The Death of Eli Gold

by David Baddiel

  Part Two

  Chapter 9

  It is a mountain of butter. It really is, with peaks and ridges and outcrops. Roughly his height, it reminds him of the snow-capped ones that surround Utah Lake. He finds it confusing. He has come here expecting to find another reason to hate The Great Satan. Instead, there is something he likes about it. He gets it. He gets that it is interesting to see something so soft represent something so hard. He gets that it is like an old-style work of art, like an old-style landscape painting, but done in a newfangled way. He gets that it refers to a long American tradition of butter sculpting, because he has seen ones of cows and suchlike at farm fairs around American Fork: in Provo, a few years back, he even saw one that the local people had made of the Last Supper. And he likes the creamy, curdy, breakfast smell, rising into his nostrils in the cold, processed air of this semi-refrigerated room.

  He is on his own in the room, just him and the Butter Mountain and the words ‘Butter Mountain: Eli Gold, butter, 1991’. He feels fury rising within him at liking it – more fury then if he hadn’t, more fury then if he had just seen it and thought what a fucking waste of space. He is tired of confusion: tired of complexity, of feeling – what did they call it? – confl icted. He has not expected to feel like this. Confliction – he does not know if that is a word – has no place in his destiny.

  On the side of the wall is a glass case, which contains a thermostat. He hits the case hard with his bare fist – it shatters easily and noiselessly – and turns up the temperature as high as it will go. He expects alarms to go off but they do not. He walks out of the Kneibler Project Space Gallery in SoHo, sucking the blood from his knuckles.

  * * *

  Checking out of the Sangster Hotel, Harvey Gold feels bad. The man on reception, the same autumnal-suited one who checked him in, hasn’t helped. He’s making him sweat, something Harvey does a lot anyway these days. Sweat used to build up in him over time, and was a response to being too hot, or, less often, because he did it less often, exertion. Now it comes on in a clammy rush, with a prickle in the armpits, on a variety of dread triggers, some of which he knows – a call from Freda, Jamie starting a tantrum, Stella walking under strip lighting – but others of which are more obscure. This one is clear enough. The man is taking a long time over the checkout, scrutinizing the bill, frowning over the AmEx number, and, now, telephoning the bank. The grey plastic receiver is wedged between his chin and his ear, and he is fixing Harvey with eyes that somehow manage to be both dead and searching. Harvey stands by, his suitcase lying uncomfortably against his leg, feeling his pores ooze.

  The problem is that Harvey has gone for it. He’s put his bill on Eli’s card, while remaining entirely uncertain if he’s allowed to. When, yesterday at the hospital, Freda suggested he move from the hotel, he had wanted to ask about who would be picking up his bill – the thought of which brought on an armpit prickle all by itself – but the conversation moved so quickly into such complicated waters that he never got a clear run at the question.

  When he arrived, Freda had been in the corridor, deep in conversation with an older woman. Harvey had noticed this woman last time he came to Eli’s room at Mount Sinai: she had the big glasses and the woolly-hat hair of the eternal hospital receptionist, so that was what he had assumed she was. Freda, unaware of Harvey’s approach, was saying:

  ‘… you really can’t? Not even if we up your wages to cover the sleepover time?’

  The older woman shook her head. Harvey stood a few feet away, unsure of whether to interrupt. John looked at him, impassive as ever.

  Harvey made a stab at a friendly, ‘Hi’ face, which gained, from John, continued impassivity.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Gold. But my mother is …’

  ‘Your mother, of course …’

  Harvey was startled by this information, that the older woman had a mother who was still alive. So, he sensed, was Freda, even though she must have known it. He sensed that Freda was perpetually startled by it.

  ‘… not well herself, and I really don’t think I can just spend so much time away from her, at the moment.’ She stopped, and took her big glasses off, and cleaned them thoughtfully with the satin material of her blouse.

  ‘Oh God. You do realize the stress I’m under at the moment, Elaine?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Not just Eli, but trying to keep on top it all – Colette, the media, the publishers, and now I hear that the Butter Mountain has started to melt …’

  ‘Melt?’

