Fascination: Stories Read online

  Dogs are wonderful animals and it’s a source of endless regret to me that I’ve never been able to have one as a pet – because of my allergies. Who was it who said, ‘The more I see of men the more I come to value dogs’? Matthew Arnold, Nietszche? Somebody. Certainly I place dogs higher in my estimation than my ex-husbands. Well, my first and second exes, definitely, not necessarily my soon-to-be third ex.

  ‘Exudations’ was the name of Georg’s next show. We were still married, just, and I agreed to participate again. If ‘Stunk’ made me famous, ‘Exudations’ made me notorious. Georg’s plan was to remain indoors in our apartment for a year and to collect and preserve everything his body exuded. Everything, yes – I don’t need to go into every detail – for instance, he strained his shaving water through muslin to recover the bristles. These ‘exudations’, bottled and boxed, hermetically sealed and carefully labelled, would then form the basis of a touring exhibition, the idea being that they provided an idiosyncratic but perfect historical record of his body over one year. I managed to last three weeks before I fell seriously ill with some gastro-bacteriological infection. Georg refused to leave the flat – his work was still in progress, he argued, and moreover he was in perfect health – and eventually the police had to break the doors down (neighbours were complaining also). Disinfection and fumigation followed, and ‘Exudations’ was no more than a brief footnote in the history of contemporary German art. I sued Georg for my medical bills (I was uninsured and he refused any contribution, claiming I had betrayed him) and, of course, our marriage didn’t survive. Georg went to live in a shack in Ibiza. I haven’t seen him since. I now realize that Georg was an accident waiting to happen, a faulty missile they forgot to test-fire.

  ‘Fire one!’ Cornelius exclaims each time he has his orgasm. Cornelius is my secret boyfriend – my U-boat captain. I used to think this was funny but it’s beginning to irritate me (Otto knows nothing about Cornelius). In fact fire warmed and illuminated my early life – or, should I say, fires. Our home was in Eastbourne, on England’s south coast. My father’s business was the fitting and installation of gas and electric fires. I once asked him why he liked Eastbourne so.

  ‘I hate it,’ he said.

  ‘But the people are nice.’

  ‘I hate them.’

  When he became ill I blamed it on this lifelong hatred festering in him. He should have moved away, especially after he and my mother divorced. It was the place’s fault, this overcrowded south-east section of our small island. The place’s fault, England’s.

  Glands, my father later claimed, were the root cause of his lassitude and weight loss. He was in no pain but it was clear something was seriously, profoundly wrong with him. He started taking all manner of self-prescribed vitamin and health food combinations to battle his ‘gland’ problem. Ginseng and cod-liver oil. Nettle tea and royal jelly. Huge amounts of vitamin E and strange seaweed stews. He munched sunflower seeds all day. When I told Cornelius about my father’s habits he laughed. When I asked him why he said they were a perfect example of the humorous tragedy of existence.

  I took the urn with my father’s ashes across the Channel to France and scattered them on the battlefields of the Somme. I thought he would appreciate being abroad, away from Eastbourne. I wandered about the meadows – it was summer – taking a pinch of ash from time to time and allowing it to fall from my fingers, carried away by the breeze. The air was full of the scent of freshly cut hay.

  Hay fever suggests summer. Mowers in the thickening meadows and the pollens taking to the air as the grasses fall to the advancing scythe. Not in my case: for me hay fever is a spring phenomenon. Now I know why T. S. Eliot said ‘April is the cruellest month’ – he too must have suffered from early-season pollen allergies. But now my allergies are with me all year long. I open a newspaper and my nose begins to run; a woman passes me and her perfume causes my throat to contract. I cough and cough. (Why do these women douse themselves in so much scent? Why this love of chemical odours?) At night I lie in bed and my hip-bones ache as if I have arthritis. I’m not alone, I know, we’re all becoming slowly poisoned, over-sensitized. We are all, in our own ways, ill.

  Illness casts a bright light, the rest of life retreats into the shadows beyond its refulgent glare. When my father was ill, no matter where I was, or what I was doing, I seemed to think about him a dozen times an hour. Eventually, there was nothing for it, and I moved back to Eastbourne to a bed and breakfast in the same street. He never went to hospital, district nurses used to visit him throughout the day, while I provided him with increasingly deliquescent then entirely liquid meals. Soon all he wanted was beef consommé. ‘Ah,’ he would say, as I bought him the steaming bowl, ‘soupe du jour.’

