by James Wood
“I did a riff on the old joke about how the difference between them is that English analytic philosophy examines your moral obligation when you have an overdue library book, and European philosophy examines your moral obligation when the Nazis invade.”
“When the Nazis invade, they’d close all the libraries and burn the books anyway,” said Helen swiftly, as if solving the issue there and then. Vanessa smiled and looked at her father.
“That’s great news about the conference,” he said. “People were giving talks about your work?”
“Well, for two hours, between four and six on a Friday, after most people had gone home. It was a two-day thing.”
“Come on, Van,” said her sister, “admit a triumph.”
Vanessa said nothing, looked full of color for a moment, and stood up, reaching for Helen’s bowl.
“Look, let us do that,” said Alan. “You’ve only got one bloody arm. Thank God it’s your right one, though. Do you remember, I’m left-handed, but—”
“But in my right mind,” finished Helen. “We remember.”
“I always liked that joke, for some reason,” he said.
“It’s on a par with those others, Dad,” said Vanessa.
“My mother-in-law has been on the continent for a week … Well, has she tried bananas? Your grandpa loved that.”
“And, The Commer has come to a full stop,” said Vanessa with childish enthusiasm.
“For years, I didn’t get that one, and was too embarrassed to ask,” said Helen. “And then I asked you and you explained that it was about Granddad’s Commer van.”
“Yes, his Commer van was always breaking down,” said Vanessa.
“Astonishingly unreliable vehicle, even by British standards … By the way, do you still have your old NatWest bank account, in Newcastle?” Alan asked Vanessa.
“The one I opened at sixteen? Yes, I do. What a funny question, where did that come from?”
“I don’t know, just thinking about your childhood, about old things, I suppose.”
“I do still have it, and I even have some real British money in it,” Vanessa added.
“Good.”
“You mean ‘good’ as a deposit for my eventual return?”
“No, just good,” he said.
“Good in itself?” She had the Querry tease in her face.
“Yes. You never know.”
“Money in the bank,” said Helen, doing a Durham accent—troublingly well. “Money in the bank” was what his own dad used to say to him. Not much, but same an’ all, it’s money in the bank. His father never knew that Alan got hold of his parents’ bank account number, and secretly deposited small sums every so often, not large enough for them to notice, thirty or forty pounds only.
* * *
At the end of the summer holidays, not so long after her attempt to run away from school, Vanessa had gone with her father to open that bank account. Alan guiltily put four hundred pounds into it, as if that might help. Vanessa remembered well that large sum, and not being able to say anything about it. She couldn’t thank him, even if she had felt like it, which she hadn’t, particularly. She couldn’t tell Helen, who had apparently not been granted the same largesse. It was the summer when the divorce was made final, became a legal fact. But her anger at that time wasn’t about the divorce so much as the way Dad had acted earlier in the summer, when she had the job at the café in Corbridge and got close to a boy who worked there—called Alan, unfunnily enough, except that his name was spelled “Allen.” Dad clearly couldn’t stand the idea that she might be about to go out with a local boy who’d left school at sixteen and had a very “strong” Northumbrian accent, and he did everything he could to ensure that they did not spend much time together. “Okay, Van, you’ll take this the wrong way, but I’m not sending you to a pricey boarding school so that you can marry a plasterer’s son from Corbridge. He has no bloody prospects. None.” He actually said that. She wouldn’t believe it now, except that she’d always been a passionate diarist, and she had those words down on paper, dated August 22, 1982.
