It was all his parents’ fault.
Throughout his upbringing they’d pinched their pennies—buying single-ply toilet rolls, with its notorious “poke-through” problem, clothing Elliot in Robert’s hand-me-downs, and foreswearing air conditioning, which meant that his friends would boycott his house all summer. Made from quick-sale vegetables with their ignominious yellow stickers, stir-fry suppers had exuded the ammoniated whiff of mushrooms gone slippery. Less from necessity than catechism, his mother never bought herself a dress at Filene’s Basement that wasn’t on sale. As much as he resisted such joyless thrift in theory, like it or not the tightwad gene was buried deep in his own DNA. Elliot bought single-ply, too.
The year he’d moved to London turned out to be a watershed, and not because Labour came to power. In hindsight (though of course making decisions “in hindsight” would make everyone rich), he should have urged Caitlin to sell her flat, that they might embark on married life in a new home that they purchased together. Back then, he might easily have transferred his Citibank savings (during a now-nostalgic era of exchange rates sometimes as low as $1.40) to go fifty-fifty on a deposit. Instead, with the accommodating deference of a stranger in a strange land, he’d contributed his half of her mortgage payments for four years, during which Caitlin’s flat nearly doubled in value. It was news to him when they split that all along he hadn’t been building a share in the escalating equity, but, the initial pittance of a deposit being Caitlin’s, paying “rent.” Bitterness was never an attractive quality, but on this point—the monies at issue running to about £55K, more than enough to have set him up in his own place—Elliot was well and truly bitter. The real test of lovers wasn’t how they dealt with illness, whether they were “supportive” or sexually faithful; you discovered what people were made of only once on the pointy end of how they handled money.
In hindsight, too, as soon as he gave up on the marriage (Caitlin was under the deluded impression that she had kicked him out), he should again have availed himself of his American savings to buy the first crappy dive he could snag. But by that point, British property already appeared wildly overvalued. Fatally, then, he had rented the flat in Bermondsey with two workmates and resolved to sit tight. Since, property had appreciated another staggering sixty percent. Would his mother be dismayed, or gratified? Elliot had been waiting in vain for houses to go on sale.
As he trooped up Pilgrimage and rounded on Manciple (both street names long ago added to his collection), even the blocks of ex–council flats seemed to be sneering with schoolyard contempt, “We were bought before 1997, nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah!” Because one couldn’t walk any distance in this city without passing residential dwellings, even brief scuttles home like this one wore him out with resentment.
Unlocking the front door of his shared loft conversion on Long Lane, Elliot supposed morosely that he could always go back to the States. When asked by uncomprehending Brits why he stayed in this bleak, godforsaken country, he would often promote some twaddle about “culture,” but an honest answer was closer to “furniture.” In an ostentatious display of largesse that helped cover for some tiny trace of embarrassment over screwing him on the flat, Caitlin had made a great show of dividing the appointments they’d bought together strictly down the middle. Thus he was possessed of a handsome two-hundred-year-old dining table whose rugged, manly cut he quite fancied. Currently the social center of the loft, it was a heavy walnut affair that expanded to seat eight—too massive to ship, too cherished to abandon. He could see himself living in this city for the rest of his life, manacled to the legs of that table.
Besides, taunted by those fatuous facades of self-satisfied brick, buffeted by the hostile forces of $4 roller-balls, Elliot did not want to admit defeat.
Typically, his father’s £160 quickly frittered from Elliot’s wallet on dull rubbish. He may have treated himself to a couple of proper lunches instead of meagerly filled M&S chicken fajita wraps, but otherwise lost the packet to new batteries for the Long Lane radio-controlled thermostat, Sainsbury’s thievingly priced non-bio laundry detergent because he couldn’t be bothered to go all the way to Lidl, a scandalous dry-cleaning bill … In all, the kind of expenditures that provide nothing that you didn’t have before.
Now that the money was spent and he still had to write his father a check, Elliot experienced a fresh burst of exasperation. Wouldn’t it have been more gracious for Harold simply to have given his son the cash? Did the guy really need $320—a rounded-up $320? The folderol now required was hardly worth five quid: writing the check, addressing the envelope, and queuing the usual forty-five minutes for an airmail stamp at one of London’s few remaining post offices, now that Britain considered the post office as outlandish a luxury as a place to live.
