by Sue Margolis
“C'mon, Bren, speak to me. What's up?”
Brenda looked at him without a trace of a smile or mischief on her face. She began picking at the lime skins.
The truth was that ever since giving Anna the newspaper ad for Liaisons Dangereux, she had been tormented by thoughts of how unspeakably wicked and disloyal she had been to Dan. Now she had bumped into him out of the blue, she felt she owed it to him to at least give him a vague hint that Anna might be up to something. The problem was that she was frightened of saying too much and spilling all Anna's beans.
“Look, Dan,” she began hesitantly, “the last thing in the world I'd want to do is interfere in your marriage, but I don't think you've got the foggiest how much this imaginary illness carry-on of yours has got to Anna. It's driving her seriously off her trolley. I know she still loves you, and she's tried very hard to understand and help, but I'm telling you, Dan, if you don't make a real effort right now, today, to find yourself a shrink, and knock this thing on the head, I'm frightened you might end up losing her.”
As Brenda spoke, guilt and shame began to coat Dan's stomach like heavy black treacle. It was the same feeling he'd got as a child the time his mother caught him at the dinner table stuffing her inedibly fatty salt beef into his school trouser pocket.
Dan couldn't look at Brenda. Instead he concentrated on scraping his spoon around the rim of his coffee cup and removing bits of dried-up cappuccino froth. He found himself thinking that if God was meant to be so bloody merciful, why was he inflicting all this emotional pain on him in one day?
He began to realize how the ancient Egyptians must have felt when the Almighty sent down the ten plagues. He was overtaken by an urge to rush back to the Vanguard building and smear the main entrance with ram's blood, otherwise there would, he felt sure, be a swarm of locusts hovering over his desk when he got back.
Anna had just driven round Gants Hill roundabout and, glancing at a signpost, realized that not only was she no more than fifteen minutes from Uncle Henry's house, but that the road seemed slightly familiar. It was then she worked out that she must have driven through Gants Hill in her lime-green VW Beetle the night in 1980 when she got off with Dan at Beany Levine's party. But years before that, even, she must have come this way with her parents whenever they went to visit Uncle Henry and Aunty Yetta.
So when was the last time she had seen them? For a few minutes Anna trawled through her mind's Filofax, remembering weddings at the Regal Rooms in Edmonton, Passover meals with Harry's sister in Newbury Park and Harry's sister's son's bar mitzvah at the Manor Hall in Chigwell. Then she got it. The last time she had seen Henry and Yetta was at a particularly poignant Sunday-afternoon tea party at their tiny Victorian terraced house nearly thirty years ago.
The Canadian cousins were over from Montreal, and Yetta had decided to lay on one of her smoked salmon bagel spreads in their honor. Henry had decided to use the occasion to make a dramatic announcement about Sidney. Sidney was Henry and Yetta's only child, whom nobody in the family ever talked about because he was in his forties and appeared to be having a homosexual relationship with a pastry chef he lodged with in Kilburn. The family could never work out what upset Yetta and Henry most—the thought of Sidney living with a man or the fact that he was doing so in Kilburn.
On the day of the tea, about thirty people were crammed into Yetta and Henry's best room. The short, overweight men wore suspenders. These held up trousers which seemed to Anna to come up to their chests. They leaned back in Yetta's faded red moquette armchairs, their chubby fingers looking incongruous gripping the handles of her pretty pink-and-gold bone-china teacups.
