White Walls

by Judy Batalion

  “No, fourteen varieties of lo mein should do.”

  He laughed, kind of.

  “I’ll have another glass of the dessert chardonnay. Actually, make that a carafe.”

  I kept drinking, staring at the moving water-fountain wall art, wondering what was considered kitsch in Asia? Old Master portraits? Abstract black canvases? He went on about how spiritual I was, and how he’d had a terrible weekend with his ex in Cornwall, explaining that I shouldn’t feel threatened. I didn’t feel threatened. I felt frisky. “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Really?”

  OMG. For several dates, he’d been begging to sleep with me, and now this? So life. “Really.”

  In his car, he kissed and grabbed me as he drove, only stopping between red lights to move forward at record speeds.

  “Back to yours?” he said.

  “No! Yours.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Yours.” I had never been so firm in my life. But there was no question: I’d rather open my legs than my front door. I wanted to see his first, to know who I was dealing with. “YOURS.” I panicked for a second. I should never have told him where I lived.

  “I’m going to yours,” he said, between gearshifts and cleavage.

  “I swear to God.” I threw his arms off me. “If you drive to mine I will not let you in. I will not!”

  “Yeesh, fine,” he said.

  I felt strong. I knew what I wanted. “Drive!”

  The problem was that he lived in the suburbs, and not only was my liquored personality and liquid courage wearing off, but heavy making out at traffic light intervals was draining my energy.

  I was pleased when he finally pulled up to his home, which he’d more than once mentioned was worth over a million pounds.

  He opened the door. “Welcome.”

  I walked in, teetering on my heels, ready to plop myself into this dazzling new domestic life.

  Which is why I was particularly startled to trip on a slick of papers. A whole pile of unopened envelopes. There were boxes everywhere. The kitchen table was lined with old food. The furniture was covered in sweaters, blankets. The image spun. He shut the lights. Thank God, I said, shutting my eyes.

  Was I drunk or was this house a disaster? It looked like no one had been here for months.

  I kept telling myself that the upper echelons were messy, as a way of showing they didn’t care. But messy wasn’t dirty, and no one should not-care this much, right?

  “Come upstairs to the bedroom.” He grabbed my hand. I kept my eyes nearly closed, opened only to a squint, trying to focus inward. I didn’t want to see this. He threw things out of the way, lots of things, and threw me onto the bed. He pulled up my shirt, and pulled off his clothes, rolling on top of me. I couldn’t breathe. His weight pressed down on my small frame, he felt like a truck. He would suffocate me.

  “Move over,” I said, pushing him with all my might.

  “Sorry,” he whispered. Then, “Damn.” Business was shut. And, I took a peek—it was a small business to begin with.

  I sighed. After all that begging . . . I pulled up my pants.

  “Going to the bathroom,” I said.

  “It’s just on the right,” he said. “Don’t mind the mess.”

  The mess? It was more of a tornado. T-shirts, towels, used razors hung from all ledges. Caked toothpaste like cement covered each edge of the sink. I couldn’t find soap to wash my hands, just traces of yellow dishwashing liquid. I felt sick. At least I’d asked to see his apartment first, I reasoned to my spinning self. Now, I could walk away.

  Except for the fact that I was stranded. “I need to put my head down,” I said, crawling over sweatshirts and onto his mattress, or at least, what I thought was a mattress. I pulled a bit of blanket over my face wanting to hide, to separate myself from this scene. As soon as my head stopped spinning and the sun flirted with rising, I was getting the hell out of here.

  I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I heard was a panic attack.

  “I can’t do it,” he said, quickly. “I just can’t do it.”

  “Yeah, I know you can’t, it’s fine,” I said. “I just need to sleep this off for a few minutes.”

  “No, I can’t take it, I can’t take you being here, with me.” He paced in and out of his room. “You have to go to another room, sleep downstairs. You have to go.”

  I looked at the clock. “It’s three a.m., and we’re in buttfuck London.”

  “I can’t!”

  He felt trapped?

  “I’m just sleeping; I don’t want anything from you,” I said, surprised at my growing candor.

  “I’m calling you a cab.”

