Read Shylock Is My Name Online

Authors: Howard Jacobson

Shylock Is My Name (2 page)

BOOK: Shylock Is My Name
4.5Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

It was in the hope of a second visitation that she took him there on every remaining night of their honeymoon. “
Oy gevalto
, we’re back on the Rialto,” he complained finally. She put her face in her hands. She thought him ungrateful and unserious. Five days into their marriage she already hated his folksy Yiddishisms. They took from the grandeur she wanted for them both. Venice had been her idea. Reconnect him. She could just as easily have suggested Cordoba. She had married him to get close to the tragic experience of the Hebrews, the tribulations of a noble Ladino race, and all he could do was
oy gevalto
her back to some malodorous Balto-Slavic shtetl peopled by potato-faced bumpkins who shrugged their shoulders.

She thought her heart would stop. “Tell me I haven’t gone and married a footler-schmootler,” she pleaded as they wandered back to their hotel. He could feel her quivering by his side, like a five-masted sailing ship. “Tell me you’re not a funny-man.”

They had reached the Campo Santa Maria Formosa, where he paused and drew her to him. He could have told her that the church was founded in 1492, the year the Jews were expelled from Spain. Kiss me to make up for it, darling, he could have said. Kiss me to show you’re sorry. And she would have done it, imagining him leaving Toledo with his entourage, praying at the Ibn Shoshan Synagogue for the last time, erect in bearing, refusing to compromise his faith. Yes, on the fine, persecuted brow of her black-bearded hidalgo husband she would have planted a lipstick star. “Go forth, my lord, be brave, and may the God of Abraham and Moses go with you. I will follow you with the children in due course.” But he told her no such thing and gave her no such opportunity. Instead, aggressively playing the fool, he breathed herrings, dumplings, borscht, into her anxious little face, the fatalism of villages unvisited by light or learning, the broken-backed superstitions of shmendricks called Moishe and Mendel. “Chaim Yankel, ribbon salesman,” he said, knowing how little such a name would amuse her, “complains to the buyer at Harrods that he never orders ribbon from him. ‘All right, all right,’ says the buyer, ‘send me sufficient ribbon to stretch from the tip of your nose to the tip of your penis.’ A fortnight later a thousand boxes of ribbon turn up at Harrods’ receiving centre. ‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ the buyer screams at Chaim Yankel down the phone. ‘I said enough ribbon to reach from the tip of your nose to the tip of your penis, and you send me a thousand miles of it.’ ‘The tip of my penis,’ says Chaim Yankel, ‘is in Poland.’ ”

She stared at him in disbelieving horror. She was shorter than he was, finely constructed, exquisite in her almost boyish delicacy. Her eyes, just a little too big for her face, were shadowy pools of hurt perplexity. Anyone would think, he thought, looking deep into them, that I have just told her someone close to us has died.

“You see,” he said relenting, “you’ve nothing to worry about, I’m not a funny-man.”

“Enough,” she pleaded.

“Enough Poland?”

“Shut up about Poland!”

“My people, Ophelia…”

“Your people are from Manchester. Isn’t that bad enough for you?”

“The joke wouldn’t work if I resituated the punchline to Manchester.”

“The joke already doesn’t work. None of your jokes work.”

“What about the one where the doctor tells Moishe Greenberg to stop masturbating?”

The Campo Santa Maria Formosa must have been witness to many sighs, but few so dolorous as Ophelia-Jane’s. “I beg you,” she said, almost folding herself in half. “On my bended knees, I implore you—no more jokes about your
thing
.”

She shook the word from her as though it were an importunate advance from a foul-smelling stranger.

“A foolish thing is but a toy,” was all he could think of saying.

“Then it’s time you stopped playing with it.” Strulovitch showed her his hands.

“Metaphorically, Simon!”

She wanted to cry.

He too.

She traduced him. He, playing? How could she not know by now that he had not an ounce of play in his body?

And his
thing
…why did she call it that?

And on their honeymoon, to make things worse.

It was a site of sorrows, not a thing. The object of countless comic stories for the reason that it wasn’t comic in the least. He quoted Beaumarchais to her. “I hasten to laugh at everything for fear I might be obliged to weep at it.”

“You? Weep! When did you last weep?”

“I am weeping now. Jews jest, Ophelia-Jane, because they are not amused.”

“Then I’d have made a good Jew,” she said, “because neither am I.”


