Varying Degrees of Hopelessness Page 5

  I took this to be because I’m a somewhat old-fashioned dresser.

  I turned shyly to further peruse the books.

  But the shop-keeper interrupted my tantalizing investigation by asking, ‘May I help you?’, in a rather rough way.

  He had an American accent.

  I immediately took against him.

  What business do Americans have selling books on Art History in the middle of London?

  Books probably by beautiful Englishmen!

  Is nothing sacred?

  To hide my indignation, I pretended I hadn’t heard the little man.

  I could tell he was little, even though he was sitting behind a desk.

  Women know these things.

  Then he said, ‘Can I help you, please?’

  This time more insistently, more demandingly, more impatiently.

  More manfully, if you like.

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied coolly. ‘I’m just browsing.’

  I think one should be allowed to wander around a bookshop at one’s own leisurely pace.

  I do not like being hurried.

  I, who have never been allowed to discover my own natural speed.

  I …

  He spoke again!

  This time he said, ‘Yes, but you see, Madam, this is not a book-store. This is my flat. You are standing in my study, casting an eye over my books, when I have not in fact invited you in, which would have been unlikely since I do not know you, and what’s more, I am trying to read.’

  This stunned me rather.

  ‘I know, I know,’ he went on. ‘The window looks like a shop window. That is because this used to be a shop. But now it is not a shop.’

  The door was still ajar, I was relieved to observe.

  Having thought I was entering a bona fide book-shop, here I was, alone with a strange man in his study!

  Who was gazing at me piercingly.

  He had a striking air of determination about him.

  And quite a manly physique in some ways.

  There was a cynical twist to his lips.

  His hair was very short.

  It would no doubt have been curly, had he allowed it to grow long enough to bend.

  His rough-shaven chin suggested to me animal passion.

  There was not enough time to make a thorough investigation of his physiognomy.

  It was however quite clear to me that he was not my Mr Right.

  He was not tall, dark and handsome.

  He was one or two of these things, but not all three at once.

  Of course I was willing to make exceptions, as I had already done in the case of Lionel Syms’s blond curls.

  This man was at least not blond.

  But he was very rude.

  And pretending to be a shop-keeper in order to lure unsuspecting young women into his study suggested to me that he was daring, deceitful and dangerous.

  So I said with what spirit I could summon in such a compromising situation, ‘Well! If everything here is YOURS, I will be going.’

  And I went.

  Afterwards, I felt totally flustered, as is usual with me after a romantic encounter with a man.

  Even if it is with an American one.

  Even if it is with a rude American one.

  (Though strangely attractive.)

  Despite my flustered state, I had the presence of mind to estimate the chances of our ever meeting again.

  In the novels of Babs Cartwheel, a reunion would have been inevitable.

  But the world is very crowded these days.

  And I didn’t move in many circles.

  Except those of my own making.

  I reckoned there was about a 2% chance.

  Our Hero at Last

  His had been a normal fifties American plaid pyjamas childhood. He had been kept occupied by hamsters, electric train sets (in which the hamsters were forced to travel), Boy Scout meetings, mountain-climbing, bike-hikes and TV. His sister had sexually molested him, tickling his penis in a way they both enjoyed until she got bored and turned to Barbie dolls. She later ended up running a gas station in Wyoming, with which she was also bored. She always seemed to him somewhat adrift.

  His mother was ill and clingy. She would welcome him into her arms and her darkened bedroom when he got home from the day’s bullying at school. She smelled of baby powder and cod liver oil. He did too, probably. Together they would eat Frito’s Corn Chips, which he hated, and watch whatever TV programme they could reach agreement on. As there were fewer shows a grown-up would tolerate, he compromised more on this than she did.

