Upstate

by James Wood

  “Well, fine.” He was engaged now, they were talking on the same level, eye-to-eye about business. “But how are you going to make any money from music if no one’s buying it? I hate to say the familiar words—revenue model.”

  “And I really like the idea of borrowing songs,” she continued, for the moment ignoring his question, though he knew she would return to it in her meticulous, vigorous way, “because that’s what we all wanted to do when we were young. What’s the point of that huge box of moldy old LPs, half of which only have one decent song on them? The very minor works of Joan Armatrading … Godspell—remember you gave me that one, Dad, after Vanessa and I saw the film? But yeah, the business model is still unclear: How do you make money from borrowing? It’s hardly worked out very well for the public libraries, has it?”

  “I’d say you need two things: You need enough borrowers that the total sum of each small individual fee adds up to something substantial. Secondly, this means that they’re going to be borrowers in name only. They are still actually purchasers, but they’re paying so little that they’ll think of themselves as borrowers. And then they keep on doing it, with each new song. It’s a con trick, really.”

  “Yes, absolutely right—you actually have great experience! Hey, you could be involved with my venture, if you wanted to be.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Yes and no. No.”

  He was excited, flattered even. It was the first time she had asked for his advice or assistance in anything to do with her work. Mostly she just spoke at him, a fluent and incomprehensible code—click tracks, residuals, compression, A&R, mechanical license, and so on. (A code he had been stealthily cracking in recent years with the help of Google.) Surely he could be involved in some way? If only she didn’t need money.

  “And it’s not money I’m after. Just to reassure you. I don’t need help.”

  “I didn’t think it was.”

  11

  Again, as at Heathrow: he had the strange sensation that he was trying to be anxious about the situation, and that this was difficult because he was also on a rare adventure with his daughters. When had he last sat next to Helen on a train? No one had that kind of time anymore. And America was peculiar, more foreign than he had expected, it sharpened his senses. What a contradictory place: for every limitation, there was an expansion, for every frustration, an easement. The train was absurd, trundling along at barely sixty miles an hour. And Penn Station was a bloody embarrassment to a great capital city. To a great city, rather. But this journey was extraordinary … it had a pioneer feel—the enormous Hudson, with chunks of ice like broken pavement in the water; and the huge wealthy forests, the valley full of forts and power stations and opportunistic houses glooming on vast icy bluffs, the railway stations more like adventurers’ huts than anything in Europe—barely manned outposts without proper platforms, and with outlandish names … Poughkeepsie, Yonkers, Schenectady; the train high above the ground, the big wheels polishing the rails, and the driver blowing that childishly dissonant horn. Why did he blow it so often? Maybe because he enjoyed it so much? Perhaps that childish harmonica sound, the crushed klaxon peal, reminded him of being a boy again? Reminded him of Christmas Day, of blowing a spitty mouth organ fresh from the box. But then at other times it sounded less like a harmonica than an animal’s long cry from the prairie. And that sound, the big easy loiter of it, was America for him, though he couldn’t say what “America” was, except that sound. He would, at the very least, see the kind of life Vanessa lived in the States, her American life.

  “Tell me what you know about Josh,” he asked. “I mean, in practical terms.”

  “Vanessa’s kept quiet about him, hasn’t she? I don’t know if he teaches philosophy or works at a Starbucks. Or both. Actually, I do know. He writes about technology. For magazines and suchlike.”

  “I knew that, too. It doesn’t seem enough of a job, to my mind. Josh is short for Joshua, I suppose?”

  “Come on, Dad, what do you think? Of course it is. He is quite a bit younger than her.”

  “Ah, how very scandalous…”

  “Well, it could be a problem.”

  “Said as if you want it to be a problem.”

  “Not at all.”

  To be fair, Helen did know about age differences. Before she married Tom, she had lived for three years with a man who seemed dangerously close to late middle age, though being in the music industry he didn’t act like it—went around in jeans and trainers, even turned up at a wedding dressed like this, and had a very juvenile haircut. He collected bass guitars and, according to Helen, took twenty-four pills a day, bullshit supplements of one kind or another. Alan had fiercely distrusted him. He still took not one single pill regularly.

