by Toni Jordan
Jamie taps his finger on the photo. She’s seen his hand before, of course. She even held it the other night when they kissed, but now she notices how large it is—but narrower, more defined than she’d expected, and bony, with tendons like ridges. His wrists, too, are broader and firmer.
‘Love,’ he says.
Caddie keeps her gaze on the photographs. ‘Is it that easy to spot?’
‘Sometimes. In this case. What’s she looking at?’
‘A photo of Inga, but I’m not sure which one. The big one, in the centre? I can’t tell from this angle where she’s standing. Do you remember what was there, in her line of sight?’
‘I haven’t been to see the fragments,’ Jamie says.
Somehow, it’s never come up.
‘What do you mean, you haven’t seen them? You’ve spent years studying her, and you haven’t been?’
‘Is it stuffy in here?’ Jamie says. ‘I need some air.’
As they leave Spagalini’s the heat hits her like a wall. By the time they turn the corner back into Caddie’s street the trees seem to have drooped and the grass on the footpath has thinned and yellowed. The background hum of cicadas is so pervasive she wonders if they’re real or if the sound is inside her head. They walk along the footpath past a poinsettia hanging over a rusted chain-mesh fence and the sight of it throbs behind her temples.
‘I owe you twenty bucks, plus two coffees,’ she says.
He raises an eyebrow. ‘Don’t leave town.’
Her damp shirt clings to her back. ‘So tell me.’
He holds up a hand to shield his eyes. ‘Nothing to tell. I fell out of love with Inga, that’s all.’
‘Right. Because that’s easy to do.’
They keep walking, stepping around a small boy coming up the hill on a tricycle, his mother close behind, pushing a stroller.
‘I had a falling-out with Philip, OK?’
She grabs his arm and pulls him to a stop. ‘When? What happened?’
‘He was my supervisor. In the early days of my thesis I was trying to find a new way to interpret All Has an End. A major revision of the symbolism, the way she inverts all the Nazi images that we’re used to seeing.’ He looks to the heavens. ‘It seems such a minor thing now. It’s hard to even remember being that kind of person. When a single paper was life and death to me.’
Philip’s big success, the article that made his name.
‘I gave him the paper for one final check. He’d send it off, he said. I thought the referees were taking ages because the journal hadn’t been in touch with me. The work wasn’t up to scratch, that’s what I thought.’ He laughs and bites his thumbnail. ‘Philip told me not to worry, he said these things take time. It wasn’t until it appeared in print that I saw he was named as the lead author.’
‘And your name didn’t appear at all?’
‘It appeared all right. In the acknowledgments. He thanked me for my invaluable support.’
A house a few doors from the corner has a stand of pawpaws in the backyard near the side fence. Two are ripe and yellow and one overripe, soft and blackly swollen.
‘Did you say something?’
‘Loudly, and with some colourful adjectives. That was not to my credit. I was a young idiot. It was called paying the rent, he told me. Everyone did it and I was immature to be upset. I had no idea how the world worked.’
Caddie turns and starts walking again. The exact same words. She had also been immature to be upset, she also had no idea how the world worked, according to Philip. She had believed him, but now she sees that these things were not peculiar to her. They were things he said to Jamie, perhaps to others as well.
‘Just accept it and the rest of my PhD would be easy, that’s what he said. And to his credit, it was.’
And just like that, Caddie feels the weight of the past slip from her shoulders. These words of Philip’s she’s been carrying around—they don’t have anything to do with her. She can put them down now, wherever she likes.
‘That doesn’t explain your leaving. You’d already paid the price.’
‘It seems crazy, doesn’t it? I did my post-doc but…I never felt the same about academia after that. I bummed around overseas for a while. And then my parents died. And I came home.’
Giving up. Turning your back on everything you’d dreamed of.
They’re in front of her house. She makes no attempt to go inside. They lean against the back of Terese’s Escort, parked in the driveway. Jamie’s taller than her so he slides his feet out to sink down to her level. They chat about nothing.
‘I shouldn’t have said anything,’ he says. ‘About Philip.’ Along the side fence there’s a long stem of grass topped with a seed head. He breaks it off and twirls it between his fingers.
