Grand Union

by Zadie Smith

  It was very late. We launched into a cruel assessment of previously pretty young men we’d once known, and then back again to age in general, to May and December romances, and whether either of us still found people in their early twenties attractive. V felt that absolutely yes, he did, although it was sometimes very hard to listen to their conversations, while I had to admit that my apparently typically feminine preoccupation with time made the young more or less invisible to me now, they were young enough to be my children and I could see them in no other light. Something about this fact depressed me: with age, and despite myself, even my desires had become civilized and appropriate. To cheer me, V described an older French artist of his acquaintance. She was eighty years old, traveled all over the world to museums showing her work, and always took with her a little case on wheels, filled with lingerie. She prided herself on regular one-night stands with men in the art world, many of whom were in their twenties. I told V that was the Frenchest thing I ever heard. He agreed and we raised a glass to this octogenarian adventuress. As we counted out our euros, we discussed another old artist, a man this time, who had recently lost his gallery because of a series of exploitative sexual relationships with younger men. What interested me in V’s account of the matter was that “everyone” had known that the man in question was a sentimental and submissive bottom, who had a habit of becoming sloppily emotionally attached to his young lovers, or victims—depending on your point of view—sending them flowers, crying down the phone, et cetera. That the “perpetrator” happened in this case always to be the penetrated, never the penetrator, was an aspect of the case that played no part whatsoever in the newspaper accounts, for whom this detail was of no interest, either because it made no difference whatsoever to his guilt or innocence, or perhaps because it was structurally invisible. But so much of life is structurally invisible, I noted, and has no way of fitting into the external accounts of our lives. Our lives are so different on the inside. We can never express their full particularity and strangeness in public, their inner chaos and complexity. There are always so many things it proves impossible to say! Yes, said V, but at the same time you can’t concede everything to the public account, to what people see or think they understand. In a completely different arena, for example, here in Paris I am Chinese. The public part of me, that is my face, speaks for me before I can, and so in the public accounting, Chinese is what I am. I cannot walk the streets with a sandwich board explaining my birth, my nationhood, my culture, my history, the history of my country and so on. That would be exhausting, impractical. But neither do I concede to their external definition. You have to be careful how much of yourself you render to Caesar. Of course, I know what I am and given the time and space I can and will express the facts fully. Although in truth I don’t bother very often. It may be a question of sensibility. I am always very amused, for example, by the sort of person who gets infuriated if you mispronounce their name! Everywhere I go in France people ask me if it’s a long A in my name or a short one. They ask very anxiously, as if they know many people for whom this kind of thing matters enormously and they don’t want to make the same mistake with me. I suppose, continued V, living peacefully in a society means understanding that the things others care about might mean nothing to you and vice versa. Do you know what I mean?

  In lieu of an answer I told him a story about a party I once attended, at which a man called me by another woman’s name all night, mistaking me for her, maybe because she did the same sort of work as me. I didn’t correct him, though we had met many times before. I tried to find it in myself to be insulted, to feel as others feel, to care as they would care, but instead I felt a strange lightness, like I’d given myself the slip for the evening. V listened in silence and then took his linen jacket, which he had not needed all night, off the back of his chair. I think that’s why I keep changing cities, he said, to keep on giving myself the slip.

