‘Then later,’ Martin continued, ‘we went to a bar.’ It was Dave’s favourite because it was the last place he saw the Velvet Underground and he’d been mourning their break-up ever since. ‘So we sit down in our little booth and Dave shouts across the table: “So, Maggie, what do you think of New York? Ten best things you’ve seen . . .”’
The bar: a booth with red cushioned seats and a dirty tablecloth. Dave and Linda sit opposite Martin and Maggie. The vocals hover, Emmylou Harris in her hour of darkness.
‘I saw Diane Arbus at MOMA,’ Maggie says. ‘You should go, it’s incredible.’
Dave shrugs. ‘I don’t really go above Fourteenth . . . I mean downtown, best things downtown.’
Here Linda interjects: ‘He means, “What do you think about me?”’
‘Well, that’d be a start; I’d like to know what she thinks about me. I can tell you what I think about her . . .’
Linda leans close and whispers something in Dave’s ear that wipes the smile from his face. Then she turns back to Maggie.
‘Tell me, Maggie, art school. What is it you want to paint?’
‘Portraits, I think.’ And when she sees that Linda is waiting for more: ‘But in a context or setting. I like the idea of showing people’s affinity with objects.’
Linda stares back blankly. ‘And did you like Hannah Lee?’
‘Well, yeah, I saw that footage of Pollock. She extends that, the act of creating, to the whole body, but I think in a way she’s renouncing the physical reality.’
Linda nods and pats her hand. ‘Did you read that somewhere?’
‘Sorry.’ Maggie recoils. ‘That sounded banal.’
‘Bullshit it did.’ Dave grasps Linda’s hand. ‘You’re a patronising bitch.’
This is what they do to newcomers, Dave and Linda: they fuck around with the tone and tempo, keep moving the posts. It is sport, and they are champions. One minute you are king, the next the gum stuck to their shoes. The worst is when you disappear and they don’t see you anymore. All of it makes you hungry to be king again, because when you are king, they are loyal and attentive and you are all that matters and everything you ever wanted to be. Like right now, Dave and Linda turn it around, start peeling away Maggie’s story as though she is a present to unwrap: from backpacking in Athens all the way back to the place of her birth. When Linda hears that her first home in Australia was a migrant camp, her eyes light up.
‘I knew you weren’t silver spoon like Dave and your lawyer boy here. That is pretty cool. And you are pretty cool. I drink to you, to you and your mother.’ Then: ‘What about you, Davey? What did you think of the show?’
‘Personally, I’m not sure what we were meant to get out of it apart from a good look at a nice bush.’
Linda doesn’t bite straight away. The argument goes something like this:
Dave: ‘Okay, so she is taking the piss out of Pollock . . .’
‘Well, you assume it’s derivative: it all has to come from the great white master.’
‘Derivative, subversive . . . I’m on your side, remember.’
‘You think you are. You want to be. Why don’t you go fight the junta, baby?’
It is the argument Martin’s heard before: Linda versus Dave; God save America versus Dave save the Sandinistas, or whoever, wherever. Linda’s cause was always ‘the deeply fucked-up shit’ happening under her own nose—the energy crisis, the censorship bill . . . Dave didn’t like giving priority to the back doorstep. ‘Every day people are being massacred and you are talking about lining up for petrol. Perspective is all I am saying.’
‘I am talking about going to jail for describing the act of fucking!’
In the middle of the batting back and forth, Martin can sense Maggie watching him. He turns around to her, expecting that she is leaning back against the booth because maybe she’s out of her depth, maybe a bit in awe—maybe she wants him to explain some of the politics—but as she smiles back at him through the dim, smoky light, he sees that none of that is true. Her eyes are narrowed, fixed, and they are asking not what it all means but what he thinks of it. Where do you stand? Her quick glance at Dave and Linda is distant, curious, before she leans in to ask: ‘Do you take sides?’ And Marty is struck with the sense that to her, right now, the answer to this is all that matters. That was the moment—later he could point to it—the moment that with a fixed gaze and a few words she positioned him outside the fray, and she alongside him. Of course, at the time none of this formed, the words just a warm and invisible breath, the gestation of what would later become her gift. For many years the moment would be forgotten, or recast as a simple come-on, and then one day he would begin to remember it again, this and what came next. Martin would remember, and then, finally, it would be everything.
