Eating Crow (22 page)

O
ne morning, waking alone in my New York bed, I discovered my hipbones. At first, feeling beneath the covers, I wasn’t sure what to make of these two hard ridges. The large man is all too aware of his body’s geography, but not of its geology. We do not dwell on questions of muscle mass and bone structure, because to do so, we must first make excuses for all the flesh that hides them and it is easier not to broach the subject at all, even with ourselves. Still, here they were, just south of my belly-softness, these two nodules of bone pointing diagonally toward my groin. I climbed out of bed and stood naked before a floor-length mirror. Now I understood why I had been so unself-conscious with Jennie. There was nothing to be self-conscious about. The love handles had all but melted away. The weight had fallen off me.

This made sense. I suddenly realized I had not eaten a single memorable meal in months. The Almas caviar blowout didn’t count. There are no calories in caviar. That’s why thin rich women eat it. We also gave away those chocolates I was sent after the
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appearance. And I had spent the weeks traveling around the world missing eating opportunities which once would have been the point of the journey. In Ireland the old Marc Basset would have sought out the very finest soda bread and oysters and langoustines. In Vietnam he would have insisted on being taken to the best place in town for pho, that fabulously intense beef noodle soup which is the cornerstone of Vietnamese cookery. He would have eaten crab claws in Mumbai and smoky kebabs in Karachi and great platefiils of barbecued shrimp in Australia.

This Marc Basset did none of those things. Obviously I ate meals, but in the distracted manner of the busy man. I do not even recall whether any of the food we ate was good or bad. Back in London such a thing would have been unthinkable. The quality of the food was the thing. In my old life the shape of each week was defined more by the meals taken than the people I took them with; my knowledge of the city was dominated by my recall of where the useful restaurants were located. This new life had no need of useful restaurants.

One way of looking at all of this is to say that I had lost my appetite, but as I saw it I had simply found new ones that did not concern what I put in my mouth. That afternoon I went to Fifth Avenue and bought suits by Paul Smith, one with a subtle pinstripe of rust, another in an outrageous houndstooth check. In Kenzo I bought fitted shirts in charcoal gray and steel blue rather than the billowing unfitted numbers in which I used to put my trust. I went to Boss and bought trousers that didn’t need to be belted high across the belly to keep them in place and silky turtlenecks of the sort I would once never have considered for fear they would make me look like I had breasts. (Which I did.) In the old days, although I fantasized about the creation of a better-dressed version of me, I was realistic enough to know that I would barely fit into the changing cubicles in these shops, let alone their clothes. It was all different now. I no longer needed to look, desperately, to see what size they went up to, because I wasn’t even top of the range. I had a new toy to play with and the new toy was my body.

Paying for all of this was not a problem. I had become a wealthy man, even if at first it had not seemed the likely outcome. The first settlement arising out of my apologies was the one for American slavery, and just as Lewis Jeffries had predicted, our careful words had not influenced the final reckoning at all. The US government awarded the African-American Slavery Reparations Committee every last cent they asked for, in billions of dollars of direct personal, business, and educational grants and endowments to African-American banks and community organizations, to be paid out over the next twenty-five years. There was no Schenke differential for me to take a thousandth percent of, a disappointment I accepted manfully. Then came the slavery settlement with the African Union and everything cheered up remarkably. The AU were offered and accepted a full twenty-five percent less than the predicted sum, a differential of billions, one thousandth of which came my way. This constituted the vast majority of my earnings, but there were also smaller amounts from the settlements in Ireland and Vietnam, on the Indian subcontinent, and with Australia’s Aborigines, all of which helped.

One day Max telephoned me and asked how it felt to be rich.

“To be honest, it’s a little unreal,” I said. “I know the money is there but I don’t quite know what to do with it, beyond buying a few good suits.”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t think I’ve worked out how to be rich.”

“Let me sort you out,” he said.

He sent me a man with prospectuses and computer-generated income forecasts who talked about tax-free environments and sustainable investments and who used my first name an awful lot in conversation. He suggested gilt-edged bonds for stability, new technology for growth, and natural mineral exploitation for adventure. All of this sounded like the kind of stuff a rich man should do, so when the documents came my way, I signed them.

Still, I tried not to wallow in ostentation. On Luke’s first night in New York, for example, I avoided the wood-and-leather-trim American bistros down in the Gramercy district and introduced him instead to the simple pleasures of the Matterhorn Café. We ordered a
fondue des Mosses
and talked about the past, but I didn’t eat much.

“You not hungry?”

“I’ve eaten it before.”

“When’s that ever made a difference to you? Remember that Italian place in Swiss Cottage? You ordered the same pasta thing there six nights in a row. What was the dish …?”

“Tagliatelle with pancetta and artichokes.”

“That’s it. Pancetta and artichokes.”

“It was an experiment. I was checking out the consistency of the kitchen.”

“No you weren’t. You just liked eating it.”

“Maybe I’ve changed.”

“Maybe you have. Mum told me to take you out and get some proper food inside you because she thinks you’ve changed too much. She says you look ill. She phones me up every time you’re on TV”

“Terrific. I lose a bit of weight and you two want to call in the doctors.”

He spooled some molten cheese onto a piece of bread and popped it into his mouth. Without looking at me he said, “Remember Dad.”

“Blimey, Luke. All I’ve done is lost a bit of what I didn’t need.”

“I’m just saying, that was how we knew Dad was ill, wasn’t it? When he started losing the weight.”

“I have not got an inoperable cancer.”

“I’m only telling you what Mum was saying.”

“Well, you can tell her I’m fine.”

“Why don’t you tell her yourself?”

