Noah's Ark (3 page)

Noah used animals occasionally in medical experiments, so the sacrifice of huskies was a smaller thing to him. So did his friend and protege Arnie Weinberg. Charming Arnie who turned up to
supper some Friday nights if his nocturnal experiments in the lab got truncated by an animal’s death. He would stride amiably into the Glazers’ kitchen spreading general joy and using code to disguise his doings from Ali’s children. ‘Croak,’ he would say shamelessly, to denote the unredeemable condition of his research subject. And he would kiss Ali’s cheek and lay his murderer’s hands all over her two younger children, who would climb upon him in delight, plait ribbons into his hair and borrow his glasses. Arnie was wonderfully attractive to Ali’s children, being that much younger than their father and gratifyingly willing always to collapse on all fours, or to charge to the topmost rung of the climbing frame yelling, ‘Man the controls, you idiots! We’re approaching the target area!’ Arnie came from Connecticut. But he would occasionally treat the children to Woody Guthrie infant songs while plucking at Hattie’s guitar. Their favourite was a song about skipping down to the pretzel man even though neither of them really knew what pretzels were. It was enough that Arnie sang about them. Arnie was thirty-nine like Ali but he seemed to her so much younger, being unattached and childless. He was also refreshingly unmedical in his style. He had recently had one of his ears pierced by a ward sister who was sweet on him and who had done it using a hypodermic needle and wearing sterile gloves. She had left Arnie complaining loudly in a chair with the syringe hanging in his lobe while she had removed her own left sleeper and placed it in the steriliser with tongs.

Arnie’s pierced ear had caused Noah much wasted time of late, since he had been required to spend an afternoon assuring an appointments committee that a man with a pierced ear could, nonetheless, be the most able man for a job. Loyal Noah, legitimacy shining, somehow, out of his every utterance, grumbled afterwards to his wife that Arnie Weinberg could have waited to pierce his goddam ear until after the goddam committee had met, couldn’t he? But perhaps it was in the nature of proteges to let one down just a little?

Noah splashed shaving soap off his jaw and pulled on a large towelling bathrobe before returning to his wife in the kitchen.

‘Noah,’ Ali said, biting off thread, ‘shall I have my ears pierced while you’re away?’

‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’ Noah said. He liked Ali the way she was. Tall, thin and unadorned. Her white body; her white unpainted face; the blue eyes fringed with pale gingery lashes. It had come initially as a great surprise to him to find himself so strongly attracted to her, but since that first departure from type he had never wavered. He liked her long bony feet and her cracked untended fingernails, which had smelled slightly of turps ever since he had sent her to the art school. It provoked in him an excess of tenderness to watch her bundle up her pale red hair, already now streaked with grey, and fix it with a single giant kirby grip. He dearly loved her long white neck.

‘The point is, I could be finished with those nasty little gold stud things within days,’ she said. ‘Then I could wear luscious pendant rubies in my ears for you – that is, if you could brook the expense, of course.’

‘AI,’ Noah said firmly, ‘ear piercing is mutilation, for Chrissake. It has to do with the status of women as chattels. It mutilates not only the body. It mutilates the female character.’ Ali thought only how splendidly patriarchal men could be in defence of one’s female rights.

‘Rubbish, Noah,’ she said. ‘What you mean is you think it’s common. What you mean is you like classy-looking, dowdy, goy women, like me.’

‘Not
like
you,’ Noah said. ‘You. I
like you,
Al.’

‘What you mean is you think pierced ears are for low-status ethnic minorities – and for the lower class,’ Ali said, ‘and not for upmarket, Quakerish women like me. You’re out of date, Noah.’

Noah laughed complacently. ‘Oh my. Is that what I mean?’

‘Arnie has a pierced ear,’ Ali said. ‘He isn’t a mutilated female.’

‘I’m not married to him,’ Noah said. ‘Leave your ears alone, Al.’

‘You mean Arnie can do as he likes because he’s a man,’ she said.

‘Because he’s not married,’ Noah said. ‘He can do what he likes because he’s not married.’ Noah’s standards with regard to mutual conduct in marriage had always been uncompromisingly high. He blamed this tiresome ear business not only on Arnie but on his twenty-year-old stepdaughter, Camilla. When Noah had met Ali, Camilla had been an extremely worried eleven-year-old with nervous tics, who peed in her bed and showed all the signs of her parents’ terminal marriage. Now, deliciously full
ofjoie de vivre,
she had hennaed her hair, pierced her ears and won an open scholarship to Cambridge. All that appeared to remain of her former insecurity was an aura of helplessness, which caused male undergraduates to capitulate to her in large numbers.