  On the walk back to my hotel, I wanted to tell one more story, about something that had happened on my train journey, earlier that evening, en route to Paris, but there was no easy way to introduce it, as it did not in any obvious way connect with anything else we had discussed, seeming to come from another reality. Yet I couldn’t shake the sense that it was significant. As we retraced our steps through the city, gossiping and joking, in the back of my mind I kept seeking some way unobtrusively to turn to my story, without seeming like an egomaniac who did nothing but tell stories about herself, but before I could find a solution we arrived at the door of my hotel. We said our good-byes, hugging each other tightly, and I ran up three flights of stairs, drunk and happy, grateful to have such a friend to whom one can say anything, without fear. But as I had this thought I remembered: I had not told him everything. I had not told him about the man with Tourette’s on the train from Strasbourg. He had been around my age, though his hair was sparse and gray, and he wore a light brown mac over trousers and shoes of the same shade, as if an attempt had been made to shroud him in camouflage. Pour le Roi! the man said, every twenty seconds or so. For the King! Sometimes he repeated it at much briefer intervals, hardly pausing between repetitions of the phrase. He could not help but say it: the only choice before him was modulation. He could be very loud or not so loud. The woman next to him, in her sixties, whom I presumed to be his mother, alternated between enjoining him to speak less loudly and answering each repetition gently, without any sign of irritation: Oui, oui . . . Oui, mon amour . . . Pour le Roi. For a moment, my eyes met with hers: she and her charge were sitting right behind me. I had no doubt, looking at her, that she had been listening to those three words for many years, maybe decades. Perhaps mixed with other words at some earlier point, but perhaps not. The look she gave me I find hard to describe. It expressed no pain, shame or anxiety. It made no application for forbearance, pity or acceptance. It was neither defiant nor angry. It was not even especially tired. The face was completely neutral. This is it, her face said. This is my life.

  The carriage was full. Realizing that the man would not stop, could not stop, each passenger—within a few moments of settling in their seats—reached for their earbuds, and thus entered a private world. I did the same. What might have been a torturous trip twenty years ago was now no trouble to anyone. There was a palpable sense of collective gratitude to technology: this evening it would allow us to be our best selves. We would not look over our shoulders, sigh, or privately pray for this benighted family to get off the train. We would smile and take our seats with a sympathetic look, signifying that we had no objection to sharing our space with the mentally afflicted. Where others surely listened to music or podcasts or movies or audiobooks, I chose “brown noise,” a warm static, turned up high, which allowed me to read a novel in peace, entirely uninterrupted. The time passed quickly. Before I knew it, I had arrived in Paris, eager to meet my friend, and taking off my earphones, was surprised to re-enter a reality I’d forgotten about, one that had persisted while I visited another. In this reality, time could not be sidestepped, avoided or obliterated. It could only be endured. For the man still had no choice but to say Pour le Roi! To repeat it every few moments, sometimes screaming it, sometimes not, while the woman at his side—who could so easily have stayed silent—offered each and every time her quiet, earnest response: Yes, yes . . . Yes, my love . . . For the King. Treating the statement not as something involuntary, essentially empty—like the yawp of an animal—but as a human utterance, which still carried some form of meaning, however small.

  NOW MORE THAN EVER

  There is an urge to be good. To be seen to be good. To be seen. Also to be. Badness, invisibility, things as they are in reality as opposed to things as they seem, death itself—these are out of fashion. This is basically what I told Mary. I said, Mary, all these things I just mentioned are not really done anymore, and also, while we’re on the subject, that name of yours is not going to fly, nobody’s called Mary these days, it’s painful for me even to say your name—actually, could you get t
he hell out of here?

  Mary left. Scout came by—a great improvement. Scout is so involved and active. She is on all platforms, and rarely becomes aware of anything much later than, say, the three-hundredth person. By way of comparison, the earliest I’ve ever been aware of anything was that time I was the ten million two hundred and sixth person to see that thing. There’s evidently a considerable gulf between Scout and me. But that’s why I am always so appreciative of her coming by and giving me news. Now, according to Scout, the news was (is?) that the past is now also the present. I invited her to pull up a stool at my mid-century-modern breakfast bar and unpack that a little for me. The light that afternoon was beautiful—from my place on the eleventh floor I could see all the way to the Hudson—and it filled me with optimism and an eagerness to be schooled. But Scout was cautious. Believing me incapable of either transhistorical thought or platform mastery, she placed a New York Sports Club tote bag on the counter and pulled out two puppets—homemade, insultingly basic. The first was a recognizably female human, although she had long arms, terribly long, at least three times the length of her body, and no nose. The other was a kind of triangular spindle with a smudgy face painted on both sides, trailing thread from its corners, which I could have sworn I’d seen someplace before. Scout’s demonstration was quite detailed—I don’t want to get into it all here—but the essence of it was: consistency. You’ve got to reach far, far back, she explained, into the past (hence the arms), and you’ve got to make sure that when you reach back thusly you still understand everything back there in the exact manner in which you understand things presently. For if it should turn out that you don’t—that is, if, after some digging, someone finds evidence that present-you is fatally out of step with past-you—well, then, you’ll simply have to find some way to remake the connection, and you’ve got to make it seamless. Not double-faced or double-sided (like this triangle-spindle guy) but seamless, because otherwise you are (and were) in all kinds of trouble. Seamless. Seamless. At which point we both got hungry and paused to order a couple of poké bowls.

