The English American

by Alison Larkin

  “I’ve heard so much about you,” Clare says. “You sound sointeresting. ”

  There was a time when I would have cringed at this. There was a time when I wished, more than anything, that I could be lessinteresting and just blend in. Not anymore.

  Clare’s utterly sweet. She’ll be perfect for Miles. And then we’re interrupted by Jan—and Fiona and Fiona and Fiona.

  “Pippa!” Fiona says. “Pippa!!!!! Pippaaa!!!” Her long white arms curl around my neck. “How’s America?”

  “Oh, full of Americans,” I say, “but apart from that it’s fine.”

  It’s a cheap shot, but guaranteed to make everybody laugh. When they do, I feel like a traitor.

  “I’ve no idea how you can even think of living in that country,” someone says, burping. “Everything’s so excessive. The Americans always have to have the biggest car, or the hottest weather, or the biggest trade deficit.”

  “And they can’t talk properly, either!” someone else chimes in. “They can’t even ask for a glass of water! Last time I went to New York somebody actually said, ‘Do you want to hydrate yourself?’”

  Everyone guffaws. I’d forgotten how snobbish the British are about Americans. The put-down is delivered with an air of absolute superiority, which is ironic considering the fact that so many of their paychecks come from American companies.

  Now one of Rupert’s cricketing buddies is talking about an encounter he had the week before with that eternal target of British mirth, a lost American tourist.

  “I wanted to say, ‘Noooo. We don’t pronounce the “ham” in Buckingham Palace!’”

  “Why didn’t you?” I say.

  He burps. “Why didn’t I what?”

  “Why didn’t you say, ‘We don’t pronounce the “ham” in Buckingham Palace’?”

  “Pippa!”

  “I’ll tell you why,” I say. “Because what you British call politeness is really a kind of cowardice.”

  “YouBritish?” Fiona says, laughing, “Oh comeon, Pip. Next you’ll be telling me you love everything about America, including its appallingly imperialistic foreign policies.” She’s a little woozy, and I love her, but she looks so smug about it, and I just can’t stand it.

  “As opposed to what? Nonimperialistic British foreign policy? Wasn’t itwe British who marched into India and Africa and said, ‘Now listen here, you little brown buggers, we’re white, and you’re not, therefore we’re going to take over your country’? At least George Bush can be excused for being too stupid to understand the consequences of what he was doing when he went into Iraq. Tony Blair’s smart as a whip.”

  “Blair’s an idiot!”

  To most of the Americans I know, Blair looks like a genius next to George Bush.

  “At least we march against the war in this country, Pip, even if the bloody government doesn’t take any bloody notice,” Fiona says.

  She’s right to point this out. Nobody marches in America much. We send e-mails. It satisfies the impulse to protest without requiring any actual effort.

  I wonder, not for the first time, what happened to the children of the Americans who took to the streets in protest against the war in Vietnam.

  “Bloody Blair,” Fiona says. She can’t stand him. No one can stand him. But she is distracted from her tirade by Neville, who kisses her neck and pulls her off into the sitting room.

  Later, when pressed, surrounded by four Fionas, one Neville, one Rupert, and a Max, I say, “There are lots of good things about America.”

  “Like what?”

  Like the fact that I can do what I’m doing, performing in nightclubs, without anyone questioning me in any way. I’d never have been allowed to set foot on a comedy or cabaret stage in London. My accent’s too posh. No one would have let me get past the “fuck off back to your Cordon Bleu cookery” attitude, despite the fact that I really can’t cook.

  I’ve spent the last few months feeling homesick for England, but by the end of the evening, I feel homesick for the United States. Where I can be completely myself because no one has any preconceived ideas about me at all. Where the school I went to is irrelevant. Where no one cares who I vote for. Where enthusiasm is considered a good thing. Where everyone’s far too wrapped up in their own lives to care whether or not I have any fashion sense.

  But the people standing in this London kitchen have made up their minds about America, and they’re not going to change them. And so, to keep the peace, because it’s easier, when they ask again, “What’s good about America?” I take the easy way out and say, “George Clooney and…well, George Clooney.”

