Waxwings

by Unknown

As people said, Finn had his father’s hair—not Tom’s thinning, white-pepper Jewfro, but a thornbush of tight dark curls that made him easy to spot in the preschool swarm. It was a nagging worry to Beth that, along with the hair, Finn had inherited the mind that went with it.

  Tom had a Jewfro without being Jewish, and a British accent without being British—at least not exactly. He wasn’t Hungarian, though he was born there, and living in the United States certainly hadn’t turned him into anything remotely resembling an American. It was his unplaceability—or, as she saw it now, his existential vagueness—that had so attracted her when they first met. He was like no-one she had ever known. The trouble was that after eight years Beth still had days when she didn’t quite know who Tom was. When she saw stories about women who’d been unknowingly married to men who turned out to be mild-mannered spies or serial killers, she instinctively understood how that could be.

  Clipping Finn’s toenails, she saw out of the corner of her eye that he was playing with his penis. She pretended not to notice, then saw that he’d caught her out and was watching her, slyly, with the funny, lop-sided smile that was a copy of his father’s. “Finn Janeway!” She stood up, spreading wide the dinosaur towel. “Come on. Out of the bath!”

  “I’m not Finn Janeway,” he said. “I’m Finn Szany.”

  She wished Tom hadn’t told him that. “They’re the same name, silly. ‘Janeway’ was just the way they said Szany in England.”

  “No it’s not. It’s different. Szany, Szany, Szany, Szany! I’m Finn Szany!”

  She plucked him from the tub and bundled him into the towel.

  “Can I have a cookie now?”

  Later, after she’d read him a chapter of Otis Spofford, she lay with Finn under the covers in his bunk bed, listening to the house creak and grumble in the wind. Pitched high on the hill and facing south, it was exposed to the full blast of winter gales as they came barreling up Puget Sound. When the wind got under the eaves, it made owlish whoowhooing noises, and Beth could hear it prowling through the junk in the attic. They needed to call in a roofer or one day soon the whole damn thing was going to fly right off—and the roof was only one of a hundred things that needed fixing.

  Beth habitually thought of the house as more Tom’s than hers. It was old and cranky, the southward tilt of the floors so pronounced that a ball of Finn’s would roll from one end of the house to the other across warped boards of varnished fir. In three small earthquakes—mild premonitions of the promised Big One—she’d felt and heard the massive timber pilings grind deep in the shaly dirt of the basement, sounding like the teeth-on-wood gnawing of a tribe of super-rats. The floors rippled, books fell from their shelves and pictures off their hooks. A long S-shaped crack appeared in the plaster of the bathroom wall. After each earthquake, the balls rolled a little faster. “It’s just settlement,” Tom had said, but to her it felt more like progressive collapse.

  She wriggled her arm out from underneath her sleeping son, pillowed his head on Squashy Bear, and slid sideways out from under the covers, then gently eased his thumb from his mouth. His lips opened and closed in a string of damp, unrequited goldfish kisses before he rolled away and again was gone. Finn went to sleep like grown-ups went to Bangkok or La Paz, taking off for a destination for which he alone had the currency and the ticket. He’d leave Beth feeling a little despondent, as if she’d just dropped a lucky friend at the airport and now had to make her way back to the office through heavy traffic. Reporting on his travels, he was no more vivid than the writers of most vacation postcards. “I had a dream about dogs,” he’d say over his bowl of Cheerios, but you never heard what the dogs had been up to in his dreams.

  There was a fiery crackle at the window as a rain squall hit the glass. Treading softly, Beth tidied Finn’s discarded clothes into his laundry basket, checked on the hamsters, Oliver and Nancy, and the stick-insects, plugged in the night light, a grinning blue moon, and went downstairs to face the tangle of unedited copy about to ambush her on the screen of her notebook.

  The house shivered around her in the wind. Even down in the kitchen, where she sat prodding distractedly at the keyboard, she could hear what sounded like burglars up in the attic. She found the Yellow Pages and looked up “Roofers”—not that anyone would come. They wouldn’t even bother to return your call. You were in deep trouble if you lived in a falling house in this fast-rising city, where every contractor was otherwise engaged. You could get a venture capitalist on the line in five minutes, but trying to find a plumber or a carpenter was about as hopeless as locating a reliable daguerrotypist, shepherd, or ivory merchant.

