He went out and walked around Chinatown. At ten he found a place for coffee and sat next to a table of students who sucked at soya milkshakes discussing, in nasal accents, some event of the night before that had kicked their asses. Walking again, he pocketed his map and took streets at random. It was much hotter, much more humid than he had expected. Twice more he tried Silverman, calling from public phones; twice more the voice told him the phone was off. The heat made him despondent. As he trudged between the high-rises of the financial district huge clichéd buildings, monuments to the erotics of money—he rebuked himself for having come so far with nothing more than a number pencilled on a scrap of paper. Even for someone accustomed to long-haul, to the feebly disguised indignities of budget travel, this was extravagant. He could not have stayed in Dundee; he had not dared to remain in London. But what did he want from Frank Silverman, this man who he now began to suspect might be hiding from him? He had come more than three thousand miles on a whim. He had no business at all in this sticky, well-mannered city.
It took another hour of walking to get back to the Trillium. He cooled off under the shower, then lay on the bedcovers letting the water dry over his skin. The curtains were part drawn, the room nicely shadowed. Half asleep, half awake, he suddenly wanted the reassurance of an erection, the distraction of pleasure (a pleasure he had hardly known in months). He thought of Zara, of the lovely sexual blush on her neck and cheeks when she started to come. His cock began to stiffen in his hand, but his imaginings became confused. There were other faces, other sounds, other intentions: images thrown by some feverish inward cinema, the sort of flickering, locked-booth pornography he wanted no part of, or had not, before the spring, suspected himself of wanting. And now? What had those hours on the hill unearthed in him? Was this self-knowledge? This?
He climbed from the bed, dressed, then shaved with excessive care, elaborate thoroughness, as though he were removing the evidence of something, scraping back to the smoothness of skin the emergent animal. Back in the bedroom, to work off the sour energy of unexpended lust, he did press-ups, squat thrusts, thirty sit-ups. He had to stay connected; to pretend, if only to himself, that he was a man of good habits, confessable ambitions, moderate appetites. A man who would not be automatically followed by a store detective or found suspect by the infra-red gaze of women and children. Dress, shave, exercise. Observe the common courtesies. Do not spit on the pavement or put your feet on the seats or get drunk in the morning. Do not clutch the arm of a stranger and ask him to pray with you. Do not tell what you know. Do not show your fear.
He was on the floor still, laid out and staring vacantly at the light fitting, when a note from the hotel reception was slipped beneath his door, a message on headed paper (the three-petalled Trillium flower) explaining that a Mr Silversham had called at 11.05 and would be lunching today at the Café Cavour on College Street at around four o’clock. Would Mr Glass like to join him?
According to his map, College was a cross-street seven or eight blocks north of the hotel. He had thirty minutes and the distance looked walkable. Coming out of the hotel, and then out of the hotel side-street, he turned on to a broad north-south avenue, passing bars with their shutters up, old-fashioned retoucheries, a half-dozen Chinese stores with boxes of kung-fu slippers and dried mushrooms in the deep shade of their awnings. At the intersection, unsure which way to turn, he guessed left, walking into the old Italian part of town and finding the Cavour ten minutes later on the corner of a small junction, a dozen tables outside, the music of some mournful, flippant love song coming from a speaker suspended among the trailing plants. Inside, the walls were hung with photographs of Italian ice-hockey stars. A bar, black and heavy as a catafalque, stood at the right-hand side of the room. Opposite the entrance, a second door spilled feathers of cooking steam whenever one of the waitresses swung through.
Though the lunchtime rush must have been over, there were still plenty of customers dawdling at the tables. Clem found a seat by the window, took off his sunglasses and ordered a double espresso. When it came he drank the water immediately, then sipped at his coffee. A few minutes before four Silverman arrived, coming through the door already looking for Clem, and waving brightly when he saw him. On his way over he was stopped by the cafe proprietress, a powerfully compact woman in a tight red dress and red high-heeled shoes. She was about Silverman’s age and played coquettishly with her expensive, tawny hair while she spoke with him. Clem was surprised to hear them talking Italian, surprised how different it made Silverman seem, like someone he didn’t know at all.
