‘That face. Yes: the beavers. They hang around with Snow White. Or someone.’
‘I think they might be squirrels …’
‘Well, whatever cuddly vermin they are, the point is – I reckon – that they’re too big.’
‘Big? But they have to be that size so that people can get in the costumes.’
‘I know that. I know that they’re not actually giant beavers stroke squirrels. But my point is – do the kids know that? No. Because the one thing you’re not allowed to tell children on their way to Disneyland is “By the way, darling, just in case you were wondering – someone lives in Mickey Mouse. Most likely a bald out-of-work dwarf who might also be a paedo.”’
Harvey laughed. Her observation was made somewhat more absurd because she was semi-whispering, so as to avoid Jamie hearing it.
‘So I know it might seem obvious to us, but the kids, I think, are expecting Mickey and Donald and Goofy and Winnie and the beavers to be kind of the size they are on the TV. Their size, in other words, or maybe smaller.’
‘You said it was a dwarf!’
‘Well, that was just a thing I said. I don’t mean a dwarf. I mean a big midget. The point is I think most kids when they walk into Disneyland are thinking: Shit! What’s happened to Mickey? When did he get elephantiasis? Or the equivalent in four-year-old terms.’ Harvey laughed again. ‘I’m serious. This is an even bigger problem if your child happens to be …’ she glanced at Jamie again, lowering her voice still further, ‘… very committed, psychologically, to a specific idea of, say, Winnie the Pooh.’
Harvey sat back in his chair. He looked at Stella, her face settling into a not unfamiliar seriousness, held back from being too earnest by a tinge of irony playing around the edges of her mouth. He smiled at her, signalling that he had enjoyed her rant, but understood too that here was something they needed to think about. But he didn’t worry about it: he didn’t worry about whether or not they should accept the invitation to Disneyland. He looked at her face and felt a soft arresting, like a blanket being laid on trembling shoulders: in his gut, he felt his digestive organs settle, and faint sounds played in his ears – just London sounds, the plash of the river as a motorboat went by, the murmur of couples walking on the towpath, bells in the distance from some church the name of which he would never know but assumed to be something to do with Hawksmoor or Wren – and, for a second, it felt as if the world was harmonizing. What Harvey felt in that second was contentment, but he would not have recognized it.
And then the light changed. A cloud settled over the sun like a kidnapper’s hand over his mouth. Stella frowned, and – always more affected by the cold – picked up her cardigan from the back of her chair and wrapped it around her arms. As she frowned, Harvey noticed something he had never really spotted before. She had lines on her face. And to Harvey, suddenly, these lines looked not like tiny infolds of skin, but like slashes, like her face was one of those portraits by Leonardo or Raphael that mad men so can’t bear the beauty of they have to rip it with a carving knife: except these slashes had been done by a tiny madman, who simply couldn’t bear the beauty of her eyes, and had poured out his criss-cross violence only around them.
Harvey felt mad. He felt it must be some kind of terrible optical illusion. What the fuck? A voice started whispering in his head, underneath all the other sounds, but more insistent, more audible: You’ve just never noticed before that she’s growing old. Frightened though he was of the voice, he wanted it to enlarge, to explain and clarify how this could have happened, how he could have missed it, but it didn’t. It just repeated the phrase over and over again. It was his voice, of course, or whatever passes for one’s own voice when the mind, as it does at times of crisis, speaks thought out loud, but looped and shrill and scratched and tampered with. It was his own voice played backwards on vinyl by a teenage death-metal fan looking for Satan.
Immediately, a counter-voice – a counter-voice that came from a place of love, of love under attack – and, also, from Harvey’s reflex knowledge of what was good and right and proper when it came to men and women – parried: So? Everyone gets old. And when you love someone, such things do not matter. Words read out at their wedding – LOVE IS NOT LOVE WHICH ALTERS WHEN IT ALTERATION FINDS – flashed up in his mind, in capitals, and he reached for them, as the truth, as his truth, but found that the sentiment only exacerbated this anxiety. Because this was the law, the iron-clad, first law of love, and of course what he was doing, presently, was breaking it; LOVE IS NOT LOVE WHICH ALTERS WHEN IT ALTERATION FINDS operated in this moment like the hand on his shoulder of an arresting policeman.