  “I fancy a wander to the buffet. You want anything?”

  Helen made it clear enough she would never eat or drink anything, except perhaps bottled water, from the Amtrak café car.

  “Mainly I just want to kick all those doors open,” he said, smiling.

  * * *

  Off he went, his black Oxfords ready for kicking. She saw again his slightly long sleeves, and how formally he was dressed. Good jacket, crisp dark trousers, white shirt. He was elegant, had the parched elegance of skinniness, like Charlie Watts—the same kind of narrow, compact miner’s body, all sinew and tendons. Pulleys and wires, somehow. Strength in that body, endurance above all. But also a harder body than his spirit, which was generous, expansive in some ways. At the end of the carriage, he stopped, a bit theatrically, looked back at her, and then kicked the hard black pad at the base of the metal door, quite sharply, as if it were a football. Nothing happened. He looked like an aging mime artist (but weren’t all the great mime artists aging?…). He’d missed. Another kick worked, and he disappeared into the next carriage.

  She’d reached a point in her life when she wanted both her children and her father to stop aging. She needed him to stay in the same place, not fade away. She needed him to be ahead of her. Maybe this desire for stasis was the very definition of being middle-aged, though surely she wasn’t quite that yet? But why didn’t Tom fully feature in her picture, her frieze? It was always just her and the twins; even in her dismayingly frequent nightmares, when in her sleep she battled men with knives and jumped out of fiery hotel windows, Tom was curiously absent. Why? Because she’d spent her teenage years in a household with one parent, and felt that to be normal? It wasn’t normal. She could see herself in the backseat of the warm car, her dress sticking to the seat, and her parents in front of her, where they belonged: Mummy in the passenger seat, holding a map or reading aloud from the newspaper, and Daddy driving, his hand on the steering wheel, the calm sweat on the back of his neck, and that funny habit he had of slightly adjusting the knee of his trouser leg after each gear change.

  There was a young family on the other side of their carriage, a girl and a boy, unremarkable but beautiful in their juvenility. Helen couldn’t keep her eyes off them. If she’d been entirely honest with her father, she would have said that her eagerness to leave Sony (apart from the important fact that the bastards at Sony didn’t seem to want her any longer, or want her enough) had a lot to do with the children. She couldn’t really bear the travel, the long hours talking crap with people who didn’t have kids, or didn’t care that she had. There were guys, always guys, who deliberately prolonged meetings, at exactly 6:30 p.m., so that they didn’t have to go home; whereas by that time of the day she had a need to be with her children that was drainingly physical. Sometimes she wished she could have two long lives, one straight after the other—a full life devoted only to work, followed by a second full life, devoted only to being a parent. The combination of the two was so difficult.

  Winter sunlight threw a white trembling dagger of illumination across her left hand with its adult veins and adult wedding ring, across her father’s New York Times, then briefly bleached out the virtual solitaire she’d set up on her laptop. They were coming into Albany, slowi
ng down, and outside there were the usual American urban scraps—a body shop; redbrick warehouses with smashed milky windows, their bricks daubed with the fat, dirty-white, risen-loaf lettering of graffiti artists; parking lots with new cars in orderly ranks; a flat-roofed mall; and a weirdly new high school. She wanted to go home. But the light, the light: she loved the clear, therapeutic blue of these American skies! When skies are blue, we all feel the benefit … one of the greatest, saddest songs ever written. Her father was returning, clumsily bearing a flimsy cardboard box. He seemed to have bought everything in the buffet: a bag of Doritos, a large coffee, a bottle of water, and some kind of soi-disant Danish. She could see it sugar-sweating inside its clear plastic wrap.

  “You’ve gone native,” she said. “How were the carriage doors?”

  “My aim got better and better.”

  She closed the laptop, not eager for him to see how she was squandering her time.

  “We’re coming into Albany, so we don’t have long now. Eat up! It looks revolting.”