‘It’s my old man,’ said Silverman, shaking Clem’s hand between both of his own, then sitting sitting down opposite him. ‘They remember him here. Carlo Argento from Crotone. A real southerner.’ He chortled. ‘He’s creeping into my skin or I’m creeping into his. I make the same face as him when I pull the hairs out of my nose.’
‘Everyone makes that face,’ said Clem. ‘You can’t help it.’
Silverman nodded. ‘My mother was Irish Canadian. I’d rather see her face in the mirror.’
‘I had the opposite problem,’ said Clem, remembering how, throughout his teens, dead Nora appeared at the periphery of crowds at dusk, or stood at the top of the stairs in the house in Bristol, a presence composed of half-lights, the sound of rain on the window.
‘You’ve eaten?’ asked Silverman.
Clem said he hadn’t but that the heat had taken his appetite. Silverman ordered two servings of spaghetti and clams. ‘You need something on those bones,’ he said. ‘And you’ll be working late tonight.’
‘Working?’
‘Relax. You won’t need cameras.’
He was dressed in jeans and a black cotton shirt, the sleeves rolled. His hair was cropped, the skin tight and tanned over the angles of his skull. He looked like a three-star general in mufti. Eating, they talked about the people they had in common—newspaper people, television people, people whose careers circled their own—but before the food was finished it became apparent that neither of them had the latest on anybody, and that both, in their way, had dropped out of that world.
‘I’m delighted you’re here,’ said Silverman. ‘Delighted and a little amazed. What would you have done if I was out of town?’
‘Gone home, I suppose.’
‘And what would you have done there?’
Clem shrugged. ‘Do you miss New York?’
‘Not a whole lot. It became a troubled and troubling place for me.’
‘And Shelley-Anne?’
‘She’s on page five hundred of something. A determined woman. I’ll go back one day, if she’ll take me. Right now I’m not in a fit state to live with anyone. Are you?’
‘Who would I live with?’
‘Are you drinking?’
‘It doesn’t seem to help me.’
‘It doesn’t help anyone. The reason I came up here, Clem, the straw that broke this camel’s back, was waking with a bloody head down by the Staten Island ferry terminal, seven in the morning, stinking of Four Roses, commuters streaming past. No memory whatsoever of how I got there. I thought I was hardened against it all, this stuff we look at. Thought I could keep it tidied away in a box called work. Not this time.’ He fell silent.
‘You have family here still?’ asked Clem.
‘A brother on the west coast I haven’t seen in years. A cousin in Moose Jaw. When I came up I stayed with an old couple my mother used to know along the lake shore by Hamilton. The Petersons. He’s a retired ophthalmologist, eighty-something. A wife called Maggie. They’re both pretty gnarled, these days, but Maggie goes out three times a week with hot soup for the street sleepers. Rides around in this big Japanese SUV she can hardly see over the dash of. No one’s ever asked her to do it. They’re not churchgoers. No idea what their politics are. One evening when the joints in her legs were swollen she asked me to drive her. Went out with her again the next week. Then regularly until I moved into the city.’
‘Hot soup?’
‘Feel free to laugh.’
‘I’m not laughing.’
Silverman tucked some dollar bills under the edge of his water glass and stood up. Clem followed him through the swing door to the kitchen, a space only a half-size bigger than his own small kitchen in London, every comer and surface piled with plastic containers, chopping-boards, bags of peppers and onions, thick brown bags of bread. The cook was a stick-thin Cambodian whose apron wrapped around him almost twice. Silverman squeezed the man’s shoulders and winked at Clem. ‘The Café Cavour’s greatest secret,’ he whispered.
The cook called to his assistant, a big creamy-skinned girl slowly peeling a potato. She fetched two carrier-bags from the chiller. ‘Some good minestrone,’ said the cook, his voice split somehow between Phnom Penh, Toronto and Naples. ‘Polpettone. Torta di patate. Tiramisu. All good. All fresh.’
‘May your ancestors see to it you get blown tonight,’ said Silverman. The cook grinned. A fly hit the light trap, died, and fell to the floor. They cheered. Silverman took one of the bags, gave the other to Clem and led the way out. They walked for a few minutes along a street of neat red and brown brick houses, an over-sweet scent of summer jasmine in the air. At points along the way they passed little groups of men, languid, patrician, their hands in their pockets, watching the road as if nothing would ever quite interest them again: some stubborn sense of exile, perhaps, or simply the Old World melancholy of the Mediterranean taken root among the grids of the New.
