by James Lasdun
‘Will you think about it, Inge?’
‘OK.’
‘Do you promise me?’
‘Yes, Stefan. I promise.’
CHAPTER 13
Insidious way in which the habits of one’s life reassert themselves – even just the habit of pottering about, not thinking or feeling anything very much at all.
I pay bills, I make my online trades (I shorted Intel again – made almost two thousand dollars), I walk Lena, I’ve even been splitting and stacking firewood for winter . . .
Meanwhile, I think less and less about my drenching at Gloria’s party, and when I do, I find myself wondering if I wasn’t making altogether too much of it in the first place. It begins to seem almost possible my assailant was just some unhinged or drunk woman who happened to overhear Gloria introducing me to Harold Gedney, and attacked me for no better reason than that she objected to my name or didn’t like my face. I can believe that one’s deeds leave their signature in one’s outward appearance; that for those with eyes to see such things, a person’s more significant actions may be legible in the cast of their features or some cryptic singularity in their gait. In other words, that the woman’s violence was motivated by an act of impersonal clairvoyance rather than any actual connection to my own past.
At any rate, with every day that goes by I feel less impetus to rock the becalmed boat of my existence, let alone outright incriminate myself.
Logically, I should therefore abandon this memoir. What purpose in an incomplete account of things; a promise of disclosure that turns out to be an act of concealment?
And yet, having come this far, I find myself just as reluctant to stop as to go on. It may be that this is nothing more than the same condition of inertia that afflicted me during my adolescence: one of those ‘Dragons of Stability’ stationed at the valve of memory, ensuring that any attempt to close it will require more effort and decisiveness than leaving it open. Possibly; but I sense something else too: some fractionally more positive, or at least aesthetically compelling, reason for continuing, having to do with a suspicion that our arrival in America sixteen years ago may in fact be more accurately evoked with the veil still drawn over the events immediately preceding it than otherwise.
That, after all, was how I experienced those first years: as a time of total division from the past. Hadn’t we come to the New World in order to build new lives for ourselves? Were we not entitled – even by a certain logic required – to leave all the fault and failure of our old lives behind us? What had happened in our prior lives no longer concerned us, I told myself. It was henceforth eternally sealed off from the present, just as the place in which it had occurred was sealed off eternally (so I believed) from the place we were in now. And in fact I pictured the mental barrier I had constructed between present and past as a wall just as solid and impregnable as the physical wall running through my home city.
I remember those first months of ours here in the States as a period of unbridled revelation and joy. I was like a tropical plant kept for years in a cold climate, then transported to its ancestral soil and suddenly budding with unexpected new life. From the moment we drove in from the airport and took possession of our fifth-floor apartment (tiny and bare but looking out on the vivid bustle of the East Village), I felt things stirring in me: new powers, new facets of spirit, heart, appetite . . . I was freed, awakened; I felt at the threshold of a most sunlit existence.
It was 1986: another era, it seems now; its ruling principle that of contrast: violent, abrupt and shameless. One moment we were turning out the lights in the church-run homeless shelter below us, with its single grimy sink for all twelve inhabitants; the next we were arriving at one of Gloria Danilov’s parties with their caviar wagons and salvers of pink smoked salmon.