  Journal-keeping has sustained me since I was twelve. Over the last few years, however, I’ve refined the process. When I wake I write the first thing down that occurs to me and before I go to bed I write down the last thing on my mind. You should try it: it is astonishingly meaningful. Those two sentences define and plot your life in the most random yet illuminating way. I look back to 14 April 1999. Morning: ‘Gianluca is a pure unreconstructed bastard.’ Night: ‘I drank champagne all day today – not a bite to eat. I’ve never felt better.’ 22 November 1996. Morning: ‘Wintry sunlight makes my room look dirty’. Night: ‘Edith Wharton is good but boring, must resist the temptation to skip.’

  Kipling, Rudyard Kipling, wrote a book called Stalky and Co. In it there is a character called M’Turk, which I suppose is a form of McTurk (though the apostrophe is something I have never seen before). It is the only evidence I’ve been able to find of a McTurk in literature.

  My own name ‘Beulah’ comes out of a book, a book that my mother was reading before I was born. The Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, by William Alexander Carruthers, set in the antebellum Deep South. My mother was on a Deep South craze at the time, she loved everything about the romanticized vision of the place. I suppose it took her away from Eastbourne and my father’s shop of fire. ‘The Land of Beulah,’ she used to sigh, and thus I was named. But Beulah McTurk is all wrong. It suggests to me a plump and heavy woman, yet I am tall and very, very slim. Consequently, I was happy to become Beulah Berlin, to be named after a city. It suggests something steely, tougher, as if I surround myself with a protective forcefield, a non-stick coat of shellac, say, or teflon.

  London: too weird and wired, these days. New York: too busy. San Francisco: too healthy. Paris: too self-conscious. All these cities I have known well, or as well as any one person can know a city. There are times in your life, though, when relaxation is what you crave and I had to leave London, felt the panicked urge to flee. So where else would I go but Amsterdam? It drew me as a candle flame draws a moth.

  Mother disapproved of my name change. She disapproved of my life as an artist, of Georg, my first husband and, I suspect, Otto, my third. I never told her about my second. But I have a feeling she would like Cornelius, my secret boyfriend: he is handsome, selfish and raffish, like a beau in a Carruthers novel.

  Otto, my third husband, is English despite his Germanic christian name. He’s called Otto Carlyle and he repairs computers. He declines to use common terms of endearment like ‘darling’ and ‘sweetheart’ and calls me instead things like ‘my pragmatic monad’, or ‘my ambrosial liquor’. I rise to the challenge. When he leaves on his trips or when we speak on the phone we sign off like this:

  Otto: ‘Goodbye, my fish and chips.’

  Me: ‘Goodbye, bird with the coppery, keen claws.’

  Otto: ‘All love to the slender gymnast.’

  Me: ‘See you soon, windmill of my mind.’

  Otto is very tall and after my father’s death I wanted, for some vague reason, to be with a tall man. He is six feet four, I am five feet nine.

  Nineteen sixty-nine. The year of my birth. 27 March 1969. That week, the first Concorde was undergoing its test flights. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were doing their lie-in for peace at the Amsterdam Hilton. I am, just,
a child of the sixties, and it seems to me only apt that I should now be back in Amsterdam. Full circle, after a fashion. A near-perfect O.

  Otto has just called from Dakar. Whenever he’s abroad and he calls I place a photograph of him in front of me. It was taken at a beach café in Antibes when we were staying with my then gallerist, Clive Count (the ‘o’ is silent, I used to say later, after he dropped me). Otto is wearing surfing trunks and a baggy t-shirt, his hair is wet and sticks up in spikes – he looks like an impossibly lanky waif. I’ve come to hate a disembodied voice, I hate talking on the telephone, but it’s never so bad when you’re looking at a photo.

  Photography is the art form I practise these days – I took it up seriously after I stopped touring with ‘The Transparent Wardrobe’, in fact. Then I taught film studies at a private university in San Francisco for two years before I began to photograph people’s feet.

