by James Wood
“My guy?”
“Blair—rotten to the core,” said Josh. “That’s harsh, maybe. But tarnished—tarnished all the way down to his once-silver tongue.”
Alan thought: still better than your guy—murderous, imbecilic, ill-educated, swaggering cowboy.
“He’s not as bad as Bush, of course,” said Josh, eerily divining Alan’s thoughts. “On the other hand, Blair’s sin is greater because his intelligence is greater. All he had to do was refuse to be part of it, like Chirac. Je réfuse! And unlike Chirac, he’d have gone down as a great prime minister, even if it wasn’t quite true.”
“I completely agree,” said Alan. It was oddly tiring, conversing with Josh. The boy didn’t really converse: he waited. Conversation as ambush.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have much faith that things are going to get better,” said Alan, asserting himself. “Blair’s successor will offer more of the same, and then Labour will probably lose the next election, thanks to Blair and Iraq, and it’ll be even worse when the Conservatives get in.”
“We don’t have a Barack Obama on the horizon in Britain,” said Vanessa. Alan liked that “we.”
“I only know what I read in the papers. I hope he’ll win. But could Senator Obama do everything he promises? Do you both really believe in Obama?” asked Alan. “I wonder if he would be able to maintain the authority he would need, being black and all.”
“Dad! This is America, not the north of England,” said Vanessa, smiling a bit uncertainly. “Block your ears, Josh.”
“That’s the ‘is America ready for a black president?’ argument,” said Josh briskly. “To which the answer is: no, we aren’t ready. Not at all. Which is exactly why we need a black president. I think he could change the country.”
“I’m not making an ‘argument,’ I’m just reflecting—you know—what you hear people say,” complained Alan, trying to hide his wounded irritation.
“Or why we need a female president,” said Vanessa. “We have to convert the present-at-hand into the ready-to-hand. Obama is currently unready-to-hand. I think.”
“What the hell? You’re mad,” said Josh, smiling.
“Heidegger. I’m reading him with the German philosophy reading group. Remember—tonight? I’m plugging away at him, but I don’t think I’m quite ‘getting’ him. A very difficult philosopher, Dad. Famous for his impenetrability. I can give you the original German terms, if you want.”
“Nein, nein! Keep the old Nazi out of this house,” Josh said, pulling Vanessa’s head to his chest and kissing the top of her head.
“Actually, Dad, I invited a few of the members round tonight, to meet you and Helen. They won’t stay very long. They’re very interested in you.”
Alan tried to look positive. On the train, Helen had said that she could endure her time in Saratoga Springs only if Vanessa didn’t inflict on them “dull and pretentious academics dressed like Mr. Bean.” Alan had a feeling they might be dressed like Josh rather than Mr. Bean. Perhaps they would arrive with customized T-shirts, each bearing a loud philosophical motto. Which wouldn’t mean they weren’t also dull and pretentious. It was typical of Vanessa—so unworldly, really—to ignore all the possible ways in which he and Helen might not want to spend time with her university colleagues. He had a feeling it was going to be a long day.
26
The German philosophy reading group looked quite normal, in the end. There were three of them; two arrived together at the house, just after six that evening. Alan was relieved to learn they were coming only for drinks. Amy Isaacson and Gary Mulhall were colleagues of Van’s at Skidmore, in philosophy and English, respectively. They were around Vanessa’s age, give or take a year or two; both American, one originally from Maryland and the other from the Midwest—pleasant, open, dressed in jeans and sweaters. Alan liked them both, enough that, loosened a little by his first drink, he had to catch himself from sharing certain family intimacies. He’d been on the verge of asking them what they knew about Vanessa’s broken arm, and how she had seemed to them these last few months. The third guest arrived fifteen minutes later, and didn’t seem to fit. He was much older than the other two; Alan put him in his late seventies. He made Vanessa anxious: she opened the door, exclaimed, and immediately called for Josh to come and help; she prematurely offered her guest champagne while he was struggling to hang up his large, old-fashioned woolen overcoat. He was formally dressed—jacket, crimson handkerchief in the breast pocket—and his manners were reticent. Around the edges of his American accent were the traces, perhaps, of a lost European life—he lingered on his t’s, and sprinkled umlauts over the needier vowels. He’d obviously been handsome; was still impressive, with a large head so superbly bald that one couldn’t imagine it contaminated by hair.
