Little Caesar (23 page)

‘It doesn’t matter,’ my mother said. ‘Mothers are always a kind of punching bag, aren’t they? Almost all men hate their mothers. That’s just the way it is.’

Sarah slides back around in the booth to where she was sitting. She blows on her tea as though it were very hot indeed.

We drove through Santa Monica, the evening was still young.

‘I thought she was really nice,’ Sarah said.

‘You don’t know her,’ I say, looking straight ahead.

Futile. You can’t hand over your world to someone else. I was breathing through a screen of repulsion. She’d taken sides with her. Neutrality I could have understood; partiality in the wrong direction was unforgivable. I hadn’t been expecting it, my defenses were down. My mother had seduced Sarah and simply wormed her way between us. She had become my rival for Sarah’s attention and loyalty.

Sarah’s room was too small for sitting around together in silence. I went outside, my disappointment in one hand, my wounded soul in the other. I felt the lack of a house to go to, wherever I went I would be a guest. The streets were lined with low, dusty trees whose leaves had curled from the drought. When ultramarine overwhelmed the sky I sauntered back and came in the door with the insouciance of a cat who has disappeared for a few days. Again the candles, the incense rising in a shaky column, the mysticism of a shaman’s cave. I tried not to look at the dead child, the focal point of the room.

‘You’re not talking,’ she said. ‘Apparently you’re very angry about something, but how can I do anything if you won’t talk?’

The listless mantra that accompanies failure. She said, ‘I don’t know, but what are you doing here if you don’t want to talk?’

I turned around and walked back down the steel steeps, back to the street. High, searing pride took my breath away. The unconditionality could end that quickly, that quickly you could be transformed from lover into unwelcome guest. After a fashion, I actually reveled in the bonfire of self-destruction. Behind me the sound of fast, light little footsteps.

‘I’m running after you this time,’ she said, ‘but next time you can figure it out for yourself. What do you want, Ludwig? I don’t know why you’re acting like this.’

For a moment I thought about ignoring her and walking on, but realized that that would be overplaying my hand.

‘I didn’t mean to send you away,’ she said, ‘I asked why you were with me if you acted like that. It was a question, okay, a question!’

My body heavy with inertia, I let myself be led back to the house. Later on she took my cock in her mouth, which was still hot from a cup of tea. A scream escaped me when I came. A few minutes later I heard the sound of spitting coming from the bathroom: she had kept the sperm in her mouth all that time.

The Indians, a coalition of tribes, had been bused in from the mountains to take part in the march on the Court of Appeals in Pasadena. As there had been during the demonstration in front of the gallery, there was a young man who seemed to be leading the operation. He was the one who held the megaphone, he led the prayer before the procession started moving. It was just past noon, the sun was shining hotly. In the middle of the circle a blind old Indian lit a fire of dried sage and mimed a series of incantations to the heavens and the earth. A banner read
NO DESECRATION FOR RECREATION.
A smoking stick was handed around and everyone waved it around their head before passing it on. The stick came to Sarah and me.

‘Purification,’ she said quietly. ‘Wait . . .’

She waved the stick, first over my head, then over her own, and handed it to the nappy-haired boy beside her. Someone screamed into the megaphone,
For the rights of Nature! Of the Earth! Of Humanity!

The megaphone was passed around. Some people were unable to find the right button. We were called upon to free ourselves from the sickness of greed and appetite. The slogans flew wildly back and forth. A group of anti-globalists, it seemed, had joined forces with the Indians. The march began. Drums pounded.

‘Tribal elders to the front!’ the leader shouted.

He had a pointy nose, his skin was the color of hazelnuts. I could see why people would want to follow him, his charisma seemed like something that could be expressed in wattage. Sarah was pushing the shopping cart again, this time filled with photocopied pamphlets. She handed out bananas and water to the hungry and thirsty. She was our mother. Behind us, a group of Indians were dancing – a handsome man in a red loincloth laid down the beat with the strips of bells tied to his ankles. He danced the whole way, his body gleaming with sweat. I shriveled under his sacred earnestness. What was I but an intruder and an impotent practitioner of irony? Sarah screamed along with the slogans; when she tossed her fist in the air, her top slid up over her belt. I saw her pale stomach. I knew what she smelled like, I was familiar with her taste.

