Mortal Love (4 page)

“Aww,” said Maddy. “Look, it broke.”

I fled down the steps and through the crowd gathered in the kitchen, heedless of who I ran into, and out into the garden. The last thing I remember of that night is Red staring at me from the kitchen window, his hands blue-white against the panes, and, from somewhere in the woods nearby, the four high, swooping notes of a barred owl's call.

* * *

Next summer my
brother found the drawings. He was back at Goldengrove with his usual cohort of cocaine lawyers and stockbrokers and junkie models. Maddy was there, too. I did everything I could to avoid her, but she only smiled and treated me the same sweet, clueless way she treated everyone else. It was Maddy who discovered the stash of books in my bedroom.

“What the fuck is this?” my brother demanded as I walked into the living room.

I'd been gone all day. Simon and his friends were sitting around blank-eyed, surrounded by drifts of cigarette butts and glassine envelopes. Empty bottles were everywhere. Someone had been cutting lines atop one of Radborne's glass-framed drawings. A halfhearted renovation was in progress, with stacks of two-by-fours and plywood piled by the door. Scattered among the building materials were my sketchbooks.

“What?” I stared at the room like it was an accident site. One of my maps lay on the floor, its corners weighted down with champagne bottles. Another was resting on the fireplace mantel. “Simon ... ?”

I turned to him helplessly. I felt as though someone had drilled a hole in my head and all the blood was leaking out.

“This shit—you're really crazy, you know that, Val?”

My brother held up an open sketchbook. There was Vernoraxia, her hands pulling her knees apart so that you could see the army issuing from between her legs, women riding greyhounds, men whose heads were on backward. A tiny woman brandished a pair of old-fashioned scissors like a sword.

“Leave him alone, Simon.” Maddy sat on the floor, her head bent over another of my sketchbooks. “I think these are so cool. . . .”

Simon started to laugh. “I think he's a fucking fruitcake.”

I attacked him with a two-by-four, smashing him on the head, then turning blindly on his friends. It took four of them to subdue me. Someone ran for the constable; someone else raced down to the boathouse and got Red. My brother was medevacked to Rockland, where he was treated for a concussion and released the next day.

Somehow Red arranged for me not to be arrested. Instead I was shipped off to the adolescent unit at McLean in Boston. The new generation of psychotropic drugs weren't yet in use; I was put on a regimen of MAO inhibitors and lithium and released in time to return to Andover in the fall. The medication seemed to cure me of wanting to kill my brother. It also killed my obsessive need to draw. Without ever stating it out loud, I knew that I had lost the one genuine gift I had, the thing that made me feel that I deserved to be alive.

I was kept under a psychiatrist's care for years after that. As new drugs were developed, more sophisticated diagnostic tools, the exact nature of my illness was determined—a seasonal bipolar disorder, spiking in early spring and late autumn; not an uncommon pattern, I was told. Mood stabilizers kept me from hypomania in spring; higher doses of antidepressants muted the devastating onset of winter, when a veil would be torn from the world, and I sensed—imagined that I sensed—the real world beyond and felt things trembling behind my eyes like splinters of lightning seeking ground. The converse happened in late April, when the flickers of new green in Goldengrove's birch trees darted and swam around me as though seeking to pierce my skin. It was during these months that Simon and my doctors reminded me constantly not to vary my medication.

And, in what always felt like the most terrible betrayal, Red agreed with them.

“Maybe someday, Val,” he'd say when I'd rage about it, home for a week or a month from school and, later, just home. Adrift. “When you're older, maybe. But not now.”

Of course that went against everything the doctors ever told me: I could never go off medication. It was a life sentence. I was imprisoned.

Years passed. My meds were adjusted again and again. Some springs I went off them, and Red would somehow find me, raving and raging on the streets of D.C. or New York, London or San Francisco, and bring me back to Goldengrove. Once I was arrested in a bar in rural South Carolina and sentenced to three months in jail for aggravated mayhem, after I almost killed a man with a pool cue. Once I nearly killed myself after a Halloween binge in New Orleans. Always Red would rescue me.

