by Linda Grant
Stephen in 1986, at forty, reverting to the jeans, the leather jackets, the denim shirts in which he had arrived at Oxford before his makeover by Andrea, had lost both the beard and now the upper reaches of his hairline. He owned three suits and several ties. His Prince Edward jacket from the SS United States still hung in the wardrobe but the buttons and the holes they were supposed to fit into were separated by a wide gap across his chest. Even the sleeves were too tight. The kids used it for fancy dress.
Looking back at this time in his life, Stephen can’t think of much to say about it. It was the period of growth followed by satisfactory consolidation.
The children brought home head lice and friends who announced, “My dad says there’s no point getting an education cos there’s no jobs.” Ivan had raised the question of whether they had put anything aside for school fees.
“Didn’t we think kids would do best if they were allowed to run wild?” asked Stephen. “Didn’t we say no one ever grew because they were measured? Didn’t we say that property was theft?”
“All of that may be true, but not in Islington.”
So Marianne was sent up the hill, to the school where serious girls wore shit-brown uniforms and formed unfriendly cliques, of which she became an enthusiastic member, and then a bossy leader.
From the outset, from when they bought the house from Ralph and were no longer confined to a few rooms, and held the key to the garden door, there had been the issue of a pet. Marianne wanted a dog.
“No dog,” Stephen said. “Absolutely no dog. A dog is verboten. You want to see me get nasty? You want to see me get Nazi?”
“Why not? Give me five reasons,” said Andrea.
“I’ll write them down for you.”
1. They’re stupid
2. They’re dependent
3. They lead a pointless existence
4. They’re stupid
5. They’re stupid
No amount of begging moved him. It was the line that could not be crossed. Dogs terrified him, they barked, they bit, they gave you rabies which was a horrible disease, he’d made a program about it, you drowned in your own saliva, how terrible was that?
What about a cat? Cats did not bound at you with their slathering fangs when the doorbell was rung, wet fur around their unpleasant blackish lips, but when you were sitting on someone’s sofa drinking coffee they jumped on your lap and buried their claws in your thighs, digging through your jeans. Cats were sly and nasty. They kept themselves to themselves except when they wanted something. And they made him sneeze.
Marianne said that if you took a small photo of a cat and blew it up really really large you’d get a lion! Stephen studied other people’s cats. Ivan had one, a black and white thing which came with all kinds of accessories his new live-in girlfriend, probably-to-be wife, Simone, had bought for it. Cats found the places on the floor where shafts of sunlight fell through the windows and made them their spots. Carlos Castaneda’s shaman said everyone had their spot on the surface of the earth, you just had to discover it. Cats made it their business to do that, without even having read the book, which was impressive. There used to be an underground comic strip called Fat Freddy’s Cat which made him laugh. The cat would take revenge on its owner by shitting in his headphones, and generally led an anarchic existence, which Stephen respected more than the slavish devotion of the dog.
On the downside, cats appeared to have absolutely no sense of humor. If cats could speak they would never have developed jokes. If you told a cat a joke, a joke about cats, and they could understand your language, they would stare at you with their cold unpleasant gaze. You’d have to explain it to them, like a problem in mathematics. Cats were Egyptian. They came from the land of the pharaohs and the pyramids, from a time of many cruel gods. They existed without humor or real affection.
He consented to a cat on a trial basis. The cat lasted three or four days before he understood that when it stared at him with its large, seemingly intelligent eyes, what it saw was a five-feet-ten-inch-tall can opener. The smell of their food sickened him, open in a bowl by the door, the cat picking away at the fishy morsels. The cat’s fur proved almost lethal, causing his eyes to close up and his breath almost to fail in his chest, and he made Andrea ring Ivan to drive him to the hospital.
They moved down several notches in size to a hamster, which lived in a cage quietly in the kitchen, being generally no trouble, not living too long, and teaching the kids important lessons about the inevitable cycle of life and death. When Max left home Stephen found himself voluntarily looking after their fourth hamster, Cuddles, not wanting it to die, with no excuse to replace it with another. He liked the little guy in there, who looked at him with bright specky eyes, and demanded nothing. It ate grains, peacefully, and emitted tiny inoffensive droppings. One day, obliged to answer the phone while he was cleaning out the cage on a Saturday morning, he left the gate open and Cuddles escaped from his confinement. Stephen searched the house for him. Later that afternoon, Andrea did the laundry. Cuddles had made a nest among the sheets and duvet covers and she scooped him up inside a pillowcase, without noticing. He emerged from the machine forty minutes later, damp and dead. Stephen wept for ten minutes, feeling like an accomplice in a murder.
These hamster years were how he thought of the eighties and nineties, the blur of middle age and child-rearing.
He was British now. He had taken out citizenship to avoid the boredom of waiting in long lines when he arrived home at Heathrow customs and immigration, and he and Andrea had both joined the Labour Party. Sometimes he even went to meetings. Twenty years later he was damned if he could remember what it was about Margaret Thatcher that had made him so angry, was it merely her hats, her handbags, her hair and her appalling teeth? For he could no longer really recall what her policies had been apart from her demonic urge to destroy the coal miners, whom he sentimentally supported because he saw them on TV, the wives, plain and indomitable, standing at the doors of their modest houses in the driving rain as the defeated men left for work or, more likely, the dole queue.
