Alan sat alone in the hotel lobby. His drink was slowly rotting the paper napkin it sat on. Dixieland jazz again marched tastefully through the air. He was sunk in a fusty red velvet couch. He closed his eyes. Helen had gone to bed; it was far too late to phone Candace—he’d not spoken to her today. He felt uneasy, raw, vulnerable. At dinner—he and Helen ate together in the hotel, leaving Van and Josh for time together at home—he had revealed feelings about Josh that he had intended to keep to himself. Helen had come to the young man’s defense, she was stimulated by his juvenile cockiness. Too stimulated … He’d seen Helen and Josh today, the way they sang that little jingle, like lovers sharing a cigarette, he’d seen that gleam in Helen’s eyes. And as a father, he was put in the painful position of having to judge, from Josh’s possibly aroused perspective, the relative sexiness of his daughters: yes, from that point of view, Helen was the clear winner. She had a body and she knew what to do with it. Of course, he was reacting to nothing more than a breeze of flirtation between two adults. But it made him uneasy. Not for what it revealed about Helen—she was enjoying herself, she was a social tourist, she’d be gone in two days, she was probably unaware of it—but for what it revealed about Josh and his care—that was the necessary word—for and of Vanessa. He was tempted to warn Helen against too obviously favoring Josh, but realized that it was essential that he say nothing at all to either daughter about the matter. Van hadn’t witnessed most of the flirting—she’d gone to the kitchen to make coffee and have a smoke out back. And if he mentioned it to Helen, she might increase her attentiveness.
Josh was warm, charming, handsome. But where did the boy get that slightly tiresome confidence? At dinner, Helen said he was just young and enthusiastic. She said he was “a bit of a techno-nerd.” (Though also “quite cute.”) Van had said “Jewish-confrontational.” Maybe that was part of it. Alan sometimes liked to indulge the fantasy that the Old Testament had been written not about the Jews, but about the British. Just imagine it for a second: the whole Bible concerns the story of … the British! Imagine how bloody good we’d feel about ourselves, imagine the deep, invisible reserves of confidence that flow from the knowledge that your little national origin story is one of the founding religious myths of the world … Far better, even, than having Shakespeare, Newton, and Darwin on our side. Maybe that was it. Jewish-confrontational. Or perhaps American-confrontational? He’d learned a couple of things today. Americans really did pronounce “news” as “nooze.” And they apparently used the phrase “going forward,” as in, “So what, going forward, should Senator Obama say about race, to neutralize the issue on the campaign trail?” (Josh pronounced the word as “foward.”) Imagine the English using that phrase!… more like “going backward.” One thing that united Josh and Helen, he could see it now, was their slightly utopian streak—they believed that things were changing or about to change, changing for the better. They had plans and projects. They both thought that Senator Obama had a real shot at the job. Good for them. Van seemed left out of this excitement, not just because the two were now singing silly pop songs to each other and talking about the future of music, but because all that Van truly cherished and loved, all that she studied and practiced, belonged so deeply in the past.
And what about me? Alongside Josh, he felt old and nostalgic and pedagogical. He didn’t want to teach old lessons to new students. Why, just before leaving Van’s house, did he start on his stupid denunciation of the computer? Josh had been saying something about how most music would soon be not just played but composed on a computer. Irritated by his certainties, Alan said something to the effect that maybe all this was true, but you would never be able to go up to a computer and sing a few notes from a melody, and ask it to identify that melody. “Not quite true,” said Josh, “we’re getting there with solo voice recognition. Hey, we could experiment right now with my laptop.” And even Van had a sympathetic, slightly sad look, as she jumped in: “Dad, actually Josh has written a lot about this—there’ve been incredible advances in the software.” The verdict—all three agreed—seemed to be that pretty soon you could go up to a computer and sing a garbled melody and get an identification: “Beethoven Fifth, first bar.” His vulnerability nagged at him—especially that sympathetic face of Van’s. She obviously didn’t want to correct her old man in public, but history—progress, rather—forced the correction.
There was a woman sitting opposite him, on the other side of the low glass table; he didn’t know exactly how long she’d been there. She was slightly turned away from him, perhaps to mitigate the awkwardness. “Okay if I sit here?” she asked. “The chairs are up on the other tables, and the bar’s just closed.”
“Absolutely,” he answered, too quickly, in the accommodating English way. “I’m not going to stay here for long anyway.”
