The Death of Eli Gold

by David Baddiel

  So now Violet opens Solomon’s Testament again, which she has not done since that day in Cricklewood. She opens it at random. She knows that the opening chapter has defeated her, time and time again: the thought of starting again with I am Solomon Wolff, and this is my testament exhausts her, and, besides, she does not have the time. Eli will be dead soon, and so will she. That chronology – beginning, middle, end – does not apply any more. Near death, life shrinks to the quantum level.

  She begins at a random page: 147. Dust motes rise from the page. She reads and reads: the one thing she has, even though she does not have it, is time. She has no time, and yet time stretches endlessly for her, here in the black hole of Redcliffe House, every minute an hour and every hour a lifetime. As she reads, something dawns on her: something so obvious, something which anyone who knew anything about books, and first novels especially, could have told her long, long ago, and which would have thrown the book into a new light, a light which perhaps might have allowed her to read it much sooner. But no one did tell her. No one told her that Solomon’s Testament is about many things – America, Jewishness, language, class, comedy, food, sex, all that brave new 1950s stuff – but it is also, quite clearly, about her.

  Chapter 8

  Harvey sits in his room, terrified. Like all people with anxiety disorders, he has read about the flight or fight response; about the amygdala and the hippocampus; about how the primeval evolutionary function implanted in us, designed to adrenalize the body when faced with a lion or a woolly mammoth, still squats in the brain like a blind, nervous toad, unable to see any difference between a woolly mammoth and a traffic jam, or a recalcitrant boss, or a computer malfunction: or, in this particular case, the possibility of illicit sex with a nineteen-year-old.

  It’s so useless, he thinks, the fucking flight or fight thing. If he listened to his body, now, it would mean either getting up and running away from the hotel screaming ‘Help me! Help me! I might be able to have sex with a beautiful young woman! Aaaarggh!’ or, alternatively, going up to the top floor, where Lark is waiting for him, and beating the shit out of her. Neither is a truly useful strategy for coping with the situation.

  It was decided, after the initial meeting with Lark and her people, that the way forward with the autobiography was that there should be a series of conversations between the singer and her ghostwriter, which Harvey would record and make notes from, and then flesh out into Story of a Songbird. The first one was earlier this evening. It took place in a sushi restaurant on Madison and 97th. Harvey took his Dictaphone and his gold leather notebook. He also wore the black jacket from his one suit. He angsted about this for a while – should he really wear the jacket from his funereal robes? And why is he wearing it anyway? It’s not a date, after all: not a fucking date – but after a while he just put it on. Stella called just before he went out the door; he didn’t pick up.

  At the restaurant, Lark, who had not dressed up – she was wearing jeans and a loose tartan shirt – told her story. She had been born in Belfast, but had been brought to London as a child. She had been a late birth for Michaela – an attempt, Harvey inferred, to save a fading marriage to Lark’s father, who had already left the family house by the time she was born. Her father, who she’d seen irregularly after he left, died when she was twelve. As well as an actor, he had been a good amateur classical pianist and maybe this is where she got her interest in music. It was fortunate that Harvey had brought his Dictaphone to pick up these and other titbits from her life as concentration was diffi-cult. The sushi, in particular, was an issue. Every time she brought a new piece up to her face, he became distracted by the idea that the raw pink fish flesh could seem, to a mind that might be led that way, like a little tongue fluttering across her mouth. Plus, knowledge of the behaviour of Japanese salarymen kept on urging Harvey’s Tourette’s head to shout, ‘Hey! What don’t you get on the table naked and let me chopstick this stuff off you!?’

  He managed to control this urge. He did not control, however, his gaze. At first he would hardly look at her at all. He was too convinced his eyes would be see-through: too convinced, as well, that her beauty would rush in through them, like rapids flooding his heart. He had to protect it, this fragile place where his love – his exhausted, infiltrated, love – for Stella lived. But over the course of the meal he forgot about this need; and a cocktail of the natural body language of interview, three bottles of sake and Lark’s blankness – it was as if he could stare at her all day and she might not pick up any agenda from it – brought his vision forward. As she talked, itemizing her life like a shopping list, he luxuriated in his licence to look. It was a liberation, for Harvey, not to look scurrilously, not to snatch secret glances. And as he looked, he let himself go. He let her beauty do its work. He let her beauty off the leash and allowed it to engender in him a deep, misplaced sense of peace.

