by Helen Dewitt
Which was not a problem in itself, because there had always been Dutch words behind the English words someone had picked. Whereas.
Cissy did not want to be paranoid but she sensed that there was an inner circle and she was not in it. Adam did not want to be paranoid. Ellen did not want to be paranoid. Merrill did not want to be paranoid. That is, Cissy sat over steak and frites at Edward’s, Adam had an Omelette Ardennaise and a Leffe at Petite Abeille (he adored Tintin), Ellen was just mooching up West Broadway toward a grilled cheese on rye at the Square Diner, Merrill was heading for a TBA brunch at the Odeon when they saw Gil duck into a bar, and fame being what it is all four thought he was avoiding them. Fame being what it is a devotion to the work of Peter Dijkstra had looked briefly like the ticket to an inner circle, and now look. It was horrible. It was false to everything that had ever mattered about Peter Dijkstra.
Cissy was the one who had followed her instincts and found herself in a hotel like a monastery, independently chosen by Peter Dijkstra. Oh, she should go back to following her instincts. She should be true to herself. Passing through Berlin she had seen a restaurant in the Daimler showroom on Unter den Linden; she had thought of having Breakfast at Daimler’s and laughed out loud but there was a plane to catch, why had she stupidly caught that plane? She would go back to Berlin and have Breakfast at Daimler’s every day among the gleaming classic cars until she had written a book as fast and sleek and gleaming as a Daimler.
Adam had found a place in Cappadocia where the people lived in caves, and later, beached in New York, found it independently singled out in the PD novella. Why had he left? He would go to Cappadocia and live in a room in a hotel in a cave until he had written a book of cavedwellers in a windwashed land.
Ellen had once missed a flight in Istanbul and spent 12 hours in the food mezzanine, an expanse of white plastic tables as far as the eye could see. There was a Burger King and a bar and a deli serving authentic Turkish food, and that day among the white tables was the best of her life. Why had she stupidly boarded her plane? (Peter Dijkstra would not have boarded the plane.) She would go back to Istanbul and stay at the airport and write a book as unencumbered and directionless as a room of white plastic tables.
Merrill had once stayed in a worn-down hotel in Paris, the Hôtel Tiquetonne, in a tiny room on the seventh floor, and he had been happy. Peter Dijkstra would have stayed, taking the creaking elevator with its accordion iron door. He would go and he would write a book as lighthearted in a worn-down world as a room in a downtrodden hotel on the seventh floor.
Perhaps this was not what Ralph had in mind when he talked of the passing of the moment, and yet the moment was passing.
Gil felt the confines of the inner circle closing in around him.
The way to be true to Peter Dijkstra was to be true to himself.
A loft and stuff is the kind of thing that fits into the transaction of the gift, you can transfer, bestow. But not having a loft and stuff, solitude, silence, being alone in a room with a notebook, if you have these things you can’t give them by transferring or bestowing.
Peter Dijkstra was in this four-room underground hotel in Vienna and he had filled 50 notebooks and if he could fill 50 notebooks why would he want to do anything but stay in the underground hotel filling notebooks? Why would he want a loft and somebody else’s stuff?
But what if???!!!!!
What if the normal rate for a room at this underground hotel is $79 a night, BUT, you could get a room with notebooks & file cards on loan from Peter Dijkstra for $299 a night, and the $220 goes to Peter Dijkstra. So he can keep his room indefinitely because it is paid for out of lending out his notebooks &c. AND. There are SEPARATE ENTRANCES. So you NEVER SEE Peter Dijkstra. He uses one entrance and you use another, so he can go on working without interruption, and you can sit in your room with the notebooks. This would Be. So. Great.
It would be great if you knew Peter Dijkstra’s favorite restaurants. People go to the restaurant and they can just order a meal. Or, they can order a meal plus notebook and file cards for the cost of an extra meal, which is left on account for Peter Dijkstra. Who can turn up whenever he wants and find his meal is already paid for!
Gil could totally see himself going to a restaurant and ordering a meal and a notebook and paying extra for the notebook. It would be better than going to a restaurant and having a meal with Peter Dijkstra and paying for the meal because there was no reason to think words from the mouth would have the intensity of the ink on the grid.