He looked at the government and thought they were stuffed shirts, pompous upper-class windbags. America had a president worse, if anything, than Nixon, an actor, a total fake. But what had Thatcher and Reagan stood for exactly? It was possible to live in London in a middle-class bubble inside which everyone said the same things, thought the same things, ate the same meals, traveled the same tube line, read the same newspapers and books, watched the same TV programs and films and used the same grammatical constructions in their sentences. You agreed with everyone else because you believed that you could not know anyone who was so badly wrong about anything fundamental. The real variables, Andrea said, were in their inner lives, that inside they all suffered and managed as best they could to manage that suffering. “I don’t,” Stephen said.
Max’s Room
Watching Ralph’s hands, Max entered a world in which communication could be entirely visual. The card was secreted in a sleeve or displaced between two fingers. It was possible to train his own eye to look where he was supposed not to look in order to understand where the deception lay, but eventually Ralph showed him how the tricks were done and handed over his expensive magic books.
In his bedroom Max practiced for hours in silence. When his sister entered he did not look up. When his mother told him he should brush his teeth and come to bed, he did not look up. When, in the kitchen after dinner, his father turned on the radio, he did not register the sound. When lightning illuminated the garden, he turned his head to watch the rain pounding the pavement. When, a few moments later, a thunderclap seemed to smash into the side of the house, he moved uneasily in his chair.
Stephen rose from the kitchen table and stood behind his son. He emptied the apples from a paper bag and blew it up then clapped his hands against it a few inches from Max’s ear. Max looked puzzled, as if aroused very gently from sleep, unsure whether he was in the land of waking or dreaming, then went back to draw
ing pictures in his mashed potato.
“He can’t hear,” said Marianne, who was waiting to be allowed to get down so she could watch her permitted hour of television. “He looks at the shape we make with our mouths and that’s how he knows what we’re saying.”
“Since when?” Stephen said, feeling a sac of poison moving in his stomach.
Marianne considered the question. “Since I was three.”
“Don’t be silly, it’s a long time since you were three,” Andrea said.
“I might be exaggerating.”
Max was eight years old, Marianne was eleven. Under their noses, their son had gone deaf without their noticing.
Privately, Stephen had thought Max was slow. His own son a dimwit. He had said nothing to Andrea, fearing how she would assault him for being an intellectual snob. So what if their son was not an intellectual, would not follow his father into science, or either of them to Oxford? Mental health counted, that is what she would say.
Privately, Andrea had thought that Max had withdrawn into silence as a weapon against what he sensed were fractures in his parents’ marriage. She did not tell Stephen this, because to do so would be to admit that there was an underlying trouble, and that this potential destabilization was herself. That for five months she had been nearly having an affair. There had been no infidelity, except that when Stephen was away filming she rang him up, they had coffee, or lunch, and agreed that nothing would happen, both of them being married, and exhausted each other with conversation about the merits of their agreement not to take anything further until they had wrung dry this putative relationship, talked it out.
And she thought afterward, better to have got it over with, to have had a one-night stand, or it would have been in the afternoon, when all their children were at school and spouses otherwise occupied. They could have gone to bed, and satisfied each other’s curiosity. They hadn’t. So there was nothing to tell Stephen, and he would have understood far better if she said she had slept with him than if she offered an account of their vacillation, their minute examination of their choices, the talk talk talk. They were both therapists. And Stephen would have angrily said, “So why didn’t you just get on with it?” and he would have been right, because she could not let it go.
The thought of him, the hairs raised on the backs of his arms, his blue eyes, the sudden sight of him waiting for her in the café reading his book, his fingers marking something important with a pen, his interesting mind. His body. She had only ever seen one grown man naked, it was too absurd.
And all this time Max was going deaf. And she was deaf to his suffering. She did not believe she was being punished for practicing adultery in her heart, she did not believe in God or karma, so she punished herself. She refused to have her teeth fixed. She would not waste the money.
These feelings of guilt are so intense inside all of us, she thought, that they seem almost biological. She and Stephen were a couple, one of whom dealt in reason and the other dealt in the irrational, and yet there was nothing you could do about these shocking emotions, your neuroses, except learn to make your peace with them. That was all she could offer her patients, she could make the pain subside a little, no cures, just an acceptance of sadness.
What is inside us is primeval, she thought. There was never any enlightenment, just the banality of peace of mind achieved by accepting the utter ridiculousness of the unconscious. It was a crazy place down there, let it be. And so she accepted that because she had nearly, but not actually, had an affair, she could not justify spending the money on porcelain veneers, having been so preoccupied that she had failed to notice her son’s hearing gently fading away. She did not tell her husband this, she merely said that she was happy with her teeth the way they were and she would rather do up the house than her face.
