First we went with Guy to FAO Schwartz. It was Saturday. I fell in love with a soft gold lion I thought Krassner might like (was I mad) and wanted to spend $200 on a thinking, talking robot in pink and green. But what was the point? The host of children I had thought to acquire through the Aardvark agency had failed to materialize: should I perhaps have one of my own? I trailed round after Guy and Lorna, feeling left out, as Guy rejected this marvellous and diverting toy on the ground of its ridiculous expense. He declared that he would spend no more than $10. If he showed himself lavish there would be no end to his little boy’s demands, or indeed to the mother’s, who would get it into her head that he earned more than he had declared to her lawyers. ‘My ex-wife’ had lately turned into ‘the mother’. She was being asked to submit to tests before Guy would acknowledge paternity. He had begun to suspect he wasn’t even the real father: the child looked so little like him, and on access days was difficult and sullen.
Come into my world, come into my world, droned the song from Mr Schwartz’s revolving dome, over and over, mesmerically. It occurred to me that Felicity might have other secret children hidden away: it also occurred to me, for I was gaining in wisdom, that if she had decided to hide them away it might be the best thing to leave them hidden. Come into my world and spend. It didn’t work with Guy. The place was crowded with the beautifully dressed of all ages. He was taking too long about not buying anything. Even Lorna was getting impatient with him, lamenting loudly the crude taste, the shock to the eye of everything on display. I thought it was all perfectly wonderful. But then I remembered how Home Alone 2, some of which was filmed in this store, was such a disappointment after Home Alone and I too began to feel tetchy. I overheard polite, persuasive mothers pretending not to be control freaks, saw weeping fathers on access leave, observed parents practising their false togetherness, heard the tantrums of their children and confirmed once again that motherhood was not for me. Let the world of the children’s toy shop be lost to me for ever. Let Holly go to her Rodeo Drive equivalent, let Harry go too, with their odd misbegotten child, let him not surface in my mind all the time, wondering what he was doing now, now, now and who with. With whom. Four o’clock on a shopping afternoon in Fifth Avenue is nine o’clock at night in London, when compulsive courtship rituals are hotting up and the drive to sexual completion glitters in both male and female eye.
* * *
Guy was persuaded to buy a Ping-Pong set for $12.50. When he had finally done we went back to the Wyndham and there found Charlie and the Mercedes waiting. Jack had said we were welcome to use the car: though alas he had the builders in at Passmore, and Joy’s guesthouse at Windspit was unavailable, so we would have to make our own arrangements as to where we were to stay during our visit to the Golden Bowl. But they would of course be delighted to see us.
In the few months since I had last seen him Charlie had turned into an American. His face seemed to have widened and flattened out: his glittering eyes to have become less wary. He no longer had the air of a mountain tribesman: he moved with a casual and athletic grace instead of the aggressive tautness of someone about to fire a Kalashnikov into the air for no particular reason, and which had so frightened and attracted Joy when she first encountered him. Charlie dwarfed Guy, it was apparent to both Lorna and me, and indeed to Guy, who disliked the look of him from the start. Guy, who normally seemed on a male enough scale, in Charlie’s presence appeared puny, narrow-shouldered and unhealthy. Some men (Krassner among them) have the gift of doing this to other men. Charlie’s teeth, once broken and blackened, now gleamed in a white, even, healthy row and spoke of health and vigour. Guy’s by comparison were crowded, cramped, and yellow. He would not see fit to waste money on his teeth, and anyway had that European propensity to believe that because God burdened you with a flaw - such as a too large nose or a double chin - it was your moral duty to live out your life according to His Will rather than to your liking. That cosmetic dentistry, let alone plastic surgery, was somehow cheating. That you were dealt a hand at birth and it was your life task to make the most of it, not organize a re-deal.
I saw Lorna staring at Charlie, her mouth dropping open, as if taken by surprise. I saw that Lorna could actually be quite attractive: that she was younger than she dressed and felt. That when her face pinkened round the edges, as it was doing now, she actually looked rather sexy. That if she’d have her hair done, and not just sensibly dunked in a basin and washed, it would turn into an asset rather than a celebration of dreariness. That if she’d wear clothes which didn’t shroud her but actually suggested she had a body as well as a mind, she wouldn’t have to put up with Guy. She could look outwards into the world and find a lover there. Forget being her mother’s daughter, she was her grandmother’s granddaughter as well.