He asked the bartender for a napkin and a pen, and he scribbled down the ideas in their brilliance as fast as they came.
He would write a book in which people did not destroy the thing they loved.
Peter Dijkstra got an e-mail from the go-getter the gist of which was that the notebook and file cards had struck a bonanza. A young writer who worshipped his work had offered the use of his loft and airfare and if he would take his notebooks to New York editors would make an exception and read the work in this unpolished state and the go-getter could virtually guarantee that they could get a deal on the strength of this and set the ball rolling.
He got an e-mail from the young American proposing schemes which seemed to involve encouraging total strangers to descend on his hotel and favorite restaurants and go through his papers.
He got e-mails from one young American after another who had learned to be true to themselves.
Peter Dijkstra had been sitting at the small desk in his room. He stood up, stretched. He left the room, went upstairs and went out into the street. It was not a very nice street: one good thing about the rooms was the fact that they had no view.
He could not think of anything to say in reply to the e-mails. Or rather, what he wanted to say was, “I’m a very good man, but I’m a very bad wizard.”
He lit a Marlboro and went off in search of a beer or maybe a Sachertorte or a schnitzel. He could not say which verb described the movement of his aimless feet.
Improvisation Is the Heart of Music
‘The rest was pure Arabian Nights. Gazelle-eyed maidens with perfumed robes brought inlaid boxes of Turkish delight and roast hummingbirds and sugared grapes and honeyed wine — ghastly stuff — and tiny cups of sludgy coffee. Silks kissed the earth. Our host raised his hands and clapped — once — twice — three times, and on the third the strains of a harp wafted in from the wings.
‘“But my dear chaps! You’re not eating!” he cried. “Try the hummingbirds, I assure you they are excellent. Or a morsel of lamb? And you must, you positively must sample the mare’s milk cheese, it is a speciality of my people, a great delicacy. Fatima! See that the gentlemen have some cheese!”
‘He went on in this way for some time, and after I suppose half an hour or so said — “But come! I shall order them to prepare us a hookah, and my companions shall entertain you. Which did you favour among those who served you?”
‘Now I was prepared to see what the hookah was like, and even — dare I confess it? — be entertained by one of the companions, at least up to a point. But Angus is a true Scot, his Presbyterian blood curdled at the sound of this.
‘“Of course I’ll not touch his filthy hookah,” he whispered to me in tones just loud enough not to be tactful.
‘Our host went on with the utmost urbanity, as though nothing had been said, urging us to express a preference for one of the girls. Angus preserved the silence of outraged virtue. I murmured something noncommittal, all extremely attractive, impossible to choose one above the rest. This, it turned out, was a bad move.
‘“My dear fellow —” he cut me short “— I understand perfectly — to tell the truth I’m not, myself, entirely in the mood — as your friend’s tastes, it seems, are not in that direction (he smiled rather maliciously at poor Angus, who went bright red as only a rufus can) — you shall have them all!” A barrage of claps, and a bevy (it really is the only word for
it, echt B movie stuff) of beautiful girls surrounded me, urging me to recline on a sort of divan strewn with silk rugs and shawls dripping with fringe.
‘Mahmet excused himself with a profound bow, leaving me, I took it, to disport myself with the company provided. If this was his object the ruse failed dismally, since he neglected to take Angus with him. Angus continued to sit bolt upright on his cushion, pulled out his pocket copy of Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class in a battered old blue and white Pelican edition, and buried himself in its pages, the picture of dour intellectual respectability. It effectively cast a damper on the debaucheries in which I was supposed to be rejoicing at the other end of the tent. After a little laboured banter with the beauties I sent them off, pulled out my Edmund Crispin, and started reading — it was the final humiliation to have nothing better to show than a humble green and white Penguin.