When mothers see what’s been done to their baby boys the milk turns sour in their breasts. The young Strulovitch, slaloming through the world’s religions, was told this at a garden party given by a great-great-grand-nephew of Cardinal Newman in Oxford. His informant was a Baha’i psychiatrist called Eugenia Carloff whose field of specialism was circumcision trauma within the family.


All
mothers?” he asked.

A sufficient number of them of your persuasion, she told him, to explain the way they mollycoddle their sons thereafter. They have a double guilt to expiate. Allowing blood to be spilled and withholding milk.

“Withholding milk? Are you kidding?”

Strulovitch was sure he’d been breastfed. Sometimes he feels as though he’s being breastfed still.

“All men of your persuasion think they were copiously suckled,” Eugenia Carloff told him.

“Are you telling me I wasn’t?” he said.

She looked him up and down. “I can’t say definitively, but my guess is no, actually, you weren’t.”

“Do I look undernourished?”

“Hardly.”

Deprived then?”

“Not deprived, denied.”

“It was my father who did that.”

“Ah,” Eugenia Carloff said, tapping her nose, “there is no end to what those executioners we call fathers do. First they maim their boy children then they torment them.”

Sounds right, Strulovitch thought. On the other hand, his father liked amusing him with anecdotes and rude jokes. And sometimes ruffled his hair absent-mindedly when they were out walking. He mentioned that to Eugenia Carloff who shook her head. “They never love you. Not really. They remain excluded from the eternal nativity play of guilt and recompense which they initiated, forever sidelined and angry, trying to make amends in rough affection and funny stories. This is the bitter nexus that binds them.”

“That binds the father and the son?”

“That binds men of your persuasion, the penis and the joke.”

I’m not a man of any persuasion, he wanted to tell Eugenia Carloff. I have yet to be persuaded. Instead he asked her out.

She laughed wildly. “Do you think I want to get into all that?” she said. “Do you think I’m mad?”


Poor Ophelia-Jane, who must have been mad, did all in her power in the few years they were together to make their marriage work. But in the end he was too much for her. He agreed with her in his heart. He upset and even frightened people. It was the acrid jeering that did it. The death-revel ironies. Did he or didn’t he belong? Was he or wasn’t he funny? His own mortal indecision for which everyone who knew him—Ophelia-Jane more than any of them—had to pay.

“You could just have loved me, you know,” she said sadly on the day they agreed to divorce. “I was willing to do anything to make you happy. You could just have enjoyed our life together.”

He enfolded her in his arms one final time and told her he was sorry. “It’s just who we are,” he said.


We
!”

It was the last word she said before she walked out on him.

There was one small consolation. They had been virtually children when they married and they were still virtually children when they parted.

They could be done with each other and still have plenty of life left with which to start again. And they hadn’t had children of their own—the cause of all human discontent.

But the divorce itself was wormwood to them both. And in the end she couldn’t help herself. Though she believed Jews to have been grievously maligned, when the final papers were delivered to be signed she still stigmatised them, through the person of her husband, in the usual way. “Happy now you’ve extracted your pound of flesh?” she rang him to ask.

The accusation hurt him deeply. Though not yet wildly wealthy, he was the one who had brought money to the marriage. And what he didn’t spend on her went, even in these early years, on causes to which she had given her blessing and which would always bear her name. He believed the settlement was more than generous to her. And he knew that in her heart she thought so too. But there it was—the ancient stain. She hadn’t been able to help herself. So the stain was on her as well.

The phone became a viper in his hand. Not in anger but in horror, he let it fall to the floor.

He wrote to her the next day to say that henceforth they were to speak to each other only through their solicitors.

But even after he remarried he carried a torch for her. Despite the pound-of-flesh allusion? He wondered about that. Despite it or because of it?


A watched kettle never boils, but Shylock watched by Strulovitch rattles like a seething pot. It’s not noise that distracts him but anxiety, disquiet, neurasthenic perturbation. On this occasion, Strulovitch’s. Conscious of him, Shylock fractionally shifts his position on his Glyndebourne stool and twitches his ears. He could be an Egyptian cat god.

“What’s to be done with us?” he asks Leah.

“Us?”

“Our people. We are beyond help.”

“Nobody’s beyond help. Show compassion.”

“I shouldn’t have to feel it as compassion. I should feel it as loyalty.”

“Then show loyalty.”

“I endeavour to, but they try my patience.”

“My love, you have no patience.”

“Nor do they. Especially for themselves. They have more time for those who hate them.”

“Hush,” she says.

The tragedy is that she can’t stroke his neck and make the wavy lines go away.