From the sidewalk, groups of skeptical blacks were watching the parade go by. There could have been no greater distance than that between those grim Indians and the blacks, who just stood there grinning. How differently they viewed the soil! The Indians were demonstrating here for the preservation of their holy ground, which the blacks associated with the forced labor of their ancestors and had radically turned their backs on. Sarah asked me to take the shopping cart while she went into a Hooters franchise to pass out broadsheets to the leering men. I couldn’t stand still in the current, I was pushed along from behind and in turn found myself pushing a shopping cart, amid a procession of Indians and anti-globalists, to a courthouse where a verdict was supposed to be overturned. You never saw a normal, reasonable person at gatherings like this, only the crackpots with rings in their noses, wearing their army surplus outfits and chanting slogans, the dull rhythm of which expressed, above all, a sense of stagnation.

Sarah came up behind me and I passed the shopping cart to her. I asked myself whether I would ever be capable of bonding with something the way she did, or whether cowardly skepticism would reign forever in that barren, prematurely old soul of mine. When we got to Colorado Boulevard I said, ‘I’m dropping out for a minute. Going to get a hamburger.’

‘Now? You’re kidding!’

I gave her a quick kiss and stepped out of the parade. At a bit of a distance I let the procession pass by and shivered at the melancholy sound an Indian was producing on a conch shell – a baby whale that had lost its mother.

I walked back to Hooters. There, in those profane surroundings, I let myself be served a hamburger by a girl who barged her breasts ahead of her like icebergs. Then I used the pay phone to call Loews and ask if they had any work for me. I was put through to Berny Suess.

‘Hey, buddy, good thing you called. Have you got time for me on Saturday?’

He wanted to know whether I could play at a reception, some charity thing, they were expecting celebrities.

Outside I asked someone how to get to the courthouse, and set off after the demonstrators. Sarah was standing in a circle of demonstrators in front of a Victorian building set among tall trees. There was, I was told, already a delegation inside; the stay-behinds were chanting prayers and dancing and singing. The leader had stayed behind as well. He stepped into the center of the circle and said it was time to pray and sacrifice. He put a shell on the ground in front of him.

‘Which way is east?’ he asked his lieutenant quietly.

Calling on the spirits of the four winds and the cosmos itself, he then made a burnt offering. The smell of rosemary.

‘Brothers and sisters,’ he said, ‘let us pray for the misguided spirits inside this building, who are also our brothers and sisters but have been blinded by greed. Let us send them love.’

Sarah nodded. There was a devout gleam in her eye. The Indian placed dried sage in the shell, lit it and fanned the smoking fire with a white wing. The group fell silent. I looked over, Sarah was standing beside me, her eyes closed. I knew she was sending love into the courthouse, or at least thought she was doing that. I thought about other things, about how much better suited she would be for the boy now leading the prayers at the center of the circle, how the two of them could lead a life of activism and holistic conviction and fuck till the stars fell from the sky – a pang of sweet jealousy. I placed my hand on her lower back, gently, in order not to break her concentration. The Indian stood up and invited the others to lay their offerings in the shell. A black man with feathers in his hair stepped forward. He knelt down before the shell and made a few karate-like gestures. His voice was that of a gospel singer. The smell of a burning feather snapped at my nostrils.

‘Oh, Lord!’ he shouted, ‘the time has come to destroy Babylon! Is the time not ripe, Lord? We beseech thee, bring Babylon down. Down with Babylon! Down with Babylon!’

He stood up, bowed, and rejoined the circle. A lineup of weirdos followed. When I yawned, Sarah elbowed me.

‘Behave yourself, carnivore,’ she said.

The prayers died out, the leader raised the megaphone to his lips.

‘Concerning the toilet situation,’ he said, ‘if you need to use the toilet, you can do that in the courthouse, but then you need to show your ID, okay? Don’t make a scene, we can accomplish more by being cooperative.’

The cooperative attitude appeared to me to be the result of an endless row of defeats suffered by his people – cooperation was all they had left.