Harry was impressing everybody with how well Maison Gloria was doing and what a natural Gloria was for the garment trade:
“I tell you,” he said, invoking what Anna now realized was a Jewish joke old enough to have come from the Dead Sea Scrolls, “a man could come up to her in the street these days, open up his raincoat and expose himself, and do you know what her reaction would be? I'll tell you what it would be. All he'd get from my Gloria, God bless her, would be: “Huh, you call that a lining?' ”
Everybody laughed—even the children, who instantly worked out that “expose himself” had something to do with willies. Five of them, including Anna, were sitting bunched up on the settee, the girls in their red Clarks sandals, the boys in their long gray Cubs socks with green Baden-Powell garters. Anna sat on the end, quietly working her way through a plate of her favorite cakes, miniature Danish pastries from Broers the bakers, which were filled with sweet cream cheese and half a dried apricot. She concentrated on finishing her Danish and tried to ignore one of her cousins digging her in the thigh with a sharpened lolly stick, because she knew that if she was good and didn't get into trouble, then Gloria would let her stay up to watch Sunday Night at the London Palladium when they got home.
In a lull during a discussion on that brilliant young Yiddishe chap Robert Maxwell and the wonderful things he was doing in business while still being a socialist, Henry chose his moment for the family announcement he had been planning.
He cleared his throat a couple of times, and like some diminutive East End brigadier bringing news from the front to his superiors at the War Office, he announced in an overly loud staccato voice that it was his sad and regretful duty to inform the family that their son Sidney was not, as everybody suspected, a homo—although he had been living a double life. For the last seven years, without their knowledge, Sidney had been married to a Catholic woman and they had two boys. They had now gone to live in Dublin with her family. As far as he and Yetta were concerned, Sidney was no longer their son, and from this time forth they considered him to be dead.
From that afternoon, Sidney-the-one- nobody -talked-about was not talked about even more.
Several years later, when “marrying out” had become more acceptable, Henry finally accepted his son back into the family and used to look forward to his trips to Dublin to visit Sidney, Maureen and the children. The rest of the family, on the other hand, continued to keep their distance. Yetta's attitude towards her son never changed. The truth was, she hadn't been given much of a chance to change. This was owing to the fact that she choked to death on a nut cluster a few months after the bagel tea incident.
Anna turned right off High Street North and into Sheringham Avenue. She found Uncle Henry's house easily enough because it was the only one, in a street full of York stone cladding and aluminum window frames, which looked as if it hadn't been painted or the net curtains washed since milk was delivered in churns and one in three infants died from diphtheria before reaching their first birthday.
Anna's timing hadn't been too bad. It was just after five, and there were still relatives, some of whom she vaguely recognized, arriving back from the cemetery and going into the house. She locked the car, dropped her keys into her bag and fell in behind two frail old women who had linked arms to support each other during the arduous journey up the garden path. Despite the warm weather, they were both wearing three-quarter-length camel coats. One of the women had chosen to make hers a touch more funereal by wearing on her head a short black fishnet veil. On top of this there squatted a very large black taffeta rose. From what Anna could hear of their conversation, which was almost everything because they were both stone deaf and needed to shout at each other to get a response, they appeared to be from the old people's day center where Henry had died during a game of kaluki.
“I tell you, Estelle, I saw him lying there dead on the floor. He looked so well. That two weeks in Bournemouth must have really agreed with him.”
Finally Anna made it into the lounge, which apart from smelling vaguely of stale wee was just as she remembered it, with its red moquette three-piece and Aunty Yetta's gold-and-onyx serving cart.
The room was seething with arms, hands and elbows pushing and shoving to get to the buffet table, whose white damask cloth was, for the time being at least, covered with plates, platters and silver gallery trays, stacked
to Kilimanjaro heights with cakes, bagels, herrings and fishballs. Anna looked round for Gloria, who had agreed to help with the catering, but couldn't see her.
Anna was starving, but decided, after the journey she'd had, that what she needed first was a drink. Various aunts and ladies from down the road were bringing round cups of tea, but Anna needed something stronger. As she had come into the room, she'd noticed there were tiny glass thimbles of whiskey, sweet sherry and cherry brandy on Aunty Yetta's serving cart. Unlike the mountains of food, these were remaining, in true Jewish style, steadfastly untouched.
She reckoned she would need to down at least ten of the glasses to get a hit and wondered how she could do this without drawing attention to herself and becoming known as Gloria's daughter the dipso.
