Upstate

by James Wood

  Alan was in fact quite excited to see his daughters in a new country, so he had to remind himself from time to time that no one was exactly on holiday. Death had made him a Little Englander: he’d only left the country a handful of times since Cathy died twelve years ago. He blamed himself for being out of the country when she finally succumbed to the cancer that had taken so long to plot its steady theft. He’d been in Lisbon, enjoying the warmth, the suffused light, when Helen phoned with the news … Anyway, America was hardly the country he would have chosen for a family vacation. America had never attracted him much. He had watched, with bemusement, his daughters go off there to work or to travel. It sometimes seemed as if in the last thirty years of his life, the little island nation that he grew up in, which for centuries had generated its own history and literature and record of prodigious scientific and industrial innovation, not to mention a fairly eventful politics, had meekly let the Americans come and restock the shelves with their own merchandise. No one objected that American presidential elections, American music, American money, American movies, American technology, and God help us, American food constituted the new reality. (Yes, it was as if the British Isles had turned in the sea, like a child’s boat in a bath, had turned slightly but definitively, away from Europe toward America.) He had quite happy memories of his only trip to the States, twenty-one years ago, on business. Three days in crazy New York, and then a day “relaxing” in some fancy dull suburb outside the city, where the only sounds between nine and six were the workers’ Spanish, and chestnuts falling gently onto the ridiculously wide, empty streets. People always seemed to be hoping he would “have a good day” (Actually, I have other plans). He did sincerely love—and rate as one of the great American contributions—the phrase “Take it easy.” He’d heard that from a taxi driver, from a guy in a shop, even from an air stewardess. Take it easy! That benign blessing wouldn’t catch on in Britain, where the pavements were sopped with cold rainwater and everyone seemed to have attended queuing school, to learn how to do it with the requisite degree of resigned submission.

  But he had to admit that America had never quite existed for him. He’d read somewhere that Americans used, per capita, three times as many sheets of toilet paper a day as the global average, which told him what he needed to know. It was an enormous, religious, largely reactionary place, with no real tradition of socialism, where the car parks were larger than many European villages. And Americanism was so bloody contagious! First George Bush’s born-again Christianity and his terrible Iraq crusade, and then Tony Blair’s American-style religiosity. Apparently, no one in the States had ever encountered Samuel Johnson’s dictum—banged into him by Mr. Watson (“Clag”), his school history teacher—that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

  7

  Snowfall had covered the city two days earlier. The cold was exotic—shockingly comprehensive, absolute. At JFK, he shuddered his way to the taxi rank. Was it possible that Helen might come from the city to meet him at the terminal? Okay, it was … not, but he indulged the fantasy for a few minutes as he emerged from customs.

  The cold made everything rigid. He was amazed by the icy fossilized hardness, the cars and buses caked in white salt, as if dug out of a quarry, the roads littered with ice, salt, rubbish, everything streaked and blanched. Exhaust fumes hung whitely, painted onto the polar air. But people were shouting as if they were in the hottest tropics. The tall black bloke who looked like a policeman, with a sort of padded orange eiderdown that went all the way to his shoes, was shouting at the taxi drivers, who shouted back at him, and the customers were shouting at each other as crafty ones tried to jump the queue. Now the black bloke was pointing at him and yelling “Fourth car, fourth car!” and he stumbled quickly to a large yellow Ford, and they were off, and it wasn’t very different from how he remembered it twenty years before. The surging of the cab, as if prodding itself into battle, the wasteful slippage of the big automatic V8, the sadistic achievement of the raked partition, which made every backseat traveler a giant in a plastic bathtub, the embattled roads and laughable neglected bridges, on which moved the latest German cars, suddenly futuristic and anomalous. Those fine new European cars, metal cockroaches, will survive the American apocalypse.

  The sense of having dropped into the middle of a civil war, with Manhattan as the wrecked spoils.