“I will.”

“You know she doesn’t call you because she thinks you’re too busy.”

“That’s crazy.”

“But you have been busy.”

“Sure. It’s one of the reasons I’ve thinned down a bit.”

“A bit?”

“But I’ve not been too busy to talk to my own mother. I’m never too busy for that.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“No, it’s fine. I’ll tell her myself.”

“Are you sure you won’t eat some more?”

“My appetite’s gone. It’s probably the bowel cancer.”

“Shut up, Marc.”

Jennie was away for the weekend so together we toured the heavy redbrick bars of the East Village and the Bowery. I wanted Luke to see that I had purchase on the city; that I was comfortable here amid the late-night hum and the expectant rattle of cocktail shakers. “You’ll love the next place,” I would say as we clambered out of the cab. “They mix the best martinis in town” or “At this one they have forty-eight different flavored vodkas.”

And yes, maybe I was a little too insistent about him enjoying himself. But he was so determined not to be impressed by anything I was doing or anywhere we went that I couldn’t help myself, particularly after the third killer cocktail. I’m not trying to blame him for what happened. It was all my own doing. But let’s just say that he made it easier for me to behave in the way I did.

We were in a bar on Union Square, slugging beer, when I was approached by a couple of young women, one hiding shyly behind the lightly tanned, bare shoulder of the other. Both of them were blonde, and as I recall, both had names which could end in a y but ended instead in an i, the dot on the top doubtless drawn as a heart when they signed their names. They were called Mandi and Traci or Suzi and Kirsti. Something like that. Luke and I were leaning back against the bar, our conversation having all but trickled away to resentful grunts and nods.

One of the girls said, “I’m sorry to bother you but are you …?”

I was accustomed to this kind of thing by now. I was on television a lot and it was natural that people should recognize me and wish to speak to me. I smiled and said, “Marc Basset, yes.”

Beside me I heard Luke sigh with irritation. The girls giggled. “We were wondering,” said the bolder of the two, “if you would …”

“Yes?”

“Say it to us.”

“Say what?”

She looked coyly at me from under her bangs. “You know. It.” Her friend giggled again.

I leaned in toward her, and as I did so she pulled her hair back behind her ear and presented her long neck to me as if it were an expanse of smooth upper thigh. “You mean …,” I dropped my voice to a whisper, “… I’m sorry.” I heard her gasp and she exhaled damply against my cheek.

She said quietly, as if she had all the time in the world, “Again.”

“I’m. So. Sorry.” I looked up over her shoulder at her friend watching us, her eyes wide.

I said, “Would you like a go, too?” She nodded but said nothing, her lips just slightly parted. Now she pulled back her hair and I whispered into her ear and I could feel her shiver. The two girls looked at each other and laughed again.

The first one said, “It’s so hot.”

“In here?”

“No. You. Whispering like that. It’s … you know?”

“Oh.”

“Do you live far from here?”

I turned to Luke. “You can find your own way home, can’t you?”

Let’s freeze the image there for a moment and review the situation. Remember, Jennie and I had only been a couple for a month or two. It wasn’t as if we were married or living together. There were no kids involved. We didn’t even own a dog. It was just a gentle friendship that had grown into something more in the pressure cooker environment of the job. Anyway, Jennie wasn’t there and Mandi and Traci were, and they were offering something which even had I been sober—which I fully accept I wasn’t—would have proved an attractive proposition. For years I had whined on about my failures with women and my inability to seize the opportunities when they came my way. But I was a new Marc Basset now. The old excuses didn’t work anymore. I had a suit by Paul Smith and a shirt by Kenzo and two very attractive blondes from somewhere big and wide and flat (Nebraska? Iowa?) who wanted to go to bed with me. Just where, exactly, was it written that I had to say no? Where? Nowhere, that’s where.

I was woken by the sound of the bedroom door opening but I didn’t raise my head from underneath the covers. I focused on the unexpected feeling of the smooth, warm bodies on either side of me and on the dull throb behind my eyes, cruel reward for the night just gone. Next I heard her calling my name quietly, as if hesitant about waking me.

“Marc?”

Initially I was overcome by panic. I could see this might not be the best of situations. But almost immediately that feeling was swept away by a wave of something more intimately associated with anger. She was meant to be away for the weekend. She was meant to be doing her own thing, and surely, so was I. Wasn’t I allowed a secret life? Wasn’t I allowed to do the things that other people got away with?

I heard her flick on the overhead light and then imagined her surveying the tangle of discarded clothes on the floor at the end of the bed; threaded through it, the little straps and lacy panels that had proved so endlessly fascinating to me the night before.

She said, “Marc?”

I pulled myself up from under the covers and so did the girls.

“Hello, Jennie.”

“Hi there.”

“Hiya.”

She stared at me. She stared at Mandi. (Or Traci.) She stared at Traci. (It may have been Mandi.) She looked at me again and said, in a thin, overwhelmed voice, “Aren’t you going to say something?”

I yawned and rubbed one sleep-crusted eye with the ball of my hand. “What were you thinking of, darling? An apology?”

“I just …”

“Dream on, Jennie. It’s my day off.”

Behold: a monster is born.

After Jennie had run from the apartment and the girls had scooped up their clothes and dressed and said their perky good-byes, I went to the kitchen to make coffee. I found Luke in there.

He said, “So tell me, when exactly did you become such an arsehole?”

“I’ll make it right.”

“Will you?”

“It’s my thing. It’s what I do. I make things good again.”

“Looks to me like what you do is fuck things up.”

“Stuff happens.”

“Oh, right. Two airhead blondes in your bed is just one of those things that happens.”