Fascination (14 page)

Sestina, villanelle, sonnet. My favourite poetic forms in order of preference. It must be because I like the imposed shape: the rules, the order, the poetic matrix. I recently read a good poem about tins washed up on a beach and last weekend went out to the dunes at Kennemerduinen and collected a dozen or so of these drift-tins. I
imagine a show – the sand-scoured, sun-bleached, wave-washed, storm-tossed tins and beside them the pristine, primary-coloured supermarket version. It could be very moving. The life of tins; their slow death by water. I like to smoke a cigarette when I read poetry, I don’t know why – I don’t smoke a lot – but, with poetry, I just like to.

Tobacco is a strange drug, when you think about it. Alcohol seems more natural – we all have to drink after all – and my favourite drink is champagne. But drawing smoke into your lungs is not an instinctive process in any way. I like the smell of wood smoke, but if I see a bonfire I don’t rush over to it and start inhaling the fumes. My father took up smoking in the last month of his life as an act of simple defiance, he said, a rebuke to his draining vitality. We would smoke together all evening as I read him poetry. I understand his position better now, see things from his point of view.

U-turns define life’s progress, it seems to me, better than the traditional image of forking paths. How often in our life can its significant events be described as a U-turn? Falling out of love, for example, is a major emotional U-turn, rather than a bifurcation on life’s highway. This sojourn in Amsterdam is a U-turn. I had to get out of London after my father died. Coming here is not a step forward but rather an urge to turn back down life’s road. Otto is a bit of a U-turn too. I fell out of love, we were going to split, and now we’re back together. Two U-turns, there. Now I’m turning away from him again towards Cornelius – it’s confusing. Cornelius hoards food – I found thirty tins of sliced peaches in a cupboard. He has four kilos of butter in his fridge. A warning sign? Maybe, to use a film image, my life is a series of jump-cuts. The continuity is illusory, imprecise, we just jump-cut from one sequence to another. Very
nouvelle vague
.

Vague ambitions are to be encouraged. Life should be full of half-thought-out plans for what you might like to do but haven’t
got the real desire, or the energy or the time or just enough money. I vaguely want to go to Russia. I vaguely want to learn Spanish. I vaguely want to read the novels of Ronald Firbank. I vaguely want to tattoo myself somewhere risqué… Cornelius has a tattoo (a twirly fleur-de-lys) on his coccyx. I cherish these vague ambitions because they seem to presuppose another existence – another life for myself – in which they might actually come about. The more vague ambitions you have the more potential lives you could lead. I explained all this once at great length to a psychiatrist (just after Georg and I had divorced) who was keen to put me on Valium. I don’t think he thought I was very well.

Weltverbesserungswahn
. How I love these German words. That’s what my psychiatrist (he was German) said was wrong with me, what I suffered from (along with various other mental maladies). It must have been the foetid, daily trauma of the ‘Exudations’ period, then my hospitalization, then Georg leaving me that made me marry this man, this maniac. On the rebound in a singularly disastrous way. What was I thinking of? I left him after two weeks and have never mentioned his name again, and never will. The single legacy of our relationship is this diagnosis,
Weltverbesserungswahn
: the conviction that the world could be better. My psychiatrist husband said it was a delusion, not a conviction, and that my refusal to acknowledge it as a delusion was proof that I was deluded. You see why I had to go. The only thing that was satisfactory during my two weeks’ marriage to this man was the sex.

Xanadu is the name of the bar I work in three nights a week in Jordaan. Cornelius is the manager. He has a small apartment at the top of the building where we make love when Otto is away. He’s just bought a thousand tins of sardines. I asked him if he liked sardines and he said no, but they were at a bargain price and you could never tell when your tastes might change. I promised myself I’d stop seeing him as soon as my book is ready (I think my tin idea is a book, now, not a show) – but I think he’s in love with me,
dammit. What’s wrong with these men? I met a publisher last week here in Amsterdam, and he said almost immediately that, all things being equal (what can he mean? Curious expression), he could publish my book next year.

Years go by. I see myself as an old lady living in an apartment block by the sea (not Eastbourne, not Ibiza). I keep the curtains drawn day and night, all year round. Qwertyuiop visits regularly. When he/she arrives he/she takes his/her shoes and socks off and I photograph his/her feet. He’s/she’s a good boy/girl, Qwert (is he/she Cornelius’s?), and he/she shows concern.