‘Jesus, baby, I’m far too straight here,’ Linda says as she starts beating the table like a drum. ‘Let’s get sorted and get out of this place. Let’s take Maggie out to play.’
So Dave pushes the tablecloth to one side and is lining up right there in the booth. When they are done Linda crawls up and straddles him, part of the show. That’s what it is to Linda . . . ‘Linda Lou, I do love you.’ Dave sings it like it’s the chorus of a song. ‘Yaouwww!’ She throws her head back and spies Martin watching out of the corner of her eye and says it is time for the party.
That is next. New York, 11 August 1973.
‘So it’s true,’ Ethan said. ‘My parents snorted speed on a table in the middle of a bar in New York City.’
Martin smiled. ‘That we did.’
‘And Linda—that night I mean: you had a thing for Linda?’
The smile faded again but this time the question was answered. ‘Ethan, any man that walked past Linda in those days had a thing for her.’
Martin got to his feet then and walked to the other side of the lawn. When he turned back, he did not move, but looked with uncertainty at the ground in front of him.
‘Dad, you okay?’
‘I suppose so, yes. Looks like I will be doing a bit of gardening, that’s all.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Did your mother tell you? I have had my last day on the bench, Ethan. I have had my last day in court.’
‘You don’t know that.’
But he did know. He knew that what he said to his son was true, and now in the back garden it weighed on him like something that had fallen from the sky. It was farewell to feuding companies with ineptly drawn contracts, to carjackers and people smugglers, and to all the rest of them. It was farewell to a courtroom falling silent in his presence. Justice Martin Field would never be asked to deliver judgment again.
The quiet was broken by a call from inside for Ethan to carry the sleeping Finn to the car.
Martin followed to say goodnight. As he reached the car, the boy awoke and held out his arms. Martin leant down and kissed him through the open door.
‘Next time we’ll go fishing,’ Martin whispered.
The boy squeezed his neck. ‘And we’ll do the Bear Hunt by heart, without reading any.’
‘Ah yes, that damn river: splash, splosh . . . or hang on, was it swishy, swashy?’
The boy laughed. ‘No, Grandie, that’s the grass.’
In the middle of the night, when Martin awoke, he walked out to the back lawn and knelt down at the edge of the garden bed.
Tompkins Square Park en route to the party, the paths unlit: a big dark path. Maggie takes her shoes off and stands on the grass. Swishy swashy . . . A black guy tells her she better keep her shoes on. ‘You want to get on, lady?’
Down the dark path, stumble trip. Stumble trip.
And into the subway tunnel where the low light flickers and a homeless woman lights a match and prays to the fire.
The night scrambles with the day like a dream. They are back in the loft, then the garden, stepping over rubble, splintered wood and scraps of metal. The eyes on the wall are windows and the windows are burnt-out holes. Boys’ faces blur under the fluorescent ligh
t like ghosts.
His chest is tapping, the sky black and endless.
Move on, Martin. That is his thought. Hurry up and get to the end of it.
Chapter 12
Maggie made a pot of tea and sat down with Martin and his newspaper at the kitchen table and they talked about the doctor’s advice, about rest and exercise and vitamins. She then moved to the subject at the front of her mind.
‘I thought I might go up to the street where you had your accident, to find the boy.’
Martin squinted into the steam rising from his tea. ‘This is the boy with the dog . . .’
‘Yes. The ambulance officer said the old woman who was with the boy went into a house a door back from the cross-street.’
Martin put his cup down. ‘It isn’t the sort of neighbourhood you doorknock until you find the right house.’