  Of all our body parts the foot is the one we treat the most harshly. No other part of our body – faces included – shows with such brutal candour our individual ageing process. We stuff our feet into unsuitable shoes, we walk for miles, we barely minister to them, occasionally cutting toenails, occasionally painting said toenails. But the calluses, corns, chilblains, veruccae and steady deformations alter them year on year in the most visible way. I have twenty-five subjects (friends and acquaintances, young and old) and every six months I take a photograph of their faces and feet, juxtaposed. Already two have asked to drop out; they find it too distressing, they say, as if the ticking clock of their own mortality is manifest there at the end of their legs, hidden in their shoes. Perhaps you saw my exhibition in Ghent, or Basle, or the one in East Gallery East in London? Some people’s feet look like vegetarian growths, others like eroded landscapes. The exhibitions were great successes. Every morning before the doors opened there would be a substantial queue.

  Qwertyuiop, that’s what I’m going to call my child, male or female, whenever I have him or her. He or she can then make any name they want out of that combination of letters. Trey. Opi. Yute. Power. I don’t care. I’m not sure, however, if I want Otto to be the father. I told him it was all over between us but he has followed me to Amsterdam and, somehow, is living in this flat I have rented on the Kaisersgracht. He says that Schiphol airport is the perfect hub for his business, and I suppose it’s true. (The computers he fixes are huge and usually abroad: airports, hospitals, government departments, he was even hired by the Pentagon for two months.) In his spare time he’s writing a novel called Garden Airplane Trap (after the painting by Max Ernst. I think Ernst has the best titles in modern art). Otto’s often away doing his mysterious job and, even though that’s when I see Cornelius, I find I miss him. Then, when he returns, I resent him. I want his presence and also his absence. When he’s not at work he spends most of his time writing his novel and reading.

  Reading is my great solace. I read a lot, but some years ago I decided, faced by the millions of books I hadn’t read, to make my reading systematic. So every year I chose a theme and only read books that fall into the specific category. For example in 1995 I only read books whose titles were women’s names. I read Emma, Madame Bovary, Thérèse Raquin, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Clarissa, and some others I can’t remember. In 1998 I moved on to animals. I read Kangaroo, Birdy, The Sandpiper, The White Monkey, The Pope‘s Rhinoceros, Travels with a Donkey. This year I’m on cities: Goodbye to Berlin, London Fields, L.A. Confidential, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Is Paris Burning?, The Viceroy of Ouidah. Next year it’ll be abstract nouns, I have Persuasion and Chaos lined up ready to go on January 1st. More and more I find I like this way of giving your random, haphazard progress through time some sort of hidden organizing factor, known only to you, only understood by you, a personal encryption. It looks normal – somebody reading a book – but underneath you alone know the significance – your life’s private palimpsest.

  Sestina, villanelle, sonnet. My favourite poetic forms in order of preference. It must be because I like the imposed shape: the rules, the order, the poetic matrix. I recently read a good poem about tins washed up on a beach and last weekend went out to the dunes at Kennemerduinen and collected a dozen or so of these drift-tins. I imagine a show – the sand-scoured, sun-bleached, wave-washed, storm-tossed tins and beside them the pristine, primary-coloured supermarket version. It could be very moving. The life of tins; their slow death by water. I like to smoke a cigarette when I read poetry, I don’t know why – I don’t smoke a lot – but, with poetry, I just like to.

  Tobacco is a strange drug, when you think about it. Alcohol seems more natural – we all have to drink after all – and my favourite drink is champagne. But drawing smoke into your lungs is not an instinctive process in any way. I like the smell of wood smoke, but if I see a bonfire I don’t rush over to it and start inhaling the fumes. My father took up smoking in the last month of his life as an act of simple defiance, he said, a rebuke to his draining vitality. We would smoke together all evening as I read him poetry. I understand his position better now, see things from his point of view.

