“You smell of a good fire,” Liesel said to Jean, while Dana opened the fridge and stared at it for a minute and then went out. “Du bist mein gutes Mädchen.” You’re my good girl. But then she stopped and dried her hands. Something had been worrying her and she remembered what it was (it rose to the surface again)—that Jean would fall asleep on the road. “Why don’t you take Paul with you? You can keep each other company.”
“There isn’t room in the car. For the way back.”
“So maybe Paul should go.”
“Why should Paul go?”
“You just got off a plane. You already took Bill to the airport this morning. What’s Paul doing? He doesn’t do anything.”
Jean said, “He’s putting Cal to bed.”
For a moment they looked at each other, and Liesel knew that if she said anything more explicit, her daughter would criticize her, but she also thought they were basically in sympathy and wanted the same thing.
“He can go afterward,” she said, but she was already giving in.
“That’s probably too late.”
“You must be dead on your feet.”
“I had a nap,” Jean said. “Anyway. After what just happened, I feel totally awake.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened, I got in a stupid … Dana can tell you. It’s nothing, I just mean I’m awake.”
Before she could go, they had an argument about the keys. Jean insisted she had given the Volvo keys back to Liesel, in case she wanted to go shopping, but Liesel couldn’t find them in her purse. This went on for several minutes, while Jean felt increasingly anxious and annoyed. They looked in all the ordinary places, on the counter by the oven, on the bench in the front hall. I’m late, I’m going to be late. In the end, they found them in Liesel’s study, on her desk, which is probably where Jean had left them, saying, I’m giving you the keys, so nobody was right, nobody was wrong. This is what Liesel claimed. “I’m not always crazy, it’s not always my fault,” she said, still in her apron; her hands were red from the cold water. Jean, relenting, looked at her. “You’re not always crazy,” she said, and Liesel followed her out the front door, down the steps, to say goodbye.
“At least this time of year there are no mosquitoes. Wait,” she said. “Wait, let me give you some chocolate for the road. In case you get sleepy.”
“I’m not sleepy, I’m fine,” but Jean waited and watched her mother go carefully up the steps of the house, not actually hurrying but moving her arms and leaning slightly to indicate haste, and after a minute returning, under the yellow glow of the front-porch light, with her purse in her hand.
“This is good chocolate,” she said, passing over a half-eaten tablet, which was still carefully wrapped in the foil. “It’s eighty-five percent.”
“Too good for me.”
“It will keep you awake.” And she said again, “Du bist mein gutes Mädchen. If you feel sleepy, pull over.”
“Okay, whatever,” Jean said. “I love you,” and reversed carefully over the dip in the drive. Liesel watched her until the car had disappeared around the bend in Wheeler Street, under the arching trees, a winter’s evening, two nights before Christmas, cold enough now that she was glad to go back inside.
*
It’s a boring drive to Dallas-Fort-Worth Airport, you just take I-35 the whole way. The radio was broken on the Volvo, and the tape player had swallowed its last cassette. All you could listen to was whatever was on that tape: one of Nathan’s old grad-school albums, an early Billy Bragg, Talking with the Taxman About Poetry, not his best. But Jean put it on anyway and knew the words well enough to sing along. Something about the tinny guitar, his voice, reminded her of Nathan’s old room at Holywell Manor, Balliol’s graduate student housing, just opposite the law faculty. Jean visited him there over spring break during her final year at Yale. He was going out with … who then? … the American girl, and sometimes stayed over with her, and so Jean slept on his futon. His English accent was terrible, but he liked to sing along: Whoops, there goes another year, Whoops, there goes another pint of beer—and the world it opened up to her again, of his goofiness and happy ambition, before the success kicked in, almost brought tears to her eyes.