  Beth left voice-mail at five numbers and was dialing the sixth when Finn came down in his tartan pyjamas, carrying Squashy Bear.

  “I woke up. I heard scary noises.”

  “Oh, pumpkin, it’s only the wind.” She opened her arms, and he sat in her lap, sucking his thumb. Through the jungle of his curls, she could see a line of print on the screen.

  suits hang out with flowies at Cafe Ho on 12th and Caesar

  “Come snuggle with me,” Finn said, and then, after a long pause, “Please?”

  They were halfway upstairs when the phone rang. For a mad moment, Beth thought, Roofer! and raced to field the call, but it was a recorded male voice saying, with monstrous jollity, “Got dings on your windshield? Call Magnolia Auto Glass at—”

  “Fuck off,” Beth whispered, and slammed the phone back into its cradle.

  Finn watched her from the stairs, his eyes big as a lemur’s. “Was that Daddy?”

  “But of course,” David Scott-Rice said loudly, with his new fanged smile, “they don’t know how to live, Americans.”

  The solo Japanese diner, hunched in a booth across from the two Englishmen, risked a glance but met the eyes of Thomas Janeway and quickly found his plate of salmon deeply interesting.

  “It’s funny, but I’ve always thought that ‘living’ is something Americans generally tend to shine at, like synchronized swimming.”

  “I meant the writers,” Scott-Rice said, with a touch of huffiness.

  They were eating late—late for Seattle, anyway—at the Painted Table, where Scott-Rice could charge the meal to his hotel bill, and to the New York publisher who would be footing it.

  “They’re like exiles in their own country, half of them. Pynchon, Salinger, Roth . . . Who does Roth talk to up there in Connecticut? He’s a recluse. Or What’s-his-name, Gass. No, not Gass—the other one. Gaddis. Lives in a shack up a lane somewhere on Long Island . . .”

  Seattle was the tenth and last city on Scott-Rice’s book-tour, and he had the punch-drunk bravado that so often came with spending too long aloft at 39,000 feet, looking down at America. By the time English writers reached Seattle, they usually had the United States figured out from top to bottom, and Tom had spent a good deal of time having his adoptive home explained to him by these haggard, jet-lagged visitors.

  “I’m afraid Gaddis has other problems on his hands. He died last year. And anyway, he had the reputation of being quite the party animal.”

  “Dead? I never heard that. Of course, it’s different for you—you’ve always been an exile. It’s so sexy to be an exile these days. Everybody wants to be one.”

  “Exile? I’m not an—”

  “Oh, come on, what about Czechoslovakia?”

  “Hungary. I was only two then, and that’s a painfully self-absorbed stage. You know, I don’t remember a blind thing about Hungary—too busy having tantrums, I imagine—and you can’t really be in exile from a country that you have no memory of at all. As for here, just about everybody comes from somewhere else, so one can’t even be an outsider, exactly. My mum’s an exile, though. She’s a real exile. You could go and visit her—she’s got a flat in Romford now—but I can’t imagine that you’d find her all that sexy.”

  Scott-Rice winkled a dime-sized Olympia oyster from its shell and twirled it on his fork close to the flame of the rushlight that burned on their table. “F
unny little buggers, aren’t they?” He blinked at Tom, his lashless blue eyes enlarged by thick wire-rimmed specs. “You know? I heard you on NPR—in Minneapolis. ‘All Things Considered,’ is it? Anyway, you were talking about ‘food courts.’ ” His voice was comically severe. “You liked them.”

  “Yes. They’re Finn’s notion of the perfect restaurant.”

  “I’d never even heard of food courts. I was intrigued. I got my escort to take me to one for lunch.” He pronged another tiny oyster. “It was quite ghastly.”

  “Yes, they do rather vary.”

  “Can we get this straight? On the radio, you said . . .” Scott-Rice pantomimed the act of recovering a memory from the deep: he threw his head back, pursed his lips, half-closed his eyes, then raised his forefinger and wagged it at Tom. “You said these places were . . . multicultural-blah . . . democratic-blah . . . liberty-and-the-pursuit-ofblah. You quoted—actually quoted—Thomas Jefferson.”

