Waxwings

by Unknown

  After congratulating him on his reading, Tom said, “So how’s the book done in England?”

  “It’s not out there yet,” Scott-Rice said. “Marketing strategy. They’re waiting on the buzz from the States.” The way he said this, and the speed with which he changed the subject, seemed shifty, but Tom didn’t pry.

  Scott-Rice was soon busy digging into his rack of lamb with a wooden-handled butcher-knife. Then he pronged a neat cube of rosy meat and held it in mid-air. “You’re playing your cards close to your chest,” he said. “What are you up to? You’re sitting on a five-hundred-page manuscript, putting commas in in the mornings and taking them out in the afternoons? You’ve got terminal block? You’re racing towards the home stretch? The natives are getting restless.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Tom said. “I’ve got a lot of . . . stuff. I think there’s probably a book in there, somewhere. It just hasn’t quite jelled.”

  “You know, after Tunnels, I was afraid you were going to be a one-book man. Tour-de-force. Bloody marvelous. But I couldn’t see where on earth you could go after that. Didn’t seem to lead anywhere. He’s written himself into a cul-de-sac, was my thought. But then you did your war book. Knocked my socks off.”

  “I’m afraid your socks are quite safe from me for the moment.”

  “Does it have a name?”

  The box into which Tom threw notes, quotes, scraps of dialogue, newspaper cuttings, and the rest of the stuff that still hadn’t quite jelled had once contained wine from a vineyard in Idaho. The side of the box was stamped HELL’S CANYON 1994 CHARDONNAY.

  “Hell’s Canyon,” Tom said, and laughed.

  “Well, that sounds like a strongish start.”

  “The book wouldn’t live up to it, unfortunately. I hate titles that promise more than they can possibly deliver. When I was fourteen, I borrowed Howards End from the library. I thought it was going to be about someone called Howard, whose end, I imagined, would be sticky in the extreme. Instead, it turned out to be about a bloody house, in Hertfordshire of all places. It was acutely disappointing. But I did like Wuthering Heights . . . as house books go. The trouble is that other people have already bagged all the really good unassuming titles. What I’d really like to write is Diary of a Nobody, or The Man Without Qualities. I think my ideal book is one where you’re pleasantly surprised when anything happens at all.”

  They were the restaurant’s last customers. The Japanese man had vacated his booth long ago, and their waiter was going from table to table, flicking each one meaningfully with a napkin. Between flicks, he put the evil eye on Scott-Rice, who eventually got around to dealing with the bill.

  “What’s the usual tip here?”

  “Double the sales tax.”

  “I just tripled it. I want that horrid boy to feel a stab of remorse.”

  “He won’t.”

  “Nightcap?”

  There was a poignant reek of smoke in the bar, but Scott-Rice’s Camels remained in his pocket. Tom had planned to mooch one, for old time’s sake, and it was all he could do to stop himself from observing who was now supposed to be the great smoker.

  Wading into the Armagnac, Scott-Rice said, “I imagine you have some gigs for visiting writers at this university of yours? Lot of people passing through?”

  Dulled by wine, Tom was slow on the uptake. “We’re a poor school. We haven’t had the money for that kind of thing. But we’ve just had a windfall, so now we’re trying to get Don DeLillo for a month.”

  “A windfall?”

  “An avalanche, really,” Tom said thickly. “Four and a half million dollars. This . . . Internet entrepreneur. He’s giving it to the program, quite out of the blue. He founded a company that makes a sort of switch for Web sites. It’s based in Menlo Park in California, but he’s building a house here on Lake Washington and says he wants to give back to the community the same money that his house will cost him. ‘Outreach,’ he calls it. Claims his first love has always been literature. He’s an Indian.”

  “A Red Indian?”

  “No, the other kind. He’s an Old Harrovian.”

  Scott-Rice carefully did up a button on his shirt. “So he ought to look pretty favorably on English writers.”

  “Oh, English, Japanese, South American—you name it. He wants UW to establish a global footprint in the world of modern writing. That’s the way he talks.”

