He returned to his flat and continued his penniless existence in London. For a few months he helped tend a bar, other times he took the train to the sea, wandered around, and came back. In that year he returned to the big house with black shutters several times a week to check for activity. The grass was being mowed, the bushes clipped, the leaves raked from the gravel driveway. But no Eliza. In his disconsolate and random way, he began to see other girls, English, Irish, French, a new girl every few weeks or months, depending on a lot of things, including how his lungs felt, since they seemed to vary quite a bit, with the pollen in the air and how cold it was, many factors, all making his bronchial tubes unknowably fickle. He wasn't using any medicine with regularity— stupid, he knew, but he was resistant, for once you started you were dependent. At first the girls were understanding but in time they became irritated. He could still screw passably well but there were days he couldn't get out of bed. He arranged to have some inhalers stolen for him and for a time he was better. But the girls came and went. Fifteen years later he did not remember their faces or their names. "I still missed Eliza," Jay said, looking at his ceiling, "it was unfinished."
He continued monitoring her house, riding by several times a week on his bicycle, which he'd started to use to keep his lung capacity up. One day, nearly a year after Eliza had left, a taxi pulled into the driveway. Watching from across the street, he saw her mother emerge holding shopping bags from Harrods and other stores. The next day he called the father's London office and claimed to be a Mr. Williams from Citibank in New York. He made up a number with a 212 area code. The call would be returned within two days, he was told, Mr. Carmody was soon expected in town. And so it seemed the family had returned. When next Jay visited the house, he saw another young man with a flop of fine blond hair and a familiar manner around the yard. The young man stepped up to a porch, said something when inside, and then stepped out again holding a baby in the sun.
The sight of it was shattering.
He began to fall forward in a run across the grass but stopped himself, not yet believing what he already knew was true. The man took the baby inside, and Jay waited until Eliza stepped out of the doorway and saw him coming. "Stop!" she called. "Stop this!"
She hurried to the edge of the yard and, looking over her shoulder anxiously, agreed to meet him in Green Park, on a bench in sight of Buckingham Palace, two days later. He counted the hours and was there early. Eliza appeared along the path and was more composed this time. The baby slept in her pram. They didn't say much, they barely touched. Just fingertips— reluctantly on her part. The matter was simple: Eliza had married one of her old boyfriends, a man named Cowles, a few years older than Jay, much further along in his career, having been both well capitalized by family funds and a prodigy in business school, and they had spent much of the previous year in the south of France. I'm sorry, Eliza told Jay. That's all I can say. There was in her tone the message that she belonged to another man now, that no matter what had once briefly passed between them, that was done and gone, obliterated by four hundred straight days of another man— his eyes and hands, his voice, his cock, his family, his shoes and books and hairbrush. Does this guy know the baby— Sally, I mean— is not his? Jay asked. No, no, Eliza shook her head. That would hurt him too much. He will never know. There was the question of sex, the question of logistics. I don't understand, said Jay. How can he think he's the father if— I saw him once or twice last summer, Eliza interrupted, okay? He came over to visit me in America. You had sex? Yes. After you met me? No, she said firmly. Right before. But the baby is yours. Jay didn't understand. Why? Because I had my period just after. David and I had sex, then I got my period, he left for London, then you and I met and had sex and that was it. I guess I wasn't careful enough. All in about one week or ten days. Are you sure? Yes, Jay. But what about when you returned? Didn't you have sex with him when you got back? I did, she conceded, but not until later. I knew I was pregnant. You did? Yes. That's why I had sex with him as soon as I could when I got back. Because you knew—? How? You can feel it, she said. You feel it in your breasts and everywhere. The timing was close enough, she said, he just thought the baby was a few weeks early. Please don't lie to me, Jay said, please tell me whose baby Sally is.
She's yours, Eliza answered, I swear.
Jay looked at the infant girl. I want to hold her, he said, I've never held a baby. She helped lift the sleeping baby out of the pram and nestled her on Jay's shoulder. So light, so tiny. Sally. After my grandmother, Eliza said. Sally. The tiny eyes and nose, impossibly perfect. He had helped to make this child. He felt the warm weight of her go through him. He settled Sally in his arms and felt himself relax, let his chin fall to the fuzzy head, his own eyes drowsy with love. Eliza watched this and began to cry. After a few minutes, the baby woke, her lips puckering instinctively for a nipple, and Jay handed her to Eliza. She sat on the bench and nursed the baby. He saw Eliza's breast, enormous and full, and desire shot through him. A mother's wet raised nipple somehow was more erotic than usual, leaking life. She's really mine? Oh yes, Eliza said, I can prove it to you. Sally has your little horn. You mean the bump in my ear? She reached out and ran her fingers along the inside edge of the cartilage of Jay's ear, where a point sat hidden on the inner fold. It was more pronounced on his left ear than on his right and so he reached for Sally's left ear, and although it was impossibly soft, it had the same tiny, distinct bump. A horn, just like yours, Eliza smiled. What other proof could possibly be as good as that?