  The next morning, I call Mum and Dad from London as I’m leaving for the airport and tell them I’ll be back soon. Dad picks up the extension.

  “It was lovely to see you, darling,” they say.

  “It was lovely to see you, too.”

  That’s not true either. It wasn’t lovely at all. It was far too short a visit, and with so much left unsaid, painful, difficult, and complicated. But it’s what we say to one another, because we’re English.

  Charlotte and Rupert drive me to Heathrow, and I get on a plane and go back to America.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  IGET BACK TO A MESSAGEfrom Walt, who is no longer under house arrest: “They dropped the case. It was politically motivated, by the damn liberals of course.”

  When I call him back, he tells me his wife is away visiting family in Canada. I am to spend the weekend with him at his house in Marsama Beach, a charming, still relatively unspoilt seaside town, about an hour south of Washington.

  His wife fell in love with the area years ago. He agreed to buy the house and let her raise the children there, as long as he could base himself in Washington. He promised that if she ever really needed him, he would come. Otherwise he would fight his battles in Washington and elsewhere and see the family when he could.

  Walt is in the kitchen, cooking mussels in a marinara sauce when I arrive.

  The blue and pink Cape house has white shutters and a white picket fence around it. It’s less than a hundred yards from a small sandy beach, with tufts of light green grass growing out of the sand, and half a mile from a small jetty, with a rowboat tied to it.

  The furnishings in the house are simple, and very old American. Light spring colors, lots of patchwork, and sparse wooden furniture. It’s clean and bright and puritanical in feel.

  I’m particularly intrigued by the jar of Noxzema by the sink. I’ve never used soap out of a jar before. It feels soft against my skin and smells of antiseptic. There are handmade blue and white patchwork quilts on every bed. At the corner of the bedroom is an old wooden rocking chair. I feel as if I’ve walked into another century.

  Margaret’s kitchen leads out into a small backyard, where there’s a hose neatly coiled, hanging on a nail. I can picture Margaret insisting her children wash the sand off their feet after coming home from the beach, so they don’t bring it into the house. Just as Mum would do.

  Walt shows me pictures of his children when they were very young, along with their blond haired, blue-eyed, elegant and beautiful mother. No wonder Walt couldn’t choose. She was a knockout.

  When Walt shows me photographs of his children, I find myself staring at his daughter Ashley. She has copper red hair, just like mine, and looks very like I did when I was the same age.

  In one shot, she’s running around in a little white dress with a green silk sash. I wore one just like it when I was a three-year-old bridesmaid for the Luttman-Johnsons.

  In the next photograph, Ashley and Edwin are playing with a black Labrador, just as I used to play with Boris’s predecessor, who was also a black Lab.

  “She looks exactly like I did when I was five, and six, and seven!” I say. “And—oh, look! I had a haircut that made me look like a monk when I was about thirteen too! Oh Walt,” I say, turning to my American father. “When can I meet them?”

  “Soon,” Walt says.

  He’s been saying he’ll tell
them “soon” for nearly six months now. The knot inside me pulls a little tighter.

  The next morning Walt comes downstairs, wearing an oversized T-shirt and his boxer shorts. He looks old and smells of sleep and sweat. His nose is crusty and even halfway across the room I can tell his teeth are badly in need of brushing. We eat waffles and bacon.

  Later we go on a walk by the beach. “Do you prefer the beach or the mountains, Pippa?” he asks.

  “I like both.”

  “Thought so,” he says.

  Walt wants to show me where his father is buried, in a beautiful graveyard by the sea surrounded by lots of other dead people from Marsama Beach. We go to see his grave.

  I have no feelings about the man who was my grandfather, because I have never met him. He does not seem real to me. But I stand dutifully next to Walt as he stares at a piece of stone sticking out of the ground with tears in his eyes.

  Later we walk down toward the jetty, next to a dark gray wall covered in seaweed.