  “This guy went to Harrow?

  “I think he went to Stanford after that. Or Middlebury. Some place like that.”

  “How much are you offering DeLillo?”

  “We started at thirty-five thousand, but might have to go up.”

  “Christ.” Scott-Rice looked hungrier than he had all evening.

  It would be hard to tell him, Tom thought, that when Shiva Ray said “writers,” he meant winners of, or at least famous candidates for, the Nobel Prize, not people like David Scott-Rice. It had been hard enough to sell him on Don DeLillo.

  Scott-Rice smiled vaguely into his brandy. “I didn’t know Web sites had switches.”

  “I didn’t either. Beth explained it to me, but I’ve forgotten how it goes.”

  “Four and a half . . . fucking . . . million.”

  “Welcome to America—the land you despise.”

  “And what does DeLillo have to do for it?”

  “A public reading. Afternoon office hours with students. Nothing much. He’ll be here basically to hang out and show his face—if we can get him.”

  “And you’ll go up—to what? Fifty? Sixty?”

  “Something like that. We’re also writing to Bellow.” Tom tried to drive home the point. “And Toni Morrison. And Günter Grass.”

  “And all expenses covered, accommodation and so forth?”

  Tom nodded dolefully. The agreement with the university, which by now should’ve been signed, was still in the hands of Shiva Ray’s lawyers. “We’re just putting out feelers at present.”

  “You want another?” Scott-Rice already had his hand up, signaling the bartender. “The air fare would be first class, of course?”

  Shortly before midnight, Tom recovered his VW from the valet-parker. The rain had ceased, though the wet streets dazzled, and stoplights tossed in the wind on their overhead wires. Watching the wing-mirror for police cars—Scott-Rice’s publicist would surely be impressed by the bar bill they’d run up—he soft-pedaled his way around three sides of the block, and turned cautiously north on First Avenue.

  A rift in the speeding clouds revealed the young moon, hazy and tarnished above the wide blackness of the bay. At this hour, the streets of rich Seattle belonged to the poor, who trudged in ones and twos, hunched against the weather, past the lighted boutiques, oriental carpet shops, and galleries of antique artifacts from Oceania. In every doorway, a ragged sleeping form. The walking homeless, with their backpacks and bedrolls, sported wild shovel beards and greasy broad-brimmed hats, like hapless prospectors left over from the Gold Rush.

  At the red light on First and Pike, two such characters shambled across the street in front of him. One wore a Seahawks cap, the other what looked like a bona-fide Stetson and full old-timer regalia—knotted bandanna, plaid lumber-jacket, jeans, and disintegrating cowboy boots. A guitar was slung across his back, and he pushed the remainder of his—or their—worldly goods in a Safeway supermarket cart. Shamed by the loose talk about money that evening, Tom dug out his wallet and found two twenties, then rolled down the window. “Hey, guys? Perhaps you could use this?”

  Seahawks stepped over to the car and took the bills. “Thanks, pardner. And you drive careful now.” When he held up the money so his friend could see it, this ossified survivor of the Old West made an approbatory O with forefinger and thumb for Tom, who gave him a thumbs-up sign in return. The man’s grinning face caught the light from a street-lamp, and Tom saw he was a Pacific Islander—Samoan, probably—and, as the light changed to green, heard the clatter of the cart wheels on the cobbles that led down to the Pike Place Market and i
ts food-rich Dumpsters. The Samoan, who had now seen that his bill was a twenty, called, “Good luck, man!”

  Tom hardly felt in need of good luck nowadays. His new American life—and after eight years, he was surprised by how it still retained the gleam of novelty—had happened to him rather as a child’s Christmas might fall suddenly, unheralded, out of season. For a man long used to solitude, irregularly punctuated by flings and affairs that blazed, then fizzled out, like fireworks on Guy Fawkes Night, marriage and fatherhood were the big gifts. The job—if being the Weyerhaeuser Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing could be called a job, exactly—had liberated him from the quiet panic and exiguous dodges of freelancing, and left him able to enjoy those gifts in all their unanticipated luxury and profusion.