‘Prepare to suffer envy,’ said Silverman, calling to Clem over his shoulder. He put down his bag beside a blue van, a gleaming, bull-like vehicle with tinted glass and racing tyres, the twin exhausts, chromed, fat as organ pipes.
‘Bought it from a young fellow who was about to get married and start a responsible life,’ he said, laughing at himself or the young fellow. ‘Pitiful and he knew it. Gave me the keys as if handing over his own bleeding balls. Had no idea what a derelict like me would want with it.’
He unlocked the rear doors. ‘The boy had everything you’d need for a party à deux. I stripped out the fur and the fairground lights but kept the music system. Speakers in the head-rests. Speakers everywhere. Johnny Cash never sounded like this before.’
There were fifteen primary-coloured plastic cool-boxes in the back. They put the bags into one of them and Silverman drove on to College Street, the van’s engine throbbing like a boat’s.
‘Power steering!’ shouted Silverman, over the noise of the music. ‘Electric windows! Air-con!’
They stopped at two more Italian places—more fulsome greetings, more busy chefs, more bags for the cool-boxes—then drove to a wholefood restaurant and picked up fifty gluten-free rolls, a tub of green curry, four of last week’s blueberry pies. Across town they called at a place called Chez-Soi, another called Eden. The last stop was a hotel by the lake, thirty people in the kitchens starting to prepare for the evening’s sitting amid a row of clashing metal and military-style confusion. The cool-boxes were almost full. On the tape deck Silverman exchanged country for rap—‘I love these angry boys!’—and slotted the van into the chain of home-time traffic, beating rhythm on the ridged leather wrapping of the steering-wheel. They made slow progress but after forty minutes they pulled on to a narrow street of English-style A-frame houses, a street Clem thought he remembered walking down that morning. Silverman backed the van into a little forecourt.
‘Home?’
‘For now. A couple of others here too. Art-installation types. Like to video each other using the john.’
They went up a flight of wooden steps to the first floor. The room Silverman rented was spacious but almost bare. The window overlooked the road. Silverman sat on the single bed. ‘A dream of discipline,’ he said, smiling ruefully. He hugged himself and briefly shivered, though the room was warm. Clem sat on the only chair. Behind him on the table was an electric typewriter, and a sheaf of papers face down on a large brown envelope, a Mickey Mouse bottle opener for a paper weight.
‘My piece for the New York Times,’ said Silverman, pointing to the papers. ‘Though I guess they’ve given up on me by now.’
‘You don’t want to do it?’
‘I seem unable to.’
‘You’ve made a start.’
‘Notes, sketches, try-outs. Little that’s coherent. And a piece like this must lead somewhere, must have a conclusion. Write about horrors and you’re expected to make some sense of them. But what’s it to be? The pity of it all? Exterminate the brutes?’
‘The brutes?’
‘Last time I wound a sheet into the machine I couldn’t even lift my hands to the keys. A head-doctor would call it hysterical paralysis. Prescribe a course of electric-shock therapy.’
‘Have you seen anyone?’
‘Head-doctors? Christ, no.’
On the floor beside the bed was a leather holdall, unzipped. Next to it was a radio, and two books: a collected Berryman and one of Shelley-Anne’s novels, A Stitch in Time. Clem asked Silverman if he was reading her.
‘I keep it for the picture,’ said Silverman. ‘It’s an odd thing but I can get a picture of my wife in any good bookstore.’
‘And Berryman?’
‘“Huffy Henry hid the day/unappeasable Henry sulked...” I don’t read him any more but he’s an old friend.’
Clem nodded. He asked what happened now.
‘This is a time I don’t care for,’ said Silverman. ‘There’s a liquor store at the comer and I think about it a lot. It’s good you’re here. Can you play chess?’
‘A little.’
‘A little will do fine.’