  Walt points to a teenage boy wearing a pair of white shorts and a dark blue sailing sweater. “That’s a Kennedy,” he says.

  “How do you know?” I say.

  “Look at the coloring,” he says, as if he were describing a horse. “And the shape of the chin. You usually find them up at the Vineyard. That one’s probably down here visiting Uncle Ted.”

  When Walt pulls into his driveway we notice another car parked outside.

  “It’s your brother.” Walt says. “Quick. Get down!”

  “I’m sorry?” I look at Walt to see if he’s joking. He isn’t.

  “Getdown !”

  I crouch under the dashboard in Walt’s car as Edwin gets out of his car. I hear Walt laugh and walk quickly across the path to his son. Their voices fade as he takes Edwin into the house.

  I’m kneeling on the floor of Walt’s car, next to an old newspaper, Walt’s orange Orioles jacket, and a Styrofoam coffee cup from the 7-Eleven.

  I feel dirty. lnsignificant. Unwanted. Second class. A secret that needs to be shut away. A problem that needs to be managed. For the first time since I arrived in America, I feel like an old-fashioned, bona fide bastard.

  Finally I hear Walt and Edwin come out of the house and what must be Edwin’s car drive away.

  When Walt opens the door to his car, he is laughing. “That was close, kid. You got your quick reflexes from my side of the family. Useful on the baseball field. Useful at times like this.”

  I can’t speak. And I can’t stop the tears. Walt stands at the door of the car.

  “Come on out,” he says. His voice is gruff. “Get out of the car.”

  My foot has gone to sleep. “I’m sorry,” I say, stamping my sleeping foot, which is being attacked by pins and needles now. “But I thought you were going to tell him about me.Them about me.”

  “I will handle this. I will tell them soon.”

  I no longer believe him.

  My leg is now bearable to stand on. I look up at Walt, pull my shoulders back, and stop crying.

  “You’ve been saying you’ll tell them soon ever since I met you.” My voice is polite and cool.

  My American father is entirely unused to being challenged, and he doesn’t like it. But something shifted when he hid me in the car. I may be his bastard, but I’m sure as hell not going to let him treat me like one.

  “It’s a bit hypocritical, isn’t it?” I say, ignoring his nonverbal signals to shut the hell up.

  “What?” Walt says.

  “You spend your life lambasting the liberals for their lack of morals and family values and talk a lot about integrity—your own, mostly—and then you shut your own daughter in the goddamn car because you’re too much of a goddamn coward to tell your son about the existence of his own sister!”

  I’ve gone too far. But I don’t care.

  “I hate it that you shut me in the car! I hate it! And I hate it that you’re a goddamn fucking Republican!”

  Walt doesn’t move and neither do I. When he speaks his voice sounds far away. It’s not a voice I recognize.

  The words hang in the air.

  “If we’d been liberals, we wouldn’t have hesitated,” Walt says.

  “What are you talking about now?” I say. “Nothing you say ever makes sense.”

  “You owe your life to the fact that we were Republicans.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If we were liberals, you’d have been aborted. Don’t you dare question my integrity again,” says the stranger in front of me.

  I walk into the house that Walt shares with his wife, get my handbag and my keys, and, leaving my overnight bag and clothes behind, without saying a word, or looking behind me, I get into Earl Grey, and head back to New York.

  In the car, the anger that has been building slowly inside me comes out in the most curious of ways. Instead of screaming, hitting the steering wheel—or the road at a hundred and ten miles per hour—I start writing a song. I can’t get the tune out of my head, and I sing it to myself over and over again until I know I won’t forget it. Now all I need are the right lyrics.

  And then I have them. I stop the car on the shoulder of the freeway to write them down. The only paper I have is a bag from Dunkin’ Donuts, but paper is paper.

  It doesn’t feel like I’m writing. It feels like I’m taking dictation.

  By the time I’m back in New York, I have a new act.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  IT’S STANDING ROOM ONLYfor the finals of the open mike competition at The Gold Room. I’m onstage and I’ve done well with my old material. Now it’s time for the new. I tell them I was adopted. I talk about finding my birth mother. Then I talk about Walt.

