The parrots were warring in the trees, and inside the phone was ringing.
“Do you want me to get it?” Mark asked, beginning anywhere he could, to inch his way back.
“No, I will. It might be about Dad.” Jean went into the kitchen. “Mom, hi.”
Outside, Mark tidied up the terrace table, straightened chairs, carried in the glasses, ducking to clear the kitchen door frame. “Everything all right?” he asked, very tired.
“Yes. No more fluid on the lungs. The pneumonia is completely cleared. He’s breathing independently for twelve hours at a time. Mom says when he can breathe on his own for twenty-four hours they’re going to release him. He’ll still be bedridden, of course, and very very weak, but at least he can be at home. Mark, I’m going to have to go back.”
He looked like he’d been hit.
“Nothing to do with all this, obviously. There just is no one else. Marianne’s swamped with her boys and Mom’s apartment—well, you know. No room. And he’s going to have all this hospital equipment—the bed, the respirator. Anyway, he wants to go home, to his own place, and I’ll need to be there. I want to be there. I have to go. It’s not going to be immediately. Not for a week or so. Maybe more.”
“I’m going down to the beach for a walk. Do you want to come along?” Mark asked.
“No. No I don’t.”
And she didn’t want him to drive, but he was never more likely to insist than when he was drunk. He bumped his way down the track and she walked around to the little garden behind the house. If the pots on the terrace were any indication, everything in it would be dead.
Narcissism, vanity—pride: surprisingly, until recently, this was considered the absolute worst of sins. It was, in fact, a form of sloth—not bothering to love. Was she able to listen to Mark—to listen and hear?
As she approached the fenced-in patch with its lean-to frame, she could see that the black mesh which shaded the beds was ripped and hanging down like a black flag. It was hard to tell, when she unlatched the low bamboo gate, what was left amid the weeds. She walked through, squeezing rubbery string beans, most of them yellow and as long as rulers, and saw a scatter of rotten tomatoes on the ground, most of them pecked by birds, along with all the strawberries. In the corner, marrows the size of dachshunds, and overgrown lettuces like vast, green Ascot hats.
Jean gathered every usable tomato into her upheld sarong, and she thought it was at least possible it had been just the once with Sophie, as he insisted. Though he hadn’t been able to talk to her about it for twenty years—and he still couldn’t, not very credibly. But as she looked around her trashed, unloved garden she wondered what, exactly, there was to forgive. He’d tried to protect her—she believed that. Why had she seemed to need the full security detail, a buffering emotional bodyguard for a husband? Because she didn’t need it anymore—not, perhaps, since Bill’s crisis. She thought of her father and his earlier crisis, the one that cost him his marriage. It was a fact that Mark had seized on a young body—a very young body—while his wife labored in another country. But she could hardly be pious about succumbing to a stock temptation. Jean was so tired. Blame, even forgiveness: these subjects, though barely explored, seemed, just for the moment, in the category of last year’s columns: filed.
Under the more urgent strain of Dad there was no room for more instability in her life. She would listen to Mark, and if he asked her to, she’d try to help him. This seemed freshly possible because she knew this was, finally, his problem. When she read Larry she thought his proposition about personal responsibility was excellent and only seemingly obvious—but still it was a proposition, abstract enough for Jean, like most people, in practice to ignore. Had it really taken all this grinding in the dust to grasp that the rule applied to her, that she must, and even enjoyably would, from here on in, be responsible for her own happiness?
When she stood up from the engaging detail of her grubby little beds and looked out to where the horizon should be, beyond the blue hills, she couldn’t see the ocean, but she knew it was there. Preserving, down in the cold dark deep, Billy’s remains. A walk along the shore was a really good idea—though even on a beach she tended to look down, scouring for interesting shells, ignoring the vast blue. So maybe “things,” including Jean, would start to look up, she thought, now stretching her neck, her back, looking at the sky. Certainly there would be change. And she could sense, remarkably free from guilt, that her most generous impulses derived from the promise of a clear horizon.
