by Paul Theroux
People do not fail without an element of struggle, but when it happens their failure is often undramatic. Failure comes in stages, like illness, a prolonged weakening, and finally a decline, with a whisper of extinction that is indistinguishable from death. This slowness and delay, the resilience in the human condition, the dying fall rather than the sudden plunge, is the reason I suspect tyrants, impatient for triumph, become murderers; why they carry out pogroms, persecutions, mass starvations; why they promote famine or reduce their enemies to slavery or captivity.
It is not enough to rejoice over the natural death of your enemies; their end must be hastened. Impatience is one of the besetting sins of the tyrant, an effect of blood lust; it is impatience that turns the conventionally cruel leader into a mass murderer.
And in order to be satisfied, Mrs. Everest wanted to have had a hand in it. “I want to kill them with my bare hands,” she’d say, pretending to be joking. And the person must fail completely, be rendered naked, homeless, ruined, exposed, the house burned down, the dog lying dead in the driveway.
Hearing stories of people she’d destroyed, I studied the look on her face—her glittering, slightly drunken eyes, her nostrils flared, her lips apart, her teeth showing, her tongue thickening with hunger. I should have been warned, but Izzy and I remained on her guest list, fascinated, and also fearful. On this island we were isolated in the true sense of the word. One of the stipulations of Mrs. Everest’s friendship was that her friends were mine, and her enemies too.
Some people, not many, received financial help from her. They were always wounded, a bit lost, abjectly grateful. Just as she could be cruel to some people who were vulnerable, she could take others under her wing and protect them. That was part of her paradox, that—so hardhearted—she knew how to offer help. She fed stray animals; she gave money to a ranch in Idaho that cared for horses rescued from circuses.
There was a woman who cleaned for her, to whom she’d given a car (not a new car, but serviceable) and paid someone to sort out her taxes; an old feeble gay handyman whose partner had died and who was indigent; an alcoholic chef who was just out of rehab and was trying to put his life back together (“I can start him off with a little restaurant”). They were all lost souls, they were no threat to her, and in truth she could not have been kinder to them; though each of these people served a purpose—the cleaner, the handyman, the chef.
She had no children, so I suppose all her maternal feelings were directed toward abused animals and these sad people who, in their tentative dependent lives, were like children, who also performed chores for her with some ability.
She was entirely self-invented. This is not a simple trick of the ego; it takes work, persuasion, money, boldness, willpower, and imagination. You have to admire it. And so, because of my portraits, my giving these images life, I began to find her of much greater interest, hideously compelling at times, for the way she had made herself, the life and the pretenses she had created, all her fictions.
Just as she could whip around and turn cruel or unfeeling, with “She is hideous” or “Lipstick lesbian,” or might laugh like a witch at someone’s bad luck, she could be unexpectedly concerned, sympathetic, even deeply moved at the plight of an unfortunate person, such as one small girl, Selma, the stepdaughter of a Brazilian roofer. The child disappeared from the island. It was not known whether she was with the man’s estranged wife. The roofer was evasive and then he too disappeared.
“I’m worried sick,” Mrs. Everest said. And she looked sick—gaunt, hollow-eyed, desperate.
“She might turn up,” I said. I could only offer platitudes.
“You don’t know,” she said to me. “That man has done something with her. I know he’s abused her, and I don’t mean ‘touched inappropriately’—I hate that expression. What does he care? She’s not his natural daughter.”
As I write this, about her kindness, I realize that I tend to revert to her cruelty, that I find it hard to believe that she had a soft spot. That cynicism is the influence of the woman herself on me, that I have difficulty bringing myself to believe in her kindness because she had taught me to be cynical. She made it impossible for me to believe in her.
She was a collector, an accumulator, a significant trait of the very wealthy, hoarding as investing—property, paintings, even people if they were powerful enough, stacking them up, displaying them as trophies—from the group photograph (“class picture,” she called it) that was always taken of the guests at her annual summer party, to the objects on the shelves in her office. “That’s scrimshaw, they’re all whales’ teeth,” she’d say, reminding me that there is no pedant like an ignoramus.