‘Hi, Charlie,’ I said, as he tossed our cases into the trunk as if they weighed nothing. What all-American muscles. He had been working out.
‘Hi, babe,’ he said. ‘Howya doing?’
‘Just fine,’ I said, ‘just fine.’ But I wasn’t. I had loosed forces beyond my control.
‘So am I,’ he said, ‘yes sirree I am!’ He too would have seen Father of the Bride and looked in on a make-believe world in which people said babe and howya and yes, sirree, and contorted his life until it came true. We are all postmodernists now.
46
The drive to Rhode Island took three and a half hours. I sat next to Charlie. Lorna and Guy slept on and off in the back seat. They were jet-lagged and gave in to it. I knew how to fight against it and to put up with the way the world lurched into a muzzy cartoon and out again, without taking to sleep as a defence. Charlie’s voice drifted in and out of my consciousness. He had lost the doffing subservience of the illegal alien, so suitable to the job of the chauffeur, and with it the reluctance to talk. He was a US citizen now. His mother and grandmother were on their way to it, he told me, as were two of his male cousins, but Amira and Esma, both his wives - he was a Muslim - were having problems. He would have to acknowledge one and deny the other, since under US law only one wife at a time was acceptable. Marriages over here had to be serial. But which one to choose? He did not wish to upset either. Amira had sons and Esma daughters so the latter perhaps needed him more. But unless he made a decision soon the women might find themselves and their children deported. Bosnia under the UN was not a place to which anyone would want to return. Sarajevo was still without light and heat much of the time. I suggested that he formally marry one under US law, and then quickly divorce her and so be free to marry the next one. We were only talking scraps of paper, as the German Ambassador reproached the British, when on Germany’s invasion of Belgium in 1914 they insisted on taking a neutrality treaty seriously, and thus launched millions into mud and death, forget Princip the seventeen-year-old danger boy. Over the Top - a Harry Krassner film, 1995. I hadn’t cut that one, but I saw it three times. And that was before I’d even met him.
Charlie told me that now the builders were in Jack Epstein spent so much time over at Windspit that he, Charlie, was going to suggest his own family moved into Passmore. They needed more space; they were sleeping three to a room in the guesthouse above the Windspit garage: there was nowhere to put the animal feed. Passmore’s garage was full of used cars, which Jack, unable quite to retire, was hoping to sell. It was ridiculous. The builders were cheating Jack: his boys could do a better job of the woodwork. Summer was coming, of course, but the grazing was bad. The soil had to be tilled, and left, and fertilized, and tilled again. It would take a couple of years. No-one in the area knew how to look after land. Esma’s sister Drusa was pregnant again: no not by Charlie, of course not, but by a US citizen, which might turn out to helpful in solving her immigrant status. Drusa had been working in an old persons’ home in Mystic: one of the old men had put her in the family way. Charlie had thought she’d be safe enough, but no. American men of all ages turned out to be sex fiends, forever at addiction clinics.
I felt a chill up my spine. I ask
ed Charlie to turn the heating up. He did. The chill didn’t go away. I asked him what the name of the home was.
‘The Rosemount,’ he said. ‘Not much of a place but a job’s a job.’ I didn’t want to hear anything more, but he told me, once he’d negotiated the Mercedes through New Haven and on to Route 91. He’d been ferrying the old gentleman about, mostly to see my grandmother, but sometimes to the Foxwoods Casino, where Drusa had been working until her illegal status emerged and she was fired. Mr Johnson had obligingly put him in touch with Maria who ran the Rosemount, who’d found a place for Drusa. She got $8 an hour, which for an illegal wasn’t bad.
‘Are you trying to tell me that Miss Felicity’s friend is the father?’ I made myself ask. Best not to ask questions at all if the answer might not be to your liking. Which is of course why questions like, Do you love me more than her? or Where were you last night? are best avoided. Charlie glanced at me sideways and I caught a glimpse of the weathered mountain tribesman still there beneath the smooth American tan.