  It was a long way from the quiet stone house in Northumberland, though not unexciting. A long sour tunnel, and suddenly with a few large bumps they were in the middle of the city, which was like heaven and hell combined, infernal but glittering with lights. The forced march of the skyscrapers, herded into groups. But the regime of verticality gave way, on Park Avenue south of Grand Central Station, to a more easygoing administration: he felt he could breathe among the shorter buildings, the apartment buildings, the galleries, even a church or two. His hotel was in fact opposite a church, Orthodox perhaps. As he got out of the cab and looked up Park Avenue, the massive old Pan Am tower, now renamed something else, seemed like a dam that was keeping the crazy tide of Midtown from flowing south.

  The hotel lobby was small, gold, and comfortable. Expensive. Helen looked after herself—well, the record company looked after its executives. He got to his room, though not easily, because the corridor was sunk in a deliberate and possibly perfumed designer gloom, and sat on the bed. Asked to be put through to Helen Querry. Certainly sir, room 432—engaged. Of course. Ten minutes: time for a shit, and a Scotch from the minibar. In that order. Room 432, please. Still engaged. So he would part the darkness and make his own way to her. She knew when he was coming in. On the fourth floor he groped along the row of glow-worm room numbers. And knocked on the door—why on earth was he a tiny bit nervous?

  Helen opened the door, blew him a kiss, pointed at the uncradled phone and returned to it, standing with it in one hand while she examined the BlackBerry she held in the other. She rolled her eyes at him in self-absolution: the sin of work. There she was, and my, she did look good. “Well for God’s sake, get him to weaponize those fabled ‘media contacts’ of his! It’s being released next month, we need all the help we can get. Yes, he’s got plenty … Yep. Okeydokey. Ciao.” He disliked both “okeydokey” and “ciao.”

  “Dad, you got here…”

  “I came by the same means as you, you know.” The last words came out a little closer to “you knaw” than he would have liked. Helen’s accent was placeless but not classless: upper-middle class, not quite upper class, southern, boarding-school. (What he wanted to call wine bar posh, if that made sense.) Undeniably the best thing he’d given his daughters was the entitlement never to think about social class. Now she was looking at him, appraising him—warmly but with a sharp eye, as if he were back in the nursing home with his ma. But she was, brilliantly, doing this while also reading something on her BlackBerry.

  “Is that shirt new?”

  “Are you talking to me or to that screen?” He was smiling.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s newish. Why, don’t you like it?”

  “I do like it.”

  He wasn’t sure that he liked it that much, in fact. He felt the need to assert himself, take the upper hand—but why was he thinking like this?

  “Right, are we going to have dinner somewhere, or what?”

  “I’ve booked a place two blocks away. Just let me close down these things.” Swiftly, elegantly, she tattooed the little device in her hand with a single finger, slipped it into her beautiful mustard-colored handbag, then crossed the room—now he noticed properly that it was much bigger than his—to the desk that held her laptop. She knelt before it, and it looked as if she was about to make herself up at a mirror. A little more tapping; not so easy to dislodge herself from this screen.

  They went down into the marble and brass lobby, and the doorman eased them out into the astonishing cold. New York met them like another dimension. There was something almost comical about the exchange of opposites: noise and cold for silence
and warmth. A fire engine was bucking down Park Avenue, clanking its chains like an angry ghost, and it was impossible to speak or think while its siren warped the freezing air beside them. Helen took his arm, with that easy warmth she had. He relaxed a little, maybe for the first time since Josh’s e-mail.

