Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

  I sat down on the chaise longue.

  “Jesus, don’t you ever read the papers?” asked Judy.

  • • •

  Three days after that conversation we flew to New York. I left messages with my mother, texted her, e-mailed her, but she didn’t call me till the end of the following week, and with the extraordinary timing of mothers chose two thirty p.m. on a Sunday, just as Jay’s cake came out of the kitchens and streamers fell from the ceiling of the Rainbow Room, and two hundred guests sang “Happy Birthday,” accompanied by violinists from the string section of the New York Philharmonic.

  “What’s all that noise? Where are you?”

  I opened the sliding doors to the terrace and shut them behind me.

  “It’s Jay’s birthday. He’s nine today. I’m at the top of the Rockefeller.”

  “Look, I don’t want to have an argument with you on the phone,” said my mother, sounding very much like she wanted to have an argument on the phone. “I’ve read your e-mails, I understand your position. But I hope you understand that I don’t work for that woman—or for you, actually. I work for the British people, and if I’ve developed an interest in that region, if I’ve become increasingly concerned—”

  “Yes, but Mum, can’t you become increasingly concerned about something else?”

  “Doesn’t it matter to you who your partners are in this project? I know you, darling, and I know you’re not a mercenary, I know you have ideals—I raised you, for God’s sake, so I know. I’ve been into it very deeply, Miriam, too, and we’ve come to the conclusion that at this point the human-rights issue is really becoming untenable—I wish it wasn’t, for your sake, but there it is. Darling, don’t you want to know—”

  “Mum, sorry—I’ll call you back—I have to go.”

  Fern, in an ill-fitting, clearly rented suit, a little too short at the ankles, was walking toward me, waving goofily, and I don’t think I realized how far out of the loop I had fallen until that moment. To me he was a cut-out figure pasted in the wrong photograph, in the wrong moment. He smiled, pulled open the sliding doors, his head cocked to the side like a terrier: “Ah, but you look really beautiful.”

  “Why didn’t anyone tell me you were coming? Why didn’t you?”

  He drew a hand through curls half tamed by cheap hair gel, and looked sheepish, a schoolboy caught out in a minor misdemeanor.

  “Well, I was on confidential business. It’s ridiculous, but all the same I couldn’t tell you, I’m sorry. They wanted it kept quiet.”

  I looked over to where he was pointing and saw Lamin. He sat at the central table in a white suit, like the groom at a wedding, with Judy and Aimee either side of him.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “No, no, I don’t think it was him. Not unless he works for the State Department.” He took a step forward and put his hands on the barrier wall. “But what a view this is!”

  The whole city lay before us. I set my back to it, turning to study Fern instead, to check on his reality, and then to watch Lamin accept a slice of cake from a passing waiter. I tried to account for the panic I felt. It was more than simply being kept in the dark, it was a rejection of the way I ordered my own reality. For in my mind, at that time—as perhaps it is for most young people—I was at the center of things, the only person in the world with true freedom. I moved from here to there, observing life as it presented itself to me, but everybody else in these scenes, all the subsidiary characters, belonged only in the compartments in which I had placed them: Fern eternally in the pink house, Lamin confined to the dusty paths of the village. What were they doing here, now, in my New York? I didn’t know how to talk to either of them in the Rainbow Room, wasn’t sure what our relation should be, or what, in this context, I owed or was due. I tried to imagine how Lamin was feeling right now, on the other side of the matrix at last, and if he had someone to guide him through this bewildering new world, someone to help explain to him the obscene amounts of money that had here been expended on things like helium balloons and steamed squid buns and four hundred peonies. But it was Aimee at his side, not me, and she had no such concerns, I could see that from here, this was her world and he had simply been invited into it as she would have invited anyone else, as a privilege and a gift, the same way queens once unself-consciously offered their patronage. In her mind it was all fate, always meant to be, and therefore fundamentally uncomplicated. That’s what I and Judy and Fern and all of us were being paid for really: to keep life uncomplicated—for her. We waded through the tangled weeds so she might float over the surface.

