by Zadie Smith
She said, “You see, when I married your father . . .”
She said, “I think it’s probably important to do rather more, and maybe think a little less?”
She said, “Where do you keep your cups?”
Before she left, she gave him a box of papers and stuff relating to the relations. “You mean this sort of thing?” she said, placing it on his nightstand.
Sarah Hoffman’s family. Trinkets and photographs and facts. Here was Great-grandfather Hoffman as a young man in European pose, looking cocky, clutching two other young men by the shoulders, the three of them with their thin ties and legs apart, standing in front of some building, some new enterprise, never to be finished. In another, four pretty sisters stand in the snow. Their heads are pitched at various melancholy angles. Only their lean Afghan hound looks at the camera, as if he knows the future secret of their terrible deaths, the location and the order. Elsewhere, a sepia postcard shows Fat Uncle Saul. A studio portrait of him as a boy with palm tree and pith helmet, his sausage legs astride a stuffed miniature pony. This same Saul had believed that the Hoffmans were related to the Kafkas of Prague, through marriage. But what’s marriage? Alex dug deeper. A tram ticket for a defunct line through a defunct city. Ten zlotys. A pair of sloppy socks of scarlet wool with lilac lozenges. The qualification certificates of an émigré Russian teacher, distant cousin. One bowler hat, crushed. But let somebody else make a mournful list, thought Alex. The people who keep boxes like these are the type who follow ominous noises into the dark cellar, who build their very homes on top of Indian burial grounds. People from movies. Everyone in these photographs is dead, thought Alex, wearily. Tiring, all of it.
3.
The night at Adam’s, the night in question, this was not the first time Alex meditated on the letters. He had been going more often in recent months, thinking it might help. The procedure was always the same. They got stoned. They sat on the floor, holding big blank drawing pads. Pens at the ready. Staring at the walls. On the far wall, ten years ago, Adam had painted a crude Kabbalistic diagram, ten circles in strange formation. These were, according to Adam, the ten holy spheres, each containing a divine attribute, one of the sefirot. Or else they were the ten branches on the Tree of Life, each showing an aspect of divine power. Or they were the ten names of God, ten ways in which He is made manifest. They were also the ten body parts of Adam, the first man. The Ten Commandments. The ten globes of light from which the world was made. Also known as the ten faces of the king. Also known as the Path of Spheres:
On the opposing wall, Adam had painted something simpler and, to Alex, more beautiful. All twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The Path of Letters.
As far as this sort of thing goes, they were done very well, Adam having a real ability with a paintbrush. Staring at them for hours in silence, though: that takes a certain commitment. The Journey to God. It is very long. It is quite dull. And always at the moment when Alex was feeling ready to switch on the television and give it up, Adam would begin to visualize his spine as a palm leaf. Off he would go from there, traveling through the spheres, losing himself. But for Alex there was no merging, no loss of self. He didn’t understand this idea of unity in nothingness. That sort of thing was beyond him. He felt no magic. Just the thick useless marijuana fug, staring at the letters, sensing nothing much, except vague anthropomorphisms: didn’t that one look like a man waving his fist? A crown? Half a menorah? A table? A sleeping fetus? A long-haired sprite?
IT WAS DIFFERENT for Adam. For him, the spheres and the letters put on their full show. Within each he saw worlds, souls, divinities. No doubt it helped to be able to read Hebrew, a trick Alex had never pulled off. But more: Adam did not forfeit wonder. Everything in Adam’s world was wondrous. He read only a page of Torah a month, for each letter of it, to him, was a book in itself. In a single meditation session, Adam could copy down his six chosen letters at least twenty times, rearrange them, permutate them, make calculations relating to their numerical values, or their colors, or the prophets they symbolized, or the music they made. Sometimes his soul soared upward and materialized in Israel. It was the time of the glory of the Temple of Jerusalem. The letters were now many stories high, like skyscrapers leaning over the land. He flew around them, examining every corner. He bathed in their light. He lay down at their feet. Lucky Adam.
“Take a seat,” Adam had said that Tuesday night, throwing Alex a velveteen cushion. The room was as ever: boxy, dark, candlelit. Joseph was cross-legged on the floor. Esther was stretched along the sofa, all legs, too high to move. A video was playing, a favorite of Esther’s, an eighties teen romantic comedy with the sound turned down. Alex had no expectations.