  His father drove a big car. He drove it off in the morning and eventually drove it back. Sometimes his returns were made more noteworthy by his acquisition of Chinese food or pizza on the way home. When he wasn’t too tired, he and his son would go outside and play ball, which consisted of throwing the ball too hard or too high for the boy to catch it. Immensely satisfying to watch one’s son scrambling in a bush for a ball. If the boy threw a fast one, his father went indoors.

  The boy preferred to go inside too and watch his sister baking green cake (for St Patrick’s Day) or knitting wool jewellery. But she never played with his balls again. He became a solitary type who practised magic tricks for hours in front of the mirror in his bedroom that was hung too high for him, so that he had to do the tricks at shoulder, even chin, level.

  He mastered ‘The Ghostly Pencil’, ‘Vapour of the Yogi’, ‘The Melting Coin’, ‘Solid Water’, ‘The Obedient Orange’, ‘The Lazy Match’, ‘Phantom Smoke’, ‘Floating Sugar Cubes’, ‘The Mystery Banana’ and some simplified Houdini escapes. He hoped to amaze and perplex his family. But his sister had a habit of indifference to him. His mother was imperturbable with damp cotton wool pads over her eyes, sunk in gloom and oil. His father was nowhere. Standing sturdily in front of a mirror in the half-light of afternoon in the dark ages of fifties America, he practised his tricks.

  This was how he got his accent, his sense of humour, his sweetness, his stiffness, his uncertainty, his hypochondria, his bad eyes, his fear of women, and his collection of kitsch memorabilia. Which wasn’t really a collection, until he realized there was too much to throw away, and that it had become kitsch.

  Well, what was he supposed to do with himself for his first twenty years? Make a million, fly to the moon, grow asparagus?

  Our Hero’s Mother

  For many years she thought she was dying. Her life was a series of anti-climaxes, leading up to that final anti-climax. She lay around listening to the sound of tea-bags brewing in the tea-pot in the hallway. She could not bear to be too close to the tea at this stage. Even through the wall she could hear the molecules in the tea giving up hope of staying as they had been, so stagnant and at ease in their dry state. She heard them surrender themselves to their hot, their liquid fate, she listened to their noiseless acceptance of this completely unforeseen development.

  The highlight of her life was menstruation. She felt her body building up to this event. It held her in suspense, since she was never sure when the storm was due to break. Her breasts got sore, days, sometimes ten days, before. She liked the explosion of blood that finally came to punctuate her life.

  But menstruation didn’t want to be loved, and took its revenge. Once, when she stood up in a room full of her husband’s poker pals, there on the chair behind her and on the back of her flowery dress was the evidence of her exciting double life, the activity so far removed from male games. The dress was not the problem. That could be dealt with by backing out of the room. But the chair? Yes, she took the chair out with her as well.

  Our Hero’s Mother Again

  Her first child had been run-of-the-mill, an essential accoutrement among her friends who had all married to have children and had children in order to feel married.

  She’d gone through the baby shower routine, smiling insincerely at each new baby item in pink, white and sky-blue, a pale imitation of the colours of the American flag and geared for a baby of a
ny description. She had worn all the hand-me-down maternity dresses, their tattered frills half-mended by harassed mothers. She’d shown the requisite delight in her bulging belly at the grocery store, while looking for cigarettes and anything else that might cheer her up. She had endured the humiliation of no longer fitting into the swivel seat at the hair salon and having to sit with the old ladies. She’d fallen tumultuously in and out of love with her obstetrician.

  She’d been through all the pooh-poohed and prettified embarrassments of pregnancy, followed by the unimagined indignities of giving birth. And then the struggle to breastfeed, doomed and distrusted from the start. She was better at preparing the wrist-hot bottles of formula, a precise science performed under trying conditions, for the kid was always crying and her breasts too wept and ached to do their duty.

  She felt that only a baby could get away with such prolonged persecution of a law-abiding citizen without being locked up. The whining, the vomiting, the crying, the diarrhoea, the rashes, the whining. The sleepless plod to the crib while trying to get her murderous impulses under control. A thing barely human that had to be served with superhuman devotion and struggle. People are not less troublesome according to size.

