by Glen Duncan
She’d booked us a table in the Grafton’s bistro, which was dark, winkingly lit with tapering high-backed leather chairs and brushed-steel fittings and in which my guess was that the cheapest bottle of wine wouldn’t be less than twenty-five pounds. ‘We’re not going to talk about the wankery of this place, right?’ Scarlet said. ‘I just thought it was easiest to eat here. Plus if I fall asleep at the table you won’t have so far to carry me.’ The English accent had been slightly compromised, required a few days here to revive. She was wearing a charcoal long-sleeved fitted woollen dress with a square neckline you needed her smooth throat to carry off. A single silver fishmail choker and plain silver hoop earrings. The idea was it all sat back and let her eyes and mouth and colouring do the work. Which they did, though she was wearing more make-up than she used to.
‘You should get the airline to pay you, looking like that after a red-eye.’
‘I take a pill and zonk out. I suppose that means my youth has gone, but…’
‘Look, I need booze, pronto,’ I said. ‘Sorry if you’ve gone all healthy but I’m still happily killing myself.’
‘Don’t worry, you’re not going to be drinking alone.’ She picked up the wine list. ‘Now, you’re going to have to let me choose because I know what I want and I don’t care what you want, okay? Plus I’m paying.’
‘Can’t say fairer than that,’ I said–and thanks either to finely tuned ESP or to the wine list’s being bugged a waiter of improbable Nordic good looks appeared and took Scarlet’s order for a bottle of Liberty School chardonnay, of which I’d never heard. Her mobile rang.
‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’
‘Take it, take it—’
‘No, no, I’m switching the bastard thing off. I thought I’d left it in the room. Sorry.’
The wine arrived. She tasted, thumbs-upped, white-eyebrowed Lars poured. I drank half mine at one visit. ‘Yes,’ Scarlet said. ‘We’d better get pissed, fast.’
‘Quite. George Peppard’s just come in, by the way. Your left. Slowly.’ Which was a little gift from God or the gods or accident, since it was exactly the ludicrous degree of resemblance–our George had the white hair and piercing eyes and even the cigar but was about five three with manifestly false teeth–to give us a glimpse when she laughed and looked at me of the old collusion.
We were tipsy but not drunk by the time the starters arrived. Enough to concede that trying to unwrap this without tearing the paper was pointless. ‘I think the best way,’ Scarlet said, ‘is to not attempt chronology.’
‘Okay. How come you live in New York?’
‘Well,’ she said, digging into her wild mushroom salad, ‘I went there about two years after we split up and started singing in a band—’
‘Get the fuck.’
She laughed–at how preposterous her (either of us) doing something like that would have been when we were together. Back then delight in our own complete lack of cool was a luxury affordable because we had each other. Even after the pole-dancing it would have been impossible for me to imagine her–I could barely credit it now–singing in a band.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But listen, we were good. We supported Dinosaur Jr once.’
‘I don’t believe you. What were you called?’
‘We changed names three times. The last one was Ghost Race.’
‘And you sang?’
‘There’s no need to sound so stunned. I can, you know. You’re the one who’s tone deaf.’
This wasn’t the hoot I was letting it appear. I’d gone in at random and already here was pain. Singing in a band? And what about the two years before that? I topped up our glasses.
‘Anyway,’ she continued. ‘It started as a bit of a laugh, but then things looked like they were going to happen and I had to find a way of staying in America, so I married the bassist’s brother’s friend.’
‘I thought you said you weren’t married?’
‘Well, I’m not now. It wasn’t a real marriage. He was gay. He slept with his boyfriend on our wedding night, which I thought was a bit unnecessary.’
‘Christ.’ Good-humoured agogness, yes, but I was seeing how this would be: life after me a demonstration of what a crippling restraint life with me had been. The more I asked the worse it would get. I felt tired suddenly, and renewedly annoyed by the snootiness of this place.
