Thanksgiving (10 page)

And in the end, of course, we got talking. Nine and a half hours is a long time to ignore someone who is sitting closer to you than anyone in your own family would normally choose to do. We exchanged data, as one does. She was a marketing manager for the Washington State Apple Commission returning from a trade show, divorced with two teenaged children. I was separated but not yet divorced, no children, a freelance journalist heading out to do research for a newspaper series tentatively entitled
If You Want To Make
A Call, Hang Up: Virtual Realities On The Pacific Rim.

I produced a bottle of twenty-year-old, cask-strength Macallan which I had bought at a speciality shop in Old Compton Street, but was now nervous about trying to smuggle past US customs in addition to the duty-free litre in the overhead bin. A few glasses of that smoky gold spirit, cut with the mineral water which Lucy had brought along, persuaded me that it probably wasn’t a good idea either to try and import the two-hundred-gram tin of Iranian caviar I had picked up at the airport. I went up to the galley and scored a couple of teaspoons, and we proceeded to pig in.

At a certain point in the oral orgy which then ensued, we moved on to rubbishing our cabin-mates. I soon discovered that Lucy had a devastatingly acute eye for the minutest details of accent, gesture, dress, grooming and general accoutrement, combined with an ability to synthesize her findings into a scurrilously witty and unsparing caricature.

Above all, she was one of the very few women I had ever met who could make me laugh. I don’t know why, but in my experience viable humour tends to be a guy thing. Men I loathe can still crack me up, but almost none of the women I have loved at one time or another have been able to provoke more than a token smile.

Lucy was different. She would go to any lengths to avoid hurting someone’s feelings, but she was never deceived and she wasn’t a hypocrite, just so long as the object of her whispered monologue had no chance of overhearing it. This necessitated her placing her mouth interestingly close to my ear. I could feel her breath on the lobe and in the inner convolutions.

At one point a small, pale child came past, followed by a woman in her sixties with a grimly competent look. She had elaborately permed faux-blonde hair and a tightly set square jaw. She was quite short, with a massive bosom and midriff tapering down to spindly legs, and wore stretch pants and a glittery sweatshirt emblazoned with what looked like a combination of a cat and an angel. She held the girl’s shoulder with one hand, while the other grasped a dauntingly huge handbag.

‘Now there’s one tough gal,’ said Lucy. ‘Married a bum when she was still cute, then had a bunch of kids. That little waif must be one of her grandchildren, poor thing. She’s raising it because the mother turned out too flighty. She used to be herself, but that’s all over. Now she’s the matriarch of a clan of losers somewhere in the woods or east of the mountains. She rasps orders at them in a husky, smoker’s voice, then bails them out when they get in trouble. The TV is never turned off in the house, even when everyone’s asleep.’

‘So what was she doing in Europe?’ I asked, scooping out another heap of the oily grey roe and inserting it between her lips.

‘One of her no-hope sons went into the service. He’s stationed at some base in Germany, put his usual crude moves on a local
fräulein
and ended up in the brig. Patsy here knows that left to his own devices he’ll screw up completely, get a dishonourable discharge and end up back on her hands, so she went over to sort him out and show the MPs a hard way to go. The kid’s the guy’s daughter, to be produced like an onion when weeping is required. God this stuff is good. And what’s really great is, you don’t even have to be hungry to eat it.’

The next of the passengers to be subjected to our collusive malice was a fortyish man wearing one of those outdoor leisure ensembles that cost more than a Brooks Bros suit. He shambled past and then turned to wait outside the lavatory, which was occupied. Anxious to show that I could play this game too, I gave him a quick once-over. He had a generically benevolent, beaming face accessorized with expensive glasses and a dress-down Friday haircut. A social worker? Or a teacher? No, he had too much money for that. That slightly Messianic look made me think televangelist for a moment, but his clothes were straight liberal baby-boomer. And the one thing I was pretty sure about him didn’t fit with any of this.

