Candace wasn’t at home. He tried her on her mobile, but she was driving, and couldn’t give her full attention to him. They spoke over each other, and managed to say, “No, go ahead,” simultaneously. He’d never much liked making phone calls, maybe another reason he had not been a thrusting, truly successful businessman, those blokes in the movies with their feet up on the desk and the phone cradled lovingly like a pet lemur on the shoulder. His parents had always been atrocious on the phone, they came to it too late in their lives and treated it with humble respect, which annoyed him when he was older—this clinging atmosphere of modesty, as if the machine were only for emergencies, donated by the generous colliery bosses. Even now, though she had a telephone in her room, his mother tried to keep conversations short, would try to end them with, “Look, this is your call, it’ll be getting pricey.” (Since he was paying her bills, it was always his call, anyway.)
Candace, so far away, was tender but practical. She told him to have courage, but also advised him to look for certain “signs”—if she says she isn’t reading anything, or isn’t playing the piano, or doesn’t want to get out of bed.
“Don’t be ashamed to go through her drawers or bathroom cupboards to find out exactly what drugs she is taking. I wouldn’t think twice about it.” (Ah, the excellent Chinese steeliness.)
“What’s puzzling is that she seems in fairly good spirits. I don’t see any of those signs. She doesn’t seem depressed. But the stairs: I was right! It was serious. She broke her arm and is wearing a cast.”
“Love—depressed people don’t necessarily go around with a big ‘D’ pinned to their chests. She broke her arm on the stairs?”
“Yes, and said that she merely slipped on the ice.”
“Well, maybe she did really slip? Sometimes a cheap cigarette is just a cheap cigarette—the Chinese version of the Freudian saying, by the way.”
“I wish you were here with me. Just you and me. I know you like hotel rooms…” He was lying on the bed, with most of his clothes off.
“You’re breaking up on me, I can’t quite hear you…”
“Seriously?”
“No,” she laughed, “that was a joke, I can hear you fine. I can hear your words, and I can hear perfectly well behind your words, too.” His daughters thought Candace was completely humorless, but in fact she had a zany, slightly unfunny sense of humor, which he adored.
“Your mother phoned yesterday. I think she was confused about your departure date. I gave her the hotel number. Though I bet she won’t phone you long distance, in the States.”
“You spoke to her?”
“You sound so terrified … It’s one of those rare astronomical events, but it is physically possible.”
“Sorry, it’s just that you try to avoid her whenever possible.”
“And she, me. Mutually Assured Avoidance.”
Yes, that was true enough. He dreaded the idea of his mother coming to live with them.
“I think your acronym would be pronounced … ‘Maa.’ Where are you driving to, by the way?” He just wanted to keep her on the phone.
“I’m on my way back from the one-day course in Newcastle, remember. ‘The Feeling Buddha’? Part of the Zen Therapy foundation module.”
“Ah. Good for you, my love.”
Alan sometimes felt guilty about his resistance to Candace’s Buddhism, but mostly he felt bullish. He was constituted by his desires. Certainly by his desire for Candace, which had brought sex roaring back into his existence after too many years of nothing. God, the tight creases behind her elbows when her arms hung down … Her slender back, her nice prim bum and those ridiculously small thongs she liked to wear, which in their lacy frailty were like dainty triangles strung on daisy chains, begging to be ripped off in a single erotic gesture, or quickly shoved aside at the crotch. Quickly pricked. If he got rid of desire, as his book on Zen Buddhism suggested, what would be left of him? Not a self, as he understood it. A driverless train, like the ones at Zurich Airport. She didn’t know that he sometimes encouraged their Jack Russell terrier, on evening walks in the garden, to lift his leg and piss on the little stone Buddha who squatted on the grass next to the birdbath. Alan had nothing against the real Buddha, who was obviously a highly enlightened cove, but that stone bust in the garden, purchased by Candace on the Internet, was rather annoying. Come rain or shine, dry wind or spurt of yellow dog piss, the chubby little chap, an Asian Michelin Man inflated with nirvana, bore the same inane grin, his impassive smile an ideally mild weapon against desire, suffering, death, and war. He wasn’t religious, had never been attracted to it, but what puzzled him was that Candace didn’t seem very religious either. Perhaps Buddhism wasn’t a religion in that sense? More power to it, then … His parents were fairly hostile to religion, good socialists that they were. Da would go every year to the Miners’ Gala, but not to the religious service at the end of the day in the cathedral, with the brass bands from the county collieries, and everyone sucking up to those velvety deans and archdeacons, who were plummy with Christian consolation. Alan did like the cathedral, would occasionally slip into the massive, dark building without telling his parents. But as for the doctrinal stuff, it was obviously man-made nonsense. And as for the question of God—well, he had a notion that “the question of God” might all have been more or less sorted out in his lifetime, like Cyprus or polio. Vaguely, with lazy irritation, he imagined some final event or revelation, a kind of theological press conference. He didn’t know whether the final revelation would be that God existed or didn’t; what seemed strange, as he put his tired head down on the hotel pillow, was that it hadn’t yet been decided, two thousand years after Christ’s death.