The Believers (2 page)

"This is the rude American from last night," Joel said, when he called the next day.

"Oh," Audrey said, "you're not rude."

"I would have called earlier," Joel went on, "but it took me a while to find your number. Do you know how many A. Howards there are in the phone directory? I've spoken to most of them this morning."

"You didn't need--"

"I wanted to apologize for my behavior last night. I think I upset your boyfriend."

"He's not my boyfriend."

There was a brief silence as they registered the eagerness with which she had disowned Martin.

"And you don't need to apologize," she went on. "He was very badly behaved."

On the way home from the party, she and Martin had taken shelter from the rainstorm under a shop awning on Tottenham Court Road, and Martin had tried to kiss her. Prompted by a hazy sense of indebtedness, she had let him at first. But the gluey sensation of his tongue in her mouth had defeated the compliant instinct, and after a few moments, she had reared away. "I'm sorry," she told him, "I can't."

"Don't be daft," Martin had grunted, pulling her toward him.

For a while, they had struggled--lurching clumsily back and forth, like boxers locked in a hostile embrace; then one of Audrey's pumps had fallen off into the road with a clatter, and Martin had released her. "You know what you are?" he had panted as she bent down in the gutter to retrieve her shoe. "A fucking cock-tease is what you are."

"Well, you're very kind," Joel was saying now, "but I'd still like to make it up to you. Might I take you for a coffee or a drink sometime?"

"I--"

"The catch is, I have meetings all day and evening Monday, and I'm leaving Tuesday morning to go back to the States, so it's really got to be today."

"Oh, dear..."

"You're booked up?"

"Well, yes. I'm going to visit my parents this afternoon."

"Hmm. And I guess you're the kind of good daughter who wouldn't put your parents off just to come and have a drink with a fellow you hardly know?"

Audrey considered this.

"Okay," Joel said, mistaking her hesitation for refusal. "I guess I'll have to come with you to your parents."

She laughed. "I don't think that would work. They live in Chertsey."

"Sure it would!" he said, warming to the role of determined suitor. "I love Chertsey! Where is it?"

"It's an hour and a half on the train."

"Fine! I love trains! I'll be very well behaved, I promise."

"I'm not sure you...I mean, I don't think you'd find it very amusing."

"Let me worry about that."

She thought for a moment. And then, to her surprise, she said yes.

They met at 2:00 pm under the clock at Waterloo. The previous night's downpour had slackened off to a steady gray drizzle, and Joel was wearing a pristine, cream-colored raincoat that seemed to glow in the dim light of the station. Audrey, who at the last minute had rejected the servile implications of trying to look pretty, arrived in an anorak and an odd little rain bonnet made of transparent plastic.

"You see, I made it!" Joel exclaimed.

"Yes, you did!"

They laughed, both a little stunned by the impetuousness with which they had undertaken this adventure.

Once they were aboard the train, a silence fell upon them, and they took refuge in the view--pretending to be engrossed by the vignettes of rain-blurred suburbia slipping by their window: a woman standing, hands on hips, in the junk-filled backyard of a terraced house; a black dog racing across a sodden football field; a lone youth at a bus stop, dipping a spidery hand into his steaming bouquet of chips.

From Audrey's anxious host's perspective, these scenes seemed ridiculously melancholic: a parody of English drear. She blushed angrily at the dowdiness of her country--at the folly of having brought this man to survey it. And to think that she had counted on the train journey to provide the picturesque portion of the trip! She glanced at Joel, still tightly wrapped in his embarrassing mackintosh, and wondered if she ought to warn him about her parents. He was looking down the corridor now, at the slow advance of a railway employee pushing a tinkling trolley of tea and buns. Turning to meet Audrey's eyes, he smiled. His teeth were as white and symmetrical as bathroom tiles.

