by Linda Grant
“But at that stage I wasn’t ready to leave New York. If I had ever been able to sell my origami dresses everything would have been all right, but Americans are so anti-intellectual, it’s all the bottom line, you can see their fingers moving, like they’re counting their money without even being aware of what they’re doing. They’re sick people. I mean the white people, African-Americans are very much more human than the rest of us. They understand things without them being explained. I showed them my origami dresses and they took them, one woman tied the cloth round her head and made a huge hat, she had absolutely no inhibitions. But when I went to see the buyers on Fifth Avenue they looked at the dresses as if they’d been dropped down from outer space. And there was something lunar about them, you know, they were just very out there, and in New York, which was the one place where they should have been understood, they weren’t, because the buyers were too stupid.
“I felt like I’d discovered the laws of relativity, and everyone carried on with the old science, the antique explanations. It was just a dress, but it was the final boundaries of what cloth could be. That was what I did and no one cared, they looked at the folds and tucks and said, ‘Well, that’s fine for you, but I’d be all thumbs.’
“I walked up and down Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue and then down to the Village and to Soho and those dresses didn’t sell. All they were were pieces of cloth and a set of instructions about what to do with them, how you could make at least fourteen kinds of dress, and the rest was left to your own imagination, the possibilities were limitless. I was trying to sell a total individuality, because even when you’d made the dress you could add a belt or pull up the skirt to a different length. The idea was from China, from Mao, who made these suits for everyone to wear so you would eliminate the tiresomeness of all that choice, but I twisted it, so that you just had one piece of cloth and a thousand and one ways of making it your own. But when I went into the stores, they just looked at my samples and said, Where’s the design? This is just a piece of fabric.
“There was one woman I started arguing with, I said it’s a concept, and she called me a flake. I’d never heard that expression. I had no idea what it meant. It could have been a good thing, I had no idea, but I found out later that it wasn’t.
“Do you ever have the feeling you want to fly? You’re with someone and you want to unfold wings from behind your back, and the wings spread out, heavy and white and the air rushes and folds and bears you up, and you just take off. And they’re sitting there, stunned because you’ve done something no one can do, and for a few moments you hover and you’re gone. I always wanted wings. When I was a child, at home in Kent, and I could hear my father’s footsteps walking past my bedroom in the hall on the way to his study, I used to wish I could fly out of the window and over the valley. I could see some oak trees in the distance and I thought I’d beat my wings really hard until I reached them, and nest with the eagles.
“So in the afternoons I’d be helping the homeless people make their gardens. Howard used to drive the rats away with his slingshot, he had plans to make a birdbath out of a pail of water balanced on a pole if he could fix it firmly enough in the ground. The birds lived very fragile lives and it was hard for them to find food and water, the skinny cats would chase them for food. We found half-eaten birds on the ground among the tomatoes. Then at night I’d dress up in my cocktail waitress costume and I’d go downtown and take orders for drinks from out-of-state businessmen. The management turned a blind eye if you wanted to go further with them, that was much better money than the tips, but too distasteful. A few of them did it, they suggested that there were certain men who were interested in me, men who liked dominatrixes, and enjoyed being tied up, they offered to show me the knots, and it was tempting, I’d have loved to have had some man on his knees, but inside I suppose I’m just a middle-class white girl, because when one night this guy approached me, I ran.
“I only lasted there a few weeks. The other women all had far greater stamina than me, I couldn’t take the hours on my feet, I kept sitting down at empty tables, which was absolutely forbidden, and eventually I was fired.
