Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

‘In life, Guy.’

  I swatted away the word. ‘Life!’

  ‘Well, life is where it hurts.’

  ‘But it was only Vee’s film that hurt Poppy. In “life”, as you call it, they strutted their stuff together, they were forces, and you couldn’t tell which of them energised the other.’

  He suddenly turned angry with me. ‘You were simply besotted with the idea of them both,’ he said. ‘You were so busy making fucking literature out of them you didn’t see what was in front of your face. Let me tell you something about yourself, Guy – you fancy that you are hardbitten and cynical but in fact you’re a baby. You idealised those women, you idealised them out of existence.’

  What could I answer? That it was not my fault that Vanessa was squatting in the dirt with Aborigines and that Poppy had dementia?

  I bowed my head. ‘I’m sorry about her,’ I said, not looking at him. ‘I’m more than sorry, I’m broken-hearted. Shall I go and see her?’

  I imagined sitting by her bed and stroking her hand. ‘Of course there are monkeys,’ I’d have told her. ‘There are always monkeys if you know where to look.’

  Francis was dismissive of my offer. ‘You wouldn’t be able to bear it. You’re not man enough.’

  I bowed my head still more. Maybe I should have dropped to my knees and bowed my head until it touched Francis’s feet. I wasn’t sure what I had done wrong, but sometimes you don’t have to know.

  After a long silence, Francis asked me how I was getting on with Carter Strobe but didn’t listen to my answer. His eyes filled with tears. His couple of years with Poppy, he confided, had been the best of his life. The worst of mine, I confided in return. I meant coincidentally. Nothing, strictly, to do with him and Poppy. Not entirely true, but true enough.

  He let me into a secret. Poppy had read everything I’d written.

  ‘With your encouragement and instruction, I bet.’

  ‘No. Before we’d even met. She read every word. Devoured you.’

  I wiped a bead of perspiration from my forehead.

  ‘And here’s something else,’ he said. ‘She reviewed you on Amazon.’

  ‘Poppy?’

  ‘Poppy.’

  ‘It was Poppy who compared me favourably to Apuleius?’

  ‘I don’t know about that. That one was probably Vanessa.’

  ‘Vanessa did it too?’

  ‘The pair of them. They sat and cooked the reviews up between them. They did it for years, apparently.’

  My mouth must have fallen open. At least it should have fallen open, and stayed that way for all eternity. Vanessa and Poppy, their heads together, over me! And never breathing a word. Never looking for a thank you, and now never likely to get one.

  So there you are, I wanted to say when I regained control of my face and could just about trust myself with words again, they were like sisters. But I could see that I would be no less than ever open to the charge of idealising them – idealising and sentimentalising them in the act of sentimentalising myself.

  You never know what’s going to finish you off. I had to leave the restaurant. Me, me, me? Yes, all right. But there was only me I had to feel with.

  ‘So what will you do?’ I asked before I left.

  He shrugged. I’d never seen a man look more helpless.

  ‘Whatever I do is probably immaterial. I don’t think there’s long . . .’

  I wasn’t made to hear sentences like that. Francis was right – I wasn’t man enough.

  I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘If I can –’

  ‘You can’t,’ he said, and looked away.

  I knew what he was thinking. You! Help! How? By writing one of your fucking books? Then go ahead and see what good that will do.

  If I hadn’t thrown a little nervous breakdown a couple of years earlier I’d have thrown one that afternoon. Womanless, I did not know how to live. Once, one of them had not been enough. Even not knowing what I knew now, I’d needed the bounty of them both. Now – well, now was now.

  And I had no book on the go, either, no sentences to lose myself in. Together, Vanessa and Poppy had got me started. In obeisance to the one or in opposition to the other, I had kept on writing. With neither to intrigue or woo or infuriate or simply do verbal battle with, I had no reason to write and nothing to write about.

  I walked the streets, occasionally running into Ernest Hemingway who as ever took no notice of me. I might have felt that we were twinned in our endeavours, the last of a dying breed, but he acknowledged no similarity. Fair enough: he was writing, I wasn’t.