More important, didn’t this amount of bother to save a fiver epitomize all that was wrong with his parents? His father’s pettiness at the Anchor & Hope mirrored the killjoy stinting that had tyrannized Elliot’s boyhood. Store-brand white bread bought in two-pound loaves, a fraction cheaper per weight than the one-pound size, had guaranteed that the sandwiches in his second week’s bag lunches would be stale, with spots of mold pinched off the crusts. The kitchen drawers of his childhood were cluttered with the tat of Green Stamps and tencent-off coupons for Tang. On phone calls with his grandparents, he and Robert had been distracted by pointed reminders to “keep it short” because the call was—always iterated in hushed, reverential tones—“long distance!” Now all his grandparents were dead. How was that for long distance?
As it happened, while Elliot foot-dragged on returning Harold’s honorarium in dollars, the pound slumped to its lowest rate in years, and was now trading in the markets at $1.78. Determined to teach his father a lesson, although he may have been a little hazy about what lesson, he popped into NatWest on his way to work. The bank was selling dollars at the predictably less generous rate of $1.69. Back home at his desk that night, Elliot punched the numbers into his calculator. That £160 wasn’t worth anywhere near $320, but $270.40. In a fit of exactitude, before writing a check for the amount to the penny, he subtracted another $1.27—the 75P for an airmail stamp.
Thus a week later an email arrived in Elliot’s personal Gmail account from [email protected] whose subject line read, “Miscalculation?” Its text was terse and lacked a greeting: “got the check. seems a bit short. 160 pounds = $269.13????????”
This response was strangely satisfying. It wasn’t like his father, a stickler for grammatical correctness even in this conventionally slapdash medium, to fail to capitalize or to omit the subjects of his sentences. The juvenile profusion of question marks was hardly in keeping with Harold Ivy’s commonly restrained style, and indicated that the message—whatever it was—had struck home.
Lingering over his reply with a glass of Rioja that evening, Elliot assumed the same tutorial tone to which he himself had been subjected during countless edifying dinners as a boy. He patiently explained about the currency market, and how the rates in the Boston Globe’s financial pages were not remotely representative of exchange rates on the High Street here in London. He noted that the pound had recently dipped, alas in this instance to Harold’s disadvantage. He rued with lighthearted despair that UK postage was “far more dear”—a pleasingly British way of putting it—than that of US mail; hence the deduction of $1.27. Signing off with an allusive flourish, Elliot typed, “Welcome to my world,” and hit Send.
Yet when he received no reply over the following several days, Elliot’s sense of triumph rapidly ebbed to a tormenting hollowness. And then the phone rang.
Elliot knew something was wrong as soon as he heard his mother’s voice. Though industry deregulation had radically cheapened the international phone call, Bea Ivy was still averse to “long distance,” and was wont to communicate with emails that were long, chatty, and free. Unless she’d gotten so scatty as to forget the five-hour time difference, she must have realized that in London it was four a.m.
Impressively
practical and matter-of-fact, his mother delivered the end of the world as she knew it. “I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, and I know it will come as a shock. His last checkup gave him the all clear. But shortly after dinner tonight, your father had a heart attack. I just came back from the hospital. As far as I could tell, the doctors did everything they could. But Elliot …” The line rustled for a second or two with static. “Your father didn’t make it.”
Naturally, she suffered bouts of weeping. But Bea also inhabited moments of repose, one of which descended during the memorial gathering back at the house in Amherst after the funeral.
“I’m so relieved that you saw your father in London last month,” she told Elliot, politely accepting a skewer of chicken satay proffered by the catering staff, then disposing of it discreetly on the mantel. “In a way, you got to say good-bye.”
“In a way,” Elliot said.
