production line of human figures. An overhead neon sign flashed between English and Chinese to the rhythm of a quick heartbeat and shadowed his jawline as though he were clenching his teeth.
The entrance became a stairwell. Humphrey brushed the front of his suit with his hands. The bottom stairs darkened and the passageway opened into a larger room before he noticed the change.
He could see one bar only. It was circular and Humphrey could make out six, perhaps eight drinkers around it. He could not see a bar-girl until he was close enough to slide onto a stool.
She was naked, but for a scarf printed with a red hibiscus bloom in her lap, and she lay on a couch. Her body lit the drinkers’ faces like a flame; it was the only source of light. She lifted an arm and the faces flared and flickered. The bar held her in a crucible and from its edges a canopy of cigarette smoke drifted to a lamp set into the ceiling.
Her head rolled to face him, the flat cheeks glittering like gilded gift paper, the cut-out eyes wide and empty. She smelled of camphorwood incense. She swung her legs to the floor and sat upright, as light as a marionette. But tall, Humphrey thought, for a Chinese. She was oiled. Humphrey pulled his hands from the bar as if he had been irreverent. The girl leaned forward; her breasts were barely fuller than a boy’s. But she was not so young, maybe, you can’t tell with Asians. The virgins, especially, all look young. He took the printed drink list from her. Thank you, he began, but she had dropped from his sight and he could hear the changing of cassettes in a console under the bar. He could not read the list easily. Poor light rather than too much wine at dinner, I haven’t had that much.
He heard laughter and smoke wavered like a veil. Humphrey looked at the other drinkers. None was Chinese. An American, chunky as an amateur wrestler and wearing a university T-shirt, held the hand of one Englishwoman and talked to another. A merchant seaman chanted a Glasgow football dirge in a slow rumble, chin hard against his chest as if fighting wind, so drunk he could not lift his full glass from the bar. A Japanese sat opposite in business shirt and tie but without a suit-coat, sharpening his cigarette on the ashtray like the tip of a pencil. Humphrey picked up a match folder and opened it. A pair of cardboard breasts flopped out, Boob’s Bar Kowloon. He put them back.
Thank you, he said, I’ll have a scotch, and again when she had poured, thank you, and as she slid the glass toward him on a coaster shaped like a pair of heavy watermelons, thank you very much, he said. She gave not the slightest sign of interest.
Humphrey felt the effects of the whisky quickly. Its vapours filled his chest with a heated perfume and his eyes moistened. He was not a heavy drinker by the standards he knew, not practised, not by his father’s measure. Nor by his wife’s. Mimi said it often: some men drink, she put it, easily. He preferred to drink at home, or at the tennis club where he was then known as a good fourth, and he feared the house parties given by Mimi’s friends largely because he could not break into the circular conversations of the husbands, through their bumping guffaws, Mimi, I can’t burrow down between their legs and heave up into the topic like a half-blind mole, it’s not me. He sat with the women, do you mind, until their smiles drifted away in the diffident swirls of his interjections and she had to take him home.
Every night he worked in the study. You won’t get the job, Mim told him. Humphrey did not answer her. He kept working. She told him again when she got home from the theatre. She was not surprised to find him still working. The paper work made five neat piles on the desk. Before they were married, she now told even her lunchtime friends, she had mistaken his diligence for ambition. Not a chance, she told him.
But he did. Humphrey set up the structure of the Fossil Extracts Conference in less than two months. He was appointed to do it, you were wrong Mimi, he said without bile for his stomach had been scoured by twenty years of their resentments, I have been assigned until further notice. His employer was one of ten member companies to the agreement, to the Conference, as they called it. Each of those companies converted fossil deposits into a convenient form for processing into plastics or fuels or packaging materials and sold the product to their own subsidiaries or to each other. The plants and animals that had laid down their lives to bubble into gastric slime had lived three hundred million years before, dying mindlessly in geomantic layers for heat and pressure to harden for the benefit of posterity.