  “Ironically.”

  “It’s a tease, isn’t it? This unnatural affection for all things American. Food courts! It’s a put-on. You just do it to annoy.” He slapped vaguely at his clothing, then rootled in a trouser pocket. “It’s your ‘schtick,’ right? You don’t really believe it—”

  “Didn’t it remind you of picnics you had as a kid? Only indoors?”

  “What?”

  “Your lunch at the food court.”

  “We didn’t stay to eat,” Scott-Rice said loftily. “We found a perfectly nice Italian place. With proper wine.” He fished a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, shook one free, and tapped its end twice on the tablecloth. An unfiltered Camel, slightly creased around the midriff.

  This was another new thing about Scott-Rice. In London, a smoking city, Tom had never once seen him smoke, whereas Tom himself couldn’t work, or even talk, without the shield and solace of a Benson & Hedges close to hand. He’d quit—“for Finn’s sake,” as Beth put it—but four years off cigarettes hadn’t freed him from their thrall. Working alone, he still chewed on tablets of nicotine gum. His secret fantasy was that when the four-minute warning sounded, he’d cadge a cigarette from someone in the street and enjoy one last heady blameless smoke before the Bomb.

  A spurt of flame from a plastic lighter, and Scott-Rice took a cautious hit. He quickly exhaled, smoking like a novice. Tom thought he was probably doing it only to épater the Americans: when in Rome, do as the Greeks.

  From behind his penumbra of enviable smoke—at once alien and intimate to Tom, like the recorded voice of a dead friend—Scott-Rice said, “An uncle of mine once ran into Guy Burgess when he was in Moscow. The poor sod—”

  “Sir, I’m afraid this restaurant is not a smoke-friendly environment.” Their waiter, a boy of college age, too young for his uniform of black silk shirt and black butcher’s apron, had materialized beside their table, head dipped confidentially close to Scott-Rice’s ear.

  “Oh?”

  “I sympathize. I must tell you, sir, I’m a smoker myself.”

  “Really?” The full wattage of his astonishingly blue gaze turned on the waiter, he lifted the Camel to his lips and sucked on it reflectively.

  His voice rising, the waiter said: “What I’m telling you, sir, is that this is a no-smoking area. Smoking is not permitted in this restaurant.”

  “Got you.” Scott-Rice smiled his crooked smile, disclosing large gray teeth. He searched the table item by item, then lightly stubbed the cigarette into the last of his Olympia oysters, which for an instant seemed restored to life. As the glowing tip of the Camel touched it, the oyster wriggled, in a tiny spasm of offended flesh.

  “Shall I remove that, sir?”

  The bent cigarette was darkening as it soaked up brine.

  “Yes, why don’t you do that? Thanks.”

  The Japanese man now leaned back in his seat, watching the Englishmen as if they were the after-dinner cabaret, as the frozen-faced waiter loped off toward the kitchen with the violated oyster shells, the skirts of his apron swishing officiously against his pants.

  “Don’t you love the way they talk?” Scott-Rice said. “Sometimes dealing with Americans seems rather like trying to have a conversation with a speak-your-weight machine.”

  Not for the first time, Tom was relieved that Beth had cried off dinner: David Scott-Rice was an acquired taste, like Marmite or black pudding, and he doubted if Beth would’ve seen his point. Tom, though, had always had a soft spot for him. He’d never actually finished one of his books, but he liked the pugnacious book reviews, the gossip column in the Times Literary Supplement that ended in a libel suit, the late Eighties TV show “The Book Biz,” where Scott-Rice genially insulted poets, publishers, agents, novelists, English dons, newspaper critics, and stage-managed such happy confrontations as the one between George Steiner and Gore Vidal. A dangerous young turk in those days, Scott-Rice popped up everywhere, attracting abuse, mockery, and more fear than people liked to admit. When he did a hatchet-job on a book in the Observer, notice was taken, and a string of little hatchet-jobs usually followed in its wake.

