The Death of Eli Gold

by David Baddiel

  – I know he’s in a coma.

  – So why are you doing it?

  He looks at her. A flash of anger goes through him. He imagines taking out his Armscor 206 .38, and shooting her there and then in her expectant, unknowing, irrelevant face.

  – Because …

  He hesitates, not because he has to search for a lie, but because the real answer to that question is not clear. When he got up this morning, after he had prayed, and after going through The Material again, he had felt at a loss. In moments, he feels a great pressure inside, a voice telling him just to get on with it, to do it now, what was the point of waiting? That was what he had felt in front of the Butter Mountain. But the pressure does not build up, it comes and goes, dispersing like steam. He needs something else. Give me a sign, he had said, to the Jesus on his wall. Not that my mission is just, he had thought, I know that: but when to begin it. Show me the day of my destiny.

  No sign emerging, he had come here, and, on the way, because it was in a sale, he had bought a digital camera. The shop was called B & H, an enormous camera store on 34th and 9th, and he had been drawn in because everyone serving there was a religious Jew. It was astonishing, he thought: a temple of modernity, all the most state-ofthe-art devices lined up like icons on the shelves, and yet the men tending to them were all dressed like Talmudic scholars from the seventeenth century. They were dressed, in fact, like he would be dressed, if he were not here but back in Utah. One of them – Hyam Lederhandler it said on his name badge – showed him this camera, a Casio, and offered to do a deal on it.

  He doesn’t have very much money – before leaving home he had withdrawn all his savings, and had only this morning been worried about the possibility of them running out before the day of his destiny – but Hyam kept on pushing him, and offering different ways in which he could organize the payments, and eventually he had said yes. He had felt in himself a desire to please Hyam. He knew from Father McIntyre’s sermons that Mormonism and Judaism had much in common: that the reason that Salt Lake Assembly Hall was adorned with a Star of David was because the two religions were brother and sister, and that, as a Latter-day Saint, he was a direct descendant of the House of Israel, a member himself of the tribe of Ephraim.

  It was easy to operate. Hyam had put a battery in free of charge, so he could use it immediately. It would do moving pictures as well. He was pleased with his purchase. It was only now, now that the woman had asked him, that he realized he didn’t really know why he was taking photographs of Mount Sinai Hospital.

  – I want to have a record of these – of his last days.

  She thinks about this for a moment, and then, with a blink and a nod, accepts it, as within the canon of what a fan might do.

  – A record is important.

  – Yes.

  – Are you OK, she says?

  – What?

  – Your hand. It has cuts on it.

  – I’m fine.

  She starts looking through her bag. His eye on her feels benign. He does not know why this should be, but then recognizes that thedress she has on, of red and white plaid, is very similar to one his sister used to wear. A sign? His thought is broken as she fishes a black file out of her bag, on the front of which she has stuck the photograph of The Great Satan when he was young that has been in a lot of the newspapers since he went into the hospital. He wears a suit: natty, his mother would have described it. It is a big file, but not big enough to contain all the stuff within it. Two bits of paper immediately fall out.

  – Oh! she says. He picks them up, because they have fallen closer to his feet, and it would have been rude and weird to let her do it. He looks at them. One is a review of one of Eli’s books, cut out from a newspaper; and another is just a piece of paper with some handwriting on it. He hands them back to her.

  – That’s the New York Times review of Tolon’s biography.

  He nods, not knowing what she is talking about.

  – If you look, you can see all the places where I’ve agreed I’ve underlined in green, and where I disagreed in red.

  She is holding up the cutting as she speaks. It is a mess of lines, more red than green. He scans it quickly, though, for the information it contains.

  – And …? He gestures towards the handwritten paper.

  – Well, after I did that I wrote my own review and then stuck it with a paperclip to the New York Times cutting, like an addendum.

  – Right.

  She opens the file. It is full of other cuttings, papers, photocopies, photographs and cards: also many more handwritten notes.

  – This is my record. Of his whole life. And also mine, I guess. My life as it has been defined by the work of Eli Gold.

  – Right.

  She is staring at him very intently. He finds it difficult to handle, so he turns and starts taking photographs again, this time of the canopied entrance area, just to put his eye out of her line of vision.

