The Death of Eli Gold

by David Baddiel

  I held her hand and said, ‘It’s all right, Mommy. It’s all right.’ I said this even though it made me feel really strange inside that she was crying. Especially the way she was crying. I’ve seen grown-ups cry in the movies and they don’t cry like that: they have a little tear and maybe they smile when they’re doing it and they still look like grownups. Mommy was crying so much it was like she wasn’t a grown-up any more.

  I thought she might hug me or something when I said ‘it’s all right’ but she just carried on crying. I didn’t want to look at her after a while, so I looked away. Then Mommy said something, but I couldn’t hear it at first.

  ‘Pardon, Mommy?’ I said, turning back. She did a big sniff. Her shoulders stopped shaking so much.

  ‘I said …’ She did a big gulp, ‘… does that mean you will stay here at nights now? Please? Until …?’

  ‘Daddy dies?’

  Her face went again then, all crumpled like a piece of paper you scrunch up.

  ‘Yes! Yes! Christ, Colette, why do you always have to be so literal! Why do you always have to f-wording spell everything out!’ Then she put her hand up to her mouth. She took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry, darling, I shouldn’t have shouted. Or said that word.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen it before.’

  ‘Seen it? What do you mean?’

  ‘In here,’ I said, picking up Mirror, Mirror. ‘It’s one of the words you crossed out.’

  She took the book away from me. ‘But when have you been reading it? When I’m not there?’

  ‘Only once or twice. That time when you went to heat up Cuddles in the microwave, and once me and Jada found it in your bedroom.’ She looked a bit shocked about it, so I said: ‘I was only trying to show her what an important and clever book it is. Because she’s always saying books are boring.’

  ‘Right …’ She had stopped crying now. She put the book back down by the side of the bed. Then she picked it up again, and put it in her lap. ‘Well, it’s a bad word.’

  ‘Why does Daddy use it in his book then?’

  She made a clicking noise with her tongue. ‘OK, can we talk about this some other time? Just don’t use it for now. And don’t look it up on the internet.’

  I nodded. Even though I already had.

  ‘So: Colette. Please. Would you please agree to staying here, and sleeping in this bed, until – well, yes, perhaps, you’re right: perhaps we just need to say it out loud – until Daddy dies.’

  I looked at her. Her eyes were so red and wet. I felt really sorry for her.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  * * *

  RW: So your suicide note …

  EG: Yes?

  RW: Can I read it to you?

  EG: Can I stop you?

  [pause]

  RW: Reading to Mr Gold case document R45/103. ‘I have – of late, but whereof I know not, lost all my mirth.’ Period. And it’s signed, EG.

  [pause]

  RW: I said earlier on that Larry Barnett might think your note valuable as it’s an original piece of writing from a Pulitzer Prize-winner. Of course, it’s not …

  EG: I guess not.

  RW: It seems odd to me that you didn’t want to write more.

  EG: I have writer’s block. I’ve had it for a few years.

  [pause]

  RW: Are you serious?

  EG: Deadly. I have writer’s block. That means I cannot write like I used to. Why would I want the last thing written by me to be substandard?

  RW: So you chose instead to quote something that obviously is not substandard …?

  [pause: sound of eg sighing]

  EG: Not really, Commissioner. It’s all more complicated than that. And at the same time, not. I did have a longer and more explanatory note planned. But when it came to it, that’s what I felt like saying.

  [pause]

  RW: It does put the quote into an interesting new context, of course. I suppose it’s art, in that sense. Conceptual. Like an installation. You’ve done a bit of that recently, haven’t you?

  EG: Yes.

  RW: I saw the Butter Mountain thing. I liked it.

  EG: Thanks.

  RW: A way through writer’s block? A way of still creating, without words?

  EG: I really don’t have time for this, Commissioner.

  RW: Did you think of you and your wife’s suicide as a kind of art?

  EG: No, of course not.