Back in the kitchen, Jean dumped her garden catch and washed her hands. She wanted to call Larry back while Mark was out. She punched in the thirteen numbers, and even before she heard his voice she could hear cars honking. He was walking down the street, and she covered her free ear, straining to catch what he said, and asked about Bill.
“As a matter of fact I’m heading up to the hospital right now. He’s a changed man, Jean. You wouldn’t believe it—sitting up, cracking jokes, reading. And threatening to leave, or escape. Apparently he keeps wandering off down the hall, which they don’t like at all. He’s desperate to be gone—pushing for early release. For good behavior. Or maybe for bad behavior.”
In her mind, Jean glimpsed court documents releasing Larry from his long marriage. What would be the stated reason and who was the plaintiff? “How are you?” she asked.
“Well.” He sounded thoughtful. “A certain amount of strain hereabouts, but nothing like what you’ve all just been through… I’m hopeful I’ll bring the case in by the start of classes. Did I tell you I did agree to teach? NYU.”
“So—the philosophy department at last. You took the plunge—congratulations.”
“Yes, I’m pleased about that. And I think I might persuade the firm to let me go on using the apartment a while longer. Partner emeritus—how does that strike you?”
“Christ, what do they call Dad? But now that we’re all becoming parents emeritus, I’d say it sounds very respectable. And tenant worthy, more to the point. Listen, I’m going back over soon. To settle Dad in, at least.”
“That’s great. We were all hoping you would. He needs you. And I don’t have to tell you that I—” The background noise suddenly blared, a mass honking, an indignant group honk. “But you knew that.”
“What? I couldn’t hear. What did I know?”
“Oh, nothing. Listen, give me a little warning and I’ll pick you up.”
“Out of the question. But thanks…for everything. I couldn’t be here if I didn’t know you were there. I’ll call you when I get in, soon as.”
Feeling much calmer, she separated out the few good leaves: they’d make a salad for one—or for two very unhungry people, and the image struck Jean as utterly dismal, as circumscribed and impoverished as her future. Was that what lay ahead, not a vast horizon but salad-for-one? Wasn’t this more or less what Melanie Mond was feeling right now? Her first wave of empathy: maybe she could learn friendship, though possibly not with Mrs. Mond. She added in some chopped ciboulettes—for a moment unable to think of the English name. Chives, not so nice. That had been a good thing about this island, not only the garden but the names of the things in it.
Like that fish she’d prepared but hadn’t eaten. Tilapia, it looked like, though they called it something else here. When they first moved to St. Jacques, Jean had started a list of ridiculously difficult French words just as, in her student days, she’d made a list of impossible British words, of which she remembered only snog, spondulicks, rawlplug, shambolic, and road drill for jackhammer—the rest had been absorbed and forgotten. Add these lists to the pyre of abandoned projects, if a list of names could be a project (Giovana, Brunhilda, Magdalena?). All her efforts at do-it-yourself—bricolage!—had been variously hampered by the long list of the unlearnable and, Jean thought, please don’t say that if children can speak the language, it must be learnable. Of course children can. And children do. This weirdly light diversion—as she fended off a grief as big as a house—was spoiled by its
unhappy reminder of the child Sophie, a child who learned to fuck.
Back in the kitchen, she opened the bottom drawer, home to duct tape, string, and her yellow legal pad, which she tugged free. She pulled a wine bottle from the fridge. She heard Mark coming in, and quickly, quietly, she stepped outside. The phone was ringing: his turn to pick up. Jean was glad to be alone on the terrace. The sky was streaked red and white like a steak marbled with fat.
In the dying light, she made a new list: April, Mar, Feb, Jan, Dec, Nov, Oct, Sept, Aug, July. Nine months between Mark’s summer idyll with Sandrine and Sophie’s Easter birth. She could’ve worked it out in her head, but she wanted to see it on paper. Then Mark came out, and she put the pad facedown on the table.
He looked very pale. “So Dan Manning has betrayed me.”