  “Here’s a question for you re: consistency,” I said, putting my elbows on the counter. “I know this woman who’s a big fancy CEO, her name is Natalia Lefkowitz. She’s totally squared the past with the present, is admired by all, and is not only seen to be good but actually does good in the world for many people, providing clean water and equitable job creation and maternity leave and plenty of other inarguable benefits for women here, there and everywhere. But yesterday she got this message.”

  I showed Scout the message, which I had received on my phone from someone called Ben Trainor, apparently an ex-boyfriend of Natalia, whose son—I mean, Natalia’s son—was in my Kafka-and-Kierkegaard class a few years ago. According to this Ben Trainor, Natalia had liked to do things, in the very recent past, that were not consistent with her existence in the present. Stuff like sodomizing Ben Trainor while pretending to be his mother. Also calling him Daddy while he pretended to be holding her as a sex slave in a crawl space underneath her own East Hampton kitchen. At the time, they had both agreed to these oppositional kinks, but when they broke up it occurred to Ben that, although there was no contradiction between his own life and his intimate life (Ben worked as the general manager of a leather bar down on Rivington), there was surely a big old gap between how Natalia morally lorded it around in her professional existence and the weird shit she was into behind closed doors. In Ben’s opinion, these dark desires “went way beyond kink into problematic,” which was the reason he was texting everybody in Natalia’s address book to let them know.

  “Scout,” I asked. “Do you think she should be afraid?”

  “Do I think she should be afraid? That’s your question?”

  “That’s my question.”

  Scout packed up her puppets and left, accusing me of flippancy and misjudging the current climate. We never even got to the poké. Sometimes I think I don’t ask the right questions.

  * * *

  • • •

  In my apartment building, as in many throughout the city, we have this new routine. We stand at our windows, all of us, from the second floor to the seventeenth, and hold aloft large signs with black arrows on them. The arrows point to other apartments. In our case, to the apartments of our colleagues at the university. The only abstainers are the few remaining Marxists (mainly in the history department, though we have a few in English and sociology, too) who like to argue that the whole process is fundamentally Stalinist. Which is like calling a child Mary. Who even uses that kind of language these days? Bendelstein, Eastman, and Waite are pointing at me. (A purely defensive move; I have done nothing wrong and am no one, and they are only trying to distract attention from themselves.) I am pointing at Eastman, in his dank little studio with the paisley carpet. Yes, since my illuminating discussion with Scout I have decided to join the majority of my colleagues in the philosophy department and point at Eastman, because who doesn’t know about Eastman? How Eastman still has a job we really don’t know. Not only does he not believe the past is the present, but he has gone further and argued that the present, in the future, will be just as crazy-looking to us, in the present, as the past is, presently, to us right now! For Eastman, surely, it’s only a matter of time.