  ‘Yes! Kneibler just called me.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Some problem with the temperature control.’

  ‘Can they put it back together?’

  ‘Elaine. It’s a mountain. Made of butter.’

  Elaine made a sympathetic face, and put her hand on Freda’s arm.

  ‘Look. Maybe you just need to talk to Colette about the idea of staying here again. I’m sure she can be talked round.’

  Freda’s head moved from side to side. ‘I don’t know. I think she’s changed.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘I’m sorry, Elaine, I do. Ever since Eli got ill. And especially since he went into the hospital.’

  ‘Changed in what way?’

  ‘She seems more aggressive to me.’

  ‘She does?’

  ‘Does she not to you?’

  The older woman – who Harvey now understood as Elaine – shook her head.

  ‘Is she just being more aggressive to me? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘I think,’ said Elaine, ‘that Colette is a very young girl, who, because of …’ she waved her hand towards Eli’s room, ‘… the circumstances is having to grow up very quickly. And that’s going to have an effect on any eight-year-old-child.’

  On the back of Freda’s head, Harvey saw a tiny tightening at the crown, from which her black-grey curls spiralled.

  ‘She is not any eight-year-old child, Elaine.’

  For some reason, John the security guy chose this point to cough. Freda’s face turned, into a sharp profile. John moved his eyebrows up, and nodded in Harvey’s direction.

  ‘Harvey!’ said Freda. ‘Wow! You are happy to turn up whenever these days, aren’t you?’

  ‘Sorry, I …’

  ‘Hi,’ said Elaine. ‘You’re Colette’s half-brother, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Hi. Nice to meet you.’

  She put out the same hand, with its landscape of veins, bones and freckles, that had waved towards Eli’s room a moment earlier. Harvey took it in his.

  ‘I’m Elaine. I’m Colette’s nanny.’

  ‘Oh! Of course. Sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing … what – what’s the problem?’

  Elaine looked to Freda for some sort of permission. Freda shrugged, sullenly. Elaine returned her gaze to Harvey.

  ‘Mrs Gold has decided to stay here at the hospital at night from now on. She was trying to convince Colette to stay here overnight too, but … she doesn’t want to. So she was asking me if I would move in to their place but …’

  Harvey looked at Freda. ‘You’re staying here? Sleeping here?’

  ‘Yes.’ said Freda.

  ‘Since when? I mean, from when? When’s that gonna start?’

  ‘As soon as we sort out the situation with Colette.’

  Harvey found that he was rubbing his face with his hands. Why? Why am I doing that?

  ‘So that means …?’

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything, Harvey. Eli has a lung infection. The doctors are working on it. I just – I wanted to take the precaution. Of being around, twenty-four seven.’

  Harvey looked at the floor. It was weirdly black, he noticed for the first time. What is that? Lino? Do they have lino any more? Did they ever have it America? What is lino? He felt, inside him, a speech germinating. A speech that began: ‘I’m his son. OK? I’m his son. I would like to be told, if he’s about to actually …’ but he never got to finish it, not even in his head, because El
aine said:

  ‘Hey! Excuse me if I’m speaking out of turn, but … maybe … Harvey – would you be able to move into the apartment?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Eli and Freda’s? Because you’re staying at the Sangster, right?’

  She pronounced her s’s with a hint of a following h, like older people sometimes do: shtaying. Shangster. Something to do with the teeth, the way that after a while they begin to sit haphazardly in the mouth.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, that’ll be costing a fortune. And you are family. It’s …’ She stopped here, realizing she might be about to cross a boundary. The sentence continued in the air: … crazy that you’re not shtaying at your father’s apartment.

  Freda was frowning hard at Elaine. Harvey looked at her, expecting her to be so angry that she might catch fire. But then his stepmother’s face cleared; she smiled, and turned to Harvey.

  ‘You know, Elaine, that’s a good idea. A very good idea. Can we sort that? How quickly could you move in?’

  ‘Really? You want me to stay at yours?’

