He flew to New York to do interviews and almost at once began to feel extremely ill. He did his best to keep going through the arduous schedule but in the end the high fever forced him to see a doctor. He was told he had a severe chest infection, near pneumonia, and if he had left it one more day he would almost certainly have been hospitalized. He was put on powerful antibiotics and somehow made it through the interviews. After the work was done, he felt shaky but better, and went to a reception at Tina Brown’s house, where he found himself standing in a small circle of guests whose other members were Martin Amis, Martin Scorsese, David Bowie, Iman, Harrison Ford, Calista Flockhart and Jerry Seinfeld. “Mr. Rushdie,” Seinfeld said, nervously, “did you ever see the episode of the show we did about you?” This was the episode in which Kramer claimed to have seen “Salman Rushdie” in the steam room and he and Jerry interrogated the man whose name, “Sal Bass,” they thought might be code for, well, Salmon. When he reassured Mr. Seinfeld that he had thought the episode very funny, the comedian visibly relaxed.
The eight-city U.S. tour went off without alarms, except that the big trade fair, the BEA in Los Angeles, refused to have him on the premises. However, while he was in L.A. he was invited to the Playboy Mansion, whose owner was plainly braver than the organizers of BookExpo America. Morgan Entrekin, the publisher at Grove/Atlantic, had published a Hugh Hefner volume, The Century of Sex: Playboy’s History of the Sexual Revolution, and as a result was allowed to host a party for bookish folk at the mansion. The bookish folk duly trooped up into the Holmby Hills and excitedly drank warmish champagne in a tent on the lawn of Hefnerland under the disdainful gaze of terminally bored Bunnies. Halfway through the evening Morgan came bounding toward him accompanied by a young blond woman with a nice smile and an improbable body. This was Heather Kozar, the newly elected Playmate of the Year, a very young girl with excellent manners who disappointingly insisted on calling him sir. “I’m sorry, sir, I haven’t read any of your books,” she apologized. “To tell you the truth, I don’t read a lot of books, sir, because they make me feel tired and go to sleep.” Yes, yes, he agreed, he often felt exactly the same way. “But there are some books, sir,” she added, “like Vogue, which I feel I have to read to keep up with what’s going on.”
He flew back to London and had his eyelids adjusted until they looked normal, and celebrated Milan’s second birthday and Zafar’s twentieth and then he was fifty-two. On his birthday Sameen and her two girls came to dinner, and Pauline Melville and Jane Wellesley too, and a few days later he took Zafar to Centre Court at Wimbledon to watch Sampras beat Henman in the semifinal. If it hadn’t been for the policemen life might almost have felt normal. Perhaps the old clouds were slowly lifting, but new clouds were forming. “The gulf between E. and me about living in NY is threatening our marriage,” he wrote in his journal. “I can’t see a way out. We will have to spend time apart, me in a Manhattan apartment, she in London. But how to bear the separation from this sweet little boy whom I love so much?”
In mid-July they went to the Grobow house in Bridgehampton for nine weeks, and it was during this time that he succumbed to his millenarian illusion.
Even if one did not believe that the approaching millennium would see the Second Coming of Christ, it was possible to be seduced by the romantic, “millenarian” idea that such a day, which came only once in a thousand years, could inaugurate a great transformation, and that life—the life of the world, but also of individuals within it—would be better in the new millennium that was dawning. Well, one can hope, he thought.