‘It’s OK. I understand.’
‘No. It wasn’t professional. I’m sure he’s very different in his personal life. A great guy, I’ll bet.’
This is her cue to say something. Not such a great guy, actually.
‘You were obviously close,’ Jamie says. He takes a step towards her, rests his elbow on the roof of the car near her shoulder. They are almost touching. She can smell the warmth of him, the scent of Fabulon released by the sun.
This is the danger. Two people with the same wound, a triangle with both of them defined by their feelings towards Philip. Two little sparrows huddling from a wedgetail. Or worse: a kind of revenge. She wishes they had nothing in common now, nothing at all. That he was a butcher, an engineer, someone in sales who’d never heard of Inga Karlson. There’s something important hovering out of reach and there’s nothing she can do to bring it closer. Philip is a chasm between them, not a bridge. She has no idea how to cross to the other side.
‘I need to think,’ she says. ‘About my future. What to do about Rachel and Inga and Fischer and all of that.’
‘Right,’ he says. He swallows and looks at the ground then straightens and buries his hands in his pockets. ‘Of course.’
‘There’s a lot going on right now.’
‘There is. A lot going on.’ He walks down the drive towards the footpath. ‘I’ll give you a call. Or you could call me. When you’ve thought.’
‘I will,’ she says.
Jamie’s car is parked back at the restaurant. She waits by the side of the road until he reaches the corner, then heads inside. She closes the door; she headbutts it once, twice. You, Caddie Walker, are an idiot, she thinks. Now that he’s gone, she misses him. They could be having sex right now—she’s imagined it for the last few nights. The whole morning is almost gone, and what has she achieved? And she needs to go back to the exhibition, to see what Rachel was looking at so intently.
Jamie will be back at his place in half an hour—she could call him. Say she’s sorry, ask if she could come over. Despite Terese’s car in the drive, there’s no one else home. Caddie’s clothes are sticking to her skin again so she strips off in the hall for a quick shower.
The doorbell rings just as she’s stepped under. Her heart beats faster. She has a chance to fix this, right now. She turns the water off and wraps her hair in one towel and her body in another.
‘Did you forget something?’ she says, as she opens the door.
She hears a low whistle. ‘Not a chance.’
It’s Philip.
20
New York City, 1938
Before they reach the bottom of the stairs the walls grow damp and patches of green lichen appear. Rachel can hear music rising around them and at first it seems a riot of instruments fighting in a sack with wails and blurts and trills, but as she listens she finds she can pick out an underlying spine of melody that each separate sound pulls and pushes against. It’s lazy yet somehow tense, like a lion resting after a meal, flicking its tail. The air around Rachel vibrates from the blares of the horn; she can feel it in the cavity of her chest. The blood in her ears seems to leap. And then they reach another heavy door and it swings open in a roar of sound and heat and it’s ha
rd for her to believe that this many people are drinking and dancing and yelling in so little space, and so early in the evening.
The ceiling is high: she didn’t expect that either. The walls are solid like a cave and hung with mirrors and strange art. There are tuxedos and furs and jewels and feathers, there are men resembling boxers and plumbers and others who might be hospital patients or bums. The crowd swells like the sea, moving as one in a wave with the music. At street level, people walk and shop and drive their cars in the fading daylight without any idea that this seething, laughing mass exists. She can see women wearing next to nothing, smoking, arm in arm with men with no jackets and filthy shirts and others in tails. The musicians on stage are Negroes. A cigarette girl walks past her; she is naked from the waist up.
Inga weaves through the crowd. Rachel is a tender in her wake.
They squeeze along the bar, beside two men speaking a foreign language. Inga orders two champagne ciders and they carry them to a small booth on the far side, away from the stage. It’s hot but not stuffy. Inga swills her drink; Rachel sips hers. It’s sweet but still burns its way down her throat and the aftertaste is the way rubbing alcohol smells. If this really is champagne, Rachel thinks, she doesn’t see what the fuss is about.
‘All these people must have come straight from work,’ Rachel says, over the noise.
‘“Work.” Yes, they’ve all come straight from schools and hospitals and offices, where they work.’
‘Really?’