  But that was long ago, and since moving to the U.S., Tom had rarely seen his name. A strangely mild piece in the New Yorker; a “Diary” column in the London Review of Books; some so-so reviews, all in the British press, of his two novels (Tom bought the first) that came out in quick succession in the early Nineties. He seemed unknown in America, so Tom had gone to his reading at the Elliott Bay Book Company expecting to find a scattered congregation far outnumbered by a host of empty chairs. But Scott-Rice had drawn a nearly full house. (As it turned out, he’d been on both “Charlie Rose” and “Fresh Air” the day before.) Several of Tom’s students in the M.F.A. program were there— Mary Ellen Girthlin, Todd Levitt, Hildy Blom. A bit mystified, he waved to each of them across the room.

  Before going downstairs to the reading, Tom had bought a copy of Crystal Palace. Sitting in the back row, he studied the dustjacket. Scott-Rice had changed his name. The book’s author was Dave Rice, and the short bio on the back flap claimed he was born in 1956 and “grew up in south London.” Nothing about Oxford, where he’d been at Balliol. Nothing about his long, louche literary career. Nothing, even, about the two novels that had come out in England. Between his south London childhood and his appearance this evening, he might have spent his entire time in jail. In America, Dave Rice was a brand-new man—and it dawned on Tom that on Sunday he’d skimmed a review of Crystal Palace in the New York Times Book Review, but had seen no reason to connect Scott-Rice’s last-minute phone call with the “engagingly bold new voice in English fiction” discovered by the Times.

  Dave Rice, when he ambled up to the podium, turned out to be twice the size of the old Scott-Rice. Cerise shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, he looked like a dugong bloated on too plentiful a diet of sea parsley.

  Head cocked to the right to catch the performance with his best ear, Tom listened to Rice read from his book in a peculiar accent that was half West Indian, half East End. Before beginning, he lit a lawless Camel and placed it beside him in a saucer, where it burned slowly, untouched, into a sagging worm of ash. Speaking in the character of someone named Caz, Scott-Rice delivered a kind of ventriloquial tirade—a sequence of riffs on the workings of the London Stock Exchange, the Spice Girls, New Labour, the cult of Diana, scooters, mad-cow disease, Lymeswold cheese, the Lottery, Madonna, and the decline of the Gunners, the Arsenal Football Club. This Caz character was meant to be in his twenties and employed by a shady brokerage firm to make cold calls, selling high-risk shares to gullible pensioners. The telephone (as he read, Scott-Rice cupped an imaginary one between his shoulder and his cheek) was what the M.F.A. crew would have called a structural device, meaning that the book consisted mostly of Caz’s cold calls. When not on the phone—and, quite often, on it—Caz dabbled in E and crystal meth. Hence the title.

  Scott-Rice being Dave Rice being Caz was a hit. Tom was laughing along with the rest of the audience, though the printed text seemed a little f
lat to him, and the narrative thread tenuous at best. Every so often, he glanced over at Hildy Blom, who was from Spokane, and could hardly have heard of Peter Mandelson and the brouhaha about his house in Notting Hill. Yet when Caz laid into “Mandy” and his puppy-dog, she heaved with giggles—and Tom realized that never before, in eight weeks of classes, had he seen Hildy Blom laugh. It was a nice laugh, too. He’d try fishing for it in the future.

  The funniest thing about the evening was that Scott-Rice got away with what in America usually counted as murder. Had a middle-aged white writer from New York showed up to read in the comic, exaggerated voice of a black kid from the projects, the room would have been loud with the censorious scrape and rattle of emptying chairs. But Dave Rice had them eating out of his hand. They adored listening to the out-of-shape Brit with his trademark cigarette read his broad-brush travesty of a street-smart boy from Battersea Rise. Scott-Rice was old enough (and surely he was born in 1950, not 1956) to have fathered half his listeners, yet he somehow managed to stand before them as a brat after their own hearts.

  When question-time came, Scott-Rice went on speaking in character. His questioners, and they were many, called him “Dave,” and it was in a Daveish voice that he replied—a nasal, throwaway, south-of-the-river whiffle. His signing-line stretched in a long, patient conga around the perimeter of the room, and it wasn’t until he got back to the hotel, where Tom was waiting for him in the bar, that he reverted to an Oxonian drawl, 1970s variety, with the requisite fine shading of London-suburban.