“I had the Harlem apartment as an eight-month sublet from someone I met in Paris who was part of the whole early project of gentrifying Harlem. The neighbors hated me. They were rich black yuppies, dentists and lawyers and professors from Columbia, and they didn’t want white people in Harlem. Go back to the East Village, they said, you don’t belong here. They were so conventional. They would have loved Islington, they would have died and gone to heaven if they could have seen your house, all this dead-salmon Georgian paint. By the time the sublet was coming to an end, I hadn’t made many friends in New York, and all of them were from somewhere else, recent arrivals like me, people who came there because we were so absolutely sure that we’d make it, and we didn’t. Some of them wound up selling jewelry from a blanket on the street, it was that bad, I mean these were people who had expected they were going to be hanging out with Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe. They were only one jump up from the homeless. A girl I knew became a junkie, and then I heard she died of AIDS. She was an artist, but whatever it was she did no one cared. She was living in a rathole, my place in Harlem was a palace compared to hers even though it backed onto the crack house.
“America threw us out, it picked us up like you pick up a frog and hold it by one of its legs and fling it as far as you can go, it sent us hurtling back across the ocean. Nothing good happened to me in New York, except the gardens, and they vanished. They are buried under hotels and offices now, the seeds and roots are sleeping. I suppose the people who made them are dead too. They weren’t well, they would have had it hard surviving the winter. This was before Mayor Giuliani came along and cleaned up the streets and they vanished back into America, if they were still alive, if life still held them.
“It had been a long time since my father had put any money in my account. I kept on checking but there was nothing there, I suppose he must have given up on me, finally, thinking that years had gone by and still I hadn’t come home so he was not able to have any control over me other than by stopping the supply.
“I wound up selling my blood. I didn’t want them to deport me so I sold my blood to buy my plane ticket and I went to Barcelona, when it was still cheap and you could live an open-air life on the Ramblas. I met a guy and he took me to Ibiza. He had a house there with stables where he bred Arabians, but his main business was a club he owned in town, a discothèque, he called it, where rich Eurotrash came to party. I stayed all the time at the house, which was inland and very peaceful. I would sit on the roof sunbathing and look out across the hills and valleys, the sky was flat blue with a few clouds like a sprinkling of salt and I thought of my old Cuban boyfriend. He bought me a horse and I learned to ride, and I spent more and more time with the horses. He was mean, but the horses were always very nice to me.
“If I could go back anywhere, apart from Cuba, it would be to Ibiza, to the house with the horses. We usually spoke to each other in Spanish but he’d picked up this English expression, I have no idea where. Mind your manners. And he used it relentlessly on me. He was always telling me that I was rude to his friends. I said, ‘Well, you know, I just say what I think and if other people can’t handle it, that’s their problem.’
“‘People don’t like you,’ he said.
“‘Who doesn’t like me?’
“‘No one. My friends ask me, Why are you with her? She’s a crazy bitch.’
“‘Well,’ I said, ‘you like me because you are always showing me off.’
“‘You spend too much time in the sun,’ he said. ‘Englishwomen should not sunbathe, your skin is wrinkling. You lie up there on the roof all afternoon and you are turning into an old lady.’
“I found his hair dye under the sink in the bathroom and I dyed one of his pure-white Arabians with it. He was furious but I thought it was the most hilarious thing. ‘The poor horse,’ he kept saying, ‘the poor horse.�
� But what’s the problem? The dye washes out eventually. The shop was out of his particular shade of dye and he came back from town empty-handed. His roots were already showing. Old man! I taunted him. I wasn’t in love with him, the way I had loved my Cuban boyfriend, but we had a wonderful life, I’ll give him that. The house was fabulous, I had the horses to ride every day. And very good sex. I can’t fault him on that.
“It was in Ibiza that I had my second and third abortions. I don’t know why you’re surprised. The last thing I would do is bring children into this hateful world. If I hadn’t been able to get the terminations I’d have just strangled them as they came out of me, I’d have killed them with my bare hands.
“This was around the time the Berlin Wall came down. I kept wondering what Fidel thought, and made Juan go to the port to buy all the papers, because we didn’t have a TV. I made him buy me a radio. I wanted to know what was happening, and could not work out what was going to come next. Now everything was an unknown quantity and I was still very curious. Before certain things had been beaten out of me. I did not expect that I would be so thwarted, I never thought I’d find myself on my knees.