“We’re going to try something a bit different,” Adam said, opening his wooden box. He passed Alex a tiny pill. White, inviolate.
SOMETIME LATER, IN the video (which was never different, in which people never changed and kept their beauty and did not die), the high school boy realized that the plain and poor girl was beautiful and rich in her heart. There was a final, redemptive kiss in a car park. Without warning, Alex lifted Esther from the sofa, grasped her and kissed her.
“Get off me,” she said.
“Stop pushing me,” she said.
“Where are we going?” she said.
But they were in the car by then. Were they? Alex paused in the middle of this posh street and closed his eyes, trying to get—as the legal drama shows like to say—a mental picture. Was Esther with him? Did he have the Kitty by then? Had he clipped her to the windscreen like a parking ticket?
He recalled that they had stopped in a garage for food. It had seemed to Alex that everyone in the garage was speaking Cantonese until he looked at them. Then they would speak English. Cantonese, English, English, Cantonese! Back in the car, he turned to Esther.
“Everyone’s speaking Cantonese. Sometimes,” he said. He was giggling. But Esther was crying and looking at her thighs.
“I’m so selfish,” she said.
It seemed to Esther that the two fetuses she had aborted (one Alex’s, when she was only seventeen, the other some man’s she met in college) were in her thighs, one in each, and she could see their fingers, pressing to get out. It must have been soon after this that a bus stop dashed across the road like a lunatic and threw itself at Alex’s car.
AT THIS MEMORY, Alex felt his face wet with tears. He did a goyish mime, for nobody’s benefit, to the effect that something had blown into his eye. He used his sleeve. He tried employing the same breathing techniques Adam had taught him to use during their meditations. In the middle of this performance, he was approached by a teenage French boy. Hurriedly, Alex gave fictional directions to a place neither of them had ever been to. The boy turned left into who knew where. The sun brightened a notch. It made the older gray city stone flash white, and for the first time in a month of smog, a pair of distant palaces winked at each other, two friends at opposite ends of a party when the crowd suddenly thins. Alex tried humming. Some of the shopping women smiled at him, but with strain, as one smiles at the elderly, infirm or disabled. Alex persevered, humming all the way to a bollard and round a corner. Now he was singing a famous song. He was walking to its rhythm. The song was morphing. This was often his way. In the past he had spontaneously composed “Let’s Go to Court,” a song about his landlord, set to the tune of “Let’s Get It On”; “I’m So Bored” (a synagogue favorite) to the tune of “You’re So Vain”; and “Incompetency,” a song for varied bureaucratic and work-related situations, thieved from Prince’s “Controversy.” Just now he was singing a radically altered version of “Norwegian Wood” in which Esther appeared, sitting on the pavement next to what was left of the car. Biding her time. In the song, as in life, she accused him of loving Adam more than her. But it was not true. That is, she screamed it, but she was wrong. He adored her. He just wasn’t always so good at showing it. In essence, the problem predated the car. Alex was careless, in small ways, in the ways that count. His
inability to remember the title of her Ph.D. (“Modes of Something in the Development of the Iconography of African Jewry in the Something”). The state of his bathroom. The books she recommended and he never read. He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.
They had been together as children (he was sixteen when she, at fourteen, reached out a quick hand for his ankle, hustled him into a hedge and kissed him); she was as familiar to him as Mountjoy. He was capable of thinking of her in that very way—as a kind of wallpaper that he did not notice until a spotlight was thrown on it. Even her pacemaker—hard and square, across which her skin was tightly pulled—was to him now an everyday affair. He had been through every stage with it: fear, awe, affection, sexualization. He no longer even attached to it the idea of her mortality; but then, she had encouraged him to be free with it. To clutch it, to dig behind it and make his thumb touch his fingers through her skin, on its other side. He was confident of her heart. Only when they attended their respective universities did he become panicked at the thought of losing it. While there she slept with other people, one man and one woman. Alex thought he might lose his mind. It took that sort of thing. More recently, if a friend of Alex’s from some unconnected world—work, college—met her for the first time and commented on her beauty, only then did he re-realize it. Re-realize? But what other word for it?