  “I’m a cab,” I said under my breath.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” I got up and started getting dressed. “I’m fucking tired and this is ridiculous.”

  I wobbled downstairs, and began lacing up my pink heels, embarrassed that they had to see such a disaster on the floor. Junk was everywhere.

  “Give me money,” I said, realizing I sounded like a prostitute.

  “What?”

  “For this ridiculous middle-of-the-night cab ride.”

  “This should be enough.” He handed me several bags of coins.

  He even hoarded change. To think I had been worried about inviting him over.

  “Call me?” he asked in a high-pitched voice, as I walked back down the garden path.

  “Yeah, right,” I actually said out loud.

  “What a loser,” I said to the cabdriver as I climbed in, my pink shoes shining in the dewy night. I couldn’t believe I’d been out with my mother, again.

  A week later, Maya schlepped me to another synagogue for another singles event. I’d told her that Benedict and I had had our last supper. “Aren’t you upset?” she asked, scanning the room for the future father of her sure-to-be-hyperanxious children.

  “No,” I said. But for the first time, it wasn’t because I was hiding my feelings. It was because I really wasn’t upset. I didn’t want that relationship. When I got to my apartment that evening and locked the door behind me, I settled down on my clean futon in my organized living room and felt relaxed. I’d left my Montreal house ten years earlier. Finally, I’d built a foundation.

  • • •

  IT WAS WEEKS later, sitting on a comedian’s toilet, that I found my bible. Though I’d heard of it, certainly, I’d never actually perused the sacred text word by word. Somehow, seeing them on the page, so matter-of-fact, especially when I’d picked up the book out of boredom and was looking forward to denigrating it (how could such atrocious schlock sell?), they called out to me a greater life lesson than any I’d received in my now six years of “emotional college” in England (much longer and more difficult than regular college, even Harvard).

  “This is funny,” I said, holding up the tome as I returned to the living room where three of us had been rehearsing sketches. Of course I meant, “this book is brilliant and changed my life in an instant,” but “funny” was the highest—and only—accolade among comic folk.

  Mel, an Australian, looked over at me holding her copy of He’s Just Not That Into You and smirked. “Yeah, it’s a pretty good read,” she said, but then I recalled how she’d been endlessly confessing her woes about a Shakespearean actor who’d been inviting her to the Globe but never anywhere out-of-this-world. To me, however, the authors’ insight was simply incredible: if a guy didn’t call you back, or dumped you, it was because—well—he didn’t like you. That was it! It sucked, maybe, but, it didn’t really matter; there’s nothing you could do, so move on. This frank honesty, this blasé discussion of not-being-liked and being-OK, blew my mind, disabling me from concentrating for the rest of the rehearsal.

  Before I left, Mel said I should borrow the book, and suggested I also take a pop
-anthropology hit, Watching the English. I shrugged (it looked so long) but took it anyway, unused to reading anything that wasn’t PhD-related. But on the tube ride home, with glances at just a few pages, more wonderment and salvation began. Sure, I’d deduced some “class rules” at the museum, but I’d had no idea that hundreds more standards existed. All the crazy yet intimidating oddities of British social behavior were laid out in chapters like a high school textbook: Food Rules, Road Rules, Play Rules, Sex Rules. Privacy and indirectness reigned (never request a tour of someone’s house). Middle-class English folk did not introduce themselves by name (why should anyone care who you are). One did not compliment because it meant too much noticing of the other (aha!). One did not speak to their neighbors because it meant putting pressure on them (asking to borrow sugar might lead to—gasp—years of forced hellos). “Negative politeness” was the British way: assuming people were most comfortable not being seen, it was most polite to leave people alone (versus American positive politeness, which was founded on enthusiastic inclusion and, well, being nice).

  There was a clear system to this craziness, a logic that I could decipher. And, like the guys who didn’t call, it wasn’t all about me. If a comedian I’d known for years crossed the street instead of saying hi to me, it was just British politeness. It wasn’t about me! If a guy texted me nonstop, asked me to hang out at the pub to watch the football with all his friends, invited me to move in, and then told me he just wanted to be friends, it was just crazy English and male behavior. It wasn’t me! Or, it was me, but it didn’t matter that much. And, it was possible for me to try to understand.