In early August 1999 the millenarian illusion that would overpower him and change his life presented itself to him in female form on, of all places, Liberty Island. It was laughable, really, that he met her under the Statue of Liberty. In fiction the symbolism of such a scene would have felt ponderously overweight. But real life sometimes rammed its point home just to make sure you got it, and in his real life Tina Brown and Harvey Weinstein gave a lavish party on Liberty Island to launch their short-lived Talk magazine, and there were fireworks in the sky and Macy Gray singing I try to say goodbye and I choke, I try to walk away and I stumble, and a guest list that ranged all the way from Madonna to himself. He didn’t meet Madonna that night, or he might have asked her about what her assistant Caresse had said to a TV producer who sent her a copy of The Ground Beneath Her Feet in hopes of getting a favorable comment from the great lady—after all the book was about a major, if imaginary, female rock star. “Oh, no,” Caresse said, “Madonna didn’t read the book. She shredded it.” (When he did meet Madonna with Zadie Smith several years later at the Vanity Fair Oscars bash she spoke only of real estate values in the Marble Arch area of London and he didn’t bother to bring up the shredding, because he and Zadie were trying too hard to contain their laughter at the tall, gorgeous young Italian stallion whose murmured pickup line seemed to impress Ms. Ciccone: “You are Italian, no?” he asked her, leaning in close. “I can tell.…”)
Elizabeth had stayed in Bridgehampton with Milan and he drove into the city with Zafar, Martin and Isabel. There were lights hanging from the trees on Liberty Island and a cool summer breeze came off the water and they didn’t know anyone and as the daylight failed it was hard to see who was there anyway, but that was all right. Then under a Chinese lantern beneath the great copper lady he came face-to-face with Padma Lakshmi and at once he realized he’d seen her before, or her picture anyway, in an Italian magazine in which he, too, had been featured, and he remembered thinking, “If I ever meet this girl my goose is cooked.” Now he said, “You’re that beautiful Indian girl who had a show on Italian TV and then came back to America to be an actress.” The Illusion couldn’t believe that he would know anything about her, so she began to doubt that he was who she thought he was and made him say his full name, and then the ice was broken. They talked for only a few minutes but managed to exchange phone numbers and the next day when he called her the line was busy because at that exact moment she was calling him. He was sitting in his car by Mecox Bay and smelled, wafting toward him across the shining water, the strong aroma of oven-roasted goose.
He was a married man. His wife and their two-year-old child were waiting for him at home, and if things had been different there he would have grasped the obvious truth that an apparition who seemed to embody everything he hoped for from his future, a Lady Liberty made of flesh and blood, had to be a mirage, and that to plunge toward her as if she were real was to court disaster for himself, inflict unconscionable pain upon his wife, and place an unfair burden upon the Illusion herself, an American of Indian origin who had grand ambitions and secret plans that had nothing to do with the fulfillment of his deepest needs.
Her name was an oddity, one name broken into two by her mother’s divorce. She had been born Padmalakshmi Vaidyanathan in Delhi (though most of her “Tam Bram,” or Tamil Brahman, family lived in Madras), but her father, Vaidyanathan, had abandoned her and her mother, Vijayalakshmi, when she was one year old. Vijayalakshmi promptly discarded her ex-husband’s name, bisecting her own name and her daughter’s instead. Soon after that she left to take up a senior nursing appointment at Sloan-Kettering in New York, and later moved to Los Angeles and remarried. Padma did not meet her father until she was almost thirty years old.
Another woman with a missing parent. The pattern of his romantic life continued to repeat itself.
“You saw an illusion and you destroyed your family for it,” Elizabeth would tell him, and she was right. The Phantom of Liberty was a mirage of an oasis. She seemed to contain his Indian past and his American future. She was free of the caution and worry that had bedeviled his life with Elizabeth and which Elizabeth could not leave behind. She was the dream of leaving it all behind and beginning again—an American, pilgrim dream—a Mayflower fantasy more alluring than her beauty, and her beauty was brighter than the sun.
At home there was another great quarrel about the things that had become the things they always fought about. Elizab
eth’s demand that they immediately have more babies, which he didn’t want, went to war with his half-realized dream of freedom in America, which she feared, and drove him, a week later, to New York City, where in a suite at the Mark Hotel Padma said to him, “There’s a bad me inside me and when she comes out she just takes whatever she wants,” and even that warning didn’t send him sprinting home to his marital bed. The Illusion had become too powerful to be dispelled by all the evidence that reality could provide. She could not be the dream he dreamed of her. Her feelings for him—he would learn—were real, but they were intermittent. She was ambitious in a way that often obliterated feeling. They would have a sort of life together—eight years from first meeting to final divorce, not a negligible length of time—and in the end, inevitably, she broke his heart as he had broken Elizabeth’s. In the end she would be Elizabeth’s best revenge.