  RW: But you thought it would be beautiful. You wanted symmetry. Which is of course the basic component of beauty … conventional beauty …

  [pause]

  RW: Would you call yourself a perfectionist, Mr Gold?

  EG: Not really.

  RW: Well, I would. A writer – a great writer – who won’t even put his own words on a suicide note in case it falls short of his standards? I’d call that a perfectionist.

  EG: My suicide note is –

  RW: A lot of great writers – great artists – great men – are perfectionists, aren’t they? They have to have perfection around them. They have to have symmetry. Like … you know that bit in Bellow’s last book where the Uncle guy says that even though his wife was fantastic and beautiful he had to leave her because he could never get over the fact that her breasts were slightly too far apart?

  EG: Saul Bellow has written two books since More Die of Heartbreak.

  RW: He has? Do excuse me.

  EG: And – Jesus, I can’t believe I’m having this conversation, here now – it’s not Saul speaking. It’s his character. Uncle Benn. That’s what you people always get wrong, don’t you? You always think that whatever’s in the book is exactly what the author thinks.

  RW: Yes, of course. Uncle Benn. I remember now. Who is – correct me if I’m wrong – a great man, though, no? In his field.

  [pause]

  RW: I’m not talking just about the fact that if you’re a great man, you’ve gotta leave women. I mean, we all know that. That’s part of the deal. I mean, you, you’re a cast-iron Great Man. You own the patent. So you should know. But it’s true, isn’t it? I mean, just now, I read in the paper – can you believe this – Stephen Hawking – you know, the guy in the chair? The superbrain physics guy with the computerized voice-box thing? He’s just left his wife. I mean, the guy can’t even walk: but he’s managed to get up somehow and leave his fucking wife. It’s in your Great Man DNA.

  [pause: more sighing]

  EG: So what are you talking about, Commissioner? I’d love to know.

  RW: I’m talking about how that connects to their work. Sometimes great artists – when they’re with the wrong women – they get stymied, don’t they? Their mojo goes. They need someone new to get the creative juices going. Like … I don’t know … I’m sure you could come up with an example better than me. Picasso! He was all washed up, wasn’t he, by the end of his first marriage – hadn’t done anything good for years – then he starts fucking Marie-Thérèse Walter and bang – he’s painting masterpieces like there’s no tomorrow.

  [pause]

  EG: First, psychoanalysis. Then, high literature. Now, high art! My, my. How long did you spend mugging up for this interview, Commissioner?

  RW: How long have you have had writer’s block, Eli?

  EG: Three years.

  RW: And you and Pauline were married how long?

  EG: Seven.

  RW: And how long would you say it was before the marriage became … imperfect?

  EG: Did I say it had?

  RW: Well. They all do.

  * * *

  It is, indeed, a wonderful view of Manhattan from Suite 2214. It is an even better view than his father, if he could, would see from his hospital room. The view from Mount Sinai is beautiful, but it is across Central Park, which means it only really works during the day, and, looking through Lark’s window, he realizes that the truly archetypal vista of Manhattan is at night. For all the force of the other images – the steam rising from the manholes one; the crisp, bright, walking-throug
h-a-flea-market-in-Greenwich-Village one; even the City of Man from the Brooklyn Bridge one – it is this one – the skyscrapers attempting to outglitter the stars – that most chimes with the Platonic Idea of New York City.

  It may be the case, though, that it just happens to chime most with Harvey at this moment, a moment he is desperately trying to lose himself within. If, as Dr Xu and many others believe, the secret of happiness is to live in the moment, then Harvey is certainly doing his best. He is trying to use the view, and the romantic whoosh it might generate, to shut out the future: to shut out any sense of consequence.

  He turns to see Lark looking at the view, too, her profile unnecessarily well lit by the refracted city lights. Sometimes, in Harvey’s tortured sexual aesthetic, young women are too young – some young women just look like young girls, and absurdly subject though he is to the tyranny of soft skin and unlined eyes, he is not attracted to youth per se. His obsession with ageing is mechanical – it is to do with skin, with the sliding of the soft machine, not some Nabokovian need for innocence, or childlikeness. But Lark, although clearly not old, has something unyoung about her; there is something in her impassivity which translates as maturity, even wisdom. She turns to him with her blue-blank eyes and he feels this to be true.

