He sits in the restaurant waiting for his brunch. He would rather the restaurant was a diner, and he would rather brunch was just called breakfast, but the nearest diner that might serve a real American breakfast is six or seven blocks away, and when he is on one of his hospital days he doesn’t like to go too far from Mount Sinai. The restaurant is called Hanratty’s.
The brunch menu has some stuff on it he doesn’t much like the sound of, but it does have steak and eggs, which he doesn’t eat that often but his mom used to make it at home sometimes when they could afford it, and she said it was the best way to start the day, the thing that would keep you going whatever happened, and so he orders it, even though he is not planning on doing much more than watching today. He remembers that Janey used to talk about focus a lot, about how that was what you needed to achieve your goals. Her goals, in the end, were to leave Salt Lake City and join the Community, but that was OK, now. He had been angry with her at the time, but now he realizes that it is all part of his destiny, and that if Janey hadn’t left that maybe he wouldn’t be here, and even if he doesn’t like being here that doesn’t matter. You don’t get to like your destiny.
So he thinks that, even though she is not here and he hasn’t heard from her in three years, he should listen to his daughter. He is listening to Janey. He is focusing. However long it takes, he will find his focus by continuing to look at The Material. Hanratty’s has broadband for its customers, so he has brought the Dell with him. This means that he can keep working while he is in the restaurant. It also means that he does not have to sit in the restaurant on his own doing nothing waiting for his food. He is a loner, yes, but he doesn’t want people thinking he is a loser.
He is hungry and the smells from the kitchen are making him hungrier, but he needs to focus, so while he waits for his food to arrive he works. He Googles ‘Eli Gold trainscript Commisioner Webb 1993 Pauline Gray suicide genuine?’. Google comes back with Did you mean ‘Eli Gold’ transcript Commissioner Webb 1993 Pauline Gray suicide genuine? He clicks on it. The key word in his selection – genuine – goes nowhere, never appears in the context he wants, which is: is the transcript on Unsolved real? He has always assumed so, but recently, certainly since he has been in New York, he has begun to question it, almost as if the city, with all its willed confusion, has crept into his understanding of things. Would The Great Satan not have brought a lawyer with him (an issue he raises in the text, but seems not to follow up on)? Would the interview have been recorded at all? Wouldn’t there have been another policeman in the room? Would they not have been too worried about The Great Satan’s status to subject him to this?
But there is no discussion anywhere else on the web of the transcript’s authenticity. It’s all just taken as read, evidence from which a thousand bloggers can link to other pages, along with whatever other conspiracy shit they’re into. Eventually, he clicks on Unsolved again, and then on the thumbnail of The Great Satan and his sister, to get to www.unsolved.goldwebbtrans.html, and reads it again:
EG: I have no obligation to answer this. If I had known the tone of these questions in advance, I would not have agreed to be brought down here. Certainly not without legal representation.
[pause]
EG: I apologize, Mr Gold, for my tone. I’m a police officer, not a great writer, and perhaps not such a judge of my own words.
EG: Yes, well –
RW: I have here a copy of your own note. Showing Mr Gold case document R45/103.
[pause]
EG: What about it?
RW: Sorry, I was just thinking about the fact that it’s a copy.
EG: So?
RW: Well, we have your wife’s suicide note. But I understand you didn’t want us to have yours.
EG: I didn’t want you to have my wife’s! It was taken from my – from our – apartment while I was still in hospital. The only reason you don’t have mine is that Larry picked it up.
RW: Yes. Record to show: Larry that is – correct me if I’m wrong – Larry Barnett, your literary agent.
EG: Yes.
RW: Who found yourself and Mrs Gold.
EG: I believe so, yes. Obviously, I was unconscious.
RW: He has a key to your apartment, does he? Larry.
EG: Not always. But I had lent him one, recently. During the last days of our marriage, when we were trying to work things out, we spent a lot of time in our lodge in New England.
RW: And on the occasion of the … on the evening in question, 3 June 1993 … Larry Barnett was … coming round to see the two of you? That had been arranged?
[pause]
EG: Commissioner Webb. I have won the Pulitzer Prize. I have won the National Book Award twice. I have been offered the Nobel.
RW: Wow. I knew your work was admired but, no, I didn’t know all that.
EG: So: do you think I’m an idiot?
RW: No, sir.
EG: Well, what sort of idiot would invite a close friend round to their house on the night that he and his wife were planning to commit suicide?
RW: Someone who wanted to be found?
EG: Found …?
RW: After death. No one wants to rot there for days.
[unheard]
RW: Or possibly someone who wanted to be stopped. Suicide is often a cry for help.
EG: Not in our case, Commissioner.
RW: No. Of course not. Anyway, this note – why did Larry Barnett insist on keeping the original?
[pause]
RW: Does he think it may be valuable? It’s an original piece of writing, after all. By a Pulitzer Prize-winner.
EG: How long is this going to continue, Commissioner? I’m still recuperating and all these questions are making me tired.
RW: Not much longer, sir. Let’s move on from the notes for the moment. We’ll come back to them later. Showing Mr Gold document R45/107.
[pause]
EG: This is an autopsy report?
RW: Yes.
EG: I’d really rather not see this if you don’t mind. rw: I know it’s painful, but I’m keen to … [unheard] … so if you check the following page, it concludes that she died from taking a combination of Demerol and Naproxen. The doctors estimate about thirty pills of the former and twenty of the latter. Plus they found traces of … hold on … Paroxetine Hydrochloride? Is that right? In her bloodstream. But not in yours.
EG: It’s Paxil. An antidepressant.
RW: Right, right.
EG: She was on it. But had come off recently.
RW: She’d come off antidepressants recently?
EG: Yes.
RW: Why would you come off antidepressants if you were suicidal …?
[pause]
EG: I’m really not certain that psycho-pharmacology is all that simple, Commissioner. But you would have to ask an expert.
RW: You were not on antidepressants?
EG: No.
RW: Have you ever been?
[pause]
EG: No.
[pause: sound of writing]
RW: Not even when you became, as your medical records show, chronically depressed? Or during the period leading up to this – suicide attempt?
EG: … No.
[pause]
RW: OK. So let’s discount, for the moment, the Paxil as being involved in the death of Mrs Gold. The doctors also estimate, from your time in hospital, that that’s what you took. Thirty Demerol and twenty Naproxen. Would you say that was correct?
EG: More or less.
RW: More or less? You didn’t count them out? That’s what suicides tend to do.
EG: I took one pill and she took one pill. One at a time, until we’d finished both bottles. We fed them to each other. We looked into each other’s eyes as we did it. It was what we both wanted: a perfect, peaceful symmetry. Are you satisfied now, Commissioner? Now that you’ve broken into our final intimacy?
RW: That is not my intention, sir.
[pause]
RW: You’re what – six-foot one? Two?
EG: Six-foot two.
RW: And what do you weigh, Mr Gold?
EG: What do I weigh?
RW: Yes.
EG: At the moment, about a hundred and eighty pounds.
RW: You lost a little weight following your ordeal.
EG: I believe so.
RW: So you weighed, on 3 June, maybe … a hundred and ninety pounds?
[pause]
EG: I didn’t, on the night that me and my wife planned to exit this universe, spend much time on the scales.
RW: Your wife, on that night, according to this report, weighed a hundred and ten pounds. She was five foot two. Would you say that the amount of Xanax and Vicodin needed to kill a hundred-andten-pound, five-foot-two woman would be the same as that required to kill a six-foot, hundred-and-ninety-pound man?
[pause]
RW: Would you not say, in fact, that, pharmaceutically, the one thing required to make sure that both of you exited this universe as planned, was asymmetry?