  “How’s work been?” he yelled at her. She shook her head, to signal “not well,” perhaps, or more likely to hint that dialogue could wait until they reached the restaurant. She was so casually in charge. She came to New York five or six times a year. Vanessa lived in America, but in some ways Helen seemed more naturally at ease with Americans, did business with them, went to hear new bands, had twice been to Saratoga Springs in fact, to hear the Dave Matthews Band, a group that had made her, or Sony rather, a fair amount of money. She sped up and down the Sony skyscraper on Sixth Avenue. She nosed around the city in gurgling Lincoln Town Cars, spent weekends at a “legendary” record producer’s house in Amagansett, where there were two pools, a six-car garage, and a basement kitted out with the largest collection of 1960s jukeboxes on the Eastern Seaboard. He’d heard some of her stories; he’d once actually met Dave Matthews, a polite, well-educated bloke whose residual Johannesburg accent was still just audible. He had great respect for her achievement. He could never do what she did, it was so social, involved so much arse-licking and party-going and drinking. And what else? Well, gambling, for one thing. Property was a sure and stable bet, stodgy compared to taking a punt on a rock band or solo singer. Buildings that failed to come up to business expectations were still there; you could use them for something, sell them at a loss, rent them until the market picked up, use them (however sneakily) as collateral, for more loans. They belonged to him, he made them, as surely as the men who put one brick on top of another and spread the muck, the mortar—the gobbo, the shite—between them. Helen, going up and down her great mortgaged tower in that glass elevator, didn’t own the bands she undoubtedly helped to make. There must have been thirty “artists” whose first records came out, with a bit of juice from Sony or from one of its affiliate labels, and then … ran out of juice. Reasonable reviews, modest sales—and no contract renewal. One of them, Verity McQueen, whose music he listened to when he drove along the A68 to see his mum, was now teaching singing at a private girls’ school in London. The girls she taught knew nothing about her brilliant first album, knew nothing about her aborted career as a singer-songwriter, said Helen; it was too long ago, and for kids nowadays the past, as Vanessa lamented about her students at Skidmore, was nothing more than the tree that fell in the forest when you weren’t there.

  8

  The restaurant was bullish and manic. And the young waiter was offhand and woundingly ugly. It wasn’t his fault, obviously, but somehow his ugliness seemed a weapon of his rudeness. His elaborate facial hair—facial topiary, really—made Helen think of the dreaded face-painting that went on at her kids’ parties: scrawled lions’ manes and tiger whiskers, difficult to remove whatever the kindhearted and absurdly patient teenage volunteers claimed. She was irritated that the place was so loud (Toto, of all things, on the sound system), the service so casual and juvenile. Roger, her impeccably tailored young assistant in London, had done some research: it was new, it was very near the hotel, had had good reviews for its French-Cambodian-American, whatever that was, food. But they’d have been better off eating in the dim, cave-like hotel restaurant. This was exactly the sort of place Dad hated—basically a noisy gym with food, everybody toned, young, and fuck-off fit.

  Alan’s gray head shone singly, as if spotlit. He looked knackered, she thought, but maybe that was just airports and jet lag. His jacket sleeves—a tiny bit too long. I must see him more often than I do. But not if that involves going up to Northumberland. To Candyland.

  Yet he was smiling at her, as if to say, I know what you’re thinking, there’s no need to apologize for the restaurant, these things happen, we’re in New York, after all …

  “We’re in New York!”

  “Yes, Dad, a bit painfully—I’m sorry. You won’t be able to hear anything I say.”

  “You may have buggered up your hearing with all those concerts, but my hearing is fine.” His lips silently shaped: “I’M SHOUTING AT YOU BUT YOU CAN’T HEAR ME!”

  “Ha-ha, very funny, Dad.”

  He continued: “NO, REALLY, I’M SHOUTING AT YOU.” It was a family tradition that Alan’s jokes went on too long—like, she now thought, an alarm you fumbled to switch off in the morning.

  “No, but seriously” (the snooze button had been located), “I like the noise, I don’t mind missing a bit here and there. Selective deafness might be useful up in Saratoga?”

  “Springs. Saratoga Springs. Saratoga is somewhere else. Florida, I think.”

  “Yep, I know that name.”

  “But let’s talk about that later, no?”

  “Okay.”