  Visitors from London and New York might think his affection for this city a pose, but Tom was happy in Seattle, whose ambiguities suited him perfectly. It wasn’t all that big, but it wasn’t all that little, either. Though gratifyingly remote—the Pacific Northwest was something like America’s own Outer Hebrides—it was also central to the big world in ways that made London, at least, seem provincial, to borrow Scott-Rice’s tiresome word for Seattle. And unlike most American cities that Tom knew, there was a here here, where herring gulls were a traffic hazard and all streets led down to the water, where the older buildings pursued a guileless infatuation with the architecture of Ancient Rome, and ungovernable greenery—bramble, vine, salal—rose up defiantly from every crevice and scrap of waste ground, as if to strangle the city fathers’ vain Roman ambitions.

  Living in Islington (Holloway, really, but the neighbors called it Islington), Tom had never felt this warmth towards London. There, he was most at home in the city of Victorian novels, the London of Tunnels, his first book, but a quick foray to, say, the Pentonville Road of 1980 made him feel a fugitive. He’d scurry nervously from shop to shop, noticing little, coat pulled up around his ears, then escape back to the flat overlooking Arundel Square and his forest-green Olivetti with the overflowing ashtray beside it, to London circa 1850—the “rookeries” of Saint Giles; Savoury Dock, where Bill Sikes met his death in Oliver Twist and the great cholera epidemic started in 1849; the old Garrick Club in King Street, with Thackeray, Trollope, and Millais; Jack Black, the Queen’s Ratcatcher; Tyburn and Marshalsea . . . Through this fog-ridden world of insanitary tenements, gin palaces, and scented West End drawing rooms, Tom moved, when things were going well, with a citizen’s confident swagger, but the London that stretched away beyond the double-glazing of his study window remained a gray enigma to him.

  It was in Seattle that he had at last learned to live in the present, more or less. He had his lapses, but nowadays mostly stood fair and square in 1999. He knew where Costco was. He enjoyed trekking out, with Finn and Beth, to the Northgate Mall. He had his elevenses at Starbucks. He’d taken Finn to see a Mariners game at the Kingdome, just a few weeks before the stadium was blown to smithereens. Though the Olivetti still occasionally saw active service, it spent most of its time in retirement on a bookshelf while Tom jiggered away at the new Compaq, Pentium III–fuelled, writing, or trying to write, about the here-and-now. In his radio commentaries, he talked of himself as “an analogue person in a digital world,” but that was a faux-modest mask. Though he wasn’t quite yet there, Tom was going digital.

  Laboring in third up the Counterbalance—how he had dreaded the gear-shifts involved here, when Beth was teaching him to drive—he could now name each passing street: Aloha, Ward, Prospect, Highland, Comstock. At Galer, he turned left and allowed the car to find its own way home.

  On Tenth West he parked on the street, under the big sycamore in front of the house, for Beth’s new plum-colored Audi now commandeered the garage. The storm had piled the leaves in soft drifts across the sidewalk and pavement, where they shifted like uneasy sleepers in the warm salt-smelling wind that thrashed the branches overhead. The house was dark, and the bulb in the porch-light was burnt out. Fumbling for his house-key, Tom stepped back into the street and stood under one of the repro gas lamps the city had installed in a recent blitz of urban prettification.

  His keys were—as Beth would say—an issue. Two jumbo-sized, interlinked steel rings’ worth, they formed an irregular lump of clinking ballast in his right-hand trouser pocket. “You’re so anal-retentive it’s not funny,” she told him. “Those stupid keys. They’re so heavy they tilt you sideways when you walk. They wreck your pockets. It takes you hours to find the right one. Couldn’t you just take a deep breath and toss, like, your thirty least-favorites?”