When she was young, eight or nine years old, starting to read for herself, to want to follow adult conversation, Nathan was her point of access: a high-school kid, dark-skinned and wild-haired, with an unshaved mustache, too clever for his teachers and quick enough to pick fights with Bill and Liesel, too. He could always see the principles at stake in any situation, no matter how small or petty it seemed, and could push you into positions you didn’t know you occupied, until you found yourself defending stuff you didn’t want to defend. So you gave in or gave up and let it go. She used to practice copying his handwriting, one of those facts about the depth of her child-devotion she only mentioned to him fifteen years later. “Huh,” he said; he didn’t know what to say. He seemed genuinely surprised, and she realized (not for the first time) that the childhood she had lived through wasn’t quite the same as her brothers’ and sister’s. No matter how close you are. She had reached the frontage road now and had to focus. Traffic wasn’t bad, it was Sunday night, and anyway the Austin rush hour comes earlier than London’s, but the ramp was short, and something about the distortions of the overhead lights and the urgent noise of tires on rough asphalt made speed and distance difficult to judge. But then she was on and that was it—a long straight ride to Dallas, almost due north, a couple hundred miles of interstate, some of it brightly lit but much of it also dark, country dark, where you had to chase the glow of your own headlamps between the lines.
She wasn’t sleepy, that was one thing, at least not sleepy in any ordinary way, she felt wired and drifting and strangely emotional—just the rush of the car (she was doing seventy-five, sometimes eighty), the mild existential danger of her own speed and the pressure of the night around her, the wide empty countryside around her, and the presence of other cars, coming and going, the luck or chance of passing them like this, with their own urgent personal reasons for driving somewhere on a Sunday night, all these people, produced in her a kind of intensity of consciousness. When she stayed with Nathan that year (it was just a weeklong visit), on some level deals must have been struck inside her, decisions were being made, to come back to Oxford, because as soon as she graduated from Yale that’s where she went. To follow in Nathan’s footsteps, she even signed up for the same degree. Sometimes she wondered whether she had failed Susan somehow, by not directing more of her imitation-flattery at her big sister, and whether this failure involved a more general kind of failure, to grow into a normal woman—to go through not just the rites of passage but the ordinary feelings you’re supposed to go through, about boys and sex and motherhood. So that now she was stuck at the age of thirty-two trying to make up for lost ground.
Paul once said to her, when she first told him about Henrik, “There’s plenty of time to make your own life with someone.” As if she were trying to steal someone else’s. She got mad at him, but it’s not always easy to tell, especially in the heat of the moment, if you’re pissed off because someone’s right about you or because they’re wrong. And she knew that what she was doing, the reason she was thinking these thoughts through, was to prepare herself for a long conversation with Nathan. They had three hours together on the ride back. Sometimes it’s easier to talk late at night, jet-lagged, in the dark, when you’re both staring at something else, like the road in front of you. Of course, for the first part at least the kids would be awake, Clémence would probably sit between them in the back. But then they’d fall asleep (after ten hours in transit, it was even later East Coast time), and the noise of the road was loud enough to make it hard to hear in back. The Volvo was an old car—there was no sound protection. Even the background warmth of sleeping kids contributes to the sense of intimacy.
Well, it doesn’t matter. You never have the conversations you want to anyway; almost never. Somet
hing always comes up, other people get in the way. But still she prepared herself, she wanted to get her story straight, even in her own head.
When Henrik was first diagnosed, she thought, that’s it. Her first reaction was selfish: that’s it for me. When shit like this happens, people don’t walk out on fifteen-year marriages. One morning he woke up with an ache in his “balls area,” this is how he put it. The truth is, he had felt something before, a sort of numbness, like you get when someone kicks a football into your … between your … legs. But when you’re forty-seven, forty-eight, a lot of things hurt, especially when you get up in the morning. And if you pay attention to everything that hurts … But he was also coming down with a cold, something was going around the kids’ school, everybody back after the long summer holiday, the temperature had dropped, leaves were falling, real life had begun again.
