No. 4 Imperial Lane

by Jonathan Weisman

  My cultural confusion was honest, though. It came with the times: punks, goths, New Wave wankers, old-guard metalheads, deadly serious communists plotting their putsches against Whitehall while the real communists across the English Channel teetered toward extinction. The kids seemed more intent on achieving fashion supremacy at Camden Market than any real societal change. The trade unionists of East London, Manchester, and Liverpool were driving the Labour Party further into socialism while their comrades in Solidarność were launching vanguard strikes in Poland that would, in short order, extinguish the Eastern Bloc. And what was a modestly well-adjusted American from a good home supposed to do in the midst of all this? Was your hair supposed to stand up in fluorescent spikes or swoop over your eyes in greasy, jet-black curtains? Were you supposed to be swept up in the protest movements or give in to studied ennui? Did antinuclear peaceniks really wear Iron Crosses and Bundeswehr tank tops over combat fatigues and Doc Martens? What about the vegans in soiled ponchos who firebombed the biology labs at the universities? Didn’t the poor, unrescued rabbits and rats just end up flambéed in the name of animal rights?

  To those questions came my answer, Maggie. To her, none of it mattered.

  When I finally asked her out for a drink, casually, she said yes. We went to the student pub near her place on the back side of campus, Park Village, it was called, an unsightly cluster of brick cubes sticking out of the South Downs that had been farmland in the 1960s, before the British government decided to build the country’s “new universities,” of which Sussex was one. Maggie and I sat across from each other at a heavy picnic table and proceeded to get into a way-too-animated argument over Jacques Derrida, fueled by lager and cider. It was midweek, and the pub was half-empty. I was enjoying myself watching her. She was cute and had this way of lolling her head and looking at me sideways in mock-hostile appraisal. I hadn’t noticed it before.

  “C’mon Maggie, what does that even mean, ‘There is nothing outside the text’? You don’t know. It’s just gibberish.” I leaned in toward her provocatively. “Deconstructionist gibberish.”

  “Gibberish, maybe.” She laughed, stabbing the air with an index finger and a long red nail. “But the French accent helps.”

  Four weeks after Maggie and I had eased our way into my narrow bed on East Slope, my brother arrived, ready for all the trips on the Continent we had planned. I surprised myself with my misery on that long European excursion. I lay in physical agony one night in a seedy guesthouse in Amsterdam, missing her. I could think of nothing else.

  I carried a vision of Maggie with me, locked in from two weeks before. She was sitting up in bed, propped up by a huge red pillow wedged against the wall, mulling structuration while reading Anthony Giddens’s Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. I lay beside her, Dickens’s Bleak House taunting me, only a quarter read, and watched her work from behind the pages. She looked over, took off her glasses, and smiled. I reached for her, and we kissed.

  “In a bit, David, I’ve got to get through this chapter.”

  It was an odd image to linger over, stoned, in a room full of cheap metal bunk beds above a bar in Amsterdam. House music rumbled beneath me, its bass line crushing my skull with its monomaniacal thudding. My brother was off somewhere exploring the debauched wonders of a city that only a twenty-four-year-old could love so much. My affections were completely elsewhere. It must be love, I moaned.

  Maggie didn’t seem to wonder. She was sure. As the end of the school year came into view, she grew to dread my return to Chicago. I contacted my school; if I were to want to take, say, a year off, how exactly would I go about requesting that? The letter from Illinois came back quickly.

  Dear David,

  We are in receipt of your request for a year off from your studies. We are happy to oblige and hope you have a grand adventure.

  Besides, the letter didn’t say, tuition would be higher the following year.

  That summer had been the leanest time of my life. We traveled for a while, Maggie and me, mostly on an ill-fated trip to Africa. Maggie indulged me on that one, even when I drove us far beyond our physical and financial capacity.

  “If we can get through Sine Saloum, we can make it to Gambia,” I assured her in Senegal.

  “Just a little further south is Ziguinchor. There’s a beach town, Cap Skirring, I swear, and maybe from there, Guinea-Bissau,” I told her in Gambia. “It’ll be amazing.”