  “My birth father is a Republican who supports the Christian Coalition,” I say. “In fact, I am the product of one of his Christian coalitions.” The audience laughs.

  “I’ve always thought of infidelity as wrong, because it means betrayal of the most hurtful kind possible. But if my birth father hadn’t cheated on his wife, I would not exist. So, if there are any couples here this evening having a secret extramarital affair, I encourage you to breed.”

  While the audience is laughing and cheering, the prerecorded backing music starts to play. This isn’t a song written by someone I don’t know. This is a song written by me, when I was hurting so badly I thought I might not make it through.

  The tune starts softly, I speak over the first part, in my English accent, sounding a bit like Noel Coward. While I’m explaining that I was adopted in England and raised to be a lady, the tune is sedate. Polite. English.

  The moment I tell them I found my mother in Georgia, the tune becomes a wild piece of pure rock and roll, and I roam the stage, like an American rock star. My body is free. My voice is strong. I’m well and truly out of the proverbial bag.

  I’m a rock-and-roll redneck

  I’ve gone completely wild

  Once an English lady,

  Now a bastard child…

  If you treat me like a bastard,

  Then I’ll be a bastard,

  Yes, I’ll become a

  Bastard Chiiillllllllllllddddd

  YeaaaaaHHHHHHHHH

  At the end of the song, the crowd goes wild. Jack runs up to me as soon as I get offstage and, glowing with pride, says, “You did it!”

  There’s a talent scout in the audience that night who invites me to take part in a competition on cable TV. The first prize is five thousand dollars.

  All the stars seem to be aligning and so, determined to get things moving for Nick, too, I revisit every gallery in SoHo. It’s a sweltering hot afternoon in July, and I’ve been walking for hours. I find myself opposite the famous Souk Gallery. The sign on the door says Closed, but the door is slightly ajar and so I go in.

  The receptionist isn’t at her desk, but the air-conditioning is world-class, so I decide to wait. The only other person in the gallery is an old man sitting on a trendy glass bench. He’s looking at one of the most extrao
rdinary paintings I have ever seen.

  The painting has a subtle, raw sexuality about it. There’s a juicy nectarine in the foreground just within grasp and some eggs pressed hard together within a knotted handkerchief that folds around their curves like a teasingly revealing shirt. The heat of the scene makes an oil can flood over. In the background is the most mesmerizing view of what looks like the French countryside, painted in vivid green against a light pink and violet sky.

  The sexuality in Nick’s work is overt and shocking, but it doesn’t hold anything like the power of the painting in front of me.

  I know I am looking at the work of not just a good painter, but a great painter. It’s the kind of painting that makes you want to step into the world within it and close the door on this one.

  “It’s a Simon Gales,” the old man says.

  “It’s extraordinary,” I reply, continuing to stare at the painting.

  “Yes,” he says. “It brings me profound peace, while making me question the world I live in at the same time. I love to sit here and just spend time with it.”

  “I can see why,” I say. We look at the painting in silence.

  “Are you an artist?” the man says, after a few minutes.

  “Oh no,” I say. “I couldn’t whitewash a wall. I’m here because—well, I suppose I’m an art agent. Of sorts. I’ve spent the last few months trying to get an artist friend of mine an exhibition, but so far, no luck.”

  Then, because he seems genuinely interested, I tell him about Nick.

  “If I could just find a gallery that would take Nick’s work, it would give him the encouragement he needs to jack in the bank and spend his life doing what he truly loves.”

  “Are you doing what you truly love?”

  “Knocking on the doors of unbearably superior gallery owners who won’t even glance at Nick’s portfolio? No, I hate it. But I promised Nick I’d help him. Anyway, it’s just a sideline really.”

  And then, because he really wants to know, I tell him about the writing and performing I’ve been doing. As the afternoon turns to dusk, he asks me why I came to America, and I tell him, and he listens with interest.