  How many notepads was he getting through a day? I couldn’t imagine getting through another page.

  Ditto finding another woman.

  Ditto looking for somewhere else to live.

  Ditto, once I gave up the streets for fear of being shamed by the tramp, getting out of bed.

  Everything that promised a future, promised only to finish me. I couldn’t see myself there. The future existed only as a promise of oblivion. I belonged to the past. I existed only in the past. I was walking through my life backwards. If I kept going I would eventually get to people reading my first novel, then to my writing it, then to Vanessa coming into the shop and asking – making a sort of pergola of her arms – if I’d seen her mother, a woman as vivacious as an apple orchard in a tornado. Vanessa herself the tornado. Two burning bushes . . .

  You can lie on your bed a long time, remembering when you were happy. Eventually the bed itself becomes the site of happiness. It was on this bed that you were happy only yesterday, happily remembering the day before, when you had remembered the time you’d been happy . . .

  So how long did I stay in my bed? I don’t know. The more interesting question is how long would I have stayed in bed? Though again I don’t know the answer to that. For ever? But as chance would have it, my family came to my aid. Isn’t that what families are for? My father died.

  All the black-hatted Hasidim in the country, and many more, I suspected, from elsewhere, attended the burial. How did they know to come? Some instinct for funereality, was it? Or just Jeffrey sending out the word?

  They congregated in the cold marble cemetery, anyway, careening and lamenting, like a murmuring forest with a raven in every tree. But for the electronic cigarette on which she puffed and which, in the late-afternoon gloom, was the only point of light, it would have been hard to make out my mother. She was dressed as though for a date, and I don’t mean with death. A single Hasidic fedora would have provided enough fabric to make the little black mourning suit she wore, and then some over for a pair of gloves.

  We’d done whatever perfunctory kissing was considered necessary earlier in the afternoon, in sight of my father’s ineloquent coffin. Mmm, mmm, at a sufficient distance from each other to ensure I wouldn’t get entangled in her jet earrings.

  ‘Now what?’ she asked me once we’d buried him with all deference to the Jew he’d never known he’d been.

  ‘Now what what?’

  ‘Now what am I supposed to do with myself ?’

  Prepare to meet your maker, I wanted to say, though from a look at the amount of leg she was showing, or at least the amount of near-empty stocking that was on display, I doubted her maker would have allowed her into His presence. Mysteriously, though her cigarette wasn’t real, she appeared to be exhaling smoke. Had she begun to burn up from the inside? With impatience to get started on the rest of her life?

  A voice I didn’t immediately recognise commiserated with me from behind. ‘I wish you long life, boychick,’ it said.

  I turned and saw someone I didn’t know. He put his finger where a moustache should have been. ‘Ah,’ I said. It was Michael Ezra, Vanessa’s croupier. Though without the moustache he looked like no one in particular. Certainly no one dangerously attractive. Shorn, his darkness merely made him appear poverty-stricken in the Mediterranean mode – a Sicilian apple picker, a Libyan goatherd. Here, but for his respectful suit, he would have made, I thought, a serviceable gra
vedigger.

  After the amount of time I’d spent lying in bed, I probably looked no better.

  I didn’t understand why he was here. He had not been a close friend of the family. But it was a free-for-all kind of funeral – most of Cheshire in attendance – remarkable for a man who had no friends. I guessed Jeffrey was the reason: he called, and every croupier in Manchester, plus every Hasid in Brooklyn, came in answer to his pain.

  ‘So what have you done to yourself ?’ I asked him.

  ‘Cleaned up my image,’ he laughed. ‘Your brother’s doing.’

  ‘Jeffrey got you to shave off your moustache?’

  ‘Yafet, yes. He’s been trying to make a good Jew of me.’

  ‘Oh God, not you too. What was wrong with the Jew you were? Anyway, I thought that being a good Jew according to Jeffrey meant growing more hair not losing what you’ve got.’

  ‘Eventually. But it’s different hair. First I had to stop looking like a croupier.’

  ‘But you are a croupier.’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘So what are you doing now?’

  ‘Looking around.’ He made it sound sinisterly spiritual. Looking around for God. Waiting on the word of Yafet.

