by James Wood
Down a side street, he found a quiet bar, sunk in wooden gloom. But the barman was large-bellied, generous, very talkative. He exuded an indiscriminate masculine joy. The regulars, as they arrived, were welcomed, and awarded equal banter.
“You behavin’, Mike?”
“No.”
“Ha!”
He told Alan to sit up at the bar, flourished a place mat, menu, napkin, and cutlery; Alan felt nicely babied, as if he were on a plane, in first class. His host quickly found out where he was from, and flattered him with counter-information.
“I’m figuring that ‘coals to Newcastle’ means your city has quite a lot to do with coal?”
“Coal, steel, shipbuilding. Used to. Newcastle was the first city in the world to have electric street lighting. Most of it has gone now. What we have instead are a set of splendid bridges. Well, we do still have the streetlights.”
“Ha—back in the nineteenth century this place was the city for steel. Second only to Pittsburgh. That’s what we did: steel. For the whole country. After the steel moved out, then we did shirts, we did collars, buttons. ‘Collar City’ wasn’t for nothing. We’ve got the Rensselaer Institute. We still have some of General Electric. Huge company. Speaking of electric lights, you know that it was Thomas Edison who founded General Electric?”
“I didn’t.” Amused, Alan felt he was up against an American version of himself.
“Yeah, that Edison. But have to say, it’s been kind of downhill from the time of the great man. People leave here, they don’t come back. And this used to be one of the wealthiest towns in America! The new mayor has all these plans, sure, but I’m tellin’ you, you can’t rebuild a whole city by getting a few artists to move up here from Brooklyn. Stupid. Stupid.”
On the way back from Troy, the interstate was crowded, the cars moving faster than he wanted to go, and the salt and slush stormed against his windshield, as if he were piloting a small boat. He saw an exit for Malta, and took it. Van, Josh … leave it, leave it. The road was pleasantly rural after the busy highway—snowy fields on either side, a massive wood just coming into view over the hill. It was getting darker: a stunted winter afternoon. Van’s radio station—he assumed it was her usual choice—was playing The Four Seasons, which Alan disliked as cordially as everyone else in the world did. To keep his mind off the situation in Saratoga Springs, he tried to listen to the familiar music as if for the first time. He leaned over to turn up the volume, a tiny downward gesture, only the tiniest moment away from the road, but when he looked up again through the windshield, a parked car he had not seen was preparing to pull out right in front of him. Alan had it under control: to pass, he lightly dabbed the brakes, touched the horn, and swerved out into the middle of the road. Nothing was coming the other way; he glimpsed a white bass drum in the backseat of the car he was passing.
He did not have it under control.
The steering wheel twisted in his hands, and suddenly the Prius was skidding, almost gracefully, without effort, right across the road. He pressed the brakes again, hard this time, in panic now, and the steering wheel retaliated and spun the other way. The car was gliding, gliding fast, and there was absolutely nothing he could do until the skid was finished with him. He had enough time to realize that he wasn’t going to die, to see that the oncoming lane was still empty of traffic, to be grateful for his seat belt, which had locked and was tightly bracing him. The Prius came to a stop at the far side of the road. The accident, such as it was, had taken a few seconds. He had turned himself completely round—he was now facing in the direction he had been coming from.
The memory of that queasy impotent slide made him feel sick. Vivaldi sparkled on. He’d been lucky, the car was untouched.
A young man, bearded, wearing a baseball cap, got out of his car, also a Toyota, Alan noticed, and ran across the empty road. Alan opened his door.
“Jesus, you okay? I’m sorry! I wasn’t actually pulling out.”
Alan’s legs were trembling, his breath short.
“It’s okay. I’m okay, the car’s fine. Actually, I looked down for a second, to deal with this … damn … music.” He pushed the Vivaldi off. “And when I looked up, you were somehow right in front of me. My fault.”
“You must’ve hit a patch of snow or ice or something. They don’t salt the roads much around Malta. Look, this was totally my bad. By the way, I’m Ryan … Your accent—is British? Where are you heading?”
