by James Wood
“I might move from my current church, actually,” said Helen. “Farewell, Sony.”
“Well, this is news,” said Vanessa, looking naively at Alan.
Leaving Sony, she explained, was the right thing to do at this point in her career, after several successes; she wanted to travel less. If she moved now, she was still young enough to build another career in the same industry. Corporate life didn’t really suit her, she said, with an unconvincing grimace.
To Vanessa, Helen seemed as she had been since they were teenagers: intimidating, sure-footed, intimate only when under pressure. Even now, a mother, she carried with her the glamour of her erotic history, so busy and extensive, and so different from—until Josh!—Vanessa’s pallid, intermittent experiments. All those rumors: Helen used to hint at intimacies with a famous producer, a guitarist, a singer. The dark-haired guy from Crash Test Dummies … Josh righted the imbalance, thank God. Helen had a remarkable authority of otherness that their father possessed in abundance. Authority of otherness was the phrase that had just formed in her head, as she watched her sister being theatrically authoritative. Like Dad, Helen had the ability to turn away from the world, from distraction and entanglements, and become the work she was doing, to care about it absolutely while she was performing it, to the exclusion of everything else. Alan had little fatherly authority of the traditional kind. He rarely lost his temper, wasn’t irrational or physically imposing. He never bullied. His authority had to do with his ability to turn away from them and become someone else, someone who was not a father. It was the power of banishment, a royal canceling, an unblessing—kingly, in that sense, and queenly in Helen’s case. In their work, they showed they could do one thing, one thing only, and master it, and she felt this singular mastery as a reproach to her own lack of worldly success. Did she lack focus, ambition, sheer strength? Had she ever had real strength as a philosopher? Maybe for a brief period when she was working on her Ph.D. Maybe then, for about two years, at Princeton, she cared only about philosophy, maybe in those two years she was a kind of athlete of thought, hard-edged, single-minded, possessing great physical and mental stamina. Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing—she’d never read that Kierkegaard book (when you’d read one Kierkegaard you’d read them all, and The Sickness Unto Death was quite enough for her), but the title mocked her from the bookshelves. She didn’t will one thing only. She had no purity of heart. She didn’t will anything much, right now, except to continue to possess Josh. Anyway, philosophy wasn’t, couldn’t ever be, just one thing. But neither was music, or building a company. So what was this otherness they both had? Was it merely the ability to will a single obliterating triumph, rather than make do with several daily compromises, the very compromises that constituted life as she understood it?
Vanessa got up to go and make some coffee. She remembered spending a boring afternoon in her father’s office. She was too young to understand what was going on, but was impressed by how utterly transformed Alan was, once at work—it was as if he’d put on a magic cape. He spoke a language that was almost foreign, a closed, coherent system, and he spoke it with fluent power. He expected a junior employee to entertain his nine-year-old daughter; twice, he looked up from his desk and looked at her and right through her: not coldly, but with efficient neglect. She imagined that Helen, so like their father in several ways, functioned similarly when at Sony.
It was Josh who drew Helen out: “Anyone who knows about the technology can see the music industry establishment is way behind the curve. Right? In, like, ten years there’ll be no record stores, and CDs will be as outmoded as old 78s.”
“It may not be quite as fast as that,” said Helen, bending forward as she spoke, more animated now, the surpassed BlackBerry forgotten in her left hand, “but that’s the future, yeah. Basically. A move away from the studios, also away from radio, and toward the computer, the phone, the screen.”
“‘Video really did kill the radio star,” Josh said with excitement.
“‘In my mind and in my car,’” Helen sang, with her hand over her mouth.
“It’s a famous song, Dad,” explained Helen. Her eyes were gleaming. “The point is, the studio isn’t relevant any longer, or won’t be, won’t be the unit of power—not in the same way. The musicians will have greater power—”
“Because, going forward, they’ll probably be recording and producing and selling themselves all at once,” added Josh. “They’ll own the label.”