I avoided thinking about drawing, or my stories about Vernoraxia, the way you avoid thinking about your own death. The last time I saw Goldengrove, the yew trees were gone, their yellow stumps raw and oozing clear, pinkish sap. Some more years passed, and it was another century. I was thirty years old, skating on the last remnants of the Comstock family fortune, designing sets for fringe theaters in New York and London. I had a few lovers, no real friends, an expensive motorcycle, no fixed address. I never knew what happened to my notebooks.

London Boys

CHAPTER THREE

Love Disguised as Reason

D
aniel was staying in Camden Town,
directly across from a block of steel-meshed storefronts, tiny shops selling cheap leather goods, ersatz SM gear, London Underground postcards, and T-shirts squalling
MIND THE GAP.
Each morning beneath his window, a trio of middle-aged unreconstructed punks emerged from the tube station to set up a boom box that blared an endless loop of “Anarchy in the UK” and “Pretty Vacant”; they sold Official Classic Punk T-shirts
(ALL MOD CONS; OH BONDAGE UP YOURS)
and did a brisk business posing for tourists before quitting work around lunchtime. Daniel imagined they then got back on the train and returned to nice little flats in Swiss Cottage and Shepherd's Bush, where they changed from their greasy leathers into Tommy Hilfiger khakis and polo shirts, picked up their children, and prepared wholesome vegan dinners for their wives. He wondered sometimes if they would permit him to join their T-shirt cooperative: he was the roughly the same age—forty-four—and, with a bit of work, his own unruly blond curls could be teased into a facsimile of Scary Hair. Then at least he'd feel that he was doing something constructive with his time in London, rather than losing another day to the increasing despair that met him when he faced his computer screen.

His e-mails from colleagues back in the
Washington Horizon
's newsroom were fondly envious and teasing, variations on
SEE WHAT YOU'RE MISSING?
or
HOW'S THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL COMING?
Of course he wasn't actually writing a novel (technically he wasn't actually writing anything), but An Exploration of Mythic Love. Or, as he had outlined in the proposal he'd given his agent,

Unfortunately, creating a Major Literary Event of this or any other era relied rather heavily upon one's ability to write, something Daniel had done very little of since arriving in London two months ago. Not that he wasn't working. He'd done the usual, filing reports on the London Scene and an interview with this month's Brightest Young Thing, the obligatory pieces on disgruntled members of the Booker short list and the differences between American and British literati (the latter smoked like chimneys and had few qualms about getting shitfaced at afternoon book launches; they were also more likely to have in fact read something in the last week).

As for Tristan and Iseult?

Well, Daniel had visited the Tate a number of times to look at Millais's
Ophelia
and various other works with Arthurian themes. And he had spent a good bit of time and a large amount of money buying expensive art books at the Waterstone's down the street. But mostly he had wandered the city by himself, or in the company of his friend Nick Hayward. It was Nick's flat that Daniel was staying in, Nick having decamped to his girlfriend's flat in Highbury Fields.

And it was Nick whom Daniel awaited this morning, in the narrow passage just off Camden High Street. Daniel could remember when the open-air market occupied every square inch of Inverness Street. Now fewer than a dozen greengrocers set up there, with barrows full of oranges and figs from Israel, greengage plums, grapes so round and golden they looked like champagne bubbles in an old Merrie Melodies cartoon. He was standing in front of these, marveling at how huge the grapes were—the size of Ping-Pong balls—and how they glowed in the damp morning air alongside a crimson pyramid of pomegranates.

“No, no, no!” came a voice at his elbow.

Daniel turned, smiling. “Good morning, Nick.”

“A few of these pips and you'll be spending your weekends in hell.” Nick picked up a pomegranate, casting a sideways glance at the woman behind the barrow. “Lucy, dear—how much?”

“Fifty p,” she said, already reaching for the fruit. “How many, love?”

“Well?” Nick cocked an eye at Daniel: a bird-bright brown eye with a strange yellow sheen to it. “What do you think? Breakfast at Camden Kitchen, lunch with Hades?”

Daniel laughed. “Oh, why not?”

