No. 4 Imperial Lane

by Jonathan Weisman

  As he read, his urine bag would cloud over with the strain on the bit of kidney still functioning. I offered one afternoon to take him down to the Imperial Arms, or just for a push along the boardwalk. The weather was finally clearing. It was still cool, but clear. A long look at the ocean would do him good, I assured Hans. He sighed, and I dropped it.

  “I could compose a note to the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, expressing on your behalf your sincere ingratitude as you face the loss of kidney function. We could have some fun with it.” I smiled at him, overeager to add some gallows cheer to the changed atmosphere.

  “Yes, David, why don’t you do that, this afternoon, while I’m napping,” Hans said wearily.

  James and Wills had screeched down from London one afternoon in their aging but potent Jaguar. I was happy to see them, to break up the sad monotony. I’m not sure Hans was. They sashayed through the front hall, unannounced, and into Hans’s room, bearing a bottle of Barolo and a tin of foie gras, not the homegrown variety of the pre-accident crowd but they knew what he liked. They couldn’t help but notice Hans’s down state, and they acted accordingly.

  “Oh, darling,” Wills said to Hans, leaning over him with flamboyant intimacy. “You’ve looked better, but haven’t we all?”

  I had seen Hans play along with such displays a dozen times. This time, he sighed.

  “Hans, really, we heard about the kidneys and all. I’d say what a pity if I hadn’t heard your grousing about the state of your life—you know, the state of actually living—for so long. Now’s your chance. Do not go quietly into that good night and all that twaddle. Rage, rage, rage.”

  He shook his fist at him dramatically, his face scrunched into mock passion.

  “I’d love to rage, Wills, really, but there’s not a lot of petrol in the tank. David,” he said, turning his head to me, “maybe you could rage for me.”

  I smiled and made a cursory fist at the sky, well, the ceiling.

  “Bravo,” said James, “having a young man at your side to express your death rattle for you. I couldn’t imagine a better way to go. And he’s not that bad-looking.”

  He checked me out from head to toe with exaggerated lecherousness. “I’m thinking of getting myself one of these Community Service Volunteers, you know. I’ll say life is too much of a strain at my age. Do they let you look at their pictures before you choose?”

  “He’s not a rent boy, you know,” Hans said, trying to engage.

  “I asked for a volunteer, didn’t I? I have no intention of paying him.”

  Wills sensed the joie-de-vivre gambit was getting them nowhere.

  “Really, Hans, why so glum?”

  There was a long, deliberate rolling of the eyes at that one, then, “If only I had actually accomplished something, you know? Trite, I’m sure, but these are the things one contemplates at the end.”

  “Oh, pshaw,” Wills scoffed with a wave of a hand. “Darling, you’ve accomplished a lot. Elizabeth, come help here. Elizabeth?” he called out into the hall, but there was no answer. She was at the poly. “There you go, you accomplished Elizabeth. You made coyote-fur straitjackets fashionable in certain circles.”

  “Young David here was nearly beaten up for that fashion.”

  “I said some circles, love. Really, Hans, nobody accomplishes anything. Maria Callas had a few really good records that will be forgotten by the next generation with their bloody compact discs.” He said “compact discs” with an exaggerated drawl, as if they were a disease. “Even old Maggie Thatcher, once she’s sold off British Rail, British Air, British Telecom, British tea, Lord knows what else, to the Americans I expect, who’ll remember her beyond the Spitting Image puppets? You can’t get caught up in all that achievement stuff. It’s all far too American.”

  “You know,” Hans said, “if I could just take a really good shit before I die, maybe I’d go happy.”

  “I think we can help with that,” James said semi-seriously.

  They stayed maybe an hour, talking that way, cheering the old bugger up, then gunned the Jag off Imperial Lane on an excursion to Lewes, where the old ladies serve high tea with all the crusts cut off.

  “I need to leave.”