“And I’m especially grateful that Harold got that opportunity to speak at Oxford. I can’t tell you how much that invitation meant to him. I suppose I tried to shelter you from his moodiness. You have your own life, in such a big, exciting city, where you’re out on the town all the time—I hope looking for a young woman with better taste than that Caitlin.” To his mother, his ex was always that Caitlin, a syntax she may have picked up from Bill Clinton.
“Well, my life in London is hardly one big party.” Ever since he’d heard the news, Elliot’s demeanor had been hangdog.
“Anyway, these last five years have been—were pretty hard for your father. He was used to being so busy, flying off to academic conferences all over the world. Always working on a paper after dinner, or drafting a new curriculum. Unlike most of the faculty, Harold didn’t give the same set lectures over and over. He was always refining, doing new research and polishing his ideas. Then, retirement—it just didn’t sit well with him. He’d never been a potterer. He had no interest in the garden, or in doing frivolous, time-filling things like taking a class in Indian cooking. He’d read, but even reading wasn’t the same. He was used to reading for a reason.”
“You mean he was depressed.”
“I suppose that’s what you’d call it. The phone rarely rang, and some days he got no emails at all. At Amherst, he used to complain so about being inundated, about how email had become a plague! But, you know, be careful what you wish for.”
“He still got a few emails,” Elliot said heavily.
“I was thrilled when they asked him to speak in Oxford—the cradle of his sacred dictionary! It was such a compliment, since obviously the British have plenty of historians who specialize in seventeenth-century England in their own country. When the invitation came in, it changed his whole … Well, he was back to his old self.”
“Yeah, he did seem pretty energized when we had dinner.” For the first time, Elliot realized that he’d never even asked his father what his lecture had been about.
“It wasn’t only the invitation. Being flown across the Atlantic again, at someone else’s expense. A hotel, being wined and dined. Even getting an honorarium, when he used to be paid to speak all the time. Oh, I think the college paid him a pittance, you know, as a gesture. Oxford doesn’t have as much money to throw around as the likes of Harvard, I don’t need to tell you that! Still, to finally earn something again, instead of just drawing down his retirement accounts …”
Feeling a little sick, Elliot deposited his smoked-salmon canapé next to the satay skewer on the mantel.
“I think too little is made of the satisfaction of earning money,” his mother said philosophically. “I discovered it myself when I started doing that freelance editing, and then I kicked myself for not having brought in a bit of my own income a long time before. Oh, it was only part-time, and we didn’t especially need the extra money. But I loved the way those checks in the mail made me feel. I was worth something, literally worth something, in terms that other people take seriously. We make such a fuss over the joy of spending. But I think earning money is a much richer experience than buying some new trinket. Your father certainly felt the same. When I finally started working myself, I was even a little piqued, as if Harold should have let me in on the secret. As if all along instead of generously supporting our family he’d been selfishly indulging a private pleasure.”
Though under the circumstances remarkably self-possessed, Bea couldn’t have been so coolly collected that she was feigning innocence; clearly, his father had kept his irritation over the light Citibank check to himself. But successfully burying the episode made Elliot feel only worse.
Glumly accepting a third glass of wine and already planning on a fourth, Elliot rehearsed the evening at the Anchor & Hope. Why, he’d simply taken it for granted that his father would pay the bill. That’s what parents did. But he was forty-three, with a full-time job, not some teenager saving for a motorbike by flipping burgers. Would it have killed him to treat his father to a meal in Elliot’s own city? Astonishingly, he could not recall even once eating out with his parents and picking up the tab. He had never taken his father out to dinner, and now he never would.
Making a mental subtraction whose difficulty suggested that a fourth glass of wine was a bad idea, Elliot calculated that in giving his father the “real” exchange rate instead of rounding up to two-to-one, he had saved himself the princely sum of $50.87.
Maybe the problem really was genetic.
After the funeral, his mother had evinced a peculiar resolution, a firm sense of direction that seemed to Elliot premature at the time. His parents’ marriage of forty-eight years had been close, and he wouldn’t have expected her to achieve this forward-looking determination half so quickly. But he had misinterpreted her sense of purpose. It wasn’t that unusual, when the marriage was sound. Within a handful of weeks, she died.