Nick picked up another pomegranate and handed it to the woman, who wrapped each one in violet paper, then dropped them in a small paper bag. “One pound, love, thank you,” she sang, turning to another customer.

At Camden Kitchen Nick produced a pocketknife. “Now then, let's see what's inside,” he said. Carefully he peeled back the violet tissue paper, then cut the crimson globe in two. “Why, it looks exactly like—a pomegranate!”

Daniel took his half and spooned a handful of jeweled seeds into his palm. He chewed a few thoughtfully, announced, “I don't think you're supposed to eat them with coffee,” and put the spent seeds into an ashtray.

They had breakfast, bangers and mash and baked tomatoes for Nick, a feta cheese and olive quiche for Daniel. Afterward Nick had a pint; Daniel drank a glass of sparkling water and tried a few more pomegranate seeds. “They sort of grow on you,” he said.

“Careful they don't grow
in
you.” Nick speared the last nubbin of sausage with his pocketknife and ate it slowly. On the other side of the table, his friend opened a notebook and looked mournfully at a page filled with his own neat, square handwriting.

Daniel was gangly and rather dewy-looking, with an aureole of dark-blond hair, large moist eyes the color of new tin, a wide wry mouth. He fancied himself a cynic in the mode of Hamlet, or perhaps Benedick; in truth he most resembled Viola, a yearning heart hidden behind a wardrobe carefully selected to disguise. Since coming to London, he'd forsaken his customary striped button-down shirts and corduroys and Harris tweeds for paisley Henleys and loose linen trousers, a vintage brown leather RAF jacket, and heavy felt clogs; his sole concession to his former self was a pair of fabulously expensive prescription glasses with frames of certified farm-raised tortoiseshell. The dandyish, souk-colored clothes suited him: not world-weary journalist but knight errant, wide-eyed, slightly stupefied in the dazzling sunlight of an older world.

Nick was the Anti-Daniel. Small and spare and dark, his upturned topaz eyes forever taking in something that Daniel could not quite see—something that Daniel was pretty certain he didn't
want
to see. Nick wore his gray hair in a long, tight braid, his beard trimmed to a sharp point, heavy gold bangles in his ears, his fingers callused and blackened from decades of handling his guitar. Thirty years of high living in London hadn't softened his Midlands accent or the raw class rage that had rung through the songs he'd played in the last quarter of the last century, starting with covers of “Hard Times” and “John Barleycorn” that he'd scored into the heart of folk clubs like Covent Garden's Middle Earth and Dingwalls here in Camden Town.
Human Bomb
had been the name of his first solo album; the tag stuck, and he refused to give it up, even during these gun-shy years of the new millennium. He was ten years older than Daniel, his gaunt face walnut brown, seamed from laughter and the harsh blaze of spotlights; even on the streets of North London, he moved foxlike, stalking the edges of a stage no one else knew was there.

“Ah,” he said, and pointed the blade of his pocketknife at Daniel. “I nearly forgot—Sira told me I must ask you to dinner tonight. We have a friend she wants you to meet; she's staying with us while she visits from the West Country. You'll love her,” he added, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “She's a former mental patient.”

Daniel scowled. The inamorata who had helped clarify his decision to take a leave of absence from the
Horizon
had left him for her psychopharmacologist at the Haseltine Clinic, a man who quoted Rumi and had recently taken up quilling. “Excuse me. Did something happen to my brain while I wasn't looking?”

“Oh, please. You Yanks are so trusting. So trust me. Come to dinner, say sevenish, and make Sira a happy lass.”

“Her place?”

“Unless you feel like cooking dinner at mine. Oh, and bring champagne—”

“Champagne?”

“
Expensive
champagne.” Nick slipped from his chair, winking at the waitress as he slid a couple of ten-pound notes onto her tray. “Didn't I tell you? This is a champers gel. None of your nasty Old World claret for her.”

“But that's the only reason I'm in London,” Daniel said grumpily. “I came here for the Old World.”

