The Death of Eli Gold

by David Baddiel

  He made a face and shook his head and looked over to Mommy, like she was going to help, like she must know what he was about to say and maybe she could tell me. But she just said:

  ‘Yes, Doctor. What exactly are you implying?’

  Then he just looked really embarrassed. He went red. I could see that even though he is from India and has dark skin.

  ‘Well, Mrs Gold. In these circumstances, when a patient is, as we know your husband to be, terminally ill – if they do get an infection or a virus, sometimes it’s felt to be best …’

  There was another long silence.

  ‘Yes?’ said Mommy.

  ‘… not to treat him.’

  Mommy nodded. She took my hand, and squeezed it tight.

  ‘Not to treat him?’ I said. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means, darling …’ said Mommy, looking at me; but then she moved her head round to face Dr Ghundkhali, and she changed her voice, making it really hard, ‘… that Dr Ghundkhali would like to let your father die.’

  I looked round at him. I felt my eyes go hard at him, as hard as Mommy’s voice. But also I felt them start to feel a bit wet, like I was going to cry. And then I didn’t know what to do.

  ‘Mrs Gold,’ he said. ‘I would not like anything of the sort. I’m just telling you what the medical situation is. And, yes, in this situation, some family members sometimes feel that it is more humane to let the patient … go.’

  Mommy squeezed my hand harder. I could feel the bad feeling that I sometimes get inside me when grown-ups talk like this. It’s like a cloud in my tummy. And I really want it to burst and get rid of its rain but it just stays full in my tummy. Sometimes it moves around, like my tummy is a whole black sky.

  ‘Dr Ghundkhali,’ said Mommy. ‘Are you aware of who my husband is?’

  Dr Ghundkhali suddenly looked very tired. He looked like he was ill, like he should be the one in hospital.

  ‘Yes, of course, Mrs Gold.’

  ‘I’m not sure you do. Not really. I mean, you know who he is and that he is an important man. But tell me: have you read Solomon’s Testament?’

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘The Compliance of Women? The Teriblo Conspiracy? Criminality?’

  ‘Mirror, Mirror?’ I said. ‘When it came out it got bad reviews, but now it’s considered a classic.’

  He rubbed his face with his hand. ‘I’m not really much of a reader of fiction, I’m afraid. I prefer history.’

  ‘Oh … I see. Biography? The lives of great men, by any chance?’

  ‘No, not really. I like microhistory. Footnote history.’

  I turned to Mommy to say ‘what’s that?’ but then she said: ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s books about the small stuff. The things we all take for granted. Books about – I don’t know – salt. Mercury. Paper. Plastic. I’m reading one at the moment, would you believe, about dust. Did you know …’

  ‘Yes, well,’ said Mommy, ‘if you had read some of my husband’s books, perhaps you would have a sense of exactly what life you’re talking about …’ and here Mommy did that thing she sometimes does of putting her fingers up around a word, and moving them up and down as she speaks, ‘… letting go.’

  Dr Ghundkhali nodded. He rubbed his face some more. He opened his mouth. Then he shut it again. Then he looked back at Mommy. ‘Right. So we’ll treat Mr Gold’s infection. No problem.’

  ‘Good,’ said Mommy.

  She got up. I got up, too. Dr Ghundkhali got off the table. He opened the door. He held it open. He smiled at me as I went through, but I just gave him a look. I can raise my left eyebrow without raising my right. Mommy says it’s a thing I can do because Daddy can do it, too, and I have seen him do it. He used to do it a lot when I was little. He used to do it when I did something funny or silly and he would do it and laugh at the same time. I used to love that.

  But that wasn’t the way I was doing it now. I did it without a smile.

  Chapter 7

  The woman’s breast is so rock-hard it squashes Harvey’s nose deep into his face, making it difficult for him to breathe. Who, he thinks, wants breasts to be like this? The point about breasts, surely, is their softness? That’s the great thing about breasts, isn’t it? There’s their movement, yes, their slow hypnotic swing, but that movement itself is soft, or at least redolent of softness; and breasts filled with silicon or shrapnel or whatever they put in them to make them like these ridiculous American ones now suffocating him don’t move or swing at all. The two breasts are seemingly no longer two at all. They move in a block, comically, like feet in a single big slipper; there is no movement independent of the rest of the body, which is what gives the breast its iconic, thing-apart status. And, besides, soft: that’s what makes breasts nice to hold, and to bury one’s face into.