  I said it flat out. I was sitting on Maggie’s bed, thumbing through a Melody Maker, an article on That Petrol Emotion. A friend in the States—well, a girl I had been in love with who hadn’t loved me back—had given me a tape of them before I left. It hadn’t taken, but of course context is everything. Now I was reading about John O’Neill and his old band, the Derry Hitmakers, and the near miss “Big Decision” had with the Top 40—charted at 42!—as if it meant something, really meant something. Maggie was lying on her stomach beside me, her head propped up on a hand, reading a thick sociology textbook.

  “Alright. Late, isn’t it? I can give you cab fare,” she offered absently.

  “No, Maggie, I need to leave Britain, to get on with my life. I’ve gotta get a fucking job this summer, you know.”

  She looked up. Our eyes met, and she let hers linger as she took off her glasses. But she was miffed, and I wondered what line I had crossed this time.

  “David, whadya want me to say? ‘Don’t go’? ‘Stay with me’?”

  “I dunno. That might be a start. Or how ’bout, ‘I’ll come with you’?”

  Her eyes drifted downward to the well-worn white sheets—bedclothes, the Brits call them.

  “You don’t mean that, David.”

  “Mean what?”

  “You don’t want me to come home with you.”

  “What the hell, Maggie? I thought those were the plans all along, at least for the summer.”

  “Plans change.”

  A little edge had crept into her voice. She was working up to something.

  We lay in silence for a long time, the Cocteau Twins carrying on unintelligibly on her vertical turntable.

  She sat up finally.

  “David, I have something to tell you.”

  Now I looked up.

  “We can’t go on kidding ourselves. I think it’s best that we, well, maybe, David, I’m sorry, I think it’s not working anymore. I’m sorry, David.”

  “What? What about your fucking courgettes and cucumbers? Was that just bullshit?”

  “David, I’m sorry. I really am. I know you stayed for me. It’s my turn to follow you. But I can’t. We’re just different people now. I’ll love you forever, David. I will.”

  “‘I’ll love you forever’ is the thing you say when you’ve stopped loving someone.”

  She sat looking at me, her mind whirring almost visibly, trying to decide whether to deliver the next blow.

  “There might be someone else.”

  Now it was my turn to sit bolt upright.

  “Might? Might? What the fuck does that mean, ‘might’? Who?”

  “Well, we haven’t slept together. I’m just, you know, interested. He fancies me. He’s, he’s bloody English, David.”

  “Who is it, Maggie?”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “Who? You owe me that.”

  “His name is Grod.”

  “No it fucking isn’t Grod. What’s his fucking name?”

  “Grod. David, I’m doing you a favor.”

  She threw off the bedclothes, reached over to put on a bathrobe (“dressing gown,” she’d say), and headed toward the door. I lay there, utterly incredulous—and thought of Cristina.

  Maggie turned back. Tears were streaming down her face; she clearly wanted to show me that—and to see if I was reciprocating. I looked into her eyes, sadly, but for all the wrong reasons.

  “Big Steve was right,” she said. “There is something about you.”

  I walked all the way home from Buxton Road, down past the train station, through the darkened Lanes and their shuttered, precious shops, past the Pavilion, flowers just beginning to appear, coaxed out by professional gardeners, a few tourists still lingering on the grounds, and along the Grand Parade to Kemptown. I ran throu
gh the long history of my love affair with Maggie as my body hurtled downhill toward the sea, flowing with gravity. “Grod,” I kept repeating in my head, “Grod. Who the hell was Grod? One last trick for Maggie Fucking Highsmith to play on me. Probably didn’t fucking exist.”

  I knew my anger was just some show I was putting on for myself, some momentary bit of self-pity. As the terrain flattened at sea level, I felt my back straighten and my spirits lift. By the time I climbed up the stoop at No. 4 Imperial Lane, I was feeling alright, really. It was three a.m. I was alone—for the first time in a long, long time. I slept well, till long after Hans’s nurses had left. I don’t know why, but he let me sleep.