I saw Lucy studying me with a slightly amused smile. She knew I’d tried and failed.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’

‘A corporate trainer. One of those guys who goes into Boeing or wherever and teaches them how to “enhance creativity” and “grow diversity”, or maybe spot nutcases who might flip out on the job and shoot someone or sexually harass their co-workers. The point being that when the case goes to court, the company can say, “Hey, we did everything we could! We provided training for all our people.”’

‘You sound pretty cynical. Don’t you think that stuff sometimes works?’

‘Sure it works. It works the way the KGB worked. You can scare most people into pretending to go along with almost any bullshit you want. But you haven’t changed them. People come the way they come. All that crap does is turn them into liars.’

She smiled at me.

‘Sorry if I sound bitter. I have to put up with it all the time at work, getting stuck in groups to talk about “Three things that make me special”. I mean, how difficult is it to sell apples, for God’s sake? I’m damn good at my job, and I bet I make twice what that little prick does, but he has the power to force me to crawl around the floor on all fours as part of some fucking “team-building exercise”.’

‘Here, have some more malt and calm down.’

‘I’m sorry. There’s lots of things I love about my country, but when I see someone like that I feel ashamed to be American.’

‘But he’s not American.’

‘What? Don’t be silly.’

‘I’m prepared to bet he’s British.’

‘Did you hear his accent?’

‘No, but look at the way he’s discreetly checking everyone out. He can’t hear what we’re saying, but he’s sussed that we’re talking about him and he’s letting me know that he knows. You guys don’t even notice that other people exist, never mind care what they think about you. You live in a culture without perspectives.’

‘Yank-Bashing 101. Very good, you got straight As. Hey, check out this babe. Oh, you already are.’

The previous occupant of the bathroom had emerged and was making her way along the aisle towards us. She was a woman about Lucy’s own age, or perhaps slightly younger, with long dark hair, liquid brown eyes and high cheekbones which had been carefully highlighted. She wore narrow linen trousers and a beige silk shirt opened just low enough to reveal a diamond necklace and a hint of cleavage. Her expression was sullen but determined.

‘Forget it,’ said Lucy succinctly. ‘You don’t stand a chance. Second wife is what we’re talking here. Big rock and wedding band, plus those tastefully sporty diamonds around her neck. So not some cheesy car dealer’s trophy. He’s more powerful and richer, a kind of elegant silver fox. Maybe a corporate lawyer whose first wife helped put him through law school. Note the clothes. Understated but very expensive, sort of fake casual, but a little too studied to be really sexy. She knows the deal. She doesn’t have much to say, but then she doesn’t have to say much. And when she does talk, it’s in a squeaky teenaged accent completely at odds with the look she’s trying so hard to create. Women like her always forget to get their voices fixed.’

Lucy took my arm, touching me for the first time, and turned to look me in the eye. As she leant towards me, I had a mad urge to kiss her.

‘And you know what else?’ she whispered. ‘
She doesn’t
like to fuck.
’

Window or aisle? On the flight to Paris I had my preferred choice, but the darkness fell rapidly and there was nothing to see. The aisle seat was occupied by a formidable Frenchwoman of an age which was becoming increasingly certain, embalmed in a mummy case of arrogantly elegant couture. I never found out her name. Let’s call her Madame Dupont.

I attempted without much success to strike up a conversation. She seemed both unsurprised and not particularly interested to find that I spoke her language badly, but I rattled on anyway, just for the pleasure of feeling the chewy texture of French in my mouth. Madame Dupont listened with half an ear and a vague smile, from time to time dipping compulsively into a designer bag containing moisturizing cream, bottles of Evian, fashion magazines and other accessories. A further accessory, it later turned out, was Monsieur Dupont, a wily-looking old bird who at his wish or hers was seated four rows back, but occasionally stopped off on his perambulations up and down the aisle to mumble something which sounded like a complaint to his wife, who dismissed it with an expressive shrug.

After the meal, which Madame Dupont fastidiously passed up in favour of a selection of deli delights from David’s on Geary, the attendants settled down for the night, leaving us to our own devices. The movie didn’t interest me, so I rummaged around in my coat pockets for the Walkman and tapes I had brought along. I also found the package with the British stamp which I had picked out of the mail on my return to the house. The handwriting on the Jiffy bag was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. Inside was another envelope, and a note.