‘We stayed married for three years, I got my green card, then we got divorced. We were lucky because after ’96 they made it so that you had to stay married five years. Also, the band broke up when we’d only been married a year, but he didn’t mind. I didn’t even pay him, which is what most people do.’
‘And then what happened?’ Our rejection of chronology notwithstanding, I couldn’t think of another way to proceed.
‘Then I did the thing on the trains for a year.’
‘What thing on the trains?’
‘You stow away, but it’s on freight trains.’
‘You’re making this up. Seriously?’
She took a gulp, swallowed. The bistro was full. A soft din of clinking and conversation had been steadily swelling around us. I’d forgotten what my starter was, had to look down at my plate: a minute portion of seared salmon on rosemary-flecked mashed potato with a lemon and dill sauce. I’d ordered an entrecôte steak, medium rare, for the main, couldn’t imagine eating it.
‘It’s a thing,’ Scarlet said. ‘Have you heard of it?’
‘Stowing away on trains?’
‘You travel, see how long you can hack it. Skint, obviously. It’s like the old hobos.’
I made a flaccid non-judgemental face. She’d wanted it to hurt, of course–I was right, you were strangling me– but now that it had she felt petty. ‘Anyway, that was a long time ago,’ she said, pulling back. ‘It feels longer ago than when we were together.’
The change was that her attention had always been elsewhere. Now it had been elsewhere and was back. Now here was elsewhere, or as much elsewhere as anywhere else. Time brought these equalizations, presumably. She was calm, substantial with assimilated experience. The grey dress and uncomplicated adornment testified. But there was something on her mind, beyond even the ridiculous coincidence of the airport. As we talked longer looks crept in, let pulse between us the possibility of something. Sex? I tried to imagine her naked with this older, sadder face, kept getting flashbacks of the younger her naked on the bed in the attic. That’s nice what you’re doing, just keep doing that.
The Rollicking Adventures of Scarlet after She Left Owen had been established and there was a limit to how many it was decent to recount at one sitting. It was so soon so obvious that next to her life mine was dull that we started taking some of the tangents conversation threw out: the elections; White Teeth; the gherkin building; the Lord of the Rings films. But it was impossible not to keep coming back to the subtextual essential (was this something? was anything going to happen?) for which, short of asking the questions direct, there was only talk about life since separation.
She was reluctant to expand on the talent agency. ‘I went to work for someone, got no thanks, fell out with her and left, by which time several of her clients had got used to me, so I poached them and started up on my own.’
‘And now you’re loaded.’
‘I took advice and made investments. There are people who advise you, you just have to pay them. Let’s not talk about that, anyway: it’s all shit.’
We’d finished the main course and were now, there was no denying it, drunk. She’d always had to watch it with booze. There was a vicious streak that could emerge and if she carried on drinking become pure evil. She was a long way from that but her eyes had enlarged and her cheeks were flushed. That last ‘shit’ had had a bitter inflection. She’d registered it, too; I saw her adjust her shoulders, remind herself to slow down. Irritation had crept in. I’d felt my self-ridicule–‘Well, of course, for the real rock-and-rollers there’s teaching English Lit in Wimbledon’–not being funny after about the third
time. I didn’t know what she wanted. We hadn’t, beyond the most glancing references, discussed the past, the shared past, our past.
‘Are you fading?’
‘No, just pleasantly tingling.’
The waiter appeared. No we didn’t want dessert but yes we did want coffee, which, when it arrived, prompted her to get out cigarettes. I told her she didn’t look like a smoker any more.
‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘Very occasionally I’ll buy a pack, smoke one or two then leave it somewhere.’
‘You’ve achieved smoking Nirvana,’ I said. ‘Whereas I,’ taking one, lighting, feeling nil respiratory protest at the first drag, ‘am fast in danger of starting again if I don’t watch it. This is about my fifth in as many days.’