Alan was at a disadvantage because had hadn’t caught the man’s first name, and heard only something like “Dr. Kunis.” He wasn’t, he explained, a colleague of Vanessa’s, but “merely a civilian member of the reading group.” He was retired, had been in “private practice in town for twenty-five years.” So Dr. Kunis was one of those mythical animals, the G.P. as humanist intellectual?
Alan failed to get Kunis’s first name because he was distracted by Helen, who turned up at the house a minute or two after the physician. Well, here she was at last, having spent most of the day, he supposed, fuming at the hotel.
Helen hadn’t been entirely alone, because Van and Josh had gone out in the afternoon to meet her at the Alexandria. Van went to cheer her sister up—she pretended it was sibling solidarity, thought Helen later, but really it was because Van’s fear of confrontation meant that all arguments, even those that didn’t directly concern her, had to be quickly neutralized, with the anxious extraction of promises and treaties. In the hotel lobby, where they’d had coffee as Josh’s and Van’s clothes dripped gray water onto the carpet, Helen protested that she’d already forgiven her father—“I’ve absolved him,” she repeated, “I never expected any help from him anyway. I was just kind of trying it on. So, Van! You don’t need to get all nervous about it.” She told them about Alan’s financial worries; neither sister had ever heard him say anything like that before. Vanessa said that their father looked “profoundly tired.” The general problem, she said, was not that he gave too little, but too much.
“Why did your mom leave him, then? If that isn’t a rude question?” asked Josh.
“Depends who you ask,” said Van. “You know it’s my weakness to see both sides of an argument.”
“So I guess you only see one side of it, Helen?”
“One and a half sides, I’d say now. I spent many unproductive years blaming our mum. And the hideous Patrick Needham. Maybe as I get older I see the ways in which living with Dad must have been difficult.”
“What ways?” asked Josh.
“I’d put it like this,” said Helen. “All through our childhood, Van and I had numerous pets—two spaniels (male and female), two Jack Russells (also a male and a female), a cat (male), three canaries (two females and one male, or so we were told), and a couple of white rabbits (both males, as I remember). Dad fussed over those pets, complained about them, even obsessed about them, looked after them day and night, and also neglected them … in his own special way. And without exception, he called all of them ‘she,’ irrespective of their gender. All the time. Does that answer your question?”
“That’s wicked,” said Josh, with admiration.
“And not remotely fair,” said Vanessa, who nevertheless had to laugh. “Though Helen’s right about the animals. ‘He, Dad; not she; it’s a he’—we were always having to correct him. Mummy always joked that she wanted to come back in another life as one of Dad’s dogs. She thought they got superior treatment.”
“He gives a lot, he withdraws a lot, he controls a lot,” said Helen, with her impressive confidence. “Traits I’m faithfully replicating in my own life as a parent…”
“It was all a long time ago now,” said Vanessa. She didn’t ne
ed to add: And besides, in the end Mummy left us in a different way.
At the party, Helen took a brisk look at the guests in the small sitting room, and decided she would spend the evening talking to Josh and Vanessa. She felt warmly toward them for making the snowy trek to the hotel. It had been fun to spend the afternoon with her, alongside Josh as the young, eager—and slightly flirtatious!—helpmeet. Josh told Helen about his parents, his brothers, and Chicago. Helen had a sense of a powerful mind insufficiently employed; she had to stop herself, at one moment, from asking him if he wanted to come and work for her in her new venture. The two sisters—well, they could still fall into old rhythms and easy reminiscence: that day when Mum, with the girls in the back, drove the old Volvo 240 into a ditch, and was pulled out by the farmer’s two massive carthorses, an absolutely magical, indelible memory for the little sisters; the afternoon when Dad broke up a fight outside the village pub and was called “a fucking wanker” by one of the men, Dad rather primly telling him to mind his language around his two young daughters; and that drab colleague of Mum’s, the schoolteacher called Mr. Boggis, who started every year by saying to his new young class that his name was Rodney Boggis and they had “precisely two minutes to laugh about it,” after which … They shared these tales with Josh, who enjoyed seeing the sisters’ pleasure. The two women told only funny or eventful stories, and told them lightly, as if their mother were still alive, and living exactly where Candace Lee now occupied their childhood space.