  What do they put in them, Harvey thinks, as she moves them back and forth across his face, semi-proving, with a shift of weight across her shoulders, Harvey’s semi-point about false breasts and their lack of independent body movement. It feels like small, flat punches, like soft jabs from a practising boxer. Perhaps I should wear one of those head protectors. How hard would it be to find something soft? Feathers? Sponge? Kapok? Although Harvey has never been entirely sure what kapok is.

  ‘I sense you’re not focused, Gold,’ says Bunce. Harvey, aware that his mouth is still open, and thus that he looks like a mouth-breather, looks over, to where another lap-dancer is sitting astride his American friend, facing away, rubbing what Harvey knows Bunce would call her butt-cheeks across his groin. He is leaning back, his big square head a counterweight to her entire body.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I feel no electric current of desire coming off you.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Yes. None. And you should. She’s good. She’s very good.’ A flicker of a bored, practised smile shimmers across the dancer’s face as she moves. ‘And I’ll tell you what I really like. She looks like that girl-child opera singer from your country. The one who’s grown up now.’

  Harvey looks at her. He is uncomfortable about many things in this situation, not least the clearly assumed licence to talk about the woman naked in front of you as if she is not there. This seems odd to him, as he has never experienced someone so clearly there. The phantom feminist in his mind deconstructs it as yet another type of objectification, as if there weren’t enough going on in this room: a way of rendering her a body without consciousness.

  ‘Charlotte Church?’ he says.

  ‘Yes. God. I love her. I’d fuck her until my dick became Welsh.’

  ‘Do you feel an electric current of desire coming from …’ Harvey twists his neck, with a stab of pain, around the side of his dancer’s left breast, in an attempt to nod towards Bunce’s one.

  ‘Susan?’

  She turns round, on the hearing of her name. She is blonde, and her eyes are not especially dead.

  Harvey frowns. Susan? Not Jenna? Chelsea? Angel? Shyla?

  ‘Most definitively a girl named Sue,’ says Bunce. She laughs, but Harvey thinks she may – just – have heard this joke before; and then goes back to the groin-grinding.

  ‘But no …’ continues Bunce, leaning over so that his mouth is close to Harvey’s ear, and his big head close to Harvey’s dancer’s – whose name he does not know – still slowly moving breast. He worries about the matter/anti-matter, Higgs Boson-creating style explosion that might happen if these two heavily gravitational objects collide, but they do not, ‘… I don’t feel much in the way of desire coming off Susan. Which is not to say, as the myth would want us to believe, that strippers stroke hookers never get any pleasure from their work. Obviously, some do and some don’t. But, no. Susan, my guess is …’ and here he looks directly at Susan’s buttocks, moving at exactly the same speed as Harvey’s dancer’s breasts, in time with the terrible R ’n’ B song banging out of the enormous speakers hovering like UFOs from the ceiling of Exotique Manhattan Table Dancing,
‘my impression is, for her, it’s just a job. Neither pleasurable nor unpleasurable.’

  ‘Right …’

  ‘Which is fine with me. One thing I’ve never understood is the idea that, sex-wise, men need women to feel pleasure. I mean, sure: it’s a bonus. It’s good. I’m happy if they’ve had a good time. But it’s not crucial. The key area, for me, is me. To be specific, my balls. Are they empty? As can be? Check. Job done.’

  Bunce smiles as he says this. It is part of his trick. Bunce wraps all his attitudes in just enough self-awareness and irony to pre-empt disapproval, or, at least, to render it po-faced. Smiling, however, does not really suit him; it makes his face look suddenly boyish and over-pleased, in direct contradiction to his given mode of being, the thinking man’s jock.

  ‘Such an attitude would, I assume, allow for sex with a lot of hookers,’ says Harvey.