‘For only a couple of thousand dollars,5 he said, casually, avoiding the question, ‘there are ways of getting Drusa citizenship which don’t entail marriage. A shame to mess Miss Felicity about, when she’s so happy. Quite the Miss Daisy, I thought, that first time I drove her to the funeral.’
Oh yes, Miss Daisy, the film held in common, the cultural resonance, the point of reference, all there in Charlie’s head already, and no doubt in Amira’s, and Esma’s, and the mother and the two male cousins, and Drusa’s new baby imbuing Hollywood by osmosis in the womb. And maybe the sheep and the goats and the cows on the grazing that needed improving would be acting like cartoon characters next. There’d be Bambis abounding in Connecticut of course, but at least no Dumbos because of the climate, and no Babes either because of Islam. (Not a film which did well in the Middle East.) Foxwoods was peopled by the cast from Pocahontas and Charlie himself, ploughing up the land, was Davy Crockett.
‘Mummy,’ I’d said to Angel once, ‘which is my back ear?’
Davy, Davy Crockett,
King of the wild front ear.
Or conversely bloody tears flow, as the I Ching put it and Guy had mimicked, as I suddenly realized, only this morning. Enough to make your eyes weep blood. Blackmail. Let ’em flow! Let ’em weep! Let ’em roll!
‘In matters of paternity,’ I said vaguely, ‘truth is important. No-one should hide anything.’ Charlie shrugged, as if it wasn’t important. It had been a good try, and one he would have been ashamed to have neglected. We turned off at the Hartford Interchange.
Behind us Lorna woke with a little cry. Charlie looked over his shoulder and gave her a smile of glittering intimacy. If he found himself technically unmarried here, dual US/UK nationality might suit him. You can have more than one wife at a time if it’s your religion and you’re living in Britain. He could end up with three legitimate wives, I could see that. They’d all be living in Twickenham, in Happiness, ploughing up the garden and a fishnet cast across the Thames. And the new Lorna might even take her mother Alison back to live at home: Amira and Drusa, from the sound of it, had better backs than Lorna. I needed a rest from the living nightmare which was worse than any I could encounter while asleep. I slept.
47
It was four in the afternoon before William and Felicity got to Foxwoods. The place had emptied out: colours seemed muted and the music quieter. Half the tables were closed. Such dealers as remained worked quietly, and made no jokes; strength was being conserved: the music was silenced. II faut reculer pour mieux sauter. You could hear the determined slap, slap of cards. The revolving car on the pedestal was being changed for a newer, brighter model. The cocktail waitresses had time to lounge around: bosoms seemed to droop as if personal energy alone had ever kept them up. One girl, as Felicity watched, stooped to lay down her drinks tray on the floor and press a licked finger on a ladder in tights stretched over plump legs: an official in a blazer with brass buttons stopped to reproach her. Her upturned face seemed pale, tired, anxious and too young. She's got a child back home, thought Felicity; she'll do anything not to lose this job. Once I was like that. There were no bursts of laughter from the tables, no whoops or yells: and from the slots just an unexcited, murmuring rattle.
‘It’s the afternoon shift,’ said William. ‘The out-of-work crowd. It’s serious business now. Eat or go hungry, and no credit for anyone. You’ve got to wait ’til ten o’clock before the big boys come in, for the fun and the laughter and the big winners.’
‘And the big losers,’ she said.
‘Don’t even think of it,’ he said. ‘Let alone mention it. I feel lucky today. Morphic resonance.’
‘I didn’t know that had anything to do with gambling,’ she said.
She felt fidgety and cross: disappointed. ‘I thought it was about cows knowing about cattle grids without being told.’
‘Same thing. The way we all know everything, if we don’t look at it direct. But my luck hasn’t come in yet.’ He seemed to be sniffing the air to get the feel of the wind. ‘We’ll wait a bit. We’ll drink coffee.’
‘Comes in like breast milk, does it?’ she inquired. ‘Just comes flooding in? You can feel it?’