Ryan explained that he was going to Saratoga Springs, too. He was a musician—hence the drums. His band was playing tonight and tomorrow night at Café Filippo, just off Broadway. Blues, folk, country. If Alan came, he’d give him the best seat in the house and make sure he got free drinks all night, too. Least he could do.
37
He drove back to Vanessa’s house slowly—gingerly, as if he’d been burnt. She was home, thank goodness. He told her he’d been involved in a minor skid, nothing very much; Englishly, she offered him a cup of tea. He felt vulnerable, breached. Defeated. Van would look after him. He knew suddenly that he didn’t want to spend another night in his hotel room. Absolutely not. He was no James Bond, not even a General Burgoyne …
She asked about Troy.
“I bet it reminded you of Newcastle.”
“Yes, that’s right. Amazing similarities. Good lord, that waterfront? Fantastic amount of empty land. Just waiting. The problem for Troy will be population decline. That’s very different from Newcastle, of course, which is still growing.” He was thinking aloud.
“Ah, Daddy, incorrigible … Maybe you should move here. So you had lunch in Troy? No Hypocrite Burger today?”
They sat at the table and drank their tea and talked about everything but Josh. About Skidmore and Van’s colleagues, about Helen and Tom (Alan said nothing about the apparent marital difficulties), and Helen’s new career (Van was full of admiration for her sister’s resolve), and the old house in Northumberland, which held so much. Van asked about her grandmother, and Alan told her he’d been over to see Mam in the Home, just before embarking on the American trip. He didn’t mention his anxieties about paying his mother’s expensive bills, or the question he kept turning in his mind—whether he should ask Mam to live with him in the big house. Troy, which reminded him so much of old Newcastle, had for the same reason reminded him of his old mother. They did not mention Candace. They talked about Cathy, but by long-unspoken agreement, Cathy only entered family conversation alive, never dead. It was always “Remember when Mummy drove the Volvo into the ditch,” as if she might conceivably drive the Volvo into the ditch again, or “Your mum and I went regularly to that hotel for a while,” as if the termination was their decision and not one made by divorce and death. He looked at Vanessa’s dear, known features—seemingly a little plainer and drier today, as if Josh’s presence had been some kind of sustaining, revivifying drug. No, he was seeing too much in everything, thinking too much. She looked just the same, maybe a bit tired after a day of teaching, the same except for her spectacles, which she’d put on because her eyes were tired and her new contacts bothering her. The spectacles restored her to him: “old Vanessa.” How he loved her blue, shortsighted eyes, her frown or squint of concentration, the tongue that slightly appeared when she became intense, her quiet voice and her soft, sidelong self-assertion. Even her complaints! How characteristic of Vanessa to moan that she missed Helen but was also glad she had gone, because “I struggle to get a word in edgeways when she’s around. Helen does manage to occupy the space around her quite tyrannically, you know.” Alan had planned to have the conversation this evening, but he felt unprepared, he was still shaken. He would wait until tomorrow. For now, he would fall into the deep embrace of familiarity; he would rest.
“So—what questions do you have from today’s adventuring? God, you made Josh laugh last night.”
“Nothing comes to mind … No, I do have one question,” said Alan, smiling. “When all these Americans, usually complete strangers, say, with apparentl
y significant meaning, ‘How are you?’ are you actually supposed to tell them how you feel?”
“Not really. The best response is to reply with your own, slightly more intense, ‘How are you?’ at more or less exactly the same moment, so the two ideally cancel each other out.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Omelet and toast okay for dinner tonight?”
“Couldn’t be better.”
And later, after dinner:
“Van, would you mind much if I moved out of the Alexandria tonight and stayed in your guest bedroom? I’ve only got two nights left anyway.”
“Of course not, I’d love it. I’m on my own. Why? Is the hotel getting you down? It would get me down.”
“It makes me think of that old phrase ‘fancy goods.’ From my childhood—certain shops full of silly objects that no one wanted. They used to advertise ‘fancy goods.’”
“I’d hardly ever set foot in that place until you visited. So—let’s go and get your things. I’ll come along for the ride.”