  U-turns define life’s progress, it seems to me, better than the traditional image of forking paths. How often in our life can its significant events be described as a U-turn? Falling out of love, for example, is a major emotional U-turn, rather than a bifurcation on life’s highway. This sojourn in Amsterdam is a U-turn. I had to get out of London after my father died. Coming here is not a step forward but rather an urge to turn back down life’s road. Otto is a bit of a U-turn too. I fell out of love, we were going to split, and now we’re back together. Two U-turns, there. Now I’m turning away from him again towards Cornelius – it’s confusing. Cornelius hoards food – I found thirty tins of sliced peaches in a cupboard. He has four kilos of butter in his fridge. A warning sign? Maybe, to use a film image, my life is a series of jump-cuts. The continuity is illusory, imprecise, we just jump-cut from one sequence to another. Very nouvelle vague.

  Vague ambitions are to be encouraged. Life should be full of half-thought-out plans for what you might like to do but haven’t got the real desire, or the energy or the time or just enough money. I vaguely want to go to Russia. I vaguely want to learn Spanish. I vaguely want to read the novels of Ronald Firbank. I vaguely want to tattoo myself somewhere risqué… Cornelius has a tattoo (a twirly fleur-de-lys) on his coccyx. I cherish these vague ambitions because they seem to presuppose another existence – another life for myself – in which they might actually come about. The more vague ambitions you have the more potential lives you could lead. I explained all this once at great length to a psychiatrist (just after Georg and I had divorced) who was keen to put me on Valium. I don’t think he thought I was very well.

  Weltverbesserungswahn. How I love these German words. That’s what my psychiatrist (he was German) said was wrong with me, what I suffered from (along with various other mental maladies). It must have been the foetid, daily trauma of the ‘Exudations’ period, then my hospitalization, then Georg leaving me that made me marry this man, this maniac. On the rebound in a singularly disastrous way. What was I thinking of? I left him after two weeks and have never mentioned his name again, and never will. The single legacy of our relationship is this diagnosis, Weltverbesserungswahn: the conviction that the world could be better. My psychiatrist husband said it was a delusion, not a conviction, and that my refusal to acknowledge it as a delusion was proof that I was deluded. You see why I had to go. The only thing that was satisfactory during my two weeks’ marriage to this man was the sex.

  Xanadu is the name of the bar I work in three nights a week in Jordaan. Cornelius is the manager. He has a small apartment at the top of the building where we make love when Otto is away. He’s just bought a thousand tins of sardines. I asked him if he liked sardines and he said no, but they were at a bargain price and you could never tell when your tastes might change. I promised myself I’d stop seeing him as soon as my book is ready (I think my tin idea is a book, now, not a show) – but I think he
’s in love with me, dammit. What’s wrong with these men? I met a publisher last week here in Amsterdam, and he said almost immediately that, all things being equal (what can he mean? Curious expression), he could publish my book next year.

  Years go by. I see myself as an old lady living in an apartment block by the sea (not Eastbourne, not Ibiza). I keep the curtains drawn day and night, all year round. Qwertyuiop visits regularly. When he/she arrives he/she takes his/her shoes and socks off and I photograph his/her feet. He’s/she’s a good boy/girl, Qwert (is he/she Cornelius’s?), and he/she shows concern.

  ‘What’s the weather like?’ I ask.

  ‘Open the curtains, Mum,’ he/she says. ‘See for yourself.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s more interesting if you tell me.’

  And so he/she does his/her best: sunny, scudding clouds, threat of rain later in the day. In my dark apartment I prefer to use my imagination. I like this fantasy of my future, but what will the reality be? Some old bag living off cigarettes and booze.

  Zoos consoled me after my father died. And the zoo in Amsterdam is one of the world’s best, so I’m told. I used to watch the chimps but they depressed me. Too human: sitting around showing off their hard-ons, hurling shit at each other. And the pacing cats were terrifying – to-and-fro, to-and-fro – all that charged, energetic resentment at their captivity. So I looked for animals that seemed content with their zoo life and more and more I found I was watching the rhinos. I came to love their massiveness, their heft and their effortless charisma. In my worst moments (when Cornelius begged me to leave Otto and live with him; when Otto asked me to come on his next trip – to California) I longed to be a rhino with my rhino armour. And so I would calm myself, watching them, imagining I was a rhino in a zoo, my day an ordered round of eating, defecating and sleeping. In a zoo, but free somehow. Free from the world and its noisy demands. Free, finally, from angst.