‘I admire it, I really admire it,’ I told Sarah later that day.

‘But?’

‘No buts. You guys, you have something you consider greater than yourselves. To do that, you have to have something I don’t have. The ability to cast yourself off, like a sannyasi.’

‘Don’t act like we’re a bunch of freaks, some sect of idiots. Isn’t there anything you believe in? Isn’t there anything sacred to you? Not even love, Ludwig? Giving yourself away for another person?’

I knew that my answer would be important to everything that came afterwards. I plumbed my inner depths, and said truthfully, ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’

The day my mother left Loews, I played in the hotel for the first time. The celebrities in the room manifested themselves as coagulations in the crowd, humanity clotted around a core. It was some kind of charity thing, sometimes someone would ask me to stop playing for a minute while a man shouted numbers enthusiastically into a microphone: so many dollars for this, so many for that. The celebrities auctioned themselves off, you could pay to have your picture taken with them. Berny Suess had come into the room twice and drummed his fingers on the piano as he looked around at the proceedings. Afterwards I went past his office.

‘Well done,’ he said. ‘I doubt they heard much, but it was better than nothing.’

I thought that was funny, better than nothing. I could pick up my money on Monday, the safe was locked for the weekend. It had to be in cash because I didn’t have a work permit.

Sarah was with the Indians – she had followed the caravan to San Francisco and would be back on Sunday night.

I walked out into the gentle evening. On the map I located Washington Way, on the border between Santa Monica and Venice, where my mother had found her rental. She had taken my suitcase along with her.

I found the house in the shade of low trees. Whispers of lonesomeness in the branches. Our possessions were stored in a barn in Suffolk, I hadn’t given them a thought since the journey started, weeks ago – there was nothing I wanted more than to have them around me and to say the word
home
.

I knocked. Then again. A little window in the door opened, like in some fairy tale.

‘Who’s there?’

She was wearing a bathrobe from Loews. Did I fancy a cup of tea? We sat down at the table, a couple of candles, shadows. I looked around at the little house with its spare furnishings. Bars at the windows, gleaming pans on the kitchen wall.

‘Sugar in your tea?’ she asked.

I looked at her.

‘Sugar, yes. And a dash of milk, please.’

‘All that sugar is bad for you.’

‘You use it too.’

‘Only a tiny bit. Mostly sweeteners, really.’

There was something about her I couldn’t quite place. I looked at her more closely. She seemed older. Perhaps it was the candlelight, but there were lines around her mouth, her eyes, the place where life resides in a face. Sleep had lowered her defenses and removed the mask of eternal youth.

‘I played tonight,’ I said, ‘at Loews. I can pick up my money on Monday. The first dollars I’ve ever earned.’

‘On to stardom,’ she said.

‘It went pretty well. They said Tom Cruise was there.’

‘Were you all by yourself ?’

‘Tom Cruise was there too, I just told you that.’

‘Was Sarah with you?’

I shook my head.

‘Well, where is she?’

‘Demonstrating with Indians.’

‘So now you have time for me again.’

‘In San Francisco. She’s coming back tomorrow.’

‘I enjoyed meeting her.’

She thought about it for a moment. Then, ‘She’s not particularly pretty or anything. Is she Jewish?’

I looked at her, thrown off balance. Why would she say something like that? Why dispel the timid spirit of peace flitting over the table?

‘I think she’s pretty,’ I said. ‘What you think . . . well, you know, forget it.’

She sighed.

‘You always think the worst, Ludwig. I thought she was nice, I said that, she seems very special.’

‘Is there any food in the house? I haven’t eaten yet.’

‘At this hour? Eating so late isn’t good for you.’

‘Not that either.’

She came back with crackers and a tube of cheese spread.

‘Fruit,’ she said. ‘Would you like some fruit?’

She put an apple down in front of me. Unless I was mistaken, I had seen this same apple a while back on the windowsill at the hotel. I squeezed a gleaming worm of cheese along the length of the cracker and smeared it out with the opening of the tube. I kept my eyes fixed on this chore all the while as I asked, ‘So what are you up to, during the day I mean? Globally speaking.’

‘Globally?’