Jean didn’t say a word, but her face felt scorched. She leaned back, literally bracing herself.
“He’s leaving the firm. Taking with him not only his entire harem from Copy but the fridge campaign as well. My fridge campaign. We’ll see about that. Flattering, eh? The nerve. He offered to stay on, for the ‘transitional period,’ which we of course can’t manage without him. I told him to clear out. I’ll have to go back straightaway. Morale check, if nothing else. J. Walter Thompson! ‘Offer of a lifetime,’” Mark imitated Dan’s accent. “He adored telling me he’s being made a senior partner—Worldwide Creative Director.”
“Mark.”
“Two hundred K starting salary. Which I seriously doubt.”
“Mark.”
“Hm?”
“It could have been you.”
“Gosh, well yes, thanks very much. Speaking of ‘thanks for the support.’ Yes, I suppose it could have been. Twenty years ago. If I’d wanted to be an employee, that is. Bite the hand that feeds you, kill the father, or wot? Quite a theme here today, that. I mean isn’t the boyfriend supposed to ask the father for his daughter’s hand? Well the answer is fuck off out of here and back to Bombay—oh, sorry, Mumbai. And that son of a bitch, even more intolerably pleased with himself now, he’s playing way out of his league. J. Walter Fucking Thompson, so imaginative! Goddamn it if that isn’t the limit.”
He slumped in his chair, rapidly tapping his fingertips on his thighs, and this time it was Jean who leaned to refill his empty glass, wine over beer traces, confident he wouldn’t mind. She wasn’t going to point out that they’d been talking at cross-purposes—not only because it would be hard to say when, exactly, that started. The sky was fully dark, and a vast yellow moon hovered—rounded and low and weighted as a belly at full term.
Jean slapped her ankle as Mark slapped his neck. She struck a match and lit a citronella candle on the terrace table, illuminating their two faces. Tilting the second candle to meet the flame, she said, “Why do we think for even a second these things will protect us from anything?”
“Hm?” Mark wasn’t listening. Agitated, he sprang up. “I’d better get on the horn to Connie and Theo, see that the rot doesn’t spread.”
He disappeared inside the house, and Jean sat there, staring at the candles. She remembered the shrines arranged over the stoops of New York on that long black night she’d spent with Larry, searching for her mother and ferrying strangers. The pregnant woman they’d given a lift to—Melba—she’d have had her baby by now; Jean wondered what she got. She worried for a moment about Bud on his first night alone in the woods. Kestrels didn’t make nests: on which crag, in what crevice or damp tree cavity, would he find respite? And she thought of Marianne and her haircut, and their new friendship, and the mysterious life span of passionate unease: this, too, had lost its force. As Phyllis liked to say, “You can’t push a string.”
Jean stood and leaned against a porch pillar, actually basking in a moonbeam, she thought, probably getting a moontan. When she saw Vikram next, she would ask him about the gravitational pull that controlled not only the tides and the female cycle but the complex eddies of their human moods, among them lunacy. She had so much to learn; she had to get to grips with a force that could reach right through the earth.
She stepped out into the cold blue of the garden and, looking down, saw that Mark, strangely, had left the gate open. She thought of his private war with the homemade loop—a simple wire fastened there by an undesigning local—that Mark was convinced twanged open by itself, just to thwart him. And though she’d always considered his obsession with keeping it shut in the first place the ultimate fool’s errand, she ached to remember it now. She didn’t hesitate to fill in for him, making her way down to the gate in the moonlight, one more time, to secure the shifting catch.
Acknowledgments
All of Ronald Dworkin’s writings are inspiring; in this novel, I owe a debt to his books Law’s Empire (1986) and his discussion there of the law as our “ethereal sovereign,” and Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (2000).
The open moleh comes from Caroline Moorehead’s invaluable book about refugees, Human Cargo (2005); she learned of this concept from Liberian refugees in Guinea.