When Leah was big with child she would call Shylock to her and get him to put his hand on her belly. Feel the kicking. He loved the idea that the little person in there couldn’t wait to join them.

Jessica, my child.

Now it was Leah who made her presence felt. The gentlest of nudges, as though some burrowing creature were at work in the ground beneath him. “Well said, old mole,” he thinks. He knew what she was nudging him about. One of the traits of his character she had always disliked was his social cruelty. He teased people. Riddled them. Kept them waiting. Made them come to him. And he was doing the same with Strulovitch, not letting on he knew he was there, testing his endurance. Hence her prod, reminding him of his obligations.

Only when Shylock turned did Strulovitch see that his cheeks and chin were stubbled—not so much a beard as a gnarling of the flesh. Nothing about his face admitted softness, but the company of his wife had called light into his features and the remains of a querulous amusement lingered in the cruel creases around the eyes he showed to Strulovitch. “Ah!” he said, closing the paperback from which he’d been reading, rolling it up again and putting it with some deliberation in the inside pocket of his coat, “Just the man.”

T
WO

T
here lived once in a big old house equidistant from Mottram St. Andrew, Alderley Edge and Wilmslow—at the very heart of what is still known to estate agents as the Golden Triangle—a dope-smoking media don who disapproved of dope and media, heir to a pharmaceutical fortune who favoured the redistribution of all wealth but his own, a utopist who mistrusted the principle of social amelioration, a lover of Gregorian chant who fantasised about being a rock legend, a whimsical conservationist who bought his sons fast cars with which they tore up the very country roads he wanted conserving. If he sounds like many people it’s because many people were wrapped up in him. But he was just one man, a single fretting bundle of idealistic envy. “Sometimes,” he told his students at the business school in Stockport of which he was the dean, “even the fortunate and gifted can feel their lives are mortgaged to a perplexing sadness.”

“You don’t say,” his students said behind his back.

For Peter Shalcross MBE, one day had become the same as every other. A live morning radio interview on any subject, an afternoon lecture to his students on Mercantilism and Alienation—on alternate weeks he changed the title to Money and Estrangement—and then the drive home in the early evening to the heart of the Golden Triangle where a neat Scotch and scarlet smoking jacket awaited him, and where he could fulminate in comfort against the faux manses and manor houses of which the Strulovitches and their kind had taken possession. Every evening at the same time he fulminated, saying the same things and feeling the same burning sensation in his chest. But habit took nothing from the fervour of his animus. Only someone who enjoyed the benefits of great wealth himself could have been made so angry by the great wealth of others—the difference being that he hadn’t had to earn his, the fact of which also made him obscurely angry.

“Can you smell anything?” he would ask visitors, throwing open the doors to his grounds, and when they had exhausted the possibilities—someone burning off leaves in the next county, horse manure, faulty plumbing, dust from the Sahara—he would rub the tips of his fingers together and say, “No none of those, what I smell is more like lucre…The filthy sort.”

Though he was concerned about the effect that the propinquity of lucre might have on the air quality, the hedgerows and his only daughter, Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever Christine—Christine being the name of the flighty society model he had ill-advisedly married and whose influence on him extended all the way down to his candy-striped socks and fashionably pointed, high crepe-soled shoes—Shalcross was known to boast to his academic colleagues about the millionaire pop stars and footballers who were his neighbours. This was not to be confused with hypocrisy. A man can boast and still deplore.

“If you wanted a pop-idol life, Christine, you should have run off with a pop idol,” he told his wife the night the Cheshire constabulary raided the anything-goes party she’d thrown for Plurabelle’s sixteenth birthday. In fact he was the one who should have run off with a pop idol. Or better still,
been
a pop idol.

It wasn’t the amyl nitrite that brought the police out, it was the amplified music. And it was a rhythm guitarist, residing half a mile away, who’d alerted them. He couldn’t hear himself practise, he’d complained. Even the noisy were entitled to peace. It was their human right.

After thinking about it for a week, Christine Shalcross did precisely as her husband suggested, though running off in this instance meant no more than moving to the other side of the paddock, where pop idols proliferated like peonies. “For all that I’ll be able to keep a close eye on her from here,” she told her husband, “I’d still prefer you to bring Plurabelle up. A girl needs a father’s example and she loves you more than she loves me. You have that in common with her.”

