My Other Life (35 page)

He went on in this vein while we listened—Alison thinking of her hunger, I worrying that Burgess might not make it and, if he did, that the prawns would be tough from sitting in the heated sauce. Lettfish seemed very serious when talking about his legal work, but his seriousness did not make him sound intelligent or articulate, only monotonously dull.

"I'm hungry," Alison said.

Lettfish did not hear her. He was still talking. "I've been facilitating joint ventures in carbon. The British carbon industry is booming. That's not a widely known fact."

"I think I can understand why," Alison said, smiling again.

There was a thump and clatter in the street, and it sounded like one of my barrels going over and losing its lid. This sudden noise was followed by a distinct but distant curse.

"What's that?" Lettfish asked me, looking worried.

"Burgess, I think."

He had not yet begun to ring the bell when I opened the door. He was wiping his tweed jacket with his pocket handkerchief. His hair was wild, his face wet with rain, his tie yanked down, and there was a new tear, with a smeary stain, in the knee of his trousers.

"Pranged my leg," Burgess said. That was another characteristic of Burgess heroes, and Burgess: they were accident-prone. "Some bloody fool left his dustbins in the footpath. When I lived in England, the dustmen carried them from your garden and put them back."

"That doesn't happen in Mrs. Thatcher's England," I said. "Come in, have a whiskey."

"Splendid." He entered, still scrubbing at his soiled jacket. "What a lovely house. Those Victorian windows are so graceful. A touch of Malacca"—he was passing the carved settee. "I should love to see these aquatints in daylight. Paul, it's a real home! My place is such a hovel, but we're working on it. Yes?"

He had come face to face with Sam Lettfish.

"And you are?"

Before I could speak, Lettfish said, "One of your fans."

"No, no, no. Terrible word—fans, fanatics. It's madness."

"One of your readers."

"Better," Burgess said, chewing his teeth.

He was still wet from the rain, bruised from his fall, distracted and seemingly blinded by coming indoors into the light on this winter night. He was stumbling and stammering, and it occurred to me that he might be a bit tipsy. He was still in motion, moving from room to room.

"Hello." He saw Alison leaving the kitchen. "Your meal smells delicious. I love curry. There's none to be had in Monte Carlo."

"Paul's done the cooking," she said.

Lettfish hovered, waiting for a chance to speak again.

"This is Sam Lettfish. You met long ago at the Festival Hall," I said, handing Burgess a whiskey.

"Lettfish," Burgess said, and squinted in concentration, as though
he had just been asked a tricky question. He chewed on the syllables of an unspoken word. "Lettfish, are you a Lett?"

"He's as crazy as I am," said Lettfish.

"So Lettfish does not speak Lettish," Burgess said. "Are you leftish, Lettfish, or flatish."

"Crazier."

"A lott is a fish," Burgess said. "Lettfish might be a corruption of lottfish."

"I'm a Jew," Lettfish said.

"To a non-Jew, that explains everything," Burgess said. "To a Jew, it says nothing."

I went into the kitchen to check on the meal. Alison stood at the counter, refilling her wine glass.

"I'm awfully hungry," she said. "Do you mind if I eat right now?"

"Please wait for us. It will look ridiculous if you eat by yourself."

"Paul, how many of Burgess's books do I own?" Lettfish called out.

"Please join us," I whispered to Alison, but when I put my arm around her she recoiled, not wanting to be touched. I left her sulking in the kitchen. To Burgess, I said, "Sam's a collector. He's got quite a library."

"For a lawyer, I guess," Lettfish said. "I get a little tired of dealing with industrial litigation relating to faulty fall-away sections."

Burgess became alert.

Lettfish said, "I prefer something flavescent."

"How much is that in real money?" Burgess said in a snarly American accent.

"Your tie is flavescent."

Burgess sipped his whiskey and licked his thin lips. He looked very frail and had that same doped-up look I had seen all those years ago in Singapore, when I understood that a writer is always two people.

Lettfish said, "Acrotism."

"Don't mention religion," Burgess said, the same snarl.

"My pulse is acrotistic," Lettfish said. "You are claudicant."