‘What’s the weather like?’ I ask.

‘Open the curtains, Mum,’ he/she says. ‘See for yourself.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s more interesting if you tell me.’

And so he/she does his/her best: sunny, scudding clouds, threat of rain later in the day. In my dark apartment I prefer to use my imagination. I like this fantasy of my future, but what will the reality be? Some old bag living off cigarettes and booze.

Zoos consoled me after my father died. And the zoo in Amsterdam is one of the world’s best, so I’m told. I used to watch the chimps but they depressed me. Too human: sitting around showing off their hard-ons, hurling shit at each other. And the pacing cats were terrifying – to-and-fro, to-and-fro – all that charged, energetic resentment at their captivity. So I looked for animals that seemed content with their zoo life and more and more I found I was watching the rhinos. I came to love their massiveness, their heft and their effortless charisma. In my worst moments (when Cornelius begged me to leave Otto and live with him; when Otto asked me to come on his next trip – to California) I longed to be a rhino with my rhino armour. And so I would calm myself, watching them, imagining I was a rhino in a zoo, my day an ordered round of eating, defecating and sleeping. In a zoo, but free somehow. Free from the world and its noisy demands. Free, finally, from angst.

‘Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.’

Anton Chekhov

For some reason Garrett Rising decided, when he was twenty miles out of Boston and heading for New York, that he had to see the ocean: he needed that far horizon, he needed the sound of surf breaking, he felt, more than anything. He knew it would calm him, so he turned off the highway and headed east for the beckoning finger of Cape Cod.

He had been to Cape Cod as a child, when he was ten or eleven, he thought, when the Rising family had spent three weeks of one summer in a rented house in Provincetown. He had dim memories: a mustard yellow house, windows that jammed, his father’s unceasing anger, the placid bay facing the town and the tumultuous ocean on the other side of the dunes.

When he stopped for gas in Orleans he felt a small tremor of excitement squirm through him. In the face of his problems, in the face of this new disappointment, he was doing something spontaneous – and something stupid too, no doubt – but he didn’t care, and besides he couldn’t see what harm it would do to anyone. All he knew was that he couldn’t go back to New York just yet – he needed the solace of the waves.

Garrett Rising was a tall, limber man with broad shoulders; he had a small belly on him but, he argued, he was forty-one, after all, as old as the century, and there wasn’t much he could do about that. He had fair hair shot with grey and his nose was small and fine with a pronounced flare to the nostrils. Many women had told
him that it was his small, fine nose that made them look at him a second time.

‘Great movie,’ the attendant said handing him his change and inclining his head at the cinema across the street: The Rio, it was called, written in a cursive cerise neon script across the cinema’s façade. The film that was playing was
Scarlet Autumn
.

‘Yeah?’ Garrett said. ‘I must try and catch it, one of these days.’

‘You won’t regret it.’

Garrett drove on. He had passed through South Wellfleet when he began to feel tired and saw the sign: ‘Pamet River Inn, next right, Ocean View, Deluxe Rooms’. He turned and bumped down a rutted road towards a large white clapboard two-storey building with a
porte cochère
and a gravelled turning circle and, on either side, a wing of individual wooden chalets linked by a sheltered walkway. The inn was protected from the Atlantic winds by a grassy hill that rose up from the shore beyond, and in the lee of the hill was a small copse of scrub pines. As Garrett stepped out of his car and heaved his suitcase from the trunk, he could hear the reassuring wash and rumble of the surf and off to the south saw the early afternoon sun glinting hard and silver on the restless ocean.

He checked in and a boy carried his suitcase to the furthest of the ‘cottages’, as he knew they were now called, and showed him in. It was a Friday in April, the boy reminded him, the hotel was quiet, just three guests – and the restaurant only opened on Saturday night and Sunday lunchtime, until the holidays started. Garrett gave him five dollars and asked him to fetch a pint of whisky. He wandered round the room and pulled back the drapes to let the clear marine light fill the space more. There was a neat kitchen with a stove, a sink and an icebox, a bathroom and the main room had, as well as its double bed, two armchairs and a coffee table. The walls were white and unadorned except for an old print of some gaunt-looking Puritans discovering a cache of corncobs hidden beneath an Indian blanket in the undergrowth. You could live here, Garrett thought, comfortably and easily: everything a person
required to live a simple, uncomplicated life was here, and the fantasy excited him once again. He was glad he had come: but he wouldn’t call home with the change of plan until the whisky arrived.