  On the way back to the hotel, Harvey felt that this was OK: that he had been granted an amnesty of sorts. Some climate confusion meant that the late August Manhattan air was colder than it should be, and he felt it as a slap, bringing him out of a trance. It allowed him to rebuild his defences, which he took to be unbreached. He could walk side by side with Lark, and look at her profile, and talk to her, and even play with the idea that this tableau, a man and a woman walking on a summer’s night with Central Park on their right and Fifth Avenue on their left, might cause some onlookers to think – the ones who were not thinking ‘nice to see a dad out with his daughter’ – that they were lovers. He allowed himself to think, from behind a wall of what he considered to be ten-inch-thick self-awareness, ‘Ah, in another life …’ This is what the monogamous are often agonizing about: not the sex they did not have, but the lives. Harvey absorbed this thought, though, with equanimity. As they approached the Sangster, a sentimental smile sat on his face like a meniscus of untroubled mercury.

  And then she said: ‘What floor did you say you were on?’

  ‘The eighth. It’s nice, but there’s no view. And – well, I never seem to get a view when I’m in this city …’

  ‘Come up to mine.’

  She said it straight, with no hint of anything. They were standing just outside the lobby. Harvey felt his smile fade, and his anxiety levels shoot up. They don’t build, his anxiety levels, they are faster than a supercar: they go from 0 to 100 in under half a second.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Come up to my room. It’s on the twenty-second floor. 2214. It’s got an amazing view …’

  ‘Yeah. You said that actually, when we first talked …’

  ‘I know. I remember.’

  Harvey nodded. He looked away.

  ‘Well, OK, I will – at some point.’

  ‘Come now. Mum’s out with Josh. She won’t be back for at least another hour; probably two. They’re having an affair.’

  Which is why he sits now, in his room, his skin tingling with sweat and his stomach churning like it’s trying to make bile butter. He had made some ambiguous excuse about needing to go back to his room first – implying that, second, he would indeed be coming up to her room. She had said fine. They had shared a silent lift together, and he had got out at the eighth floor. He had looked back at her and she had looked straight at him, but he could not read it. He had no sense of what was going on inside Lark. He could see her but could not feel anything coming off her. It was as if she was looking out at the world from behind reinforced glass.

  He does not, of course, think that Lark is interested in him physically, but he knows there are thousands of reasons why women sleep with men that have nothing to do with the male version of attraction. Women, sexually, have much more subtext. Perhaps she is doing it to get back at her mother for having this affair; perhaps she is impressed by the Eli Gold connection, although she has not mentioned it since their first meeting; perhaps she liked how he appeared to be listening raptly to her in the restaurant; perhaps she is just bored, and wishes to flex her beauty. It might be none of these reasons. She may
indeed not even want to sleep with him at all.

  Not that it would make things any easier for Harvey if Lark had said, in the same neutral way that she said everything else, ‘I want you to come up to my room because I want you to fuck me.’ Well: it would be easier in one way; insofar as Harvey would then not be facing the twin possibilities of rejection and humiliation – and, no doubt, removal from his first proper job for ages – along with the more direct ones of guilt, shame and destruction of his family life.

  Harvey wonders how the other men – the ones for whom ending relationships is weightless; the ones who live close to the man-bone – would be in this situation. Is adultery also weightless for them? These sexual chances that tot up so apprehensively in the libido’s memory – how unmanly is it not to seize them with both hands? To try and calm himself down, he starts a game of chess on his iPhone, but his thought process is so frazzled that even by his standards the game is short. Within seconds Ting! Tiny wins. He tries a mantra. I would really like to have sex with Lark, but if I don’t have sex with Lark, it’s not the end of the world. It does not engender even a flash of peace. He tries it the other way. I would really like to stay faithful to Stella, but if I don’t stay faithful to Stella, it’s not the end of the world. He is considering that this second way does not quite work – the mantras are impulse controllers: they are meant to deflect desire, not duty – when he realizes how deeply, even though he has never said it before, he has internalized this idea, that he has always taken it for granted that infidelity to Stella would indeed be the end of the world. For the first time, his mind rises up against it. I am ill, he thinks, ill with attachment, ill with what time does, ill with love. Lark will give me a respite, won’t she? A holiday from it all; a moment’s health.