  She had a diaper service at least. A man came to the door to collect the dirty diapers from which the shit had been carefully scraped. He delivered a bunch of clean ones, on which the shit was instantly deposited.

  There was all the boredom of being at home so much -not since her own infancy had she been so housebound and friendless. She didn’t want to see her friends, in case they noticed the blankness in her. Of course, in the end there was all the thankless socializing involved in PTA meetings, Xmas plays, Brownie outings, swimming lessons, piano lessons, ice-skating and Hallowe’en: she dressed the kid as a blob, a devil, a cigarette box.

  But when the second one emerged rather effortlessly from her womb, she changed. She hadn’t noticed with the first how beautiful a baby’s eyelids are. She’d fended the child off as if she was trying to get something sticky off her fingers. But this time she didn’t want to let go. She left her husband’s bed to sleep with him, her son, who seemed the only thing in the world that was hers. She willingly fed him from her body, happy to encircle him, happiest when encircling him, infusing him with mother-love to make him grow.

  She napped when he napped, woke when he woke, wept and laughed with him. She took him to the grocery store and was amazed to see people twisting his little fingers around theirs, as if he were just another baby in a baby boom. And then they dared to change the subject and ask, ‘And how does Sandy like having a little brother?’ ‘How IS Sandy?’ ‘WHERE is Sandy?’

  Sandy was at school. Sandy was usually at school. And her mother felt these questions as an affront. Why was she not allowed to love her son? People gave her no peace about it. They were determined to recall her from her ecstasy. They did not approve of this sudden acquisition of maternal feelings. Even her own mother seemed increasingly stern over the phone. She no longer wanted to inform her mother of the latest indication of the baby’s perfections.

  But finally it was her mother who broke the spell, the dream-state in which she’d kept him so safe, in which she herself had felt so safe. Her mother said, ‘You have GOT to give that child a name.’ As if she was Queen Victoria or something. As if she was GOD or something: ‘Give that child a NAME.’

  So the Child was given a Name. And the intimacy between the mother and the infant who had escaped her body without pain, except that of eternal vigilance, who had been worth any ordeal anyway because he was her cushion to lie on and plump up for the rest of her life, her lonely life, the child she had called Bumple and Baba in the interim, was lost for ever. This minuscule, pre-verbal, prehensile US citizen deserved respect. No longer the outlandish sense of responsibility that made her want to keep the globe from spinning in case it dizzied him, the possessive pride in having created something that just needed a little rounding off, all the easy work still to be done, and glory assured.

  She called him Robert, the name of a grown man who has already left home. Only echoes, half-remembered gestures of their love-affair remained. It was the beginning of the end.

  Our Hero’s Education

  She taught him at home for as long as she could. She eagerly set about making him the man that everyone wanted, a man who would escape her grasp. She taught him to do household chores, so that as she dusted, he followed along below with a small broom. She sang him opera highlights at the piano, freely translating from languages she didn’t know and inventing her own outrageous plots. She taught him the essential thing in life: how to play solitary card games. And she worried about when it would be necessary to inform him of death. One of these days a doctor would tell her she had months to live, she moved forever in a cloud of decay, she could smell it all around her. How to explain to a child that you and he will some day die? That you brought him into a world in which such unbearable things are to be borne, and that you yourself have long understood and accepted that you and he will some day die? Every aspect of awareness, whittled down and rounded off, cultivated and captivated by life, to be dented, denied and finally destroyed by death. In every beginning its end. This was not dinner-table conversation!

  ‘When we made you, a bit of your Daddy and a bit of me went into you,’ she told him one day. ‘And that’s why you look a bit like him and a bit like me, and even behave a bit like us.’

  ‘I guess that’s why you made me a bit peculiar.’

  It was time he went to school.