Inga laughs, sharp, like a bark. ‘No, not really. It’s like this down here from the middle afternoon until well after you’ve served breakfast to the working stiffs. Mostly ne’er-do-wells, with the odd whore, gangster, artist and subversive. Dope peddlers. Anyone who wants a party, almost any time.’
‘I didn’t imagine that people like you—’ Rachel begins.
‘You didn’t imagine that people like me?’ Inga’s eyes widen and she folds her hands over her heart, an approximation of being pierced with an arrow. ‘I’m highly likeable, or so I’m told. There are fan clubs. Letters from small children. They pray for me, so they say. Sitting at my lonesome desk, toiling every day for the greater good.’
‘No, no. I didn’t. I’m sure that people like you. I mean people who are like you. Authors, I mean. I didn’t imagine you in a place like this.’
‘But this is the best place to be,’ Inga says. ‘At home there’s just you and your thoughts. Your bright, white, unsullied pages. Out on the street, there’s always the danger that someone will see you. Sometimes that’s fine, sometimes I’m in the mood for that. But usually I just want to be by myself. Listen.’
Rachel tries, but she can’t make out any sounds apart from the noise of the continual party. She can’t hear a thing, she says.
‘Exactly,’ Inga says.
‘Excuse me, beautiful ladies.’
Rachel looks up to see a man with a painted necktie, shiny black hair and a lush moustache. He smiles with the tips of his teeth touching. He raises his eyebrows like he’s trying to stretch them to the ceiling.
‘Fuck off,’ Inga says, without looking at him. ‘What was I saying?’
Rachel swallows. The man has obediently fucked off, fading into the dancers on the floor, seemingly none the worse for meeting Inga. ‘You just want to be by yourself.’
‘Exactly.’ She calls to the bar for more drinks, waving a note. ‘But when even myself is too much to bear, I come here.’
The drinks arrive and, as the waiter leaves, another man comes to stand beside their table.
‘Are you deaf or stupid? I just told you,’ says Inga. This time her eyes are on her drink.
Rachel could have told her that it isn’t the same man as before. He has no moustache, for a start. His hair is dark grey and wavy with lighter grey patches above the temples. His nose is bulbous and his lips are fuller. He’s older, wearing round wire glasses that sit low on his nose. His eyes are bloodshot and he is wearing what appears to be a short silk bathrobe over tweed trousers with a white scarf almost to his knees. He looks to Rachel like a man who’s just woken up and staggered downstairs to find a couple of hundred strangers dancing and drinking in his living room.
‘What did you tell me?’ the man says. ‘I know what. Nothing, that’s what.’
‘Darling Charles,’ Inga says. ‘How funny to see you here. What a treat.’
‘A treat?’ He holds a squat glass of amber liquid and, as he speaks, it sloshes onto the floor. ‘I’ve been calling you for three days. I’ve sent a messenger around, and I’ve sent Marion even though I can’t spare her, and the phone rings and rings. I’ve even had someone deliver a side of salmon from Nova Scotia because I don’t know anyone who won’t open the door to Canadian salmon. Except for you, apparently. I was just about to scout the streets with a bloodhound trained on the scent of your indifference.’
‘Yes, yes, mea culpa.’
‘I’ve been here every evening for two weeks. She’ll show her face down here at some stage, I’m thinking. My poor hardworking liver’s taking a bullet for you.’
‘Don’t go on, honestly. Sit down, have another drink. This is Rachel.’
Rachel the waitress, she thinks, Rachel from Allentown, Pennsylvania who is as much at home here as she would be in an airship floating over the city. She shuffles around the booth to make space for him. The man, Charles, sits as if his knees give way and shakes her hand.
‘Rachel is my Galahad, Charles. I met her just this afternoon when she risked all to save me from a dragon.’
‘I think that was Gawain but in any case, the pleasure is mine,’ Charles says. ‘Please tell me she hasn’t been out making mischief. Just this afternoon, did Inga say? I can tell from your fresh complexion that it’s a recent acquaintanceship. Me, I looked like Tyrone Power when I first met Inga. That was several hundred years ago, shortly after the siege of Yorktown.’
