Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(28)

“What?”

He sighed again. “You’re more than this. You’re better than this.” How could he put it? You’re not just a piece of cheap tail? No, too hurtful. “He’s left out your, your … your mind.”

“It’s you who keeps on about mens sana in corpore sano,” she said. “Sane mind in a sound body, both together. I know what you’re thinking: that this is just about the sex. But that’s the point! I represent – I mean, she, the Dark Lady, she represents a healthy, down-to-earth rejection of the false, wispy, sentimental … It’s like D. H. Lawrence, that’s what he says. That’s what Gav loves about me!” And on she went.

“So, in Venus veritas?” said Tin.

“What?”

Oh, Jorrie, he thought. You don’t understand. Men like that get tired of you once they’ve had you. You’re in for a fall. Martial, VII: 76: It’s only pleasure, it isn’t love.

He was right about the fall. It was fast, and it was hard. Jorrie didn’t go into the details – she was too stunned – but what he pieced together at the time was that there was a live-in girlfriend, and she’d walked in on Jorrie and the Earthy Poet while they were disporting themselves on the sacrosanct domestic mattress.

“I shouldn’t have laughed,” said Jorrie. “That was rude. But it was such a farce! And she looked so shocked! It must have seemed really mean to her, me laughing. I just couldn’t help it.”

The girlfriend, whose name was Constance (“How prissy!” Jorrie snorted) and who was the embodiment of that very same wispiness and sentimentality so despised by the Poetaster – this Constance had gone white as a sheet, even whiter than she already was, and had said something about the rent money. Then she’d turned and walked out. Not even stomped: scuttled, like a mouse. Which just went to show how wispy she was. Jorrie herself would have done some hair-pulling and slapping at the very least, she claimed.

She had felt the departure of Constance ought to be a cause for celebration – the forces of vitality and life and the truths of the flesh had triumphed over those of abstractness and stagnation – but that had not been the outcome. No sooner had the Half-Rhymer been barred from the moon-maiden’s chamber than he began caterwauling to get back in: he yowled for his vaporous Truelove like an infant deprived of its nipple.

Jorrie was less than tactful about this excess of whimpering and regret – the words *-whipped and limp prick were thrown about by her with perhaps too much abandon – so her expulsion was inevitable. According to Mr. Poetaster, the imbroglio was suddenly all her fault. She’d tempted him. She’d seduced him. She was the viper in the orchard.

There was something to that, Tin supposed; Jorrie had been the huntress, not the hunted. But still, it takes two to tango. The Minor Minnesinger could have said no.

Short form, Jorrie had told him to shut up about Constance, and they’d had a fight about it, and Jorrie had been flung down onto the sewer grating of life like a used condom. No one had ever treated her like that before! His own heart wrenched with pity, Tin had tried to distract her – a movie, a drink, not that he could afford many of either – but she was not to be placated. There were no hysterics, no visible tears, but moping set in, followed by an ill-concealed, smouldering rage.

Would she step over the edge? Would she confront the poet in public, scream, hit? She was angry enough for that. A cruel joke had been played on her, since her Musehood, once a source of pride and joy, had become a torment: the Dark Lady non-sonnets were now enshrined in Gavin’s first thin collection, Heavy Moonlight, and they sneered at Jorrie from its pages, mockingly, reproachfully.

Worse, these poems accumulated gravitas as Gavin clambered up the ladder of acclaim, collecting the first in what was to be a string of minor but nonetheless career-enhancing prizes. Those early poems had been augmented by others, different in tenor: the lover recognized the mere fleshliness, indeed the grossness and fickleness of the Dark Lady, and returned to the pursuit of his pallidly glowing Truelove. But that ice-eyed paragon had declined to forgive the heartbroken lover, despite his overcrafted and bathos-heavy and subsequently published pleas.

These later poems did not reflect well on Jorrie. She’d had to look up the word trull in Tin’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. It was wounding.



Jorrie went on a retaliatory stud-gathering riff, plucking lovers like daisies from every wayside ditch and parking lot, then casting them carelessly aside. Not that such behaviour ever has any effect on the one who’s spurned you, as Tin knows from his own experience: if it’s gone as far as that, they don’t care how much you debase yourself to get back at them. You could f*ck a headless goat and it would make no earthly difference.

But then the wheels of the seasons turned, and tender-fingered Dawn chalked up three hundred and sixty-two pink morning entrances, and then another year’s worth of them, and another; and the moon of desire rose and set and rose again, and so on and so forth; and the Poet of the Sprightly Prick receded into the dim and misty distance. Or so Tin hoped, for Jorrie’s sake.

Though it seems he has not receded. All you have to do is kick the bucket and you’re right back in the memory spotlight, thinks Tin. He hopes the lingering shade of Gavin Putnam will prove a friendly one, supposing it is indeed lingering.



Now he says, “Right, the Dark Lady sonnets. I remember them. Absinthe makes the tart grow fonder, but verse is cheaper: it certainly hooked you. You used to stagger into my barbershop enclave reeking of gutter sex, you stank like a week-old whitefish. You were cross-eyed over that dickhead the whole summer. I never could see it, myself.”