He feels a sudden pressing need to urinate. This comes over him these days much quicker than it used to. There is no gradual buildup of pressure any more, just a switch in his bladder that flicks to urgent. He makes a mental note to make sure he doesn’t drink too much water and goes to the bathroom in good time before the day of his destiny. It would not help his focus to be thinking about that.
He makes sure to put the Dell to sleep before he gets up, not wanting any passing nosy waiters to look at his screen. The waiter points him the way downstairs to the rest rooms.
Inside the men’s room there are framed newspapers above the urinals, mainly the New York Post, although there is one old copy of the National Enquirer with a gory front-page photo and headline that says ‘I CUT OUT HER HEART AND STOMPED ON IT’. He does not read the one above his basin at first, as all his energy is concentrated on getting his penis out of his flies quickly. Once past the swoon of relief he can breathe normally again, and notices that the framed paper in front of his face has a picture on it of Hanratty’s, with the words Rudy and Judy’s Hideaway underneath. He peers at it. When he and his sister were children they had a hideaway. It was a small natural clearing, hidden within the overgrown hedge that ran along the side of the back garden of their house near the airport in Salt Lake City. Pauline hung a series of blankets over the branches around it; once you were in there it felt like a tepee. They even tried to light a fire in the hideaway once, with some twigs and a lighter he had found in the graveyard behind the City Temple: their dad caught him and beat him hard for that. They called their hideaway by their names, too, though by their nicknames, not their real ones. Because she had protruding front teeth at the time, he called her Bugs, and she called him Swish, the noise his corduroy pants made when he ran. Swish and Bugs’ Hideaway. They got up to all sorts in there.
His piss takes a long time, long enough to read the first paragraph of the attached article, which he is pleased about, as sometimes now he needs to go really badly and yet when he does out comes nothing but a small dribble.
– Busted, eh? says a voice next to him. He looks over. His relief had been so full, he had not noticed that a man had come and stood by the adjacent urinal. He is pleased that he did not notice this, as close proximity with other men inhibits his bladder in public toilets.
He does not say anything. He looks over at the cubicles. They are a good size, he thinks. There would be room in there.
– I remember that, says the man, unperturbed. Giuliani. What a guy. All that zero-tolerance shit, and then he’s fucking some cunt on the side. And not even that on the side, he brings her here every Sunday for brunch!! Sings her fucking Italian love songs! Over waffles and eggs fucking Benedict!’
He nods. He shakes himself off, carefully – he has issues there, too – grateful to move away. But the man continues, looking over his shoulder at him, even though now he is at the washbasins.
– Still – everyone’s got some shit going on, haven’t they? And there’s always a woman at the heart of it. Isn’t there?
He feels that he should answer – the man’s questions, although rhetorical, seem to demand some gesture of agreement.
– I guess … he says.
– Zero fucking tolerance.
He feels the cold water run over his hands and watches in the mirror as the man turns, doing himself up. The man is balding, and fat enough to struggle with his fly. He sees himself, his sharp, white face, one of those faces that still looks somehow boyish even though it is old, and feels an urge to rush over and tell this man everything about his sister, about The Great Satan, about the long hard road to his destiny: and he wants the man to approve of it, to nod and purse his mouth and shake his head and say too fucking right. He doesn’t know why he so wants this man’s approval, but senses, as with the jihadis, that it is something to do with certainty.
When he gets back to the table, his steak and eggs are waiting, going cold.
* * *
I read one of Daddy’s books today. Well, Mummy read it to me. Then she had to go back to the hospital so she let Elaine carry on until it was time for me to turn my light off. I can read, of course, but Mommy didn’t want me to read it by myself. I think she wanted to read it to me. Also I worked out she wanted to check there were no bits in it that were too grown up for me to hear, about sex and stuff. When she was reading it sometimes she’d stop for a second and then the lines on her forehead would come out like they do when she’s thinking hard about something and then she’d carry on and I reckoned she was maybe missing a bit out.
It’s the first time I’ve been allowed to see any of Daddy’s work. Although I did see the Butter Mountain. That was a thing he did before I was born. Daddy stopped writing for a bit then – Mommy says he had ‘writer’s block’ which is when you’re a writer and you can’t think of anything – so he became an artist, just for a little while. Mommy and Elaine took me to see it because Daddy doesn’t like it any more. It’s in a big gallery downtown. It is actually a mountain made out of butter. It’s not the same size as a real mountain but it is really big, bigger than me, and it looks exactly like a mountain, except made of butter. The gallery has to keep it in a special cold room to stop it melting. I said to Mommy, did Daddy really make this? Didn’t his hands get really greasy? Stupid questions like that, because I was only four. She said no he didn’t make it himself, but it was his idea: and that artists didn’t have to make their own things any more. I didn’t really understand that but I really loved the Butter Mountain. I wanted to tell Daddy how much I loved it when we got back but Mommy said not to, because he hates it now.
Anyway, Mommy said it was time. She said it kind of slowly, with that very serious face she sometimes puts on.
‘Time for what?’ I said.
‘Time that we introduce you to Daddy’s writing. It’s time you got to know why Daddy is such a great man.’
‘Before he dies,’ I said.
She nodded, and breathed in, without saying anything: it looked for a minute like she was holding her breath. She always does this when I say anything about Daddy dying. I don’t know if I’m not meant to talk about it. But in The Heavenly Express for Daddy they tell you that you should talk about it if you want to.
Before she started Mommy explained to me that Daddy didn’t write books for children (like I didn’t know that) but that this book was maybe the nearest thing: ‘It’s something of a latter-day fairy tale,’ she said.
‘Like café latte?’ I said.
‘What?’ she said.
‘A latte day. Is that a day when you only drink café latte?’ This is what she always orders in Starbucks (there’s one downstairs in the hospital): grande, skinny, extra-hot. When I was little I always used to be frightened that extra-hot would be so hot that she’d get burnt when she picked it up or that maybe she’d go ‘Ow!’ and then throw it up in the air and it would all land on my head or something.
She smiled that smile which means that I’ve got something wrong, again. When she does it her front lip goes up quicker than her bottom one, so she looks a bit like a rabbit, about to bite on a juicy lettuce.
‘Latter-day, darling, not latte day …’ she said, kissing me on the cheek. She smelt of wine, though not much, just a little. I liked it. ‘It means … it means today. Mirror, Mirror is like a fairy tale for today. Except it was written over thirty years ago. We’ll just read the first chapter for now, and see how far we get.’
Mirror, Mirror was what the book was called. Daddy wrote it in 1978. It is his seventh novel. Mummy told me that when it came out it didn’t get such good reviews – that’s when people in the newspapers tell you if stuff is good or bad – but that now everyone realizes it is a classic. I put my head onto the pillow and held onto Cuddles. He was cold and I wanted to get him warmed up but Mummy had already started reading.
In this land of ours, which inspires gratitude in some and resentment in others, there was born at the start of the century a boy, whose given name was Herbert Aloysius Morris, but who would come to be known to all his friends as Herb, and to his parents [and here Mummy did that frowny forehead thing] as Herbie.
She carried on, but it was quite hard to understand, not that much like a fairy tale at all. There were no fairies, and no castles, and no witches, and no princes or princesses. I thought that Herbie was supposed to be the hero, but he was just a boy with really bad asthma like that kid Patrice at my school has got. It made me wonder how long I was going to be away from school. Mom took me out when Daddy went into hospital. Elaine does some more home teaching now: a ‘top-up’ Mommy calls it. At first I was really pleased, like I’d been given a special holiday all of my own, but when Mommy said the thing about asthma it made me think of Patrice and his funny blue inhaler thing and I realized I kind of missed it. School, I mean, not Patrice’s inhaler!