  “Anyway, I was glad to come. I wanted to see you.” Fern reached over and brushed my right shoulder with his hand, and in the moment I thought he was only removing some dust, my mind was elsewhere, I was stuck on this image of me caught in the weeds and Aimee floating serenely over my head. Then his other hand went to my other shoulder: still I did not understand. Like everybody else at that party, except perhaps Fern himself, I could not take my eyes off Lamin and Aimee.

  “My God, look at this!”

  Fern glanced over briefly to where I was pointing and caught Lamin and Aimee as they exchanged a brief kiss. He nodded: “Ah, so they do not hide any more!”

  “Jesus Christ. Is she going to marry him? Is she going to adopt him?”

  “Who cares? I don’t want to talk about her.”

  Suddenly Fern grabbed both my hands in his hands, and when I turned back I found that he was staring at me with comic intensity.

  “Fern, what are you doing?”

  “You pretend to be cynical”—he kept seeking my eyes as I tried equally hard to avoid his—“but I think you are just afraid.”

  In his accent it sounded like a line from one of the Mexican telenovelas we used to watch with half the village, each Friday afternoon, in the school’s TV room. I couldn’t help it—I laughed. His eyebrows came together in a sad line.

  “Please don’t laugh at me.” He looked down at himself, and I looked, too: I think it was the first time I’d ever seen him out of cargo shorts. “The truth is I don’t know how to dress in New York.”

  I eased my hands from his.

  “Fern, I don’t know what you think this is. You really don’t know me.”

  “Well, you are hard to know well. But I want to know you. That is what it’s like, being in love. You want to know someone, better.”

  It seemed to me that the situation was so awkward that he should just disappear at this point—just as such scenes in the telenovelas cut to a commercial—because otherwise I didn’t see how we were going to get through the next two minutes. He didn’t move. Instead he grabbed two passing flutes of champagne from a waiter’s tray and drank his down in one go.

  “You have nothing to say to me? I am offering you my heart!”

  “Oh my God—Fern—please! Stop talking like that! I don’t want your heart! I don’t want to be responsible for anybody else’s heart. For anybody else’s anything!”

  He looked confused: “A peculiar idea. Once you’re alive in this world, you’re responsible.”

  “For myself.” Now I drank down a whole flute. “I just want to be responsible for myself.”

  “Sometimes in this life you have to take risks on other people. Look at Aimee.”

  “Look at Aimee?”

  “Why not? You have to admire her. She’s not ashamed. She loves this young man. It will probably mean a lot of trouble for her.”

  “You mean: for us. It’ll mean a lot of trouble for us.”

  “But she doesn’t care what people think.”

  “That’s because as usual she has no idea what she’s getting into. The whole thing is absurd.”

  They were leaning on each other, watching the magician, an engaging gentleman in a Savile Row suit and a bow-tie who’d been at Jay’s eighth birthday, too. He was doing the trick of the Chinese rings. Ligh
t poured into the Rainbow Room and the rings slipped in and out of each other despite their apparent solidity. Lamin looked mesmerized—everybody did. I could hear, very faintly, Chinese prayer music, and understood, in the abstract, that this must be part of the effect. I could see what everyone was feeling, but I was not with them and could not feel it.

  “You are jealous?”

  “I wish I could fool myself the way she can. I’m jealous of anyone that oblivious. A little ignorance never stopped her. Nothing stops her.”

  Fern emptied his glass and placed it awkwardly on the ground.

  “I should not have spoken. I believe I have misinterpreted the situation.”

