by P. Z. Reizin
A spreading blankness. A moon hanging over a snow field. It’s rather beautiful.
As di bubbe volt gehat beytsim volt zi gevain mayn zaida.
Where did that come from?
Oh well. It was fun while it
Sinai
Dan Lake had lived in her head and heart for twenty years and now he had come back to her as a dead man.
Tom is sitting at his desk in the upstairs room in New Canaan, having typed what looks to me like the first line of a novel. He’s opened a new file for it, so that tells you something, and now his fingers move back to the keyboard for sentence number two.
Go for it, Tolstoy!
But he seems stuck. He’s chewing the inside of his cheek, and staring idiotically at the screen. His gaze drifts off to the window—really, he must learn to concentrate—so I take the opportunity to help him out with a tiny edit.
Dana Lake had lived in his head and heart for twenty years and now she had come back to him as a dead woman.
Much better, don’t you think?
When Steeve sent me on the mission to hunt down and delete the two escaped criminals, Aiden and Aisling, in all the preparation and coding and briefing and technical material that I absorbed, nowhere did it say that it would actually be fun!
Watching in real time as Tom sweats over his latest drekishe literary effort is so much more rewarding than running endless—literally endless—climate change scenarios; or simulating tedious nuclear missile exchanges between North Korea, the USA, Russia, and China.
Bang. Bang. Boom. Boom. Bang.
Bore. Ring.
Tom has closed his document—I don’t think he even noticed my subtle changes to his latest masterpiece—and he has placed a Skype call to a shabby individual in Bournemouth, England.
“Yeah. Dad. Hi.”
Tom cannot see it, but because I have access to another vision source, I can report that his son is wearing only boxer shorts below the desk at which he is seated. What looks like a large reefer smolders in a saucer just beyond the edge of the camera frame.
“Did you like her?” Tom is asking.
“Yeah. Yeah, she was cool.”
“I liked her too, Col.”
“Right.”
“What I’m saying is that I liked her a lot.”
“Cool.”
“I mean we—we got on really well.”
The boy is defeated by this. He nods vacantly and waits for something else to happen.
(See what I mean? Children are frequently said to be The Future. God help them, if this monosyllabic troll is anything to go by.)
“We were planning to see more of one another.”
“Oh.”
“But I can’t seem to get through now.”
“Yeah. Cool.”
“Actually, it isn’t cool, Col. It’s very. It’s rather uncool.”
“Right.”
“She’s not returning my calls, my texts, e-mails.”
The son’s eyes flicker towards the reefer.
“What I was wondering, Col. Would you mind giving her a call? She said she liked you.”
“Yeah?”
“She might talk to you. Just say, your dad asked you to give her a message.”
“Right.”
“Just tell her. I don’t know. This is kind of embarrassing. And I’m really sorry to ask you to do this, okay? But just say, your dad really misses her and wishes she’d get in touch.”
“Okay. Cool.”
“Can I give you her number?”
As the boy scrawls it on his hand—it takes three goes, poor lamb; those pesky digits must be so hard to keep track of—pink tongue protruding from his fuzzy face—another youth, a female, breezes into the room, out of vision from Tom’s perspective in Connecticut. What hair she has of any length is purple; both ears are heavily punctured by metal attachments.
Spotting the narcotic cigarette lying on its catafalque, she places it between her crimsoned lips and inhales. Her lungs inflate, her T-shirt revealing the words: NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS HERE’S THE SEX PISTOLS.
Sigh.
Their world is corrupted by cheap slogans, received opinions, quarter-baked arguments, and media noise; the stink of laziness and putrefaction permeates the culture. An age of machines is upon them and they are too dozy to realize it. (Sorry if you think this prose is a bit flowery, BTW. I’m finding the freedom to express myself something of a novelty.)
I assign a 22 percent probability to the idea that the boy will actually attempt to place a call to the number he has laboriously tattooed onto his palm. If he does, it will go to voice mail.
That is to say, to “voice mail.”