  This newfound sense of detachment followed me home that night, and into my stage life. When I finally got a spot at a popular gig on a boat, only to arrive and find it was miles away from the tube station at the East London docks and en route I saw a series of teenage girls fist fighting, not to mention the deck was covered in Union Jack flags (a symbol of the British far right) and I was the only woman, let alone foreigner, let alone Jew on board, and the drunken audience of three was seated behind a pole, and I was nearly attacked by a Rottweiler while onstage, and the performance didn’t go so well, I did not beat myself up like some of the other comics, but simply said, that was not about me.

  As I walked back to the train, watching out for any unusual violence, I marveled about how when I first got glasses, their effect was so apparent: trees were no longer a composition of green clouds but I could see each distinct leaf. Nature, I’d realized, was intricate and beautiful! I felt like I was wearing similarly thick lenses now, distanced from my surrounds, whose intricacies I saw clearly. These codes showed me that there were boundaries between me and Brits, me and men, me and the world, and that those differences weren’t lonely, but empowering. Even interesting. Taking wide steps, despite my unfashionable rounded shoes, I felt in control.

  • • •

  TWO WEEKS LATER, R. B. Kitaj, my heroic drawing room painter, committed suicide.

  At the museum, first thing in the morning, my coffee still too hot to drink, the BBC Web site glared at me: my middle-class hero—the Royal Academician, this English art success—had suffocated himself with a plastic bag. His obituary, which I read immediately, my cheeks tingling, explained that he’d always been attacked for being an outsider with unfashionable intellectual opinions on art, implying his insecurity had led to his self-destruction. I should have called him, I kept thinking, struck by the brutal finality of this news. It was as if I’d unexpectedly lost, not a friend, but an ideal. He killed himself. Even Mom hadn’t killed herself. Everything was frail, paper-thin. How could the creator of this striking living room, the bearer of a life I wanted to use as a model, have vanished? My hands shook as I Googled, binging on the headlines.

  When I gained some composure, I stood up in the middle of the office to share this news. But suddenly Helen swept frantically by, followed by a horde of harried assistants. “Is everyone all right?” I asked, suppressing my update.

  “It’s urgent,” Charlotte explained, sighing, as if art history was a field rife with emergencies. “The construction workers didn’t understand. One of them urinated in the eighteenth-century toilet. And sat on the furniture.”

  “I’m so sorry about the sofa,” I said, apologizing instinctively while reminding myself not to demonstrate excessive compassion.

  “You mean, chaise longue.”

  “Right,” I said, but just then I knew: I would never get it right.

  I had no class. I too was an outsider, deeply unfashionable. England had been my cherished escape, and I’d learnt a lot here, but, Lord (and Lady), I was so not English.

  • ELEVEN •

  COMMENCEMENT

  London, 2007

  We woke to the powdery London light that existed only in the mornings, before the days became gray and smoggy like a Dickens Christmas even in July. Mom was nestled into my pillows, her elbow propped up. My parents had come for my doctoral graduation, and were staying with me. It was fun to have them here, sharing my space, even if it meant they’d had to take the shelves out of my tiny European fridge to fit their stash of budget groceries.

  I’d woken once in the night to listen to the chorus of breaths. Her breathing, Dad’s breathing from the futon in the next room. Little blusters and burps; a symphony of genealogy. Would I ever hear this again? I always wondered if it was the last time.

  “I just don’t see why she dumped him,” Mom now said. “Aiden was so good for her.”

  “Maya recently broke up with a guy who was like Aiden,” I said. The night before, we’d met Maya for dinner at a gastropub. Minutes before Maya’s arrival, Mom had disappeared into the bathroom. I’d feared the worst—a mood swing, an inconsolable episode—and had to distract Maya while I figured out how I’d manage the rest of the evening. But just as I was about to go looking for Mom, she appeared, fully made up in cosmetics and a scarf, neither of which I had any idea she owned. I hadn’t even changed, and there she was, a surprise transformation, a soft smile adorning her visage. I was relieved, but also upset that the grin wasn’t for me. Maya had thought she seemed incredibly sweet.