He picked up yesterday’s
Globe
, which someone had left on the coffee table, and saw the headline about the Nazi bombing raids on London, hundreds dead and wounded. He remembered his only visit to London, in ‘32, when he had been on his way to Hamburg, when Sean Kavanaugh had sent him to Germany to buy the two Reiner-Hoffman printers at rock-bottom prices. He had been a rich man in Germany with his American dollars, he remembered; he’d never felt so rich since. In London on the way back he had stayed in the Hyde Park Hotel, and he wondered vaguely if it had been hit by the bombs. He remembered the girl he had taken to his room. One pound, ten shillings she charged him. What was that? Ten dollars? Sweet girl – what was her name? Kitty? Mary? Hotel rooms always made him think of sex, which was not that surprising, he reminded himself with a brief, warm flare of shame, as the only sex he experienced these days tended to take place in hotel rooms.

The whisky came, he drank some and called his wife in New York and told her plans had changed and he was obliged to stay over.

‘Did you get the contract?’ Laura asked.

‘We’re almost there,’ he lied. ‘Just a few details to confirm.’

‘Thank God. Did you call Daddy?’

‘I’ll call him this weekend. He’s retired, you know.’

‘He likes to be informed, he still likes to –’

‘So I’m staying over. Tell him I’m staying to sort out the details.’

‘How long?’ Laura could not prevent the suspicion colouring her voice.

‘I’ll be back tomorrow.’

‘Where’re you staying?’

‘I don’t know yet. I’m at a pay phone. I’ll find somewhere.’

‘Nowhere expensive. We can’t afford to –’

‘How’s Joanna?’

‘Joanna’s got another headache. I’ve called the doctor. She has no appetite.’

Garrett listened to his daughter’s various symptoms, said good bye and hung up. His daughter was eighteen and she seemed to have been ill from one thing or another since she was born. How could someone be so unhealthy and no doctor find a reason? Her mother fussed too much, had always fussed needlessly, endlessly, over her: too much fussing made you sickly. Garrett checked these thoughts – he could feel the anger build in him again. He picked up his hat: time to hear the noise of the sea.

The beach was empty and the clouds had hidden the sun – the light had turned grey and monotone making the sea-grass on the dunes dull like moss. The wind whipped his tie and he had to turn his body and cup his hands tightly around the match as he lit his cigarette. He thought about old Mr Foley and the way he had broken the news: he had been fair – couldn’t argue about that – gave him three months’ notice. ‘Foley and McBride won’t be renewing the contract, Garrett, I’m so very sorry.’

Garrett stared unseeingly at the horizon as he tried to compute the effect this would have on the company. He calculated: seventy per cent of their business was involved in printing Foley and McBride guidebooks – they’d run off 30,000 copies of the Los Angeles guide alone. Fifteen years they’d been Foley and McBride’s printers. There would have to be lay-offs: Pauly, Tom Reed, Tom Harbinger…

He heard a shrill annoying yapping and looked round to see a small white dog with an erect, arced tail and a thick ruff of fur around its neck nosing at a coil of sea-wrack at the surf ’s edge. The dog’s lead trailed behind it. Then came another shout, more distant, and Garrett looked down the curving beach to see a figure waving its arms and shouting something. He only caught the words ‘Mister, please –’ before the wind carried the rest away.

Garret wandered over to the dog and picked up its lead. The dog snapped and growled at him. What kind of a dog is that, he wondered? Pissant little white dog.

The figure approached, wearing a rust-red windcheater and beige canvas trousers, short in the leg. It was a woman.

‘Thank you, so much,’ she said. Her thick brown hair was dragged back in a loose pony tail. She had a strong bony face and a deep voice, a voice that was full of confidence, the confidence of money, he thought, as she thanked him, profusely, sincerely, for catching her dog, her naughty, ill-disciplined, spoilt brat of a dog. There were gold rings with coloured stones on her hands, he saw, as he gave her the dog’s lead. Hard to tell her age, a bit younger than he was. Mustn’t stare so.