Joel was wondering if perhaps he had been wrong to insist on this outing. Who knew what quaint rules of English etiquette he was forcing the girl to break by thrusting himself upon her like this? Perhaps she feared for her virtue. Perhaps...no, he wasn't going to worry about it. He wasn't going to let anything spoil the fun. This was his first trip to London--his first trip outside North America. There was nothing his gaze lit upon that did not remind him of his intrepidity. The faded red leather of the train seats. The splendid dilapidation of that station they had just left. The way Audrey sat across from him, so stiffly, clutching her unbecoming rain bonnet in her fist. She was, he had decided, impossibly, romantically English: a figure out of--well, out of a book about English people.

He began to tell her about himself. He described his work with the Freedom Riders in Georgia and Mississippi. "Negroes are the most disenfranchised people in America," he said, "and they're up against the most powerful people in America: the white establishment." He joked about the time he had been kicked by a police captain in the bus station in Jackson. He mentioned, with what he hoped was appropriate humbleness, that he had recently been asked by the Reverend Martin Luther King to join his legal team. He showed her a piece of paper on which he had copied out a quote from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: "As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at peril of being judged not to have lived."

"I carry that with me everywhere I go," he said. "Just to remind myself."

Audrey nodded, trying to hide her alarm. She did not know who Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was, or what the word "disenfranchised" meant. She had never met a Negro.

Joel looked at her, feeling baffled and bad-tempered. Why did she not say anything? Why did she not congratulate him on the valor of his deeds, or show surprise that a man of his accomplishments was paying such courtly attention to her?

"You haven't told me anything about yourself," he said, wondering if perhaps he had missed some crucial fact of her biography that would explain her self-possession.

Her reply was a little reluctant--she was not as used to treating herself as a topic of conversation as he was--but she seemed to give up the facts truthfully enough. Her parents were Polish, she told him. (The original family name was Holcman.) She had grown up in Hackney, the younger of two sisters. Her father was a tailor--now retired, owing to a heart condition. She had left school at sixteen. She worked as a typist for an import-export business in Camden Town.

"You and I are both workers, then," he said with a smile. "Not like those kids last night." It was as he had thought. She was without distinction. This female dignity, unsupported by status or money, was a wondrous act of levitation, to be sure. But he was anxious to have it done with now--to be told the trick of it. A girl who could
never
be talked down to would be a little exhausting in the long run.

Audrey's parents lived on the ground floor of a small shabby-looking house just behind Chertsey High Street. The rain had turned its red brick to a somber shade of brown. When the front door opened, an unpleasant, complicated smell of old meals gusted out from the interior. The woman who answered the door was white-haired and drastically fat. Her vast bosom strained against the confines of her floral housecoat; her swollen feet spilled over the edges of her slippers like rising dough escaping its pan. Audrey spoke quickly in Polish. After a moment or two, the woman's face lit up with understanding, and she extended a chubby hand to Joel. "Come," she said in a heavy Polish accent. "You are welcome." Her forlorn smile acted on her face like a stone thrown into water. Flesh rippled; chins multiplied. Only now, as he entered the dank house, did it dawn on him that this must be Audrey's mother.

In the hallway, another door opened, and he was thrust into a tiny, hot, ornament-choked room where an elderly man sat slumped before an electric bar heater. Audrey and the mother both began speaking to him at once in Polish. While he listened, the man gazed at Joel appraisingly. At length, he smiled, just as his wife had done, and stood up to greet the visitor.

Mr. Howard was as slender and wizened as his wife was wide and pneumatic. When he and Joel shook hands, his tendons crackled like chicken bones in the young man's firm grasp. Joel was relieved of his coat, and a cat was brusquely shooed from a crumbling, doily-covered chair. Audrey and Mrs. Howard left the room to make tea.

"So, you like England?" Mr. Howard asked as Joel sat down.

"Oh, yes, very much," Joel assured him. The room in which they were sitting faced onto the street, so that he had to strain to hear Mr. Howard's soft voice over the sounds of playing children and passing cars outside. Periodically, the shadow of a pedestrian would loom up against the net curtains, making him start.

"But the business opportunities are not so good as in America?" Mr. Howard asked. His face, with its sunken cheeks and rheumy eyes, could have been the symbol for misfortune on a tarot card.

Joel paused. "No, I guess not."

"America is top place for business," Mr. Howard said. "If I had my life over again, I would go to America. But now, is too late."

