And it occurred to me also (Justin talking to a prostitute in the doorway) that I was going to lose Raissa Shestatsky to another man, that I was losing her even while I was standing here. And those lyrics: Lennon leaning obscenely close to the microphone to emphasize the dirtiness of the words. That business about getting done by his girlfriend. The notion that I might never see Raissa naked again hit me like a kick in the stomach.
Why, I wondered, had I come to France, to this grey, grey city, when my life was so obviously elsewhere: an apartment on Major Street where I had left a young girl sleeping fitfully? What had I been thinking!
And then came the song’s final notes, that piano, wistful, fading, like a girl waving from a train.
I was in Casablanca in the seventies piddling about and waiting for my life to begin when I met a young Iranian, Arghavan Gholami, one afternoon. We were in a café in the French quarter, everyone uneasily stoned on hashish, Raissa long gone, when he began to talk about growing up listening to the Beatles in a small city on the Caspian Sea.
The Caspian Sea?
It was like talking to a Beatles scholar with an Arab accent (as momentarily displacing as a Chinese woman talking with a Jamaican accent). Did I know, Arghavan asked, that Ringo had played drums on the album version of “Love Me Do” but that a studio musician had sat in for the 45? That George Harrison had played bass on “She Said, She Said” because Lennon and McCartney had had a violent row which concluded with Paul storming out of the studio? That the lyric about butterflies in “It’s Only Love” seemed so corny to Lennon (even though he wrote it himself) that it wrecked the song for him? That Beatles producer George Martin lifted the cello strokes in “Eleanor Rigby” from the soundtrack to Hitchcock’s Psycho? (Another surprise.)
“If you want to know how Ringo got the job,” Arghavan said, “listen to the drumming on ‘Anna.’ It’s like a set of drums falling down the stairs.”
Until that day, I’d always assumed the Beatles were my possession, that other people liked them, sure, but I had a special rapport with them. But listening to this young Iranian, I began to suspect maybe that wasn’t the case. And the idea that it might not be gave me a confusing sense of comfort, that I was not, therefore, alone with this peculiar sensation of longing or sadness or incompleteness that I experienced whenever I heard their music or saw them in photographs.
All this ran through my head as I waited for the cameraman to stop fiddling and tinkering with the lighting, George Harrison already seated opposite me, patient, waiting to begin. For reasons too inane to elaborate on, I had decided to conduct the interview with no notes—I must have wanted Mr. Harrison to be impressed.
“We’re ready over here,” the producer said.
Harrison drummed on the arm of his chair and looked up pleasantly.
“So George,” I began, my mind wiped clean as an after-school blackboard, “what was it like being in the Beatles?”
The room sagged. The producer looked paralyzed with dismay. Even the cameramen, trained like pointers, flinched. Harrison paused. He looked away, thinking of an answer, determined to take the question seriously, and with it, the person who asked it.
“Well, you know, for a first job, it wasn’t too bad.”
Everyone relaxed. With a guy like that, you can’t go wrong.
My memory of what he said after that is patchy. Luckily, I kept the raw footage, and looking at it today, I see a kind and thoughtful Harrison responding with playfulness, while off camera a voice (mine), a full octave higher than normal, asks overly complicated questions punctuated by explosions of pointless laughter (again mine). We talked about all sorts of things: his older sister whom he visited in Canada at the outset of Beatlemania, the late Brian Epstein, gardening, Eric Clapton, Monty Python, even the American playwright Tennessee Williams. Were his last plays bad or was it just the critics? Harrison wondered aloud, an elegant, pre-emptive defence of his new album and the hostility it would no doubt provoke among young reviewers eager to show their flashy irreverence.
I mentioned Shanghai Express, the dopey movie he produced with Madonna and Sean Penn. “Wrong cast, wrong script, wrong director. Where did we go right?” he asked with an amused chuckle (big, healthy teeth). You could tell he loathed Madonna personally but was too adult to indulge it on camera with a stranger, although I sensed it wouldn’t have taken more than a nudge to get him going.