He called Jean to tell her that he wasn’t coming in—an easy call to make, because she worked at the company and needed to know. In other words, one of those conversations he didn’t have to conceal or disguise. Monica was almost out the door, dragging the kids to school. Emil and Freya still needed to be walked (Sasha left earlier for her cello lesson), and he had come down in his dressing-gown to make himself coffee and wave them off, before going back up to bed. For some reason it gave him pleasure to be able to speak openly to Jean, for legitimate reasons, in front of his wife. Later, around eleven o’clock, he called again, just to pass the time. “I think I found something on my … I think I felt something … on one of my testicles. It hurts a little, too.”
“Have you talked to somebody about this? Does Monica know?”
“It’s fine, I’m sure it’s … I’m just lying here and feeling bored and sorry for myself.”
“Go see someone,” Jean said. “Go see someone today.”
“I don’t feel well, remember. That’s why I’m in bed.”
“I don’t care,” Jean said.
Like many practical and competent people she treated complaints as problems to be solved, but she also had a nervous tendency, she took everything seriously and had a habit of thinking in terms of worst-case scenarios. Maybe this is what he wanted from her, and he was using her anxieties as a kind of test, to see if he should be worried or not.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll go see someone, but not today. This is nothing new.” He meant, the feeling of numbness or the slight ache. “I can go tomorrow, when I don’t feel like shit. I can go next week.”
Ten minutes later Jean called back to say she had booked him an appointment with his GP—for three o’clock. (She had worked as his assistant for several years; it felt natural for her to take charge in this way.) So he went.
Among the various things she blamed herself for, Jean sometimes added this to the list: that she had somehow made the cancer happen to him, either because it was a kind of accretion of his guilt, something his kidneys couldn’t process or whatever … or because she had made him go to the doctor and it was only because the doctor found something that it was actually there. He had to wait three weeks for an appointment at the clinic in UCL and then another week for the results. In other words, almost a month of keeping the lid on her anxieties, which is more or less what it felt like. She was conscious of a kind of rattle in her manner, an almost audible low-level and constant need to release internal pressure. They were carefully polite to each other, both at work and afterward, in their moments of manufactured alone time—sharing a taxi, for example, to a screening at Soho House. Jean couldn’t tell if he was distancing himself from her, for understandable reasons, in preparation for the necessary break, or just hunkering down, or if in fact she herself was pushing him away. Selflessly or selfishly, who knows.
Still waiting for results, Monica rented a cottage in Somerset for half term and he drove down with her and the kids on Saturday morning. Jean’s envy felt like a kind of poison, which makes you unrecognizable to yourself. One night he called her from his cell phone—their first contact in almost a week. The cottage had no reception so he had to walk about ten minutes along a B road to the nearest pub, where there was free Wi-Fi. (“I told Monica I wanted to check my email.”) It was about six o’clock, the sun was setting, he would have to walk back in the dark. Already the pub was filling up, she couldn’t hear him clearly, background noise of people and music, the signal quality was poor, so he stepped outside and she could feel the change in atmosphere like a shift in weather—he was standing outside in the mild evening cold.
The clinic had called while they were having lunch at Coleridge Cottage in Nether Stowey. What he had was a stage 3 embryonal carcinoma. It had spread to his lungs, and maybe elsewhere—he needed more tests. The good news was … it was … he wasn’t very good at the terminology, yet—seminomatous, which is typical of … older patients. He laughed. Most of the time it’s very treatable. Jean was still in the office, about to go out for the evening—she was meeting a few girlfriends at the Curzon on Shaftesbury Avenue, and took her cell phone into the bathroom, so she could listen in peace and talk to him without being overheard. Or break down if she wanted to. He said, “It’s what Lance Armstrong had. But not as bad.”
“Okay,” she told him, as clearly as she could. “What do you want me to do?”
“Look,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about it all day. I can’t live like this and make them care for me.” No, thought Jean, you can’t, and knew what was coming next. But then he said, “I think we should move in together. I want to tell her.”
“That’s a terrible thing to do to somebody,” Jean said.
Even in the bathroom she kept her voice low. The floor was tiled (a strand of wet toilet paper lay by the loo) and everything echoed. There was a smell of running drains and disinfectant. She leaned against the door, with her back against it.