Noah had always been terribly good for Camilla and Camilla was devoted to him, though she was given to complaining good-naturedly of late that he lectured her too much, which was true. He did. Lecturing was a form of communication, which sat well on him. He accused her most latterly of promiscuity and lectured her on venereal diseases. He reminded her pressingly that while her oral contraceptive pills would protect her from conception, they would not protect her from VD.

‘Abstinence is a more dependable strategy,’ Noah said. ‘Or restraint. Try restraint, Camilla.’ But it only made her smile. ‘There’s a kind of VD you can’t cure,’ Noah said.

‘You must know that.’

‘Of course,’ she said. Then she asked him to renew the licence on her motorcycle.

‘You’ve overspent on your allowance,’ Noah said, doing his fatherly act which had always been so deeply gratifying to them both. To Noah because she had replaced the children he had long before left behind when he divorced his first wife, and to
Camilla because her own father had never learned to handle the role.

‘That’s right,’ Camilla said and she waited brazenly for him to pull out his cheque book and sign. Recently Camilla had led him by the arm into a claustrophobic boutique to buy her a birthday present. She had chosen two pairs of silver earrings. One pair of sparkling three-inch drop earrings and another pair of small floral clusters. Now she wore both drop earrings in her right ear and one of the clusters in her left.

‘The fashion is clearly against symmetry,’ Noah said. He smiled at her because she was so much like Ali under the plumage and paint, and because she wore such absurd secondhand clothes, with padded shoulders, which reminded him of women on the subway during the last war.

‘What do you plan to do with the fourth earring?’ he asked her. ‘You mean to save it till you pierce one of your nipples?’

‘I’ll give it to my boyfriend,’ Camilla said. Noah’s instinct was not to care too much for personal adornment in men since he himself had no feeling for it. He was the kind of man who, having been coaxed out of turn-ups just in time for the fashion to revert, could not be coaxed back again.

‘Mummy wants to pierce her ears, too, you know,’ Camilla said.

‘Over my dead body,’ Noah said. ‘I will not allow it.’

Ali now poured coffee.

‘What about Camilla then?’ she said. ‘Camilla looks gorgeous with her pierced ears.’

‘Camilla looks like she ought to be selling violets in Drury Lane,’ Noah said. ‘Or telling fortunes. Gorgeous she may be. I don’t deny it.’

‘How about your secretary then?’ Ali said, because Noah’s research unit boasted a dark-eyed Cypriot typist, who wore silver filigree earrings halfway to her shoulders, and whose looks Ali greatly admired. All that wonderful gloss in the hospital canteen was a great antidote to disease and pestilence, she thought.

‘AI,’ Noah said, ‘what the hell is this that I am drinking? Gravy mix?’

‘Sorry,’ she said. It had crossed her mind suddenly that she would like to paint the vulgar, bright oranges there in the precarious fluctuating sunlight, in their funny bowl. Oil paint simulating china, simulating basket weave. And then the view from the window beyond the kitchen was so inviting, with Noah’s tangled climbers all beginning to bud and the field, beyond the out-houses, with cows. The cows so black and white that they stood on the green field as though appliqued upon an emerald banner, carried in a church procession.

Ali had begun to paint with the advent of Noah and the paintings recorded, appropriately, a certain hard-won domestic contentment. She liked to paint food, flowers and children. A stone jug with poppies on a striped seersucker cloth; her eight-year-old daughter Hattie arranging narcissi in a jam jar or back from a party with ribbons in her curly dark hair. Like the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century glorying in hung rabbits and bundles of asparagus, in scrubbed forecourts and in dew on vine leaves, Ali liked to celebrate through these things the ending of lean times. Noah had put an end to her lean times.

‘The coffee shop is right alongside where you buy your artist’s materials,’ Noah said. ‘For Chrissake AI, why can’t you go there to buy coffee? Freeze the beans. No problem.’

‘Eva Bobrow sends Mervyn there,’ Ali said with apparent irrationality, but wishing to register a strongly felt reaction both against Eva’s managerial style and against the parade of food connoisseurs. ‘She
insists
on the Colombian, she says. She does the insisting and he does the shopping. Oh my God, it’s all so disgustingly advanced it makes me want to puke. Why am I so backward in these domestic matters? It’s no wonder he ran out on me.’