Estranged from himself, humiliated by his wife, disappointed in his sons who had gone to work for banks which had the indecency to fail, depressed by the cynicism of his students, appalled by the social deterioration of the Golden Triangle and expecting to die early, anyway, as his parents and grandparents had, Shalcross left instructions with his solicitors for the care of Plurabelle. “Taking into account the size of her fortune and the sweetness of her nature, Plury will be at the mercy of every moneybags and bloodsucker that comes along,” he told his lawyers. “Find listed below a number of ordeals of character to which every aspirant to her bed must be submitted. Any who hope to approach her by some other route should know that my family’s reach is long and extends to low places as well as high.”

Having deposited these detailed stipulations, he went into the garden of the Old Belfry—his belfry, of course, was genuinely old—laid himself out beneath the second most ancient oak tree in Cheshire, stuffed tissues up his nostrils against the stench of filthy lucre, took an overdose of the pills for which his family had been overcharging grossly for half a century, and expired.

Richly left and richly independent, Plurabelle shed copious tears—for she had inherited the sadness gene from her father—and allowed a decent interval of time to elapse before summoning the courage to read her father’s test, presented to her in a long Manila envelope, like a Last Will and Testament, by his solicitors. A gap year, she called this decent interval of time. A period in which to travel, meditate, meet interesting people, have a breast enlargement and work done on her face.

At the fulfilment of which, looking simultaneously younger and older than her years and ever so slightly Asiatic, she sliced into the envelope with a letter opener made of the horn of one of the rhinos she intermittently marched through the centre of Manchester to preserve. Unable to see how being able to identify the three biggest lies of the twentieth century, or to name the fifty richest “foreign” families in the United Kingdom, or to suggest a viable scheme for assassinating Tony Blair, would yield her the ideal partner, she put her father’s test in the bin and devised trials more likely to yield the sort of man she thought she wanted. On her twenty-first birthday she attended a swinger’s party in Alderley Edge, having taken the sensible precaution of ascertaining first that her mother would not be there. She went wearing a Formula One driver’s suit and goggles and jiggling the keys to each of her cars—a Volkswagen Beetle, a BMW Alpina, and a Porsche Carrera. These, once she had secured the attention of the majority of the guests, she threw into an ice bucket and went outside to wait in the Beetle. That fights broke out over the BMW and the Porsche but no one followed her to the Volkswagen didn’t entirely surprise her, given that this was Cheshire, but she felt she’d learned an invaluable lesson. Deceived by ornament and the glitter of appearance, men were incapable of seeing substance let alone valuing it. She became a lesbian for a year, received instruction in holy orders from a nun who had once done secretarial work for her father, tried her hand at modelling, journalism, photography and kinetic sculpture, had her breasts reduced, and settled finally for running a restaurant—though she had no cookery skills—in what had been the stables of the Old Belfry.

She called the restaurant Utopia and envisaged it as the centrepiece of that experiment in idealistic living her father had often talked to her about but never got round to putting into practice. Guests would be invited to stay the night, or even the weekend, go on treasure hunts, play croquet, fall in and out of love, treat one another beautifully, avail themselves of therapies of various kinds from Ayurvedic massage to marriage guidance—Plurabelle herself excelled at mediating between stressed partners, having practised for many years on her parents—inveigh against wealth, though only the wealthy could afford to attend, and of course enjoy food that bespoke honest endeavour combined with profligacy. Cottage pie washed down with Krug Clos d’Ambonnay. Or white Alba truffle with tap water. Eventually, she told a reporter from
Cheshire Life
, she would put her own ornamental virginity on the menu but as yet had not devised a method for distinguishing the right buyer from the wrong.

Though highly photogenic in the gamin style, with a retroussé nose, a Daisy Duck mouth, golden tresses, a throaty voice that brought to mind a bee buzzing in a windowpane in late summer, and a Scandinavian weather girl’s figure, Plurabelle Shalcross had her father’s fascinated mistrust of the media. No, she wouldn’t make a television programme about her Utopia weekends, but then again, if it were to be a series, maybe she would. To the idea of bartering her virginity on screen she brought the same complex of scruple and consent, with both finally winning out. Better, surely, from the point of view of audience interest, to keep the question of her finding the right man forever in suspense. Week in, week out, she could set new challenges and, week in, week out, suitors would fail them. Thus she laughed, cried, frolicked, cooked badly and, as episode followed episode, adjudicated—not just between lovers prepared to joust to win her, but between the affairs of others among her guests. Soon, imperceptibly, her programmes came to be about judgement as much as food and love. A new series entitled
The Kitchen Counsellor
became an overnight success. Couples, friends, even lifelong enemies, would bring their disputes to Plurabelle’s table where, as she served them delectable dishes prepared behind the scenes by someone else, she would deliver verdicts held to be binding at least in the sense that all parties had agreed to abide by them in their release forms.