‘We turned in soon after. We never saw our host again: in the morning the Nubian appeared with a message on a tray. I took it, and he disappeared without a word. It was from Mahmet:
‘“My dear chaps,
Business calls me away unexpectedly. So sorry to interrupt our larks together! Please avail yourselves of the yacht for as long as convenient. What a story for your grandchildren! You can tell them you were once shipwrecked with
Sindbad the Sailor”’
Edward paused dramatically before the name; after pronouncing it he fell silent, ending the story with a resounding close. He leant back into the corner of the sofa with a little expectant smile. The silence stretched out, a little awkwardly. As always with Edward’s stories, a round of applause seemed the most fitting response, but this is seldom used other than ironically in private conversation. Maria had not yet worked out an acceptable substitute, though she had had plenty of opportunity to practice: Edward was a gifted raconteur. Edward and Maria were engaged, but without the ease this implies — Maria still found herself struggling to keep up with a companion of such wonderfully polished conversational skills. What was the appropriate response to narrative tours de force? Should one praise the performance? Aim for intelligent comment? Laugh? Counter with a story of one’s own? That reminds me of the time I — but Maria’s life offered little in the way of anecdotal material, none of Edward’s stories had any connection with the sort of thing that happened to her.
‘What a story!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’ve always wanted to hear a genuine traveller’s tale: you don’t happen to have a bit of Roc’s egg lying about, I suppose?’
‘Nary a one — I did think the least our host could do was leave us each a ruby the size of an orange, but Sindbad seems to be a bit of a Thatcherite these days.’
Maria laughed heartily.
Edward and Maria had a big wedding. Maria had a very pretty dress (lace over satin); she decided to have a long veil. The men wore morning suits. She had a little going-away suit in nubbly pink silk, with binding, just the least bit Chanel, and a little hat. How can you have that kind of wedding and not be just the tiniest bit camp? Edward and Maria got in the limo amid showers of rice and confetti. Edward laughed, and kissed her. ‘You look lovely, my dear.’
They were taking a real old-fashioned honeymoon! They would go to Paris by boat-train, spend a week there, then go south to the Riviera. They would spend two weeks on a cruise ship, stopping first at various Italian ports, then at the Greek islands. They sat side by side in their compartment, holding hands — it was not something they had done often.
‘Y’know, I hope I have better luck this time than the last time I went sailing,’ said Edward.
‘Why is that?’ asked Maria.
‘The last time I went sailing I got shipwrecked! Have I ever told you the story? It was when Angus McBride and I went island hopping after Finals. Altogether a fantastic tale! We’d booked onto something that sounded perfectly respectable — the Hellenic Swan or some such thing — but turned out to be a great tub of a Victorian yacht that had been restored and put to work for the tourist trade. Amazing boat! Someone had clearly done it up to the nines about eighty years ago. Plush upholstery — swags of gold rope — thick Turkey carpets — vast numbers of cut-glass chandeliers — and a lot of brass and mahogany woodwork. It was all rather the worse for wear by the time it crossed our path, and its owners hadn’t had much luck in luring tourists aboard — the only other passenger was a mysterious Turk! Well, we’d only just started to make his acquaintance by the tarnished grandeur of the bar, when we ran into a bit of rough weather in the Adriatic, and the bloody boat started to go down!
‘Mahmet got us rather briskly into one of the lifeboats and winched us down. Then Angus and I started rowing like blazes! We saw the crew pulling off in another boat. We’d got perhaps a couple of hundred yards away when we saw the ship go under. I don’t suppose I’ve ever seen such a terrifying sight. One moment rather a lot of the bow and a fair bit of cabin roof were still above water; then an enormous swell rose above it, and the whole shebang was sucked under in a couple of seconds. A few flecks of foam and a stray life preserver were left floating on the surface where, just a few minutes earlier, there’d been a twelve-ton yacht.
‘We were at sea in the lifeboat until noon the next day. Angus and I had already started wondering whether it might be prudent to ration supplies, but Mahmet was superbly unconcerned. In the event we could have gorged on the water biscuits and tinned luncheon meats in the hold: we were picked up by a magnificent yacht which turned out to belong to Mahmet. He’d been on his way south to meet it at Genoa, but its captain had had the sense to head north when he heard of the disaster which had befallen the Swan. We were shown to a cabin, where we slept heavily all the afternoon — we hadn’t got much sleep the night before. When we woke we found we were at anchor off an unidentifiable bit of coast. A gigantic Nubian told us we were to join Mahmet on shore for dinner, and saw us into a small motorboat. We were taken ashore, and escorted into a vast tent which had been set up on the sand.