I have been inspired by the work of Carl Jones and the Gerald Durrell Endemic Wildlife Sanctuary on Mauritius, which I visited in 1996. Jones—a Welsh biologist and talented crusader for the endangered—is the man responsible for the rescue of Falco punctatus, the Mauritian kestrel, beginning in 1974, when he went out there and found only four remaining kestrels: the rarest bird in the world. None of my characters, or the captive breeding project in which I involve them, represent an accurate portrait of the real conservationists or their methods, any more than my made-up island, St. Jacques, is Mauritius.
For all kinds of help, from readings (and rereadings) to specialist fact-checking and borrowed desks, I am very grateful to Elizabeth Fonseca and Dick Cornuelle, to Katherine Bucknell, Jim Krusoe and Annalena McAfee; to Vera Graaf, Michael Glazebrook and Sarah Lyall, to Nancy Southam and Amanda Moffat; to John Ryle, John Holmes, and Rich Baum; to Elena Fonseca and Caio Fonseca. Thanks to Andrew Motion for permission to quote from his Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life.
I could not be luckier in my editors—Rebecca Carter and Gary Fisketjon. Thanks to Alison Samuel, Publishing Director of Chatto and Windus. Thanks to Andrew Wylie and everyone at the Wylie Agency. Thanks to Liz van Hoose, and to Susan Bradanini Betz, painstaking copyeditor.
London 2008
About the Author
Born in New York and educated at Columbia and Oxford, ISABEL FONSECA worked at The Times Literary Supplement, and her writing has appeared in a wide range of publications, from The Wall Street Journal and The Nation to The American Scholar, The Economist and Vogue. She lives in London with her husband and two daughters. Her first book, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, was an international bestseller.
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Praise for Attachment
“Fonseca’s vivisection of matrimony and desire is cruelly exacting.”—The New Yorker
“An astute observer of human behavior, both real and imagined, [and] a literary heavyweight…Fonseca ultimately transforms the familiar into the foreign, forcing both her characters and her readers to examine their unquestioned perceptions about who they and their loved ones really are.”—Chelsea Bauch, Time Out New York
“A memorable brilliance.”—Times Literary Supplement
“Seemingly from nowhere, out pops a searing tale of middle-aged anxiety, so accomplished and pertinent, witty and wise.”
—The Independent on Sunday (UK)
“Not only smart but smart in a pleasing and all-too-uncommon way: It’s insightful about grown-ups in the throes of grown-up emotions…Fonseca is commendably clearheaded and unsentimental about the nature of attachment, particularly in long-standing relationships.”
—Adelle Waldman, New York Sun
“An accomplished debut, full
of passion and intelligence.”
—Lisa Appignanesi
“A confident, smart first novel [with] a story that seems personal and deeply felt…Fonseca is especially adept at making middle age look shockingly similar to adolescence [in] all its corporeal and sexual insecurities.”—Helen Schulman, The New York Times Book Review
“Fonseca’s exploration of middle-aged displacement, both mental and physical, is intelligent, nuanced and immensely satisfying…as fruity and delicious as the cocktails served on the fictional tropical island where it’s primarily set.”—Alexandra Jacobs, New York Observer
“An acerbic, funny, and maddening coming-of-wisdom novel…Fonseca’s frank takes on sexuality, sexism, age, and how fear undermines love are canny and tonic.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist, (starred review)
“A compelling fiction debut…Fonseca’s nonfiction Bury Me Standing drew a vivid portrait of the international Gypsy community, and she shifts locales and emotional registers with evocative ease here, delving deeply into her ensemble’s motivations. She’s as unsparing of their flaws as she is frank about their desires…A dramatic demonstration of the limits of attachment.”—Publishers Weekly
“Fluent, confident and funny…the beauty of the island and the dense undertow of threat are faultlessly captured, so that while wallowing in the lushly atmospheric opening scenes we are plunged straight into intrigue… Only in the last few pages are the original threads picked up again to form a series of impressive twists.”—The Guardian (UK)
“It’s a corker…excellent—if you’re over thirty-five and married it’s like someone walking around in your head.”
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