Not only was this a cheaper option than going to law or even arbitration, it gave combatants a taste of passing fame and, still more alluringly, Plurabelle’s incomparable sagacity. Who cared, after that, whether they had won their argument or lost it!

For those for whom fame was less important than vindication, Plurabelle, flushed with success, initiated a live interactive Webchat facility called Bicker. Here, the contentious would submit their grievances to the arbitration of the British public. “I can’t be the one who decides everything,” Plurabelle told her friends. But the British public turned out to be too vitriolic an arbitrator even for its own taste, the site consumed itself in rage, and Plurabelle was once again the person who—in the humane spirit of it not mattering whether anything was decided or not—decided everything.

Life was a game and Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever Wiser Than Solomon Christine its master of ceremonies.


Oh, but sadness is a curse.

Plurabelle’s mother told her it was natural in a girl who had recently lost a father. But Plurabelle sought a deeper cause. Or maybe a more superficial cause. A different cause, anyway.

Her mother couldn’t help her with that. “Philosophy exceeds my maternal brief,” she said. “Why don’t you go to sadness classes in Wilmslow?”

“Because I don’t need to be taught it. I need to get rid of it.”

“That’s what they do there,” her mother said. “I put it wrong. It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous only for sad rich people.”

“Will I have to stand up and say, ‘Hello, my name is Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever Christine, I have a personal fortune in excess of twenty million pounds and I am a saddist’? Because if I do I’m not going.”

Her mother shrugged. In her view what her daughter needed was a lover. When you have a lover there’s no time to be sad.

Plurabelle went anyway, despite her initial reluctance. It’s possible that she too secretly hoped to find a lover there. Though God knows she didn’t need any more sadness around her. In order not to be recognised she wore a headscarf that made her look as though she had toothache. Most of the others were in disguise too. We are sad because we’re famous, Plurabelle thought. But the convenor told the gathering not to look for reasons right away, not to attribute it to ambition or stress or the spirit of competition and envy prevailing in the Golden Triangle. They were sad because they were sad. The only important thing was not to be in denial.

Over coffee, after the first session, she discussed this idea of not looking for a reason for their sadness with an older, elegant man whom she’d noticed at the meeting, sitting somewhat apart and staring ahead of him as though the sorrows of ordinary mortals were not to be compared to his. He introduced himself, in a manner that was part apologetic and part disdainful, as D’Anton, and close up seemed to her to be sad because he was homosexual (or at least not definitively heterosexual), for which, as she understood it, they were also not to look for reasons. They talked at length in a serious vein, after which she asked him to one of her Utopia house parties. It was up to him whether he wanted to be filmed or not. Bring someone, if you like, she told him. But he arrived alone, bearing an enormous glass paperweight in the centre of which was a teardrop. “That’s beautiful,” she said, “but you shouldn’t have.” He made light of the gift. Among the objets d’art he made a living from importing, he explained, were glass paperweights. This one came from a small village in Japan where they’d been blowing glass since the fourteenth century and no one knew how to do anything else. She wondered if the teardrop was human or animal. They say it’s the teardrop of whoever beholds it, he told her. Whereupon they both cried a little and held on to each other as though they meant never to let go.

Soon D’Anton became a regular visitor, sometimes staying after the rest of the weekend guests had gone home. They found comfort in each other’s melancholy. “You must think it’s ridiculous me living in all this splendour and still being sad,” she said.

“Not at all,” he answered, shaking his head. “I import beautiful objects from Japan, Grenada, Malibu, Mauritius and Bali, and have a home in each, and yet I am sad in all of them.”

“Bali is one place I haven’t yet been to,” Plurabelle said. “What’s it like?”

“Sad.”

Plurabelle shook her head in sympathy. “I can imagine,” she said. Then, after a moment’s contemplation, she asked him, “Do you think it’s because we have too much?”

BOOK: Shylock Is My Name
4.5Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Taking Chances by S.J. Maylee
A Letter for Annie by Laura Abbot
Consequences by Sasha Campbell
The Only Victor by Alexander Kent
A Winter of Ghosts by Christopher Golden, Thomas Randall
Don't Let Go by Jaci Burton
RoadBlock by Bishop, Amelia