Joseph Anton: A Memoir (90 page)

Elizabeth took Milan and went to see Carol and he was left with his agonized self-questioning. The millennium celebrations were approaching and he was being torn apart. Oh, and in Iran, it was reported that five hundred “hard-liners” had pledged to sell a kidney each to raise the money for his killing, which might solve the problem.
A sure cure for all diseases
, as Sir Walter Raleigh had said of the executioner’s ax.

Joseph Heller died, and a great good humor went with him. Jill Craigie died, and a great kindness left with her.

On New Year’s Eve the PR guru Matthew Freud and his fiancée, Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth, invited them to the Millennium Dome. He took Elizabeth, Zafar, Martin and Isabel, and Susan the new nanny stayed at the house to babysit Milan. In the dome, Tony Blair stopped by to shake hands with Matthew and Elizabeth and shook his hand as well. When it was time to sing “Auld Lang Syne” the queen had to hold Blair’s hand and the expression on her face was one of faint distaste. Elizabeth held his hand and the expression on her face was of terrible love and anguish.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind
, they sang, and then it was midnight and church bells were pealing all across England and the Y2K bug failed to bite and there were no terrorist attacks and the new age dawned and nothing was different. There was no magic in moments. Only human beings could bring about transformations, magnificent or diabolical. Their fate was in their own hands.

On Twelfth Night, just a couple of weeks after Elizabeth took Milan to see his “grandma,” Carol Knibb tried to commit suicide, leaving letters for a number of people including Elizabeth. She said she had no faith in her treatment and preferred to “end it.” She didn’t succeed because she didn’t take enough morphine. Her husband, Brian, woke her up, and though she said that she wished he hadn’t, she would probably have woken up anyway. She was in an isolation ward now because in this condition the slightest infection could bear her away. Her white corpuscle count was down to two (it should have been twelve), and the red count was also very low. The chemotherapy had had a very destructive effect. Brian called Edward Said’s doctor Kanti Rai, who said yes, there were other treatments available in America, but he couldn’t swear that they were better than the attention she was receiving. Elizabeth was badly hit by Carol’s suicide attempt. “She was like a rock to me,” she said, and then added, “But in a way I’ve been my own rock ever since my mother died.” He hugged her to comfort her and she said, “Do you still …” but then broke off and left the room. Something wrenched hard at his heart.

Then it was her birthday and he took her and Zafar and five of her oldest friends to dinner at the Ivy. But when they came home she confronted him and demanded to know what he was going do. He spoke to her about the destructive effect of the battle between her desire for more babies and his for New York and he uttered for the first time the word “divorce.”

At the end of a marriage there was no originality. The one who was ending it slowly dragged himself away, while the one who did not want it to end swung between sorrowing love and vengeful anger. There were days when they remembered the people they had always been and found a way to be generous and understanding, but those
days became rarer. Then there were lawyers and after that both people were angry and the one who was ending it stopped feeling guilty,
you came into my life riding a bicycle and working as a junior editor and living in someone’s attic as their lodger and you want to leave it as a multi-millionairess
, and the one who had not wanted it to end did everything she could have sworn she would never do and made it difficult for the one who was ending it to see his son,
I will never forgive you, you have ruined his life, I’m not thinking about you, I’m thinking of him
, and they had to take that to court and the judge had to tell them that they should not be in his courtroom because they owed it to their child to work it out. These were not the people they truly were. Those people would reemerge in time, after the name-calling and greed and destructiveness had passed, after the one who was being left met the Illusion face-to-face in New York and abused her in a vocabulary nobody had realized she even possessed, after they worked out how to share their son, somewhere in that future after the war was over and the pain had begun to fade they recaptured themselves and remembered that they liked each other and that beyond liking each other they needed to be good parents to their child, and then a little imp of cordiality crept back into the room, and pretty soon they were discussing things like adults, still disagreeing, disagreeing quite a lot, in fact, and still sometimes losing patience with each other, but managing to speak, even to meet, finding their way back not so much to each other as to themselves, and even managing, just sometimes, to smile.

