THE INFORMATION

'No. Only Gwyn,' said Belladonna, staring straight ahead, as if conducting a conversation with Richard's trousers. Then she tipped her head back. 'You think I'm all mouth, don't you,' she said, and let it half-smile and pout and quiver. 'I'm not. I'm not. What's your favorite? I want to know.'

'Why?'

'So we can make Gwyn jealous.'

And Richard was gone.

Gal Aplanalp didn't call.

'Gal Aplanalp is on the phone to me two hours a day,' said Gwyn. 'Foreign rights. She does it all herself. Alexander used to just give them away. But Gal gets decent bread even from the East Europeans. Gal's great. So much vivacity. So much exuberance. So much love of life.'

It seemed to Richard that the maggot that lived in Gwyn's brain had got itself stuck in a corner or a U-bend between the two frontal hemispheres, causing its host to go on standing there (perhaps indefinitely) making faces of chaste and twinkly approval. The two men were in the outer bar of the Warlock, leaning on the quiz machine, or the Knowledge, as it was called hereabouts, even by the cab drivers, for whom the Knowledge had meant crouching for a year on a kid-sized moped with a clipboard up on the handlebars. Gwyn and Richard were not here to play tennis. They were here to play snooker (the Portobello Health and Fitness Center was closed for remodernization). This meant they had to wait for a table. At length, Gwyn's maggot freed its wiggling back leg. His face cleared, and then frowned, watchfully. He was wearing a new tweed jacket; the material was yellowish and tufty, like a lightly chewed corncob.

'Thanks for the first chapter of the new one,' said Richard. 'Mouthwatering. Is it all like that, more or less?'

'More or less. If it ain't broke, don't fix it-that's what I always say. Proofs will be ready next month. You'll get one.'

'I can't wait.'

A gum-chewing teenage girl in a hot-pink catsuit walked past, heading for the stairs and the aerobics room. They watched her go.

'Do you wonder,' said Gwyn, 'do you ever wonder, as you get older, about changing sexuality?'

'What the next batch is like?'

'Because that's progressing at the same rate as everything else. It's all speeded up. They're different now.'

'Probably.'

'But different in what way? My impression is … and this is only from the letters I get, mind .. . my impression is that they're more pornographic. More specialized.'

'What letters do you get?'

'There's usually a photograph. And a broad hint at a certain- speciality.?

Richard realized that he had always found Gwyn erotically inscrutable. Who cared, when Gwyn was with Gilda? Not for the first time he wondered if-thanks to an impossibly humiliating complication-he was queer for Gwyn in some way. He thought about it. Richard didn't want to kiss Gwyn. It was surely inconceivable that Gwyn wanted to kiss him. Anyway, it wasn't going to happen, was it. And Richard didn't really care why he was doing what he was doing.

'Demi's young.'

'Not that young.'

And Richard felt power slowly absent itself from him as Gwyn said,

'She didn't really grow up in the sexual swim. Not sheltered, exactly. Between you and me, she's been around. Not that she remembers that much about it. This was in her cocaine phase. You know. Upper-class girls all have a cocaine phase. When they're born their dads put their names down for the smart dry out clinics. She's even been-she's even had several lovers of West Indian origin.'

'You astonish me.'

'I'm proud to say it. Good for her! But she's hardly your thoroughly modern miss. Now take fellatio. My impression was, years ago, that some girls did it and some didn't. Or they were like Gilda, and did it on your birthday. Well I bet they all do it now. It's not whether they do it. It's how they do it.'

It was like a game when you lost the rhythm of dominance, and you never moved freely but always in reply. Richard said, 'There's this girl who wants to meet you.'

'Attractive?'

'Extraordinary mouth. She wants to ask you a question.'

'What's my favorite color?'

'No. What's your favorite.'

Richard then found himself giving Gwyn a gavel-to-gavel account of his experience with Belladonna. As he did so he thought: what was I playing at in there? Belladonna was barely seventeen, and out of her mind. Common sense demanded that he should have made her take her clothes off, at least, and do a little dance. Ever since that crepuscular encounter Richard had been adding to the large number of outrageous novelties that were, he discovered (now he came to think about it), his favorite. There was one favorite in particular: the kind of sexual intercourse that involved not an exchange of bodily fluids so much as a full transfer.

'Well,' said Gwyn. 'Send her over.'

'What is your favorite??

'No, no. I just want to fill out the picture. Why knock yourself out for a hamburger when your wife serves Chateaubriand every night.'

Yes, thought Richard, who had heard this line before: but a hamburger is sometimes just what you fancy. And do you really want chateaubriand every night?

'I would never-I mean, what I have with my lady is just…' Gwyn fell silent. The maggot kicked in for a while, as he shook his head with his eyes closed and then nodded his head with his eyes open. 'We were making love this afternoon. No. It must have been last night. No. It was yesterday afternoon. Or this morning. Anyway. That's not important. We were making love and I was kidding her about one of her West Indian lovers. And she looked up at me and said, 'Darling. Believe-' Ah. Here she is!'

He broke off and greeted his wife as if-as if what? As if this was 1945, and he hadn't seen her since 1939. When that was over Demi regained her balance and stood there, with a change of clothes in her shopping bag, smiling weakly at Richard, who moved forward to kiss her, in his turn.

Gwyn said, 'When are you two going to get together? For your in-depth chat about yours truly. It's the least I can do to fix you two up. In exchange for the 'sexy young fan' that Richard is bringing over for me. Come on, Demi-get up those stairs. We don't want any extra inches, do we love.'

When Demi had gone on up for her class Gwyn spent the last few minutes filling Richard in on his European deals for Amelior Regained. While doing this he used several slang synonyms for the denomination of one thousand. Richard had noticed that as soon as any novelist clawed his way past three figures he immediately started trying out the word grand. He himself would never do this. He would never do this, even if he got the chance. It was a disgraceful capitulation to the here and now-to the secular, to the mortal. Why would you want to sound like a tycoon or a gangster? Whatever you were going to get, you weren't going to get it in your time. That was the gamble. That was the shot… Anyway, and more locally, Richard was feeling so poor these days that he switched off his windscreen wipers every time he drove under a bridge.

'So I said, 'Take the fifteen large from the Portuguese but subtract the dime on the audio deal. What's a K?' I said it,' said Gwyn, steadying himself, 'I said it just to get Gal out of my hair.'

During the last couple of minutes of their wait, the maggot got itself stuck again, or ravenously burst into a whole new chamber, condemning Gwyn, in any case, to a series of imperious scowls and glares …