She nodded. Of course, she had thought of that herself. It was in part the reason she hadn’t yet gone.
‘These people lead difficult lives, Maggie. I dare say the least of their worries is losing that dog.’
When he saw that she was ready to argue he put up his hand. ‘I’m not saying don’t go, just leave it until a weekend when Ethan can go with you.’
It was a sensible suggestion, and reason enough to put it out of her mind and listen instead to his caustic commentary on the letters to the editor in the newspaper—today either lauding or lambasting the backroom deals to form government—and, as she listened, to dare to hope that if their life was to be housed within these walls, there was no reason it could not resemble what came before.
When only minutes later the tangled neurons in Martin’s brain steered him through a door into a different place and time, there was little hint of it. Still he sipped his tea and turned the page, then stopped. In the Health and Science section there appeared an article on ways to beat cellulite, and above the article, a waist-down photograph of a woman in a swimsuit. Maggie was only half listening when she heard: ‘Poor old Sonia.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Sonia Kirby. Arse like a bruised peach.’
Sonia Kirby was the wife of the judge who had his chambers next to Martin’s. At tedious functions to welcome or farewell other judges, the four of them had gravitated to each other for a while before thinking better of it and gravitating away.
‘What are you talking about?’
Martin looked up from the page and smiled—a smile of warm welcome, as though Maggie had just entered the room—then he turned his eyes back down to the photograph, and up again, waiting for an answer to come to him. When it did, it was this: ‘She complained about it. Cellulite. She wanted to get it sucked out.’
‘When on earth did she say that?’
Again a smile, though this one more wary, less welcoming. ‘I don’t remember. At one of those dreadful gatherings, I imagine.’
Maggie started to clear the cups, then put them down again. ‘Sonia Kirby told you her arse looked like a bruised peach?’
‘She was drunk, I suppose. I don’t say she used those words exactly.’ He pointed to the woman’s bottom in the newspaper. ‘It looks like a bruised peach, don’t you think?’
Maggie did not look and did not respond, and for the rest of the day she endeavoured to put it to the back of her mind, another bulky item into an already crowded space.
The next morning Martin followed her across the road and down the path to the ocean pool, where he perched on a rock while she did her laps. When she was done he stood at the ladder holding her towel, handing it to her as though this was his habit. A small thing, but enough to remind her, however gently, that everything had changed.
‘You could do laps with me,’ she suggested. She had no wish for that, but was minded to see how far this would go.
‘God no,’ he said. ‘I hate laps.’
‘Yes, that’s right. You do.’ At least he remembered that. And then more: Martin asked her something about the commission she was working on; it was for the brother of a woman she had painted over a decade ago. Martin remembered the painting.
‘She was the blue dragonfly.’
In each of Maggie’s portraits there was a motif, an object or a combination of objects, a conduit between herself and the subject.
Maggie started. ‘How extraordinary.’
He shrugged. ‘Ask me another.’
‘The doctor fellow, Benson.’
‘Easy—that was the cross-section of the bird. You weren’t sure if he was too pleased with it.’
‘Mary-Ellen Dodds.’
‘The map. Colour-coded. Beautiful.’
‘That was twenty-five years ago!’
And on he went, without a moment’s hesitation, the images locked in his mind. ‘That is marvellous, darling.’ And then: ‘Strange, isn’t it? It’s like you can see them.’
He smiled. ‘As clear as you standing before me now.’
As to the day of the accident itself, now more than a month ago, she had stopped asking him for an account. Since the stroke—the second as they now knew—his attention was more and more grounded in a distant past. ‘Some patients regale listeners with stories of war,’ his doctor had told her. ‘A battle or a particular manoeuvre. A victory. The facts are malleable, of course. Many a hero was made in the retelling of a memory.’ Martin, it had turned out, had his own story.