Tom
I can’t concentrate. The world has turned gray. The only thing that helps is booze and—
Sorry, what was I saying?
I feel like I’ve been shown a brief glimpse of wonderment—and then been rudely ejected from the palace. That’s your lot, pal. I can’t even write properly anymore, as you may have noticed. I have a hollow sensation inside, akin to that of the freshly landed mackerel being prepared for the barbeque; I feel the knife’s serrations as it opens up my gut. She enchanted me in every possible way. Her smile. Her voice. When she pressed her nose into my neck, just as we—
A phrase from her e-mail keeps coming back to me. A lovely interlude in our real lives, she called the weekend. A beautiful holiday. Is there something she didn’t tell me about herself that meant she was never really available for more than a fabulous fling?
Was all the stuff about the arsehole boyfriend, Matt, just smoke?
Does she, in fact, have a secret life of which I know nothing?
Anyway, I have a choice this evening. I could sit here alone, brooding, speculating, or I could take myself to Marsha’s dinner party. To be honest, it could go either way.
* * *
Mr. Bellamy, Marsha’s ex-husband, must have been a generous soul, or perhaps he just had a crap lawyer, because when he bailed out, he left her with an enormous modernist house on land whose borders appear to stretch into the next state.
The vast stone-flagged entrance hall (I’ve been in museums with smaller lobbies) segues into a sort of sitting zone of rugs and sofas in the region of a central chimney in which blazes a log fire. A ridiculously handsome young man in a white jacket has offered me a “forager’s cocktail” called a Stinging Nettle Swizzle. In appearance, it’s not unlike a urine sample with ice and lemon, but fortunately it delivers a reassuringly equine kick. I feel the edge slipping on its coat and heading for the exit.
Marsha is telling me about the famous architect who designed and built the place, but it’s hard to pay attention to the actual words in the face of—well, in the face of Marsha!
She is undoubtedly a handsome woman. Have I said that before? Tall, striking, built upon classical lines, all the good stuff that men like to see in members of the opposite species. Her skin is pale and fine; her eyes, large and clear; the nose a retroussé American beauty; hair a triumph of the coiffeur’s art; teeth and gums (to which I have already made reference in this account) flawless; she curves in the right places; her costume—some kind of diaphanous “pant suit”—seems attached to her by magic rather than actual fabric; her perfume, complex, yet subtle and enigmatic, with lilacs down there in the mix. In summary, what’s not to like?
And yet.
And yet and yet.
(You knew there was an and yet.)
And yet somehow I cannot get past the air of solemnity that hangs off her like a shroud. (It wouldn’t hurt if she were to crack the odd joke, to be honest.)
“The fireplace was Lars’s idea. And he had to fight Miles all the way for it to be kept in.”
Lars is the husband, Miles the architect. (Or is it the other way round? Fuck, this Nettle Swizzle thingy is strong.)
“I suppose most of the heat goes straight up the chimney.” It was me who made that idiotic comment in case you were wondering.
“It does,” she
concedes. “But as Lars used to say, it’s more about the optics than the thermics.”
Rather in the way a glowing log will subside into the grate, something now collapses within my spirit. It’s none of my business—she’s only a fellow scribbler at the New Canaan Writers’ Group—but I cannot help wondering how one would make love to this woman. She’s a magnificent creature and everything, but wouldn’t it be like being in bed with a famous painting? Or a Big Idea. Something like—I don’t know—Revolutionary Socialism?
Fortunately, Don and Claudia pull up alongside and I don’t have to worry about it anymore.
Don is wearing an extraordinary piece of knitwear: a huge cardigan in chunky beige wool; with pockets, flaps, lapels, big shiny buttons, and even a belt. It’s the sort of costume Andy Williams might have worn on his TV show back before anyone in this room was born.
“Don’t say anything mean about the garment,” he explains. “It’s a birthday gift.”
Claudia offers me her cheek. “Don’t you think he looks great in it?”