"My left ear," Jay said now, sitting up. "Feel it."
"You want me to touch your ear?" I said.
"Just go ahead."
So I did, tentatively, reaching out to pinch the cartilage at the end of his ear. The vein in his temple pointed to his eye like an arrow.
"Feel it? There's a bump."
"No."
He directed my fingers with his own. "There."
I felt exactly what he was talking about, a small triangular ridge, the tiniest of horns.
"Did you see the baby again?" I asked.
"No."
"No? What were you doing?"
He made, he told me, a point of cycling past the house every month or so, just to torture himself, or to remember, maybe both. And one April afternoon, he said, when he did this he saw that all the wooden trim had been painted a garish blue, a cerulean blue. The shutters and cornice and French doors. C'mon, he thought, why mess it up, it was something the newly arrived Turks or Arabs would do, someone with no understanding of— then he knew. The family was gone. This time for good. They'd sold the house and moved and that meant that something had happened. He turned the bike around and rode back the other way, slowly. Fuck it, he thought, I'm going to find out. He pulled over at the next house. A blond woman in her thirties was kneeling in one of the rose beds, turning fireplace ashes into the earth.
"Excuse me," said Jay.
The woman shaded her eyes. "Yes?"
"I'm an old friend of the Carmodys," he said. "Did they move?"
"Yes," she said. "Hated to see them go."
"But why?"
The woman stood, perhaps because of the naked misery of his voice. "They couldn't be here anymore." She brushed some earth off her trowel. "Business, I suppose."
He mumbled his acknowledgment. He sat there looking at the dusting of tree pollen on the road. Then he walked back to the woman.
"What about the little girl, the family?"
"With Mr. Cowles, you mean? I think they moved to Tokyo. Something about a branch office, I didn't quite follow it. A very good opportunity with the bank."
Thus did Jay lose contact with Eliza Carmody Cowles and his daughter, Sally Cowles.
"I tried to find them, calling, but it was no good. It was too far away."
"You think of following them?" I asked.
He touched the oxygen mask to his face. Shook his head.
"Too far?" I interpreted. "Too difficult and expensive."
He pulled the
mask off. "I was a kid, you know? I didn't know anything. I didn't really know what it meant, either." He decided not to go back to America, he said, so he found a better job, not in a bar, where the smoke bothered him, but teaching American conversational English to Saudi princes located in London. A strange job, but not one he minded. All he had to do was talk. "They were very well educated," Jay said, "much better than me. Oxford, usually. Some had gone to school in the States. But they wanted to get the American idiom, the flavor." When one of the students, a young woman, saw him coughing and heard the story of his accident, she took him to her father, a doctor. The man put Jay on a course of steroids that changed his life. The steroids shrunk the swollen lung tissue and his coughing subsided. The chronic infections could clear and he began to gain back weight. Within three months he'd put on thirty pounds, and his color was better. Now a little older, back to nearly his full strength, much of his natural substantiality restored, and with a little money to spend, he began to explore London.
"I think there are women in the next part of the story," I said.
"Yes."
"You were feeling better, your mood was nihilistic, you didn't mind having a good time."
"Something like that," he said. "That's when I learned to like a good cigar, actually. Pubs. The young Brits, the traders and bankers, were giving up pipes and hitting the cigars."
A couple of years followed, Jay continued, in which he met dozens of young professional women in London, a few American, many European, and simply enjoyed himself. He dated two or three women at a time, sometimes seeing older women who were in unhappy marriages. So much money was washing around London that the collective euphoria rounded away the ends of these affairs. "It got a little crazy," he said. "I got a little crazy. I was sometimes sleeping with three or four different women a week."
"You're lucky you didn't get anyone pregnant."
"I was very careful about that," Jay said. "There are tricks you can use."
"Besides a rubber?"
"You don't come."
"You pull out?"
"No, you just don't come. You teach yourself not to."
"You're a weird fucking guy, you know that?"
"You can have sex with a lot of women if you never come," Jay noted. "Or not often, at least."
"It sounds pretty hostile," I said, "a way of having control over women. Also a way to make sure you didn't have another child taken from you."
"Thank you, doctor."
"Shit, Jay, it's obvious."
"I know that. I mean, I know that now."
"Keep telling me," I said. "I want to hear about how you found Sally again."
London was a spinning carousel of money, he went on. "The boom happened there, too, just like in New York," he said, "and I got into a real estate firm that was relocating people into London. Offices, apartments, the whole thing. All you had to do was wear a suit."
"You met a lot of people. It was an education."