‘I like that you’re tetchy,’ he said. ‘It means you’re in tune. This place, when it’s lying low, ticking over, the tide ebbing, waiting to come crashing back. Even affects the coffee machines. They get no strength into the cup. It’ll be okay. Don’t worry about it.’
A woman came up to him in the cafe and said, ‘Can I just touch you?’ and William smiled and nodded, and the woman, who had bleached hair and chipped purple nail polish touched his lapel and said, ‘I really felt that. It jumped from me to you.’ Then she added, apologetically, because Felicity was looking surprised, ‘William’s on a lucky streak. I watched him move from eight thousand down, to thirty up, just in a couple of hours.’
‘Really?’ asked Felicity, politely.
‘Upped his league to purple and beyond. Way to go. I guess I just don’t have the nerve.’ She moved off and William said, ‘Poor Kathleen. One of the natural born losers.’
‘I wouldn’t give my luck away like that,’ said Felicity. She was feeling better. The tide goes out so far, then it has to come in again. Though William was right, the coffee was pale and thin. ‘Sometimes you’ve got to take chances,’ he said. ‘You know you think like a gambler?’
‘Always have been one, I guess,’ she said. ‘I just didn’t know it.’ A Gamblers Anonymous poster on the wall behind them said Winners Know When to Quit. Felicity suggested that they move to the next table if he was waiting for his luck to come in. He said no, since the poster spoke of winners it had to be okay, so they stayed. Felicity said, ‘While we wait for a following wind, tell me why your last wife divorced you. Was it gambling?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to tell you ’til I was sure about you. Some people get peculiar about Casinos.’
‘And the first two wives?’
‘They both died. Luck of the draw. After that a guy feels like defying fate. The first one was cancer, the second just walked out into the road one day. She was a lot younger than I was. She was thinking of something else. She was on her way home from the doctor. He’d told her she was pregnant. If I’d gone with her it wouldn’t have happened. But I was a teacher in those days. I was at work.’
‘That’s the terrible thing about employment,’ she said. ‘The way it interferes with real life.’
He was grateful for the lightness. He took her hand.
‘I went for grief counselling,’ he said. ‘You know what I blame those people for? They never made me laugh. If someone had made me laugh I would have got better sooner. You make me laugh. You might even cure me of all this.’ He nodded down towards the Casino. Another row of tables opened: an extra row of lights drew punters away from the quarter slots to the ten dollar.
‘I might not want to,’ she said. ‘I might like it too.’
‘Frankly, it
’s madness,’ he said. ‘Another world. But it gets familiar. You get to know the regulars. If people talk here they really talk: you’re down to the basics. Other people’s lives. Especially on the graveyard shift, that’s just before dawn, when there’s very little hope left. Last post for the drunks and the drugged and the desperate. I keep away from the tables then. You’ve got to be disciplined. No use thinking one last throw, one last deal, one more spin, and all will be well. You’ve got to set about these things with a bit of energy. You can get too tired to want to spend.’
He snapped his finger at a waitress with bright pink cheeks and a blonde plait of hair around her head and ordered a hamburger. It was out of mealtime, but Miss Felicity ordered one too. Back at the Golden Bowl there’d be salad and low-cholesterol quiche.
‘We were talking about your wives,’ she said. ‘The last one, please.’ ‘I got to fifty on my own and then I married Meryl. I wasn’t gambling then. I took her up to Passchendale: she loved it, her daughter Margaret didn’t. Nothing to do. And I suppose I got bored and came back to this place and ran up a few debts. Nothing too bad.’
* * *
But then Meryl, egged on by Margaret, had joined a programme for the wives of gamblers, and they’d worked on her and soon she’d begin to get hysterical if he so much as left the house, let alone came back with the dawn, no matter how much he had in his pocket. She thought winning was somehow worse than losing. Finally Margaret had talked her mother into getting a divorce. The judge awarded Meryl and Margaret Passchendale. A bad day’s play. And after that what was left of his family held the loss against him. Margaret had just let the place stand and rot, warts, sculptures, paintings and all.
Fay Weldon - Novel 23 Page 30