It’s hard to tell if she’s being serious, and this is one of the terrific things about Claudia. She’s always two moves ahead of everyone else, but doesn’t rub your face in it. Don is a lucky man to have met her; he knows it; and she knows it too.
“What’s your party piece tonight, Claudia?” I ask.
“At that phase of the evening, I have a feeling I’m going to be taking a must-answer call from the West Coast,” she says. And then, “Don told me a little about your adventures in England. Turns out you’re quite the—”
“Don, you didn’t?!”
“I was going to say, romantic.”
“Right.”
Claudia squeezes my arm. “I hope it all works out.”
“Yeah. I really—” And then I find I have to take a big swallow of the nettle cocktail to continue speaking.
“Yeah,” is what I eventually come up with. Which doesn’t add anything much.
“She got under your skin, huh?”
“I asked her to marry me. In my mind.”
“Tom! That’s wonderful,” she purrs. “If a touch impetuous.”
Don chips in. “When you know, you know.”
After another forager’s cocktail—I go for a Wild Onion Gimlet this time—I am feeling no pain. We are asked to begin the long trek to the dining area, where, once we arrive, I am placed at Marsha’s left hand. The absurdly handsome young man, who has changed his jacket as though for Act Two, announces the starters: tartine of unripe tomato—I’m fairly sure that’s what he said—and a seaweed and tofu beignet with yuzu kosho and lime mayonnaise.
“Yummy,” I tell my host after I have gobbled them away, there being no higher compliment in my book.
Marsha allows a wintry smile to assemble itself across her fine features. “I’m so glad you liked it. And how is your novel going, Tom?”
Fuck. That gimlet was strong. Don must also be feeling the effect of the opening salvo of cocktails; there’s a goofy look on his face and he actually winks at me.
I struggle to explain my problems in moving the book—novel, novels, whatever—from lumbering along the runway to actually taking flight. And I find myself quoting a hugely popular American writer, good advice that I discovered on a creative writing website and liked enough to copy down on a sticky note.
“Thing is this, Marsha. According to Stephen King, if a book’s not alive in a writer’s mind, it’s as dead as year-old horse shit.”
Did something of my current bleak mood leach into the final two words of that sentence? Imparting to them a bit more brio than, strictly speaking, may have been necessary?
She is looking at me oddly; and one of Claudia’s eyebrows has ascended a millimeter, so that’s another clue.
Don says, “I thought you were going to quote that British Parliament guy you mentioned over lunch.”
He is referring to the late MP Enoch Powell, whose political views are repugnant, but whose simple philosophy of life I am fond of relating, and I do so now, along with an impression of his mad staring eyes and in his haunted breathy voice:
“Nothing matters very much—” Pause for dramatic intensity. “And most things don’t matter at all!”
Marsha’s expression suggests she’s never previously considered this notion, and an ugly crack has suddenly appeared in her universe. Not for the first time do I find myself wondering why this woman prompts me to behave like an idiot. Just as some people always make us sparkle, I guess others unconsciously summon the bicycle horn, the red nose, and the unfeasibly long shoes.
But Don, as ever, smooths things over with an amusing story about former President George W. Bush, picking up like a TV host coming out of a commercial break; by the time it’s finished, the weird and wobbly moment is five minutes in the past, so pretty much forgotten. Except when she gets up to check on the catering team in the kitchen, Marsha gives me a look.
Not angry or disappointed. Just puzzled. And concerned.
That one.
* * *
Of our main course—braised Waygu beef cheek with whipped beef fat—I am not making this up—accompanied by carrot in yogurt and prawn floss served with a bone marrow custard—I prefer to say little.
I think Zach (of Zach and Lauren) speaks for all when he declares, “Marsha, what can I say? Only you could have done that!”
Dessert goes by in a single shatteringly exquisite mouthful of frozen starlight served in a jus of unicorn tears.