When I started thinking about school I thought that maybe I wasn’t listening hard enough so I tried to listen really hard, although then I thought I don’t know how you listen hard. Jada can make her ears move and I thought if I could do that I could maybe make them go like towards Mommy’s mouth or the book and that would be a way of listening hard.
… a nose so prominent and genuinely beak-like the boys playing stick-ball in the gutter outside Olinskys on Pelham Parkway would stop and flap their arms at him. Herbie didn’t mind that so much; he wouldn’t have minded at all if his nose, with its huge oval tunnels designed to maximise breathing, actually worked. But every morning, he awoke with a palate so dry it felt like he’d been sleeping open-mouthed on the dead soil of the Great Plains at the height of the Dust Bowl.
Mommy stopped here and started to explain to me what the dust bowl was, but it was even harder to listen to her explaining it than it was listening to the story. As she was talking, the pages of the book flicked back to the start, and – I know I should’ve been listening but I just got bored – I had a look at the bit at the start again.
I was right. She had a missed a bit out, when she did the frowny forehead thing. She’d even underlined in pencil the bit she’d missed out, and put a little question mark by the side of the line. In the book, what it actually said was:
… but who would come to be know to all his friends as Herb, and to his parents – and wives – as Herbie.
I didn’t really understand why she’d missed that bit out. It just meant that all his wives had called him Herbie. What’s wrong with that?
So I said: ‘Mommy? Can you warm up Cuddles?’
She did that face where her eyes go all hard.
‘Darling. I’m trying to explain to you about the Dust Bowl. Have you been listening?’
‘Yes, but Cuddles is cold,’ I said.
‘Well, I’m warm him up in a minute, when we’ve finished reading.’
‘Her.’
‘Her.’
‘Please do it now, Mommy, please. I want Cuddles to hear the story, too, and she only comes alive when she’s warmed up …’ Mommy made a face at this, but it wasn’t a bad face: it had a bit of a smile in it.
‘Really. When she’s cold, she’s dead,’ I said.
‘Yes, all right,’ she said, and took him, and went out.
‘One and a half minutes …’ I said.
‘I know!’ she said from outside the door. That’s how long she has to put Cuddles into the microwave for. She’s got lavender pebbles in her tummy, and if you put her into the microwave for one and a half minutes they warm up, and it’s a lovely smell. While she was gone I grabbed the book and started flicking through the pages. There were loads of little marks she’d made in pencil. I didn’t get to see all of them. I saw this bit first:
… rather than cleaning them off, he would rub the sticky drops into his chest, convinced that the pleasure invoked by their release was contained somehow within them, and that such pleasure must promote good effects in the body. His sperm was medicinal, revitalizing and cheaper than Vicks VapoRub, which his mother bought in three packs from Bigelows and insisted on rubbing into his torso every night so vigorously he thought his ribs might break.
I tried to remember all the words: promote, sperm, invoked, medicinal, VapoRub, to ask Jada tomorrow. She always knows what grown-up words means. I got to see some more pencil-marked bits – just little bits of them, flicking through quickly, because I could hear Mommy coming back:
… the long dark progress towards marriage’s moribund centre …
… his ice skates, blades sharpened like bayonets …
… ‘They’ve raped that neighbourhood, the Italians …’
… the architecture of the dead …
… her ass raised, hovering, almost politely …
It was exciting, like watching grown-ups when they can’t see that you’re there and they start saying stuff you’re not meant to hear. I really wanted to read more but she was nearly in the room. I put it back down on the sheet where she left it just in time.
‘Here he – she – is!’ she said, holding out Cuddles. ‘She’s more than warm enough.’
I took Cuddles. ‘God,’ I said. ‘She is warm. It’s like she’s got a fever or something.’
Mommy laughed and shook her head. ‘A fever! I don’t know. You must have inherited your father’s black sense of humour.’
I smiled.
‘Are we going to read the rest of the chapter?’
She looked at her watch. ‘Well, what with warming up Cuddles and everything I’m not sure I’ve got time now. I said I’d be back in the hospital by nine.’
‘Oh, please, Mommy,’ I said.
She reached out and touched my hair, rubbing it. She looked really pleased.
‘Well, OK. I’ll get Elaine to read you the rest of it. Till the end of the chapter.’
I nodded. When I was younger, like five or whatever, I sometimes did this thing of nodding when I wanted something. Nodding a lot, over and over again. I guess I thought it was cute, like a puppy or something. I did it again now. It made Mommy smile even more.
She went out and called Elaine. I could hear her slow steps on the floor outside. She always sounds like she’s got a limp when you hear her, but when you see her, she hasn’t. I hoped that Mommy would leave the book on the bed again, but she hadn’t, she’d gone outside with it. I could hear Mommy whispering stuff to her. She was telling her about the pencil marks, about not reading me those bits. I guess she was showing Elaine them, too.
But Mommy didn’t tell her about Cuddles. I touched her. She was already going cold.
* * *
The news that Meg Antopolski has had a fall goes round Redcliffe House like – not exactly wildfire, given that the actual information had to be conveyed from geriatric mouth to geriatric ear, with a fair amount of mishearing and drifting off halfway through sentences – but certainly very quickly. Because the nature of the days is so static, any news is exciting, even bad news. And, in fact, bad news happening to someone else is, as it is in any other human environment, particularly choice: one shouldn’t imagine that the inhabitants of an old-age home are any less prone to schadenfreude than anywhere else. One perhaps thinks they should be, because of the supposition of wisdom, which is, in the conventional imagination, harnessed to selflessness, but also because it’s all going to happen to them very soon: there’s no point in luxuriating in a peer’s downfall if you’re quite so imminently in line for the very same downfall – that very same fall down, in fact, to the same bone-shattering parquet.
But then again, the bad things befalling the inmates of Redcliffe House are the bad things that will befall us all, eventually, so certain residents are entirely happy to indulge in the delicious frisson afforded to them by the realization that their hip bones, however arthritic, are not at present fractured, unlike both of Meg Antopolski’s. Pat Cadogan in particular luxuriates in the telling; or so it seems to Violet, as she listens to her in full flow at teatime.
‘Both gone; smashed to smithereens. She’ll not walk again,’ she says, her thick Yorkshire accent painting her prurience over with a patina of common sense. It must be nice, thinks Violet, to possess vowels which make everything you say sound like it must simply be the most natural response.
Mandy puts their plates brusquely down in front of them. Violet has ordered the soup, tomato and basil; Pat a cream cheese and cucumber sandwich, sliced neatly into triangles, with a small handful of crisps on the side. Teatime at Redcliffe House is at five thirty, and the last meal of the day. Like lunch, residents can make their own in their rooms, but Violet, like most, is always too tired this late in the day to cook.
Violet remembers when she first arrived, realizing that teatime did not mean actual tea, with perhaps some cake or scones, at three, but rather a kind of early supper (but never with very much food, designed to facilitate an expected bedtime of nine, and minimize digestive issues); it made her feel like repacking her bags and going back to her flat in Cricklewood, re-rented though it was. So many things go with age, but it was the ones that slipped through the net without notice – or, rather, that were slipped through the net by others who, in their idea of your best interests, tried to make it seem as if nothing had been lost – that induced not just sadness, but rage.
‘I mean, to be honest, she never looked where she was going, did she? Meg.’ Pat was continuing. ‘Always barging about. No one could ever tell that woman anything, let alone to look out. You know what she was like, always thinking she knew best.’