All signs of paralysis were gone, and his speech was back to normal. Martin’s appearance remained that of a healthy sixty-five-year-old man who looked younger than his years, and a conversation, if kept brief, might not dispel the appearance. They had been out to an exhibition opening, and a couple of dinners. It was good to see their friends again, the inner circle trusted enough not to tread awkwardly around what had happened: Annie and the gallery girls, a few of Martin’s barrister mates. At the dinners there was less wine, less shouting across a table. With others they didn’t know as well, Martin would speak with the curiosity of a stranger, repeating names and moving on to make a comment on his immediate surrounds—the sunlit glass in a bay window, the sweetness of the duck broth, the shape of a woman’s dress (on the taste of food and the shape of women he was more and more prone to comment). As to what happened when a conversation was allowed to continue, there were those who were naturally inclined to stop and listen, and those who did so under sufferance or were brave enough to cut him short. She did not condemn the latter, and was at times even tempted to encourage it as she saw in Martin’s eyes that he was scrambling for a way to get back to New York City, 1973. All that was required was a break long enough to ask the speaker-soon-to-be-listener about their travels; he would nod his head as they took him to various cities around the globe, waiting to see if they’d alight in Manhattan, then after a few minutes or so he’d reroute them there himself, explaining that when he was twenty-eight he had gone there on a secondment, and it was there that on 11 August 1973 he had met his Maggie. Eyes glazing over like the lens of a projector, he would embark on his tour—into his loft or the pigeon lady’s studio or the garden in between the tenements—the audience held captive until eventually a way was found to extricate themselves. Even those who had been happy to listen could listen for only so long.
To begin with Maggie had admonished him, at first gently (‘It is longwinded, darling’, ‘I think they’ve heard that story’), then not so gently (‘Martin, you are being a bore’, ‘Stop being a nitwit’). But at dinner last week at Annie’s, when Maggie went to open her mouth she saw him cower like a dog when a hand is raised, and she resolved then to let him be, to let him go. No, she did not condemn them, any of them, but this was what he had left, the man who had forgotten when to stop; people could find their own way to sidestep around him. They did not need her help.
When they got back to the house one morning after her laps, the Chief Judge telephoned and asked if he could visit in the afternoon. ‘Yes, John,’ Maggie heard him say. ‘We would love to see you.’ They went to the shops to buy biscuits and cake and Martin ironed a shirt that had no nee
d of ironing.
A few days after the visit, Maggie heard Martin in his study and went to see if he needed anything. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I am almost done . . . The identification was too weak.’
‘What identification?’
‘He said the shirt was green. He got it wrong because he wasn’t looking at the shirt. He was looking at the knife.’
She reminded him of John’s visit and suggested they take a walk. Later in the week, he was back at his computer again, working on the same judgment, commenting on the same evidentiary point. She brought him a coffee and said nothing, knowing now that the only way for it to be over was to let him finish. When he did, his associate—on Maggie’s request—thanked him and confirmed receipt.
Then there was last Friday. She had heard him get up early to go fishing, but when she went out she saw his fishing rod and knife and tackle box discarded on the lawn.
Martin was standing in the kitchen at the fridge, the jar of chutney in his hand again. ‘Chutney?’ she asked. ‘Let me get the marmalade.’
He looked at the label, then placed it on the table next to the plate with the buttered toast.
‘No, thank you,’ he said. ‘I prefer it.’
‘You prefer chutney on your toast?’
A single nod.
‘For breakfast?’
‘Yes, I do.’ The reply was formal, the judgment final: ‘For breakfast, I prefer chutney on my toast.’
Maggie knew well enough this was not a leak that could be patched to protect the whole. Watching Martin as he ate his toast and chutney, a nod of approval after every mouthful, she considered each deviation and its consequence: the fishing gear on the lawn, the jar that held chutney and not marmalade—and the man sitting across from her, the man who was only in part the one she had met in New York thirty-seven years ago.
That was what he spoke of now, again: that day.
‘You didn’t like the show?’
‘What show?’
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