Any person’s collection of chosen objects is a glimpse into her mind. I liked Mrs. Everest better when I saw some folk art she’d collected, because folk art is innocent-looking and highly colored, purposeful, inventive, always seeming to evoke what is happiest in childhood. It was also the opposite of the hideola that she exhibited.
Another lunch at Junior’s, a fondue this time. As always, she led the conversation. She was excited about the art scene, she said; she wanted to go in a completely new direction. It occurred to me that she was going to ask me to show my work at her gallery. But no, she began to speak about a man who worked in sand.
Thinking I had misheard, asking her to repeat this (sand?), she detected the incredulity in my tone and took it for hauteur. She said, “No one has ever done what he’s doing.”
She chewed, she spat, she made garbage of the fondue, and at the end she patted her food-splashed mouth and said, “I have a feeling. When I have a feeling about something, I’m invariably right.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“I have a feeling that you’re going to do my portrait.”
This teasing statement was typical of Mrs. Everest. She wasn’t commissioning a portrait; she wasn’t asking a favor of me. She was mentioning a rapture she’d had, that I was going to paint her picture.
She turned to look out the front window of the restaurant. But she was listening, tremulous with attention.
“Wouldn’t it be marvelous if your portrait showed me holding a bouquet of flowers?” She was persistent. “Each flower with its traditional meaning—daisies for innocence, pansies for loving thoughts, tiger lilies, and so forth. A whole message in blossoms.”
I did not say that one could not improve on a Henry William Pickersgill masterpiece. I did not say no. No one said no to her. But she did not hear yes, and my silence meant I wasn’t interested. My pride would not allow me to do a portrait of someone who thought so little of my work that she refused to show it in her gallery. Or perhaps I was rebelling against her taste for installations and looks-like-art.
Long before she suggested that I do her portrait, I made a short and bitter ink sketch of her, rather dark, a mushroom on a dunghill, but close-up it was a little twisted woman on a money box, rendered perfectly. Her hatred of figurative painting was an inspiration to me, the sort of contempt that turned my every brushstroke into a calculated phrase. And it made me resist her.
A passerby glancing through the restaurant window at the three of us—Izzy was also there—would have assumed we were old friends having an intimate meal together, never guessing that this was a ritual of farewell. The passerby would not have noticed that Mrs. Everest had asked me nothing about my painting, nothing about our plans, our travel, our health. That she did not meet my gaze or even look my way.
After her monologue about the new show she didn’t mention meeting again—nothing about the future, not even next week, never mind next month. She didn’t eat a mouthful of the salad she had ordered. She poked the crab cakes apart, scattered the lettuce, punctured and pushed the cherry tomatoes, mashed the avocado. She ordered a glass of Prosecco, but without taking a sip, her eyes brimmed with gluey reproachful tears.
In the most low-key way, just chatting, making small talk, she conveyed indifference with the slightly perturbed and preoccupied air of someone who coul
dn’t linger, with an unmistakable suggestion that, though she might see us again, we no longer mattered to her.
This invitation had been Mrs. Everest’s idea. She wanted a portrait from me. She had even described it: Mrs. Everest posed in a sun-drenched window among symbolic flowers. All that remained was for it to be hung. And listening, just smiling, I had sent a message of disapproval, which was like a foul smell.
When the check for the meal came, the immensely wealthy Mrs. Everest frowned and turned away from it.
“I must run,” she said. “Don’t get up. Leonard is outside.”
Leonard, her driver, greeted her with a groveling smile and a little bow, and then he helped this old lady into the car.
And when they drove away, Izzy said, “She seemed in a funny mood.”
I saw Mrs. Everest one more time. This was at Sandy’s house on the bay. He had invited us, but said nothing about Mrs. Everest’s proposal that I should paint her portrait.
She was standing in her usual posture, as I would have painted her: old suede jacket, tousled hair, a glass in her hand, the elderly face of a wicked child.