He stared at Joel, as if daring him to challenge this melancholy conclusion.

Joel nodded. He was beginning to feel slightly panicked by the heat and squalor of the room. The chair that he was sitting on smelled strongly of cat pee. Mr. Howard's sweater was dotted with food stains. Whatever malaise hung over this house could not be attributed to poverty, he thought. Cleanliness cost nothing, after all. His own parents, poor as they were, had always kept a spotless home. To this day, his mother would insist on boiling the antimacassars if company was coming. No, the dirt and disorder here suggested a failure of will, a moral collapse of some kind.

"It's very kind of you to let me intrude on your Sunday afternoon like this," he said.

Mr. Howard waved the comment away. "How much do you pay your workers? What is average wage in America?" he asked.

It occurred to Joel that Mr. Howard was under some misapprehension about what he did for a living. He was talking as if Joel were a businessman. Joel decided against correcting the error. He did not want to risk contradicting whatever Audrey had chosen to tell her parents about him. And in any case, it seemed pedantic to insist on the truth when Mr. Howard was clearly so engaged by the falsehood. Remembering his traveler's worldliness, he gamely rose to the challenge of posing as an entrepreneur.

Presently Audrey and her mother returned with the tea things. Audrey poured. Mrs. Howard dispensed biscuits and beamed at Joel as he ate one. Mr. Howard said something to Audrey. "He says you're a clever man," Audrey translated. Heartened by the father's good opinion and the mother's feminine twitter, Joel grew expansive. He admired Mrs. Howard's tea set and affected to be interested in her description of its provenance. He listened, with a subtle knitting of his brow, to Mr. Howard's sorrowful account of his heart problems. He related funny stories about his time in England and complained lightheartedly about the awful weather. Mr. and Mrs. Howard chuckled in their muted, unhappy way, and told Audrey--Audrey was the medium for all compliments--that Mr. Joel ought to be on the stage.

Later, when both parents had briefly left the room, Joel turned to Audrey. "I'm having a great time," he said gallantly. "Your father is terrific." He paused, fearing that this last remark might have stretched credibility. But Audrey did not cringe, or challenge the generosity of the judgment.

"Yes," she agreed. "He's a very good man."

Her loyalty startled him. Even now, at the age of thirty-two, Joel was still prone to roll his eyes behind his parents' backs when presenting them to his friends.

After a couple of hours, Audrey said it was time to go. Mrs. Howard protested, but Audrey prevailed. Coats were fetched. There were more handshakes. Mrs. Howard kissed Joel on the cheek. The door clicked shut, and they were back out on the street, breathing in the blessed coolness of the damp evening. Joel felt buoyant. He had handled the queer little episode very well, he thought. And now that he was freed from the greenhouse heat of that terrible front room, the visit was beginning to seem funny: a rich addition to his store of experience.

On the train journey back to London, Audrey was silent and formidably erect in her seat. Joel watched her anxiously. He would have liked to touch her, but he could think of no physical approach that would not seem brutish. As he considered how they would accomplish their good-byes at the station, a gloomier view of the day began slowly to assert itself. Those parents had not really been amusing at all, he thought. They--and the great, unspecified sadness of their house--had been awful. What a silly adventure this had been: how pointless to have spent one of his last days in London chasing after a girl! In forty-eight hours he would be gone, and they would never see each other again.

When they disembarked at Waterloo, he turned to Audrey with a resigned smile. "That was great. Thank you for taking pity on a foreign visitor."

"It was my pleasure," Audrey said, ignoring his outstretched hand. "Shall we go back to your hotel?"

He was staying, along with all the other Americans in his delegation, at a place in Bayswater--a tatty Greek-owned establishment, with a grandiose foyer. He wondered if there would be a fuss about taking a woman to his room, but the desk clerk barely glanced at Audrey when he handed over the key.

Up in the spartan, high-ceilinged room, with its little sink, marbled green by the dripping tap, Audrey took off her damp shoes and socks and then her anorak. Joel noticed for the first time her long and elegant arms. "What a funny place," she was saying as he bent down to kiss her. "Have you been lonely staying here?"