  We didn’t get that far, and I kept that failure to myself, even when that oddest of Shangri-las, the benighted little country of Guinea-Bissau, entered my consciousness in a big way. We returned flat broke, having accomplished nothing beyond wrecking my gastrointestinal system. Unwilling to ask my parents for money after forsaking them for another year away, I looked for work, illegal without a permit and scarce to begin with in Thatcher’s England. We sold junk out of the “boot” of Maggie’s mom’s car, until finally I signed on with Community Service Volunteers, a wage-slave organization that apparently took all comers, and it was CSV that found Hans. All that was expected of me was to muddle through until June, when his friends would come take him to Tuscany, as they did every summer. Nigel at the volunteer agency was encouraging. He wore a cardigan sweater with holes at the elbows that clung tightly to his bony frame. His teeth were crooked, and he looked at me earnestly.

  “I twust, David, that you will find the Bwomwell household to be a warm and wonderful place to spend a few months,” he said.

  Hans’s white, two-story row house was nice by Brighton standards, small and tidy with a pub down the street called the Imperial Arms. Maggie was two bus rides away in a grungier part of town. The furniture in Hans’s house was strangely spectacular—grand armoires too large for their cozy spaces, bowed chests of drawers carved exquisitely, gilded bookcases with fine gilt grilles, commodes of the antique British sort—and decorated incongruously with African objets, carvings, masks, delicately inscribed gourds, and musical instruments. I felt like I was in a museum.

  Before our adventure in Africa that summer, Maggie and I had hitched to her cousin’s farm in north Devon. He had some camping equipment to lend, and he wanted to show me how to use his old army Primus stove. While we were visiting, he took us to a manor nearby. It was something an American was supposed to enjoy. Maggie had mocked the opulence of the place, preserved in state by the National Trust. I didn’t think much of it one way or another at the time, but it came back to me as I toured the Bromwells’ home. I was no expert, but this furniture seemed to have a pedigree.

  Hans asked nothing about me that morning, nothing in the vein of an interview at all. I asked him what he thought of my girlfriend spending the night every once in a while, to which he replied:

  “Fuck like bunnies, for all I care, just as long as you come when I call.”

  The panic that had overcome me that first moment with Hans was overwhelmed by my inability to think up an alternative living arrangement. I could hurry back to Nigel and ask for a different assignment, but I saw little chance of getting a better one in or near Brighton. I could cut the cord, say “That’s it. I’m done. I’m going home.” But I was no closer to that than I had been when I let myself stay in the first place. My resignation snuffed out my panic like a heavy, damp blanket. So I did what I told the volunteer agency I would do. I moved out of Maggie’s overcrowded group house, away from Big Steve the punk and Little Steve the rocker, Astrid the hippie and Suzy the normal one, and in with Hans and Elizabeth Bromwell.

  A week later, complaining already of my absences, Maggie came to visit for the first time. I went to meet her at the bus stop on the Grand Parade and saw her tumbling down the steps and out the door, lugging an overstuffed overnight bag. I didn’t know she had planned to spend the night.

  “How long did you say this was going to last?” Maggie asked, slightly winded and laughing as she pulled down her skirt. Leighton Buzzard girls, even those who read sociology and cultural studies, didn’t talk like Hans and Elizabeth Bromwell. They sai
d “dunno” a lot and called people “prats” and “wankers” and “willies.” They got their knickers in a twist. They didn’t dress like them either. An overstretched sweater—a jumper, in English English—draped over Maggie’s torso and obscured most of her tartan skirt. She wore round, steel-framed glasses that might have been called cool-chick glasses in the States had they not come from the National Health Service. Here, they were just cheap, free actually.