‘Okay,’ Noah said. ‘How about if I take over the buying of coffee? I see no reason why Mrs Bobrow should determine what coffee I drink.’

‘My dear Noah,’ Ali said. ‘As if you were ever in one place for long enough to buy anything except in Duty Free shops. I’m sorry it’s such foul coffee. I wasn’t thinking when I made it, that’s all. There’s nothing wrong with the beans, but I’ll go to that poncy shop from now on – only because it’s for you. Oh Jesus, Noah, wouldn’t it be nice if you weren’t going today?’

Noah’s expertise in the matter of human respiratory pathology had always caused him to board aeroplanes far too often – unlike Ali, who resolutely never went anywhere, except to the same place on the Cornish coast once a year. Noah went to conferences in Sardinia and in Tokyo. He had been to conferences in Czechoslovakia and in Peking, and in the northernmost part of Norway where there was nothing but fish and fishermen. Nothing to eat but fish. Fish rolled into balls and stewed. Smoked fish cold on crackerbread. And even the museum full of fish, he told Ali. Embalmed fish with eyes that lit up at the flick of a switch. Most of the time, however, he went to New York to ‘liaise’, as he said, with colleagues.

‘Sure,’ Noah said. ‘To stay home right now would be great.’

Connubial gratification had come to him late in life and he liked less and less to be parted from its source. Nor did he like to leave his garden when the season had just now drawn him out of doors again after the winter. Nor did he relish the necessary tedium of a day’s jet lag, which worsened with increasing age. He was intensely and romantically involved with Ali and loved to watch her – especially as she was now, with her head bent over her sewing, because while he scrupulously granted women the right to whatever roles they chose, he nonetheless found them at their most attractive when engaged in domestic labour. Like Degas he liked women’s haunches bent over a mop and the look of female arms up to the elbows in soap suds. He liked the whole genre of sock-mending by lamplight. Ali’s sewing reminded him unconsciously of his mother. Noah was one of those unusual people who liked his mother. Noah’s mother had been that apotheosis who had always been ready with a hot breakfast
before he went on his newspaper round. On the quiet Ali had always found Noah’s mother a little suspect, with her aura of maternal sanctity and her benign grey-haired infallibility. Besides, she was a writer of very silly letters. But it didn’t matter to her much, because the woman was safely in Florida and Noah was worth any number of mothers.

Along with Noah’s regrets at having to leave was the specifically favourable state of Ali’s menstrual cycle. It had not escaped his notice that Ali did not need to use her rubber diaphragm from the next day. It was a bad time to be going away when one could be enjoying the additional perk of one’s wife’s unguarded cunt. He knew this because he kept tabs on Ali’s menstrual cycles in his pocket diary and always had. She was no good on dates and punctuality. He had found it both unbelievable and infuriating when he met her that she had not owned a watch; that she would lean out of the bathroom window far enough to catch sight of the local church clock – which was itself often far from accurate. Now he had learned to accept it more or less. The diaphragm had been introduced by himself to replace Ali’s hazard-prone alternatives, but it had to be admitted that the taste of spermicidal cream on the tongue could inhibit one’s pleasure in oral exploration.

‘You’re not fertile from tomorrow,’ he said wistfully. After ten years in England he still pronounced ‘fertile’ to rhyme with ‘myrtle’. Ali did not hear him because she had her mind once again on the oranges. If one could paint wood like Holman Hunt, she thought. And why did one like pictures through windows so much? Did they imply advance or retreat? Could one ever go forward by looking back or did it always hamper? To go backwards – did one regress or move forward? And did pictures through windows merely imply a blinkered vision; a fear of life itself? Here again the picture of Thomas’s double impinged and Ali resolved at once to remove it when Noah had gone. The man was advertising cigarettes! That was surely in itself a heresy in Noah’s house, when Noah had always been so uncompromising
in his rules against cigarette smoking. Had one always wanted reality in easy, measured doses, she wondered; boxed in and bounded in nutshells? Probably. And had that been the real reason why one had let Thomas Adderley slip like water from one’s emotional grasp and had gone on to embroil oneself in two hopelessly unsuitable marriages – first with a philistine and next with an ego-maniac? Thank God for Noah!