“Oh, I’ve blown it again. Something I said!” She grinned, and he understood that she’d had a few drinks, and that maybe she often had a few drinks. He reckoned her to be five or so years younger than him. Her dyed black hair was past due—a frozen white stream, the late fee as it were, ran right down the middle of her parting. She looked a little wrecked, had the undernourished plumpness of the drinker. But everyone more or less his age looked wrecked; you became slightly fond of everyone your age, as maybe you were once fond of everyone in your football team or in your regiment. If he saw wreck, what on earth did she see in him?
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“England. I’m visiting my daughter here.”
“Yeah, I thought so—you have a great accent. Like one of the Beatles.”
“Oh no, that’s Liverpool, further south … thanks anyway.”
“I’ve been to England,” she said. “To London. Also Cornwall. It rained … like shit the whole time. You don’t mind me saying that?”
“It does. Rain a lot. Like shit, in fact. Was that recently?” He guessed that it wasn’t, that recent life involved drinking and sleeping it off, and hanging around this town. He found her quite attractive, partly because she was opposite him and talking to him, but not only because of that—there was some grandeur in her manners, a ruined prestige that intrigued him. He liked her American drawl, her deep voice, and her eyes, which looked sore.
“I went there as a kid, a few times. Twice on a boat, once in a plane. No, twice in a plane … Oh hell, whatever. Twice in a boat, and twice on a plane, I think … We’re not allowed to smoke here, right? Do you think anyone would stop us? That little fascist at the bar would—he just invented a bullshit state law that says he’s not allowed to serve someone more than three drinks in one hour.” Her voice was rising and Alan was keen to go to bed and leave her to the persuasive force of the little fascist, but he didn’t want to seem rude, so he asked her why she’d gone so often to England when she was small. She told him that she grew up in New York City, with money and privilege—a nanny, a cook, a Hungarian driver. A big apartment on Park Avenue. And an English father. My mother, she said, was a Trask. It sounded like some kind of religious sect, or perhaps a political sinecure. A Trask? She explained that Trask was a surname, and that her mother’s nineteenth-century forebears bought a large estate just outside Saratoga Springs. In the 1890s, they built a huge house on their land, designed it to look like a famous country house in England—she forgot which one. “It’s called Yaddo. Have you heard of it?” He had not, but then he’d only been in town for two days. The name, she said, came from one of the Trask children, who invented it, to rhyme with “shadow.” The daughter loved the way the maple trees cast shadows. The Trasks bequeathed their house, in the 1920s, to America’s creative artists, stipulated that Yaddo had to be used as a writers’ retreat, a place for people to come and do creative work. It wasn’t open to the public, so he’d never be able to visit it. “Unless your daughter’s a writer.”
How, he asked, did the Trask heirs feel about their ancestral home being given over in perpetuity to a bunch of freeloading artists?
“Honey,” she said, pausing theatrically to drain her empty wineglass, “that’s the point. There were no direct heirs, it’s the saddest fucking story—the Trasks lost all four of their children in childhood. All four. Diphtheria, mostly.” Alan agreed that it was terribly sad—the great horror, he thought to himself, the reversal of generation, parents burying their children, Karl Marx trying to throw himself into the grave to lie alongside his young son.
“I know something about that,” she said. “About sad fucking stories.” She looked at him, and ordinary decency demanded that he ask her more. But he was tired, and couldn’t quite face the spillage of another ten minutes. And didn’t he have his own sad stories? So he looked down at his drink, and she fortunately lost the black thread of her sad tale, and also went quiet. Grabbing his moment, he made his apologies, told her he’d enjoyed their conversation, and stood up.
“You’re not the only who has to go,” she said with quick annoyance. “Didn’t I say, two minutes ago, I couldn’t stay for long?”
“Okay,” he said, gently surrendering to her fiction. “Okay.”
* * *
Back in his room, he stood by the freezing window. Outside it was clear, dry, arctic—the over-salted main street was parched gray like desert bone, the packed walls of snow glowing blue in the streetlamps. He watched her leave the hotel, stop to light a cigarette, fumble the fag and pick it up, and then walk slowly, far too slowly for the frigid temperature, up Broadway.
On his way to the bathroom, he passed the closed white laptop on his desk. It had made its way out of the computer bag, but no further. Yes, he should log on and see if Eric Ball had written to him. Two other colleagues, also. Worst of all—the three-year migraine of the Dobson Arts Centre and Café; movement on that project was promised this week or next. He would not open the magic box and let all the evils fly around the room. It could wait till morning.