  – It’s so great to meet another properly committed fan, he hears her say.

  – Yeah.

  – I’ve met so many people who say they love his work, and then they just don’t. Not like I do. Not like … And now he hears the shy insinuation in her voice … we do.

  He moves the camera up to the top of the hospital again. Seen through the lens of the Casio, his hand making the image move and shake, what he is seeing takes on the quality of a film. If it was a film, he, as the director, would make Eli – ah: he has let the name into his head: that is her fault, for saying it over and over again in that breathy, hushed tone – The Great Satan, rise from his bed, and appear at the window. Then he would know exactly what room he is in. He thinks, when the time comes, he will be able to find it anyway. He will be led there by God. But he would like to know now, to be sure. He would like The Great Satan to appear in his sights, and then click. Click.

  – Tolon’s biography, he says, still looking into the camera. – Yes …? – It was published in 2003. He has gleaned this from looking at her cutting.

  – Yes.

  – Just remind me … did it say anything about … his marriage to Pauline Gray?

  She does not respond. He takes his face out of the camera. When he looks at her, her face looks childish, confused.

  – Of course, it has a section about it. Why do you ask?

  He can hear an urgency in her voice, like someone whose button has been pushed, ready to defend, ready to fight their corner.

  – No reason.

  She sniffs. He can tell he has made her suspicious, but her urge to demonstrate knowledge of her subject is too great.

  – Yes, well, he’s more fair-minded about it then some, at least. Kerensky is the worst. Worse even than some of the things you can find on the internet. Kerensky should be put in prison, I think, for some of the things he says. You read that biography without knowing all the facts and you would think …

  She halts. He finds he can’t resist it.

  – That he murdered her?

  She is looking very upset now: he thinks she might cry. The thing that drives him, that informs his being, cannot, for her, be voiced. He has said it as blankly as he can, but he knows that in his tone there was an edge. He needs to control himself.

  – Terrible, he says. I hate Kerensky.

  For a second, he thinks she is going to throw her long arms around him.

  Chapter 10

  He had thought there might be one. Maybe when he was a kid. A baby. Or maybe of his and Stella’s wedding: he had sent him one (he had invited him, but received no reply). There could be one photograph of him, somewhere in his father’s apartment.

  Perhaps in Eli’s study, a space could have been found in between the photographs of Eli. Eli with Arthur Miller. Eli with James Coburn. Eli with W. G. Sebald. Eli with Gloria Steinem. Eli in a group with Joe Namath, Walter Kronkite, Warren Beatty and Bill Clinton. Eli on a beach with Eric Idle. Eli with Jack Kerouac. Eli with Bob Dylan. Eli with – fuck me – with Picasso. When did Picasso even come t
o America? Or is that Paris? Eli with Dick Cavett. Eli sharing a laugh with John Updike. Eli dancing with Madonna. Eli, smoking, with Kingsley Amis. Eli with ELVIS! Shaking hands! Eli with some people who Harvey doesn’t know but they look very important and clever: academics? Eli with Jackie Onassis. And Eli on his own, over and over again, young, moodily backlit in black and white, or smiling, throwing his head back, in colour so rich it looks like a still from a Super 8 film, or white-haired and kindly faced, in a sepia-treated circle of light, or wackily positioning his glasses in a 1970s shot which Harvey remembers having seen before in an old copy of Vanity Fair, subtitled ‘The Seer’.

  Or perhaps in the lounge. And if not of Harvey, surely: one of Jamie. For fuck’s sake. His grandchild. On this ornate Edwardian mantelpiece, there might be room for one, one photograph of Jamie – doing that heartbreaking thing he does of smiling but not at the camera – amongst the endless frames of Freda and Colette and Eli, and Freda and Colette and Eli together, and Eli with what looked to him like Freda’s mum and dad; or on this minimalist coffee table, cheekily mismatched against the generally antique aesthetic, with the picture on it of Colette and Eli and Freda with Nelson Mandela; or maybe on this beautiful fucking nineteenth-century fucking – I don’t know – armoire or something, next to this one in the fucking frame of the fucking fucking cat.

  ‘Are you looking for something?’ says Elaine, standing in the doorway to the lounge.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Not really.’

  ‘Just admiring the furniture?’

  He nods and smiles awkwardly, like people do when other people say things like that.

  ‘It is beautiful. They have a lot of very lovely pieces.’

  ‘Pieces. Yes.’

  ‘That’s Freda, mainly. Mrs Gold. Before they met, Eli – well – as long as he had a chair and a desk, he didn’t care.’

  Harvey nodded, repositioning his awkward smile around his face. The number of people, he thought, happy to tell me what my father is like.

  ‘And his books, of course,’ she says, gesturing towards the shelves, which are packed. Elaine walks over to them. ‘This is just a fraction of them.’

  ‘At least they’re not arranged alphabetically.’

  ‘No, Freda wanted to do that, but Eli wouldn’t let her.’

  She makes a knowing face – knowing, that is, about the dynamics of her employers’ marriage – and Harvey does his best to smile in appreciation. Some of the books sit in towers on the front of the shelves. These seem to be mainly Eli’s works, suggesting, perhaps, that those were the ones he most frequently took off the shelves. From the top of one of these, Harvey picks out Chess, Eli’s slim essay on the game, and idly flicks through it, wondering if there might be some tips here on how to beat Deep Green.

  ‘So,’ Elaine continued, ‘are you OK with everything? Your room OK?’

  ‘Yeah. Yes.’

  A great chess player, like a great novelist, requires a very particular, almost contradictory, combination of ruthlessness and empathy. Because you need to be able to imagine what another might do in any given circumstance; and you also need, when the moment shows itself, to be able to kill off that other: quickly, decisively, guiltlessly.

  ‘That room is a little small, but Mrs Gold thought … uh … that you would like it.’

  He shuts the book. Did she think that? Or did she tell you not to put me in the bigger and more salubrious spare room, the one I saw in passing at the other end of the hallway, in case – I dunno – Jesus Christ shows up needing somewhere to doss for the night?

  ‘It’s fine, yes … although it’s been a while since I slept in a single bed …’

  Elaine looks at him sharply: whether because he is breaking some kind of etiquette by registering a complaint, however mildly, or because it’s not been a while for her, he cannot tell.

  ‘Well, if you’re not comfortable …’

  Harvey, who is never comfortable, says: ‘It’s fine.’

  Elaine nods. She moves into the room, towards the deep cream sofa which stands in its centre, and, with some kind of robot-lady instinct, plumps the cushions scattered around it, of which there are too many, and which match the fine Persian rug underneath the sofa, and the velvet curtains behind it, too tastefully. Harvey takes out his iPhone, looking for a wi-fi signal. There isn’t one. This is bad news. It means that when he wants to masturbate, which he will want to do to streaming internet pornography, he will have to do it in his father’s study. He looks out of the wide window. A barge of some sort, loaded with timber, is chugging methodically down the Hudson, every few seconds belching out a small, indolent puff of smoke. Harvey wonders if Freda somehow hired these barges, to convince Eli that his vision of New York was still intact.

  Elaine stands up again. Her hands are pinioned behind her back, elbows crooked, the shape that pregnant women sometimes make to balance the weight of their stomach. Harvey puts his iPhone back in his pocket. Into the room comes the cat, looking much fatter than it does in the photograph. Harvey makes some chucking noises and reaches to stroke it: it runs back out.

  ‘Don’t worry, he’s like that with everyone except Colette. Would you like some tea? Coffee?’

  ‘No, it’s OK. I mean, yes, I would but I can do that. Y’know. Probably best for me to find my own way about the kitchen.’

  ‘You sure? They have a Rayburn. Do you know how to work that?’

  They have a Rayburn? In their Manhattan apartment? Really? ‘Um … yeah. Maybe. I don’t know how much cooking I’m gonna be doing anyway. Probably just get takeouts.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. Of course.’

  Harvey coughs: not his anxiety retch, just one of those self-conscious coughs that people do to fill the air. He sits down on the sofa. He tries to sit back on it, but there are too many cushions. The Filipino maid comes in to dust, taking great care over the pieces. Her face is as sombre as a Nigerian hawking DVDs on a Costa del Sol beach.

  ‘If you can check on the mailbox from time to time,’ says Elaine. ‘I can do it when I visit but I seem to always be carrying things when I come to this house.’

  ‘Right. Sure …’

  ‘It’s downstairs in the lobby. A box with twenty-three on it, same number as the apartment, of course. Just bring it up here and leave it on the kitchen table. If I see anything that looks important, one of us can take it down to Freda at the hospital.’

  He nods, only half listening, as he does when people start going into domestic details. The Filipino maid goes out.

  ‘So …’ he says, ‘where’s Colette?’

  ‘She’s at the hospital.’

  ‘Right.’ He looks up at Elaine. This, he knows, is the worst angle to look at an older face: if worst is understood to mean the angle that will make the face look oldest. From below, the up-ness of the eyes accentuates the down-ness of the skin. He wonders, of course, how attractive Elaine might have been, twenty or thirty years ago: if you can see through the skin to the face, the ur-face. His calculations are that she might have been pretty. But what can you do with that? You can’t even say it. At a party given by his publishers, once, he had met Joan Bakewell. He had seen clips, on YouTube, of Joan Bakewell on Late Night Line-Up in the 1960s. There were not enough clips of her on YouTube for him to track her life, so she had never joined Linda Ronstadt in the obsessive search for peak beauty, but there were enough for him to know that she was gorgeous. On meeting her, this was what he wanted to say: Joan. You were so beautiful. But the use of the past tense would mean that this, meant as a compliment, would be taken as insult. Grammar would make it into an insult. It was an insult, to say of beauty, that it was. But how, then, could you ever mark its passing? Was it something you were only allowed to say after death, as an epitaph? She was so beautiful.

  ‘She’ll be back later,’ she said. ‘I will bring her back, for bedtime. I’ll put her to bed.’

  ‘OK …’

  ‘And then tomorrow, I’ll come and pick her up about nine …’

  �
�Nine? What time does she wake up?’

  ‘About seven.’

  ‘And breakfast … what about …’

  ‘She’s fine to get her own breakfast. She has a menu. You can see it in the kitchen, it’s really cute. She writes it herself. Tomorrow is uh …’ She screwed up her face. Harvey sees how, when she was young, this expression would have been cute. The lines under her eyes scrunch and fill. He thinks about the urge he gets, while looking at Stella, to pinch the skin under her eyes where the lines congregate, and cut it off with some scissors. In his fantasy this leads to neither blood nor pain. The two flaps of skin created just meld.

  ‘… I think it’s oatmeal. With cinnamon and brown sugar. She loves that.’

  ‘Yes. Well. Good. My son has a kind of menu thing, too …’ This is sort of true. He doesn’t explain that the menu consists entirely of cereals from those mini cereal selection boxes, Coco Pops on Monday, then Corn Flakes on Tuesday, then Rice Krispies on Wednesday, then Corn Flakes again on Thursday, then Weetabix on Friday, and that he has to have all the boxes lined up every day in the right order, otherwise he will refuse to eat at all.

  ‘Oh! You have children?’

  ‘Yes … just the one. Jamie. He’s nine …’

  ‘Oh. It must be really difficult, being away from him for so long.’

  ‘Yes. It is.’ It is. He really misses Jamie. He is struck with love for him, four or five times a day. Jamie remains the nearest thing Harvey has yet found to an antidote (to depression, to despair, to disgust, to whatever else it is that squats in his cells). It is love, of course, that is the cure, but love not weighed down and complicated by sex.

  Elaine looks at him more softly now, almost as if she sees him with his son on his lap. She sits down next to him, smoothing her plaid skirt. Harvey imagines – or, rather, cannot stop himself from imagining – what her buttocks must look like under the skirt.

  ‘You’ll be OK with Colette. She’s a very sweet girl, really. Very clever, of course. For her age. As you would expect. And sometimes that cleverness can seem a little … precocious. And, hey, as Mrs Gold says, she’s a girl who knows her own mind. But, as I say, underneath she’s a sweetie. It’ll be nice for you to get to know her.’