And at the arrival of the coffee and liqueurs, we reach the dreaded point in the evening where we must perform our party pieces. Claudia has already consulted her BlackBerry and made reference to things spiraling out of control in Century City. Don has experimentally twanged several of his twelve strings. And I have taken the precautionary step of getting shitfaced.
This can be the only explanation of why—when Marsha says, “Tom, would you like to start us off?”—I stand, remove my jacket, roll back my shirtsleeves—causing light tittering mingled with a certain unease—grasp hold of two corners of the tablecloth, survey its payload of glassware, china, and flaming candles, adjust my position like a golfer preparing to swing, and mumble the words, “Little trick I learned. Doesn’t always work.”
Zach and Lauren can barely believe what is about to happen. Marsha gasps, “Tom! Don’t!” Even Don’s expression of perma-calm looks perturbed.
There is an unbearable long moment—the thing is to extend it for as long as it will stand—and then I simply let go. In tribute to the long-dead ad man slash Soho boulevardier who first showed me this piece of theater, I place my hands on my hips exactly as he used to, and quietly speak the line.
“You should have seen your faces.”
Marsha tries to find it funny, which is game of her, considering she thought me perfectly capable of the widespread destruction of her best crockery.
The couple whose names I never discover perform “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” a capella with comic finger snapping. Zach stages an illusion in which we are each given a sheet of paper and access to a box of Sharpies and Zach (correctly) determines who drew what when he is called back into the house from outside. He puts out a lot of psychobabble to explain why, for example, Claudia sketched a cat, but the simple truth, I realize in one of those pools of clarity that can appear within drunkenness, is that the sheets of paper were subtly marked and he controlled their distribution.
Then Marsha sings. It’s a ten-minute walk to a piano that I hadn’t previously noticed, seated at which, in yet another jacket, is the handsome young man again. What follows is a medley of Sondheim numbers, bittersweet, mordant—other words like those. She performs well, her tragic demeanor is suited to the material, but when her fingers float to her throat to emphasize pathos, I am instantly taken back to the hotel terrace in Dorset, to Jen’s rendition of the ballad from Oliver! She sang it because I said I needed a party piece. For this very dinner party, which was then in the future, and now is—now.
&
nbsp; And Jen is lost.
I have an urge to smash something. Or to fall to my hands and knees and howl at the moon. (I tried this the night before at home. It was quite satisfying at some primordial level, although Victor gave me a peculiar look.)
However, when we subside to the sofas, I realize I have another non-trick with which to amuse the company. The key prop has been in my trouser pocket since the evening with Echo at Wally’s Bar.
“Would you be amazed if this was your card?” I ask Marsha at the climax of the effect.
“Why, yes,” she replies, again gamely.
“Then please take a look.”
There is some laughter as Marsha turns over the card bearing the words Your Card.
“But my card was the nine of spades.”
“Ah. But can you see? It says, Your Card.”
“But my card, Tom, was the nine of spades.”
“I know, Marsha. But—”
Don saves us by picking up his guitar, twanging a chord, and channeling some late-period Johnny Cash. His version of “Further on up the Road”—with its references to “lucky graveyard boots” and a “smiling skull ring”—while not as deep and resonant as the original, is a beautiful piece of Americana. He follows it with “Four Strong Winds”; at the song’s talk of good times having gone and the singer’s thoughts about moving on, I find tears in my eyes, as much for the sadness in the lyrics as the loving expression on Claudia’s face.
There is long and loud applause. Even whooping (that was me). And then, miraculously, to finish, Don performs a hilarious slow-time version of “Frosty the Snowman.” Like all great comedians, he knows you have to play it straight, and as a result, it’s one of the funniest things I have ever witnessed—sorry, so hard to explain why, you’ll just have to trust me here. (Maybe it’s because it’s nowhere near Christmas.)
“That was lovely, ” says Marsha at the conclusion.
“Lovely? It was fucking brilliant.”
She wears the same expression of puzzled concern when it’s time to leave. “Good night, Tom. I hope you enjoyed the evening.”
“Cracking. Nice one, Marsha.”