  I shook my head. ‘Jesus!’ I said.

  He lowered his eyes.

  After a moment or two of awkward silence, he enquired after my wife and stepdaughter. I couldn’t remember which I’d told him, or which he’d thought, was which.

  ‘We are no longer together,’ I said, to be on the safe side.

  His eyes shone compassion on me. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  I thanked him. ‘So now it’s in the past for all of us,’ I was surprised to hear myself say, ‘you can tell me.’

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘Whether you had, you know . . . Whether you went off with her that night?’ Now I’d started it was hard to stop. ‘Whether you went on seeing each other.’

  ‘You’re asking me if I had an affair with your wife?’

  I had to think about it. I had no head for subterfuge. Which was my wife, again? ‘No, her daughter. Vanessa.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘She seemed to take a shine to you.’

  He shook his head. ‘You . . . writers,’ he said, checking his language because of where we were. ‘You think the worst of everybody. You think everything is underhand and unpleasant.’

  ‘I’m not accusing you. I’m only wondering.’

  ‘But why are you wondering? Why should I have had an affair with your daughter or your wife? I met them only once. And I happen to be married myself.’

  I checked myself from looking at him enquiringly, man to man, as though to wonder when being married had ever made a difference to anything. It was not, I decided, a look that would go down well with him.

  ‘It was you,’ I reminded him instead, ‘who said looking like Omar Sharif pulled in the birds.’

  ‘That was a joke. Can’t a person make a joke with you?’

  Not when it comes to sex, I thought about saying, then changed it to ‘Of course you can. Joking’s what I do.’

  ‘Do you? Well, I can tell you’re not joking now.’

  ‘It’s my father’s funeral,’ I said.

  ‘Then treat it with respect.’

  ‘Touché, boychick,’ I said.

  But he hadn’t quite finished with me. ‘It’s not all the way it is in your novels,’ he said, lowering his voice because Jeffrey was heading our way, hairy and refulgent, holding a holy book. ‘People rutting like monkeys, people pissing in one another’s mouths . . . where do you get this stuff from? Your father has just been put in the ground. Isn’t it time you got serious?’

  ‘People pissing in one another’s mouths is serious,’ I said. ‘You don’t embark on such a thing lightly.’

  ‘Sick!’

  ‘Sick, sane, who’s to say?’

  ‘You think it’s sane to ask me, here, on such a day, whether I’ve been having sex with members of your family? If that’s what you choose to write about, that’s your business, and if you can find people who want to read it, good luck to you, but believe me, it’s fantasy. Not everyone is fucking their brains out.’

  (His brains out.)

  ‘So what are they doing, Michael?’

  Unless he was Mordechai now.

  He didn’t so much as hesitate. But then he had been a croupier, accustomed, while the wheel spun, to sorting bets and settling arguments quickly. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘They’re doing good.’

  I learned later that Michael Ezra practised what he preached. He did good. His oldest child was severely handicapped and in a home. Every day he travelled thirty miles there and thirty miles back to see him. That was why he had worked as a croupier – so he could have the daylight hours free to visit his sick child.

  Frankly, I’d rather not have known this. Just as I would rather not have known that my father, returning rapidly to dust, had performed remarkable deeds of charity or endurance in his otherwise contemptible life. Not that he had. But had he, it would have disturbed the equilibrium of my view of him to have learned of them. You can know too much about people. Find out all there is to know about even the most dull or scoundrelly and you uncover a thousand reasons for respecting them. And then where are you? Suddenly the world becomes one vast melancholy sounding box, vibrating to the still sad monotonous music of humanity.

  Whereupon words will no longer frolic lewdly before your eyes.

  And the next thing you know you’re writing social-worker novels.

  43

  Apeshit

  Tedious to admit, but I believed what he had told me about my women. Vanessa had not been slipping away to Cheshire in order to finger his bristling moustache. Poppy neither. I believed my brother too. Vanessa had not fucked him into or even out of a brain tumour.