  His love language had been very silly but now that he returned to his more usual administrative language I felt sorry. He turned and went back indoors. The magician finished. I watched Aimee get up and approach the little, rounded stage. Jay was called up, or at least arrived at her side, and then Kara, and then Lamin. The whole party surrounded them in an adoring crescent shape. I seemed to be the only person still outside, looking in. With one arm she was hugging Jay and Kara, with the other she held up Lamin’s left hand in triumphal pose. Everybody clapped and cheered, a muffled roar through the double-glazed glass. She held this position: a room full of cameras flashed. From where I stood it was a pose that collapsed many periods in her life into one: mother and lover, big sister, best friend, superstar and diplomat, billionaire and street kid, foolish girl and woman of substance. But why should she get to take everything, have everything, do everything, be everyone, in all places, at all times?

  Seven

  The thing I remember most vividly is the warmth of her body as she ran off stage and into the wings, into my arms, where I stood ready with a pencil skirt to replace her satin dress, or a black cat’s tail to be pinned on her behind—once she had shimmied out of the pencil skirt—and clean tissues to wipe the sweat that always sprung from the bridge of her freckled nose. There were of course many other guys and dolls to whom I had to hand guns or canes, or fix a tiepin, straighten a seam or set a brooch just so, but it’s Tracey I remember, holding on to my elbow for balance with one hand and stepping lightly into a pair of bright green capri pants which I then zipped up the side, taking care not to catch her skin, before kneeling down to tie the bows on her stack-heeled white taps. She was always serious and silent during these quick changes. She never giggled or fidgeted like the other Hot Box Girls, nor was she in any way self-doubting or in need of reassurance, as I soon learned was typical of chorus girls but alien to Tracey’s nature. As I dressed or undressed her she remained fixated upon whatever was happening on stage. If she could watch the show, she would. If she was stuck backstage in a changing room and listening to it over the monitors, she was so focused on what she was hearing that you couldn’t engage her in conversation. It didn’t matter how many times she saw that show, she never tired of it, she was always impatient to get back inside it. Everything backstage bored her. Her real life was out there, in that fiction, under the lights, and this confused me because I knew, as no one else in the cast did, that she was having a secret affair with one of the stars, a married man. He played Brother Arvide Abernathy, the kindly older gentleman who carries a bass drum in the Salvation Army band. They didn’t need to spray any gray in his hair, he was almost three times Tracey’s age and had plenty already, a salt-and-pepper Afro that contributed to that air theatrical critics like to call “distinguished.” In real life he was Kenyan-born and raised, followed by a stint at RADA, followed by another at the Royal Shakespeare Company: he had a very plummy Shakespearean speaking voice, which most people laughed at, behind his back, but that I liked to hear, especially on stage, it was so luxuriant, verbal velvet. Theirs was an affair conducted in little pockets of time, with no freedom to expand. On stage they had almost no scenes together—their characters came from two different worlds, a house of prayer and a den of sin—while off stage everything was clandestine and harried. But I was glad to take on the role of intermediary, scouting out empty dressing rooms, keeping watch, lying for them when lying was required—it gave me something concrete to do with my time instead of wondering, as I did most nights, what on earth I was doing there.