Finally she decided that everybody was too busy eating to notice her. She made her way over to the cart and picked up a glass of whiskey. After about five glasses she was beginning to feel much calmer, and was just about to go into the kitchen to find her mother when she became aware of a man's voice behind her. It sounded soft and smooth—as if it spent most of its life doing Kerrygold butter commercials.
Anna turned round. Every nerve ending in her body capable of a sexual response, including ones she didn't know about in her pancreas, suddenly felt as if they were about to take off all their clothes and step into black silk negligees.
Anna was standing face-to-face with one of the most beautiful men she had ever seen not on the arm of some Hollywood babe. Her eyes darted quickly to the buffet table to check that Sharon Stone and Michelle Pfeiffer weren't hovering by the pickled herrings.
They weren't. The only people lurking by the pickled herrings were wearing man-made fibers, and there wasn't a Neiman Marcus carrier bag or an even remotely toned upper body part in sight.
“I was just saying,” came the warm Irish accent, “I didn't realize it was the done thing to get plastered at a Jewish wake, but if it is, then I think I'll join you. By the way, I'm Charlie Kaplan. Henry was my grandfather.”
Dan was getting desperate. He'd decided after such a stressful day to leave work early. As he lay on the sofa going through the ads for counselors in Time Out, he felt like a eunuch wandering around an Ann Summers shop. The list of therapies on offer seemed endless. How the hell was he supposed to know if astrological Reichian analysis was any better than Jungian crystal therapy, or if Janovian primal therapy was a safer bet than underwater rebirthing.
What he did know, on the other hand, was that Brenda had frightened the life out of him. It had taken her to convince him, when Anna couldn't, that his health had become an obsession, and that Anna could leave him because of it. Losing her was unthinkable.
Finally he came across a very brief and straightforward-looking ad from a psychotherapist who appeared to be a chartered member of some shrink institute or other. Dan knew psychotherapy only involved talking to a therapist a couple of times a week, and he could get away without buying a snorkel and flippers. He dialed the number and got a calm, reassuring woman's voice on the answer machine: “I hope you won't take it as a personal rejection that I am unable to speak to you just now, but if you feel strong enough to share your feelings, please break down, cry or let go of your anger after the tone.”
Dan thought she sounded a caring sort and left a message asking for an appointment.
If Brenda was right, he was, without doubt, on his way to saving his sanity and his marriage. He decided there and then not to mention any of this therapy business to Anna. He wanted to surprise her by coming home one day and announcing he was cured and that he was whisking her off for a holiday in the South Pacific.
What caused his positive and determined mood to evaporate in an instant and made his heart rate shoot up to 155 (he confirmed this using the second hand on his watch) was the thought that Brenda might have got it all wrong. What if this therapist woman started wading into his psyche only to discover that it was too late, that his sanity couldn't be salvaged and that he was, in fact, completely and utterly barking? As he imagined ending his days lying naked on a filthy, piss-soaked mattress in some nuthouse, the strain became too much. He went upstairs to the bathroom and tested his urine for sugar.
C H A P T E R F O U R
ANNA KNEW THAT IT DEFINITELY wasn't the done thing to get drunk at Jewish funerals. She assumed God would probably wreak his vengeance on her by making sure the Globe on Sunday spiked her piece on nits. What she also knew was that it was even less the done thing for a woman, particularly a married one, to pull at a Jewish funeral. Only after she assured herself that God hadn't turned her into a particularly horny pillar of salt did she pluck up the courage to reply to Charlie Kaplan.
She wanted to say bloody hell if Uncle Henry was your grandfather then that means you're Sidney-the-one-nobody-used-to-talk- about's son, so how come you're so tall and screw-me-quick gorgeous when they always said your father was short and weedy?
But because Charlie was giving Anna the kind of look that would have forced even the most committed lesbian to reassess her position on fellatio, all that she could blurt out was: “Hello, I'm Anna Shapiro. Henry was my uncle.”