We talked about his ten-year-old son Dhani who, on hearing the new album, asked Dad why he hadn’t written a “really good song” like “Blue Suede Shoes,” to which a touchingly embarrassed Harrison replied, “He’s got a point.” We talked about a recent Paul McCartney sulk (again he was diplomatic) and, of course, about John Lennon. Responding to my question about whether he now feared for his life, Harrison frowned with the authentic discomfort of a modest man and replied, “No. The truth is, I’m not important enough.” I remembered that when, ten years later, a deranged fan broke into his house in the middle of the night and stabbed him. Mrs. Harrison subdued the intruder with a single downward swing with the business end of a lamp.
Our interview concluded, Harrison stayed put, chatting with the crew and producer, and then wandered off back downstairs, stopping in the doorway to talk some more. He was on his way, he said, “to meet Eric and Ringo for dinner.” (There’s a dinner I’d have liked to go to.)
I never met the other three Beatles. I saw a bearded Ringo once in the lobby of a New York hotel reading the newspaper, but I left him alone. You don’t break in on a guy when he’s taking a few minutes to read the paper. I had a few one-person-removed encounters. I interviewed Yoko Ono when she came through Toronto with a dreadful, howling album. She was very much what I’d been told to expect, a suspicious, controlling woman who interrupted the interview twice to inquire, “Would you ask that question to Bruce Springsteen?” (No, but then the Boss doesn’t write songs that sound as if an animal had caught its foot in a trap.)
No one ever knows what goes on between a man and a woman and I can only assume Yoko must have been a whole lot more fun with John Lennon than she was that day with me. Sexual chemistry forgives all.
I interviewed Albert Goldman in Rome, where he had fled after publishing an ugly-minded biography of John Lennon in 1988. The whole thing stank of a publicity stunt, especially the armed guard who sat glum and bored in the corner of the hotel suite.
But I liked Goldman a lot. He was an effervescent New Yorker, a gifted phrase-maker and a wonderful conversationalist who had made a major life miscalculation: he had not understood that for a Beatles book to sell well, Beatles fans have to like it. At that moment in Rome, his book was number two on the New York Times bestseller list, but it was already falling like a lead pipe. Sensing that something very bad was coming his way, Mr. Goldman sought to anaesthetize his distress with balloon-sized glasses of red wine before lunch. It didn’t help. The book ruined his career and not long afterwards he died on an airplane in mid-flight.
Near the end of our chat in Rome, though, as he was walking me somewhat unsteadily to the elevator, I remarked that the Lennon biography had taken him five years to write, which was the same amount of time that Flaubert had taken to produce Madame Bovary. Had it, I asked, been a prudent choice of subject matter? Given that, as a writer, you don’t get those years back. He replied that he didn’t know.
A few months before his death, a colleague phoned me one evening, said he had a message from Albert Goldman, whom he had just interviewed. It was about the Flaubert question. Goldman had assured my friend that I would understand. “Just tell him no, it wasn’t,” he said.
There have been almost five hundred books written about the Beatles. Remember, this is a group of young men who disbanded forty years ago and who recorded, in total, about ten hours of music. Only ten hours and twenty-eight minutes, to be precise. You would have guessed so much more!
But still, by 2005, I’d had enough of them. It’s not true that you fall in love only once in your life; but it is tru
e that you only fall in love a certain way, with a certain absoluteness, once. And I thought that’s maybe what had happened. Sometimes I’d hear “No Reply” or “Help!” or “Don’t Let Me Down” on the car radio and I’d think, That’s a terrific song, but I couldn’t be bothered listening all the way through, to that corny last chord of “She Loves You,” or even the delicious chorus in “Here, There and Everywhere.” I’d switch channels.
Then, a few months ago, a funny thing happened. I dropped into a second-hand bookstore, a grungy underground place in my neighbourhood. I was flipping through The Alexandria Quartet—it always reminds me of my mother—when I heard through an overhead speaker the final, dramatic bars of “When I Get Home,” a song from A Hard Day’s Night. And when John Lennon got to the hook, the hair stood up on my arms.
It was barely English, but I again felt it: it was back, that odd mixture of euphoria and sadness, of being close to but still on the outside of something terribly, terribly important.
