THE INFORMATION

signing skills-soon to be deployed in greater earnest at the Gwyn Barry stand out on the mezzanine. Abruptly and with such marked address that the publicity boy interposed himself between them, a burly woman in jeans and tank top stepped up to Gwyn and said, 'Nothing personal, but I think your books are shit.' With corporate calm and erectness the publicity boy steered Gwyn past this bejeaned embarrassment, this tank-topped glitch. And she called out after them, 'Not everyone thinks you're wonderful!' Gwyn hesitated; he hesitated, half turning, half smiling, as if grateful for this salutary reminder-that America still contained one or two holdouts. The woman turned, and communicated with her companion, in sign language. She didn't pinch her nose with her fingers or anything, but it was clear that she was telling her deaf friend that Gwyn's books were shit. With pride and solidarity, Richard had already intuited who this must be: Shanana Ormolu Davis, of Bold Agenda. He watched Shanana shoulder her way out of there, content to admire her from afar.

The haze above South Beach was evaporating under its share of the sun's heat. Under that fraction of energy which our terrestrial star-a star on the main sequence but heavier than ninety percent of its peers, and just entering early middle age-radiated with such moronic munificence, not only earthward: in every other direction too. Every second,640,000 tons of mass were lost in the solar reactor and were multiplied, in (inefficient) obedience to the Einsteinian equation, by the speed of light squared: 186,282 X 186,282. Richard took off his jacket-a taxing task. He had never given a reading before. But he had spoken in public often enough. If you defined public freely enough. Dollis Hill tube, then 198B. Follow the walkway. You will be met near the ticket machines. What Price Modern Poetry? All welc. The invitations came in every other year. He always accepted. He could see himself, one day, being stretchered out of his deathbed to go and discuss the death of the novel. Would the novel have any last words? With a harsh groan he leaned forward and started unlacing his shoes.

Over the ocean was where Gina was. Now, when he thought about his wife, he was sorry to find that he always pictured her in flagrante delicto, in blazing crime, and he had to stand there with a towel over his wrist, like a waiter, while she hauled herself out from under . . . He didn't know. But he had strong suspicions. In a few minutes Richard would go back to the bar at the hotel and write postcards-to Marius and Marco, to Anstice, to Keith Horridge. And he would write a letter to Gina. Containing no news. A letter of love. That song he'd sung, those mornings, in the face of February:

What you want: Baby I got. What you need: D'you know I got it…

And then the second verse, rendered at the very limit of female rapture and practicality:

I ain't gonna do you no wrong While you're gone. I ain't gonna do you no wrong Because I don't wanna .. .

He refastened his clothes and gathered his things and went back up the beach.

'Nothing. No, not nothing. Tell Lawrence good-bye. Tell him goodbye, good- bye.'

Gina told Richard good-bye, that time. Good-bye, good-bye. And he kept coming back. He didn't get the lunch or the early-evening drink.

He certainly didn't get the glazed and heavy-blooded hour in his room at the Savoy. But when he rode the train back to London he had her home address in his waistcoat pocket; and after that, sexually, the when was in doubt but not the what. The why? Because in skilled and determined hands the pen and paper are near equivalents of the ravisher's doctored drink, the rapist's spit-steeped balaclava. Like the fists of the martial artist, written words, hereabouts, can be classed as weapons of deadly force, usable only in the ring or on the mat-for display. If men knew about women and letters, women and notes. If they believed it. Thus the veteran husband, before setting off for work, scribbles something like GASMAN SAYS HELL CALL LATER or WERE OUT OF BUTTER AGAIN, and that evening returns to find his wife in a bikini and high heels and with a chilled cocktail glass in either hand; after dinner (his favorite dish), she softens the lights still further and engages the tape of swoony music and puts another log on the fire and settles him there in the marmalade light on the rug with the cushions and the creme de menthe. And retires from the room. So he can have a hand job. Wait. That comes later. Where was he?