Thus after the wheels of probate finished turning, he and Robert were settled with an inheritance far more sizable than Elliot would ever have anticipated.
Once the money landed in Citibank, he didn’t visualize it as rows of zeros, stacks of banded bills, or bars of gold bullion. Rather, he pictured a tat of Green Stamps and tencent-off coupons for Tang; mounds of mildewing discount dresses, mountains of molding store-brand white bread, and teetering towers of toilet roll—single-ply. Rotting somewhere in a vault in Boston were hundreds, perhaps thousands of unordered appetizers, forgone desserts, and undrunk cups of restaurant coffee. And it was freezing in there—icy with forty-eight summers’ worth of air conditioning that his parents had lived without.
At however poor an exchange rate, Elliot could now readily purchase a respectable home in London—where during a precipitous economic downturn property prices had finally started to slide, and it might indeed be possible, he thought wanly, to find a house on sale. Toward this end, he could apply not only his inheritance, the nest egg in pounds at NatWest, and his original American savings of $37K and change, but an outstanding check for $269.13, which had never been cashed.
Kilifi Creek
It was a brand of imposition of which young people like Liana thought nothing: showing up on an older couple’s doorstep, the home of friends of friends of friends, playing on a tentative-enough connection that she’d have had difficulty constructing the sequence of referrals. If there was anything to that six-degrees-of-separation folderol, she must have been equally related to the entire population of the continent.
Typically, she’d given short notice, first announcing her intention to visit in a voicemail only a few days before bumming a ride with another party she hardly knew. (Well, the group had spent a long, hard-drinking night in Nairobi at a sprawling house with mangy dead animals on the walls that the guy with the ponytail was caretaking. In this footloose crowd of journalists and foreign-aid workers between famines, trust-fund layabouts, and tourists who didn’t think of themselves as tourists if only because they never did anything, the evening qualified them all as fast friends.) Ponytail Guy was driving to Malindi, on the Kenyan coast, for an expat bash that sounded a l
ittle druggie for Liana’s midwestern tastes. But the last available seat in his Land Rover would take her a stone’s throw from this purportedly more-the-merrier couple and their gorgeously situated crash pad. It was nice of the guy to divert to Kilifi to drop her off, but then Liana was attractive, and knew it.
Mature adulthood—and the experience of being imposed upon herself—might have encouraged her to consider what showing up as an uninvited, impecunious houseguest would require of her hosts. Though Liana imagined herself undemanding, even the easy to please required fresh sheets, which would have to be laundered after her departure, then dried and folded. She would require a towel for swimming, a second for her shower. She would expect dinner, replete with discreet refreshments of her wineglass, strong filtered coffee every morning, and—what cost older people more than a sponger in her early twenties realized—steady conversational energy channeled in her direction for the duration of her stay.
For her part, Liana always repaid such hospitality with brightness and enthusiasm. On arrival at the Henleys’ airy, weathered wooden house nestled in the coastal woods, she made a point of admiring soapstone knickknacks, cooing over framed black-and-whites of Maasai initiation ceremonies, and telling comical tales about the European riffraff she’d met in Nairobi. Her effervescence came naturally. She would never have characterized it as an effort, until—and unless—she grew older herself.
While she’d have been reluctant to form the vain conceit outright, she might plausibly have been tempted to regard the sheer insertion of her physical presence as a gift, one akin to showing up at the door with roses. Supposedly a world-famous photographer, Regent Henley carried herself as if she used to be a looker, but she’d let her long, dry hair go gray. Her crusty husband, Beano (the handle may have worked when he was a boy, but now that he was over sixty it sounded absurd), could probably use a little eye candy twitching onto their screened-in porch for sundowners: some narrow hips wrapped tightly in a fresh kikoi; long, wet hair slicked back from a tanned, exertion-flushed face after a shower. Had Liana needed further rationalization of her amiable freeloading, she might also have reasoned that in Kenya every white household was overrun with underemployed servants. Not Regent and Beano but their African help would knot the mosquito netting over the guest bed. So Liana’s impromptu visit would provide the domestics with something to do, helping justify the fact that bwana paid their children’s school fees.
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