“Right. And there’s justice—for decades the studios essentially shafted their musicians, imposed punitive contracts, often mismanaged the marketing. Malcolm McLaren with the Sex Pistols. And what about Motown—most of those musicians got almost nothing for their work. They had to sue Berry Gordy for royalties, yet he made a packet from the label. Do you know why you hardly ever hear crash cymbals on the classic Motown songs?”
“No, but you will tell me,” said Josh, smiling. Quite flirtatiously, Alan thought, with sudden alarm.
“Because many of the recordings were done in what were basically the living rooms and basements of ordinary Detroit houses. The mics weren’t good enough—crash cymbals would have overwhelmed them. Actually I feel pretty utopian about this. I’ve never been a producer, I started as basically a company accountant, because I had a degree in economics, and supposedly knew about money, and became ‘an executive,’ whatever that means. I think we’re on the verge of a moment when someone like me, who was traditionally considered at best a suit and at worst the enemy, could become the ally of really great new musicians. I want to liberate them to do their best stuff. Back to a Motown sort of model, but without the exploitation. A revolution.”
“That does sound utopian,” said Vanessa, who had come into the room with the coffeepot. She wanted to sound as neutral as possible.
“It has to be utopian, because I’d be running a business that also functioned, at least at first, like a philanthropic foundation.”
“But it couldn’t be a charity, it surely has to be a business?” asked Alan.
“Oh, by the way, Dad could be involved,” Helen said jubilantly.
“Would you?” asked Vanessa. Alan shrugged, opened his hands to the air. For a second, with both women looking at him expectantly, he was forty years old and they were young children, asking nothing more than whether he would come outside and push the swing he’d attached to the massive dusky copper beech. Mummy was bored of doing it. Nothing more: he could do that.
“Yes, I might well,” he answered.
“What would you do?” asked Vanessa. Alan said that he wasn’t sure, but that perhaps his experience in building and managing a reasonably successful company from scratch would be of help.
For some reason, a statement that would have been easy for him to utter in a familiar context made him awkward, in this house in Saratoga Springs, with another generation, perhaps two other generations, watching him. He added that he had a few business rules that had worked well for him over the years. He might get them into a book one day. Josh asked what they were, and again Alan felt strangely shy. “Well, do you know the real reason why we beat the Germans in the Second World War?”
“Wait, who’s we…? I’m just kidding,” said Josh.
“Because we had better supply lines than the Germans did. That’s a fact. The British were more efficient than the hyperefficient Germans … Well, the same goes for civilian life. You’re only as good as your suppliers, all the way down the chain. Sort out who supplies you, find the people you can really trust, and that’s half of the work done there.”
“Interesting,” said Josh, turning away.
“Dad is famous for his ‘rules,’ in our family,” said Vanessa happily. She loved being with her family. It was all she wanted, really. “Some of them make sense and others are extremely mysterious. Who wants coffee?”
“In what way mysterious?” asked Alan, mock-woundedly, smiling at Vanessa.
“Well, the one about how you should always back your car into
the drive, because the journey out is more important than the return. I think that counts as practically a piece of metaphysics in the business world.” Everyone was amused, and Alan realized that this was the first time he’d heard Josh laugh—the lad seemed to suck in air even as he expelled it.
“You also used to say,” added Helen, “the one thing a parent can reliably do for his children is to give them swimming lessons, so they don’t kill themselves by drowning.” There was—so Alan felt—a quick silence in the room, and Helen moved on rapidly. “And you used to tease Van, when she was at her most vegetarian, that it’s very hard, when eating a roast chicken, to think it wasn’t expressly created to be eaten.”
“Ha, I’m not sure that’s a rule, exactly,” said Alan. Vanessa, passing coffee, added a few more: Dad always assumed that people who had bidets in their bathrooms were into “kinky stuff.” And much as he admired Nelson Mandela, it was an uncomfortable fact—Van emphasized the word “fact”—that the quality of South African white wine had declined since the end of apartheid. And he was oddly proud of never having had hiccups.
“You’ve never had the hiccups?” asked Josh.
“Not to my knowledge.”
“That’s a weirdly cool achievement,” he said.