‘Don’t you listen to him, Rachel. He would have died of boredom years ago without me. I’m like a tonic for him,’ says Inga. ‘Now, what shall we talk about? Mrs Roosevelt’s charming friend? Gloria Vanderbilt’s grippe?’
Charles removes his glasses and polishes them with his jacket. The light is soft where they’re sitting but Rachel can still see the red flush on his cheeks and angry vessels around the side of his nose. The band launches into ‘Caravan’: Rachel has heard of Duke Ellington, though she’s never heard jazz played live before.
‘What about your next draft,’ Charles says, louder, over the music. ‘Let’s talk about that.’
‘You’re not very nice,’ says Inga. ‘No wonder people avoid you.’
‘That’s unkind and untrue. You think I’m nice, don’t you, Rachel?’ he says.
She looks from one to the other. ‘I’m not sure,’ she says. ‘I’ve only just met you.’
‘Good lord, I’ve found an honest New Yorker,’ says Inga. ‘Hold the presses.’
‘Speaking of presses,’ says Charles. He jerks his shoulder to the far side of the room.
Rachel can’t identify what or who he’s pointing out, among the sea of people. Inga, though: she can see. She takes another long sip.
‘Charles,’ she says, calmer now, cooler. ‘If he comes over we’re leaving.’
‘He’s been helping me track you down. Doing the rounds of the bars, in case you popped up somewhere else. Not because it’s his job—it isn’t. Because nothing’s too much trouble. He’s been a trooper.’
‘Did you say trooper? Or traitor?’
‘You can’t always have your own way,’ Charles says.
‘Whose name is on the cover? Whose sweat and blood is on the inside? I’d rather set fire to every copy than have that man come anywhere near it.’ She squeezes her glass like she’s about to snap the stem. ‘Americans. You are all children, playing at things. You joke, you take nothing seriously. This is serious, Charles.’
It’s a different Inga now, Rachel thinks. No longer flippant, no longer the lost little girl at the restaura
nt. How many Ingas are there?
‘He’s on board. We pay him a little extra, he keeps all the trouble away. And he’s good at his job.’
‘A protection racket,’ says Inga. ‘Him and his thugs.’
‘A smart business alliance,’ says Charles.
‘Rachel,’ Inga says, leaning toward her. ‘Do you see that man over there? The one in the white shirt with the suspenders, leering at the woman in the unfortunate blouse? He’s one of your very own American Nazis. Homegrown.’
‘Inga,’ Charles says.
‘That’s why America is a beacon for immigrants. All these Jewish quota people coming from Germany by the boatload, even humble me crossing the oceans for Lady Liberty. Because America can beat the rest of the world at anything. Even fascism.’
‘She’s overreacting,’ Charles says to Rachel. ‘They’re patriots, that’s all, Americans proud of their German heritage. They’re worried about the commies, just like we are.’
‘That’s what they do out at Yaphank, I’m sure. They sit around like proud Americans and worry about the commies.’
Charles rubs his face like he’s drying it with a towel. ‘Inga. It’s a free country.’ His voice is louder than it needs to be. ‘They own their own property, which is what we do here in America, and besides, it’s a picnic ground. Children sing around the fire, probably. They eat bratwurst and sauerkraut and sing, I don’t know, the Horst Wessel Song.’
Inga drains her glass. ‘He’s a pill. You don’t know what they’re like.’
‘I know I bend over backwards to keep you happy. You’re like the neurotic younger sister I never had. But I’m not going to fire a good worker with a family just when people are getting back on their feet. It’s not two years ago we had soup kitchens on every other block in this city. Have you forgotten what it’s like to be broke? Besides, he’s ambitious. Hardworking. Wants to make something of himself. More people should have half his drive.’
While they’re talking, Rachel can see the man with the suspenders winding his way across the crowded dance floor toward them. He’s smiling, and every now and then he waves in an awkward attempt to catch their eye. He’s knock-kneed, she sees, as he darts to avoid a reckless dip. And then he’s in front of them, a smallish, soft-haired man with a sheepish smile and a long, thin face. His fair hair is parted dead in the middle of a low hairline. He wears round, fine glasses. His small eyes sparkle.