– I think not.
She makes a face like she is sucking a lemon.
– Ur … OK.
She puts both hands into her bag. She takes out a photograph and holds it in his face.
– Do you have one of these?
He squints at it. It is a photograph of her, smiling, in a bathroom – he can see the edge of the toilet behind her – holding an old book, hardback, with some red and black old-style modern-art image on the front. Above the image are the words: The Teriblo Conspiracy. Her finger appears around the frame of the photo. Her nail, which has a neat line of dark under the pale crescent, points to the book.
– It’s a first edition.
Another photo appears in front of his face. It is the book again, but shot close up. It is held open at the title page, on which there is a scrawl of some sort.
– Signed.
She takes the photos away from his face, revealing her face, triumphant. She puts the photos back in her bag.
– Why photographs? Why don’t you just carry the book around with you?
Her face screws up.
– Are you mad? What if it got stolen? Or damaged? It’s an old book – published in 1961, as I’m sure you know – and just exposure to the air will yellow the pages. I keep it in a humidor.
– A what?
– A humidor. It’s a box to store cigars in. I got it on eBay. Keeps them at a constant temperature. And humidity.
– Cigars …
– And books. Obviously. Anything you put in it.
– Why is it in a bathroom?
– The humidor? It’s not.
– No. That photograph. You’re standing in a bathroom. –
Oh. The light. I don’t have much light in my flat. The bathroom has the brightest bulbs.
He nods. He looks up from the photograph to her. He makes a defeated face.
– Well, no, I don’t have one of those.
She raises her chin proudly. She rummages in her bag again, getting out some cards. She holds them up in a fan in front of his face. All of them are photographs of The Great Satan, relaxing, smiling, looking jaunty, looking wise.
– All signed. I have others at home.
– Did he sign these for you?
She snorts with laughter. The wings of her nostrils contract into a V-shape. He imagines it raw and red in the base of that V, maybe even eczema-spotted, when she has a cold.
– Of course not. I got them on eBay, too. I’ve never met Eli Gold.
He notices how she always refers to The Great Satan by his full name. Then her eyes, which are a pale green, narrow at him.
– Why? Have you?
He thinks about how to answer this for a second, and then decides to tell the truth. He does not like lying, Lying for the Lord aside. He will not go on to tell her the whole truth, of course, but it is good, when he can, to minimize lying.
– Yes.
It was just the once. He – although none of his wives or children – had been invited to the blessing of his sister’s marriage. It was in 1986. Her and The Great Satan had married in secret, but she wanted some kind of event afterwards, so they had a blessing on Martha’s Vineyard, in New England. Later, he would come to see this as ironic, because of Chappaquiddick. But at the time, he had been happy enough for her. He knew she was gone from his life – she had been gone for a long time, ever since she moved to New York and went to college – but on that day, it didn’t matter. He forgave Eli – he still would call him that then – for taking his sister away from him, because she looked so blissful and beautiful.
He only spoke to him once. The blessing, which was non-denominational, took place in the grounds of a lodge, which Eli owned. Like most of Martha’s Vineyard, it overlooked water, not the sea but one of the island’s many small internal lakes. In the evening, there was dinner and speeches and dancing in a marquee. His sister and Eli danced the first dance – to ‘Just One Of Those Things’ – but then Eli, already in his sixties, was too tired, and sat down, not on the top table but right next to him, in a chair vacated by a woman who had spoken no words throughout dinner and who had now stood up to dance.
– Hi, he said.
This was a time when he would still address people before being spoken to. Eli carried on just breathing, looking down at the floor, which was made of wood even though they were in a tent. It was spring: cold enough at night on the Vineyard for the older man’s breath to steam in the soft marquee light.
– Hello, said Eli, eventually. He looked up at him. Eli’s face, close up, was a crazy mess of lines.
– Are you OK? he said.
– Never better.
– Really?