  A week later, I came in late to empty Hans’s urine bag one last time before retiring for the night. I drew his curtains and pulled the thick woolen covers over his head. The stereo was silent. His rubber-tipped stick was still strapped to his hand, but he was not reading the book open in front of him. He was staring out at some invisible point in the room, propped up on his pillows. He was staring, I suppose, at the end.

  “Leave me uncovered for a while longer,” he said, in a barely audible exhale.

  “Of course,” I said.

  I came around the far side of his bed and sat down, compelled to stay. I reached over his emaciated chest and unstrapped his pointer, then lifted the book and reading pallet from his bed and brought them to the end of the room.

  “David,” he murmured softly, “do something with your life—no, do more than one thing, more than one thing.”

  “I will,” I answered, almost in a whisper. Sound seemed out of place in the gathering darkness and near silence. Hans’s vacant eyes were bereft. The sadness was overwhelming. I had not seen that in him.

  “David, I’m not one to impart any wisdom. Lord knows, I have none to give. I did one thing of importance in my life. One. I like to think I saved a life, probably two.”

  He paused to catch his breath. His head rolled slightly toward me.

  “Whose?” I ventured.

  “Tell me about Cristina.”

  “I did what you asked me to, Hans. I offered my help.”

  “Did she take it?”

  “Yes, she did, much to my relief. I’ve been helping her prepare for her exams.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “She wants to go into fashion design or something like that, but she knows first she has to go to university. She’s going to read history, I’m pretty sure, maybe English literature. She’s good at both, I mean really good. But she’s been reading up on how to get into the fashion industry. She’s serious about it. And smart. I’m impressed.”

  “What did I tell you about American ambition?”

  “I don’t think I gave her that.”

  His head turned to face me, and our eyes met without quickly averting. I wondered if it was the first time that had happened. He held that gaze, his mouth turning up in the slightest of smiles.

  “I was a pretty young thing too. All the benders at university wanted to claim me as one of their own. I enjoyed the attention. I think I invited it, to be honest.” He stopped to swallow.

  “My loss of beauty may have been a little more dramatic than most, but it was nothing special when you think about it. Happens to us all. I look at Cristina”—he paused for several seconds—“and I imagine what she’ll look like in fifty years.

  “Beauty is not meant to last, but it’s also not meant to be wasted. It’s a trap, a lure, maybe a means to a greater end if you’re lucky, or skilled. I did nothing with mine. There was a girl for a while, Segolaine. You know her from our little reading sessions, I’d imagine, David. I loved her name. I loved her too. But I didn’t know then how much that matters. She was my last chance, as it turned out, but I didn’t know that at the time. You’re not meant to regret what you couldn’t have foreseen, but…”

  He caught his breath.

  “I had thrown my life away even before all this, before my beauty was taken from me. I was born with more chances to find meaning than almost anyone. And here I am, unable to see beyond my bed skirt.”

  He motioned me to draw near.

  “If I lose Cristina, if she amounts to nothing, it’ll be for nothing. She’s the one—she’s the life I need to have saved.”

  We sat in silence for a long time. He turned his face back to the ceiling, the light from the streetlamp peeking through the curtain and illuminating one side of his face.

  “I’ll protect her, Hans.”

  Then tears flowed. They rose from nowhere, or maybe some long-dry well that was disrupted by a tectonic shift deep within the heart. I was startled, out of control. I moved to wipe my face with a sleeve, but I kept crying. Drops flowed in tracks down my cheeks, dripped off the end of my nose, fell from my eyes as I leaned forward to compose myself.

  “David, are you going to be alright there?”

  I laughed and sat in silence for a while.

  “Yes, Hans, sorry.” I sniffled.

  “Should I read you a letter from the stack?” I asked in a hush.

  “Take one for yourself, David. I know you enjoy them.”

  I stood and gestured with his blankets, a slight lift of the edge of his voluminous wool pile. He nodded, almost imperceptibly. I covered his head, drew the curtains more tightly, turned out the light, and left him alone.