‘The rest was pure Arabian Nights. Gazelle-eyed maidens with perfumed robes brought Turkish delight in inlaid boxes and roast hummingbirds and sugared grapes and honeyed wine — ghastly stuff — and tiny cups of sludgy coffee. Silks kissed the earth. Our host raised his hands and clapped — once — twice — three times, and on the third the strains of a harp wafted in from the wings.’
Edward raised his hands and clapped; paused; clapped; paused; clapped again, and then caressed, gracefully, the air with his right hand in a wavy glide suggestive of the delicate notes of the harp.
‘“But my dear chaps! You’re not eating!” he cried. “Try the hummingbirds, I assure you they are excellent. Or a morsel of lamb? And you must, you positively must sample the mare’s milk cheese, it is a speciality of my people, a great delicacy. Fatima! See that the gentlemen have some cheese!”’
Maria crossed her legs, shifted on her seat, held her elbows. She had been, from time to time, slightly put out by Edward’s habit of modulating out of dialogue into anecdote, but she had supposed it to be, at least, a matter of spontaneous impulse. This mechanical repetition was something quite other and alarming.
‘We turned in soon after. We never saw our host again: in the morning the Nubian appeared with a message on a tray. I took it, and he disappeared without a word. It was from Mahmet:
‘“My dear chaps,
Business calls me away unexpectedly. So sorry to interrupt our larks together! Please avail yourselves of the yacht for as long as convenient. What a story for your grandchildren! You can tell them you were once shipwrecked with
Sindbad the Sailor”’
Edward paused dramatically before the name, and after pronouncing it fell silent, ending the story with a resounding close. He leant back into the corner of the compartment with a little expectant smile. Maria smiled back nervously. So well-rehearsed a performance seemed to call more than ever for applause. What conversational alternatives were there? Would it be acce
ptable to repeat her comments of last time? Would Edward recognise them, and realise that he had told her the story before? Maria felt that this would be hideously embarrassing. She must come up with something new. At the same time it seemed unfair: she must improvise because he had rehearsed.
Perhaps it was a matter of rehearsing conversations until one got them right. Perhaps she had not responded well enough last time, so that Edward had had a niggling sense that a proper performance of story and reception had not taken place; perhaps this was her chance to improve. This was an alarming thought: if she did not rise to the occasion, the story might be brought out again and again until she perfected her reply.
‘What a marvellous story!’ she exclaimed hastily. ‘I’ve always adored The Count of Monte Cristo — there’s a wonderful Dumasian quality about this, isn’t there, the European swept suddenly from the midst of the working day technological world into the fantastic improbabilities of the Orient!’
‘Yes,’ said Edward, smiling agreeably, ‘one did rather feel that one had been catapulted into a big baggy monster of romantic French historicism. Thoroughly enjoyable for someone with low tastes like me, but a terrible trial for poor Angus, who felt he’d done nothing to deserve it. He stalked off the yacht at the earliest possible opportunity, injured innocence writ large on his brow.’
The Rapide hurtled through France. It was night; the windows of the compartment showed Edward and Maria only themselves surrounded by the paraphernalia of travel: the Spectator, some paperback mysteries, one of the Lucia books (Maria was not yet enough at ease to buy herself Vogue); a partially eaten Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut bar, a packet of Jaffa cakes, a couple of oranges; a thermos flask of tea. The hours of travel had been punctuated by the recounting of anecdotes, many of them familiar to Maria. After each story Maria would pick up a theme for comment in the counterpoint which must follow; Edward would develop it briefly, then silence would fall. Sometimes Maria would bring out a new subject, which would be canvassed for a few moments before it reminded Edward of another story. Sometimes they turned to each other and smiled, and kissed, abandoning the struggle to converse.