– Hey. I’ve been tested. I have the blood pressure of a man half my age. And the sexual capability of one a third of it.
– Oh, he said, great. But then felt a little silly responding seriously to this when he looked into Eli’s eyes and they were laughing; not telling him that that was a joke, that what he had said was not true: just laughing.
– And, you know what? Even if I have, it’s true, felt a little winded by the dance, hey … I’ll soon be up again, buoyed, energized – made young again by the sight of, and here his eyes turned to face the dance floor, my wife! Look at her, would you? I mean: just look at her!
He looked round. Other couples were joining the floor now, but Pauline was still dancing on her own, like she used to when they were kids, except that wild jerky child movement had all gone into grace, a sweet, swinging grace, like a blade of grass on a summer breeze. She was in a trance, brought on by joy and music, and, for a second, the two men just watched and drank in her dancing.
– Already you see, Eli said, I’m reborn. She’s like vitamins for me. She’s intravenous! He leapt up, indeed like a man half his age, and almost skipped towards her, opening his arms as he went.
– I’m her brother, he said, her twin brother: but he was long gone.
He doesn’t tell the blonde woman any of this. He says, into her wide, insecure stare:
– At a reading.
– What? Where? He stopped giving public readings thirty years ago!
He looks at her. She looks a little like she might cry. He does not know what she wants: whether to be told it is a lie, that he was only trying to best her and has never met her idol; or that he has, and that he therefore holds within him whatever great secret she has always assumed such a meeting would unearth.
– Yeah, he says, I’m older than I look.
* * *
We went into the Maternity Unit today in the hospital. I was just looking at the sign in the elevator, and Elaine annoyed me because she saw and she said, ‘That means the place where the babies are born’ and I said, ‘I know.’ I mean I hadn’t been completely sure but I sort of did know.
Anyway, I love babies: they’re so funny. So I said can we stop and have a look. And Mommy said she wanted to go straight up to Daddy’s room, but that it was OK for me and Elaine to go in and join her upstairs later. It’s all part of me knowing about what she calls the facts of life. It’s a funny phrase, that, isn’t it? The facts of life. When Mommy says it she means sex and stuff, but it should mean loads of other things as well.
It was nice in the Maternity Unit. There were lots of drawings and photos up on the walls, and even some balloons. It felt really different from Daddy’s floor. I guess it would. When we came in there was a nurse at a desk who asked us which mother we were visiting, but then Elaine told her who we were, and even though she didn’t know another nurse came over and said that was all right. When we were walking away I heard the first nurse say, ‘Are you sure?’ and the other one say, ‘Yeah, it’s the famous writer’s daughter’ and the first one said, ‘So what?’ and the other one said, ‘Oh I don’t know. Anyway, it’s an old lady and a little girl. It’s not like it’s a man come in creeping around.’ There were loads of babies in there. There were some being fed milk from boobies, and some from bottles and some who were asleep in cots.
Elaine always asked the mommies if it was OK for me to go and look at them. One of them – he was called Alexie – looked really like a little old man. He had a little woolly cap on and when I put my finger in his cot he held onto it really tightly. His face screwed up and I couldn’t get my finger out at all. ‘Look at him,’ said Elaine. ‘He’s holding on for dear life.’
As we went out we passed somewhere called the Labour Ward. I heard someone screaming in there. It was really frightening.
‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘That’s someone having a baby,’ said Elaine.
‘Why are they screaming?’ I said.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘because it hurts.’
‘Hurts? How?’
Elaine went a bit red and carried on walking.
‘Elaine?’ I said. I could tell from her being quiet that this was one of those times when she didn’t agree with Mommy about me and the facts of life.
‘It’s a birthing pool,’ she said, when I caught up with her, which didn’t answer my question at all.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a little round pool of warm water that ladies sit in when they give birth. It’s supposed to be a nice, natural place to do it in.’
I nodded, and looked back. There was another big, horrible scream, and some bad swear words.