“You were misinformed.” Nick wriggled his hands like a conjurer and moved swiftly through the restaurant and out onto the sidewalk, where he made a show of withdrawing a pair of sleek, scarlet-lensed sunglasses and fitting them onto his nose. He gave Daniel a mocking nod and began to walk backward into the crowd. “Seven o'clock, Danny-o ...”

“How can he
do
that?” Daniel asked in a beleaguered tone. Beside him a woman carrying a baby stopped and looked where he was pointing.

“Do what?” she demanded, clutching the baby to her breast. “There's no one there!”

With a furious glare, she turned and strode down the High Street.

Sira's flat was
on a tiny street in Islington, the last in a terrace of Regency-era town houses overlooking Highbury Fields. The yellow-brick buildings had wide sills painted white and window boxes filled with masses of begonias, their petals glossy as new satin. The town houses shared a sweeping view of Highbury Fields, a wide green swath bordered by plane trees; there were lime trees behind Sira's house, and in front an old wrought-iron fence marked where the narrow road turned into a pedestrian way. It was the most pastoral residential neighborhood Daniel had ever seen in London; he could easily imagine sheep and cattle grazing there, as they had done a century before, or performers setting up Punch-and-Judy shows, which still happened sometimes on the weekend.

He arrived promptly at seven. Sira opened the door, exclaiming, “
Daniel!
” and throwing her hands up in such delighted surprise that for a moment he was uncertain that he had, in fact, been invited.

But no: that was just Sira's way. “Daniel, dear, come in, come
in!”
she cried, kissing his cheek. “Nick's just opened a bottle of wine. He's out on the deck.”

She grasped his hand, rather tightly, Daniel thought, and led him through the hall, past a pair of bikes and Nick's in-line skates and up the twisting stairway. “I am so glad you came, Daniel. Nick's invited a ... a friend,” she said, and gave him a look that might have been either relief or alarm. “She's between flats, so she's storing some things here. She takes up a bit of psychic space as well,” she added. “Like Nick.”

Daniel smiled, making sure the champagne was tucked safely under his arm. He thought of Nick and Sira as being like those magically paired demons and angels that appear in movies, egging the hero on to certain doom (Nick) or salvation (Sira). She was a barrister who had met Nick twenty years before; since then, their relationship had withstood tours, a paternity suit, canceled album contracts, failed musical technologies, and a half-dozen record companies. Sira claimed this was because they had always kept separate flats, migrating between them like swallows. She was Nick's height, bone thin, her silver hair cut so close to her skull you could see the indigo veins beneath, like a faint tribal tattoo. When she opened the door, a burst of scented steam rolled into the corridor, lemon and coriander and cumin.

“Nick!” she called as she drew Daniel through the living room and out a pair of open French doors onto the deck. “Daniel's here!”

“Hello, Daniel.” Nick sat at a round café table, arranging olive pits into a pyramid. “Can I get you some wine?”

“Sure. But I thought you said your friend likes champagne.”

Sira frowned. “You mean Larkin?”

“Your houseguest. Nick says she drinks nothing but Dom Pérignon.”

“From a shoe,” Nick added.

“Nick.” Sira turned to him. “What are you up to? I don't think Larkin's supposed to drink,” she explained to Daniel, who was still holding out the Veuve Clicquot. “She's on medication, and Nick knows it. I don't know why he would tell you otherwise,” she said, and, taking the champagne bottle, went back inside.

Daniel turned to Nick. “You prick. Why—”

“Pay no attention to her. I know all, Danny-o.” Nick smiled and patted the chair beside him. “Never doubt me, Dan. Never doubt me.”

Daniel sat, swiveling to look out onto an expanse of lawn green as a grass snake. An asphalt path etched its way through it before ending in front of a small gated enclosure, the local Two O'Clock Club. There were no children or beleaguered mothers there now; the ice cream stall was shuttered, the overflowing rubbish tip had been emptied. He sighed, turned, and stared to where the westering sun had turned the City's shining caverns into a glittering dream of the Future, while behind it the immense blue-and-gold Mongolfier balloon moored at Vauxhall made its strange stately ascent every half hour. Gazing at this incongruous vista, his face bathed in syrupy light and mouth slightly open, Daniel looked even more daft than usual.