"Once you've started using words like that, because you like the sound of them, you're lost. The world has no use for you. No one wants to read them." He looked at Alison, who had wandered out of the kitchen looking haunted and hungry. He said, "Transponder."

"The rice is overcooked," Alison said.

Lettfish said, "Before there was good quality control, the transponder market gave us a lot of billable hours."

"Finite amplitude waves," Burgess said.

Lettfish brightened, hearing the words, and said, "I had a case of copyright infringement involving electronic monitoring using those. We had trouble getting the case to court because the infringer lived in Monte Carlo. He didn't count on us having a partner in the principality. Kleinvogel. The infringer settled."

Burgess had his glass to his lips, but he did not sip. He said, "Fall-away sections."

"Your military type uses different specs and usually a titanium bolt in the linkage," Lettfish said.

"Observe how this description derives from the solid field of technology," Burgess said.

Alison had brought the serving dishes of curry and all the rest of the meal to the table. She said, "Shall we sit down?"

"There is something essentially philistine about technology. And the law is just book-hating."

"I love your books," Lettfish said.

"Ballocks," Burgess said, taking a seat at the table. He leaned over to Alison and said, "I think it's all going awfully well."

He was drunk. I could see that from the way he had heaved himself into his chair, from his breathlessness, from the way he sat. And Lettfish watched him eagerly, with a mixture of respectful caution and genuine bafflement—innocence and disbelief.

I was grateful when, unbidden, Alison began passing the rice, and then the dishes of dal and prawn curry.

"I'm sorry your wife's not here," she said.

"Liana broke her ankle. Tripped on a child's toy left on the marble stairs of one of our leading hotels. Took a header. We tried to sue. We were threatened with destruction by the hotel."

Lettfish said, "I might be able to help."

"Haven't you done quite enough?" Burgess said, with a screech in his voice that made Lettfish wince.

Then Burgess became preoccupied—finished his whiskey, spooned chopped banana, murmured the word "sambals," and he did not look up as his hand moved crabwise towards his wine glass and his fingers snared its stem and hoisted it. He drank. He did not notice that his last outburst had silenced the table. He ate, working
his mouth as though the food were too hot; but it was his bridgework in motion, his useless teeth were part of his unmanageable mouthful.

'"You're the writer chap,'" he said, mimicking a pretentious, fruity voice. "Isn't it interesting, the number of writers who went to medical school—Joyce, Maugham, Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, Voltaire, the list is endless. And yet can you name a single writer who went to law school?"

"Robert Louis Stevenson," I said, hoping it would calm him.

"To please his father. He despised the law. But there's no one else."

I said, "Anthony Trollope must have known the law. There's a very good legal judgment, the definition of 'heirloom,' in
The Eustace Diamonds.
"

Lettfish, grateful for my intervention, eagerly looked at Burgess for a response.

"Trollope was a civil servant, a postal official. It was his business to know the law, since he drew up postal treaties. I was thinking of a writer who actually practiced law in the way that Chekhov practiced medicine. You can't name one."

He faced Lettfish, he chewed his teeth, he sipped his wine. All this mouth motion seemed like aggression, and even his food-flecked lips were threatening.

Alison said, "I fancy he's pulling your leg, Mr. Lettfish."

Lettfish stared bug-eyed at his plate, and in his silence he seemed to glow with rage and disappointment.

"Does anyone mind if I smoke?" Burgess said.

He was lighting up as he asked the question, and he blew a cloud of smoke over the remains of the dinner. Sam Lettfish shut his mouth and kept his head down, like a man in a storm.

"I'll make coffee," I said.

Burgess said, "Do you have tea? I'd love a mug of strong tea. Two tea bags. Two sugars. Just a drop of milk. Lovely."

"Nothing for me," Lettfish said.

'"You're the writer chap,'" Burgess said again, and grinned horribly at Lettfish.

Alison pushed her chair back and said, "I hate to be a spoiler. Please don't get up. I must go to bed or I'll never make it to work tomorrow. Good night."

She was smiling but it was not a smile. I thought of her saying,
Why are you doing this to me?

Burgess and Lettfish said good night. I went into the kitchen and put the water on for tea.

I heard Burgess saying, "So Kleinvogel is your partner in the principality..."