“I wish I’d stayed in Ibiza. It was a big mistake to leave. Juan would have looked after me, he would never have allowed these things to happen. I was happy there back in the eighties, before life turned so strange. I could have married Juan and raised horses and gone to Barcelona every couple of months, which would have been enough. It was Juan who pointed out that I was a country girl at heart. You belong among the peasants, he told me, except you don’t think like them, which is a tragedy for you.
“I can no longer remember why I left him, and sometimes, at night just before I fall asleep, a memory comes to me that I didn’t leave, but that he asked me to go because of some absurd crime I had committed which caused him to lose face. But if that is true, I really don’t remember it.
“I should have stayed out of the sun. I’m always having to have lesions biopsied. So far no cancerous cells. I assume I’m fine, I have no symptoms.”
Mounds
Stephen dreamed of his mother’s meat loaf with gravy and creamed potatoes. He rebelled against his wife’s healthy nutrition plan and her new mantra of eating only when you are hungry and stopping when you are full. He was the rationalist, not she, yet he found her regime joyless. Eating connected him back to his mother’s kitchen, to her cake-baking, to his first experiments with the principles of chemistry, and how ingredients like butter, sugar, eggs and flour lost all resemblance to their original selves when combined. But he still enjoyed eating the results of the experiments.
No, food was more than fuel in ways he was not particularly interested in examining. In the BBC canteen at lunchtime, he chose the lasagne, the fish and chips, the quiches, and experimented with English desserts like jam roly-poly and trifle. He learned to like custard and what the British called biscuits. The only thing he drew the line at was Christmas pudding and mince pies, for what was the point of a dessert made out of dried fruit? Had the British never heard of pecans, chocolate? He had inherited his father’s wiry frame, thickening now around the middle, but with no tendencies to be a fat man, so why should he not eat what he wanted? He liked to eat. What else were his pleasures, when the only drugs were the joints he and Ivan lit at weekends and the occasional line of coke Ivan brought over for his birthday? Apart from that, all he had left was food. He no longer smoked cigarettes, and sex was irregular, neither of them had the energy.
Periodic cravings washed over him with the longing and yearning he had once felt as a hormone-assaulted single man at Oxford, staring at the girls in the next-door garden with their spectacular breasts. He wept at the thought of lemon chiffon pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side, maybe two scoops. He drooled over the recollection of fudge brownies, fudge sundaes, apple cobbler, chess pie. Sometimes he ate two chocolate bars on the journey home from work and put his key in the door feeling guilty and nauseous. He badly missed a candy from his youth called Mounds, which was unavailable in Europe. Its name summed it up: a pile of sweetened coconut enrobed in chocolate. The British had something similar, they called it a Bounty bar, but it wasn’t the same in a way he could not put his finger on, perhaps it was as simple as the color of the packaging and its associations. Nor did it have, as its sister confection, the Almond Joy, which was identical to Mounds but with an added nut.
Whenever he went to America to see his parents, he took an extra bag with him, to fill with Mounds, Almond Joys, Peppermint Patties, Clark bars and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. His favorite candies did not have caramel in them, which he couldn’t stand. Snickers would be an ideal bar were it not for the thin layer of light brown goo holding in place the peanuts. Caramel, he worked out, was primarily used as engineering, to make things adhere to the base ingredient, usually a fondant or nougat, while chocolate held the whole thing together and kept it from sticking to your hands. He suggested to the commissioning editors a fun science program on the construction of famous confectionary bars but was knocked back by the BBC’s ban on using brand names, which rendered the idea pointless.
He was forced to buy a small refrigerator for his study to keep his American candies, as he called them, from deteriorating before he had worked through them all. Chocolate, he observed, developed in the heat a whitish moldlike substance called bloom, which he found unappetizing though he knew it was harmless. A subsection of research argued whether the bloom was caused by phase separation or polymorphic transformation. This was how he could have earned a living in the commercial sector: analyzing chocolate deterioration. It no longer seemed as shameful as it had when he had been in Professor Whaley’s office at UCLA; you settled for less, he thought, that’s what life was, perennially settling for less.
