Zoo Time (40 page)

‘It isn’t even true,’ I went on. ‘I’ve seen you together. I’ve watched you make music together. You look like sisters.’

‘And you think all sisters like each other?’

I didn’t have a sister but I had Jeffrey. ‘No,’ I said.

‘And at least if you’re sisters people
expect
you to be rivals. When it’s mother and daughter the mother is expected to move over.’

I shrugged. Seems fair to me, my shrug said. Though I could never have been accused of expecting Poppy to move over. Roll over, maybe. ‘There’s room for both of you,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘Before you know it you have a beautiful daughter,’ she said. ‘You’re still a girl yourself and suddenly you’re a mother. I didn’t do girl enough. I didn’t do it well enough or long enough.’

‘I seem to remember something about a naked photo shoot in Washington,’ I said.

‘Oh, that. Five minutes of my life, and then all hell to pay. Vanessa loses another father and I’m another ten years making it up to her. And even then I’m not sure I’m forgiven.’

I formulated a theory on the spot. You aren’t meant to forgive your parents. And they aren’t meant to expect to be forgiven. You go on your way. Goodbye, Mother, goodbye, Father, thanks for nothing. Seventy years later you kiss and make up, but at least in the meantime you aren’t a living torment to each other. Torment too strong a word? Reproach, then. Vee and Poppy had spent too much time together. That was the unnatural part. No wonder they couldn’t quite like each other.

‘I have not,’ I said, ‘heard Vanessa say she can’t forgive you. For anything.’

Which was true. I had heard Vanessa call her a slut and a pisspot, but that was another matter.

Or was it? In so far as calling her mother a slut pointed to one of the ways her mother did not behave as a conventional mother should – that’s to say to act her age and move over – well, I supposed there was reproach in that. Indeed, given the thoughts Poppy had inspired in me, to say nothing of Jeffrey Braindrain, well, Vanessa had a point.

So did they hate each other? Was that what that bouncing along arm in arm in identical cork sandals actually amounted to – hate?

And had I, in my own foolish way, been an instrument of that hate? A bit-part player in their psychodrama? A mere tool?

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Poppy continued. ‘I think Vanessa’s great. I think she’s wonderful. I think she’s wonderful for you. Born to be a writer’s wife –’

‘I wouldn’t let her hear you say that. As she sees it I’m born to be a writer’s husband.’

‘Well, there you are, precisely. She isn’t easy.’

‘Must she be?’

‘It would be nice if she had more patience. I don’t feel I can count on her. If I had a Jewish daughter she would be more considerate.’ She made it sound as though she’d chosen badly. If only she’d picked the Jewish daughter when she had the chance.

‘She has sent you the dress I’ve just brought. Are you sure you don’t want to try it on? I’ll look away.’

Once a tool always a tool.

‘Stop it,’ she said. But then added, ‘You see – you’re considerate. I think that’s because you’re a Jew.’

A terrible thought struck me. Was that what Poppy had all along supposed I was being – considerate? Considerate the night shooting stars dropped into the Indian Ocean and I slipped my smoking fingers between her cellist’s thighs? Considerate when I’d stood with my arms around her and my foot on the throat of the tarantula? Considerate as my eyes met hers in shocking knowledge on the uppermost rung of Broome’s Staircase to the Moon?
Considerate!

‘I’m not considerate to
my
mother,’ I said.

‘You probably are,’ she said dismissively, ‘but even if you aren’t you have a brother to share the responsibility.’

My brother Jeffrey. Had she thought he too was being considerate the night he kissed her, or whatever else he did, by way of solemnising my marriage to Vanessa?

‘So is that the problem with Vanessa – that there’s only her? That’s a bit tough on her.’

‘And a bit tough on me.’

‘Tougher on her.’

‘No, tougher on me.’

I wondered if we might make a game of it. Tougher on her, no tougher on me, no tougher on her, and end up falling in a heap together in the bed of mint, wherever the mint was.

But the conversation had not been heading in the direction of illicit sex. And to my dismay I realised it relieved me to think that. I don’t say I didn’t want her still, but she was not as irresistible as I remembered her. Could have been the clothes – jeans, flip-flops, sloppy sweater. I had always preferred her ‘dolled up’, to use a favourite expression of my mother’s. Hoisted high and painted, the cleavage starting just below her chin. She looked a touch weary, too. A little flushed in the face and red around the neck. She pushed her face forward, I noticed, as though to assert mastery over her jaw. Her head seemed heavy for her. It looked like hard work keeping herself straight.

‘I’m getting older,’ she said, as though reading my mind.

‘You don’t look it.’

‘I’m getting older.’

‘And?’

‘Vanessa doesn’t have the patience. So who will look after me?’

‘You need a nice Jewish boy to care for you, is that what you’re saying?’

It was the first time I had ever used that expression. But she’d brought the subject up, and it seemed apposite.

Once upon a time she’d have patted my cheek and called me monkey. Today she just waved what I said away as though it were a summer fly. But I was just going through the motions anyway. I felt that my time had been and gone with her. And even that the time that had been was not the time I’d thought it was.

Had there been no transgression to speak of at all?

I almost felt inclined to shake her hand. No hard feelings, Poppy. That was a lot of fun we almost had.

For the second time that afternoon she read my mind. ‘Well you
are
a nice Jewish boy,’ she said, rising from her deckchair, ‘whatever you say about yourself.’

And then she kissed me, full on the mouth.