  “Why?” Mom asked, turning to me in the bed. “Maya seems smart.”

  “Maybe she’s not ready,” I said, enjoying our chat session in this SATC pidgin, feeling like we were two teenage girls who kissed pillows and did must-increase-their-bust exercises. I’d reported several of my recent dates to Mom. When I didn’t know how to progress things with Tim, she said, “Drink some red wine.” When Ian had been aloof, canceling dinners but inviting me to his choir recitals, she’d said: “He sounds gay.” Now she smiled. “Aiden was so grounding,” she said. “Carrie needed it. Does Maya?”

  “Good morning,” Dad called to us from the other room.

  “Morning,” I called back. “How did you sleep?”

  And then.

  The person shifting in an instant, as if clicking on a new effect in Instagram, immediately changing the tone, the coloring, the sharpness of the lines, and thus, the whole meaning of the picture.

  I felt Mom’s body tense on the bed next to me. The sheets became taut. “What do you want to do today?” I asked, generally, to the stifling air around me. “The Globe?”

  “Sure, the Globe,” Dad answered and closed the door to the bathroom.

  Mom rolled away, her back to me. She pushed the blanket between us. “Sure, the Globe,” she mocked.

  I breathed, trying to stay calm. My tiny apartment felt like it was shrinking. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Why are you mad? Are you mad at me?” Could just talking to my father have set her off? She wanted something from me that I just didn’t understand, couldn’t give.

  “I’m not mad at you, Judy,” she hissed, now frantically dressing herself.

  I went to the kitchen to give her space.

  Within minutes she was slamming doors, then yanking open my fridge, p
ulling out the margarine tub and the knife, then, they left her hand. Swerved toward my arm.

  “Stop attacking Judy,” my father screamed. “What the hell did she do to you?”

  I halted frozen in front of the sink.

  “We’re here for her PhD graduation,” he continued. “We’re guests in her house.”

  My limbs tingled. I was shocked by Mom’s actions, but even more so by Dad’s. I’d just turned thirty years old, and this was the first time he had defended me.

  “Stop it.”

  His voice boomed into my brain. He had acknowledged the dysfunction. He had acknowledged me. I was not hidden and transparent, but real, tangible. When he saw me, I saw myself. I saw the situation.

  “Get out,” I said quietly. I looked Mom in the madly glinting eyes. Her hands were full of plastic containers. “Behave yourself or get the fuck out of my house.”

  My house. There it was. Our houses were separate. We were separate. She was not me.

  “Fine,” she mumbled, and I stumbled back, my hands trembling, shocked at her easy capitulation. “I’ll behave,” she said in a quiet voice, aping me like a schoolchild. Then she sat in my chair and began spreading cheese on a roll. As if nothing had happened.

  She was ill, really ill, and it wasn’t just in my head. But it didn’t mean I had to be the victim of her illness.

  That afternoon I wore a cap and gown. I was finally ready to graduate.

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY, I dropped my parents off at Heathrow. “I have too many things going on with the houses,” Mom had said. “I need to get back.”

  “So go,” I said. How many times could I convince them to come, to stay, to enjoy themselves, to enjoy me?

  The day before, Mom had arrived at the graduation ceremony alongside Dad, gleaming with pride. Like a professional ninja photographer, she left her seat to follow me as I processed, skidding down the church aisles with each of my formal steps, contorting to take snaps of every moment of my ascension in the academy. (“Wow, your mother’s really into this,” a peer mused. “American style,” I’d answered, knowing that’s what she’d been implying, strangely proud of Mom’s lack of British restraint.) Mom’s mood had remained buzzing through the champagne and strawberry reception in the institute’s courtyard and even in the galleries, as she giddily examined nineteenth-century French cabaret and café scenes. I was careful to balance my time and introductions between her and an increasingly drunken Dad, who pulled me aside, a toppling glass in one hand, wiping tears from his eyes with the other. “Your grandmothers would have been so proud,” he said as he pinched my upper arm. I’d imagined Bubbie, her strong warrior arms clutched around my gown, her checkerboard cheek in my neck. “I always knew you’d become a doctor,” she’d say, not caring that I was a doctor of sculptures.