  12

  She had a broken arm. Vanessa came carefully down the steps of her house to greet them beside the cab, her right arm in a—pine-green?—cast. How could she not have told him?

  As soon as he saw his elder daughter, Alan felt he couldn’t say anything to her about her depression, and was filled with despair. He couldn’t say anything to her. But she looked surprisingly good, had lost weight. Her dark hair, always beautiful, wasn’t baked into that matronly bun she had affected in recent years. It was loose around her neck. She was wearing tight jeans, and there was something else: no glasses. Had she left them in the house, or did she now have contacts? Her sweet face. He kissed her, held her to him, and then, as she went to embrace her sister, he said, “What happened? With the arm?”

  But Vanessa, in a very Vanessa-like way, was fussing with Helen about whether they had given a big enough tip to the cabdriver. “We gave plenty,” he said, annoyed that this was how they would begin things. He pulled the bags from the cab’s boot, and double-slapped the roof of the car, as he’d seen the bloke at JFK do it: a smack on the rump and the horse is quickly dispatched. Not so, the driver was examining some piece of paper and wasn’t in a mood to hurry. “Why can’t he bugger off?” Alan muttered. Vanessa was beginning to look a little fearful, as she did whenever she perceived any conflict, and especially the glint of her father’s temper, and Helen, seeing this, picked up their bags and moved them all inside. It was caustically cold, anyway.

  Vanessa’s house was at the top of a gentle hill, near the college campus, on what seemed to be the more expensive fringes of Saratoga Springs. It was almost rural, certainly more rustic than he had expected. There was a lot of wild land around the house, dead patchy grass mostly covered with snow, huge bare maples. The place was charmingly run-down. Probably Victorian, covered in long horizontal strips of elephant-gray wood, with tall old windows he immediately thought of as maiden-aunt windows (the old loyal face glimpsed for a second behind the uneven glass, the blurred candle flame, the winter outside) and an ample front porch on which two white rocking chairs, icily disabled, gestured at warmer seasons. The stairs were rotting, with several nails coming out. Josh was no handyman, then. Give him half an hour with a good hammer.

  Inside, the house was large, loose, original. He wanted to study the pictures on the walls (some fancy abstract stuff; an Indian with a turban against a beautiful washed-pink background), to look closely at the bright fabrics thrown over the sofa and over the very baby grand piano (not a surprise, that piano, given Vanessa’s early devotion, but a surprise still), at the rugs and books—these last were piled absolutely everywhere, as if in exaggerated homage to “the life of the mind.” He had an urge to be dismissive, vaguely vandalistic. Surely she hadn’t read them all? But the place seemed comfortable and free, somehow, and he also admired that. This was her life, then! This was where she read her books, and wrote (or failed to write). And played the piano. Cathy and he used to laugh at the repetitious practice, the same wooden pieces day after day, Van’s narrow back turned to the room, the Mozart and Burgmüller audible anywhere in the house, even in the upstairs bathroom.

  He took a minute before going into the kitchen, where Helen was talking, at speed and volume, and Vanessa was stirring something in a pot with her good arm. Helen sounded confident as ever, but Alan knew that she spoke loudly, more forcefully, when anxious, and he was fairly sure that Vanessa knew this, too. How tedious that everyone was so nervous.

  “That looks uncomfortable, can’t Helen do it for you? What happened to the arm?”

  “I already offered, she won’t let me.”

  He had a strong desire to touch Vanessa again. He and Helen had not embraced or even pecked each other on the cheek last night, when he turned up at her room. The BlackBerry partly to blame, of course.

  “I fell down the steps you just walked up. Just before Christmas, on the first ice of what’s feeling like a very long winter. The good news is, I get the cast off next week.”

  “That’s what happened?”

  Vanessa didn’t reply, but briefly slowed her stirring and looked at her father, a glance of tenderness, of pity almost. For an uncanny instant things were turned upside down: for he was supposed to protect her, if need be, not the other way round …

  “Well, look after it. Those planks are going to get loose, maybe that was what made you fall. The nails are coming out, I saw when I was walking in … I like the house, by the way! What you’ve done with it. But the maintenance must be a nightmare. The windows are all shot, for a start.”