She hadn’t expected me to say hello, and seemed startled by my small talk. I was enthusing about the plants I had bought, annuals for the summer, enumerating them, describing their colors—dahlias, delphiniums, Shasta daisies.
“Verbena,” I said. “Zinnias.”
“I hate verbena, I hate zinnias,” Mrs. Everest said, and frowned and coughed a little, like a cat choking on a mouthful of fur, and I translated that cough as I’m through with you.
After a short spell of being ashamed I had ever known her, I began to wonder why I’d endured her for so long. People say, “It’s all good,” and “I have no regrets,” and “It was a learning experience.” But I do have regrets. I want years back, I want days back, I want the hours back that I spent sitting over meals with Mrs. Everest. I regret knowing her. I didn’t hate her; I felt sorry for her having to drag her damaged soul through life. I hated myself for knowing her, for pitying her. I hated myself for my appetite.
Have some cheese! she said the first time we met. That was the beginning of many meals that ended in my refusing to do her portrait. And I had wanted to do her portrait!
I mentioned this when I complained about her to her friend Sandy, because I knew he’d tell her everything. He listened with his fanatical stare, then said, “Don’t take this the wrong way,” and sounding like Mrs. Everest, added, “The only free cheese is in a mousetrap.”
Another Necklace
“WE ARE QUITE fortunate to have with us today one of the most illustrious English writers of our time, and now a fellow resident of Boston,” Mrs. DeWicky was saying at the brightly lit podium. Backstage, in semidarkness, just at the edge of the heavy pleated curtain, waiting for her to finish, Raleigh Crindle smiled at the technician seated before the bank of lights and switches. He pointed to himself with a slender stabbing finger and, with a pop-eyed, self-mocking face, whispered the word “illustrious.” The technician made his own hand into a pistol and cocked it at Raleigh and mouthed the words “You the man.”
Then, noticing something, the technician came closer and squinted with concern and inclined his head—it was all mumming and dumb show here—as if to say, “Are you all right?”
Advancing in the heat, the man had loomed with a ripe animal smell and thick inquiring fingers, and Raleigh’s chest tightened. His breathing became arrhythmic, he missed a beat of air, then gagged and whinnied a little as though with fear or ecstasy. He placed his hand against the welt on his neck and managed a smile and a whispered sibilance, “My necklace.” The man opened his mouth and mimicked laughter, his big tongue working like a dog’s.
Raleigh was fastening his collar button when Mrs. DeWicky at the podium said, “Mr. Crindle’s perfectly marvelous fictions,” and he was annoyed with himself, even in this heat, for noticing that Americans used the words “quite” and “perfectly” around English people in the belief that it made them sound more English, and sometimes said primly, “We took tea,” in a way that English people seldom did. Raleigh wanted to be more grateful: coming here had saved him from obscurely vegetating in Slowland.
“For the past two decades, in novels and stories and travelogues, Raleigh Crindle has written powerfully of London, and of the English class distinctions he has called ‘Asiatic subtleties’ in his recent collection of essays, How to Be English.”
But he was thinking, Travelogues?
“Mr. Crindle has won many awards and prizes, and for his portrayal of the quite delicate social misunderstandings, he has been called . . .”
This part of the introduction Raleigh knew so well from his published and much-quoted biographical note that he smiled again at the technician. Just as he heard, “I’d like to present tonight’s guest,” his cell phone buzzed against his thigh. He slid it from his pocket and flipped it open with his thumb and read the text message: This is no damn joke. Im comin for u and u gon be damn sorry.
He heard a disapproving hiss. Raleigh lifted his pale face from his cell phone to the technician. In rapid scolding hand movements, the man indicated to Raleigh that he must turn off his phone. And then the curtain parted.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Raleigh Crindle . . .”
He was dazzled by the lights and the density of brightened faces. He approached the podium, thanked the woman, and in a practiced gesture he slipped a folded piece of paper from his inside pocket and, his damp fingers twitching with anxiety, smoothed it in front of him on the sloping surface under the microphone.