“You know, I think so, too,” said Alan, unsure just how sarcastic Josh was being.
21
Alan sat alone in the hotel lobby. His drink was slowly rotting the paper napkin it sat on. Dixieland jazz again marched tastefully through the air. He was sunk in a fusty red velvet couch. He closed his eyes. Helen had gone to bed; it was far too late to phone Candace—he’d not spoken to her today. He felt uneasy, raw, vulnerable. At dinner—he and Helen ate together in the hotel, leaving Van and Josh for time together at home—he had revealed feelings about Josh that he had intended to keep to himself. Helen had come to the young man’s defense, she was stimulated by his juvenile cockiness. Too stimulated … He’d seen Helen and Josh today, the way they sang that little jingle, like lovers sharing a cigarette, he’d seen that gleam in Helen’s eyes. And as a father, he was put in the painful position of having to judge, from Josh’s possibly aroused perspective, the relative sexiness of his daughters: yes, from that point of view, Helen was the clear winner. She had a body and she knew what to do with it. Of course, he was reacting to nothing more than a breeze of flirtation between two adults. But it made him uneasy. Not for what it revealed about Helen—she was enjoying herself, she was a social tourist, she’d be gone in two days, she was probably unaware of it—but for what it revealed about Josh and his care—that was the necessary word—for and of Vanessa. He was tempted to warn Helen against too obviously favoring Josh, but realized that it was essential that he say nothing at all to either daughter about the matter. Van hadn’t witnessed most of the flirting—she’d gone to the kitchen to make coffee and have a smoke out back. And if he mentioned it to Helen, she might increase her attentiveness.
Josh was warm, charming, handsome. But where did the boy get that slightly tiresome confidence? At dinner, Helen said he was just young and enthusiastic. She said he was “a bit of a techno-nerd.” (Though also “quite cute.”) Van had said “Jewish-confrontational.” Maybe that was part of it. Alan sometimes liked to indulge the fantasy that the Old Testament had been written not about the Jews, but about the British. Just imagine it for a second: the whole Bible concerns the story of … the British! Imagine how bloody good we’d feel about ourselves, imagine the deep, invisible reserves of confidence that flow from the knowledge that your little national origin story is one of the founding religious myths of the world … Far better, even, than having Shakespeare, Newton, and Darwin on our side. Maybe that was it. Jewish-confrontational. Or perhaps American-confrontational? He’d learned a couple of things today. Americans really did pronounce “news” as “nooze.” And they apparently used the phrase “going forward,” as in, “So what, going forward, should Senator Obama say about race, to neutralize the issue on the campaign trail?” (Josh pronounced the word as “foward.”) Imagine the English using that phrase!… more like “going backward.” One thing that united Josh and Helen, he could see it now, was their slightly utopian streak—they believed that things were changing or about to change, changing for the better. They had plans and projects. They both thought that Senator Obama had a real shot at the job. Good for them. Van seemed left out of this excitement, not just because the two were now singing silly pop songs to each other and talking about the future of music, but because all that Van truly cherished and loved, all that she studied and practiced, belonged so deeply in the past.
And what about me? Alongside Josh, he felt old and nostalgic and pedagogical. He didn’t want to teach old lessons to new students. Why, just before leaving Van’s house, did he start on his stupid denunciation of the computer? Josh had been saying something about how most music would soon be not just played but composed on a computer. Irritated by his certainties, Alan said something to the effect that maybe all this was true, but you would never be able to go up to a computer and sing a few notes from a melody, and ask it to identify that melody. “Not quite true,” said Josh, “we’re getting there with solo voice recognition. Hey, we could experiment right now with my laptop.” And even Van had a sympathetic, slightly sad look, as she jumped in: “Dad, actually Josh has written a lot about this—there’ve been incredible advances in the software.” The verdict—all three agreed—seemed to be that pretty soon you could go up to a computer and sing a garbled melody and get an identification: “Beethoven Fifth, first bar.” His vulnerability nagged at him—especially that sympathetic face of Van’s. She obviously didn’t want to correct her old man in public, but history—progress, rather—forced the correction.