Here. Richard Tull, leaning over a bottle of Valpolicella at the kitchen table of his flat in Shepherd's Bush, late at night, with the telephone's cries smothered under a pillow (Dominique-Louise), writing to Gina Young. The letters were confetti, like apple blossom in the accelerator of the April streets. By every post they came. He was sending her formulas and borrowings-truisms, the disposables of love. Her replies were like thank-you notes to an excitable and ultimately goonish godfather. He barely glanced at them. Every other weekend, persistently, long after D. H. Lawrence had been supplanted by local pottery and crafts, by antique typewriters, by imperial loot, he journeyed up there, his facial flesh juddering to the jolts of strip light and rail track, his cheeks urban pale but for the dabs of color where Dominique-Louise had scratched or elbowed him; slowly he would raise his chin in stern romantic pride. Half hours in the High Street coffee bars, strolls through the municipal gardens in rain too light to fall. Feed the ducks. Her hand, when at last he took it, was elegantly nervous and long-fingered. He said so. He said more. Back in London he made an important correction to the final proof of Dreams Don't Mean Anything, on the dedication page, where he put a line through Dominique-Louise and went for something simpler. In the sodden pastoral of Victoria Gardens he leaned against her under the dripping birch. She sadly kissed him. Her lips were lean and there were raindrops on her hair. He knew it was in the bag when, one Saturday night, round the rear of the Station Hotel, he was lugubriously beaten upby Lawrence, the outgoing boyfriend, who was accompanied by an older brother and a cousin-who were not needed. Richard wasn't much good at fighting. He was good at writing. Book reviews. Love letters. Richard, in his bow tie, went down and stayed down. His body more bent than curled, one open hand slackly resting on his knee. Even when Lawrence's boot started coming in, and Richard resignedly sat there on the concrete, against the wall, giving a quiet yelp or a loud hiccup every time the leather met his ribs, he didn't feel picked on or hard done by. He took it for granted that Lawrence would do what Lawrence would do, with his body. So Lawrence nutted and loafed, then kneed, then kicked (the head-butt was his first move: pain began at this instant with their brows crushed together, their noses interwedged, their lips a kiss away). He swore: 'Cunt!' He also wept. Richard had taken Gina back to his room at the Savoy that afternoon for the first time. Inconclusively. But he went down very quickly, in his bow tie and his paisley waistcoat, and just sat there on the wet stone. He knew Lawrence couldn't be that bad. Lawrence must be okay, or must have become okay, after nine years with Gina.

Two and a half months after Gina moved down to London (she was surprisingly well organized and unterrified, and without his seeming to do much about it she soon had a tube-map and a duplicate of his door key and a diary/address book and a job and-no, she insisted-a studio flat nice and near to his place with white curtains and a white sofa that at midnight she transformed into an aromatic bed infested with embroidered pillows and cuddly animals where he too was cuddled and canoodled and regularly rendered speechless by her ultrametropolitan diligence and ingenuity on top of all the primitive ardor), Richard left her and went back to Dominique-Louise, to his bulimic vamp, who screamed at him all night long and never got the curse. He had a whole sequence of girlfriends, at that time, who never got the curse. He didn't have anything against the curse, so far as he knew. It was just that none of his girlfriends ever seemed to get it. He drew no conclusions; but it remained the case that several years had gone by without him glimpsing a tampon or a drop of blood that wasn't his own. Until Gina, whom he left anyway. She didn't cry.

Richard hoped and even expected that she would go back-to Nottingham, and to Lawrence. The day he left her he noticed, as he undressed that night, under Dominique-Louise's unadmiring gaze, that all vestiges of Lawrence's beating had at last been absorbed by his body: the tenacious bruises on his hip bone, the scrape on his forearm, the eventful spectrum of yellows and purples that had looped his right eye,to which, that night in Nottingham, Gina had herself held the lump of raw meat. This coincidence seemed to Richard to demarcate the affair as an episode of reckless nostalgic: class, blood, the provinces, D. H. Lawrence, uncomplicated love. Five nights later he went back to Gina, or at least he went back to her flat. The same right eye had been adventitiously reblackened by Dominique- Louise. Once again Gina flew to the fridge. The meat she returned with came out of polyethylthene packet. This