Both sides of the picture fascinated me: the ruin and the glamour. I came at them with an undiscriminating hunger that each aspect seemed to satisfy equally. I liked the grime and the grunge, the filthy subway cars lurching by in a fluorescent lichen of graffiti, the street-cleaning vehicles whirling their medieval-looking brooms over the crack vials and sodden porn mags of the East Village gutters. These things had a power about them despite their ungainliness; a lumbering industrial potency that their equivalents in the GDR had never possessed in my eyes. It was just an orientation in the direction of purpose, I suppose, but even that was new to me; the reverse of the machines I had used during my stint in the Construction Brigade, where a comprehensive cynicism was detectable in every malfunctioning switch and lever. I felt immediate affection for the starkly elemental street furnishings: the trash baskets, meters, hydrants, all cast in the same lava-grey substance that looked like metal regressing to its stone ore. The tenements opposite us with their pirate-ship riggings of fire escapes, their water silos bristling like fat, primeval rockets, had a fantastical grandeur in my eyes, as did the empty lots in their chain link and razor wire, where spindly ailanthus trees grew out of the enormous mounds of garbage. And though it frightened me, the darkness of the project blocks by the East River, where the street lamps had broken and violence seemed electrically imminent as you walked by, filled me with admiration too. To be truthful, my enthusiasm embraced even the human wreckage – the junkies down at the needle exchange office on the first floor of our building; the crack-addicted, AIDS-ravaged figures panhandling in Tompkins Square or curled up on the streets in cardboard boxes; the sidewalk vendors laying out their pitiful bric-a-brac of toothless combs and empty cotton reels . . . All of these sights, which soon began to appal Inge, had an exhilarating effect on me. They seemed to raise the stakes of my own existence; enlarge my sense of what it was to be alive on this earth. I felt wrenched out of the confines of the world I had grown up in, where the spectrum of available experience corresponded so suffocatingly to the tiny size of the country itself. As the old joke there went, a husband suggests to his wife that they spend their vacation taking a tour of the entire GDR. ‘Oh, yeah?’ says the wife. ‘What are we going to do in the afternoon?’
And meanwhile there was the other side of the picture: those visions of pure, dripping gold. Furred models stepping from limos to shop for diamond ankle bracelets; tanning parlours where god-like bodies revolved under ultraviolet lamps . . . Even just the food stores: to behold for the first time those illuminated tiers of fruits and vegetables, the forests of flowers spilling out their scent and colour from the East Village bodegas; to walk on and be confronted, on the same block, by another, then yet another such Wunderkammer; to go inside and fill a basket with delicacies you had never bothered to distinguish in your mind from the nectars and ambrosias of myth, so little had you ever expected to taste them; to watch your bill being created by nothing more than the passing of each item over the glass-topped counter’s mysterious scarlet ray – all of this was an astonishment to me; one that merely increased as I discovered that these bodegas occupied not the highest but in fact the very lowest position on the city’s hierarchy of stores, that above them were the more resplendent Korean groceries with their banked, year-round fires of grapefruit and peach and strawberry, that these in turn were as nothing to the crammed volumes of the Gristedes and D’Agostino chains, which were themselves eclipsed by the mighty cornucopias of Zabar’s, Balducci’s, Dean & DeLuca, where the entire planet seemed to have concentrated its riches for one’s delectation; our own Baltic condensed into a hundred types of smoked fish, the Mediterranean gemmed and gleaming in jar after jar of olives; all of this of course entirely commonplace to other shoppers, but to us as startling as if a New Yorker should walk into a shop and find delicacies from Jupiter and Venus casually on display. And then the buildings themselves, the skyscrapers, my childhood fetishes, rising south and north over the humbler rooftops of the Village: the Empire State like a great syringe with some fiery elixir of the city vatted inside it, the Helmsley in its gold tiara, the Twin Towers reading each other’s paragraphs of light . . .
How I loved this place! Having spent my teenage years dreaming
of being reborn as an American, I should not have been surprised by this, but the reality of the country so exceeded my wildest imaginings that I would sometimes find myself in a state of almost painfully overfulfilled expectation. Even the shelter we supervised on the floor below us was a source of unexpected joy. I had imagined it was going to be a place of pungent squalor and criminality; that to pass muster there I was going to have to find the resources of a prison guard somewhere inside me. But I was mistaken: the men who lived there, far from being the brutal or broken spirits my anxiety had conjured, seemed to me to embody, in a peculiarly pure form, precisely the qualities I had always most desired for myself: vitality, innocence, hope. Their stripped-bare lives, even the undeniable craziness of one or two of them, elevated them in my eyes, giving them an almost heroic air. I remember them vividly: David, young, lean, furiously energetic on his diet of protein powder and homegrown alfalfa sprouts, a fanatic reader of memoirs by billionaire executives, monopolising the pay phone with his own labyrinthine moneymaking schemes; Donald, bankrupted by medical bills, lumps all over his neck, forever poring over an enormous dictionary, convinced he needed only to master the rules of ‘orthography’ in order to get his life back on track; Jean-Luc, a qualified doctor (so he claimed) who had come to America from Haiti in search of a job, had his suitcase stolen with all his medical certificates, and been marooned ever since, his kindly eyes signalling, as he told you this, that he didn’t expect you to believe a word of it and forgave you in advance for your scepticism . . .