‘Do they have a dying pool?’ I said.
* * *
Harvey doesn’t believe in God. He knows that God does not exist. He knows it as pure fact, like he knows that stone is hard and that his room does not have a panoramic view of New York City. And yet he carries with him a completely contradictory sense that life is, in fact, patterned. These patterns are godless, but they are patterns. Harvey cannot quite articulate how, intellectually, he contains this contradiction, but in Spasms of the Soul, the collection of essays that first moved Eli away from fiction into metaphysics, resuscitating his writing career at the turn of this century, his father says:
When faced with the regular argument that a divine being could not possibly allow bad things – war, cancer, famine – to exist in the world, believers in God should say – instead of going on at length about free will – that God is interested in neither good nor evil but simply in his greatest act, creation. He is an artist. He is, in truth, a post-modern artist: unconcerned by morality or balance or even narrative.
This gets quite close to how Harvey feels about it, although he does not know if, when his father wrote this, he was an atheist. He knows that Eli was very committed to unbelief when he was young, but he did turn, in later life, a bit mystical. There’s a fair amount about religion in the later philosophical essays (including the famous pronouncement on Israel – ‘The Jews have enough people who dislike them already without actually being in the wrong’ – which led to an official condemnation by the Anti-Defamation League) and much mulling over the subject of God, although often in ways which seems to equate Him, more or less, with Eli Gold.
Anyway, it’s things like this – like Lark turning out to be a) staying in the same hotel and b) the woman he had seen waiting for her luggage at JFK – that make him sense the acute presence of these patterns. It doesn’t bring him any closer to God. He feels that they are malevolent, these patterns, that they contain synchronicities designed to destabilize his small chance of peace – and he knows that for them to be malevolent, for him to ascribe to these patterns a moral condition, is to accept an idea of intelligent design to the universe. Which completely fucks up his atheism. He sometimes likes to think, assuming in his head a raffish, Oscar Wilde-like air, I don’t believe in God; but I do believe in the Devil. He never actually says this out loud, however, which is probably for the best.
He knows Lark is this woman because of the jpg on the front cover of the PR PDF, Alan’s attachment Lark1resend. He hadn’t been absolutely sure it was her at first – however much not in need of airbrushing, and good lighting, and extra make-up she had been in the airport baggage hall, all this had obviously been added to her publicity picture, distorting her away from his memory – but applying to the picture his usual face-searching skills, zooming in on it until the pixels blurred, had convinced him. The girl with the Woodstock hair, who stabbed Harvey with her beauty at the airport, is Lark.
So Harvey has begun to work on a pitch for her autobiography. It is stupid, he knows, that this is how he has got over his ghostwriter’s block. After all, he would have been able to guess, without opening Lark1resend, that Lark would be attractive – either straightforwardly beautiful, or, at the very least, quirkily sexy. Why it makes a difference that he happens to have seen this particular beautiful young woman before he does not know. He does not know why that coincidence impels him on to pitch for writing the story of her short life more than if he had opened the attachment and she’d just been any beautiful young woman.
He has begun work on her autobiography even though thinking about meeting her makes him anxious. Harvey knows he is a beauty addict. He knows he craves beauty like a junkie craves crack. And like a junkie trying to stay clean, he tries therefore to avoid beauty. This is, unfortunately, much harder to do. It’s much harder to come off beauty than crack. You don’t see crack walking down every street; you don’t see it constantly glorified and celebrated on the TV, in magazines, at the cinema, in song; you don’t see it on billboards imbued with the message YOU NEED THIS. His method – his way of getting by – is to accept the ambush but not the trap; to fix but not to fixate. His eyes, he knows, will be caught, his life every day hit by a series of little stops, but that aside, he will not dwell there. He will not sit down with beauty – other than Stella’s, of course: a beauty he is not so much sitting down with as chasing into tunnels.