  “Dad, it’s been here for a hundred and twenty years, quite a long time for an American house. Tell me about New York—last night, the hotel, the trip up here: everything. What do you think?”

  “Great scenery from the train. You’ll have to explain to me exactly what this ‘upstate’ thing means. Are we ‘upstate’ now?” asked Alan.

  “It’s quite simple,” said Vanessa. “Technically, it means New York State north of New York City—up the state, like upriver. As opposed to downriver. Actually, it’s a bit more specific than that, and generally refers to northern New York State. Yes, where we are now.”

  “That Hudson sure is one amazing river,” he added, with an attempted American twang.

  “All American rivers make English ones look like piddling streams. I like that.”

  “Dad availed himself of the Amtrak café car, against my advice,” said Helen. “He’s now officially addicted to Doritos.”

  “Sensible man.”

  “New York was pretty crazy for me, as per usual.” Helen looked very finished and urban, alongside Vanessa. “Silly meetings, large amounts of dreary business, buzz buzz buzz. I’m just extremely tired,” she concluded, perhaps more flamboyantly than she’d intended to. Alan was about to mention what she’d told him on the train, about wanting out of Sony, but refrained. Perhaps she didn’t want Vanessa to know.

  “Then welcome, both of you weary ones,” Vanessa said quietly, “to the world-famous Saratoga Springs Rest Cure. Now, some lunch.”

  “Where’s Josh?” he asked.

  “He’s in New York—research for a piece. He won’t be here till tomorrow. He sends apologies. He’s very keen to meet you both. Of course, he’s heard nothing whatsoever about you.” That was more like the old Vanessa, whose sense of humor resembled her sister’s, so that at the dinner table, years ago, if you had shut your eyes, you couldn’t tell them apart—joke for joke, cruelty for cruelty, sweetness for sweetness, allied but apart. Now they sat at Vanessa’s big pine table and had a late lunch. Through the drafty tall windows, the white landscape had a frigid glow. But the clouds were closing in. He watched his two highly intelligent, grown-up daughters, as they approached and drew back from each other, like switched magnets: Helen apparently more confident, acute, with her slightly sharp teeth, elegantly handsome, but also being disagreeable somehow, as if she were necessary medicine Vanessa just had to take; Vanessa quieter
, softer, with her long dark hair and slightly squinting eyes, but exact, precise in her every word and thought, and so, to him at least, quite as formidable as her more obviously intimidating sister. How had he and Cathy produced them?

  Helen was talking about Tom and the twins—Tom didn’t really do his share around the house, she was so tired when she got home, she had so little time, and it was frustrating that the nanny hadn’t tidied up or done the kids’ dishes but was just squatting on the ground, as if her willingness to get down onto the same level as the kids absolved her of adult duties. Again, there was the blade of complaint, as if it were all his fault or more likely Vanessa’s. In fact, Alan didn’t care for Tom that much, was a little suspicious of him from the start, Tom quickly breaking one of his cardinal “male rules”: he clapped his hands when someone told a joke or a funny story. (Everyone was now doing this, but men at least could refrain.) And Vanessa, deliberately refusing to provide the desired sympathy, was now slyly implying that Josh was a domestic paragon in this respect, a male feminist who did all the cooking and shopping. When it came to cleaning—“the historic feminist fault line,” she said—neither of them cared too much about it: they muddled through. Of course, Vanessa conceded that unlike Helen, they didn’t have children, so there was less mess, less work to do. Less of everything, thought Alan, with a tremor.

  And then Helen, perhaps softened by Vanessa’s concession, was asking her sister about her academic work, and Vanessa got that delicious look of frowning concentration she had whenever philosophy was at issue, her tongue unconsciously peeking out of her mouth. She explained that she’d recently been to a conference, and shyly suggested that part of the conference was devoted to a discussion of her old paper about marrying Anglo-American analytic philosophy with European theory, and how she delivered a kind of postscript to that original paper.