  He had keys to hotel rooms, to London flats unvisited in twenty years, deposit-boxes in railway stations, long-abandoned suitcases, tennis courts, filing cabinets, his parents’ old house in Ilford, his student digs in Brighton. The difficulty was that each one summoned a precise image of the lock it used to fit. In a way he couldn’t bring himself to explain, they still opened doors for him. So he hung on to the key to Sue’s place in Onslow Square, long after she’d married and moved to somewhere down in Hampshire. He’d tried to segregate them, moving his American keys to one ring, and planning to exile the European collection to a drawer in the study, yet they remained obstinately coupled. Without their familiar weight, Tom felt strangely insubstantial. He shuffled, unhurriedly, through the Yales and Chubbs until he found the Ace he was looking for. No key had ever been so precious to him.

  When they first caught sight of the house—even before Beth turned off the ignition—Tom had known it was the right place for them. On a block of grandiose remodels involving clerestory windows, wrap-around balconies, azure-tiled roofs, fake adobe, and basement carports, the house stood out like the lone honest burgher in a line-up of con artists. “Prairie-style, 1910, in need of some minor refurbishment and modernization,” according to the spec sheet, but what Tom saw was amplitude and solidity—the generous overhang of the eaves, the massive square timber pillars of the porch; an air of bluff, unpretentious, American self-confidence. You’d trust a house like that. You’d buy a used car from it.

  Standing with the realtor in the bare-earth basement while Beth’s footsteps sounded—very faintly—overhead, Tom admired the great rough-cut fir pilings that held the house aloft. “They don’t make them like this anymore,” the man said. “Sturdy. Deep-rooted.” Just the qualities for Tom.

  The realtor told him that it had been built by a well-known Seattle shipwright, and there was a shiplike woodiness about it—the paneled walls with high box-beam ceilings, the stout window-seats, a black carved fireplace that would’ve looked well in a fair-sized Elizabethan manor. Pointing at the handsome triangular shelving built into a corner of the dining room, the realtor said, “Your china hutch.” Yes, Tom thought, they’d need china, and in an instant he’d filled the hutch with craquelure Wedgwood.

  The rooms at the back looked out at Elliott Bay and the Sound. On the third floor, there was a single bedroom with a gabled window; an eagle’s perch, with its aerial view of the miniature Manhattan of downtown, the miles of sun-speckled open water, islands like floating clumps of moss, and, beyond the islands, saw-toothed mountains, snowcapped even on a mid-August afternoon. Here, in this amazing eyrie, Tom had stood hand-in-hand with Beth and said, “I’ll take it,” smiling because that was a line from a Larkin poem, and funny in this context. But it would take too long to explain.

  Back in the car, Beth said, “You didn’t talk him down!”

  The asking-price was $192,500—within a whisker of what Tom had got for his two-bedroomed leasehold flat in London N7, in a grimy stucco-fronted building that looked like a birthday cake on which the mice had been at work. In just three words, Tom had transmuted base metal into gold, and to have haggled over the price would have wrecked the magic of the exchange.

  “It’s a bit dark,” Beth said, but he could see only sun on snow, and the mercurial dazzle of the sea.

  Stepping quietly into the dark hall, he stumbled into Beth’s old bike, which slid from wall to floor w
ith a dream-wrecking crash. Tom listened, but heard nothing from the sleepers upstairs. He switched on the light and, carrying the bike as carefully as if it were constructed of spun glass, moved it well clear of the front door. Its chain was off, and the brakes seemed to have locked solid on the front wheel. Beth hadn’t ridden it in years, but it had become part of the furniture of the house, like the hutch, for which they’d never bought china, and which now housed a miscellany of stuffed toys, paperbacks, CDs, board games, and Disney videos, along with Orlando, the goldfish, who swam alone amid the bright green plastic foliage in his bowl.

  Tom shucked off his loafers at the foot of the stairs and tiptoed up to look in on Beth. Her reading lamp was still on, but she was huddled under the comforter, a scrap of razored blonde fur visible against the pillow, her book splayed open on the carpet. He picked it up: Your Hyperactive Child.