And what took even longer, but happened in the end, was the return of a friendship, which allowed them to do things as a family once again, to eat in each other’s homes, to go out to dinner and a movie with the boys, even to take vacations together in France, in India, and, yes, in America too. In the end it would be a relationship to be proud of, one that had been broken and stomped on and broken again, but then rebuilt, not easily, not without moments of destructiveness, but slowly, seriously, by the people they truly were, who had reemerged from the science-fiction armor, the wild monster-movie bodysuits, of the people the divorce made them be.

It would take years for this to happen, and it would require his Illusion
to stab him in the heart and vanish from his life, not in a green puff of smoke like the Wicked Witch of the West but in some ancient Scrooge McDuck’s private jet, into his private world at Dismal Downs and other places filled with wretchedness and cash. After eight years during which she had told him once a week on average that he was too old for her she ended up with a duck who was two hundred years older, because Scrooge McDuck could open the enchanted door that allowed her into her own secret dreamworld of infinite entitlement, of life lived with no limits on the Big Rock Candy Mountain with the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees; and because in a private room of a private pleasure dome in Duckburg, USA, there was a swimming pool filled with golden doubloons and they could dive off the low springboard there and swim for hours as Uncle Scrooge liked to swim, in the soothing liquidity of his money; and so what if he was Duck Cheney’s close friend and John McDuck (no relation) would tell him he could have his choice of U.S. ambassadorships after the defeat of Barack Obama?, that didn’t matter, because in the basement of his private castle was the Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and in the cave at the heart of Duck Mountain, which he had bought in a venture-capitalist coup long ago in the Jurassic era when he was just a young duckling of seventy summers or so, his tame tyrannosaurus flanked by his loyal velociraptors guarded from all marauders his fabled dragon hoard, his private uncountable stash.

Once she had gone away into the world of make-believe where she truly belonged, reality returned. Elizabeth and he did not remarry, nor did they become lovers again, because that would have been unrealistic, but they were able to be better parents, and also the best of friends, and their true characters were shown not in the war they fought but in the peace they made.

In the year 2000 that old story, the
fatwa
, did resurface now and then. He was in Manhattan standing on a Barrow Street sidewalk after looking at a possible place to rent when the British foreign secretary called him on his cellphone.
How bizarre this is
, he thought.
I’m standing here unprotected and going about my everyday life while Robin Cook tells me that
his Iranian counterpart, Kharrazi, has promised that everyone in Iran is behind the deal, but British intelligence still isn’t convinced, and by the way Kharrazi says the story about the men selling their kidneys isn’t true, blah blah blah
. He had thrown a switch in his head and wasn’t waiting to be given the green light by the British government or Iran anymore, he was building his freedom by himself right here on the sidewalks of New York, and if he could just find a place to live that would really, really help.

There was an apartment on Sixty-fifth Street and Madison across the street from the Armani store. The ceilings weren’t high enough and it wasn’t that beautiful but he could afford it and the owner was ready to sell it to him. It was a co-op, so he had to be approved by the co-op board, but the seller was the chairman of that board and promised it would not be a problem, which proved that even chairmen of Upper East Side co-op boards could be ignorant of what people really thought of them, because when it was time for the interview, the hostility of the board toward the candidate could not wholly be explained by the cloud over the candidate’s head. He arrived at a glossy apartment populated by lacquered ladies whose faces didn’t move, as if they were masked characters in a Greek tragedy, and he was ordered to take off his shoes to protect the fluffy white rug on the floor. There followed an interview so perfunctory that it could only mean one of two things: the masked goddesses had already decided to say yes, or they had already decided to say no. At the end of the appointment he said he would be grateful for a quick decision, at which the grandest of the grande dames shrugged eloquently and said through the Oresteian immobility of her face that the decision would happen when it happened, and then added, “New York’s a very tough town, Mr. Rushdie, and I’m sure you understand why.” “No?” he wanted to say. “No, as a matter of fact I don’t understand, Mrs. Sophocles, could you explain that?” But he knew what she was really saying. “No. Over my dead Botoxed liposucked rib-removed colonically irrigated body. Never in a million years.”

In the years that followed he occasionally wished he had remembered that lady’s name because he owed her a big thank-you. If he had passed the board he would have been obliged to buy the
apartment he didn’t really like. He failed, and that very afternoon he found his new home. Sometimes it was hard not to believe in Fate.

The U2 song—“his” song—was being played on the radio and DJs seemed to like it. “In the film,” Padma said to him, “I have to play Vina Apsara. I’m perfect casting for her. Obviously.”
How she made me feel, how she made me real
. “But you’re not a singer,” he said, and she lost her temper. “I’m taking singing lessons,” she said. “My coach says I have real potential.” The film rights to the novel had recently been acquired by the piratically dashing Portuguese producer Paulo Branco and the film was to be directed by Raúl Ruiz. He met Branco and proposed Padma for the female lead. “Of course,” said Branco. “That will be perfect.” In those days he had not learned how to translate producer-speak into English. He did not realize that Branco was really saying, “Of course not.”

He had lunch in London with Lee Hall, the acclaimed, Oscar-nominated screenwriter of
Billy Elliot
, who loved
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
and was eager to work on the screenplay. When Ruiz refused even to meet Hall the project began to go rapidly downhill. Ruiz hired an Argentinian screenwriter, Santiago Amigorena, a Spanish speaker who would write the screenplay in French, after which it would be translated into English. The first draft of this Chimera, this Pushmi-Pullyu of a screenplay, was predictably appalling. “Life is a carpet,” one of the characters was asked to say, “and we can only see the full design in our dreams.” That was one of the better lines of dialogue. He protested to Branco and was asked if he would be prepared to work with Amigorena on a revised version. He agreed and flew to Paris and met Santiago, a nice man and no doubt an excellent writer in his own language. After their discussions, however, Amigorena sent him a second draft that was as opaquely mystical as the first. He took a deep breath and told Branco he would like to write a draft himself. When he sent this screenplay to Branco, he was told that Raúl Ruiz had refused to read it. “He won’t even read it? Why?” he called Branco to ask. “You have to understand,” Branco replied, “that we are here in the Universe of Raúl Ruiz.” “Oh,” he said, “I thought we were in the universe of my novel.” The project broke down irretrievably within a
few days, and Padma’s dream of playing Vina Apsara came to an early end.

“New York is a tough town, Mr. Rushdie.” He woke up one morning to find a full-length photograph of Padma on page one of the
Post
, and beside her, below a small inset picture of himself, was the headline, in letters two inches high,
TO DIE FOR
.

And the next day in the same newspaper there was a cartoon in which his face was seen through the crosshairs of a sniper’s rifle. The caption read,
DON’T BE SILLY, PADMA, THOSE KOOKY IRANIANS WOULD NEVER COME AFTER ME IN NEW YORK.
And again a few weeks later, in the
Post
again, there was a photograph of the two of them together walking down a Manhattan street, and the headline
WORTH DYING FOR
. The story was out everywhere, and in London one newspaper editor claimed his office was being “flooded” with letters demanding that Rushdie’s royalties be seized because he was “laughing at Britain” by living openly in New York.

Now she was scared. Her picture had been in all the papers in the world and she felt vulnerable, she said. He met, in Andrew Wylie’s office, with officers from the intelligence division of the NYPD, who were surprisingly reassuring. In a way the
Post
had done him a favor, they said. They had announced his arrival in the city so loudly that if any of the “bad guys” they were monitoring had been interested there would have been an immediate response. But there had been no disturbance in the Force. Everything was calm. “We don’t think anyone is interested in you at this point,” they told him. “So we have no problem with your plans.”