  It comes to him that he knows who will provide the answer, at least as regards what a real man would do. It is too late to call, but he opens the Sony Vaio, and calls up Bunce’s Facebook page. He types into the Instant Message box:

  Bunce. Are you up?

  A second later it comes back:

  I was just thinking about you. Thinking about sending you something.

  I probably shouldn’t but fuck it.

  Whatever, yes. Do. Bunce: listen.

  What?

  He takes a deep breath and puts his fingers to the keyboard:

  A woman – a young, very attractive woman – has just invited me up to her room. What should I do? And I know what you would normally say, but think about it for a second. You’re married. I think that through all your big male bullshit you love your wife. I think even you would think twice. So. I love my wife. I really love my wife. But I’m fucked up. I’m fucked up about it all. What should I do?

  He presses return. The reply does not come instantly. Bunce is doing what he asked: thinking about it. Harvey reads what he’s written. It is a mess. It does not express how he feels at this moment, except in regards to being a mess. Then, these words appear in his inbox:

  Yeah. It’s a tough one. But here’s the thing, Harv. Who do you want to be on your deathbed? John fucking Betjeman? Or Eli fucking Gold?

  * * *

  Last Saturday, Mommy arranged for Elaine to take me to the zoo. This was weird, because me and Elaine haven’t done anything like that for ages, not since Daddy got ill. Because we spend all the time at the hospital. But also maybe because Daddy is gonna die soon, but nobody knows when it is and Mommy really wants me to be there when it happens, so, suddenly, it’s like no daytrips, no play dates, and defi nitely no sleepovers at Jada’s. Also the zoo; the zoo! Not like a museum, or a monument, or a music recital, or anything. I love those things, of course, but still, I really really really love animals.

  And here’s the really amazing thing: she called Jada’s mom, and arranged for her to come, too! And Mommy never does anything like that. She never calls any of the other moms at the school herself, she always gets Elaine to do it. And she doesn’t really like Jada. I know that’s the truth. She would never say so, but every time I tell her about something Jada said or a TV show or a movie she’s told me about, Mommy does that face that looks a bit like someone’s pinched her.

  And it is true that Jada never talks about books. I sometimes try and tell her about them but she always goes bor-ing! And does a big fake yawn. So I can see why Mommy doesn’t like her. But the other thing is that Jada’s mom doesn’t like her going out with me when Elaine’s so old! That’s what she said, that she thought it was a bit weird that my nanny was so old and she had her own ideas about why my mom had hired someone over sixty. I don’t know what that was about, and neither did Jada. But the point is, she thinks that Elaine might, I dunno, forget where we are, or fall over and break a bone in her skeleton or something while she’s looking after us. It’s crazy, she’s not that old.

  So that’s why it’s so AMAZING that Mommy sorted out a play date with her. And we had such a great time. We saw the lions and the zebras and the elephants; we saw the penguins being fed fish from buckets; and there was a monkey who was touching his winky-wonk over and over again! It was so funny! Although it looked a bit sore. And Elaine let us have an popsicle each – I had a Tangle Twister – and a bag of Toxic Waste to share. The sun was shining and Jada wasn’t too yeah, yeah about it – she wasn’t yeah, yeah about it at all – and even Elaine seemed to smile more than usual. I wish Jada’s mom had seen her. She looked young: like, fifty.