‘Did she trip?’ Violet knows that Pat will have the details. She chooses to ignore her use of the past tense.
‘Slipped getting out of the shower. She had one of those rooms with the sit-down showers. She reached up to hold onto the rod and it was all soapy, wasn’t it – her hand slips off, and then …’ Pat makes a small exploding noise, inducing her lips, with their thin coating of cream cheese, to tremble.
‘So she was found …’
‘Completely starkers. Yes. Got to the panic button but couldn’t get to the towel rail.’
‘Poor love,’ says Violet. Pat raises an eyebrow, as if to say, that’s what happens if you go barging about without looking where you’re going your whole life.
Norma Miller comes into the dining room, unseen by Pat. She makes a face to Violet, indicative of the awfulness of having to eat with Pat. Violet suppresses a smile, which becomes harder when Norma approaches Pat’s chair from behind with an invisible dagger, bringing it down on her back over and over again.
‘What?’ says Pat and turns round.
‘Hello, Pat …’ says Norma, having recomposed her features. Her hand, however, is still raised above her head in a fist.
‘What on earth are you doing?’
Norma looks up at her hand. ‘Well. The nurses made an announcement: apparently a sexy young man is coming into the house and is looking for a dinner date for tonight. So I said …’ she gestures to her raised hand, ‘Me! Me! Me!’ She shakes her head. ‘And then I just couldn’t get it down. Arthritis, you know.’
Violet laughs, engendering a sour glance from Pat. She has seen Norma do this before: she is one of those old ladies who likes to draw attention to the absurdity of their sexlessness. Pat is not. With a wink to Violet, Norma moves off towards another table. Violet wishes she could go and eat with her and listen to more of her incongruous raunchiness, even to the point where it might become too much, as she knows it would.
‘Where is Meg?’ says Violet. ‘At the Royal?’
‘Yes.’ Pat sniffs, and pats her mouth with a napkin. She looks Violet square in the face. ‘She won’t be coming back.’
Violet blinks, knowing that the way Pat has presented this information is intended to be demonstrative of her straightforwardness, and, in particular, her straightforwardness in the face of death. It says something about herself, more than about poor Meg: it says, and of course, when my time comes, I shall be ready for it. I shall not lark about. Violet’s hand hesitates, holding her spoon, and Pat glances towards the small red puddle within, daring her to prove her own no-nonsense acceptance of death by carrying on the journey of spoon to mouth.
But Violet does put her soup spoon down and smoothes her hands over her lap, the rucked-up flowers on her dress regaining their equidistance from each other. She wonders about hips: about why so many people of her age break them, and why this so often represents the opening of the morbid door, the first step down to the darkness. Her bones are good, she thinks, a consequence of her mother always insisting that she begin the day with a glass of milk, even when it was difficult to get hold of. But feeling the tips of her hip bones now, tiny, jagged mounds grazing across her palms, it is hard not to gauge their fragility.
She has only ever broken two bones in her life. When she was nine or ten she had a skipping accident and broke her wrist. Like many of her distant recollections, the tones and colours of this memory seem clearer and more real now than events and conversations that happened yesterday: sometimes even than the meandering, shiftless present itself. She remembers the rope tied to a fence post, her sister twirling it faster and faster at the other end, telling her she could skip as fast as her if she tried, and then the touch of the rope, hairy, spidery, tangling on her naked ankle. She remembers the fall, crashing to the cobbles. She remembers the particular cobble, the small brown dome rising up out of the road to meet her right wrist smack in the centre of the bone. She remembers screaming, remembers her father charging out from their backyard, remonstrating with her sister, and the rush of air as he picked her whole body up in one clean movement. His chest was heaving with the effort of running so quickly out of the house, and each expansion of it squeezed her more tightly, but the pain seemed to counteract the pain in her wrist, the good fire chasing out the bad, and she wanted to be squeezed harder. She remembers him saying, Vi, Vi, where does it hurt, his normally raucous Cockney voice whispering, full of the knowledge that even though the accident was not his doing it had happened on his watch.
The other time was when she was with Eli, when they were living together in one room above a bakery in Walthamstow just after the war. She broke her nose. It was soon after the war – eighteen months into their marriage – and at first there was no convincing Gwendoline that Eli had not punched her. Gwendoline was by this time living apart from Henry, and had herself sustained a number of black eyes and bloody noses on her way out of the door: thus she had already, in her mid-twenties, become the sort of woman whose most unshakeable convictions are built upon an assumption of the evil of men.
‘You may as well tell me,’ she said, as they walked through Walthamstow’s post-war streets, searching for somewhere that would sell them sugar. Gwendoline wanted to bake a cake, but she had baked two this week already – she had filled out a lot, Violet had noticed, since leaving Henry – and her ration limit was up. ‘I know when you’re lying.’
‘I’m not lying,’ said Violet. ‘I fell out of bed and hit my face on the chest of drawers. It’s Eli’s fault, in a way, because our room’s so small and I’ve told him to shut that drawer before, but he stuffs it with his clothes, and it sticks a bit …’
‘And he’s lazy.’
Violet looked down at her feet, moving over the dust-filled pavement cracks. This was true, as regards shutting drawers, or, indeed, any domestic duty; it was not true in other respects, but it was too difficult – and not worth it on this point – to challenge Gwendoline.
‘But why did you fall out of bed? What on earth was he making you do?’
Violet looked up. Gwendoline’s mouth had curved along a line poised halfway between prurience and disgust.
Violet wondered what to say. The truth, on this occasion, was nothing. But there had been many times when the violence and strangeness of Eli’s desires had made her think she was not just going to fall out of bed, but out of herself. Violet had been a virgin on their wedding night, and nothing Eli had told her about himself had led her to believe otherwise about him, but there was a purpose and resolve to the way he moved sexually which disorientated and at times frightened her. Any sense she may have had of sexual understanding being a joint process – each overcoming the other’s nervousness, holding hands as they took their first paddling steps into the sea of love – vanished. Instead, she often felt, in bed, like a spectator, even as she herself was made into spectacle. For example: she had expected that this aspect of their marriage would be conducted in the dark, but Eli insisted on the light always being on. And then he would look at her: but really look, peering, studying, all the time frowning and rapt as if the answer to whatever question burnt away at the centre of his soul lay somewhere in her secreted self.
On one level, Violet relished this – sex allowed her to feel that here at last she was Eli’s focus, that she held his gaze at night in a way she could never do during the day. It allowed her to imagine herself as the rarest of diamonds, examined through an eyeglass by this most studious of jewellers. At other times, it simply emphasized the stern, unyielding fact of their separateness. Eli’s lovemaking, then, she knew, was not a dialogue; it was entirely rhetorical.
‘Well?’ said Gwendoline. She had stopped, ostensibly to look inside the window of Percival’s Toy Shop, but mainly to emphasize her need to know.
The truth was that Violet had been pregnant for two and a half months, unbeknownst to anyone. She had no one to confide in – her mother by this time was insensible with alcoholism, and Gwendoline herself, with her entrenched hatred of men and deep cynicism about Eli in particular, would only have been negative about the prospect. And not Eli: she had no idea what Eli would think about having a child. It was a period of time when he was squeezing every second between the end of work and bedtime – he had got a job in the sorting office for the local branch of the Royal Mail – to write. He had written a set of short stories, and was two-thirds of the way towards the completion of Solomon’s Testament, the manuscript of which lay on the floor at the end of the bed, there not being enough room on Eli’s tiny desk to accommodate both its towering pages and the fat black wedge of his Remington typewriter. It sat there, day and night, growing as he wrote, a totem pole of paper, around which they tiptoed in silent reverence.
