He hadn't bought a magazine like this since his teens when his sex life was like that, private, him, paper, unrealistic dreams. He remembered it as a sad time, a desperate time, when love - what he actually wanted - was translated by some butcher and came out, "fuck". He remembered, it came out fuck. It came out fuck-fuck-fuck, get some of this babe, how d'you like that, gerrin there, fuck-fuck, yeah, fuck-fuck-fuck. He remembered, what he actually wanted, (fuck), was love.
He was a writer and he had met a man in London, an ordinary man, with ears, a nose, eyes, a wife. The man wrote for a dirty magazine, not a porn mag, just a dirty one, with tits and plenty of pussy, full frontal stuff, lots of it, but, and he was assured this over scallops and Chablis, "not the sick gynae stuff, Jack, no anal, no gaping cunts, no animals, no chair-legs, no two up stuff or machines."
" And our readers, Jack, young blokes; they read crime-stories like yours, they read thrillers, but they're red-blooded, Jack, they like pussy out front, just as it is and plenty of it. Nothing wrong with that, Jack, is there?"
He didn't know. He used his mobile and rang his publisher.
"Stand? They want to do you? Jesus, Jack that's a good outlet, yeah."
He disconnected. "OK," he said to the man.
They sent him some copies, in a brown bag, six of them, shiny, STAND sprawled across the top in giant yellow, giant white letters, women on all fours, women lying in fur, women with soft red, soft red and shiny lips. He glanced at them, laughed to his wife, giggled nervously and said, "Sheesh, if your mother stumbled on them, she'd have a fit." And his wife looked inside and said, "But they're ugly, I mean they're ugly," and he looked, properly this time, and he looked at more and said, "They weren't that ugly in my day."
He was happily married. He was going to put them in the garbage but gave
them to a guy in the pub. "They're a bit rough," he said, "most of them
dogs."
When he came back, his wife said, "Gone?" and he said, "Are what gone?" and
she said, "The books," and he said "Oh yeah, couldn't wait to get rid of
them, gave them to some bloke."
That night, when they lay together, his wife was restless, then she turned on the light.
"What?" he said.
"Did you really buy things like that?" she said.
"No," he said. "They weren't so crude, the women were better looking."
"Are you sure?" his wife said.
"I'm sure," he said.
His wife turned off the light.
The article was a good one. They'd misquoted him, but they'd got the essence of his writing pretty much right. They had his mug-shot, a good shot of his latest books, and a few choice quotes about his fellow authors to stir the pot a bit. Of course they'd angled everything towards sex, and hyped up his girl detective's love-life, but that was par for the course. He had the coverage, the exposure, and what were a few misquotes against that?
His wife was less happy with the four small pictures scattered through the article, a bleach-blonde with a hard, sad face, red-lips and a sugared, tidied pudenda, almost dressed in one shot, naked and ready for it doggy-fashion by the last.
"And that," his wife said, dropping the magazine, "that is their version of Kathy Ocean. A waste of time."
He said he'd throw it out. All he kept was the article, the rough, sad girl, his TV cop, and on the back, surprising him, a girl-woman noticeably pretty, her teeth neat, intelligent eyes, soft, a nice figure. He put it away somewhere.
Once, he'd had a happy marriage. Looking back, he wasn't even sure where and when it had become sad. But his wife dressed now in their bathroom and came out pristine, her sex beneath office greys, her flat and worked-out belly skirted, fluffless, immaculate. And she left him daily, worked all hours, flew to exotic cities, typed memos on a lap-top in front of their mumbling TV.
But he was a famous author now and people read his books. Kathy Ocean had been televisioned, filmed, merchandised, discarded, and with the money, the success, he had moved on, to write more delicately, to write more finely, to write less ugly words, stories less full-frontal, not so pandering.
His interviews now were for Vanity Fair, New Yorker, and Paris Review. All three had published his pronouncements, two of them his stories. Now his agent placed his short fiction in the most prestigious places; in Harper's and Atlantic, and now, a commission, Diary of a Female Man , in Playboy.
They had sent him galleys - it was a fine story - and he was up there now with Kerouac, Marquez, Nabokov and Updike. He was only asked once - was Playboy the right place to publish - and he had answered quotably, talking of the literate arts, that artists needed their platforms
His copies came on a Wednesday when the house was cold. His wife was away again, doing some important thing, turning the Dominican Republic's face to the twenty-first century for all he knew, but away nevertheless.
He had taken the Playboy upstairs - he read when he bathed - and the story was fine and he knew it, and the magazine was glossy and the articles a cut above, and the women - he looked - were, well, women, and he thought of pale pink rubber toys and he remembered, once upon a time, how he had wanted to find love but had called it something else, and he found he had an erection and he thought about masturbating because he was sad.
But then as he moved, a tear of bath-water, a single droplet of unsullied water, struck his book. One side was his story, the other a naked woman, and the tear was in the corner of her eye and it rolled perhaps an inch, and the woman, almost a girl, looked out, and he thought of another girl, surprisingly pretty, neat teeth, intelligent eyes, soft.