  ‘Yes! Why not? I don’t know why we didn’t think of it earlier! I’ve been worried anyway about leaving the place empty for such long periods of time.’

  ‘But Colette … will she be all right with …?’ Harvey didn’t quite know how to frame what the issue was here, so he just said: ‘… me?’ He remembers how her eyes had been so full of fury when she screamed that thing about Eli hearing everything still despite his coma, that time he was trying to tell Roth how much of a fan he was. It was almost like she was screaming it at him. But maybe it had just been a weird kid’s tantrum, and he just happened to have been in the firing line.

  ‘Oh, she’ll be fine. She’ll still be here most of the time. It’s just at night. She doesn’t want to sleep here at night.’ On the word here, Freda waved her hand in the air, to indicate, simultaneously, the hospital and it’s just a child’s silly nightmares.

  ‘And when Colette has decided something, she has decided something,’ said Elaine.

  ‘Yes,’ said Freda. ‘Exactly like her father.’

  She beamed at him. Freda had managed, in this small time, to convert Colette’s resistance to her wishes into something positive, by rewriting it as a dramatization of her daughter’s genetic inheritance; as a realization of her inherent, inescapable Eli-ness. Harvey wondered if she could ever recognize such Eli-ness in him; whether she even remembered, when telling him what Eli was like and how alive such traits were in Colette, that he was her husband’s progeny, too.

  Elaine excused herself, tactfully – having put this particular cat amongst these particular pigeons, Harvey sensed in her the grace to let him and Freda discuss it in private. He didn’t, however, immediately know what to say to this request – which, he noted, had not been phrased as such. He knew – or certainly had come to understand since being in New York – that the reason he had never been invited to Freda and Eli’s apartment was because to set foot in it would have been to encroach onto a sacred space, a space from which he was more barred as a result of his family closeness, disturbing as it did Freda’s preference to airbrush Eli’s previous families out of history – but that now, the site of that sacristy had shifted to the hospital. Thus her sudden acceptance – positive endorsement, in fact – of Elaine’s idea, because it allowed her to do the thing that Harvey has realized she always needs to do, which is to consolidate her position at the top of the nearness-to-Eli hierarchy. Harvey moving into the apartment does that, relegating him to a Colette consort, an on-call driver for Eli’s daughter should his father start to breathe his last. It occurred to him, therefore, that the best way to challenge this hierarchy – he heard Stella’s voice in his head encouraging him to do exactly this – would be politely to refuse the move, and ask for a room at the hospital himself. But he didn’t. He couldn’t be fucked. Freda has so much more energy for all this than he does. Plus he won’t have to tip some flunky every time he fucking moves. Plus he won’t have to fear bumping into Lark or her mother in the lift. Plus it’ll be more comfortable.

  ‘Um … OK.’

  Freda smiled, a really big one, her top lip going up above her teeth to reveal a layer of gum as pink as bubblegum. She looked genuinely grateful, and Harvey felt suddenly sorry for his stepmother; he felt how hard all this was for her, how long it had been since something good had happened to her. She put one of her hands on Harvey’s chest, fingers outspread, and raised the index finger of her other one. ‘You have to promise me one thing though.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You have to keep your cellphone on at all times. Because …’ She looked through the porthole to her right; Eli’s oxygen-propelled chest was just visible, rising and falling above his bed sheets, ‘… I may need you to bring Colette down here. At any time, day or night.’

  Her eyes came back to Harvey. They were fierce with gravitas. Her finger was still in front of his face, an antenna twitching with seriousness.

  ‘And Elaine – I mean, she’s amazing, Elaine, a fabulous child-minder, but she’s, you know – old. She doesn’t always hear her cell. She doesn’t always remember to charge it up. She basically doesn’t quite get cellphones.’

  Harvey nodded. His mother had been the same: Why would I want people to be able to contact me wherever I am all hours of the day, Joan had said when he, concerned about how regularly she was getting lost out on her daily walk, had bought her a mobile. ‘Because if Eli – well, you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You need to be ready for that call, Harvey. OK?’