“I think it’s better in the long run. It is already terrible, what we’re doing. But I have to … I have to live a life I want to live. I want to live it with you.”
“What about the kids?”
“We need to get an apartment together. They can’t come and visit you—in that room.” (Jean rented a room from a woman near Brondesbury Park; she had access to a shared kitchen.) “You are not saying anything now. I don’t know if this is something you want.”
“Yes,” Jean said. “I’ll do whatever you want me to. I love you.”
“Okay, good. Me, too. Okay,” he said. “I should go back now—it’s dinnertime. I’ll see you Monday in the office. We can work everything out.”
When the phone went dead in her ear, she didn’t move for a moment. It was like lying in bed and thinking, I should get up. The pressure of conflicting feelings … a kind of standoff … but she also thought, if my life has an emotional center, a moment on which all the different forces converge, it’s this, and I’m going through it now. But maybe this is just a kind of self-importance, which means you haven’t digested or thought through what’s actually going on. Not yet anyway. When she came out of the bathroom, she sat down at her computer again and typed “Lance Armstrong’s cancer” into Google and followed the various threads until it was time for her to meet at the cinema, about a fifteen-minute walk away—across New Oxford Street, busy with buses, the lights coming on and people going home—into Soho.
For the next few days, until he came back, apart from everything else that she was worried about (and she spent much of her spare time online, looking up his diagnosis, coming to grips with the various terms, trying to understand the treatment options, and following the science and evidence-base behind recent developments), she also worried that he would change his mind. Maybe it was just the heat of the moment. He was stuck in Somerset with the kids. But his explanation when he saw her again sounded perfectly reasonable.
“I knew as soon as I heard from the clinic that I had to tell Monica. I mean, about us. You can’t ask someone to care for you on this basis.”
They were having lunch at one of these bibimbap places you find on the backstreets
by the British Museum, among the secondhand bookshops and expensive ceramic stores, the tartan outlets. Hot sauce bottles sticky on the plastic table; a strangely provincial air of quiet and neglect. The staff seemed to live downstairs, where the kitchens were. There was only one other group of customers, four men, sitting in the back by the restroom door. Henrik and Jean had at least a little natural light, such as it was—falling between tall gray buildings.
“I expect there will be a certain amount of drama in the next year,” he said. “Even if it is mostly very boring. And I won’t ask her to feel whatever she will feel about that … we have not had such feelings for each other in many years … without telling her about you. And as soon as I tell her, our marriage will be over. I don’t expect anything else.”
But even then, as she lay in bed that night, too excited to sleep (not happy exactly but deeply agitated, and debating whether she should call someone—Paul, Nathan, Susie, Liesel? anyone but Bill), she remembered what he had said and wondered if it left room for doubt. As if it were still up to Monica in the end. But she never found out if that’s what he meant, because it didn’t matter: Henrik was right. Monica kicked him out. And for a week he stayed either on the sofa bed in the office (which they sometimes offered to “friends” in the business, other directors and producers, visiting London) or at her room in Brondesbury, while she looked for an apartment. For years she had lived, more or less, in student squalor—either in Oxford, in a shared house on Marlborough Road, near the Head of the River pub; or lodging in various rooms in northwest London. Her landladies were mostly divorced mothers whose children had grown up and moved out. But now she was looking for her own first grown-up flat, and they needed three bedrooms, so that Henrik’s kids could stay on weekends, once all that was sorted out.
The fact is, she was having fun, and she felt guilty about that, too. And not just fun—she knew that whatever else she was doing, she was living more importantly than she had been living before. Spending more money, living on a grander scale, with bigger things at stake. They looked around Kensal Green Station, because the rents were still borderline affordable and they could catch the Overground train to Euston and walk from there into Bloomsbury. It’s like shopping for an imaginary life, which you then pay for and live. Here’s where I’ll sit and have my coffee, here’s what I’ll look out on from my bed. A city life, with a commuter train to catch each morning, and a home with somebody to come back to at the end of the day.
Christmas in Austin Page 15