Allen Farnley was a lovely boy with a beautiful soul and a slightly coarse, heavy face. He looked older than sixteen, with bulky shoulders and long arms he held tightly down against his sides, like an owl at rest. He might have been “a plasterer’s son,” but he was at war with his semiliterate family. He knew a lot more than Vanessa did about classical music, kept Brahms and Ligeti scores under his bed. He was greedy for everything, for all knowledge, he swallowed the universe like a pill. That was a phrase they had discovered in an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson, discovered it together, it became the phrase of the summer of 1982: swallow the universe like a pill. Allen’s dad was worried that his son was homosexual—queer—which was especially amusing to Vanessa, because he never stopped staring at her bum in the café, and eventually got his way. Not all the way, they were both too shy and inexperienced for that, but there was a breast squeeze or two, a lot of kissing, and she remembered an inexpert hand stolidly wedged between her legs as a kind of stabilizing device, the way chocks were wedged under the wheels of an aircraft: ecstasy always paralyzed Allen, it was the same when he listened to music. They talked a lot about God, and tried to “philosophize”: What is music? What is “the good life”? Does death make life pointless? And so on. She had no idea where he was now. But she doubted that Allen’s life had suddenly developed “prospects.” Of course she was never going to marry Allen. They both knew there was no real future in it. Even at sixteen, she slightly pitied her father for his misplaced anxiety. She looked at him, across her own dining table. Here he was, at last: he had come all this way to see her in America. He looked tired. His handsome, narrow face was pale, and she realized that she could no longer picture him as a younger man. That loss tormented her whenever she thought about her late mother: she could still hear Cathy’s young voice but could no longer see her as a young woman. Poor Dad, with his worries and all his striving, and his endless “northern” will! What was the point of that extraordinary will? To succeed, to make something, a successful company, to make money, to have children, to keep that beautiful old house … But he hadn’t kept hold of his wife, and so he hadn’t really managed to keep hold of his family—hadn’t kept the family intact—so what good was the beautiful hollow old house? Now he was just old, like everyone else will eventually be, and soon enough he wouldn’t possess the last remnants of any of it. You swallow the universe like a pill, but then you piss it out, too, it passes out of you, along with everything else important. Yes, she must not think like this, must not dwell on things like this—so everyone seemed to be telling her, so Josh told her, so Dr. Lasky hinted—but it was very hard not to.
Helen, she remembered, was patronizing; she implied that she found Allen Farnley hideous but that Vanessa couldn’t really afford to be choosy. Vanessa was looking forward to Josh’s return tomorrow, because Josh was undoubtedly handsome, was better-looking than Tom, and was younger, too. Helen’s husband was beginning to wither on the vine, somewhat.
“Does anyone object if I have a smoke?” she asked.
“No, blow some of it my way,” said Helen.
13
They left after lunch, and went to the hotel to check in. A cab was called, and it was the same driver who had brought them, the genial Muslim bloke who had asked them, on the way from the station, where they were from, and having discovered they were British, had picked up an enormous book from the front passenger seat and waved it: “You know Robert Fisk? The British journalist Fisk? He tells the truth, it’s all there in his book.” Alan had admired how smoothly Helen had handled him, and was looking forward to another display of her finesse. But he was on his phone, talking in Arabic, and ignored his passengers, who sat quietly and looked at the streets.
“Christ, it’s bleak here,” said Alan. It was getting dark quickly, and somehow the snow that had fallen the day before seemed already shabby. A massive orange truck, with a plow at the front, passed by an
d spat salt at them. You could taste the salt in the air, the snow was coming down as flakes of salt.
“It’s really not bleak.” Helen was shifting impatiently in the car, her face long and unappeased. “Saratoga is one of the nicest towns in America. If you want bleak, I can show you. Drive half an hour or so from here to Troy. Now that’s bleak. Or at least it looks pretty bad from the highway. Troy seems almost Soviet—rotting old warehouses, dirty factories, there’s a grim river, and horrible new blocks of buildings that look like hotels for the fat party apparatchiks…”
“All right, it’s not bleak. But it’s so bloody cold … Maybe, with the other place, its name laid a curse on it? What were they thinking? Troy, indeed…” The cab was moving slowly down an admittedly handsome main street, it was called Broadway, wider and more spacious than its English equivalent. The buildings were ornate, proud, redbrick or faced in stone. He was reminded of certain streets, still fine, in Newcastle or in Harrogate. The ones that got away, that escaped the bombers and the town planners … These eminent nineteenth-century American buildings stood like stone ghosts of lost prosperity, impotent but still accusing: we know what we did, what we achieved, but what have you built for the future, what have you achieved? Good lord, the Adirondack Trust Company, presumably a bank, looked like the Lincoln Memorial. It seemed to be made out of marble, with two huge Greek columns on either side of the main entrance. And almost next door, they were pulling up alongside it now, was an extraordinary building, their hotel, called the Alexandria, done up like a Venetian palazzo. There were three levels, with rows of tall, narrow arched windows. There was a piazza balcony on the first floor that ran the length of the building, with thin columns and filigree fretwork everywhere. He reckoned it was late nineteenth-century, though knowing this country it might easily have been authentic Renaissance, nicked from somewhere in Italy and brought over in bits on a boat.
“I think you’ll like this place, Dad. At the very least it’ll amuse you. It’s American sui generis. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.”
The lobby was dark, full of polished mahogany and plum-hued velvet. It was also frantic with objets—the hysterical congestion of the bourgeois Victorian parlor: two tall fig trees in brass pots, peacock feathers in jars, oak standard lamps, two hideously religiose Tiffany lampshades (casting pools of sacred dusk), a closed grand piano, a prim chaise longue with scrolled arms, a huge staircase, and asylum-grade drapes, thick as prison walls, at the window frames. There was that cinnamon smell again. Dixieland jazz was playing through concealed speakers. The effect was archival, as if color were trying to turn itself into sepia and earn itself a caption: “Olde Saratoga.” If he’d been less tired he’d have enjoyed the joke—except that it wasn’t quite offered as comedy. He needed to call Candace, and sleep for a bit. Helen was back on her BlackBerry, ably prodding. The girl behind the registration desk did not inspire confidence; at her side was a plate with a vast, half-eaten piece of cake. She put her fork down and looked up. “Welcome to the Alexandria!”
But check-in was easy, and a few minutes later he was sitting on his hotel bed, the second in two days, and pulling his shoes off. The bedroom was less funereal than the lobby, but still ornate. He was sitting on a roofless four-poster bed (the four wooden columns made him think of the tie-rods that poke out of concrete foundations); there was another chaise longue, in striped pink-and-cream satin: at either end, the fat cylindrical cushions, buoyantly tight, were less like cushions than flotation devices. He looked directly onto the main street, with its fine shopfronts and ornate antique lamps.
Snow was now blowing in the air, illuminated in the arc of these lights, scurrying sideways and returning like large wet insect-clouds, white against the flat violet air. The window glass was appallingly cold on his forehead.
There was a knock at the door: “Room service.” He hadn’t ordered anything, and for an absurd James Bond second—him again!—Alan thought he could be in a film. It was a real hotel employee, and he was bringing the hotel’s complimentary glass of champagne. Fairly bad champagne, it turned out, with a single bloated raspberry struggling to stay afloat.
He phoned through to Helen’s room. “A bloke just came to give me a glass of champagne with a raspberry…”
“He just came by my room, too. They didn’t used to do that.” Helen had stayed twice at the Alexandria, both times in the summer, when the hotel’s old-fashioned outdoor swimming pool was a necessary treat. She’d come up to hear Dave Matthews at the Performing Arts Center, one of the best places in America, she said, to hear live bands.
“I know what you’re fishing for: okay, Vanessa seemed fine. To me. A bit limp. A bit damp. Do you know that ‘damp’ is an actual category in Chinese medicine? Too much ‘dampness’ is rectified with certain foul-smelling hot teas.”
“When I think how close you were as kids, how Vanessa admires you and admires what you do…”
“Admires what I do? Pop music? I don’t think so, Dad.”
“Yes, she does. You don’t know.”
“The Philosopher and the Music Executive. It’s an updated Aesop fable, with her as the wise old owl and me … as the foolish donkey or something.”
“I don’t think anyone would ever think of you as foolish,” he said—admiringly, in spite of himself.
“As the greedy fox, then?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Helen…”
“Well, I thought she seemed okay. And to tell you the truth I couldn’t see a sign of any particular new crisis. Maybe she seemed a bit nervous. And she looked quite good, different somehow, more done up. She’s got contact lenses now.”
“But the arm! So she really did fall. Josh wasn’t exaggerating. It was serious.”
“She slipped!”
“Why the hell didn’t she tell us about it? Isn’t that suspicious?”
“Maybe, maybe not. I think she likes the drama.”
“That’s unfair. You can’t accuse her of enjoying the drama if she kept it a bloody secret! Find out for me? I need to know if it was an accident. I can’t do it, Helen … I’d better call Candace now, then have a sleep before we regroup tonight.”
14
Candace wasn’t at home. He tried her on her mobile, but she was driving, and couldn’t give her full attention to him. They spoke over each other, and managed to say, “No, go ahead,” simultaneously. He’d never much liked making phone calls, maybe another reason he had not been a thrusting, truly successful businessman, those blokes in the movies with their feet up on the desk and the phone cradled lovingly like a pet lemur on the shoulder. His parents had always been atrocious on the phone, they came to it too late in their lives and treated it with humble respect, which annoyed him when he was older—this clinging atmosphere of modesty, as if the machine were only for emergencies, donated by the generous colliery bosses. Even now, though she had a telephone in her room, his mother tried to keep conversations short, would try to end them with, “Look, this is your call, it’ll be getting pricey.” (Since he was paying her bills, it was always his call, anyway.)
Candace, so far away, was tender but practical. She told him to have courage, but also advised him to look for certain “signs”—if she says she isn’t reading anything, or isn’t playing the piano, or doesn’t want to get out of bed.
“Don’t be ashamed to go through her drawers or bathroom cupboards to find out exactly what drugs she is taking. I wouldn’t think twice about it.” (Ah, the excellent Chinese steeliness.)
“What’s puzzling is that she seems in fairly good spirits. I don’t see any of those signs. She doesn’t seem depressed. But the stairs: I was right! It was serious. She broke her arm and is wearing a cast.”
“Love—depressed people don’t necessarily go around with a big ‘D’ pinned to their chests. She broke her arm on the stairs?”
“Yes, and said that she merely slipped on the ice.”
“Well, maybe she did really slip? Sometimes a cheap cigarette is j
ust a cheap cigarette—the Chinese version of the Freudian saying, by the way.”
“I wish you were here with me. Just you and me. I know you like hotel rooms…” He was lying on the bed, with most of his clothes off.
“You’re breaking up on me, I can’t quite hear you…”
“Seriously?”
“No,” she laughed, “that was a joke, I can hear you fine. I can hear your words, and I can hear perfectly well behind your words, too.” His daughters thought Candace was completely humorless, but in fact she had a zany, slightly unfunny sense of humor, which he adored.
“Your mother phoned yesterday. I think she was confused about your departure date. I gave her the hotel number. Though I bet she won’t phone you long distance, in the States.”
“You spoke to her?”
“You sound so terrified … It’s one of those rare astronomical events, but it is physically possible.”
“Sorry, it’s just that you try to avoid her whenever possible.”
“And she, me. Mutually Assured Avoidance.”
Yes, that was true enough. He dreaded the idea of his mother coming to live with them.
“I think your acronym would be pronounced … ‘Maa.’ Where are you driving to, by the way?” He just wanted to keep her on the phone.
“I’m on my way back from the one-day course in Newcastle, remember. ‘The Feeling Buddha’? Part of the Zen Therapy foundation module.”
“Ah. Good for you, my love.”
Alan sometimes felt guilty about his resistance to Candace’s Buddhism, but mostly he felt bullish. He was constituted by his desires. Certainly by his desire for Candace, which had brought sex roaring back into his existence after too many years of nothing. God, the tight creases behind her elbows when her arms hung down … Her slender back, her nice prim bum and those ridiculously small thongs she liked to wear, which in their lacy frailty were like dainty triangles strung on daisy chains, begging to be ripped off in a single erotic gesture, or quickly shoved aside at the crotch. Quickly pricked. If he got rid of desire, as his book on Zen Buddhism suggested, what would be left of him? Not a self, as he understood it. A driverless train, like the ones at Zurich Airport. She didn’t know that he sometimes encouraged their Jack Russell terrier, on evening walks in the garden, to lift his leg and piss on the little stone Buddha who squatted on the grass next to the birdbath. Alan had nothing against the real Buddha, who was obviously a highly enlightened cove, but that stone bust in the garden, purchased by Candace on the Internet, was rather annoying. Come rain or shine, dry wind or spurt of yellow dog piss, the chubby little chap, an Asian Michelin Man inflated with nirvana, bore the same inane grin, his impassive smile an ideally mild weapon against desire, suffering, death, and war. He wasn’t religious, had never been attracted to it, but what puzzled him was that Candace didn’t seem very religious either. Perhaps Buddhism wasn’t a religion in that sense? More power to it, then … His parents were fairly hostile to religion, good socialists that they were. Da would go every year to the Miners’ Gala, but not to the religious service at the end of the day in the cathedral, with the brass bands from the county collieries, and everyone sucking up to those velvety deans and archdeacons, who were plummy with Christian consolation. Alan did like the cathedral, would occasionally slip into the massive, dark building without telling his parents. But as for the doctrinal stuff, it was obviously man-made nonsense. And as for the question of God—well, he had a notion that “the question of God” might all have been more or less sorted out in his lifetime, like Cyprus or polio. Vaguely, with lazy irritation, he imagined some final event or revelation, a kind of theological press conference. He didn’t know whether the final revelation would be that God existed or didn’t; what seemed strange, as he put his tired head down on the hotel pillow, was that it hadn’t yet been decided, two thousand years after Christ’s death.