7
Another Day in Paradise;
or, How Many OxyContins
Do I Have Left?
It must have been thirty years ago when I met Nessa Cornblum. Nessa, the rabbi’s daughter. She was working at the Rose Heights, an exclusive club for elderly Jewish women. She served high tea in the afternoons. Of course, she hated it. Nessa was at her conversational best when she was hating things, putting things down. She’d go still as a snake while her brain cooked with inventive cruelty—so-and-so’s weak chin, so-and-so’s sagging bosom—and then, finding just the right condemning phrase, when she hit the target and knew she hit the target, her Egyptian face slid open with a dazzling smile. Lord, she was pretty, though, that caramel skin, an almond face on which the centrepiece was a long, beautiful nose. You can talk about a woman’s behind, her smell, her breasts, her fingers, she had all that, but the masterpiece was her nose. It was a sexual virtue all on its own.
I was in the Bamboo, a lively, crowded bar down on Queen Street, the night I met her. I was at a table with a handful of people: Justin Strawbridge, Dexter Alexander, a medical intern, I forget his name, a night dentist, a computer programmer, an actor, somebody’s younger brother (then studying to be a helicopter pilot) and a dancer from the Danny Grossman troupe. Everyone was drunk, but in a young, happy way. Nessa Cornblum was there too, sitting with a couple of young women a few tables over. She must have felt she was with the wrong crowd, that she was missing out on something, because she kept looking this way, waiting for an in, an eye she could catch, a joke she could tag, something that would let her dump her pals (“Be right back”) and join us. Which she did.
I wasn’t especially attracted to her, not at first anyway, which she could sense, and that, coupled with my age—I was thirty, she was nineteen—intrigued her.
I don’t know who brought up Isla La Mar, maybe it was the intern or maybe a piece of music came on, but Dexter shouted, blowing a lungful of smoke at the ceiling, “Let’s go back! Let’s get on a fucking airplane and just go!”
The intern said he couldn’t take a Caribbean vacation just now, the dentist couldn’t either, but Justin Strawbridge, with that rich mother of his, sat back in his chair looking like a man who’s just remembered something. “Well, fuck me,” he said, and clapped his hands. It was a small gesture, that clap, but it sealed the trip. I shared a taxi home that night with Nessa; it stopped first at my apartment on Euclid. She lived further north, up in Forest Hill with Rabbi Cornblum and her two sisters. After we said good night and I got out of the cab, she wound down the window. “Do you have anything to drink at your house?” she said.
That was the first time we were together, and it wasn’t much, to be honest. A touch of theatre on her part. I have nothing against hollering and writhing and saying naughty things, but over the years I’ve discovered that just wanting to be there is what makes a good lover, not a 9.8 gymnastics routine.
While Nessa lay under the sheets, I poured myself a vodka, plopped in an ice cube and began to discuss, of all things, Scott Fitzgerald. The chatty gregariousness of the sexually sedated. “The reason The Great Gatsby feels like a longer book than it actually is”—here I pause for effect— “is that all the characters know each other before the story starts. So you’ve got thirty or so different relationships all going on at once.” Another sip and a ruminative look out the window. (I’d said this before.) “That’s what gives the book its remarkable density, why it feels like a five-hundred-page novel.”
“How would you guys feel about me tagging along with you to Isla La Mar?” Nessa said, propped up on one elbow. A breast revealed.
“In what capacity?”
“Just one of the guys. But I can see you’re hesitating. You’re worried you’re going to have to look after me down there. That I’m going to latch on to you like a lamprey.” “Did you know that lampreys almost annihilated the entire salmon and trout population of the Great Lakes?” I said.
“No, I didn’t know that.” Here she sat up in bed, the sheet falling entirely from her breasts, and lit a cigarette.
“And that it was a Canadian who invented a special poison which killed the lamprey larvae in the stream beds?”
Puff, puff.
“Can you imagine the ingenuity of a formula which kills only one species of egg and leaves everything else intact?”
“Uh-huh.”
“A Canadian guy.”
“So you said. But what’s your answer?”