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Some people think that only natural things can be beautiful. But man-made things can be, too.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Harvey. He glances away from her, because he cannot take her gaze and what it might imply. The clock on the bedside table, glowing red, says 11.15. He wonders what time Michaela might be coming back.

  ‘Harvey …’

  He hears, through the deadpan intonation, some hint of a cue. Like a whip crack, he switches his attention back to Lark.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s a reason I wanted you to come up.’

  He feels his anxiety rise past an unprecedented level at this confirmation. Why should desire, he thinks, induce such fear? Why should getting what I want scare me so much? She looks down, reaching up a hand to the buttons of her tartan shirt. Behind her, at the corner of the far wall, Harvey sees the black edge of a grand piano, a wall-mounted Bang & Olufsen, a set of lacquered boxes, a fireplace with faux-quartz logs, and an oak cabinet containing row upon row of old books: Of Human Bondage, The Scarlet Letter, Jude The Obscure, What Maisie Knew. He even sees, on the sage velvet seating area, the first edition of Solomon’s Testament, next to the mock-up cover of Lark: Story of a Songbird. Lark shifts towards him, an angel in this hotel heaven.

  He moves his face closer to hers. When she looks up his lips are open and ready and his need to kiss her is so strong that only a very tiny part of him is worried about his breath. A blur of silver juts in front of his eyes. He backs away.

  ‘What’s that?’ he says.

  ‘It’s a dongle,’ she says. ‘For a computer.’

  ‘Right …’

  ‘It’s got some of my songs on it. Five of them.’

  ‘OK …’

  She proffers the dongle again, like she might offer a suspicious cat a piece of fish. Harvey stares at her. He realizes that that is why she has just reached up a hand to her shirt: to take the dongle from her breast pocket.

  ‘It’s so stupid,’ she continues. ‘You were right. Of course you can’t write my autobiography without hearing my songs. You can’t know who I am without my songs. My songs are me.’

  It is the most animated Harvey has seen her. She continues to hold out the dongle. In its tremulous gravitas, her attitude is reminiscent of a mother handing over her child for safekeeping. He looks out of the window. New York seems suddenly drained of glamour, just a bundle of corporate towers that leave their lights on all night.

  He looks at Lark. Her face is blithe, blank and clear as a white wall; but then her eyes, betraying some fear, move away from his face to check the door behind. Harvey realizes that she is worried her mother may come in and catch her doing this: breaking the embargo. He breathes a deep sigh, of sadness but also of relief. God has passed from him his cup of delicious poison. He nods, and from her hands he takes the dongle, registering that this flash of her fingers across his will be the only time he will touch her flesh tonight, or any other night.

  Later, much later, Harvey Gold is sitting in his own room, naked, staring at his laptop computer. He has masturbated many times for a man of his age. Next to him are five empty miniatures of various spirits. It is, as we know, part of Harvey’s unmanliness that he does not like alcohol, but he can swallow it like medicine when he needs it to act on him like medicine. He has taken it now in order to make him sleep, but that has not worked as yet – first he has to sit through the drink making him drunk.

  When he had initially got back to the room, the relief was still with him. The lack of anything happening between him and Lark allowed him to call Stella back, and to tell her he loved her without compunction. In truth, he could have come back from Room 2214 having impregnated Lark and it would nevertheless be absolutely the case that he loved Stella, but I love you was still easier to say having not done so. Four hours later, however, he awoke with a heart-stopping start, and, sensing anxiety spread over him like some awful spiritual dandruff, headed for the minibar. Now all he feels is furious and old and mad and drunk and sick and excluded forever from paradise.