  Whatever it was that drew her so frequently to the north, leaving me to my literary labours in the capital – it wasn’t Ezra and it wasn’t Yafet. That left a multitude of other readings, of course; those weren’t the only temptations the north of England had to offer. But a novel suggestion presented itself: Vanessa had not been deceiving me. Not in the sexual intrigue sense anyway. Not everyone, as Ezra sweetly put it, was fucking their brains out. And you don’t get a more novel suggestion than that.

  So what had she been doing?

  Good. I decided she’d been doing good.

  Was it possible?

  Could it be that Vanessa and her mother were good women? Composing rave reviews of my novels for Amazon, and telling me nothing about it, was the work of good, loyal, selfless women, was it not? They weren’t to know those reviews would screw up my sales. When it comes to evaluating goodness you can only count intention. Vanessa was now working with Aborigines – that was the mark of a good woman. Poppy had resisted my attentions and given poor Francis the best two years of his life – that, too, was goodness in action, was it not? Making a moody man happy. (Or in my case making a happy man moody.)

  But what if there was more?

  As a novelist I’d never been much interested in secrets. Secrets were plot and only a moron could be interested in plot. As a reader, when I got to the spinning of a secret I closed the book. Who wanted to spend the next three days wondering what the secret was only to discover it hadn’t been worth keeping in the first place? As a man I’d been different. As a man I saw a secret every time my wife, or indeed her mother, left the house. As a man I gorged on secrets. But they were always secrets of the same sort. Secrets of betrayal. A consciousness of betrayal kept the juices flowing. Life was dull until the imagination had some betrayal to chew on. That I might have sent my imagination out on other errands I was gradually coming to realise. Age, was it? Or did this just happen to a man who was living alone with no women coming and going and therefore no one to betray him? Sex feeds on sex. So the opposite must be true – the more nothing happens, the more nothing happens. People with clean minds are simply people who hav
e never started on the ladder of lubricity. And I had been off the ladder long enough to be thinking spotless thoughts, in the pale, ghostly glow of which Vanessa and her mother began to appear as angels.

  What if their goodness, I asked myself, now that one was dying and another was as far away as it was possible to go, extended way beyond their concern for me and Francis? What if, for example, they’d returned to Knutsford as often as they had, and without asking me along, because . . . well, because Poppy, like Michael Ezra, had a son, which is another way of saying that Vanessa had a brother, living in a home . . . well, for the mentally disabled? What if lovingkindness explained their absences (as it would explain their being in Cheshire in the first place), and a deep underlying sadness explained the fractiousness which had latterly marred their relations with each other, never mind with me? Did he lie there, year after year, with his tongue lolling out of his mouth, wondering where the monkeys were, in a terrible pre-enactment of his mother’s dementia? Was that what Poppy was unable to forgive when she saw Vanessa’s film? Not the charge that she had been a sexual competitor, not me, nothing to do with me at all? But the implicit blame?

  Now I was on the what-if roundabout I couldn’t, or didn’t want to, get off. What if, after a long and harrowing illness, the son and brother had died, maybe in the arms of his mother or his sister, and the women had been left to mourn a life that had never adequately been lived, which somehow, with more love, they might have made a little better, a life, what is more, that called into question their own genetic soundness? Did Poppy castigate herself for Robert – let’s call him Robert – did she wonder what unsoundness in her had misflowered into this ghastly family anomaly? Had Robert been the reason, in fact, and never mind her nude posing with a cello, for the break-up of her marriage to Mr Eisenhower? And what if Vanessa was unable to forgive herself the shame she felt at having an imperfect brother? They had never once mentioned Robert to me. Aha! That denoted shame, surely. And perhaps a fear that I would run a mile if I knew what tainted blood coursed through the veins of the women I adored. Was that why Vanessa let me get away with my courtship of her mother – assuming she ever knew a thing about it – because she couldn’t begrudge her an attention which for a brief hour would allay the fears she had about herself ? Was I – no better than a fattened black spider made comfortable in this intricate web of consideration; no better than Beagle sitting self-satisfied in his cage, allowing troops of girl gorillas to pick fleas from his fur while he stared in admiration at his own blazing erection – the only one in our little clan thinking of no one but himself ?