And you fought these absurd little domestic wars, such as with your wife, who would not permit sugar of any kind in the kitchen, which wasn’t needed as she did no baking and expected guests to take their tea and coffee without it. All meals ended with fruit selected according to the season. Winters were an endless bore of apples and pears until the short tepid summers of strawberries or raspberries, served with yogurt. On special occasions they were allowed a sorbet. In the end, arguments over sugar had become his protests.
Andrea had been plump when he met her, he liked that, he liked a zaftig woman, short and squeezy. Now she was lean. She was a jogger, pounding the streets of Islington, where there were no parks and no fresh air. She did three circuits of Highbury Fields, thinking through her patients’ problems as she went; Stephen did nothing. At home at his parents’ house in L.A. no one followed any sports, physical activity outside work was for jocks and in England he had never learned to watch soccer, let alone cricket or tennis. Andrea bought him a set of what he insisted on calling dumbbells, suggesting he might lift them for twenty minutes before breakfast three days a week. They gathered dust, under the bed.
Stephen no longer had any real idea what his wife’s hair color was; white lines occasionally appeared at the roots, which he was too polite to mention. Was it his imagination, or was she growing blonder, with what he called yellow streaky pieces? He’d gone to bed with a plump redhead on a mattress on the floor in a room scented by joss sticks and patchouli and woken up in an Islington mansion next to a firm, toned body and a sleek, ever-lightening bob of hair. In the mirror, he saw his own wiry black hair grazed with gray, and a widow’s peak developing as it receded from the temples, leaving pink, mottled skin. Scared of the new health hazard, skin cancer, he started to wear a hat: an American baseball cap from the Gap, the only kind of hat he was prepared to wear, with its name and logo on the front. His old clothes still hung in the wardrobe, he was not prepared to get rid of them, they were who he really was, he could not forget the boy who had sailed across the Atlantic on the SS United States with high hopes.
When he went out to buy a pair of 32-inch-waist jeans and they didn’t fit him, he came home empty-handed. He was a 32-inch waist. This was hi
s measurement, it was a descriptor, like a birthmark. “But self-evidently you are size 34,” said Andrea. “No, I’m not,” he said, stubbornly. “You should cut out chocolate, then you’d be back in your size 32s.” “Never happen,” he replied, in a sulk.
To Andrea, her husband’s refusal to abandon the childishness of what she called his sweeties was obviously a symptom of unresolved issues which he refused to confront. He had, from the start, declared himself not a candidate for therapy. He accepted and indulged her career as a way of making money out of other people’s neuroses, but if he possessed a subconscious, and he unwillingly accepted that he must, since she insisted (and he was prepared for the sake of a quiet life and respect for her and her career to agree), it was and would remain concreted over. The world in his opinion had too many wonders to investigate to waste time exploring imaginary ones. He had purchased one of the first Apple Mac computers and one of the first modems on the market. He could enter, like an intruder, university departments where he experienced the eerie sensation of walking through the halls late at night when all the faculty had gone home, and the place was silent but you could read the notices on the boards, the names of the professors, the courses they taught and their research interests. These were the first websites. He joined user groups and chatted about biotechnology. Andrea caught him on the internet, a half-eaten Mounds bar on the desk next to him, “talking” to a woman at MIT.
What did this compulsion to eat chocolate mean, she wondered, and why the candy bars of his childhood? Something infantile had not been fully outgrown; he had always been a breast man, and before that a momma’s boy. There was something not entirely adult about her husband, she thought, he retained a boyishness he should have long ago abandoned. It was her theory that in all marriages there is one person who is the grown-up and the other who is the child, and she knew which role she fulfilled in this particular partnership. He still had the eagerness, the curiosity, the straightforward humor of the boy she had first met in the garden and had decided that he was the One, the one to whom she would lose her virginity. This was what she still loved about him, that he was not depressed or sour or bitter or angry, like many men who sat before her in the patient’s chair. She was very tired of listening to male rage and male misogyny.