  Observing their affair was interesting to me too for it was curiously constructed. Every time the poor man caught sight of Tracey he looked as if he might die of love for her, and yet she was never very kindly to him, as far as I could see, and I often heard her call him an old fool, or tease him about his white wife, or make cruel jokes about his aging libido. Once, I interrupted them by mistake, walking into a dressing room I didn’t realize they were in, and found a singular scene: he was on his knees on the floor, fully dressed but head bowed and frankly weeping, and she was sitting on a stool, her back to him, facing the mirror, applying some lipstick. “Please don’t,” I heard her say as I slammed the door shut. “And get up. Get up off your fucking knees . . .” Later she told me he was offering to leave his wife. What was strangest to me about her ambivalence toward him was how severely it disturbed the hierarchies of the theatrical world she occupied, in which every soul in the production had a precise value and a corresponding power, and all relations conformed strictly to a certain schema. Socially, practically, sexually, a female star was worth all twenty chorus girls, for example, and Hot Box Girl Number One was worth about three chorus girls and all the understudies, while a male speaking part of any kind was equal to all the women on stage put together—except perhaps the female lead—and a male star could print his own currency, when he entered a room it re-formed around him, when he chose a chorus girl she submitted to him at once, when he suggested a change the director sat up in his seat and listened. This system was so solid it was unaffected by revolutions elsewhere. Directors had begun, for example, to cast across and against the old class and color lines—there were black King Henrys and cockney Richard IIIs and Kenyan Arvide Abernathys sounding just like Larry Olivier—but the old onstage hierarchies of rank remained firm as ever. In my first week, lost backstage and confused about the location of the prop cupboard, I stopped a pretty Indian girl in a corset who happened to be running by and tried to ask her for directions. “Don’t ask me,” she said, without slowing down, “I’m nobody . . .” Tracey’s affair struck me as a form of revenge upon all that: like watching a house cat capture a lion, tame him, treat him like a dog.

  • • •

  I was the only person the two lovers could socialize with after hours. They couldn’t go to the Coach and Horses with the rest of the crew, but they had the same urge to drown a post-show adrenalin high in alcohol, so they went instead to the Colony Room, where nobody else from the show went, but where he had been a member for years. Often I was invited to go with them. Here everyone called him “Chalky,” and they knew his drink—whisky and ginger ale—and it was always sitting on the bar waiting for him when he arrived on the dot of ten forty-five. He loved that, and the stupid nickname, because it was a posh English habit to give stupid nicknames, and he was devoted to all things posh and English. I noticed he hardly ever talked of Kenya or Africa. One night I tried to ask him about his home but he became irritable: “Look, you kids, you grow up here, you think where I come from it’s all starving children and Live Aid or whatever the hell you think it is. Well, my father was a professor of economics, my mother is a government minister, I grew up in a very beautiful compound, thank you very much, with servants, a cook, a gardener . . .” He went on like this for a while and then returned to his preferred subject, the glory days of Soho. I felt embarrassed but also that he had deliberately misunderstood me: of course I knew his world existed—that kind of world exists everywhere. That wasn’t what I’d wanted to know.

  His real allegiance was to the bar itself, which affection he struggled to translate to two girls who had barely heard of Francis Bacon and saw only a narrow, smoke-stained room, the lurid green walls and the crazed clutter—“Art shit,” Tracey called it—that took ove
r every surface. To annoy her lover, Tracey liked to make a show of her ignorance, but though she tried to disguise it I suspected she was often interested in the long, digressive, drunken stories he told, about artists, actors and writers he had known, their lives and works, who they’d fucked and what they’d drunk or taken and how they’d died. When he went to the toilet or out to buy fags I sometimes caught her deep in contemplation of one nearby painting or another, following the movement, I thought, of the brush, looking intently, with that sharpness she brought to all things. And when Chalky staggered back in and resumed his subject, she’d roll her eyes but she was listening, I could tell. Chalky had known Bacon only a little, enough to raise a drink with, and they’d had a good friend in common, a young actor called Paul, a man of “great beauty, great personal charm,” the son of Ghanaians, who’d lived with his boyfriend, and Bacon, for a while, in a platonic triangle, down in Battersea. “And the thing you have to understand,” said Chalky (after a certain number of whiskies there were always these things we had to understand), “the thing you have to understand is that here, in Soho, at that time, there was no black, there was no white. Nothing so banal. It wasn’t like Brixton, no, here we were brothers, in art, in love”—he gave Tracey a squeeze—“in everything. Then Paul got that part in A Taste of Honey—we came here to celebrate it—and everyone was talking about it, and we felt like we were the center of the whole thing, swinging London, bohemian London, literary London, theatrical London, that this was our country, too, now. It was beautiful! I tell you, if London began and ended on Dean Street, all would be . . . happiness.”