They spoke back and forth in short, slaplike replies while the kettle boiled and I made Burgess his cup of tea.

When I returned to the table, Lettfish was saying, "I imagined you'd be above all that."

"Of course I am," Burgess said. "My ivory tower is the perfect height, and I sit there paring my nails, oblivious of the lawsuits brought against me."

"If Kleinvogel knew of your standing in the world of literature, he wouldn't have proceeded against you."

"That's ballocks. 'So you're the writer chap.' His exact words." Spit flew from Burgess's lips as he spoke.

"Kleinvogel's a great litigator."

"Kleinvogel is cauchemardesque."

I handed Burgess the cup of tea.

"Everything's going awfully well," he said, and smiled. He blew on the cup and then set his lips on the rim and began sucking at the tea, and eyeing Lettfish. Then he uncorked the whiskey bottle and poured some whiskey in, topping off the cup.

"What book of mine do you especially admire?"

"
Nothing Like the Sun,
" Lettfish said in a small voice.

"It's a parlor trick. My least achieved novel. It's a thin idea, tricked out with Elizabethan verbiage that I pinched from old glossaries. Wrong again, Max."

"And the first
Enderby.
"

"Meretricious," Burgess said.

"
Devil of a State.
"

"A victim of threatened litigation," Burgess said. "The libel lawyers made me rewrite it."

Lettfish said, "Paul told me—"

"You see?" Burgess winked at me, then turned to Lettfish. "So you're here selling—what?—military hardware and children's toys, pretty much the same thing. And what I want to know is, do you miss American food? Sara Lee cheesecake, that sort of thing?"

Lettfish shook his head from side to side, as though he had just received some very bad news and was like a man grieving.

"I used to eat it myself," Burgess said. "I won't hear a word against it, Max."

"My name is Sam. Kleinvogel is Max."

"Tell me," Burgess said, "why is your neck turning purple?"

Lettfish's face was twisted, he looked miserable, stung by the conversation and sickened by Burgess's cigar smoke. He was trying to be brave, yet the ordeal showed on his face—not only pain but a deeper and more lasting look, a sad scowl of disenchantment.

Compressing his lips, Burgess hummed a few notes, making his jowls flap, and then sipped his alcoholic tea and spiked the cup with more whiskey.

"You can't read, Max," he said, and stuck out his jaw. Now I could not look at his mouth without imagining his set of false teeth.

He ground out his cigar butt and lit another one and blew smoke assertively, squinting behind it, as though planning an attack.

Lettfish lifted his head and, scarcely controlling his anger, said, "You've got to be kidding."

Burgess smacked his lips and took out his fountain pen and drew on a napkin, a stave of parallel lines, then rapidly, like hanging fruit on these lines, he inscribed a series of notes.

"Go on, what does it say?"

Lettfish folded his arms. "That's music."

"A four-year-old could have told me that. Go on—hum it."

"I will do nothing of the kind."

"Anger makes some people crude, and it turns others pompous," Burgess said. "So you can't read the simple phrase."

"What is this, some kind of test?"

"Exactly," Burgess said. "Gesualdo. Know him?"

"I haven't read him," Lettfish said. "Sorry. I can't read everything."

"He's a musician, Max. Sixteenth century. But very modern in his tonalities. That"—he pointed to the notes—"is the opening of his madrigal 'Moro, lasso.'"

Lettfish looked again as though he were grieving.

"Max, a knowledge of serious music is essential to an understanding of my work." Burgess began to hum, and though he
seemed drunk and rumpled, his humming was precise and tuneful and was like a reminder that he was sane.

Over this humming, Lettfish said, "I own every book you've ever written."

"Too bad you can't read, Max."

Lettfish smiled hopelessly and got up to leave. "I wasn't asking you to like me," he said.

"Cauchemardesque," Burgess murmured as I saw Lettfish to the door.

Lettfish's last words to me were: "I always felt there was something missing in his books. Now I know what it is. He's a very sad man." But it was Lettfish who seemed heartbroken.

Burgess was smiling when I returned to the room.

"I think it all went awfully well," he said, and went on humming the complicated music.

It was the last time I saw him. Lettfish too stopped calling me. And Alison said, "Don't ever do that to me again."