He didn’t believe in therapy; he could do it himself. Yes, he imagined his love on a screen in front of a preview audience; he saw them watching her and ticking the boxes. Yes, he wanted his love at a distance, physically close but in some other way hard to reach. The stranger’s initial impression of his love—as an African princess, or as the look-alike of this or that actress—appealed to him in a way that her various realities could not. He wanted to meet her for the first time, over and over. He wanted to always be at the beginning of the movie—not in the car park but in the classroom. He was in awe of her beauty and he never wanted to lose that awe. Yes, Doctor, yes. I want to be her fan.
Esther’s head was shaved like a boy’s. Lying next to her, he felt he could hold that coconut head for the rest of his life. She could beat him in an arm wrestle and most arguments. She was bigger than he, and more beautiful. But he was tortured by the idea that she would grow old! He understood that in all likelihood this sort of thinking would lead him to die lonely, without anyone. He told himself the story that this was the great tragedy of his heart. The great tragedy of his heart was that it always needed to be told a story.
4.
Pointlessly, Alex ran the very last hundred meters, the gallop of an uncoordinated tall man, like an animal recently shot in its flank. And then stopped on the sudden. Just next door to the auction house, the popular musician Leonard Cohen was looking bored by a boutique, alongside a woman who was not. Alex was not a boy anymore; he had no intention of going over and begging for an autograph. But Leonard certainly gave him pause. He did find himself hovering nearby, discreetly; he did watch Leonard spit some gum onto the pavement, pat the woman on the shoulder and then walk towards a famous coffee shop. “Suzanne.” That was a brilliant song. Something of Mercy. “Sisters of Mercy.” An eternal classic. But he was almost an hour late for this auction.
A minute later, Alex found himself in the coffee shop against his rational will, standing behind Leonard, admiring the foreverness of Leonard, his infinite nature, the fact that long after the physical Leonard was worm food, somewhere the virtual Leonard would still be moving, singing and being interviewed. And he was balding. It was incredible. He had an inbuilt distance. Even standing beside him, Alex felt worlds away. Leonard’s fame was going to save him. Alex felt resentment build. Why Leonard? He just looked like a guy. What was so special about him? And why was he in this coffee shop anyway? What kind of a famous person walks into a coffee shop full of ordinary people like Alex?
Alex stood behind him now, angrily watching. Resenting the splendor of Leonard’s loafers, the jeans, the smart jacket, seeing Leonard drum his fingers against the counter, hearing Leonard say:
“A mocha, can you do that? But could you not put the chocolate on top? And two parts milk to one part cream? That’s great. Thank you, yeah, that’s perfect. Actually—yeah, could you put that in an extra . . . yeah, like another cup—they’re really hot, these—I don’t wanna have to sue you, ha! Ah, that’s great. That’s fantastic.”
Goyish, thought Alex-Li.
CHAPTER FIVE
Tif’eret
BEAUTY • Praying in the workplace • Quote unquote
• Jimmy Stewart was Jewish • The Kabbalah of Elvis Presley • Drinking games • Once upon a time in Europe • Brian Duchamp • Proceed calmly to the nearest exit
1.
Auction Room 3 works like this: it is not a real place but a sort of cathedral or synagogue to which Alex comes every other week and speaks by rote. He counts ceiling tiles and thinks about God. He prays, after a fashion (God help me; Jesus Christ, get me out of here). He hopes that the phone bidding will cease, he hopes someone will let him own the things he loves. But nothing changes. Alex says what he has said before, making the same silent curses, watching the prices soar and escape him. The auctioneer, with his fruity, theatrical voice and his gavel, hits a block of wood in precisely the same spot, no matter the day. And the American, Jason Lovelear, says:
“Leonard Cohen? You’re kidding me—Leonard Cohen? Is he still out there? He’s not coming in here, is he? Jesus. I used to date his sister, Chloe. Chloe Cohen. Big girl. Thyroid. Not when I met her. It developed later—then I had to end it. Leonard was very dismayed. A lot of bad feeling went down between me and that guy.”
No, it is not true. Lovelear didn’t always say that. But taking into account changing nouns and pronouns, he always said something like that.
“ALEX-LI TANDEM,” said Lovelear.