Would a child disturb him too much? Or would he be pleased? Would it help him in some way? She had been convinced, always, that she would have children, and never would have imagined that the announcement of the imminent arrival of one could have elicited an ambiguous response from her husband, but there it was: she had not been sure how he would take it.
Then a week ago she had woken up in the middle of the night with a piercing pain in her stomach. One of her many uncertainties about her condition was whether or not it was all right for them to continue to make love while she was pregnant, but since she was not the kind of woman who could withhold her body against her husband’s demands for enigmatic, undisclosed reasons, they had carried on as normal. And she did not think, on waking and feeling this pain, that it was her husband’s fault. She blamed herself, in fact, for not saying anything; for having wriggled underneath him during sex in a vain attempt to move the clutching life out from under his weight; for not knowing – for never knowing – what the best thing was to do. Her hand went between her legs and she could feel a mix of liquids. She lifted her hand to her face, but was too frightened to switch on the light – the same light that had been left so resolutely on a few hours before. Quickly and quietly, not wanting to wake her husband, she scrambled out of bed, trying to get towards the tiny bathroom – shared, on the landing, with the flat next door: it crossed her fevered mind that she might be found on the floor by the neighbours – but in her haste, and in the dark, she fell, her face coming directly into contact with the edge of a drawer left open by Eli. It was, as she had said to Gwendoline, always too close, that chest of drawers – dark and huge, it loomed over their single bed in a way that would have convinced a child that it was a monster – but there was nowhere else in the room it could go.
She cried out, falling back onto the bed, and then rolling off onto the floor. Blood seemed to be flowing from all ends of her. As she toppled she became aware in the dark of a fluttering in front of her face, and, at first, thought it was something brought on by the blow, like the stars that circled round the skulls of head-injured characters in The Beano; but then the light came on, and she saw that it was a page of Solomon’s Testament, one of a few that had risen up from the pile on the floor following her fall. Some more were strewn about the threadbare carpet, but the majority had remained in a block – the block that she had fallen on directly, and that she could feel still underneath her. At the edge of her vision she could see some of the words – words that Eli had forbidden her from reading while he was writing – but only the unfinished end of a page: and then turns, on his broad heels, into Times Square, where the ailing hues of a thousand different. She rolled a foot further, off the main block of paper, and looked round to see, as she had feared, the cover page and numerous other sheaves of Eli’s masterpiece-in-waiting streaked with red, some of it still dripping down the white sides like the daring strawberry icing she had once seen on an enormous wedding cake in the pages of Ladies’ Home Journal. Her mind filled with blood: she didn’t know whether the blood on the pages was from her nose or between her legs, and she wondered how that could be found out; wondered, too, how it was that paper could cut, and why it was that, when it did, it produced from fingers virtually no blood. She felt Eli’s shoeless steps behind her resonating up from the floorboards: it was him who had turned on the light. He would pick her up in his arms, now, just like her father; he would squeeze her, and, even though the squeezing of her in bed earlier in the night had been bad, this would be a good squeeze, a healing squeeze, like her father’s. It would stop the bleeding: his arms would be a tourniquet. Violet waited for the small rush of wind, and then indeed it came, wafting up her nightdress, but she did not come up with it. Instead, Eli crouched down and lifted the block of paper into his arms. He stood over her, naked, clutching the soiled Solomon’s Testament to his chest like a child: and it was, in fact, in its blend of her blood and his words, his brain and her body, the nearest they would get.
Violet lay there for some small time, listening to him breathing, not wanting to do so herself: wondering if it would have been better if she was dead. Then he knelt down and whispered, in a voice hoarse with relief: ‘It’s OK …’ and put his hand on her hair, stroking it away from her coldly sweating forehead. ‘Vi … It’s OK.’ Violet looked round to him. His face was compassionate – there seemed to be tears in his eyes – but even though she nodded, accepting his touch, she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure what he meant. It was an imprecation that she would continue to wonder about, much later, even into the time when these kind of things were no longer shrouded in mystery and you could read articles in newspapers, for heaven’s sake, insisting that sex during pregnancy was fine, and there was only a very small chance of a miscarriage from it – even then she would sometimes wonder whether Eli had been reassuring her, or forgiving her.
* * *
Harvey is in his hotel room looking for the optimum YouTube clip of Linda Ronstadt. This doesn’t mean, necessarily, the best YouTube clip of Linda Ronstadt: her performance of ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’ on The Don Kirshner Rock Concert, for example; her beautiful – if, on the tiny Sony travel speakers he has attached to his Vaio, acoustically challenging – version of ‘Blowing Away’ at a Lowell George tribute concert in 1979; or her 1969 appearance on The Johnny Cash Show, which, though clearly far too early for Harvey’s purposes, does distract him for a while, partly because Linda is so astonishingly gorgeous on it, and partly due to this dialogue she has while sitting on stage with Johnny:
JOHNNY: Where you from Linda?
LINDA: I’m from Tucson, Arizona.
JOHNNY: That’s wonderful country, I like to go out there and jack-rabbit hunt. Do you ever go rabbit hunting?
LINDA: I never could pull the trigger, you know?
JOHNNY: Well, I didn’t like to shoot ’em, I just liked to hunt ’em.
LINDA: It’s OK to shoot them.
JOHNNY: If you’re hungry, I guess.
LINDA: If you’re hungry, right.
JOHNNY: Hey, let’s do a song.
None of these are right, although the 1979 appearance is close. What Harvey is searching through the YouTube image wall for – as he has done in the past with Brigitte Bardot, and Debbie Harry, and Jane Fonda, and Audrey Hepburn, and Raquel Welch, and, more latterly, Meg Ryan, Joanna Lumley, and Felicity Kendal – even, once, Tessa Wyatt (from the ITV sitcom Robin’s Nest; used to be married to Tony Blackburn; unbelievably lovely to look at in 1983) but could find no matches for her – is the point at which this beautiful woman’s beauty peaked. And by peaked, Harvey isn’t thinking so much as maximized, although that’s sort of in the mix, as reached its tipping point: peak beauty as in peak oil.
With all these women – whose beauty at its height dismantles him; there is a clip of Jane Fonda from a black-and-white movie called Catfight that he cannot watch without holding his breath – he wants to find the point at which they lose it. This is not sadistic. He does not want, like some middle-aged male version of the Queen in Snow White, to revel in the downfall of their looks. What he wants is to see how far he can push his desire: how far down the line.
So the truer description would be to say that Harvey is looking for the point just before Linda Ronstadt became – in his eyes – no longer a great beauty. He is presently convinced that this point is an appearance on The Leo Sayer Show that Harvey estimates to be early 1980s, therefore making Linda, who Wikipedia dates as having been born in 1946, mid- to late thirties. In the clip, she undoubtedly still carries herself as an attractive woman, and is quite clearly fancied by Leo Sayer (a fancy, Harvey surmises, not obviously reciprocated by Linda, who can hardly bear to look at the gyrating Isro-haired monkey). They sing ‘Tumbling Dice’, and, in an eighties BBC kind of way, it’s meant to be sexy. All this helps, as Harvey can be influenced in this matter; if other men regard a woman as being sexually attractive, Harvey will take notice.
The point of all this is to train – retrain – his eyes. The novel thing that YouTube has given the voyeuristic billions – the ability to trace change in a person by seeing them in gobbets young and then old – is being used by Harvey to discover if desire is, as some of his therapists have insisted it is, malleable. This is not something he instinctively believes. Desire for Harvey is adamantine. Or, perhaps more precisely, it is fast: too fast to steer. The sight of female beauty makes Harvey a mirror. Beauty reaches his eyes and is returned as desire, at the speed of light.
But despite this Harvey tries. What else can he do? He will not leave Stella because her beauty has passed some imagined optimum, however much his father’s ghost may be pouring that poison continually into his ear. He will not read this anxiety as a mandate, forcing him away from his life. So he has bought into the possibility that you can consciously shift the coordinates of your own desire: you can lead it to where it’s best for everybody, to a place where it causes no trouble. And if one way of doing this might be to watch Linda Ronstadt in her late thirties singing with Leo Sayer on YouTube, in the hope of discovering that, although her face no longer makes him hold his breath like it does when she is on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1978, he still finds her attractive – then he will watch it and watch it again.
There are other ways in which Harvey uses the internet for self-medication. Pornography, for example: Harvey feels that, for him, it has a use beyond the obvious. It can be incorporated into the same Neuro Linguistic Erotic Reprogramming that might result from extended looking at mid-life clips of iconic female beauties. He feels that there is a political dimension to this. Harvey, still Joan Gold’s son, has made internet porn right in his head. Or, at least, while being aware of all the arguments against it, has come up with one in its favour, through remembering that one of the big no-nos of porn is that it fosters the idea that only one type of woman – young, slim, smooth-skinned – is erotically acceptable. Well, Harvey thinks, say what you like about the internet, but it has fucking subverted that hegemony. Now women can be erotically objectified whatever state they are in: morbidly obese, mutant, severely disabled and, yes, old. This bar has been raised and raised again, in cyberspace. It has taken apart the whole under-twenty-six, under-120 pounds stranglehold on the erotic that pornography used to insist upon. Harvey has even put this argument to some women, and some of them have even listened.
Beyond the multitude of MILF sites and www.over50.com, however, lies the slightly more troubling area of granny porn. Harvey’s argument falters, he knows, in the face of www.oldgoats. com, www.uglyancientsluts.com, www.isitmymom.com. The other thing comes out, the possibility that the finding of the old and the crippled and the deformed erotic is just another form of degradation: that what the masturbating viewer is enjoying is the pure and final humiliation of decay. But fuck that, thinks Harvey: he never imagined that you can crack the egg of what men find erotic and find only goodness. Besides, his central project is not intellectual, but self-improving: he thinks that looking at these sites may be a type of familiarization therapy for him, acclimatizing him slowly to the ineluctable fact that women do age. Or, rather: that women who age can still be women you might want to fuck. He knows, obviously, that the idea that female fuckability lessens with age is shameful, but his first instinct is that it is true at least for his libido; what he is hoping for is that watching some of this stuff might lead him to a second instinct. It is a strange world, of course, where watching granny porn can be construed as being in the cause of love.
Trouble is, though, these sites don’t do it for him; not at all. He finds them disturbing psychologically, physically and, for all his intellectual sophistry, politically; the images of these ladies – he wants to use the word, ladies; that’s what their faces, age conferring its quiet dignity, still seem to inspire, even as the way their bodies are arranged violently rejects the word – invoke in him a seemingly impossible mix, an oil and water mix, of repulsion and compassion. They don’t stimulate Harvey’s erotic centre; at best, what they produce there is confusion – a kind of start-stop thing, whereby he can feel his libido responding initially to the basic coordinates of the image – it is a woman, she is in lingerie, she is opening her legs – but then halt, uncertain, distraught – when her age becomes, a split-second later, apparent. These sites profoundly disorientate his sexual self; and, for that, he is sometimes grateful, because what he wants most of all is to think that that self can be shifted.
Other times, he just endlessly Googles the problem. Ageing; ‘sex and ageing’; age partner anxiety getting older sex psychological; wife skin age time; on and on and on, desperately thinking that the right combination of words will unlock the cure. And what he has discovered is this. There is what he has come to think of as a Great Silence on this issue. That in all the billions of words on the millions of subjects that the web contains, no one has said anything on the subject of what it is like to fear the sight of your loved one growing old. There are sites – many – about how age doesn’t matter in love; discussion forums for people whose partners are fifty or sixty years older than they are, full of contributors making the point over and over again that ‘age is just a number’. There are sites for older women with much younger men, and vice versa; there are sites where women complain to other women about being dumped for younger women; and there are endless, endless sites about how to make yourself – if you’re a woman – look younger, all full of imprecations about how this, of course, is not important to one’s inner self but we all want to make the best of ourselves and hey why not and let’s do it but do it responsibly and look at this photo of this woman and how much younger she looks now and so therefore everything is now right with her world. But there are no sites that say: Are you like me? Do you love your wife/husband/partner but cannot bear the sight, or even the thought, of them growing old? Is their beauty so important to you, that for reasons that you don’t even understand, the loss of it from your gaze feels terrifying? And do you hate yourself for having these thoughts and these feelings but can’t stop them? That’s what Harvey wants, a site that says that. And then: Well, I can help you. Or at least: you are not alone.
He clicks off YouTube, glancing past a video grab of Linda Ronstadt as she is now. He doesn’t want any more self-help from the screen, but other temptations rear up from the empty Google box. Harvey can’t help himself, the rich colours of the word call to him: the bright blue Gs, the sapling-green l, the red and yellow Os like deliciously over-made-up eyes. He types it in. Harvey Gold. Twenty-eight thousand and two hundred entries. The same stuff as always, in the same order as always, starting with the Wikipedia entry for the other one. Harvey doesn’t understand why his entry doesn’t come up on the search page. Instead, he has to click on this other Harvey Gold, the one who, he knows only too well by now, is an American guitarist, bassist and organist turned keyboardist for the avant-garde rock/New Wave band Tin Huey. I really must download some Tin Huey at some point, Harvey thinks, before clicking on For other persons named Harvey Gold, see Harvey Gold (disambiguation).
His short entry comes up; not, at least, a stub:
Harvey Gold
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Harvey Gold (born 2 March 1966) is a British-American writer. He is the son of the world-famous novelist Eli Gold. In 1996 he himself wrote a novel, Blah Blah Blah, which was neither a commercial nor a critical success. He has ghost-written a number of celebrity autobiographies. His name does not appear in any of these but it has been suggested that the celebrities may include Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, Jeremy Vine, Chris Noth, Glen Campbell, Simon Cowell, Jocky Wilson, Nicole Richie, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Natascha Kampusch.
Natascha Kampusch? That was a new one. The only biography Harvey has actually ghosted in this list is Chris Noth’s (of Sex and the City) Bigger Than Big: Harvey’s main memory of writing it now is the number of times he had to correct himself after writing his subject’s name as North, or Moth – but some Wikipedia-editing wag seems to take delight in adding to this list every time he looks at it. He had originally edited all the names out – he had thought about putting some whose autobiographies he had written, but knew it was against his contract – but they keep on coming back, different every time, and now he has given up.
He clicks back to Google, and then slides his fingers around the mouse square to bring the cursor to the bookmark Amazon, for the second stop on his daily cyber-round of self-immolation. The page comes up: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0349117462/ ref=ed_ra_of_dp/026-8296630-3788113. It is the page for Blah Blah Blah (paperback edition), currently standing at 239,767 in the bestsellers’ chart. He scrolls down. Two stars: seven customer reviews. They have shifted the order of these reviews around for some rebranding reason, so the first one is now gangstero (Isle of Man), who says:
** not a chip off the old block, 23 Jun 2002
By gangstero (Isle of Man, UK) – See all my reviews
TOP 1000 REVIEWER
Harvey Gold has got a lot to live up to, and if I hadn’t been expecting something at least in the ballpark of Solomon’s Testament and Criminality and The Compliance of Women, then maybe I’d have given it a few more stars. But even without the expectation set up by the Gold name, I’m not sure it ever really works. I just didn’t really like any of the characters. Especially the hero (?) and narrator, Jake, a self-obsessed and obnoxious character who, at the end of the day, just wasn’t a very pleasant person to spend all that time with. I finished it but only because I never give up books halfway through.