So the idea of spending time, of actually being with Lark, disturbs him, but he blanks it out as best he can, thinking that he can always shield himself with a Dizzy-style mantra – I would love to kiss or lick or fuck Lark – all the things, in fact, that I do not want to do to beautiful paintings – but the fact that I can’t is not the end of the world. Something like that. He can cope with her, he tells himself: it is just work. Work-wise, though, there is very little to go on in the PR PDF. It just talks hazily about Lark in the usual modern myth-making ways: about her relevance, her unique personal style, her status as a contemporary artist, her quirky and subversive sense of humour, and her amazing connection to her audience. Trying to come up with a genuine angle, a real way into her, is like trying to hold water in his hands. For a start, there is absolutely no indication, in the tiny précis of her life given in the press release, of the thing that, as a biographer, he would normally look for first: struggle. Her parents were themselves in show business – father an actor, mother a model – and she seems to have been groomed, from a very early age, for stardom. He realizes the way forward – the way most likely to get him the job – is simply to rewrite the press release: to give back to the people in control of Lark what they have already decided to hear.
In terms of his own integrity – which he surprises himself by thinking about – Harvey has squared it by deciding that whatever he writes doesn’t matter anyway, not once Lark becomes, as she clearly will, famous. Harvey, although not famous, has spent long enough around fame to know that the version of the person it presents is always wrong. Once they are out there, stuff about them gets around that is all just hearsay, but somehow, because it is written down in newspapers, on autocue scripts, on the internet, it becomes truth: not just the half-truths, but the quarter-truths, the eighth-truths, the absolute zero-truths. It all becomes, somehow, gospel: like the Gospels.
So he has started work. He has just written the first words of his pitch – a lark is a bird; but it can also mean a merry prank, a joke, a thing of laughter and joy – and is about to highlight/delete when his iPhone rings. He looks at the lit-up micro-window: Stella.
‘Hi,’ he says.
‘Hi, darling,’ her voice responds. She sounds alert, upbeat, through the transatlantic crackle. ‘How are
you?’ Her voice modulates easily, with no crunching self-conscious gear change into concern.
‘I’m fine. Yeah.’ He pauses. ‘Working.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Don’t sound so surprised …’
‘OK, I won’t. And Eli?’
‘Yes, he’s … well, no, not fine. I don’t know. I’m not aware of any change. I’ve still only seem him the once.’
‘You haven’t been back?’
‘Stell … I’ve only been here a couple of days.’
‘Three. Three days.’
‘It’s still two days here. Two days and a bit. It’s still only the morning of the third day, I mean.’
‘Yes, I know what you mean … Hi?’ A man’s voice rumbles in the background. ‘Oh, thanks. Brilliant. Yeah, I’ll be off in a minute.’
Harvey waits a requisite amount a time, before saying: ‘Was that Godard?’
‘It was Geoff.’
Stella works – three days a week – as a solicitor, in Maidstone. Her office, which he has been in twice, had been a challenge even for Stella to cosy up, but she has made a good fist of it, bringing in lamps so as to negate the flickering downlight, placing a furry rug under her desk, changing the regulation blinds for an old pair of red curtains. He is always amazed at how much her surroundings matter to her.
‘Was he trying it on?’
‘No, he wants to show me this new people-finding software we’ve had put in to the system.’
‘People-finding?’
‘Yeah, it’s linked to government databases. Allows you to access the whereabouts of anyone, anywhere. Anyone who might know something about one of our cases …’
‘I see. And does he perhaps want to show you this software, while leaning over you – looking down your office blouse? I don’t know why I don’t come in and punch Mr Goddard’s lights out.’
She laughs. ‘Yeah, yeah. Stop pretending.’
‘I’m not pretending.’
‘Yes, you are. You love it, Harvey. You love it if any man burns any kind of tiny candle for me. Makes you feel all puffed up and proud.’
The Death of Eli Gold Page 18