  I made a date with young Scout to go to the Forum. I felt we’d taken a wrong turn and I wanted to get our friendship back on track. I don’t like this friction between the generations. We went to see A Place in the Sun, starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. And Shelley Winters. I don’t do that just to be cute: I genuinely feel bad for Shelley Winters. And if you’ve ever seen that movie, with its carnival of physical beauty—into which poor, plain Shelley Winters has been placed as counterbalance—you’ll know that eight-point type is a fair and accurate representation of the situation. The antihero of this picture, by strange coincidence, is called Eastman. George Eastman. He’s played by Clift, who always makes me want to type the word “febrile.” It’s as if he’s so beautiful it’s making him ill. (When I mentioned this to Scout, she asked me why I thought physically objectifying men was any different from objectifying women. I had no answer. I returned to my popcorn.) George Eastman is the poor midwest relation of a rich California family that runs a big, successful bikini business. Young Eastman grew up in his super-religious mother’s Christian mission, proselytizing on the streets, probably shaking a can for coins, but now he’s come out west to ask his old Uncle Eastman for a job. To cut a long story short, he falls in love with two girls.

  One is sweet, ordinary, sincere, lower-class: Shelley Winters. Shelley works with him on the factory floor, stuffing bikinis into boxes, and happens not to be able to swim. (This will become important later.) The other is hot-as-hell Elizabeth Taylor: rich, upper-class, an Eastman family friend. Seeing as he has no chance with Taylor, George gets things going with Shelley, although relationships are banned in the factory, and if they’re discovered they’ll both lose their jobs. Unfortunately, Shelley falls pregnant. All of this is sometimes hard to follow because the movie was made in 1951, and everything’s buried under the Hays Code. No one says “pregnant” or “I want an abortion.” But, despite the polite cutaways and the euphemistic language, you get the picture. Two unmarried people, with no money, who hardly know each other, are about to have a baby that neither of them wants. What to do? Shelley thinks the only solution is to get married. George doesn’t want to. In the middle of this crisis, George bumps into Taylor again. This time she notices that he looks like Montgomery Clift and falls madly in love with him. So now Shelley is a problem. Gotta get rid of Shelley. But how?

  To distract himself from the urgency of this question, George accepts an invitation to Taylor’s parents’ beach house and spends a weekend looking tanned and expensive, beautiful and happy, and not at all like a poor boy from Chicago who once walked the streets pleading with the lost and the sinful to join him in the bosom of Christ. Throughout this section o
f the movie, Scout kept leaning over to ask me, “Did Montgomery Clift make this before or after his car accident IRL?” I really couldn’t say. Whenever I thought it was after, I found myself noticing strange marks on his face: a cut on his cheek, or the scar from a huge laceration on his neck. But then when I thought it was before, his face looked perfect to me, as if God had taken Brando and Dean and found a way to combine them in a delicious man sandwich.

  At a certain point, while George is trying to forget his troubles at the beach, Shelley Winters calls from the bus station and says that if he doesn’t marry her right away she’s going to come over to that beach house, publicly expose him, and fuck up his whole life. He makes his excuses to Taylor and her family and goes to meet Shelley. They head to the registry office, to get married, but it’s closed. To calm her, George suggests a picnic, out in the woods, by the lake, and maybe that’s when he remembers the time she told him she couldn’t swim. He hires a rowboat—under a false name—and takes her out on the water, apparently with the full intention of killing her. And she does die that very day—in murky circumstances. The two of them argue in the little rowboat; it tips; they fall in. And the next thing we see is George dragging himself up the bank. Did he try to save her? Did he swim away? Did he force her head down, down, down into the water? Was it murder in the first degree? Or in some other degree? Was it even murder? We can’t know. We’ll never know. George heads back to his weekend paradise. Taylor’s parents’ black maid happens to be making lunch. You see her only three or four times, and she barely speaks, but let’s just say that she had my full attention. I admired the way she acted as if she were fully invested in this drama unfolding at Taylor’s parents’ beach house even though, in my mental version, this fictional maid’s fictional brother was one of the several thousand people who were lynched IRL in the first half of the twentieth century. Each time she appeared, I gave her a little improvised dialog, whispering it into Scout’s ear: “Yes, miss, I’ll bring the dessert out now. I mean, my brother was lynched not long ago, down in Arkansas, but I can see you’ve got bigger fish to fry—I’ll get right on it.”