  On the side of the computer, in a USB port, is the silver dongle. On the screen is a new Word file, titled Lark: Story of a Songbird. He has written the opening paragraph of the first draft of her autobiography:

  My name is Lark. Actually, Samantha Spigot. I’m a 19-year-old singer. At the time of writing, I’ve done nothing special or interesting in my life so far. By the time this book comes out, though, I’ll be a star. My face will be all over magazines and TV and what cunts who aren’t funny call the interweb. This is nothing to do with my songs. It’s to do with my face, which is beautiful. People will want to see my face and so they ascribe talent to it. Other people will back the desire to see that face with money, which is why you will have seen it everywhere. It will in fact be the reason you will have bought this book. But shame on you. Shame on me. Shame on all of us.

  He wrote this at the height of his drunkenness, a drunkenness which has now fallen – as it does quickly with Harvey: the window in which he is actually drunk, as in whirling and uninhibited, is very small – into a scratchy, dizzy nausea. Surprisingly, he has rewritten it a couple of times, making a few judicious edits. He has attached it to an email, cc’d to Alan, Michaela and Josh, entitled Lark: Autobiography Intro … and then, in the body of the text, written ‘hi guys. this is kind of the way I’m thinking of going with this. all comments appreciated. H’ His thumb dallies over the track pad, ready to click send.

  He can’t see any reason not to click, even though he is sober enough now to remember that he does, actually, need this job – he needs the money, and, more than that, he needs the work: he needs something to employ and distract his mind away from bad rumination. But he does not want to write Lark’s autobiography. It is not just bitterness: even in the face of all this belittlement, some tiny shred of self-esteem clings to his ego like a determined embryo to the walls of a threatened womb. He is Eli Gold’s son, and should not be writing the life story of someone who has not yet had a life.

  His thumb hovers again. The child’s cry, it’s not fair, sounds again like a bell deep in his being. But because Harvey, despite everything, is a good man – or at least, trying to be good – or at least, someone who has picked up enough from people around him to know what goodness is and feel that he should aspire to it – because of this, he is alive to other unfairnesses, even ones which might not be targeted at him: even ones which might be emanating from him. So, before clicking on send, he thinks, ‘OK. Just one. I’ll listen to one …’ and he opens the MP3 files on the dongle, which is entitled, simply, Songs.

  He highlights the first file, called Astray.mp3, and double-clicks. Some acoustic guitars, and then some words: the usual st
ring of pop words, love words – heart, hand, hope, sun, rain, you, me. They don’t really matter, the words. Even through the travel speakers, it is clear: the song is beautiful. Lark’s voice is beautiful. The flat nothing of her sat-nav tone is transformed, through the alchemy of music, into a glorious breath instrument. This music will be beautiful, he realizes, long after Lark is not. And then another revelation comes to him: Lark has Asperger’s. Or something like it – she is, in the modern idiom, on the spectrum. That explains the voice, the blankness, the complete failure to understand how the invitation to her room may have been misinterpreted, and why something about her manner has always seemed familiar to him. She is like his son. She is like Jamie.

  Except in one respect, made clear by this song. She has a talent. She has an extraordinary talent, which Harvey cannot but feel is provoked in some way by whatever her place is on the spectrum. His finger goes back to the track pad on his computer. He highlights the paragraph entitled Lark: Story of a Songbird, and clicks delete. It goes, revealing only the white of the unwritten-on page, and he bursts, suddenly, into tears: not small dignified sobs, nor the pleasurable trickle-down-the-cheek inspired by sad films or sad songs – so much liquid pours from his eyes and nose he thinks he might dehydrate. It runs in rivulets along the corrugated lines his face makes as it contorts in a series of huge silent howls. He does not know what is making him cry, whether it is the music, or the blank white page, or his exile from the young female body, or his dying father, or his poor, unexceptional boy. The song shifts from its sweet verse to its even lovelier chorus, a deeply touching, tender melody, and even though he is still crying, he feels every follicle on his flesh goose-pimpling. He looks down to see that even the greying hair around his pubis is standing on end.