An image came back to Harvey from childhood. When he and his mother first came back from America, the young Harvey was clearly lonely, disorientated by being brought back from their enormous apartment on the Upper West side of Manhattan with a battery of childminders, to a two-bedroom flat in Wembley (Joan, of all Eli’s discarded wives, reacted with the most fury at his desertion: but her fury was allied to an immense pride, and a certain self-flagellating stoicism, which led, in contravention to most furiously deserted wives, and much to her ex-husband’s delight, to a refusal to take a cent of Eli’s money). So his mother bought him a cat. The idea of a dog, the more obviously companionable animal, was impossible, seeing as Joan very quickly got a job in the English department of the newly established North London Polytechnic and the six-year-old Harvey even then, even by six-year-old standards, gave off a sense of being unable to cope with responsibility. Joan had also decreed that they should not have a kitten, partly because she didn’t want to deal with house training, but also, with her fierce sense of rectitude, because she felt that there was something improving about making Harvey look after an animal that was already somewhat infirm.
Harvey loved the cat, who he called Luffa, a diminutive of Fluffy; years later, he would discover this to be the name of a homeopathic nasal spray. His ability to love had spaticised with his parents’ split, but not his reserves of it. The young Harvey was desperate for a receptacle to catch the overspill of love endlessly pouring from his heart, and that was Luffa. Harvey was transfixed by the tabby mongrel’s deadpan feline beauty. He would look at her face for hours, and silently beg her to grace his lap with her warm, soft form. He would come home from school, tight with the small trauma of the day, and run to wherever she was for release, sometimes burying his face in her fur. Every day for three years he would do this, until one day he saw her from their living-room window sitting under a tree in the small communal garden behind their flat. He ran as excitedly towards her as ever – the run even more purposeful now that Luffa was getting old – until he got close enough to bend down and kiss her: but then, just before his lips made contact, across the side of her sleepy face crawled a large spider. Harvey was terrified of spiders: as a child, and indeed as a grown man, they flooded his body with horror, exploding his senses into a whiteout of fear and revulsion. If, for the pre-women-worshipping Harvey, cats were Beauty, then spiders were anti-Beauty. He literally recoiled, like a spring had come out of Luffa’s head, knocking him backwards about four foot onto the grass. Even as he fell he knew immediately that he was scarred, if not physically, then psychologically; that here was a memory which would come back to him at some bad time in the future, death crawling over the face of love.
So here it was, returning in middle age: the spider on Luffa’s face. As he stared at his wife’s altered features, a mixture of emotions coursed through him: disbelief, uncertainty, profound existential terror. These coalesced into a form of intense psychic discomfort, as if a sadistic dwarf – the one, perhaps, in the Mickey Mouse costume – was scraping its fingernails down a blackboard in his soul. Stella, her empathy antennae immediately twitching, said:
‘What’s the matter?’
He looked at her. They had no secrets. She was his best friend. He had found what he was supposed to find, his soulmate, and the mating of their souls had happened without censorship. But here: here was something unsayable. She wa
s his friend. He loved her: fiercely. How could he say words which would break that love in two? He couldn’t: and not just to Stella. He saw, in his imagination, not just her face, but the faces of all the women he had ever known, and all the women he had learnt from when younger, and all the women who had written and were writing in all the books and all the newspapers, about men and their shallowness and cruelty and objectifying and body fascism and misogyny. They seemed to crowd around his wife, challenging Harvey to tell the truth: he saw them, an infinity of women, arms folded, tapping their heelless shoes, drumming their unvarnished nails. He heard them chorus in unison: Well? And in amongst all the women, nodding and raising their eyebrows, he saw as well many men; men in glasses and suede jackets and well-cut hair, men who looked very like himself, carrying copies of the Guardian and the New Statesman, men who had accepted and internalized all the arguments about the dark truths of patriarchy, and now held them as unblinkingly – if not more unblinkingly – as the women. It was a huge right-thinking congregation, as unshallow as the river it stood beside. And then he saw their reaction should he offer the real answer – a wave of disgust, disappointment and outrage, passing all the way from Stella to the massed ranks watching on Tower Bridge, ready to open in three hours and forty-seven minutes like all the legs in all the pornography the watching of which had clearly led Harvey to this pretty pass.