I said, “I can’t look after you there. Just as long as we’re clear on that.”
Thinking back on that conversation now, at the age of sixty, I don’t understand why I wasn’t more alarmed about my future, why I didn’t understand that I was dangerously close to ending up like one of “those guys” whose company you sought out in the university cafeteria but whom, fifteen years later, you glimpse in an all-night doughnut shop: he’s still doing it, still talking up a storm, riffs about the second gun in the Kennedy assassination, riffs about how Brando saved Al Pacino from getting fired from The Godfather. But it’s three o’clock in the morning, the company’s different now, and he’s said it all before.
So we caught an early morning flight to Isla La Mar and then took a minivan to San Agatha, a fishing village on the north coast. It had been three years.
In the daytime, Justin, Dexter, Nessa and I snorkelled in the green-water caves. At night, we drank overproof rum in the Hotel La Mar bar and saw ourselves as extraordinary people. Sometimes Nessa came to my room and got into bed without a word. Behind the hotel the foliage was overgrown and gave off a mild rotting smell and sometimes you could hear things moving around in there at night.
Then one night Nessa Cornblum didn’t come.
I saw her in the hotel bar the next morning; she was having breakfast alone. The sun had darkened her skin, and sitting there in a sleeveless black T-shirt she looked so beautiful that I was scared of her.
I said, “So where were you last night, young lady?”
Young lady. You can see what I was trying to do—to get back to that zone where I had lived so effortlessly for weeks, ever since the night on Queen Street. But all that seemed like a foreign country now. And that funny, inauthentic sound of my voice? She must have heard it, must have understood what it meant.
“I got in late. I didn’t want to wake you up.”
“Did you fuck him?”
“Yes,” she said, and returned her eyes to her omelette.
“Who?”
“Some French guy.”
“The guy with the tattoo on his arm?”
“Yes,” she said, relaxing as if we were on the verge of talking shop. A week before, we could have been.
“Good-looking guy,” I said.
“He sure is.”
I heard a voice in my head say, Do you think I’m good-looking? I got to my feet. “Okay,” I said.
“Be careful with yourself today,” she said.
Three girls from the University of Southern Mississippi spilled
into the bar. One of them had a very red face. She’d fallen asleep on the beach. Children played on the patio while their parents ate breakfast and frowned. It was a family hotel.
“Meaning what?” I said.
Nessa looked up and frowned too. It was getting worse, like a rope running through my hands. I couldn’t get a grip on it.
I went up to Justin’s room on the second floor, beside mine. The door was open. He was sitting on the bed, barefooted, playing a guitar the colour of sunset. Writing down the lyrics and the chord progression. He looked at me and then back down at his notebook and then quickly back up to me. “I hope you haven’t fallen in love with her,” he said.
“Nope.”
“That could cost you a couple of years.”
“What could?”
“Falling in love with her. Getting into it, getting out of it, getting over it, a couple of years anyway.”
I said, “I thought we were going to the beach today.”
He said, “Why don’t we go down to Pamela’s and buy some speed instead?” Just the idea of an alteration energized him; he put the guitar in its case with quick gestures, as though now that he had made a decision, he was afraid the opportunity to act on it was going to flee.
I said, “That’s a beautiful guitar.”
He said, “Let’s go.”
So we went down to Pamela’s and bought three or four black Dexedrine capsules and chased them with warm beer. Pamela’s beer was never cold.
Soon Dexter wandered by in a pair of cut-off jeans with a T-shirt on his head. His shoulders were covered in acne scars. I asked him where Nessa was.
“Fucking her Frenchman,” he said. Dexter was the kind of friend you only keep when you’re young.
We headed down the road in a Dexedrine gust, the island painted in green-gold. Looking at my friends, a day and a night of adventure ahead of us, I thought, Yes, I have managed my life well. And the proof of it is this moment.
I didn’t see Nessa in San Agatha, not in the crowded street nor in any of the bars nor at a salsa dance down the beach later that same night. Which was fine until the speed began to wear off; and then my life with its gossamer achievements began to come apart like wet tissue paper.
The Perfect Order of Things Page 10