It was just one night. She went back to Los Angeles and he returned first to Little Noyac Path and then to London. He was working on an eighty-page book proposal, treatments for four novels and a book of essays, that he hoped would bring in enough money up front to allow him to buy his Manhattan home, and things between Elizabeth and himself continued to be rough-edged; but he saw his friends and received an honorary doctorate in Liège and was happy that Günter Grass was given the Nobel Prize at last and if he managed not to mind too much that he was not on the Booker Prize short list (and neither were the much praised Vikram Seth and Roddy Doyle) it was because he was calling Padma at her apartment in West Hollywood late at night and being made to feel better than he had felt in years. Then he went to Paris for the publication of La terre sous ses pieds and she joined him for a week of intoxicating pleasure punctuated by hammer blows of guilt.
Zafar had not returned to Exeter, but whatever feelings his parents might have had on the subject suddenly became irrelevant because Clarissa was admitted to the hospital with over a liter of liquid in her lungs caused by a serious infection in the region of her ribs. She had been complaining of acute discomfort to her GP for some time but he had not sent her for any tests and told her it was all in her head. Now she wanted to sue him for malpractice but behind her angry words there surged a dreadful fear. It had been almost exactly five years since she had been declared cancer-free, and after five years one was supposed to be able to relax, but now she was very afraid that the terrible thing had returned. She called him to say, “I haven’t told Zafar, but there may be a secondary cancer in the lung or on the bone. The X-ray is next week and if there’s any shadow it’s probably inoperable.” Her voice trembled and broke but then she steadied herself. She was being strong but after the weekend her brother Tim called to confirm that the cancer was back. There were cancer cells in the fluid removed from her lungs. “Will you tell Zafar?” Yes, he would.
It was the hardest thing he ever had to tell his son. Zafar had not been expecting it, or had managed to close his mind to the possibility, and so he was horribly shocked. In many ways he was more like his mother than his father. He had her inward temperament and her green eyes and her liking for adventure; they went four-wheeling in the Welsh hills and spent weeks together on cycling holidays in France. She had been there for him every day through the crisis of his father’s life and had helped him have a childhood and to grow up without going crazy. She wasn’t the parent Zafar was supposed to lose.
“Oh my sweet loving son,” he wrote in his journal, “what pain I must help you to face.” The X-rays showed that the cancer had reached the bone and that, too, was something only Zafar’s father could tell him. The young man’s eyes brimmed with tears and he began to tremble and allowed himself briefly to be held. The doctors had said that if Clarissa responded to treatment she could perhaps expect to have a few more years. He didn’t believe it and decided he had to tell his son the grim probabilities. “Zafar,” he said, “the one thing I know about cancer is that when it gets a grip on the body it goes very fast.” He was thinking of his own father, the speed with which his myeloma killed him at the end. “Yes,” Zafar said, pleading to be agreed with, “but she’s still got months and months at least, right?” He shook his head. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that it may be a question of weeks, or even days. At the end it can be like falling off a cliff.” Zafar looked as if he’d been slapped hard across the face. “Oh,” he said, and again, “oh.”
She was in Hammersmith Hospital and was getting rapidly worse. Tim said they had found that the cancer was in her lungs as well and she had an oxygen face mask to help her breathe and she couldn’t eat solids. The speed of her decline was terrifying. The doctors at Hammersmith were at a loss because of her weakness.
They couldn’t operate or begin chemotherapy until they fixed the problem of the fluid filling her lungs, and she just kept getting weaker.
She really was dying, he understood. She was fading fast.