It was unsayable, what he felt. The only thing was that it also felt – despite being horrible and awful and a source of great self-loathing that it should be felt at all – natural. It didn’t feel like it should, a symptom of a false consciousness. It felt as natural as vomiting.
So Harvey did what he often did, with people he didn’t really know, or with previous partners: he half said it.
‘Have you changed your make-up?’
She burst out laughing. ‘Have I what?’
‘Sorry, I …’
Then she stopped laughing, abruptly: ‘What is this, now?’ she said. Harvey felt chased, then, by her empathy. She knew him too well. He wanted immediately to pass it off as nothing; but her understanding of him was like a prison searchlight.
‘Really, it’s nothing. I just wondered – I was thinking about Bumblebee …’
Stella raised her palms but it was too late.
‘Bumblebee, stumblebee, buzz, buzz, buzz. Bumblebee, Stumblebee, buzz, buzz, buzz,’ said Jamie.
‘Sorry,’ said Harvey, ‘I forgot.’
She shook her head at him, with some irritation, and began searching in her knapsack for something to distract the boy. Harvey had not forgotten, although he knew that her general acceptance of his absentmindedness would cover him: he had deliberately said a word he knew Jamie fetishized in order to switch focus. It was a trump card, but one which he had never thought to play before, and, as soon as he had, realized that doing so was mildly abusive.
‘Zubb, zubb, bzzzzz, beebumble …’
Jamie would continue echolaliaing around Bumblebee now for at least ten minutes, unless Stella managed to shift his attention onto one of the various action figures she had brought to lunch with them, prepared for such an eventuality. She took one out of her bag.
‘Jamie! Jim-Jam! Look!!’
She bent down to jiggle the plastic monster in front of Jamie’s face. The boy was frowning now with something between concentration and possession.
‘Beeblebum, busy busy bee, bee bum-bum …’
With her attention directed towards Jamie, Harvey was able to stare at Stella’s face unhindered. Looking at her directly while in the grip of this sudden neurosis had been too much, like staring into some black sun, and, besides, she could see his eyes that way round: she could read him. In profile, he could be a voyeur. He could project all his anxiety onto her face in unpeace. At this moment he began a process that was to be repeated endlessly in the coming years, a type of feverish checking, a hypervigilant, furtive scanning for more lines and for anything else that might proclaim a falling away from youth: roughness and/or falling of skin, open pores, neck slackness, grey hairs, spider veins, spiders themselves. Why, he thought, would I look so hard for something I don’t want to find? But the urge felt unstoppable: his gaze moved across her face, sifting and microscopic, powered by negative hope like those rows of people searching in fields for clues that will only tell them that the lost child is already dead.
Then the sun burst back through the clouds, just as Stella looked back up towards Harvey from Jamie, and the feeling was gone. She looked beautiful again. Harvey shuddered, as if waking from a bad dream, and immediately resolved that this experience had been some kind of hallucination. He knew, instantly – or at least, desperate to locate an explanation which placed the responsibility outside of himself, felt it as hard fact – what had brought it on: it was his father, the father who had fled from every woman he had ever loved the minute they had begun to age. It was his father’s voice that he had heard whispering frantically inside his head. There was stuff embedded in him by his father, which he clearly was not even aware of: dysfunction, misogyny, fear and loathing of women. He determined immediately not to succumb to it, to Eli: he could give this basket of bad feelings that name.