In the evenings, as they drifted in from the streets after we unlocked the door (our principal duty, along with keeping the store-cupboard stocked with laundry soap and toilet paper), I would sit with them in the communal room, spellbound. Their conversation revolved around two themes, each as intoxicatingly ‘American’ to my hyperattentive ears as the opening notes of Appalachian Spring or some other purebred anthem: their eager willingness to take responsibility for their own predicament, and their unquenchable optimism for the future. They were homeless, they believed, simply as a result of what they called their ‘bad choices’. But they also believed that the good life was attainable to anyone in this great country of theirs, themselves included, and that all it required was for them to make, instead of those bad choices, the ‘right’ choices, which they would make as soon as they were ‘ready’. As simple as that! No talk of bad luck or the inherent injustices of the social order; nothing between themselves and their destiny: an apocalyptic nakedness! Every one of them, it seemed, was a millionaire-in-waiting: right now they were just going through their shelter phase, as the heroes of legend go through their obligatory spells in the desert or the pauper’s hovel. Absurd as it may sound, I wanted to be as they were: emptied out of everything but faith and hope! Their glamour extended from themselves to the physical space they inhabited. Dingy as it was, with its soiled woollen curtains, calcium-bearded radiators, narrow beds and bits of old carpet remnant, the place had a rock-bottom sufficiency that I found strangely appealing. The hot water worked; the kitchen always had plenty of store-donated food in it; there was company if you wanted it, but no one imposed on you. I remember thinking that if we failed to make a go of things in this city, I, for one, would be content to end up in such quarters.
But there was no reason to believe we would not make a go of things. We had a glamour of our own. We were young, exotically foreign; people wanted to know us; they wanted to help us. My father’s old opposite number at the UN, Jim McGrievey, now an attorney in private practice, received me in his midtown office soon after we arrived. A spry, mirthful-eyed man, amused to be in the position of being called on by the son of his old ‘sparring partner’, he fired a few innocuous questions at me about my life in Berlin. I told him, in the vaguest terms, about my literary endeavours, predicting, correctly, that he would not press me for details. With the innocently satisfied look of a person matching two puzzle pieces together, he leaned over his desk and said to me: ‘Listen. I’m going to introduce you to a good friend of mine, Gloria Danilov. She’s a wealthy lady – very politically connected but she also likes to have creative people around her. Play your cards right and she’ll do something for you, I’m sure of it. Here, I’ll have my secretary arrange a meeting right now . . .’
And a week later, by the gliding logic that seemed to govern our lives in those days, I was being shown by a butler into a flower-filled waiting room in a vast residence on Park Avenue. My audience with Gloria lasted no more than a few minutes – delegations of businessmen and politicians were no doubt waiting their turn in other parts of the building – but the brevity of our meeting in the alcove of her library, looking out on the late summer dusty greenness of the park, merely seemed to concentrate its impact on me. I remember the dreamlike strangeness of being addressed as if it were an established and incontrovertible fact that I was a distinguished Man of Letters and bona fide political dissident. There was no reason, of course, for Gloria to question my credentials: McGrievey would have recommended me in flattering terms, while her own burnishing propensities naturally raised my alleged accomplishments to yet more unrecognisable heights of brilliance. What did surprise me was that, while in the past such credulousness would have made me uneasy, here I found myself fully acquiescing in Gloria’s version of myself. It was as if she had some magical power of suspending the true nature of whatever came into her orbit, and persuading it to conform with her preferred vision of things.
