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Authors: Ned Beauman
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was no satisfactory answer, because if they didn’t, then their beauty was being exploited and despoiled, which was a tragedy, and if they did – well, they couldn’t. They just couldn’t. For eyes as dizzying as Adele’s to exist in the same body as a banal urge to get stoked over a desk by an unwashed playwright was a paradox as imponderable as the indivisibility of the Trinity.
Loeser himself, meanwhile, hadn’t had sex for a very long time. He had worked hard to erase all mental records of the night of the corset factory, but if he assumed, in the interests of supplying his own biography with at least a minimally sympathetic protagonist, that he hadn’t laid a finger on that fifteen-year-old prostitute, then the last time was with Marlene Schibelsky, and that was nearly two years ago. When he’d said to Achleitner that he might never manage it ever again, he hadn’t believed his own words, but now he retrospectively detected in them a vibration of plausibility. So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.
His dispiriting conversation with Adele had turned on this very subject – sexual abundance, that is, not its opposite. The previous night he’d arrived at a party at Zinnemann’s flat in Hochbegraben to discover that Zinnemann, always a domineering host, had invented a new game.
‘We’re at that age now where everyone’s slept with everyone else,’ he had explained to his assembled guests. ‘There might have been royal dynasties of Persia that were more incestuous but I think apart from that our social circle is just about the limit. The phrase “permutational exhaustion” wouldn’t be out of place. Now, some people say it’s tiresome and we should all make new friends. I think it should be celebrated.’ And he started handing out bundles of coloured string. ‘Look around the room. If you see somebody you’ve gone to bed with, then you tie yourselves together at the wrists with one of the ten-foot pieces of string. And if you see somebody you’ve gone to bed with repeatedly on some sort of joyless petit bourgeois pseudo-marital basis – if you see someone you’ve “gone out with”, in other words – then you tie yourselves together at the wrists with one of the five-foot pieces of string. The result will be no more awkward in practice than any other party – just rather more tangible. And after tonight, every other party you ever go to will seem carefree in comparison.’
There was a baffled pause. Then, to Loeser’s disbelief, everyone started to do as they were told. They must have realised it would be a good story the following day. Before long, Zinnemann’s drawing room was a great rainbow spider’s web. The point of the colours was to make it easier to trace a string from its beginning to its end, and indeed several liaisons were revealed that had not previously been public. Every guest was dragged this way and that by their past loves, held in quivering strummable tension by their old conquests, so thoroughly entangled in a universal net of erstwhile romance that they would have to duck under somebody else’s heartbreak just to cross the room for a drink. There was such a thing as symbolism that was too bespoke, thought Loeser – but the real problem was that Marlene wasn’t here, and nor, as it happened, were any of his other four, so he had no string around his wrists and he looked like a eunuch. He couldn’t tolerate that, even if it was virtually true. So he crawled out of the room on his hands and knees and got a cab over to the Fraunhofens’ in Schlingesdorf.
Herr Fraunhofen was a machine-gun manufacturer whose wife Lotte thought she was cultured, so every month she invited writers and actors and artists and their auxiliaries to her house for an evening salon. (It was one of those houses where even the tassels on the tassels had tassels on their tassels, which might have sounded
Loeser himself, meanwhile, hadn’t had sex for a very long time. He had worked hard to erase all mental records of the night of the corset factory, but if he assumed, in the interests of supplying his own biography with at least a minimally sympathetic protagonist, that he hadn’t laid a finger on that fifteen-year-old prostitute, then the last time was with Marlene Schibelsky, and that was nearly two years ago. When he’d said to Achleitner that he might never manage it ever again, he hadn’t believed his own words, but now he retrospectively detected in them a vibration of plausibility. So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.
His dispiriting conversation with Adele had turned on this very subject – sexual abundance, that is, not its opposite. The previous night he’d arrived at a party at Zinnemann’s flat in Hochbegraben to discover that Zinnemann, always a domineering host, had invented a new game.
‘We’re at that age now where everyone’s slept with everyone else,’ he had explained to his assembled guests. ‘There might have been royal dynasties of Persia that were more incestuous but I think apart from that our social circle is just about the limit. The phrase “permutational exhaustion” wouldn’t be out of place. Now, some people say it’s tiresome and we should all make new friends. I think it should be celebrated.’ And he started handing out bundles of coloured string. ‘Look around the room. If you see somebody you’ve gone to bed with, then you tie yourselves together at the wrists with one of the ten-foot pieces of string. And if you see somebody you’ve gone to bed with repeatedly on some sort of joyless petit bourgeois pseudo-marital basis – if you see someone you’ve “gone out with”, in other words – then you tie yourselves together at the wrists with one of the five-foot pieces of string. The result will be no more awkward in practice than any other party – just rather more tangible. And after tonight, every other party you ever go to will seem carefree in comparison.’
There was a baffled pause. Then, to Loeser’s disbelief, everyone started to do as they were told. They must have realised it would be a good story the following day. Before long, Zinnemann’s drawing room was a great rainbow spider’s web. The point of the colours was to make it easier to trace a string from its beginning to its end, and indeed several liaisons were revealed that had not previously been public. Every guest was dragged this way and that by their past loves, held in quivering strummable tension by their old conquests, so thoroughly entangled in a universal net of erstwhile romance that they would have to duck under somebody else’s heartbreak just to cross the room for a drink. There was such a thing as symbolism that was too bespoke, thought Loeser – but the real problem was that Marlene wasn’t here, and nor, as it happened, were any of his other four, so he had no string around his wrists and he looked like a eunuch. He couldn’t tolerate that, even if it was virtually true. So he crawled out of the room on his hands and knees and got a cab over to the Fraunhofens’ in Schlingesdorf.
Herr Fraunhofen was a machine-gun manufacturer whose wife Lotte thought she was cultured, so every month she invited writers and actors and artists and their auxiliaries to her house for an evening salon. (It was one of those houses where even the tassels on the tassels had tassels on their tassels, which might have sounded
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