  After the zoo, we took Jada home. And then we went to the hospital. I thought we were just going in to spend a couple of hours in Daddy’s room as usual before going home for dinner but then when we got there Mommy was waiting outside his door, standing next to John the security man. I got a weird feeling in my tummy when I saw her there, ’cos I thought: oh no, Daddy’s died, and I wasn’t there! But then she smiled, and opened her arms, and I ran into them, and she gave me the biggest hug.

  I started to say ‘What’s going on …?’ but she shushed me and held my hand and we started to walk along the corridor. We went past the little room that Dr Ghundkhali had taken us into that day, and then into another room. Mommy gave me a little smile, and then opened the door. It was quite a big room, although not as big as Daddy’s. There was a window that looked out on all the skyscrapers. And there were two beds in there. One was bigger than the other. By the side of that one, there was a table, with a whole load of books on it, all by Daddy. And then there was a small bed. On that one, someone had put loads of my toys. I think it was meant to be all my favourite snuggle toys, but it wasn’t. It did have my Baby Born and Dilip my kangaroo and Becky Boo who’s a monkey that talks and I love all of them but then after them it just had loads of teddies and stuff that I don’t even have names for any more, not since I was like six or something. Next to the bed was a little pink table, and on that was a frame with lots of little shiny jewels on it, and in that frame was a photo of Aristotle. Next to that was my Nintendo DS Lite, and Mommy’s copy of Mirror, Mirror with all the crossed-out bits in it.

  I turned to look at Mommy. She was smiling but it looked like she’d been smiling the whole time I’d been looking at the beds and the toys and stuff and now her smile was maybe hurting or something.

  ‘Are we living here now?’ I said.

  ‘Well, darling. Yes. I suppose you could say that. Just for a bit.’

  ‘How long?’

  She stopped smiling when I said that.

  ‘Darling … I don’t know how long …’

  I got it then. Whenever Mommy says she doesn’t know how long we’re going to have to do something, she means: until Daddy dies.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I sat down on the bed.

  ‘Don’t you like it?’ she said. ‘We brought all your favourite toys.’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘We didn’t? Elaine?’ She was standing outside the room, but she came in when Mommy called her. ‘I thought I asked you to make sure we brought all Colette’s favourite toys?’

  ‘Well, I …’ said Elaine: she looked a bit upset, �
�… you know, Colette changes her mind quite a lot about which ones are her favourites.’

  ‘I don’t!’ I said. ‘And besides – I don’t want to live here anyway!’

  ‘You won’t be living here, darling. You’ll still be going back home some of the time. It just means that you can sleep here … now …’

  ‘But I don’t want to sleep here!’

  She came over and sat down on my bed. She moved Becky Boo out of the way. She did a little nod, to Elaine, and Elaine went out of the room. She took my hand and put it in her hand. Her hand felt colder than I thought it would be because it’s always quite hot in the hospital.

  ‘Darling … you know we had that little chat with Dr Ghundkhali the other day?’

  I nodded. I could feel that I wanted to cry. I was trying not to.

  ‘Well, I’ve been speaking to him again … and: well, you remember he said that Daddy now … had something wrong with his lungs?’

  ‘A lung infection. That’s what he said. I remember.’

  ‘Yes. Well, it hasn’t got better.’

  This made my tummy feel tight.

  ‘But we spoke to him! We told him off! We said he mustn’t let Daddy die!’

  She squeezed my hand harder. ‘I know darling. And he isn’t doing … they have treated him. But it hasn’t worked.’

  ‘What do you mean it hasn’t worked!’

  ‘It hasn’t worked! The lung infection hasn’t gone away.’ She shook her head and looked very sad. ‘I don’t know what else to tell you.’

  I sat down on the bed next to her.

  ‘Don’t cry, Mommy,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she said. ‘I …’

  And then she did cry, really a lot. It felt really weird to see her cry.

  She did cry before, when Daddy went into the hospital the first time, but this time it was much more. When she started she was just sniffling, but after a bit her mouth opened wide and even though no noise was coming out of it it was like she was screaming. Her mouth went all down at the sides of her face and she looked sort of younger, and much, much older at the same time. She put her hands up and covered her eyes, but she was crying so much that her tears came through the lines that your fingers make when you hold them together.