  The night before Robert started kindergarten, his mother dreamt she found him hanging naked from the bath-tub shower tap. He had committed suicide because she was sending him to school. His body was cold. But when she loosened the string around his neck, he stirred. He was saved! She held him close, caressing the small, helpless head, weeping and crooning over him, ‘Baba, my Baba.’

  ‘Don’t call me Baba,’ he said, reviving. .

  The next morning, she took him to school with some trepidation. She feared he would never forgive her. Her dream baby would feel betrayed. But the living actual boy was eager to go to school. He wanted to catch up with his sister, Sandy.

  The teacher’s name was Miss Roberts. She said it must be fate that Robert was in her class. This was an unfortunate word under the circumstances, too close to ‘fatal’. Robert’s mother didn’t feel encouraged by it, under the circumstances. Under the circumstances, she longed to get home so that she could collapse. She watched him line up limply behind his class and plod into the low building as if it were the gas chamber.

  But Robert loved school. They had tadpoles there, and a large marble-run with ramps and jumps and bridges and slots and tunnels for large blue marbles. He developed crushes on little girls, whom he tried to sleep next to at nap-time, when they all lay down flat on the floor. And he was urged to believe all manner of unlikely but gratifying things about the United States of America and its place in the universe.

  ‘There are two kinds of roots,’ he told his mother. ‘Tap roots and bushy roots.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘And some plants eat each other. And some eat animals.’

  ‘Oh, like the Venus Fly Trap!’ yelled Sandy.

  ‘Yes,’ Robert said, annoyed. ‘The Venus Fly Trap. That eats bugs. Some plants drink tea.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked his mother.

  ‘Yeah, my teacher gives her roses tea to drink.’

  His mother grimly acknowledged that she had been supplanted by this woman who couldn’t possibly appreciate the miracle of Robert’s legs and arms, his nose that was still a baby’s nose, a woman who didn’t know his favourite foods and probably didn’t care. Who surely didn’t realize the sweetness of him. A woman who would never have noticed him hanging in the shower.

  But school had its compensations. At Thanksgiving he brought home a picture of a turkey, made in the shape of his own hand, and on the back it said, ‘Mommy I love you.’

  Our He
ro’s Hamsters

  He practised serial monogamy with his hamsters: one at a time. The first was called Amelia. She never bit. Towser was another favourite, valiant Towser, who’d seemed the most at ease when riding in the cattle-car of the electric train, in and out under Robert’s bed. But none of them was exactly happy.

  Our Hero’s Sister Sandy

  Sandy drank a lot of Coke. She liked the harshness of it in her throat – it must be the bubbles exploding, she thought. She often pondered the problems of molecules. She felt that too much movement, for instance, was hard on the human body. This is why it’s tiring to travel. The molecules have to exert themselves to hold the whole construction together when the body is in motion. This is also why vacuum cleaners can never be liked. Vacuum cleaners cause a great deal of molecular uproar.

  Robert never realized his friendship with Sandy had a beginning, a middle and an end. He forgot it had begun. He never knew that his mother, peeping through a crack in the door one day when a suspicious silence had filled the house, saw Sandy squeezing his penis. Sandy was yanked out into the backyard and slapped.

  ‘You don’t do that to my son, you little bitch!’ Words Sandy had never heard before sprang from her mother’s mouth. Octopus arms entangled her.

  Sandy never touched Robert again without uneasiness, even repulsion. She never touched any man without fear of hidden consequences. A crucial element of parental permission was never granted. Her mother seemed to find sex distasteful and never spoke of it. She never even explained to Sandy the rudiments of menstruation. In the end, all was revealed when a friend noticed Sandy’s red-stained skirt after gym, and helped her to wash it and then the bench Sandy had been sitting on.

  Her father died without telling her he loved her. He had not even managed to teach her how to use a cheque-book. He died without telling her her Social Security Number. It was only boredom that calmed Sandy’s soul, and a recurrent sexual fantasy which involved cats eating mice, naughty bits first.