  I assumed in ignorance that all of Britain would be more or less the same, not some Merchant Ivory fantasy of posh accents and white trousers but without the variations of region, race, and wealth that I grew up with. Maggie taught me about class, the true working class, Brits living north of London, warehoused in row after row of identical houses, with a pub, a cup, and a Sainsbury’s to get them by. Her mom, Maryanne, had a harelip, mended badly, and a boyfriend, Alf, who traveled the Midlands selling stuffed animals—“plush toys,” he called them—out of a suitcase. When Alf asked for butter at the table, he’d say, “Would you pass the fat, love?” Her father had abandoned them, first for a construction job in Abu Dhabi, then for a younger sheila, who dressed like Maggie but grew fat on chocolate digestive biscuits. In ways I could never, Maggie would have understood Hans’s sarcastic greeting for me, the implications of Woody Allen and Maria Callas. The British grasped class stratification at a visceral level. They were born to it.

  “You know, David, you can’t be fooled by that old blanket on what’s-his-face’s bed,” she said, walking up the steps to the front door.

  “Hans,” I said.

  “Hans isn’t like your friends at Sussex. He’s not from Luton or Sheffield. He already hates you.”

  She turned in time to see my face droop, and gave me an encouraging smile.

  “Alright then, ‘hate’ might be a bit much. He just doesn’t like you, love. But I do,” she added, kissing me on the cheek. “It won’t be for too long anyway, right?”

  “Until May.” I dropped her suitcase on the stoop with a thud and fished out my keys. The summer had long given way to the grayness of an English autumn. The air was dampening but not yet cold. “Then he goes to a villa or something in Italy for the summer. I guess he goes there every year.”

  “You’re joking,” she gasped. “May?”

  “That’s what I promised the agency.”

  “It’s October. You’ll never make it.”

  “It hasn’t been a good start,” I agreed.

  Elizabeth opened the door with a smile. She beamed in fact, not at me but at Maggie. A girl I had not yet seen, only a few years younger than us, sixteen or seventeen, but tall and dark-complexioned for a Brit, came out of the kitchen and smiled. Her black hair streamed down her back, over a tight-fitting T-shirt that clung to her lovely breasts. “I’m Cristina,” she said with a wink, then dashed upstairs, leaving Maggie to glare, first at her, then at me as my eyes followed Cristina’s breathtaking backside.

  “My daughter, David. Remember I said she’d be coming back from her uncle’s farm this week?” Elizabeth said to me, catching my gaze and bailing me out. “Got back just now, while you were out fetching your girlfriend. Maggie, right?”

  She smiled at me.

  “Come into the kitchen, both of you. Hans is listening to Die Fledermaus. His beloved Maria,” Elizabeth said. “You don’t want to disturb him.”

  She whirled around the little kitchen in great excitement, not doing much but doing it quickly. She offered us tea in stained, delicate cups, not Maggie’s usual mugs. They had dainty roses that wound upward from the bottom toward slightly chipped rims. She took out a quart of vodka and poured herself a shot.

  “As I’ve been telling David here,” she said excitedly, “I’m going to the poly now, so I need him more than some of the other volunteers who have come through. I’m learning to type and some maths too.”

  “Really?” Maggie chimed in. “What kind of maths?”

  It was the kind of question I would have shied away from. Elizabeth was nearing forty, I suspected. Unless she was studying advanced calculus or linear algebra, there could be no easy explanation for a math class at the community college at her age. But Maggie seemed to understand that Elizabeth didn’t care. Elizabeth was different from Hans. She showed no disdain. She absently brushed aside her unruly hair. Her mouth worked itself to one side, the right, as she blew away a hair. She reminded me of the nervous girls I went to middle school with—always wanting so desperately to be liked, never expecting they would be.

  “I’m going to get a job,” she said, a smile breaking across her face like a beacon. The sentence and the expression seemed completely unrelated, at least to me. She said it as I would have said “I’m going to win the lottery” or “I just saw the most amazing movie.” There could not have been a more genuine look of delight.

  She poured herself another shot, then downed it as she took her seat on the kitchen stool.

  “It’ll be my first. ‘’Tis my vocation, Hal; ’tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation,’” she said with a flourish of her arm.

  Hours later, Elizabeth called us down again, to discuss dinner. She’d be making canard à l’orange, she announced, one of Hans’s favorites, with a duck bought from a butcher on the east end of Brighton, a butcher who hung his venison for six days, prepared his own pheasant, and made sure always to save Hans his very favorite: pig vagina.