Dear Tony

Here they are at long last, the photographs you requested. Have fun looking through them. Or perhaps it won’t be fun.

Anne

I remembered that during our negotiations about the divorce, I had asked my previous wife to send me the photographs of my early life which had ended up in the formidably organized and catalogued series of albums that Anne used as a shrine to the family life which, despite her strenuous efforts, she had never quite managed to create.

I opened the inner packet, which turned out not to be an envelope, just a sheet of paper folded and taped around the photographs, all of which slid down between my knees, scattering on the floor. I painfully gathered up the ones I could reach, but a few seemed to have slipped back towards the seat behind me. I ignored these for now and settled down to view what I’d come up with.

They were not in any order. The formats all varied too: larger, smaller, square, rectangular. Most were in black-and -white, the rest in assorted styles of unconvincing colour. Some had been bleached out in patches, others had faded overall. I worked my way through them, trying to put names and dates to places and faces. Even when the prints had scrawled annotations on the back, these were usually so recondite as to constitute yet another puzzle. ‘Ides of March ’71 – Eat, you Brute!!!’ I hadn’t the faintest recollection of ever having gone to a toga party, but here was the evidence which proved me wrong.

The photographs came in random bunches, rather like memories, and it took me at least half an hour to sort them into anything resembling chronological sequence. The earliest showed me with Sally, the first girl I had slept with, and only then because she’d been too kind to tell me that when she said I could spend the night, she meant on the sofa. She was kind in bed, too, which I remembered even at the time thinking wasn’t quite what I wanted. It was still a good deal better than the opposite, though, which I came across in due course with . . .

Thea? Bea? Something like that. The shot of Sally and me, taken by one of the people we shared a house with, shows the two of us on a pier in the town where we were all at university. I’m in black, my eyes averted, an existential cigarette smoking moodily between my fingers. Sally looked plumper and sexier than I remembered her, and was flirting slightly with the camera, looking obliquely up at it with a faint smile. In the one snapshot of the adolescent Lucy which I had ever seen, again taken by a college friend, her expression is almost identical.

Leah, on the other hand, stares directly at the camera with a look that seems to say ‘The very idea that you might be able to pin down a complex, free-flowing, multi-faceted, liberated woman like me with your simplistic male technology in itself constitutes an insult of the kind I have come to expect from someone like you.’ This would have been in Islington, early seventies. Leah had been my first, although by no means my last, example of that class of women, particularly prevalent then, who disliked men but felt that they sort of needed one anyway, and gave themselves and the man involved a bunch of grief as a way of demonstrating just how despicable the whole sorry business was.

Leah certainly had no intention of compromising her unique particularity by having children, and since the surrender to gender stereotypes this involves is symbolized by the female orgasm – I’m paraphrasing her rhetoric here – her attitude to sex had been ambivalent too. Theoretically, she’d held that every ‘penetrational act’ was tantamount to rape, and repeatedly accused me of ‘imposing’ orgasms on her. In practice she was the most demanding lover I have ever had, particularly when it came to the precise details of sequence, duration, technique and post-game commentary.

But I’d been young then, and saw Leah as a challenge which at least three other men in our circle were ready to take up any time I felt I couldn’t handle it, so I’d hung in there gamely. In the end she’d pretended to come around to my point of view, having finally decided that maybe she should have a child after all. I promptly ditched her. The tragedy of every relationship is that it changes the way you look at things, including the relationship itself, which it may well end by making seem irrelevant. I could forgive Leah her endless diatribes and sparring matches, anything but turning herself into a pallid version of someone I’d wished I’d never met in the first place.

Later on I learned never to mess with women who hate their mothers, and came to regard my affair with Leah as a humiliating waste of time. Now, looking at those photographs and the others in the pack, I felt only the insidious power of the past. Sally and I had met at university, where she was a year ahead of me. When she graduated, she stayed around for most of the following year, in the hope, I discovered during the bitter rows at the time of our eventual breakup, that I would marry her, settle down and have a family.