by Self, Will
Memories of my dad and his card files of smutty gags; his Indian-head, mother-of-pearl money clip; his lack of funds for it to clip. In the Depression he took jobs doing anything. Esther told me once that he was a pimp for a while, and I can believe it. Although he wasn’t an overtly sexual man, there was a greasy feel to him, a greasy Jewish feel. I would imagine that he had a large pimp’s penis. But the job I remember best was the one he took closing down department stores. He was good at this – firing the staff, arranging for the stock to be discounted, selling the premises. He functioned better during the Depression than he did either before or after. Very much a twentieth-century man – my father. A boom-and–bust jockey. An economic cyclist.
We tip up on to the steep slope of Highgate West Hill and drive between wealthy villas. Then along the Grove at the top, past Yehudi Menuhin’s imposing house. I hate Menuhin. I sent Natty to audition at his school when she was eight. She was a not untalented little pianist – but I knew not good enough. But that isn’t why I hate him – I hate him because he never crossed a road alone until he was twenty-five, or so they say. Just fancy! The ultimate effete, artistic Jew – and this is meant to be impressive? This racial cosseting. Yuk. He’ll live for ever – of that I’ve no doubt. Live for ever in a gilded cage of sound, a eat’s cradle of golden harp strings. Double mint choc chip yuk. Thirty-two flavours of Baskin-Robbins’s best nausea.
I know it’s got to my liver, this cancer. I can feel it as we tilt down and turn into Hampstead Lane. I can feel the fucking thing swollen inside, each lurch of the car pressing on it so that, like a filthy sponge, it oozes poisons. The body’s oil refinery is itself polluted. The crazed enzymes have taken over the asylum – oh, for a sane axeman. Two fucking lumpectomies that fraudulent pal of Steel’s did on me. He scooped out my boobs like a counterman in Baskin-Robbins . . . Maybe I want ice cream, that’s why I keep thinking of it. ‘Natty.’
‘Mumu?’ She’s in the back with me again. She has darker skin than me – but finer-grained, to go with her long narrow nose, delicately flared cheekbones, violet eyes. Little bitch. When she was a child she went red in the sun, but if she’d let it get to her now she’d turn a pleasing olive. But she’d rather be sallow, clearly. Under her preppy clothing are track marks, sores, infections, all abraded by her serrated nails. I wonder how Miles can stand to touch her.
‘I wonder how Miles can stand to touch you.’
‘What?!’
‘I want an ice cream; no – an ice lolly.’
‘OK – they’ll have them at Kenwood.’ She heard me, but hey – let’s not make waves.
If I were dying when I should’ve, say in the late sixties, when I thought my head would explode with howling misery, when every time their father opened his fat mouth I thought I’d have to kill him, then – then I would’ve written the girls affectionate letters, telling them of my sadness, and how much I loved them, and how sorry I was to be leaving them. Too late. They’re here, they’re grown-up, they’re crap; and so we’ll bicker towards oblivion.
I must’ve dozed a little, or zoned out, because when when I’m conscious of myself again I find we’re hobbling down the hill towards Kenwood House, a fuzzy blob of off-white Palladian which wobbles amazingly for something so heavy. The girls have me under either arm and I’m saying to them, ‘You must remember how much easier dying is for a pessimist like me than it would be for someone who’d expected anything from life, who’d counted on anything.’
‘Yes Mum.’
‘I mean to say – I’ve always been hunkered down on the starting line, waiting for the pistol shot so I could race to the next bad thing.’
‘You wanted it badderly,’ says infantile Natty, in baby talk.
‘Oh, I did, I did.’ I clutch her hand tighter under my armpit, and I guess she thinks this affectionate, but it isn’t.
Kenwood. I’ve always known I was going to end up here. When I first came to London it was my favourite park. I’d come here alone and sit and read a book, or strike up conversations with old women, or down-and-outs. In the States I was never gregarious in this fashion, never. It was all that English dissimulation that forced my cards, made me play my crappy little hand: ‘Oh, how interesting – do tell me more.’ And they would, by Christ they would. That precious fucking reserve, it transpired, was only the thinnest of hoary mantles, beneath which was a positive torrent of chilly drivel. No, there’s nobody like the English for inconsequential chat and I hope they all fucking choke to death on it. ‘How’s the wea-theurgh!’