38
He didn’t see Vanessa the next morning; drowsy in bed, he heard her in the kitchen, then she was running up and down the stairs. He waited to hear the front door close, but missed it; woke again to silence. He’d just dreamed of Cathy. She was driving the old Fiat 500, and little Vanessa and Helen were standing on the backseat, as they used to, poking their heads out of the big sunroof. Then the scene shifted, in the way of dreams, and Cathy was no longer with him, and just before he woke he was, oddly enough, buying shoes for his daughters …
He had the sense of rising temperature; water was dripping from the icy window frames, and he had been woken in the very early morning by a carpet of snow sliding off the roof and falling deeply somewhere below. It was warm under the sheets. Ah, he had a pulsing erection. Old morning friend.
She returned for an early lunch, and they ate soup and toast, and Alan had the feeling he’d had the night before, of being almost a child again, with Vanessa as his sibling. What if the two of them just lived like this for days on end? It was intensely precious. Why not?
They sat at the table with their tea. He was about to speak, then hesitated; he didn’t know how to proceed. There was a silence; Vanessa looked at him. He found a way in.
“I never told you, by the way, a strange thing happened. On Monday morning your Christian neighbor came round, when I was on my own, and tried to pray with me.”
“What, Jerry? With you?”
“He held my hand, right here at this table, and we bowed our heads.”
“Goodness,” said Vanessa, “he’s never tried anything like that on me.” She stood up, started taking plates to the sink.
“Maybe not, but I think you’re his real target, not me.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Van, it was Jerry who found you at the bottom of the stairs. He said you were in pretty bad shape. His words precisely.”
“Of course I was, I had just broken my arm in two places. I was lying in snow! That’s being in pretty bad shape.”
“He also told me about you going to his church … and crying in church? ‘Spiritual despair’ is what he called it. That’s also being in pretty bad shape, no? You’re much cleverer than I am, so you must be pretending not to see what I’m saying.”
“Dad, don’t worry so, I’m better now than I was. Much happier. You can see that. Jerry found me at a very low point, for sure … But Helen said yesterday morning she’d never seen me as cheerful.”
“When you were younger, Mummy and I used to worry about you so much. And now I’m worrying again.”
“Too much.”
“No, not too much. Not too much. You ran away! And those poems you wrote? And it frightened the life out of us when you decided you would give away everything you owned to your friends. Everything, even your precious books. Do you remember that? At Oxford? The university had to inform us about it.”
“That was a long time ago. You didn’t need to be so frightened. I know what you were afraid of. I’ve never been inclined that way, Dad … I was young, I thought I was being ‘philosophical.’ That’s all it was, very pretentious indeed. Not as dramatic or morbid as you think.”
“Van, tell me the truth. You didn’t deliberately throw yourself down those stairs, did you? Please tell me the truth.”
She turned, the tap still running, and moved to his side.
“It was an accident, Dad. Was it Josh who gave you the idea that I tried to do myself harm?”
“Yes, initially. He was frightened.”
“I didn’t know he had written to you with such … alarmism. I thought he just suggested that you might come and ‘raise my spirits.’ Look, Josh and I were having some difficulties, not getting on at all, and after an argument about possibly moving to England he … went away and he left me on my own, and I collapsed a bit. Some of the old awful stuff came back. I was very depressed, I will admit it. And yes, he was frightened, so he ran away. He knows he did the wrong thing. But after that fall on the stairs, Josh came back and asked me to go with him to Chicago.”
“You liked his parents…”
“Yes, I met his family there—that was the real turning point. I loved them! I felt completely embraced by them. I know why he took me to meet them, because everything was different after Chicago … It feels like a new start. Josh said a few days ago that he might come this summer with me to England, to look around. An exploratory visit, see how we might feel about living there.”
“You never told me you were thinking of coming back—to stay. For good, I mean. Helen filled me in on that. You know I’d love it. Absolutely love it. The tap’s still running, by the way.”
“We’ll see … I admire the school here, I like my colleagues. But in the last year or so I’ve found I miss the strangest things from home—double yellow lines, BBC news at six o’clock, those weirdly small white radiators we have. Silly things like that … English birds!”