She paused to take in the understated navy woolen suit. This looked as if it had cost an arm and both legs, plus a certain amount of offal. Underneath he was wearing an equally expensive polo shirt in a slightly darker shade of navy. “Well, not actually my uncle,” she continued. “We weren't really related. Sort of adopted uncle. So if I remember right, you must be from Dublin, then?”
“Yes, from a village just a few miles outside. I bought m'self a little cottage there last year, but I'm not home that often. I fly with Aer Hibernia . . . long haul, mainly.”
“So you're Captain Kaplan?”
“It is kind of alliterative, but I live with it.”
Anna knew it was her turn to say something light and conversational, but she couldn't, because her profound relief that Charlie Kaplan didn't appear to be living with a wife or girlfriend had begun to segue into an exceedingly downmarket, but nevertheless compelling, scenario involving an airline captain, ideally the one in front of her. In her daydream, Captain Kaplan was sitting at the controls with his head turned to face her, wearing nothing but his pilot's cap and a huge erection, while she was sitting opposite him with her legs slightly apart, in a very short black PVC trench coat and no panties.
As Anna came back to the reality of Uncle Henry's living room, she realized Charlie was staring at her and smiling. He couldn't be more than thirty-two or -three. Anna's hand darted from her side to the nonexistent loose skin under her chin and then back to her side again. For the first time she noticed his eyes, which were a deep Irish blue. They looked especially striking against his Semitic olive skin and almost-black hair, which was longish and slightly wavy. He reminded Anna of a very young George Best with overtones of horny Israeli paratrooper.
“Oh, right, good, great,” Anna spluttered. She downed another micro-whiskey in one. “Must be fascinating—all that travel.”
Charlie agreed, it was.
Then there was a pause which was just slightly too long for social comfort.
“So, Anna, tell me about yourself. What do you do?”
Anna hated telling strangers what she did for a living, especially if they seemed the sort who might look down their noses at the tabloids. It always ended up with her having to spend fifteen minutes justifying her existence as well as the existence of tabloid newspapers. Nevertheless, over the years, she had developed an extremely well argued and erudite case for both, and could deliver it with the force and assurance of a QC on a winning streak at the Old Bailey.
However, in the presence of a man so ravishing he could undoubtedly get Andrea Dworkin rushing out to buy lace open-crotch panties, her intellect and articulacy failed her and she ended up stuttering out something about the tabloids all being crap really, but the money was brilliant.
The conversation would have gone on in this stammering, faltering fashion had Anna n
ot accidentally broken the tension by asking, “So, how's your father?”
In a voice which was pure hormone, Charlie shot back at her with, “Well, I'm down for it if you are, but I'm not sure this is quite the time or place.” Then they both burst out laughing, just as Gloria was making a beeline for them carrying a tray of milky tea and looking so anxious even her hair was clenched.
“Good God, Anna, where have you been? We've all been worried sick.”
“Don't tell me, everybody's been phoning the police and the hospital, and the Missing Persons Helpline, and the FBI.”
“Anna, people worry.” Gloria sighed, somehow managing to shrug at the same time as holding on to the tea tray.
“Mum, I've been stuck in the most horrendous traffic on the North Circular.” Anna paused to let her irritation at her mother's kvetching subside.
“Oh, and I'd like you to meet Charlie Kaplan,” she went on. “Henry was his grandfather.”
Anna thought her mother smiled at Charlie for a second or two longer than was decent for a woman of her age. It turned out that the two had already met at the cemetery. Gloria was just saying what a shame it was that Sidney and Maureen weren't able to make it because they were on a Saga holiday in Oslo, when she spotted Aunty Millie at the other side of the room. Gloria looked round for somewhere to put the tea tray and finally handed it over to a passing Kaplan great-niece in red platforms, matching acne and a nose stud. Then she went to fetch Aunty Millie who, before Anna arrived, had been bragging to Gloria about her grandson the top West End accountant.