“After that wonderful introduction I can hardly wait to hear what I’m going to say,” Raleigh said, and after the ripple of laughter, he added, “If anyone wishes to accompany me to the Charles River at the end of this talk, they can watch me walk on water.”
That sacrilegious second remark fell flat, but when he recovered and said, “I am proud to call myself a Bostonian,” he was so surprised by the vigorous applause that he pursued it, saying, “As you know, many of my fellow countrymen—and countrywomen—have fled Britain for New York City. There are more bossy, high-profile English people in America now than there were before the Declaration of Independence!”
To yelps of laughter, he went on, “As the Londoner said of the GIs during the war, ‘I don’t mind the Americans. But it’s those white people they brought with them.’ I seriously wonder whether there are any English writers left in London! Perhaps it’s understandable, since a knighthood means more in America than it does in Britain, but an English accent is still a questionable asset. Hearing my accent, some Americans ask me, ‘Are you English or gay?’”
His accent was plummier in America, or sounded so to his ear, like an old voice on the wireless. And there were other words he had to avoid, like “schedule,” or else had to learn how to say them differently. He had become acutely aware of his manner of speech, his gulping and stammering. Sometimes in shops he attempted an American accent, and even then was not understood. “‘Cans,’ not ‘tins,’” he told himself.
“It is simply not true that when you ask an Englishman the time he tells what it is to the minute, and when you ask an American the time he explains how to make a clock.” That one didn’t work. He began again, affecting a confidential manner, lowering his voice. “But it is true that when you step on an Englishman’s toe he’s the one who says sorry.” He continued, in the same tone, over the laughter. “On my second day in New York City I was walking down the street and saw a stack of newspapers and the big black headline ‘Queens Mother Raped’”—he let this sink in, he repeated the headline in a shocked voice—“and I must admit it gave me a turn—you know how headlines have a way of seeming like boasts. But this was an outrage, until I realized of course that Queens is a borough. But to avoid any further misunderstanding I decided that I would not stay in New York a moment longer, and came to Boston, where I have been very happy ever since. Besides, my fellow Brits have claimed New York as their own and are sh
amelessly looking for celebrity there.”
He paused for the crackle of appreciation to die away, then said, “They’ve forgotten what Dr. Johnson said about thirsting for wealth and burning to be famous.” He smiled and used his confidential tone again, saying, “‘They mount, they shine, evaporate, and fall.’”
Leaning against the podium he spoke into the silence. “Little do they know the pleasures of your city, which is not a city really, but a small town surrounded by smaller towns.”
He knew from a muffled pause, a withholding, a silence and suspense, the very quality of the air in the hall like a drop in pressure, that he had just said the wrong thing. It was so easy here to blunder, and you were so quick to know it.
“Of course all cities are built up of townships, and Boston has bags and bags of character,” he said, backing away; and explaining, praising, he recaptured the attention of the audience, who, as he always felt, were sitting in judgment upon him.
But he was glad for a chance to speak, grateful to have been asked. He needed this audience to take him on trust. He had come here to stay and found Boston to his taste. He could live in a house here, he could own a car; it was only twenty minutes to the woods in one direction, or to the ocean in the other. He could know the whole city, and no one knew him. The line about the fellow Brits—and the middle-aged ones he knew well—claiming New York as theirs might have sounded jokey, but they had rebuffed him in the stately city.
The English had come, they closely guarded what they had found, they didn’t share, there were as cliquey in New York as they’d been in London—cliquier, really, and slyly competitive in being part of the scene, not so much class-conscious as wicked one-uppers. Some behaved like expats in a savage colony, praising the place in public but denigrating it in private, mocking the locals in exaggerated have-a-nice-day accents. Yet they had possessed it, crowding him out, and he found it hard not to resent them. The first English person seems unique, and then you see the second one and realize it’s a whole identical tribe. There were just too many of them now. They were telly faces and wireless voices, they had strong opinions about everything, explaining America to Americans, who listened to them, and they were cock-a-hoop because the UK had stopped listening.
