“I understand,” the boy said. They were looking at a snapshot of four generations.
“No, you don’t,” the man said. “This was snapped right here in Leicester Square, in front of the statue of Shakespeare, because everyone thought I was a writer. I tried, but couldn’t do it. I’d sit all morning and bang out a few lines, and everyone said they were terrific, but no one would publish them unless I paid for it. So everyone said you need an agent to get published, but you can’t get an agent unless you’re already published. I was a great disappointment to your mother. She thought she was marrying the new Shakespeare because I won the Senior Poetry Prize. It all seems bloody stupid now. For five years I sat at that typewriter with my thumb up my nose while your mother supported us. Have you lost your voice?”
“Hello.”
“Jolly good.” He had signaled the waiter in the Swiss restaurant to come over. “This wine is wretched,” he said. “Bring us something decent: a Neuchâtel red, chilled.” The waiter said nothing, but picked up the bottle and padded off. It was clear he didn’t believe the man, who was dressed, below his good sportsjacket, in jeans and filthy sneakers.
“This is you,” the man continued, “on my lap. You were a fat thing, and your head came out like a zucchini. And that’s your grandpa, who is still a fat thing, and that proper Englishman with the mustache and the stiff lower lip is your great-grandpa. Was. He never forgave me for marrying an American, and Jewish to boot. He told me it would never work out. Quite right, too. Would you like this picture?”
“I don’t know,” the boy said.
“Then to hell with it.” The man crumpled the photograph and stuffed it in his cup of coffee, which spilled over the printed tablecloth. “If you don’t want something hard enough”—his voice rose and diners at the nearby tables turned their heads—“then to hell with it.”
The boy sipped his coffee and said nothing. He looked at the man steadily, without expression. He was a tall boy, pale, with brown curly hair and the faint beginnings of a mustache.
“That’s what your mother did to me,” the man said, “hardhearted bitch. Sorry,” he added, as the boy raised his chin. “She did the same thing with old Rex when he got flatulent, just chucked him out. Said she couldn’t breathe the air and he was staining her nice little ruggies. Waiter!”
The waiter stood silently, staring at the tablecloth.
“There’s been a terrible accident, a frightful accident,” the man said. “This time I’d like an Irish coffee, put in a double scotch instead of whiskey.” The waiter carried away the cup with the crumpled photograph bobbing on the surface.
“But she liked this square, all the birds, all the trees—that’s why I thought we could meet here. You’ve changed, you’re looking more and more like her. Little eyes. But you’re tall—in two years I’ll be a shrimp next to you. She liked these big ugly knobby trees with the peeling bark and a thousand starlings on every limb, and I liked all the theaters around them, so it was a spot we could get together on. What do you feel, sitting here?”
“I don’t know,” the boy said again. “Nervous, I guess.” He paused. “But not very nervous.”
“Yes, just like your mother. She was not very anything. That’s American, I think.” He leaned back, waving his arms and teetering in his chair. “But we’re all Americans now. We queue up for burgers and milkshakes and pizza and Star Trek VII. Bloody joggers all over the city, knocking down old ladies and picking them up again, nice as pie. Confess, you’re a jogger, am I right?”
“Yes,” said the boy. “I’m on the track team at college.”
“I knew it. You have that lean and hungry look that worried Caesar. Do you think too much? Are you a dangerous young man?” He pulled out a mashed pack of cigarettes. “What kind of young man are you?”
“Just average,” the boy said. “Not dangerous. I’m studying to be an engineer.”
“Yes, all American boys become engineers, don’t they? It must be a law of some sort. They build and they knock it down, they build and they knock it down. I would think it’s exhausting.”
“I have to go,” the boy said, beginning to rise from the table.
“No!” The man put his hand on the boy’s thin wrist. “Please don’t go, it’s been so many years. I know I’m not doing this well, I’m out of practice, is all. Don’t go.” The boy sat down again, but perched on the edge of his chair like a fledgling ready to test his wings. “Do you know what I do for a living?” the man asked. “Does your mother ever tell you how I make the money I send?”
“She says you do all right.”
“I sell mail and laundry chutes to apartment buildings. It’s quite profitable, actually. Better than bloody sonnets or short stories, what a fool I must have been! Everybody needs them—chutes I mean, not sonnets. Letters and dirty laundry, that’s what the world’s about. But at twenty-one”—he patted his pockets, looking for the photograph—“who knows that? And I think I was the youngest man ever to reach the age of twenty-one, I was that silly. Your mother liked that for a while, staying up all night to see the sunrise, sitting in the park waiting for the starlings to come out, things like that. You know what I like about you?”
“What?” said the boy.
“You look people in the eye, that might be American, too: the English have trouble doing that. We tend to stare at a light fixture while we talk, haven’t you noticed?”
“You look at your drink,” the boy said, and the man laughed, beckoning the waiter. “A pint of ale to stare at,” he said to the waiter. He winked at the boy. “Never mix, never worry.”
“That makes white wine, red wine, scotch, and beer,” the boy said. “You won’t get sick?”
“Sick?” said the man. “I’m dead. Your mother killed me. She was a keeper-tracker, too. ‘That’s your fourth,’ she’d say. ‘That’s our sixth movie this month, that’s the tenth time you said that, that’s the twelfth time you’ve gone to the loo.’ She got tired of my spending her money, I suppose; it must have bored her, cheering me up all the time. So she went back to Newport, la dee da, and took you with her. Do you like America, really?”
“I do,” the boy said, “I like it a lot. I’ve met nice people.”
“They’re nice if you’re not black or Mexican or Polish, whatever. Your mother told me some stories.”
“Just read the papers,” said the boy. “I mean the English papers.”
“Yes, people prefer their own, don’t they? Paint your bum green and sooner or later someone will shoot you. Only natural, after all.”
“I really have to go. I have a date.”
“Listen, did your mother ever tell you what we did the first time I was away from you? I flew to America; we had this crazy idea that American publishers would like my work better than the English publishers did. I was only going to be gone a week. You were about two years old and we were afraid you’d forget me, so we made a dozen copies of my passport photograph and pinned them all around your crib, probably scared you to death. Did she tell you that?”
“What did the publishers say?” the boy asked.
“Never saw them,” the man said. “I stayed at the Algonquin and got terrified by the whole thing. I’d look up an editor’s address and walk around the building and duck in the nearest pub for a drink. Came home in three days. She had taken down the photographs. You had eaten one of them apparently. She never told you that?”
The boy was standing, shrugging into his jacket. He took the man’s hand. “Good-bye,” he said. “Take care.” He strode off on long thin legs.
The man turned around to watch him. He struggled to rise, then sat down again, pulling out his wallet. “He’s a good lad,” he told the waiter. “Did you hear him? ‘Take care,’ he said. He has every reason”—he held the waiter’s eye—“every reason to dislike me. And still he said, ‘Take care.’ I bloody well will, too.”
Through the windows he could see the starlings swooping and swerving over the bright marquees, in and out of the tall plane trees, mirroring the dense crowd below as we surged toward our dim and irresistible destinies.