No one’s physicality depressed Alex quite as much as this man’s. Lovelear’s hair was either black and he was dying it blond or vice versa, and if ever he had an upper lip it was not in evidence now. Although he was not atrociously overweight in terms of pounds, his flab was ingeniously placed. He had side bellies. The small fold-up chair he sat on could not contain them all. One of the many things TV does not show you is the potential range and horror of the human form. For this alone, thought Alex, it is rightly celebrated.
“Hullo, Lovelear. Sorry—late.”
“At last. We saved a seat for you. Dove, move up, man. Okay. So. You look like a disaster. Why you so late? That girl, right? I’d be late if I had a girl like that.” Here, Lovelear made an obscene International Gesture. “Yes, sir. But didn’t you drive?”
Alex took his place between Jason Lovelear and Ian Dove, two men who considered themselves friends of his. He got the relevant catalogue out of his case, opened it up on his lap. He circled Lot 159, an alarm clock that came with a certificate of provenance confirming its residence in Graceland between 1965 and 1969. Ian Dove passed him a wooden paddle with the number 10 on it.
“ ’Mazing, innit, the estimate on that. Two thousand quid for an alarm clock. Can’t be right, can it?” murmured Dove with the exact same intonation with which a normal man might say the following sentence: Terrible, innit. And she was only forty. Forty years old and she got hit by a bus. And we’d only been married the day before.
“Yeah, amazing.”
“Do you know what I reckon?”
“No, Ian.”
“I reckon we’ve got a serious Elvis fan on the phones. That’s why the prices are going mental.”
“Right.”
“Do you know who I reckon it is?”
“No, Ian.”
“I reckon it’s Jackson.”
“LaToya?” queried Alex-Li, just for a change. “Or—wait—not Jermaine?”
Ian Dove’s kindly face creased up. He ran both hands through his prematurely salt-and-pepper hair. Ian Dove worked on the shop floor of a plastics factory near Gatwick. Every so often his wife found him profoundly drunk, asleep in their airin
g cupboard, curled up by the boiler. He could only afford to be a part-time Autograph Man, but he took these auctions very seriously, as a hobbyist will. He was the only man Alex had ever met who envied Alex his life.
“No, Alex—I mean—”
“I know, Ian,” said Alex, softly. “It’s all right. You’re probably right. I’m not feeling myself today. Ignore me.”
“Otherwise known as Shut the hell up, Dove, you’re boring us.”
Ian wrapped his arms around himself. “Sorry I spoke.”
“Sorry I spoke?” echoed Lovelear, wide-eyed. “Is that a phrase—Sorry I spoke?”
Lovelear had spent ten years in England and grew no fonder of it. Alex often wondered what it must be like, to be stranded in a little country that seems a shrunken parody of your own, like Lilliput.
“Anyway,” said Lovelear, turning to him, “you missed some choice items. And I can tell you this: no kid stuff today. Uh-unh. Naturally, John Baguley took maybe, I don’t know, like seventy percent of the rock memorabilia? Such an incredible asshole. You know he just opened another shop. In Neville Court? He’s like the goddamn Ronald McDonald of autographs now. Asshole. And everything else has been going on the phones. And then, get this, then they start into the eighties film stuff, and who comes up?”
“Ally Sheedy,” said Alex.
“Right. And which insensitive loser,” said Lovelear, turning to Ian, “suggests I buy it, like it wasn’t already hard enough ending that relationship? Like it doesn’t just rip me up, seeing her face.”
Alex, unfairly, was making a certain pointed International Gesture (tongue tucked in front of lower teeth; long, invisible chin, tickled by fingers of right hand). Ian accidentally smiled. Lovelear let out a four-tiered expletive. It was a line from a movie. Ian shivered. Alex suspected that there was something about being sworn at by an American in the cinematic setting of an auction house (North by Northwest; Octopussy) that was deeply meaningful for Ian Dove, who lived in Little Marlow, a small English village in which no film has ever been made or set. Something about it moved Alex too. He was so familiar with the dialogue between Lovelear and Dove that he no longer heard the specific words themselves but only their vibrations, their constant ringing bass note. He knew, for instance, what the disapproving woman behind did not know and could not appreciate: that underneath the words, ugly and amateurish, there was a beautiful elegy going on, which never changed. Every conversation between these two men was actually the same conversation, different words, same meaning. A sort of modern Kaddish, a religious chant:
