Joseph Anton: A Memoir (79 page)

They had dinner at Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter’s house and Harold held Milan on his lap for a long time. Finally he handed him back
to Elizabeth and said, “Tell him when he grows up that his Uncle Harold enjoyed his cuddle.”

The boss of British Airways, Robert Ayling, went to speak at Zafar’s school, and Zafar questioned him about his airline’s refusal to fly his dad, and criticized and scolded him for several minutes. Afterward, when BA finally changed their no-fly policy, Ayling spoke of how moved he had been by Zafar’s intervention. It was Zafar who softened the airline boss’s heart.

Summer in America! As soon as Milan was old enough to fly they traveled to their annual weeks of summer freedom … on a British airline this time, a direct flight, and the three of them together! Virgin Atlantic had agreed to carry him, giving him a direct route to the United States. No more trips to Oslo, Vienna or Paris to catch a friendly plane. A brick fell out of the prison wall.

The Grobow house was welcoming, their friends were all around them—Martin and Isabel were in East Hampton, Ian McEwan and Annalena McAfee had rented a house in Sag Harbor, many other good people visited them from the city—and they had a new baby and a wedding to plan. This was their annual shot in the arm, the time that gave them the strength to survive the rest of the time. There were birds in the trees and deer in the woods and the sea was warm and Milan was two months old, as sweet and smiling and mischief-faced and miraculous as he could be. Everything was perfect except for one thing. Four days after they arrived he heard from Tristram Powell that the Indian government had refused to allow the BBC to film
Midnight’s Children
on Indian soil. “It would be prudent to avoid the misapprehension,” a government statement explained, “that we in any way endorsed the author.” That statement engraved itself on his heart. “The producer, Chris Hall, is on his way to Sri Lanka to see if we can shoot there,” Tristram said in his gentle way. “Everyone at the Beeb feels so much effort has been put in and the scripts are so good that they want to try to save it.” But he felt sick at heart. India, his great love, had told him
to fuck off because it didn’t want to endorse him in any way.
Midnight’s Children
, his love letter to India, had been deemed unfit to be filmed anywhere in that country. That summer he would be working on
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
, a novel about people without a sense of belonging, people who dreamed of leaving, not of home. He would use the way he felt now, dreadful, disconnected, spurned, as fuel for his book.

The story broke in the British press but he turned away from it. His friends were all around him and he was writing his book and soon he would be married to the woman he had loved for seven years. Bill Buford came to stay with his girlfriend, Mary Johnson, a sparky Betty Boop look-alike from Tennessee, and the Wylies and Martin and Isabel came around for a mighty barbecue cooked by Bill, who had become quite a chef. He took Elizabeth out for a pre-wedding date at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. The avant-garde director Robert Wilson invited him to watch rehearsals of a new piece he was making, and wanted him to provide a text for it. He listened to Bob explain the piece for over half an hour and then had to admit he hadn’t understood a word of what the great man had said. Robert McCrum came to stay for a night. Elizabeth spoke to the people at Loaves & Fishes, the outrageously expensive deli, and arranged the wedding food and drink. They went to the East Hampton town hall and got a wedding license. He bought himself a new suit. Zafar called from London with grand news: His A level results had been good enough to get him his place at Exeter University. Happiness and wedding plans cushioned the Indian blow.

Then, a second Indian rebuff. Bill Buford had been invited to the big New York celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence to be held at the Indian consulate in Manhattan on independence day, August 15, 1997. He told the consulate folks that Mr. Rushdie was in town, but they backed away as if confronted by a rattlesnake. A woman called Bill and gave a stammering explanation. “In the light of everything surrounding him … we felt … not in his best interests … a very big event … lots of publicity … the consul-general can’t … not in our best interests …” On India’s fiftieth birthday, Saleem Sinai’s birthday, Saleem’s Cinderella creator would not go to the
ball. He would not allow his love of the country and its people to be destroyed by Official India, he promised himself. Even if Official India never allowed him to set foot in his homeland again.

Again he took refuge in the good stuff. He went to the city for a few days and found Elizabeth a wedding present at Tiffany. He did interviews for the
Mirrorwork
anthology and went to hear David Byrne sing “Psycho Killer” at Roseland. He had dinner with Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt. Paul was writing and directing a film called
Lulu on the Bridge
and wanted him to play a sinister interrogator who would give Harvey Keitel the third degree. (A sinister interrogator after Robbe-Grillet’s offer of
un médecin assez sinistre:
Was this typecasting?) Zafar flew out to join him and they took the jitney back to Bridgehampton in hundred-degree heat. He got back to Little Noyac Path to find Elizabeth in a suspicious, mistrustful mood. What had he been up to in New York? Who had he been seeing? The damage done by his brief infidelity was still there. He didn’t know what to do except to tell her he loved her. It made him fear for their marriage. But five minutes later she shrugged off her misgivings and said she was fine.