From the holdall Silverman took out a hinged chess set. They played for an hour, the set between them on the bedclothes. When the game was over, Silverman made coffee. They listened to a baseball commentary on the radio. Clem read the first chapter of Shelley-Anne’s book and looked at her photograph on the inside cover, a studio shot, clumsily retouched. The artists came home, fought in the kitchen and made up noisily in the room beside Silverman’s. Night fell. Clem smoked at the window. Silverman made more coffee, then lay on the bed with his hands behind his head. At ten thirty he insisted on another game of chess. Clem won again. Silverman shaved and changed his shirt. ‘Soon now,’ he said. ‘Almost there.’ Clem drowsed and, half-asleep, bit his tongue and tasted blood. At a quarter to one, Silverman called his name and they went down through the hushed house to the van. The last time they had set out at night together they had travelled in UN Land Rovers with a patrol of frightened blue-helmets. That, too, had been Silverman’s plan, for Clem had not wanted to go out in the curfew. After two weeks in the capital he had plenty of material. The agency was sated; the story was off the front pages; it was time to think about flights out. But Silverman, the older man, the man of reputation, of charm, had worked him round, talking, half seriously, half teasingly, about a money-shot, a picture to excite a prize jury. In the end, Clem had gone because he liked him, this rangy North American with his over-experienced face. In the end he’d gone because he didn’t want to miss anything.
They checked the cool-boxes and climbed into the van.
‘A short drive,’ said Silverman, turning on the ignition.
‘And then?’
‘Aha.’
‘You’re full of mysteries,’ said Clem.
Silverman smiled. ‘That sounds OK. Does it bother you?’
The roads were almost empty now. A few taxis, a prowl car, a last street-car, brightly lit, a couple in the very back the only passengers.
‘You know,’ began Silverman, “when I regained my senses down by the ferry terminal I didn’t have a nickel left on me. Cleaned out. I had to walk home. It took an hour. All the way I saw myself in store windows. A madman. A ghost.’ He paused. ‘The human nervous system can handle a great deal of insult, but it’s not endless. I came up here to save my life.’
‘I need a Canada of my own,’ said Clem, softly.
Silverman gestured in the dial
-green gloom of the cab. ‘Canada is bleak. Physically and spiritually bleak. But coming back here I found something. A truth about people I didn’t have before.’
‘A truth?’ Clem twisted in his seat. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Just that. A truth I didn’t have before.’
‘And the church? Haven’t we already seen the truth about people? Haven’t we smelt it?’
‘I’m talking about something else, Clem.’
‘Obviously.’
‘Truer, perhaps.’
‘A truer truth?’
‘OK. A better one.’
‘What makes you think we can choose?’
‘What makes you think I can’t? Anyway...’
‘Anyway what?’
‘Do we really know what we saw out there?’
‘Don’t fucking do this.’
‘I mean it. What did we really see?’
‘I’ll send you the pictures.’
‘I don’t need the damn pictures.’
‘Then what the hell do you need?’
‘What I need,’ said Silverman, raising his voice to match Clem’s, ‘is something that lets me sleep at night. What you’re talking about is... nihilism. An impossibility.’
‘I’m talking about what we saw. You and me.’
‘And you can live with that?’
‘What I can live with is irrelevant! It changes nothing!’
‘You blame me.’
‘Blame you?’
‘You blame me for getting you into it.’
‘No.’
‘You blame me.’
‘No.’
‘Why not say it?’
‘I don’t blame you, Silverman!’
‘Yeah, but I know you do.’
They stopped at a red light. Clem found the rocker switch for his window, let the window down and lit a cigarette. He would have liked to get out of the van now and walk until he was exhausted. Where was the city boundary? How far from here? He wanted to find himself beyond the range of street-lamps, walking on a prairie as big as a sea, as black as the sea. Poor Silverman! Whatever he was into now, this mystery tour, this ‘truer truth’ he held up as a shield, he was not the guide Clem needed. Unfair, of course, utterly unfair to have expected it. Unfair, cowardly and lazy. Had he, for a single moment, considered what he might do for Silverman? What Silverman might have hoped to get from him? He flicked the end of his cigarette away and put up the window. Between them the silence grew pointlessly tense. To break it, Clem said, ‘My neighbours in London used to throw paint from their windows.’
The Optimists Page 7