  ‘Well …’ says Bunce, ‘It would. But no, I’m waaaaaay to cheap for that. I hate spending money on a date, let alone a hooker. And besides: with hookers, you lose the thrill of the yes, the gaining of the Golden Ticket, when you’ve persuaded and charmed and conned until she’s reached escape velocity; and the next magic step where she puts her knees behind her ears and lets you sweat and grunt and punish like a bull mastiff on a toy poodle, and your inner voice is throwing both fists in the air and exploding between two thundery reactions: a) I fucking won!; and b) I cannot believe I’m getting away with this shit again.’

  Harvey nods, remembering that an evening with Bunce involves listening to a lot of this stuff: this is how he talks, all the time.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘You know this … what Susan’s doing there, to your groin – that costs money? We’re on a tab here?’ Harvey hears himself speaking like an American, going up at the end of the sentence like the Bengali in the taxi, but without the excuse of having heard American speech rhythms burbling on behind him every day for the last however many years. The idea embarrasses him, makes his face go red – he can feel it, although knows it cannot be seen in the flashing dark – because there is something about accent-chasing, especially American accent-chasing, which speaks of desperation, of wanting so much to fit in. It makes him feel like an English fifteen-year-old obsessed by The Fonz.

  But Bunce seems not to notice; he just shrugs, and says:

  ‘Hey. I am large. I contain multitudes.’

  The music stops, followed a split-second later by a calming of the lights. Both dancers get off both laps. There is an awkward moment, like a potted version of waking up the morning after a one-night stand, as they stand there putting their underwear back on. Harvey’s dancer, demurely, turns away to do this. Susan is less bothered: she fiddles with her bra straps face-on, while fixing Harvey with a gaze that feels to him like a rebuke. He looks away, catching sight of his reflection in one of Exotique Manhattan Table Dancing’s many mirrors. He looks, as well he might – right-on man gone wrong, new man grown old – ashamed.

  ‘So, honey,’ she says, ‘wanna go upstairs to the private room?’

  He glances over to Bunce, who, Harvey thinks, raises an eyebrow, although because he is absurdly blond, with eyebrows that verge on the invisible in daylight, it’s hard to tell: it could just be some random crinkling above the contact-lens-blue pupil. Harvey used to be able to do a killer raised eyebrow – an inheritance from his father – but lately, the muscle seems to have atrophied.

  ‘No thanks,’ says Harvey. ‘I’ve just found out I’m the Federal Reserve for the evening.’

  She nods, and looks away, not bothering with a polite smile. Why, thinks Harvey, am I trying to sound so fucking American? He is trying, in fact, to sound at home here, to sound like the sort of person who comes to these kind of places often and is not in any way daunted by them, and thus has fallen into what he imagines might be the lingua franca of, say, a hedge-fund manager on a bawdy night out.

  He wonders, too, as Susan and her beautiful buttocks – but why? What is so beautiful about the bisected pound of flesh? How can something so banal, something not actually that different, graphically, from the inflated Ws he would draw over and over again on rough-book paper as a child, drag his eye towards it so? – walk away, why he failed to take up her offer. It was not the cash, even though one of the reasons Harvey is trying to affect a breezy confidence is that he has no real idea how much the bill for the evening at Exotique will be. It had been Bunce’s idea to meet here. He said he would rather get it out of the way at the start of the evening, so that they could talk properly for the rest of the night without having to think When for fuck’s sake are we gonna go to a strip club?

  So meanwhile: why not the private dance? Harvey had been more attracted to Susan than to his own dancer – not least because her breasts looked considerably more real – but had felt intimated by the forthrightness with which she had offered her services. Also, he had felt sorry for the other one, having made the assumption that her quietude was indicative of some secret sadness, which is the kind of assumption that soft-hearted men have always preferred to make about women who work in the sex industry, from Sir John Everett Millais onwards. Not that that makes any sense: because she looked maybe a little sad, he chose her, rather than her friend, for a lap dance; he did not whisk her away to a safe house and provide her for the rest of her days with a steady income.