In the sixties this place was primmer, more proper. The prams looked positively nineteenth-century – great black things, pushed about by pudding-faced nannies and mums, all belted up in coats and hats and even gloves. Now it’s spring, and track-suited, androgynous parent-substitutes are shoving McLaren buggies loaded up with hothouse weeds. There are faggots flexing their muscles on the shaven grass. Yaws would come here every weekend before Sunday lunch and force the girls to accompany him. Yaws had played lacrosse when he was at the varsity. I kid you not. And he thought it would be nice for the girls to learn to play it with him. Nice for whom? Not me. I’d stay back in Hendon, overcooking Sunday lunch in the prescribed way. Granted – I’d take the task on, but what were we going to do otherwise? Yaws himself, notoriously, could survive for days on a heel of bread smeared with Frank Cooper’s Oxford marmalade. Cunt. To think I washed his underwear. Double cunt. Double choc chip cunt.
The only thing that remains unchanged in this ersatz landscape are the little brown men. They’re exactly the same, in their trilbies and brogues, spiking litter, checking notices to see that they’re officious, driving dinky vans full of dead leaves. The suits themselves may be nylon now – they certainly look cheap – but the men are as fawn as ever. Fawn-coloured – and they look like fauns too. Camden Council must have an Affirmative Faun Action Programme. I’ve never seen a truly brown little brown man, though, never. The brown men are important – they minister to the memorial benches. I always fancied a memorial bench: ‘In Loving Memory of Lily Bloom 1922–1988, Who Loved to Take Our Products on This Bench. Hoffmann La Roche’. But when I looked into it two years ago (I did this when I discovered the lump, did it even before I called Sydenberg, the GP), I discovered that the Heath was bench-saturated, that if you wanted to evoke even the tiniest bit of recall here in the future, you’d have to have your name put on a marker along with a lot of others. Doubtless, as with the benches, relatives scatter ashes around these markers. A delicious irony – those of us Jews who escaped the Holocaust, none the less interred in mass graves with our kikey kind. How unkind.
Inside the tea place it’s dark, despite the whitewash on the walls. This is the old stable block of the house, and even now or maybe especially now – with its stalls full of horse-faced Englishwomen slurping down Earl Grey, it feels like one. The only non-horsey face in the place is a version of my father’s. A smaller, painted version of his face – like Dad’s funerary mask. A Jewish face. A New York Jewish face. An Upper East Side New York Jewish face. A UESNYJF. Esther, my sister.
‘Lily!’ She’s on her sharp heels pointing her beak at me, and her claws are out.
‘Esther.’ My piece of dead veal collides with her facial. Esther doesn’t have a face any more – only a facial. Not that she’s had nips and tucks – she knows better than to do that, because she’s going to live for ever. If she has a facelift now, in thirty or forty years’ time she’ll be looking like Methuselah.
‘How are you?’ Incredible, only the tactless can live for ever – that much is obvious. ‘Let me look at you.’ Why would you wanna do that, dumb ass? Well, let her –looking is all you’ll get.
I slump there in my cancer cloak while the world goes on dancing about me. They give me a little pot of Cornish ice cream, which sits in front of me on the table uneaten. I mean to say – it’s hardly likely to repeat on me, now is it? And anyway – I asked for a lolly. I regard Esther critically; it’s interesting looking at a version
of yourself that has achieved immortality, courtesy of Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany, Bergdorf Goodman and all the other temples of dressage – which is what these English horses could do with, even my little ponies. Americans always look so clean and scrubbed and presentable – is it any wonder I ended up a slut living in this dungheap? Is it any surprise I lost my teeth grazing on this rotten dump?
Esther has brought presents for the girls. Yup, Tiffany thought so. A brooch for Charlie, which she’ll treasure along with the rest of her hoard, and a little gold watch for Natty, which she’ll pawn the first time she claps eyes on some dangling balls that aren’t attached to a man. They chat away as if I wasn’t here. Esther tells them about her hotel, her art gallery, her other shops, her properties, this business, that business. Natty’s lovely head is heavy with heroin now – that much is obvious – but Charlie keeps on nodding and interjecting and chatting with her mummified aunt. Her made-up aunt.