  Harvey, feeling a need to respond with more than just a nod, wanting to move past whatever block he always felt with his father’s wife, reached out for her with his hand. Her hand, however, was still raised in front of his face, index finger-first; which caused him to grasp her finger, and tighten his fist round it: which both looked and felt weird, and not a little inappropriate. She looked at the hot-dog shape their hands made together, then at Harvey. He relaxed his grip. She pulled her finger out.

  So that is why, sweatily, Harvey is leaving the Sangster Hotel. Beautiful women pass by in the lobby, as they do everywhere expensive. His eye is drawn to them, but also to a black – African-American? Is that right? Harvey knows it is but finds it an uncomfortable phrase, because of the implication that black Americans are not totally American – woman behind reception who he has not seen before. His guy is still on the phone, so he turns to her.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi!’ she says, startling him with her upbeatness, although he should be used to it now. He’s been in America for a while.

  ‘I’m just checking out …’

  ‘OK, sir. I do hope you enjoyed your stay.’

  He feels his honesty imperative tingle: Well, just a couple of nights ago I was up at four o’clock in the morning drunk and weeping and hitting myself in the genitals … but he swallows it.

  ‘Yes, thank you very much.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘I was wondering: could you make sure this gets to the woman in room 2214?’

  He hands over an envelope, on which he has written Lark. Inside is the silver dongle, and a note which says, ‘Lark: Your songs are beautiful. But I’m not going to be writing your autobiography. Sorry. Best of luck, Harvey.’ He had wondered about saying, after ‘your songs are beautiful’, ‘as are you’. He had wondered about one or two kisses after his name.

  ‘OK, sir. I know the ladies in room 2214, so that’ll be fine.’

  He feels a small ball of anxiety burst in him, like a bath bomb. ‘Yeah. The younger woman …’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir?’

  ‘Well, as you say, there are two women in that suite. That package is for the younger woman not the …’ He hesitates: the phrase older one weighs heavy in his mouth: is it unacceptable? What’s the equivalent of African-American here? ‘… It’s a mother and a daughter. Can you make sure the daughter gets it?’

  ‘We’ll do our
best, sir,’ she says, ‘… although sometimes I see those two about the hotel and they look just like sisters to me!’

  She laughs, and he does his best to laugh along with her. ‘No. Yeah. OK. Thanks. Bye …’ says the man on the phone to the bank. He puts the receiver down.

  ‘No, that’s fine, Mr Gold,’ says the man. ‘We can charge everything to that AmEx card.’

  ‘We can?’

  ‘Yes, sir. That’s what the bank is telling me.’

  ‘Extras, too?’

  The man looks up and smiles. Harvey cannot read his face but thinks it might be in reaction to his silly, instant hopefulness. He hopes it’s nothing to do with any particular item on his Extras bill.

  ‘Yes, sir. I suspect you could have upgraded yourself to a much superior room if you’d wanted to. Perhaps on the twenty-second floor … the view from there is remarkable. Still: next time perhaps?’

  * * *

  – What are you doing?

  He looks round. At first, he does not recognize the woman who is speaking, but then realizes that it is the one with the woollen tricoloured hat, only she is not wearing it. It must be a defining item for her, because she looks like a different person without it. Her hair, the colour of straw, is in pigtails, which does not have the effect of making her look young.

  – I’m taking photographs.

  – Of the hospital?

  – Yes.

  He continues with what he thinks of as his work. He points the camera up, towards the top of the building. She frowns: he is aware of it in the corner of his eye. It distracts his concentration.

  – You’re trying to get … shots of Eli?

  He doesn’t answer. The sun, breaking free of weak clouds, moves around a triangulated section of the roof. Its light burns into his lens. He shuts his good eye, leaving the stuck one to perceive the brightness.

  – But he’s in a coma. He won’t come to the window.

  She has corralled his work into her world. His actions must be an act of fandom, and thus a challenge, to her own. Her words mean: I have of course already considered trying to photograph Eli from here, but because of my greater knowledge of his condition I knew that it would be pointless.