Helen knew her father was keeping a wary eye on her; he had followed her movements as she entered the house, while he pretended to be talking to an eminent-seeming old chap with a very bald head. She wasn’t angry with him, but disappointed. And determined not to show it. But she wasn’t above playing a little trick on him, which occurred to her as soon as she learned from her sister that Dr. Kunis, several years retired, had once been Van’s doctor.
“Only your doctor?” asked Helen, smiling.
“Oh—I know what you’re implying, which reveals that you’ve never had any psychotherapy. If Dr. Kunis were my therapist, even my ex-therapist, he would never appear at my home, at a private event. Therapists might wish to meet their patients’ relatives, but it’s not allowed. Totally not done.”
The sisters gazed at the two handsome old men, who were apparently discovering all kinds of things in common.
Helen’s moment came sooner than she thought it would. She was in the kitchen a few minutes later, talking to Josh, when Alan came in, looking—so he said—for more ice. Josh took the hint, murmured something about needing to turn down the music, and faded out of the room. Alan fussed with his bowl of ice.
“Look,” he said. He was talking very quietly. “I’m excited about your new thing. There was just no need to go storming off like a bat out of darkest bloody hell at breakfast.”
“I didn’t go storming off. There was nothing more to talk about.”
“There’s plenty to talk about, but not there in public, at the hotel, and not here in public, either. When we get back to England, when we get back … why not come up to the house for a weekend? Bring Tom and the twins? We can talk properly about it then. I do want to help you. In any way I possibly can.”
“Dad, it’s okay. I’ve been essentially on my own for most of my life. I don’t need any help. Thank you all the same.”
“You were happy enough to ask for it this morning.”
“One kind, one kind of … assistance. That’s what we talked about at breakfast.”
“Essentially on your own? You know you’re being hurtful and completely impossible, and above all … extremely unhelpful?”
He hadn’t meant to use that last word and it struck them both comically. But because they were imprisoned in their argument they were not permitted to smile, and instead lapsed into a childish, stubborn silence.
Helen was the first to crack.
“I don’t want to spoil everyone’s last night together, and I promised Van that I wouldn’t. So I shan’t. I apologize, Dad, for the thing about being on my own … It isn’t true. It absolutely isn’t true … You seem to be getting on brilliantly with that distinguished-looking chap.”
“A nice old boy,” said Alan, as if thirty years separated the two men. “He was keen to hear about my English background, seemed disappointed that I’m barely old enough to remember the war. He’s a good listener, I’ll say. Better than my G.P., that’s for sure.”
Helen couldn’t help herself.
“I tried hard to get Van to admit to me that Dr. Kunis was actually her therapist and psychopharmacologist—which seems pretty obvious to me. It would explain why he’s so very interested in you.” Helen looked at her father and was inwardly delighted to see his face whiten with alarm. Poor Dad, she thought, who had a dread of all forms of surveillance.
“I may be wrong of course, it’s just a strong hunch.”
“Christ, Helen, why didn’t Van warn me? Of course! It explains why she’s so anxious around him. He’s already been working on me like bloody Uri Geller—my childhood, my parents, what they did. I even told him that I got divorced. And all about Candace. Bloody hell.”
“Just steer clear of him,” said Helen.
“Oh I will, all right. Strange thing is that he seems a very nice chap, a perfectly decent bloke.”
“Many therapists are, I’ve heard.”
Alan gave his daughter suspicious scrutiny. She watched him enter the sitting room, carrying the bowl of ice, attempting to veer away from Dr. Kunis. But the room was too small; there was no protection.
27
She could smell Van’s cigarette, just outside on the back porch, so she pushed open the screen door and stepped into the clear cold.
“I know I should be back inside,” said Vanessa.
“It’s my party, I’ll be shy if I want to?”