  The reasons why he doesn’t follow Susan up to the smaller rooms on the first floor are manifold. There is the money issue. And then, Harvey is – this is key: this is his shield and sword against chaos – faithful to his wife. Within the confines of this faithfulness, pornography, street sexual anguish, feeling like he is going to faint in front of Lark and, once in a very blue moon, a lap dance, are containable. Beyond lie the great plains of infidelity; and Harvey feels that, right on the border to those plains, fringing it, like a fence that may be in one land or another or both, stands the private lap dance. Also: Harvey is so aware of his own tendencies that he is frightened that the more intense, one-on-one intimacy of the private dance may lead him, instantaneously, to fall in love. Which would be both disastrous and embarrassing.

  The music cranks up again. The thudding bass starts to give Harvey a headache, not helped by his having had two Budweisers, the second of which is sitting in front of him now, its last quarter, like all beers he has ever had, undrunk and turning sour. Away from the trance state that the gyrating female body inspires, a kind of alienation effect sets in, making him suddenly see no connection at all between the trimmings of this place – the bass lines, the lights, the mirrors, the velvet furnishings – and sexiness. As if to counteract this, two other dancers, who have been idling by the bar, move, with self-conscious slinkiness, towards him and Bunce. Harvey looks towards them, uncertain, but his fellow lap-dancee, sitting up and ready, has an air of knowing exactly what to do: he doesn’t go so far as to wink at Harvey, but everything about his body language implies it. As the women get there, and settle, in front of the two men, hands on hips and eyebrows expectantly raised, Bunce yawns, theatrically, and says:

  ‘Shall we make a move?’

  ‘No. No. You’re so wrong, Gold. The bigger and faker the better, and I think I like them even better when fully clothed. I like the cartoony element. I like them stretching out of a shirt or a suit or pulling some sort of fabric that doesn’t want to be pulled any more. I want them larger than life, ridiculous, preposterous, because they appeal to my sense of the absurd, and my id’s sense of the absurd; and I draw encouragement from the truth that the woman has spent a fortune and put herself into the hands of a mad scientist, has become Hanna Barbera’s conception of a female, solely to draw men’s sexual attention.’

  Bunce slams his empty beer glass down on the bar as he says this. He is not angry, but Harvey confiding in him his uncertainty about false breasts has led to an outbreak of definitiveness on the subject. Bunce has no half-positions: he thinks in rant.

  They are sitting in Why Not?, a bar on the corner of West 40th and 9th, overshadowed by the hul
king concrete of the Lincoln Tunnel Overpass. Bunce, on leaving Exotique, perhaps to disperse pent-up sexual tension, had wanted to walk. It had felt directionless to Harvey, and when they ended up here, in the unhip section of Hell’s Kitchen, he had started to feel anxious, a little because of an old 1970s sense that New York was dangerous at night, but more because the street-scape had started to resemble the badlands of his dreams. In his dreams, Harvey often finds himself lost in some tangled urban land-lock of shopless streets and dead ends and fenced-off areas and gravel-scrubbed waste grounds and closed industrial parks and half-finished bridges, black wires rising out of their broken struts and joists like the legs of insects trapped inside the masonry. This part of New York looks so like his dreams that he had started to wonder whether he had been here before, like something was jogging his unconscious. It gave him the creeps. The appearance of Why Not? felt oasis-like.

  It is not, though, the sort of bar Harvey expects to find in Manhattan. This seems to be another trick, similar to his failure to find in the city a hotel room with the Promised View. What Harvey had assumed it would be was a long, narrow room, plush and hardly lit, with a bar flanking a series of narrow booths for the conducting of sexual and economic deals. Why Not? is not that. The fittings are pine; there is a jukebox, and a pool table, over which denim-clad men are bent; no women are present, apart from those serving drinks; and although there is not actually a confederate flag above the bar, when they walked in ‘Tuesday’s Gone’ by Lynyrd Skynyrd had been playing. It feels to Harvey like reality is for once conforming to film and TV, except the wrong films, the wrong TV; expecting a bar out of Sex and the City, they have walked into one from The Accused.

  Bunce orders two more beers from the woman behind the bar, who breaks the mood further by looking very like Angela Merkel.

  ‘Bunce,’ says Harvey.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t make me drink any more.’

  ‘I’m not making you drink anything, Harv.’