I had hoped that seeing Esther would provoke some flood of recall. I wanted – God knows why – to immerse myself in childhood again. I wanted to summon up sarsparilla and kewpie dolls, baseball cards, jitterbugging, kreplach, jitneys, the surrey with the fucking fringe on top. I wanted us to mull over the proportions of all the houses and apartments we grew up in and the foibles of all the friends we’d had. I wanted to reach back to a time when Esther and I loved each other more than anything else in the world, when the only thing in the world we feared were our poor, sad, frightened parents. I wanted to turn the leaves of the high-school yearbook with Esther (Class of ‘35 – ‘A flair for business is an ornament for the whole world’) back to a happier time. But now I set eyes on her, all I can think of is ‘The Relic’ by Donne, and how, despite the fact that her expensive watch is shackled on to her skeletal wrist, she’s going to live – while I’m definitely going to die.
One thing to be grateful for is that there’s no waitress service here. Esther always abuses servants with her familiarity – ‘Hi! What’s your name, then? Mark, eh? I bet you’ve made one here . . .’ – effortlessly engendering their contempt. And mine. Although it’s not hard to feel contempt for surly English service. England – where the waiters respond to any orders that transgress the menu as if it were carved in stone and they were terrifying and incomprehensible heresies. ‘Hold the mayonnaise?! You mean to say the world is round?! God is dead?! Good and evil are conterminous?!’ There’s one thing I can do for Esther, though, one bequest her lumpy, liverish, cancerous, moribund sister can give her, and that’s to not talk about anything of consequence whatsoever. Don’t talk about dying. Don’t rupture her great reservoir of denial and watch her sang-froid escape into the hell of the present. Heat up, bubble, boil, evaporate –leaving this little old Jewish lady just as terrified as this big dying one. Oh no, save her. Together with her savings.
I can’t be damned to listen to people’s chatter any more. Everything they say bears upon a future that doesn’t include me. I don’t even notice if it’s Esther who leaves, or us. The fact that I’ll never see her again is obscurely satisfying – and I prevented her from visiting my shitty little apartment, propping her narrow JAP ass on my dusty cushions. She’s the sort of woman who wants the earth girdled with a sanitary strip-for the duration of her stay, which, as I believe I’ve mentioned, will be for ever.
We’re in the car again and heading down the hill from Highgate. Charlie is a very good driver, much less impetuous than I used to be, far steadier. She knows how to pilot this big Kraut box, this steel egg-carton containing a diseased yolk. Pain has been cracking on the edge of me for hours now. I’m drenched with sticky pain, and Natty’s lying – cool and dry-on an ottoman of my heroin.
Miles is waiting outside when we get back, resting his beauty on a wall. I wonder how many he’s travelled to get here this time? He’s a law student, he studies hard – what’s he doing with this skittish trash? They unload me and hustle me inside, to where Molly and Doreen have made enormous inroads on the entropy. Seat covers have been cleaned! Shelves dusted! This is real housework going on. I like to think I could’ve been a good housewife – I should’ve adored to keep house for a man I admired. I’d’ve ironed Trotsky’s shirts like a dervish, then made love to him like a seal. But the men I was with were always feeble suppliants, wanting sex the way little boys want sweets. Pathetic. No wonder I’d discover myself day after day cursing and moaning and even screaming as I wiped up their shit, cooked for them, ordered their little play-dens. I’m glad that’s over. I’m glad house-cleaning is over. Goodbye Jif, fare thee well Flash, au revoir Harpic – I’m sure we’ll meet again some su-unny da-ay.
They’ve cleaned the flat up because they’re going to sell it. Charlotte’s going to sell it. I wish my will wasn’t in order, I’d’ve liked to gift little Miss Yaws at least a duplex of litigation, if not Bleak House itself.
Competent black hands are all over me now – and d’jew know what? I don’t care. I can feel each black handprint as she pushes and plumps me like a pillow, but there’s no Pavlovian revulsion, no sick decoction of petty-minded bigotry. I used to torment Yaws: ‘You’re the fucking black man’s burden!’ I’d scream at him. ‘Look in the fucking dictionary, you creep! Read it – “a contagious disease of Negroes characterised by raspberry-like tubercules on the skin” – that’s you, pardner, that’s you!’ Usually, at around this stage I’d begin hitting him, and wouldn’t stop until one of the kids intervened. Do I feel guilty? Not any more, not now. Junky will have to wait – I’ve had the diamorphine for my lonesome, and the Valium, and whatever other shit it was that Doreen gave me. Junky will have to wait now.