“English birds? As opposed to American ones?”
“Yes,” she said defiantly, “English birds … and maybe Europe more generally … There’s a Kantstrasse right in the middle of Berlin—that kind of thing I miss, you know? A street named after a philosopher! And I don’t really have any close friends here, no one other than Josh. Thank goodness for him. Aristotle says that friendship is the thing human beings can least afford to be without.”
“What if Josh doesn’t want to come with you to England?”
“I think he does want to. And if not, we’ll stay here.”
“All right. Good. I’m glad.” He paused, he was winded by the earnest, hopeful certainty of her reply, and could only press on feebly, without much attack. Strategically, was he going forward or backward? He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t speak a word of what Josh had hinted at the day before. It would flay her.
“Anyway,” he weakly mused, “there was life before Josh, so there could certainly be life after him.”
“Yes, Dad, there was, but it wasn’t always very happy life, was it?”
“You are fine, ultimately. You just said so yourself.”
“I wasn’t that fine. For me, it’s not so easy to be fine.” She sat down next to him and looked out the window. He followed her glance, over the waste white. Her eyes glistened. He could see the contact lenses, spectral, seeming to float. Her breath was slightly metallic. “I sometimes think I see too well, that’s my problem, I see the bones of life, the structure of it all, that’s my problem. I think too much.”
“What on earth do you mean?” He tried to conceal his annoyance.
“I don’t want to. I’m doing Nietzsche with the students later in the term, and he says that we should learn to forget, that we should become skilled at not knowing. He says that we envy the animal, and want to ask it, ‘Why do you just look at me instead of talking to me about your easygoing happiness?’ If it could, the animal would reply: ‘Because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say.’ It’s fine pagan wisdom, b
ut not wisdom I’ve been able to act on.”
“Ah, Van, all these years, whenever we’ve talked about anything serious you’ve offered me a reading list.”
“You see that house there? The one on the right. You see it has a screened porch? In the summer, my aged neighbor sits there. Professor Ensor. He’s a wonderful fellow, genial and very cheerful, walks everywhere with a little camouflage-pattern backpack and a stick, ninety years old, still living alone. Belgian, originally. A retired medievalist—he taught at Skidmore forever. Before going into academia he was a monk, but he fell in love and left the Dominican order and got married. Later, he lost his Christian faith—for rather a wonderful reason. It was around the time they announced the Hubble space telescope and all the amazing things it could see. He suddenly realized that if the great thinkers he studies and reveres, all the people from the Middle Ages, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Dante, and the rest, were to hear about the new telescope, they would all want to gather round it, to look into it and up to the spheres of heaven, up to Paradise—to see God, and Jesus sitting on God’s right hand, and all the company of angels, and I don’t know what else. In his mind’s eye he could see these men excitedly, expectantly gathered round this telescope. He explained all this to me one day. As soon as Ensor thought that thought, he realized that he wasn’t a believer; he realized that he would have had to disappoint those great thinkers and inform them that there’s nothing up there.”
“Very interesting indeed, but let’s get back—”
“I’m not finished, that’s not the point of my story.”
“Okay.”
“In the summer and fall, he sits in that porch and reads, and often takes his meals there. And last September, I saw him eating his lunch. He was alone, he’s mostly always alone except for a not very friendly middle-aged daughter who occasionally visits. His wife died about ten years ago. So: I watched him while he ate his soup. It took ten minutes, and it was oddly hypnotic. He sat at a flimsy card table, hunched over the bowl. His hand slowly, patiently, methodically moved to the bowl and then up to his mouth, again and again, back and forth, taking very slow mouthfuls, until he was finished. Then he picked up the bowl and put it to his mouth, and drained the remainder. It was like watching exercise. I admired this monkish patience—he has great discipline, great fortitude—and I was also horrified by it. There was no discernible pleasure in the meal, just the discipline of going on. Of continuance. The reflexes of longevity. He was simply feeding a body, so that it could continue. For what? Well, to continue living alone for a little longer, so that he can eat more soup … It seemed an absolute image of life: the utterly meaningless, repetitive continuance. That’s what I mean by seeing things too well.”