Although he’s read gangstero’s review a number of times before, it still makes Harvey furious. Like? You didn’t like him? Do you think you’re supposed to like Raskolnikov? Humbert Humbert? Portnoy? Solomon Wolff? Odysseus? He thinks these things, trying to absorb his basic hurt that gangstero has not liked Jake, who is, in virtually every respect, him.
His eye glances down the other Amazon reviews, all bad, searching for the comfort of the one good one. It has been removed from the page itself, but he finds a link to it on the right-hand side:
* Amazingly funny and well written; could almost be by his dad, 17 Jan 2003
By chill
I don’t know what most of the other reviewers on this site are going on about. I loved this book. The characters, especially Jake, are really well-drawn, and, yes, they push the envelope a bit in terms of behaviour, but that just makes it all the more interesting. The story maybe droops a bit in the last third, but it stays funny and moving all the way through. The bit where Jake and Ella split up made me cry, too.
He wonders if there’s a way of getting this one shifted onto the main page. He wonders, too, if he should have added a bit about how clever the end plot twist is, to counteract the thing about it drooping in the last third, which he’d only put in so that no one suspected his authorship. Adding a drop of something negative hadn’t caused him as much pain, however, as the reference to his father. He knew, of course, that every single review of his book would begin by name-checking his father – he knew, too, that even good ones (had there been any) would have adopted a the-bar’s-been-set-pretty-high-for-this-guy tone – but he would’ve liked, he really would, just one review, even on Amazon, even written and click-posted, slightly sweatily, by his own hand, not to have mentioned Eli. He knew, however, that since all the others did, he had to.
It’s not in stock new, he notices, but there are twenty-three available used, starting at £0.01. Homonculus, adele1, and bookzone_uk are all selling them for that price. Harvey thinks: who the fuck sells a book for £0.01? How the fuck are they making any money? How many books do these people need to sell to break even? New, on Amazon, Blah Blah Blah is available at the reduced price of £6.99: so Homonculus needs to sell 699 copies of Blah Blah Blah just to buy one new one.
He shakes his head. Unable to resist another, equally masochistic, impulse, he goes back to Google and types in ‘Eli Gold’. The screen shows Results 1–10 of 1,947,000. None of them about a different Eli Gold. Above the standard search results are the News results, seven or eight different entries all told, but linking onto hundreds of others, saying ‘Doctors uncertain about great novelist’s health’, ‘Literary world fears for Eli Gold’, ‘Gold’s publishers promise reprinted posthumous collected works’, ‘Eli Gold: the last Great Man?’ He ignores them and clicks on the first main entry:
Eli Gold
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Eli Gold, born Eli Goldblatt (born 25 May 1923 in Troy, New York) is an American novelist, poet, screenplay and short story writer, essayist, conceptual artist and literary critic. His most famous works include his first novel, Solomon’s Testament (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize), and his dissection of the state of American marriage, The Compliance of Women. He is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Frost Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He is the only person ever to have turned down the Nobel Prize for Literature, offered to him in the mid-eighties. He has had five wives, the fourth of whom, Pauline Gray, committed suicide, apparently as part of a pact with Gold, which he survived. Despite the scandal surrounding this, he is widely considered – particularly since the death of Saul Bellow in 2005 – to be the world’s greatest living writer.
Contents [hide]
1. Biography
1.1 Early life
1.2 Early career
1.3 Success
1.4 Late work
2. Themes and influences
3. Criticism and controversy
3.1 Plagiarism
3.2 Refusal to accept Nobel Prize
4. Pauline Gray’s suicide
4.1 Details
4.2 Scandal
4.3 Exoneration of Eli Gold
5. List of works
5.1 Fiction
5.2 Essays
5.3 Conceptual Artwork
5.4 Editorship
6.. Quotations
7. References
8. See also
9. External links
Biography
Early Life
The eldest son of Ernst August Goldblatt, a Jewish-American immigrant from East Prussia, and Helen Harris, a Catholic of Irish extraction from Boston, Eli Gold was born on 25 May 1923 after the family had settled in Troy, a city in New York state.
Yeah, yeah, he thinks. He clicks back to Google from the Wikipedia entry. Two video thumbnails sit at the top of the search results. One, on Veoh, entitled Eli G, Gore Vidal, Germaine Greer arguing on Dick Cavett, 1970, he hasn’t seen before. He clicks on it. It is a middle section of the interview. The camera is on Greer and Vidal, listening. Harvey notes that she was gorgeous, then, and considers searching for some other footage in order to run her through the Linda Ronstadt mill. It cuts from her and Vidal – their faces wear the same archly amused expression – to Eli, who sits opposite, next to the central figure of Cavett. The set is very brown. A book sits on a beige table. There is the sound of scattered laughter, some applause. Eli is leaning back in his chair with the face of a man whose last bon mot went well. He is smoking.
His hair is full and dark and his eyes are alive. He is in a black suit and black glasses and white shirt and black tie. He looks like the famous sometimes do: like Elvis in 1956, or Jagger in 1969, or Margaret Thatcher in 1981 – someone who is not just living in the moment, but living in their moment. The moment is them. Harvey looks at his father, last viewed white-eyed and screaming in a hospital bed, and realizes that he is seeing, here, his father’s apex, his point of peak beauty.
CAVETT: But seriously, Eli – can we address … I mean we have Germaine here. She’s been, well, some would say, stringent in her criticisms of your work.
GERMAINE: I called him a misogynist.
CAVETT: That’s a strong word.
ELI: You know, Dick … fame is like starlight.
GERMAINE: Oh, here we go.
ELI: It is. Whatever you were first seen as, that’s what people still see, years later. And that’s what Germaine, or at least, her – as it were – foremothers, decided I was when I first started out and so now there’s no going back. It’s fixed, from that point way back in time.
CAVETT: You’re saying that’s not a fair description of you, any more? Misogynist?
GERMAINE: Oh come on. [picking up a copy from the table] This is your new book, right? The Compliance of Women?
[Audience laughs]
GERMAINE: Yes, exactly. That says it all, doesn’t it? But there’s more, inside. [she opens it, starts to read] ‘Anyone can fall in love at first sight, thought Willard. It’s whether you can stay in love at second sight. Or third sight. Or five hundredth thousand sight, when the sight may not be quite what it was to boot …’ [to audience] Don’t laugh!
CAVETT: It’s not often I let a guest say that!
ELI: That’s true for both genders, that sentiment, isn’t it Germaine?
GERMAINE: It’s a man speaking.
ELI: But not me.
GERMAINE: What’s your point?
ELI: Is it a misogynist book? Or is it a book about misogyny?
There is some applause, and some sneering from the audience. Greer sits back, shaking her head. Vidal laughs. The camera cuts back to Eli, smiling and blinking slowly. Harvey’s email pings. He pauses the screen, glad to stop scratching this over-scratched itch, and clicks onto Mail, some part of him expecting, as always, redemption.