Doreen’s got me down and my little radio’s on, warbling. It’s the evening repeat of The Archers. People hate the way the media repeat things – but not I. I love it. I wouldn’t care if they echoed this episode again and again and again, as long as I was there to hear it, as long as I was still alive. From a region deep in the darkest, most diseased portion of me an old blues man is warbling. What is this, some song I heard when trailing my rag dolly behind me, clumping through the dirt on the other side of the streetcar line? Who knows, but it’s old, as old as me: ‘I wish I was a mole in the ground / Like a mole in the ground I would root that mountain down / And I wish I was a mole in the ground.’
Not long now. Next door there are voices raised above the pseudo farm life: ‘Do you think we should call her GP?’ I daresay Charlie already has her mobile phone out; she wields it as if it was the future itself.
‘I think it might be an idea. I don’t honestly think she’s going to be able to stay here much longer.’ But I want to stay here – I want to stay with you, Doreen. ‘But – ‘ And here her voice dips beneath my hearing range, allowing me to tune in to the other voices in the next room, Natasha and Miles bickering about where they’re going to eat. Who would’ve thought everything was going to happen so suddenly?
Chapter Four
Sydenberg is on his way – goody gumdrops. Sydenberg, the last tailgating medic in a queue which stretches back to the late forties. You cannot fault me when it comes to providing employment for these interns, I’ve always been a zealous customer of the house call. For what is hypochondria, if not the midwife of all the other, littler phobias? When the girls were kids I’d get Virginia Bridge out at the drop of a hat. My motives were mixed, I guess, because as much as I wanted her insipid reassurance, I also liked to observe Yaws with his auxiliary squeeze. It amused me when, like a kid himself, he was confronted with an ice lolly in either hand, not knowing which one to lick.
I also liked the doctors’ being at my beck and call– or so I thought. I realise now that all I ever represented to them was diseased throughput; another sick shell of a human requiring a missing component to be bolted on. Modern Times – no wonder these assembly-line workers find themselves unable to cease making diagnoses when their day’s work is done. Sydenberg is by no means among the worst; certainly better than that snotty twerp Lichtenberg who ‘psychoanalysed’ me in the early
fifties. I remember that all too well. He was a friend of Kaplan’s – and there was a sinister congruence in the attitude they’d take towards my crise de nerfs in any given week. I said at the time, ‘You two are in cahoots!’ but they denied it.
Lichtenberg was an orthodox Freudian who related every single aspect of my psyche to my early childhood. Well, while my childhood may have been extra shitty, I should’ve been concerning myself with Dave Junior’s – which was actually under way. But no, Kaplan was in favour of the analysis, the Eight Couples Who Mattered (our incestuously entwined coterie of friends) were in favour of it, and the fact that it kept me mired in the past hardly seemed relevant – at the time. Lichtenberg actually gave me licence, encouraged me to have affairs. He felt it would help me to undermine my negative relationship with my father. Bullshit. The truth was that all this Freudian sex talk was the preview, a blabbermouthed precursor of all the feckless promiscuity that was to follow in the sixties. Although not for me – by then I’d relapsed to the talking bit. Mostly. I wonder what Lichtenberg would say regarding the current impasse? Probably quote Freud: ‘The aim of all life is death.’ I wish I’d killed the creep when I had the chance.
From city to city, from burg to burg. Sailing through the bergs and into the arctic night. Sydenberg is one of those English Jews who are more English than the English. Actually, nowadays, almost anyone is more English than the English. Since the late seventies the English have abandoned their reserve, their coolness, their rustic urbanity. They’ve always complained about their ‘Americanisation’, meaning chain stores, supermarkets, advertising – but what they’ve failed to account for all along is the creeping cosmopolitanism that’s transforming their culture – if not their precious fucking society. I noticed in the seventies – that bulbous decade that the English were beginning to get wiseacre Jewish American humour, to find it genuinely funny – and that was the beginning of the end. The indigenous Jews were too dull and conformist a group to crack real jokes. They were the ones left behind in Liverpool while the rest of us headed on to the New World. As soon as they made some money they retreated, Rubens-like, to the ‘burbs, to live out their days in colourless indifference. Jewish Anglicans. The English had to turn to American Jewry for entertainment, and so began the proper Jewing of London. Now every little Cockney punk you meet cracks wise, kvetches, shmoozes and cheats. Great.