He nodded. "Five years. I ran some rehab jobs, I took a few architecture courses, that kind of thing. Learned the lingo. Everybody's a faker in this business. I was working the investment and sales side, in a very minor way. Little projects, nothing big, nothing where my complete lack of knowledge would show. Usually I hired some old boozed-out carpenter to run the site for me. I made some money, and I kept a little of it."
"Stayed in touch with the farm, with your father?"
"No. Not much."
"Your mother hadn't communicated."
"My father told me that he was pretty sure that she'd gone to Texas, because her father was from there. She'd always wanted to know him. I had to think whether I wanted to chase after my mother in Dallas or Houston or someplace or stay in London."
"You were waiting for Eliza to come back."
He was, he said, at least subconsciously. By now he had the business connections to track David Cowles, had even met a few of his associates socially. And then one day he heard that Cowles had moved back to London. "I found his office and followed him home. Sunglasses and a hat. Easy, right? He didn't know my face. There had been no direct communication and I'm sure Eliza never told him a thing. He had no idea. By then he owned a very nice house in the suburbs. High bushes, mansard roof, casement windows. He'd made a lot of money in Tokyo. I spied on him a bit. I saw Sally. She was almost seven now. A little Eliza. Looked just like her, the hair and eyes and legs. Of course, now, she really looks like Eliza at twenty. I mean, it's disturbing. But even then, it killed me to see her, Bill, it broke me up. That was my daughter. My daughter. Then—"
He stopped talking.
"What?"
"She died."
"Eliza?"
"In a car, with a man."
"An accident?"
"He was driving, driving too fast, and they rolled over, in a Jaguar. Roof collapsed."
Ripped from life. I wasn't sure what question to ask next.
"The guy lived," Jay narrated. "The fucker, though there's not much left of him."
"Who was he—?"
"They knew each other. Were driving at a high rate of speed to London from the country late in the afternoon. That's about all I could find out."
"Who was he?"
"Some guy, also in the financial community. I looked him up, he'd been in Japan the same time she'd been. Same age."
"An affair, hurrying back to town?"
"Yeah, maybe. Hard to say. She was capable of it. After all, that's how she got pregnant with Sally."
"People have secrets."
"Yes," Jay said. "Always. I couldn't go to the funeral, I couldn't do it. I should have. Fucking inexcusable. I was very messed up. It was on a Sunday afternoon, and I was passed out in some girl's apartment."
Jay stood, as if wanting to move away from his last thought, and walked to his refrigerator and opened the door. He shook three pills out of a bottle and swallowed them. "That was the beginning of the end," he muttered.
"What do you mean?"
He meant, he said, that he could no longer survive in London. Could not function. He lost his job and floated back to New York City. The boom was starting to age. He'd saved enough money to rent the apartment we sat in, and he found work rehabbing brownstones in the better neighborhoods of Brooklyn. And then the day came he woke one morning to find himself short of breath, not suffocating, just working harder than ever. "Your lung capacity is really dropping," the doctor told him. "And will keep on dropping."
So he told me about the oxygen. "I stayed off it as long as I could. Once you start, even a little, your body likes it, wants more of it. I'm okay most of the time. If I get tired, it gets harder. Like you saw out at the farm that night. I was really wasted that night."
As he reached thirty, his health began to fail. He felt it in the slightest of ways. He couldn't climb steps the way he used to do. His lips occasionally turned bluish and his fingertips hurt, he said. He had to think about breathing in a way he never had before. What this meant is that the natural decline of his lung capacity, which happens to everyone, was beginning to carry him into the zone of breathlessness. We are born with almost twice the lung capacity that we actually need. This is why people may survive on one lung and also why smokers dying from emphysema take so long to expire. As total lung capacity falls toward forty or thirty percent, problems set in. Breathing becomes labored, the lungs can't clear the mucus they make. In Jay's case, he said, he was told by the pulmonary specialist that he had the lung capacity of a man who'd been smoking sixty to seventy years, or, expressed differently, the lung capacity of a man who had never smoked and who had somehow lived to the age of one hundred and twenty.
His life span was now limited to the declining slope of his lung function; barring an accident, he'd die of gradual asphyxiation. The rate of decline was variable; it could speed up, it could slow, but it always moved in one direction. He had to have his lungs checked every six months, during which time the forced expiratory volume, the FEV, would be measured, the number always trickl
ing downward. The disease was particularly cruel in that he could be stable for periods of time yet wake up with another percentage of his breath gone.
"And then somewhere in here, you found out that David Cowles had moved to New York?"
"Yes."
"How?"
"I got curious and called his London office. He'd gone to a new company. I called them. Got a forwarding number. I sweet-talked some people, said I had a deal for him to look at. You know, bullshitted the situation. I felt sorry for the guy. His wife had been killed and probably because she was sleeping with another guy. I admired him, to be honest. He'd pulled himself together, remarried. Had enough capital to relocate here."
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