Max lived on for some weeks in the vault of his silence. He was utterly absorbed in his book of magic tricks. Ralph told him he needed to practice in front of a mirror and he locked himself in the bathroom, climbed onto a stool and watched the cards, lengths of string and small balls perform feats of illusion under his control. It built in him a sense of invincible power. Soon he would be ready to stun his parents and their friends with a performance. Until he was ready he stuck with his audience of one, Ralph, his head resting against the lace antimacassar, nodding, sometimes even crying, for no reason. No reason.
One day he was taken from home to the hospital, his best magic book packed in a small suitcase. They sent him to sleep. His hearing had subsided slowly, he had not remembered missing it; he enjoyed the stillness, the peace. He woke suddenly, oppressed by noise. A child was crying in the next bed, he put his hands over his ears to cut off the din. Papers rustled, nurses walked heavily across the lino, a glass of water made a noise, your own hands did. Looking back as an adult, he wished they had allowed him to stay deaf, not to have inserted the grommet in his ear; he would have enjoyed learning sign language, and would have been good at it, being manually dextrous. Performing his magic act, he preferred not to hear the audience, uninterested in their applause. It was their faces he watched, the look of astonishment, the brain reeling from the impossibility of what it had just seen. He loved watching jaws drop.
The restoration of his hearing after his temporary deafness, Andrea realized, had done nothing to reverse a tendency in his personality to quietness, secrecy, withdrawal and a discomfort with social interaction. Of all the family members, he was the one who expressed no opinions. His school work was completed and handed in on time, but he wasn’t listening, he had fallen out of the habit, it didn’t interest him to hear what others said, what information they imparted, it could all be obtained from books. He had few friends, finding their company unnecessary. He kept them at bay with his command of illusion. He lived in a solitary world of distant admiration and respect. It was all he wanted.
Transitory Gardens
“‘The white girl, the white girl. Here comes the white girl.’ She was always standing outside my house in the snow or in the sticky heat, wearing a red Santa hat come rain or shine. I don’t know where she slept at night, a whole family was living on a heating shaft so I guess she was on the street, like everyone else, or maybe in a shelter. The city was full of beggars holding out paper cups with a dime or two in them, or even pennies. It was cruel, to give a homeless person just cents. But up in Harlem and maybe other places as well, on wasteland some of the more energetic homeless people made gardens, with fruit and flowers, and after a while I found myself going there every afternoon to see how they were getting on.
“There was something very Zen about those gardens, it was a short cycle of life and death, no more than a summer or two at the most, because they were planting in ground that torn-down buildings had once stood on, and something would be built there again, but there was always a transitory moment when the earth breathed and these homeless people came along and dug. I believe it was because they had a longing for permanence, for a connection to one spot. I found it really moving what they did. Everything about the enterprise was so uncertain. I used to watch my mother in the garden at home in Kent, pruning the roses and removing any suckers. She had a long-range plan, she wanted to make a landscape that would survive, and be documented. My father said you build a house for that, but my mother saw the creation of a permanent garden as an act which defied God. At least I think that’s what she meant, it’s my interpretation, because to defy God meant that the garden would have an underlying form that couldn’t easily be erased by the seasons. Adam was the first gardener, I know that because we had a poster in the hall that my mother bought and had framed. It read, When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? And there was a drawing of a naked Adam with his hoe. My father never noticed that it was a slogan about class, he rushed past it every day on his way to the station and rushed past it again when he came home at night. But for my mother, gardening was some weird holy ritual, a pact with the Deity and a contest with him.
“The street people who
made the gardens in Harlem were the urban poor, and the poorest of the poor, if they needed materials they had to go hunting in the trash, and the only water they had came from the sky. So I was drawn to go and hang out with them, and help where I could with the carrying and the planting.
“I met a guy named Howard who was lounging in a broken armchair in a tomato patch in a gap on the street where he’d pushed away the rubble of a torn-down brownstone, and he was sitting back eating one of his juicy tomatoes, like a king on his throne. In front of him he’d dug a hole and lined it with plastic garbage bags and when you looked down into the hole, there were six fat goldfish, God knows where he got them.
“A woman named Maisie, who was originally from Detroit, grew huge sunflowers just for the hell of it. She could have sold them on the street but she wouldn’t, she just wanted to see those sunflowers reach up with their massive yellow heads, it was a totally piss-off gesture. Someone else gathered rocks and painted them with the flag of their home country, which I couldn’t recognize, I don’t like flags, and faces like masks. That was not so much a garden as a sculpture park. These people were so incredibly limited, they had no money, everything was found, and everything would either be stolen eventually—they’d go to sleep in a cardboard shelter on the lot and in the night someone would come and cut down the flowers and take the vegetables—or the winter would inevitably arrive and the earth would disappear under the snow, and the gardens would disappear too. Sometimes they’d return in the spring, they’d come looking for shoots, for some sign that there was a recovery, but mostly the gardens were temporary.
“I went to work as a cocktail waitress for a while, it was all I could get because I didn’t have a work permit and it was the sort of place that wasn’t very picky about who they hired. My feet would be swollen from standing all night and the straps of my shoes cut into my instep. I had to keep my fingernails and toenails neat and painted, and present them every evening for inspection, as if I was a fucking horse.