  “You’re joking,” I said, venturing familiarity for the first time since I had arrived and using Maggie’s British inflection, an affectation I had picked up but insisted I hadn’t. The trick was never to end questions with a rising tone. The most inquisitive phrase always sounded like a statement. It’s no wonder the British never sought any answers from the world. Their language and tone offered only advice and opinion.

  “Amazing what parts of an animal are considered a delicacy, isn’t it? I won’t eat it, but Hans relishes tastes. When you can’t shag, you can’t walk, hell, you can’t wipe your arse, what do you do? Eat, really. Taste. Taste anything. It’s his last adventure.”

  To watch Elizabeth prepare dinner was a marvel. It focused her mind. I had been so broke for the past two months, I was reduced to buying rice and Brussels sprouts in bulk at the Brighton farmers market, just off the lorry depot. I’d prepare them with curry powder, or chili powder, or cream and cornstarch, or tomato sauce. It didn’t much help. It was still Brussels sprouts and rice. But just when I had grown despondent over my poverty diet, I found myself watching this strange, flighty woman patting down the duck she had filleted and trussed, preparing a citrus medley for the sauce, reducing it, baking, broiling. The smell was overwhelming.

  When it was ready, Elizabeth carved up a plateful, included some parsnips and broccoli drenched in butter, set it on a tray that had been sitting on the counter, already set with cutlery and a starched white cloth napkin, and pushed the meal into my hands.

  “You’re on,” she smiled, a phrase she had taken to using as my cue each evening.

  Hans was lying utterly still, opera music still drifting around him. His eyes opened slowly to meet mine. Maggie walked a step behind, uncharacteristically shy.

  “Is this your bunny, then? Prop me up and come round.”

  I set the tray on the nightstand beside his bed, reached under his head, and lifted his torso as I pushed down the pillows, careful to grab more this time than just his head as I had my first night, when he had jolted to life to admonish me.

  “No, David, not just my bloody head. You have to prop up my body. Don’t be shy about it. I won’t break. Reach under my shoulders and heave.”

  I was glad I didn’t follow his advice. I would have thrown him across the room. His back had been warm and moist. I don’t know why I expected otherwise. I could see the vertebrae so prominently, I guess I thought I’d be pressing cold, bare bones. But lifting his upper body was no more difficult than supporting his head. He weighed nothing.

  Now propped up, he looked more squarely at Maggie. They locked eyes,
neither of them smiling.

  “She can go home now,” Hans said. “Cut the pieces small, like I told you. And I like a bit of duck, a bit of parsnips, and a sprig of broccoli on each forkful.”

  Maggie and I exchanged glances as she walked out. I looked at her helplessly, she left without a word, and I heard the front door shut.

  My first option at Community Service Volunteers had been working with juvenile delinquents on the Isle of Wight. It wasn’t that far from Brighton, but Maggie and I would have seen each other only on the weekends, and with eighteen pounds in my pocket a week, probably not every weekend. Hans came up a few days later, before I had given CSV an answer on the delinquents. Maggie’s mum believed it was a sign from God that we were meant to be together forever, but after that first encounter between Hans and Maggie, it was clear this would not be easy on our relationship. A sign from God, maybe, but so were Job’s boils.

  Hans’s bed was massive, an oversized hospital number that could be lifted and lowered, with side rails that seemed to serve no purpose for a man who could not roll over. Hans lay on a rubber sheet of air nodules—penises, he liked to say—which worked to lift his body from the bed top and keep away the bedsores, imperfectly maybe, but this was a technological marvel compared to previous prevention devices: foam pads, cashmere blankets, anything that felt soft to the touch but flattened into what might as well have been sandpaper against an unmoving, deadweight body. One of my main jobs was to shift him from side to side every few hours during the day. Two nurses with tight white costumes that delighted Hans came in the morning to bathe him and clean his catheter, thank God. But I’d have my share of dirty work: emptying the urine bag, wiping his bum, adjusting the catheter when his penis would inexplicably grow hard.