39

Wild One

I had stayed the night in Wilmslow. Vee had texted at midnight to see how my first day out of bed had gone. Had I remembered how to walk. I texted back that I was fine but the family had converted. She texted me saying that if religion was the only way I could cope with her having written a novel, that was fine. Whatever worked. Though she was surprised that the whole family had needed to convert. PS – what to?

jews
, I replied.

good, but weren’t you always?

you knew?

you know i knew. your nose, remember

I went to sleep remembering. Hot nasal nights with my wife. That’s what hotels are for. Remembering. Missing.

Vanessa was strange about religion. I picked her for a pagan when I first met her. She swore, she blasphemed, she gave blow jobs in back alleys. Anyone less godly it was hard to imagine; and yet she tolerated religious extremes in other people and at times went so far as to encourage them. I didn’t know whether she’d been to see my brother after learning of his illness, and was unaware as yet that she’d nicked his tumour as a metaphor for her mother’s state; but if she had nipped up to Wilmslow when I wasn’t looking there was every chance she’d been as instrumental as the rabbi in turning Jeffrey into Yafet. I wouldn’t even have put it past her to have suggested
bal-chuva
. It was the kind of thing she liked doing – showing that she knew what a person’s true self was, and instructing him how to walk in the particular path of righteousness that was best suited to his needs. Other than ask me to give her orgasms with my nose she had rarely alluded to my being Jewish. God knows what she’d asked Jeffrey to do with his. But I could well imagine her getting him to turn to Yahweh as a means of dealing with his tumour.

I breakfasted at the hotel then took a taxi to the Dementievas where Jeffrey had agreed to meet me, though he didn’t find that name funny any more. Funny about funny, how faith regained invariably has trouble with it. You find your old religion and lose your old sense of the ridiculous.

‘I’d always known there was something there,’ he told me. This morning he had shed his Homburg and was wearing a knitted skullcap.

‘Something where, Yafet?’ He wouldn’t answer to Jeffrey. It was Yafet or it was nothing.

I wondered if he was going to touch his head and tell me that it hadn’t been a tumour after all, just his unattended-to Jewishness trying to get out, swelling and knotting until he’d put on a skullcap and grown ringlets, and then the pain subsided. Maybe he was even going to prescribe being born again as a Jew as a cure for all cancers, not just cancer of the brain.

But by ‘there’ he meant his heart.

‘You never felt it?’ he asked, tapping away at his chest.

‘Well, I’ve felt plenty of things in my heart. In fact, I think I’d say I’ve felt everything in my heart. But what you’re describing, no. And don’t tell me I’ve been in denial.’

‘You haven’t missed anything?’

‘No, Yafet.’

‘You haven’t felt that there’s always been some question waiting for an answer?’

‘No, Yafet.’

Not true. There always had been some question waiting for an answer. But it wasn’t my brand-new baby Jew-boy brother’s idea of a question or an answer. The question was ‘Where has the idea of the book as prestigious object, source of wisdom, and impious disturbance gone?’ And the answer was on the five-for-four shelf at Primark.

He smiled at me. It was strange to see the difference a skullcap and beard made to his face. His eyes looked blacker and more brilliant, his mouth sloppier, his expression more spiritual. Even his fingers looked longer, like a healer’s.

He had a pile of ornately bound books on the floor by his feet, the kitchen table being occupied by the jigsaw. From the other rooms came the sounds of the Dementievas? – or should it now have been the Dementiovskies – stirring in their sleep.

‘We could study together,’ he suggested.

‘Why does the phrase “study together”, Jeffrey,’ I wanted to ask him, ‘always suggest books you’d rather be eaten alive by rats than read?’

But that would have been more brutal than I believed I should be, though I believed I should be brutal. So I merely said, ‘Only if we could study a subject of my choice after.’

‘And what would that be?’

‘The novels of Henry Miller.’

He closed his eyes, his lids heavier and darker, more Mediterranean, than I’d ever seen them. I wondered if he was using make-up.

‘You ever read him?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘Then why the closed eyes?’

‘I’m asking myself if his books are anything like yours . . .’

‘I wish,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know why you’re asking yourself that. You haven’t read mine either.’

‘You know I’ve never been a reader.’

‘I do know, which makes me wonder why you’re reading what you’re reading now.’

‘Different.’

‘You can say that again.’

I picked one up. Back-to-front writing, the script ancient, heavy and mournful, lacking the visible music of the vowel. Leopold Bloom’s shocking, unforgivable, irrefragable words, re the Holy Land, hammered in my ears –
The grey sunken cunt of the world
. We were similar Jews, Bloom and I. Thin-skinned, on the qui vive for insult, double-edged – a
cunt
, after all, is no negligible thing, a cunt is where it all begins – but otherwise enough already.

Though apparently not.

‘Did you ever write a book about us?’ Yafet surprised me by asking.

‘Us?’

In illustration of his meaning, he twirled a piece of hair which I suspected he was training to be a ringlet. Had I had ringlets, I thought, I’d never be able to keep my hands off them. Right now, for example, I’d be yanking them out, a hair at a time.

‘There is no us, Jeffrey – Yafet. And no, I never did.’

‘Why not? What’s wrong with us?’

‘I had no interest in the same way you had no interest. Just because you’ve undergone a whateveryoucallit, it doesn’t follow that I must. You have a tumour. I don’t. If this helps you, great. I’m pleased for you’ – the number of people I was suddenly having to be pleased for! – ‘but don’t insult me with it.’

‘You may have missed a trick.’

‘
Might
have missed a trick. What kind of trick?’

‘Rabbi Orlovsky told me all the best writers in America are Jewish. He said he’s never heard of you. If you’d been writing about Jews he’d have heard of you.’

‘That’s in America.’

‘He hasn’t heard of you here either.’

‘Kind of you to tell me that, Yafet.’

‘I saw an interview you did once for the
Wilmslow Reporter
. You told them you liked writing about wild guys.’