He went with Ian McEwan to get Thai takeout for dinner. At the restaurant, Chinda’s, the Thai lady said, “You know who you rook rike, you rook rike that man who wrote that book.” Yes, he admitted, that’s me. “Oh good,” she said. “I read that book, I rike it, then you wrote another book but I did not read. When you phone your order you order beef and we think, maybe it’s Birry Joel, but no, Birry Joel he come on Tuesdays.” At dinner Martin spoke of going off to visit Saul Bellow. He envied Martin this: his closeness to the greatest American novelist of their time. But he had bigger fish to fry. He was getting married in four days, and it was about to be the end of the world, or at least the world according to Arnold Schwarzenegger. The day after their wedding day, August 29, 1997, was used in
Terminator 2
as the date of “Judgment Day,” the day the machines, guided by the supercomputer Skynet, launched their nuclear holocaust against the human race. So they were getting married on the last day in the history of the world as they knew it.

The weather was excellent and the field of cosmos was as brilliant as the sky. Their friends assembled at Isabel’s family’s compound and
he went to fetch the judge. Then in a circle stood Paul and Siri and little Sophie Auster too, and Bill and Mary, and Martin and Isabel and the two Amis boys and Martin’s daughter Delilah Seale and Isabel’s sister Quina, and Ian and Annalena and the two McEwan boys, and Andrew and Camie and their daughter Erica Wylie, and Hitch and Carol and their daughter, his “ungoddaughter,” Laura Antonia Blue Hitchens, and Isabel’s mother, Betty Fonseca, and Betty’s husband, Dick Cornuelle, in whose garden they were standing, and Milan cradled in Siri’s arms, and Zafar, and Elizabeth with roses and lilies in her hair. There were readings. Bill read a Shakespeare sonnet, the usual one, and Paul unusually but thoughtfully read William Carlos Williams’s “The Ivy Crown,” about love that came later in life:

They rejoiced that night in their seven years of improbable happiness, these two who had found each other in the middle of a hurricane and had clung to each other, not in fear of the storm but in delight at the finding. Her smile had brightened his days and her love his nights, and her courage and care had given him strength, and of course, as he confessed to her and all his friends in his wedding night speech, it had been he who had flung himself at her and not the other way around. (When he conceded this after seven years of insisting on the opposite she laughed out loud in astonishment.) And the world did not end, but began again the next day, refreshed, renewed, past all accident.
We are only mortal
, the poet said,
but being mortal / can defy our fate
.

And on the day on which the world continued Ian and Annalena got married too, at East Hampton town hall. They had planned a party on the beach, but the weather turned against them, so everyone came to Little Noyac Path and there were more wedding festivities all afternoon and evening. The day brightened and they played incompetent, un-American baseball in the field at the back of the house and then he and Ian went again to Chinda’s for Thai takeout and he still wasn’t Birry Joel.

The British papers got the story of his marriage at once—the East Hampton town hall staff had leaked the news almost as soon as the ceremony was complete—and all of them ran it, with Elizabeth’s full name. So there she was, visible at last. For a moment she wobbled badly, then recovered and got used to it, as was her determined, sanguine way. As for himself, he felt relieved. He was very tired of “hiding.”

That night, after a barbecue on Gibson Beach, they were at John
Avedon’s house when David Rieff called to say that there had been a car crash in Paris and Princess Diana had been badly injured and her lover, Dodi al-Fayed, was dead. It was on all the TV channels but nothing substantive was being said about the princess. Later when they were going to bed he said to Elizabeth, “If she was alive they would have told us so. If they are not giving us news of her condition it’s because she’s dead.” And in the morning there was the confirmation on the front of
The New York Times
and Elizabeth wept. All that day the story rolled out. The paparazzi chasing her on their motorbikes. The car going very fast, the drunk driver pushing it to 120 miles per hour.
That poor girl had no luck
, he thought. Her unhappy ending arrived just as happier beginnings had become possible. But to die because you didn’t want your photograph taken, that was folly. If they had paused for a moment on the steps of the Ritz and let the paparazzi do their work maybe they would not have been pursued and it would have not been necessary to drive at that insane speed and die in a concrete underpass, wasting themselves for nothing.

He remembered J. G. Ballard’s great novel
Crash
about the deadly mingling of love, death and automobiles and thought, maybe we are all responsible, our hunger for her image murdered her, and at the end, as she died, the last thing she saw would have been the phallic snouts of the cameras coming toward her through the smashed car windows, clicking, clicking. He was asked to write something for
The New Yorker
about the event and he sent them something of this nature and in England the
Daily Insult
called it a “Satanic version,” in bad taste, as if the
Insult
had not been willing to pay a fortune for the photographs for which the paparazzi were chasing her, as if the
Insult
had the good taste not to publish the pictures of the wreck.

Milton and Patricia Grobow knew everything now; they had read about the wedding in the local papers. They were delighted, and “proud,” and happy for the arrangement to continue in future years. Patricia had been the Kennedy children’s nanny, she said, she was “used to being discreet.” Milton was almost eighty and very frail. The Grobows said they might consider selling the Rushdies the house.

A few days after they got back to London he flew to Italy to take part in the Mantova literary festival, but nobody seemed to have cleared his visit with the local police, who barricaded him in his hotel and refused to allow him to attend the festival sessions. Finally, with many of the other writers as a sort of honor guard, he tried to repeat his Chilean trick by just walking out into the street, and was taken to the police station and held for several hours in a “waiting room” until the mayor and the police chief decided to avoid a scandal by allowing him to do what he had come to their town to do. After the weeks of ordinary life in the United States this return to European skittishness was dispiriting.