‘Tell me what you were doing at the airport,’ she said, sitting forward, one hand flat along the table the other holding her cigarette away from her face, a not entirely unselfconscious Mrs Robinsonish pose. Veins showed faintly under the pale skin of her bent wrist and palm. There had been a phase when she’d made me take a long time kissing her wrists and ankles before going anywhere sexual. (Kiss me there. Keep kissing me there. That was part of her pleasure, to keep me doing the thing that made me desperate to do the other thing. She had a tone of gentle instruction that at the time aroused me beyond all reason.) I was drunk enough to have to keep stopping myself saying I’ve missed you so much you have no fucking clue dying’s only ever been a bearable idea if living was with you and how could you have left me you fucking cunt when I loved you in the great old high romantic way of love and now look at us we’re full of all the rubbish.
‘I was getting interrogated.’
‘What?’
I told her.
‘And you just go there to watch people?’
‘Well, yes, and to plan my next terrorist action.’
‘I was there, you know, when the towers were hit.’
‘Christ, were you? Where?’
‘I was on the roof of a building half a mile away. Watched the whole thing.’
‘Holy shit. What were you doing on the roof?’
‘It was a friend’s roof garden. Actually…’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ Then she sat back in her chair, let her shoulders sag. This was the same air of having run out of a particular strategy she’d shown on the train. ‘Do you want to come up for a drink?’
The room was large, warm, thickly carpeted, decor subdued neutral contemporary but with a black leather Sixties-style couch and three sub-Rothko panels above the bed. Scarlet having kicked off her shoes went to the minibar, bent, stock-checked, the soft dress pulling tight enough over her backside to show manifest knickerlessness. ‘Two Rémys and two Glenlivets,’ she said. She was in a bad mood with herself, deep down. Contempt for the coincidence? Something.
‘Either. Whatever you want.’
We took the couch, me sitting facing front, her sideways with her back against the arm and her feet up on the cushions. Painted toenails under the nylons’ gossamer, a stripe of reflected light down each shin. The smell of leather was a challenging third presence with us. She’d given me the scotch, taken a brandy for herself. This presumably was the quiet the day had been weaving and scribbling for. I stretched my legs, pointed my toes, let my ankles softly crack. She had the option of putting her feet in my lap. Not yet. No point trying to think about any of it through the booze. Easier just to give yourself up. Fate, as Pasha would say. Destiny.
‘I saw the whole thing,’ she said. ‘From the first plane hitting to the second tower going down. People jumping, all of it. The thing is, we went in and turned the television on. There it was, happening in front of our eyes, but still, you need to see it on television. I kept going up and down the stairs between the two.’
‘I can’t imagine what being there must’ve been like.’ No, I couldn’t, but I could clearly remember what watching on television had been like for me. Tara Kilcoyne’s predecessor, Amy Waterhouse (with whom I’d shared staff-room half-hours in mild, wry, consoling acceptance of the smallness and glamourlessness of our lives) had come into my room between lessons and said, There’s something you should see.
‘You’re probably expecting a story,’ Scarlet said.
I turned to look at her. Lighting was the bedside lamps and by the dresser a tall standard in a translucent, papery, ribbed shade that looked like the cocoon stage of a science fiction creature. In its diffuse, warm, buttery light she was dark golden, soft, tired-womanly inviting.
‘There isn’t one,’ she said. ‘It was exciting, that’s all. Something out of the ordinary was happening. I’m telling you because it came up. It’s not my shock-the-guests party piece.’
Courtesy of being drunk I was mildly insulted. ‘Well, thank you very much but I’m afraid even I, hick that I am, need a bit more than that to be shocked. I mean it’s great you were there and got to see it but the emotional response is hardly news, is it? Something big happens, it’s a thrill. I watched them going down on television myself and thought, Fucking great. It’s nothing, just a relief that all the world’s information isn’t, as you thought it was, in. All the ethics and emotions come along afterwards because we know we’re obliged. It’s grim that people died but people die every day. Who gives a fuck, apart from their relatives?’
‘Sorry,’ Scarlet said. ‘I didn’t mean to be patronizing.’
‘You’re a big person,’ I said, the genie threatening to come wholly out. ‘But even small people watched it on telly and pretty much just went, Wow.’