“Okay, so I lack your strength, it would seem,” said Vanessa.
“I’m not judging you. I think I’d skip your party if I were you.”
“I know that by your standards a couple of academics and a doctor is pretty minor fare.”
“I was joking, I was joking!”
“Sorry—I’m bloody tense. Why am I so tense? Wish I had something stronger in this cigarette.” She flicked the butt into the dark garden. “Since we’re both skipping out on my party, one of us must be right.”
“Thanks for coming to the hotel this afternoon,” said Helen. “I do like Josh. He’s kind, he’s bright, he’s—”
“Devilishly handsome?”
“Angelically? Still too young to be devilishly—lucky chap.”
“He is my absolute love, Helen,” she said with simple pride. “I love him.”
“And I can see why.” For a second, she felt pettily envious, and almost added: the whole town can probably tell you’re in love.
“The only thing we ever argue about is my smoking … I think I want to go back to England with him.”
“I said to Dad this morning that you should be teaching at Oxford or London, or somewhere like that, not out here.”
“I want to show him off there!”
“Does he want to go? He strikes me as quite American.”
“Two months ago I would have said no. Now I think he does.”
Having some idea of what had happened in the last two months, Helen suddenly felt very sorry for her sister; it took her breath away.
“Have you and Dad made up?” asked Van. “I could see you in the kitchen—I looked through the window. It all looked terribly serious. You know he’ll come through in the end. He’s just treating your proposal like a deal. Dangling you, a bit.”
“I really don’t need him anyway.”
“It’s partly a matter of dragging him, kicking and screaming, into the future—away from his own projects. Josh and I were talking about it last night. You’re a utopian. Always on the move, restless … I feel very stuck here, by contrast. Old, snagged on my old books.”
“Oh, you love your
books. They’re your best friends. You do have an awful lot, though … Three thousand?”
“Probably around that.”
“Dad and I agreed to differ. But I played a little joke on him, I couldn’t help it. I suggested to him that the good doctor is actually your therapist.”
“So that’s where you were heading…”
“He’s trying very hard to avoid him—as we speak.”
“Surprise, surprise—Dad knows as little about therapeutic protocol as you do. It would never happen.” But Vanessa was smiling, and her eyes were bright. She’d always been somewhat in awe of her sister’s boldness. “It would be like inviting to dinner the judge who is deciding on your very delicate court case.”
“Now don’t go and spoil it by whispering the truth in his ear,” said Helen.
“You are wicked, just as Josh said…”
28
In the sitting room, Alan was clinking an ice cube into his Scotch, his back to the room, when he was taken by surprise. Josh was right behind him, almost talking into his ear.
“Alan, sorry by the way if it seemed we were ganging up on you last night. If it’s a consolation, to go back to our conversation, there are a bunch of things that computers can’t do, may never be able to do in my opinion. Yeah, Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997. So what? A computer can store more data about possible chess moves than humans ever could. But computers can’t beat humans at poker or Go. So it ain’t the end of the world as we know it. Not yet, anyway.”
Josh, in his way, was trying to be kind. But why do I need “consolation”? How weak does he take me to be? Do I act as if I think it’s the end of the world? He found himself standing in Van’s living room, once Josh had moved away, doing some furious mental computation of his own—to be precise, fighting the American War of Independence all over again. The Battle of Saratoga, but this time with General Burgoyne triumphant, not defeated, and using very different weapons. This young American, who looked only forward, not backward, who seemed able to discard everything that had produced who Alan was, and everything that Alan had produced … Well, let’s see how he’d actually get on in the modern world, without the British contribution. Gravity—Newton!—electricity—Faraday!—circulation of the blood—Harvey!—evolution—Darwin!—antisepsis—Lister!—penicillin—Fleming!—the steam engine—Trevithick!—the steam turbine (especially dear to him because that was where his dad had worked)—Parsons!—the atom—Rutherford!—the jet engine—Whittle!—the computer—Turing!—DNA—Crick! Or was it Watson? The English one, anyway. The modern age is British. Or was. Without any of that, without the country he so easily flicked aside, Josh would be a diseased, immobile caveman.