As we were talking she placed her large, warm hand on mine, as though we had been the dearest of friends for many years.
‘I want you to help me with my magazine,’ she said. ‘I want you to help me choose the unsolicited pieces we sometimes run. I’ve been looking for someone with a more international perspective than our intern who does it at the moment. You’re just the person I have in mind. Will you do it for me?’
I accepted without hesitation: her belief in me seemed to obliterate my own knowledge of what I was. The job, a virtual sinecure, gave me a pleasant office I could wander into whenever I had nothing better to do, a stipend of a thousand dollars a month, and – more precious to me than anything – the satisfaction of being a cog in the mighty, humming machinery of my new world.
Meanwhile, Inge too seemed to be in the process of establishing a new life for herself. Eric Lowenthal, true to his word, had chosen his new project with her in mind, and he began developing it soon after we arrived. He made a tremendous fuss over both of us, and seemed to want to convey that he considered Inge a great prize, going out of his way to include us in every part of the immense effort involved in getting the project off the ground. Every week there were lunches with producers and investors. There were late-night sessions watching audition tapes at his Tribeca apartment. There were rides out of the city to scout locations; script conferences where Eric would consult us on his latest revisions; meetings with lawyers, agents and distributors . . .
Again that purposefulness, so utterly novel to me; the sense that one’s inner desires and dreams could actually be transformed into material realities in this miraculous new universe. At first, Inge seemed to thrive in its bracing atmosphere as much as I did. A rehearsal period had been set for the following spring, with shooting to start early that summer. The film – a sort of philosophical parable, I gathered – was about a poor émigré from Poland who cleans houses in New York and finds herself inexplicably beset by wealthy American admirers. ‘You’ve read Being and Time, of course?’ Lowenthal had said to me in an attempt to explain it. I had nodded (though I hadn’t read a word). ‘Well, think of Inge’s role as the “Remembering of Being”, and the men wooing her as supplicants trying to recover that memory.’ Which meant nothing at all to me, though Inge appeared to approve, which was all that mattered. Already by winter she was beginning to submerge herself in her role, and as the rehearsal date approached, she seemed to burn again with the same subdued glow of gathering energies (I think of the flames, barely visible in daylight, on jet-fuel refineries
in airports), as she had when I first saw her in that Prenzlauer Berg theatre. For a time I even had the sense that she was shifting, with Eric’s encouragement, into that other self of hers: the actress/beauty who offers up her mysterious vitalities in exchange for the world’s regard.
This was our grace period, in retrospect; our honeymoon. There were tensions, of course; little erratic shock waves from the past; shadows cast backwards from the future. The words ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ had begun appearing in newspapers and on people’s lips, and they disturbed me, dimly, like obscure portents in a dream. There were problems, right from the start, in Inge’s adjustment to the American way of life. The jetsam of squalor washed up every morning by the tides of a free, unsanitised press created special difficulties for her peculiar, somewhat morbidly compassionate temperament. With no capacity for detachment, no ability to unsnag her heart from the things that caught hold of it, she could be reduced to despair by the contents of the Metro Section of the New York Times. Every one of those grim stories – old people frozen to death in trash-filled apartments; children starved, beaten, hit by stray bullets – seemed to lodge itself inside her and take root there, requiring her to enter into every corner and cranny of its pain, even as each day brought in new ones just as bad. For a while she got it into her head that nothing short of actual, practical intervention would do, and in her quietly fanatical way she would try to help: writing letters to editors, government departments, welfare agencies; badgering our own Lutheran benefactors to get involved; signing up for volunteer programmes; going off on subway rides to far-flung housing projects – this white-blond and no doubt utterly baffling foreigner, offering her assistance to complete strangers in her imperfect English . . . Then, as the ineffectuality of her efforts, the massive indifference they met, became impossible to ignore, she shifted her energies towards this more passive act of empathy –snip-snip, snip-snip (I can hear her now) – as though instead of trying to relieve the world’s suffering, she had settled for the role of its recording angel.