She didn’t say anything. I stared at my feet. It was a relief to be shifting into the rawer mode. All the years waiting and then it turns out you’re angry because when all’s said and done she left you. She left you. I felt her moving on the couch, tensed–but she was getting up. The cushions gasped; the removal of her weight left me feeling as if I was making the couch, the world, lop-sided. Anger had surged and subsided in the time this took, revealed itself as an option, potentially useful in the business of staying excited; nothing more. She put her drink down on the dressing table. ‘Got to pee,’ she said. It took two skewed steps and a quiet ‘Bollocks’ to right herself. I imagined her at a brownstone’s parapet, leaning on the heels of her hands. Who was the friend? I pictured a preposterous James Bondish man, evening dress, bow tie, mid-morning notwithstanding. The hard blue sky and the brilliant buildings with their shared wreath of thudding smoke. The images on television had reminded us that geological time was still going on, even the biggest things were little.
The bathroom had a low-noise Expelair over which I could hear her stream hitting the water. No amount of time apart would reinstate the bodily privacy those Brewer Street years had blasted. I could walk in there now and pick up the conversation with her on the can and it wouldn’t mean anything. She hadn’t even closed the door. I couldn’t see her but the idea depressed me. The older we get, the sadder we look on the toilet.
She took a few minutes after the flush. I’d finished the first Glenlivet and was into the second when she emerged. I’d framed a jokey apology–Sorry, I appear to have become a twat under the influence of drink and the shock of seeing you–but now that she was there (she’d taken a couple of steps then stopped near the dresser) I knew it was the wrong note. We looked at each other. She came to the couch, stood in front of me. Touched-up lipstick and reapplied perfume. I was thinking: What was the point of slogging through all those years in between if we’re going to have this, now? Had she never come back I could have told myself the loneliness was a searing education, an ascent into the grace of accepting being alone. But here she was. What a waste. If I’d missed her by ten seconds.
Scarlet very slowly (filmically, since one’s seen it so many times on screen) straddled me and put her hands on my shoulders. Seventeen years. Her face had a slight frown and hot front of urgency that made me expect an intimation of her peculiar absence underneath. Instead I got…What? Her unexpected concentration on the here and now. An
d naturally, since like me she’d been walking the earth the better part of forty years, sadness. Was there an escape from sadness, anywhere? (No. The answer came clear enough. No, there is no escape from sadness because behind all life is death.) It was impossible to tell if she wanted this, any of it, but the momentum was unarguable with. No way of not going ahead now. There would be time later for Oh, fuck, what have we done? I had a very clear perception of the swirling unknown information, fragments of New York and lovers and incarnations and investments and lies, a history which, no matter what we brought into being now, would always have the power to corrupt it. But we’d got to the point of not caring, fizzled into annoyance then past it into letting things play themselves out. My mother had said once: ‘For years it was like I was swinging alone on a trapeze, then suddenly one day the other one came towards me with your father on it with his arms out for the catch and I thought, If I miss I’ll fall and die, but if I don’t try this one chance will never come again. Mind you, I say I thought all this but it was really just a moment of letting go and all that empty space for a split second underneath me.’ I remembered the afternoon she said this. She was sitting on the couch braiding Maude’s hair. Scarlet and I were lying on our bellies on the floor, colouring. My mother’s voice had stolen into our awareness and without realizing we’d become rapt. She rarely talked that way. A moment of holiness in the middle of a nondescript afternoon.
The image of the trapeze flight and catch was in my mind when Scarlet (with dress ridden up to reveal lace tops to the black stockings, the intolerable softness of her upper thighs and the beginning of the firm tendons that with the legs apart reach in and meet at the cunt) leaned towards me, that canvas-dust space just under the striped roof of the big top so remote from the audience and so familiar to the fliers, my mother with the dark hair and distant, clear-eyed look of the India photographs suddenly launched into nothingness, her bare arms out for my father’s grasp, the first touch of hands and wrists, the grip, the plait, the swing away into the future.