  The waiter arrived, with two bowls of olive oil and several torn pillows of artisanal loaf.

  “What have you been doing in New York?”

  “Oh God, too much, it’s been absolutely crazy here, it’s always like this. Lots of big meetings, a lot of corporate and legal bullshit—the Americans are very good at looking after you, they do things properly, but you have to work for it, work, work. They do love their eight a.m. breakfast meetings! I’m … I’m quite a big deal here, actually…”

  “I’m not at all surprised.”

  “They make a fuss of me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They make a fuss of me, they look after me very well.”

  “Yes, so they should, so they should … Do you actually like New York?”

  “Well, I don’t want to live here, if that’s what you mean.”

  He didn’t really know what he meant; he just felt slightly argumentative.

  “All this flashy money and noise,” he added.

  “You just said you liked it!”

  “I do, but I always feel that something is going to fall on my head.”

  “Icicles do sometimes come down in this season. A student was killed a few years ago. Look, I enjoy the city, though much less since the kids were born, I certainly can’t imagine trying to bring up children here … They’re fine, by the way, Dad!… And Tom sends his love … I like it, and I like how straightforward Americans are, in the business world. There’s none of that tiresome English hand-wringing, that subterfuge, the perpetual apologies. More money, less crap: that’s the simple reason why Europeans come over and work here. Isn’t it? Also, Sony have been great employers.”

  “Have been…?”

  Speaking to her father about work, she always made sure to emphasize the business side: a storm of meetings and deals, indistinguishable from banking or the law. The hours spent flat on her back, headphones on, listening to rubbishy hopeful recordings, all the anxiety when a new record was being released, the immense amount of organizing and electronic paperwork—that we ignore, because Dad, apart from a few quiet songs by Pink Floyd and one particular eccentric thing by Ian Dury, had never had time for contemporary music, for her music. Dad thought her colleagues all looked and acted like Leon Russell at the Concert for Bangladesh, i.e., circa 1971—the crazy white beard and the long hair. “These blokes,” he once said, looking over her shoulder at a copy of Melody Maker with a photo of someone like Eric Clapton but not Eric Clapton, in mid-solo, head thrown back, “look, it’s just male exhibitionism, mating rituals—he’s holding his penis out in one hand”—he pointed at the neck of the guitar—“and strumming his balls with the other.” Maybe not the most original observation, but you didn’t forget it when your dad was the one saying it. This was the time when Dad was noticing such things. Having failed to groom Vanessa—bespectacled, unkempt, even a bit smelly in those days—Dad turned his attention to Helen, told her what “looked good” on her, told her that “you know you’re attractive when male drivers stop in busy traffic to let you cross the road” (a truth annoyingly hard to dismiss), praised himself for
never spending more than four minutes in the bath, of all the silly male vanities … The strange thing was that though he could be, on occasion, a male bore and a selfish shit, he was not innately those. At that time, he seemed to be playing the role of patriarch, as if someone were paying him to act it out. But later she understood why: it was not so long after Mum moved out and went to live with the repellent Patrick Needham, and Dad was still angry and terribly insecure, his wounds flowing …

  The waiter arrived to take orders, and complimented them on their excellent taste: “Very good choices.” He pronounced “Madam” as “Madame.”

  “Well, I’ll be the judge of that,” said Alan once they were alone.

  “Of what?”

  “Of whether I’ve made a good choice.”

  “It’s a weird American mania—it’s catching on in London. You now get praised for everything. For having a birthday or ordering a meal or having finished your year at school, or just buying something really expensive in a shop.”

  They started eating.

  “I can’t help thinking, though,” Helen continued, “does he do that with everyone, even when there are six people at a table? I mean, we can’t all be making identically good choices, can we?”

  “Sounds like a philosopher’s job.”

  They looked at each other. This wasn’t the place to talk about Vanessa, she thought as the music—something she knew but couldn’t now name—loudly worked the room.