Later on he would realize that this both was and wasn’t true. Or at least that knowing this made it no easier to fight. He would come to realize many things: that the handmaiden of this phobia was light, and that light plays many tricks, one of which is that bright light reflects off skin, making, outdoors, the effects of ageing less visible in the sun; that the worst days are the cloudy ones, when grey light picks out grey skin; that once you’ve noticed that someone has aged, you can’t not notice it, there is no deactivation switch; that parts of the body which he might have thought irrelevant to the beauty-policing-eye (elbows, armpits, feet) can all become sites of this anxiety; that every woman would soon be scanned in this way; that the way he would look at young smooth-skinned women in the street would become no longer straightforwardly sexual but, rather, medical, as unreachable antidotes; and that the point about the lines on Stella’s face was not that he doesn’t love her because of them, but, rather, that when they seem magnified on her face, Harvey fears that he may not be able to make his love work. Her beauty is not the only thing he loves about her, by any means, but it is the key that unlocks his love, that makes him think of her softly, that makes him appreciate all the other attributes more keenly. He has swallowed the beauty myth so deeply – the propaganda, force-fed to us from the fairy tales onward, that beauty is goodness – that he needs to see her beauty to see everything else – to see all the things that are beautiful about Stella that are nothing to do with her beauty.
He has lived with all this for so long now that he is no longer sure that the responsibility lies with Eli, living inside him and directing his eyes like a malevolent oompaloompa. He has come to New York to watch his father die, but also perhaps to find out for himself at last how much of what Therapist No. 3, in one of his rare moments of speech, referred to as his particular version of body dysmorphic disorder by proxy was inherited, and how much it was just intrinsic to him, Harvey Gold, who had, after all, not lived in daily contact with his father since he was six. On the day Eli actually left, the day he walked out of their East Side apartment, he gave Harvey a present: a chemistry set. It was summer. The previous Christmas his father had given him a chess set – he had been waiting ever since for Eli to teach him how to play – and Harvey can remember thinking that because this box was also emblazoned with the word ‘set’ that this present must be something similar: and he was correct, insofar as both presents implied, in his father’s mind, a misplaced idea of Harvey as intellectually precocious.
The chemistry set was a wooden case, with a lockable hinge on the side. On the front was a drawing, of a man and a boy, in silhouette, looking towards a mountainous horizon: the man had his arm around the boy’s shoulder. They were dwarfed in the frame by an enormous triangular beaker, in which an orange liquid was bubbling. Above the beaker were the words
Lionel Porter Chemcraft Lab Chemistry Set, and a sticker warning that the set should not be used by children except under the supervision of adults, that it should be handled with caution, and that it should be kept away from children under eight years old. As a result, the Lionel Porter Chemcraft Lab Chemistry Set was never opened by the young Harvey, instead becoming, first, an instrument of outrage for his mother to berate his father with, and, second, something that she decided to leave behind, very deliberately, when they sailed for London on the QE2 a month later.
Nonetheless, it is this chemistry set that Harvey finds himself imagining when he considers his psychological project here in New York. He imagines that big beaker full of whatever toxic, corrosive compound it is that makes him feel as he does about Stella; he sees it bubbling, and he sees it distilling into its constituent elements, allowing him, the man who still feels like the boy in silhouette, to find out once and for all what part of this is Eli, what part Harvey, and what part just default fucking maleness.
Of course, most of the therapists and all of the few friends that Harvey has confided in about this anxiety have gone for the obvious conclusion: that it is simply a projection of his own fear of ageing. Looking at himself now in the wardrobe mirror at the Sangster Hotel, he knows, as ever, that this isn’t true. He doesn’t deflect his own ageing. He sees it happening every day, in the ever-thinning of his hair, the ever-fattening of his frame, the ever-froggying of his features. It gives him no joy; he isn’t pleased about it; but he isn’t pathological about it. It makes him sad; it does not make him despair.
But then Harvey has never thought of himself as beautiful. He has always relied on others to provide him with beauty. And so that is why, when he looks back down from his froggy face and tries to read out his unfolded mantra – I would much prefer it if Stella was not becoming less beautiful with time; but the fact that she is becoming less beautiful with time (like we all do) is not the end of the world – he can’t. The words freeze in his throat, and even if he does manage to croak them out, they sound thin and racked and stuttery. They sound like a lie told by a bad liar. Because Harvey knows that it is the end of the world.
The Death of Eli Gold Page 13