There was a woman sitting opposite him, on the other side of the low glass table; he didn’t know exactly how long she’d been there. She was slightly turned away from him, perhaps to mitigate the awkwardness. “Okay if I sit here?” she asked. “The chairs are up on the other tables, and the bar’s just closed.”
“Absolutely,” he answered, too quickly, in the accommodating English way. “I’m not going to stay here for long anyway.”
“Oh, I’ve blown it again. Something I said!” She grinned, and he understood that she’d had a few drinks, and that maybe she often had a few drinks. He reckoned her to be five or so years younger than him. Her dyed black hair was past due—a frozen white stream, the late fee as it were, ran right down the middle of her parting. She looked a little wrecked, had the undernourished plumpness of the drinker. But everyone more or less his age looked wrecked; you became slightly fond of everyone your age, as maybe you were once fond of everyone in your football team or in your regiment. If he saw wreck, what on earth did she see in him?
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“England. I’m visiting my daughter here.”
“Yeah, I thought so—you have a great accent. Like one of the Beatles.”
“Oh no, that’s Liverpool, further south … thanks anyway.”
“I’ve been to England,” she said. “To London. Also Cornwall. It rained … like shit the whole time. You don’t mind me saying that?”
“It does. Rain a lot. Like shit, in fact. Was that recently?” He guessed that it wasn’t, that recent life involved drinking and sleeping it off, and hanging around this town. He found her quite attractive, partly because she was opposite him and talking to him, but not only because of that—there was some grandeur in her manners, a ruined prestige that intrigued him. He liked her American drawl, her deep voice, and her eyes, which looked sore.
“I went there as a kid, a few times. Twice on a boat, once in a plane. No, twice in a plane … Oh hell, whatever. Twice in a boat, and twice on a plane, I think … We’re not allowed to smoke here, right? Do you think anyone would stop us? That little fascist at the bar would—he just invented a bullshit state law that says he’s not allowed to serve someone more than three drinks in one hour.” Her voice was rising
and Alan was keen to go to bed and leave her to the persuasive force of the little fascist, but he didn’t want to seem rude, so he asked her why she’d gone so often to England when she was small. She told him that she grew up in New York City, with money and privilege—a nanny, a cook, a Hungarian driver. A big apartment on Park Avenue. And an English father. My mother, she said, was a Trask. It sounded like some kind of religious sect, or perhaps a political sinecure. A Trask? She explained that Trask was a surname, and that her mother’s nineteenth-century forebears bought a large estate just outside Saratoga Springs. In the 1890s, they built a huge house on their land, designed it to look like a famous country house in England—she forgot which one. “It’s called Yaddo. Have you heard of it?” He had not, but then he’d only been in town for two days. The name, she said, came from one of the Trask children, who invented it, to rhyme with “shadow.” The daughter loved the way the maple trees cast shadows. The Trasks bequeathed their house, in the 1920s, to America’s creative artists, stipulated that Yaddo had to be used as a writers’ retreat, a place for people to come and do creative work. It wasn’t open to the public, so he’d never be able to visit it. “Unless your daughter’s a writer.”
How, he asked, did the Trask heirs feel about their ancestral home being given over in perpetuity to a bunch of freeloading artists?
“Honey,” she said, pausing theatrically to drain her empty wineglass, “that’s the point. There were no direct heirs, it’s the saddest fucking story—the Trasks lost all four of their children in childhood. All four. Diphtheria, mostly.” Alan agreed that it was terribly sad—the great horror, he thought to himself, the reversal of generation, parents burying their children, Karl Marx trying to throw himself into the grave to lie alongside his young son.
“I know something about that,” she said. “About sad fucking stories.” She looked at him, and ordinary decency demanded that he ask her more. But he was tired, and couldn’t quite face the spillage of another ten minutes. And didn’t he have his own sad stories? So he looked down at his drink, and she fortunately lost the black thread of her sad tale, and also went quiet. Grabbing his moment, he made his apologies, told her he’d enjoyed their conversation, and stood up.