  Dear Bet,

  Don’t say I never take the initiative. I contacted Sir Gordon who miraculously had your address at some hotel in a place called Luanda, very posh I’m sure. I was quite distressed at your last letter. I believe the word you were looking for is “rape.” You said he took you. I take things all the time and barely ever elicit any anguish. You seem to be suffering quite a lot of that. You could have hardly known this man you call your husband before he became that. You say he is a changed man. I ask, “Changed from what?” The lover of those opening days and weeks of a romance is a miraculous thing. Every word he utters is magnificent poetry, every gesture both gallant and gentlemanly or, if coarse, in an utterly attractive way. You shake the drug from your system and pray that what you behold as you nurse your hangover is an acceptable facsimile of the lover you thought you had. There, I sound like Mother.

  Still, I trust things have settled down. Far be it from me to pretend to understand the torment of war suffered silently by your young doctor. Men are resilient creatures. Dr. Joao, by now, has surely resumed life as himself. It is up to you to decide whether that is the man to share your life with. For most of us, that decision comes before you kneel before the altar, but Elizabeth Bromwell has always followed a slightly different path. Please keep me informed about all this, darling. I may have to saddle up and ride to the rescue, or at least inform Papa.

  As for me, well, I have done everything you have told me not to, and it has cost me dearly. Segolaine has flown the coop. For someone who has shared her bed with innumerable clients for money, she was awfully touchy to learn that I was having a few birds on the side.

  Yes, I took that confounded job at the bank. I am a loan officer, putting my political and historical education at the University of Edinburgh to good use listening to the sobbing appeals of aspiring homeowners, the petit bourgeoisie of Paris and its suburbs. I really am soft. I’ve approved all but one loan, and that poor fellow was dead broke, determined to open the ten-thousandth cooking school in this saturated city. To drown my guilt, I sautéed sheep’s kidneys in cream and butter for one of the lovely young clerks who was consoling me for the loss of my girlfriend. You must try them some time, the kidneys, not the clerks.

  I do not mean to be so flip, but I can’t help myself. I miss Segolaine a lot. She stuck by me ever so long. I don’t know what she saw in me, but I fear no one else will ever see either.

  You must tell me about this new land of yours. I did look it up on a map. It’s large and far south. Just thinking about it makes me sweat. And by the time you read this, no doubt, you will be a mother—and I an uncle, fancy that. Tell me what brand of genitalia the littl
e dear has, and I’ll send a proper present. I am serious about this Joao character of yours. You must keep me abreast.

  Your loving and worried brother,

  Hans

  Chapter Sixteen

  A half-dozen Alouette helicopters swept over Serpa Pinto like bulbous-eyed giant mosquitoes in a menacing swarm. The grasslands passed below, seemingly unpopulated. But that was deceptive. Neto’s MPLA, those once-soft intellectuals from Luanda, had brought down four Alouettes in 1973. João Gonçalves watched the landscape of Eastern Angola sweep beneath his boots, a London-educated physician trained in trauma care through three years of war, readying for combat as an ordinary medic.

  “Your turn, Major, go,” a lieutenant yelled inaudibly. Gonçalves fell from the chopper, hit the marshy grasses, and rolled as he was trained. He grabbed the pack that had been thrown down beside him, unslung his weapon, and took off after the other soldiers for the relative safety of a small copse on the edge of the elephant grass.

  The enemy could be canny, reluctant to engage. They knew time was on their side. That past September, not four months before, liberated Guiné declared independence. Amílcar Cabral had been assassinated in January ’73, gunned down by at least thirty of his comrades, dark-skinned, real Guineans tired of the platitudes and orders of the Cabo-Verdiano half blood and his intellectual elite. What the Portuguese took as a sign of chaos, the Africans knew to be the final chapter of purification playing out before Guiné was swept into history. Moses would not be crossing to the Promised Land, but that didn’t mean the Israelites wouldn’t be taking Bissau.