Zafar called Mr. Waxman, the senior consultant at Hammersmith, and Waxman told him it wasn’t appropriate to discuss the case on the phone but agreed to speak to Zafar if he came into the hospital. “That means nothing good,” Zafar said, and he was right. Then Zafar went to see Clarissa’s GP, who admitted to having made “two serious mistakes.” He had not taken her chest pains seriously when she first mentioned them, and he hadn’t rethought his position when she complained about the pains repeatedly. “Eighty-five percent of chest pains are caused by stress,” he said, “and I went with the statistics.” Also, she had had a mammogram less than two months earlier and it had been clear. But the cancer hadn’t come back in her breast. She had been complaining of pain since June or early July, Zafar said, and the doctor had done nothing. Now, this insensitive man crassly and cruelly said to the dying woman’s son, “She had a very serious cancer before, you know, and I’m not sure she ever accepted that. Now, her days are numbered.”
“I will get this bastard,” he wrote in his journal. “I will get him.”
He went with Zafar to Clarissa’s bedside on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 2, 1999. She was gaunt and yellow and so weak, so scared. She could hardly sign her name on the checks she said she had to send. She did not want to sign her will, but in the end she signed it. Waxman talked about starting the chemotherapy at once because it was her only chance and he said there was a 60 percent chance of success, but he didn’t sound convinced. Zafar’s face was heavy with despair and though his father tried to sound as positive as he could it didn’t do any good.
The next morning Waxman said that Clarissa had very few days to live. They had started the chemotherapy but she had had a negative reaction to it and they had had to stop. There was nothing else to be done. “There is,” said Zafar, who had spent the night scouring the Internet and had come up with a wonder drug. Mr. Waxman told him, kindly, that it was too late for all that.
The “Internet.” That was a word they were learning to use. That was the year someone had first used the word “Google” in his presence. Now there were these new electronic horizons, this new “terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze,” in which Bellow’s Augie had once located the human adventure. If this “Google” had existed in 1989 the attack on him would have spread so much faster and wider that he would not have stood a chance. He had been lucky to be attacked just before the dawn of the information age. But today he was not the one who was dying.
She had less than twenty-four hours, they told him, and he was sitting by her bedside holding her hand and Zafar’s, and Zafar held her other hand and his. Tim and his wife, Alison, and Clarissa’s close friends Rosanne and Avril were there. Then at one point she slid into something worse than sleep and Zafar drew him aside and asked, “You said that at the end it happens very fast—is this it? It looks like all the life has drained from her face.” He thought, yes, it might be, and he went to her to say goodbye. He leaned over her and kissed her three times on the side of the head—and bang, she sat up straight and opened her eyes. Wow, that was quite a kiss, he thought, and then she turned and looked him right in the face an
d asked with terror in her gaze, “I’m not dying, am I?” “No,” he lied, “you’re just resting,” and for the rest of his life he wondered if he had been right to lie. If he asked such a question on his deathbed he would hope to be told the truth but he had seen the terror in her and had not been able to say the words. After that for a time she seemed stronger and he made another appalling mistake. He took Zafar home to rest for a few hours. But while they were sleeping she faded again and went beyond the Orphic power of love to recall her. This time she did not return. At 12:50 A.M. the phone rang and he heard Tim’s voice and understood his folly. Zafar, that great big young man, wept in his arms all the way to the hospital while the police drove them to Hammersmith like the wind.
Clarissa died. She died. Tim and Rosanne had been with her at the end. Her body lay curtained in a ward. Her mouth was slightly open, as if she were trying to speak. She was cool to the touch but not yet completely cold. Zafar couldn’t stay with her. “That’s not my mother,” he said, and left the room, and didn’t look at her in death again. He himself couldn’t stay away from her. He sat beside her and talked to her through the night. He talked about their long love and his gratitude to her for their son. He thanked her again for mothering him through these hard times. It was as if the years of their separation had fallen away and he had full emotional access once again to an earlier self, an old love, at the very moment when those things had been lost forever. He was overcome by grief and sobbed uncontrollably and blamed himself for many things.
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