The email is notifying him about a message to his Facebook page. Harvey doesn’t look at his Facebook page much any more, after the first flurry, the Facebook frenzy, of a couple of years ago. He clicks on the link: it is from Ron Bunce. He sees Ron’s tiny jpg come up by his message – blond, lantern-jawed, the 1950s marine face slightly betrayed by something mental in the staring blue eyes – and then reads what he has written in the message box:
Hi Harv! How goes it! Listen, really pissed to hear about your dad. I’m a fan, too – may have mentioned this – but mainly of the short stories, which are corking. Still he is like, what, 100? And had a fucking good innings, money and fame-wise but more importantly chick-wise. On the bright side – does that mean you’re in the Land of the Free? If so, let me know. You know how much I fucking hate Hymie-Town (no disrespect: although you’re only like one quarter Yid, yes? So scale the disrespect down three-quarters anyways) but I have to come up to Connecticut anyway to hang out with the cops there who arrested a pedo we apprehended in New Haven, on the run from Toledo, before we put the cunt down for many many years of rasping lubricated-only-by-AIDS-infected-spit anal rape.
I’m coming up next week, so if the old man’s still breathing then, let’s have a drink and score some stripper pussy. Or I will and you can watch, if you still insist on taking marriage seriously.
Harvey rubs his eyes. He has not heard from Bunce for over five years. They became friendly at college – Bunce was over for one year from Michigan State University doing a course in, of all things, theology. Actually, this may not have seemed so unlikely on a first meeting with Bunce: his absurdly American looks could be interpreted as respectable – he sometimes wore a tie, his hair remained cropped in a rectilinear blond block at a time when most was gummed and backcombed up to look like enormous sea anemones – and, with those he didn’t know, he was shy, even to the point of stammering. But in private – and this is where the student Harvey, at the time hardly able to breathe for fear of getting the politics of breathing wrong, fell for him – Bunce was absurdly unrestrained: obscene, expressive, ridiculously sure of himself, able, uniquely at the time, to say whatever he wanted, about whoever he wanted, without first checking the utterance with some internal policing mechanism. In later life, Harvey would come to realize that the reason Bunce so fascinated him was that he combined being funny and clever with illiberality, a combination which in 1986 he would have considered impossible.
But lately they had had no contact. Harvey knew from email round robins that he now worked as an assistant prosecutor for some DA’s office in the Detroit area, but that was all. Harvey wasn’t sure whether to respond. When younger, he had been a social optimist: happy to meet new people, or re-meet old people, and to shift his personality around to suit the situation. Now, he only really wanted to see the people with whom he could be entirely himself: the thought of preparing a face to meet the faces that he might have to meet exhausted him. Thus, at home, he only really wanted to see Stella, and perhaps one or two other close friends.
But he was not at home. He was, in truth, a little lonely. He was prepared to risk a small amount of awkwardness: or, more precisely, he was prepared to force himself to be a bit more male than he was actually comfortable being, in order to fit in with Bunce’s idea of him as his friend.
Bunce,
he wrote,
Great to hear from you. Yeah, a night out would be fun: and a relief. It is pretty grim, the whole Dad dying thing. I’m staying at a place called the Sangster. Not in a suite, so if we’re going to be carting a lorryload of hookers back, we’ll probably have to find somewhere bigger. Give a call here when you get to Connecticut, or on my cell, 00447835 381449.
cheers
Harvey.
He gets up from the antique reproduction desk tastefully positioned in an alcove in the room, and wanders over to the window to look out at the elegant internal courtyard of the Sangster Hotel. The climate control system, humming at a discreet level just beneath his sonic notice, protects him from the apparent mugginess of the thickening sky. He wonders again if he is here for business or pleasure: he wonders if the Sangster is a business hotel. He is almost certain that it would describe itself as that, among many other things, but not a pleasure hotel, which sounds to Harvey like a euphemism for a live-in brothel. He wonders how much it would cost – in both dollars and shame – to move into a pleasure hotel and employ the staff to take away all the pain.
His phone rings, shaking him out of his thoughts like an alarm jolting him from deep sleep. The contact glowing on the screen says Alan Agent. Harvey has often wondered why his agent, who is eight years younger than him, is called Alan, a name he thought became extinct in 1971.
‘Alan,’ he says.
‘Harvey! How are you?’
Well … Harvey thinks. Let’s not go into that.
‘I’m OK.’
‘How’s your dad?’
Alan’s tone is sympathetic, but on the edge of efficient. Harvey knows a long description of his father’s medical condition is not actually being asked for. He glances at Eli’s frozen, smiling image on his computer, which has become warped by the video grab. It looks like a Francis Bacon portrait of Eli. It looks, in fact, like the Francis Bacon portrait of Eli.
‘He’s … y’know.’
‘Yes, of course. I feel for you.’
Back when he still thought of himself as a writer, rather than a ghostwriter, Harvey used to have another agent, called David. He and David were friends, sort of. He used to enjoy his calls. He didn’t feel that when David said pleasantries to him not about the matter in hand, it was just stuff that he had to get through before arriving at the matter in hand.
‘Thanks, Alan. I appreciate it.’
‘Did you get the Lark material?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Have you had a chance to read it yet?’
‘Well – you know, I’ve got a lot on my plate at the moment …’
‘She’s in New York.’
At the words, Harvey looks out of the window, expecting to see it – New York; perhaps expecting to see Lark dancing amongst the skyscrapers. Instead, there is the sedate internal courtyard of the hotel.
‘Oh, right …’
‘Her people are taking her round to meet all the American music moneymen now – so that when she releases in the UK, they can coordinate it all simultaneously stateside.’
People? Stateside?
‘Anyway, I’ve had a word with her people, and they’re keen. They think – and so do I – that it’s fortuitous that you happen to be in the city at the moment. I really think you should read that material I sent you on her, work up the pitch, and then we can set up a meet? OK?’
Meet?
‘Well, OK, Alan. But I can’t promise anything. You know, with my dad being the way he is and everything …’
‘Where are you staying?
‘Where am I …? The Sangster.’
‘Fuck. Really?’
‘Yes. My dad is paying. Well, he might be.’
‘That’s where she’s staying.’
‘Fuck. Really?’
‘That’s what I said!’
This is the nearest Alan has ever come to a joke with Harvey.
‘Yes …’
‘But that’s brilliant. That makes everything so easy. Listen, Harvey, I have to go but do have a look at that material. It’s only a couple of pages from the PR company …’
‘OK, OK.’
‘And once you’ve read it, and had some thoughts, I’ll get back on to her people.’
But who are my people? Alan? Are you?
‘This is great news, Harvey. I’m sure this is the one you’re going to get!’
Harvey feels, for a minute, that Alan is going to say ‘Laters!’ But he doesn’t. He just puts the phone down, too busy, clearly, to say goodbye: pleasantries only at the start, never the end.
The one you’re going to get? Is that what it’s come to? An assumption at the agency that Harvey Gold is the client who never gets the gig? He searches on his email and finds the one Alan sent before. He sees the attachment, a PDF: Lark1resend. He becomes filled with a terrible ennui, the sort of thing that used to hit him sometimes during work, but these days before work, at the thought of work: he may be the only person in history to suffer from ghostwriter’s block. With what feels to him like a superhuman effort, he overcomes his disinclination and clicks on Lark1resend. It takes a few seconds to open, the Vaio doing that thing it sometimes does of looking like a very simple operation has caused it to die. In the pause, he wonders if Dizzy’s mantras could work for stuff that you don’t want as well as stuff you do want. They are designed for curbing desire, or at least preventing it from curdling into depression – change your must-haves to preferences – but could it work the other way round? Change your must-nots to oh all right thens? I do not want to have to fucking pitch for this fucking autobiography of this done-nothing fuckwit, but if I do have to, it’s not the end of the world. Something like that. With a whirr and a click, the PDF opens. Oh no, he thinks. Not her.