We Had It So Good (6 page)

They got back in the van.

“Roll another joint, man,” said Ivan. “We need to be wasted to see this.”

They were profoundly stoned. The moon acquired satellite planets and the lanes were full of goblins. Andrea began to speak of a book called
Lord of the Rings,
which everyone but Stephen had read. Apart from the essential works of high school,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Grapes of Wrath
and some Jack London, Stephen had only read two novels,
The Catcher in the Rye
and
Catch-22
. “I'm waiting for another novel with the word
catch
in the title,” he said.

Grace had put on a cloak, he had never seen a garment like it before, apart from movies about the olden days with Errol Flynn when people wrote with feathers. Andrea shivered in her green velvet dress; he wondered whether to put an arm around her.

The van stopped. They got out on the edge of a steep escarpment.

An outline in white lay below them, but Stephen could barely make it out in the darkness. Andrea came and stood next to him.

“What do you think?”

“I don't know, I can't see anything.”

“You're not really enjoying yourself, are you?”

“I wouldn't say that.”

“Look, Ivan and Grace are making orgone.”

A few feet way he could see a moving shape on the ground.

“Is that why we schlepped all the way out here? So they could fuck on a hill?”

“Probably.”

“Why are you and I here?”

“Ivan likes company. He needs an audience.”

“Your friend Grace is very ballsy, and I don't mean that in a good way.”

“She wouldn't mind you saying that, she'd take it as a compliment.”

“Are you cold?”

“A bit.”

He put his arm around her. She laid her head on his shoulder and he smelt her skin. Next he kissed her, because it seemed like the expected thing to do.

U
ndressed, her skin was ivory, with a tuft of coppery hair. His clothes were rags on the floor covering her green dress.

“That was quick,” he said. “I'm really sorry. And now your sheets are all wet.” He rolled her away from the seeping patch. “For crying out loud! What's this?”

She looked down. “Oh, it's true then. You do bleed a little.”

He was stunned.

“I don't know what to say.”

“You don't have to say anything.”

“I had no idea, how old are you?”

“Twenty. It's late, isn't it?”

“Why me? Why did you decide on me of all people?”

“I suppose because you were so unimpressed with us. And didn't want to know why I wear this and Grace wears that or who we are and where we come from and do we know Giles or Peter or Claire. You just tagged along. And you were very funny on that fence.”

She had never met an American, she thought they must all be like him, with black hair and beaky noses, and an up-front way of talking. She supposed there must be endless depths of complication, hidden under a straightforward surface. It would be interesting to find out.

“And why me?” she went on.

“Well, I guess because you were there.”

He realized it was a disappointing answer, her smile had faded. But having made love to her, or rather, abruptly combusted inside her, he began to like the
idea
of her. He liked her red hair and the bumps of her ivory body underneath her long velvet dress, though the dress itself he couldn't stand. He knew it was polite, after you had made love to someone, to properly introduce yourself, to give a little bit of Stephen and to receive a little bit of Andrea back in return. Once these presents had been exchanged, you could decide how much more you wanted. Or if you should get out of bed fast, and run.

So he told her all about Marilyn Monroe's champagne mink and growing up in L.A., and she told him about the froggy day, the hotel, her parents' disappearance, as she smoked her little roll-up cigarette. Stephen found the tale so bizarre she might as well have been describing Hottentots. Parents were there to
love you
. (You fall for what you do not know, he figured out eventually. But you do fall, the loss of balance is the point.)

But he also wanted to know about the blonde, the dragon-lady, what was her story?

“That's a big question. You have to begin by understanding that Grace made me. I am her creation.”

“How could she have made you? That's crazy.” He recoiled from her in the bed, she felt his withdrawal and knew she had to get him back.

“No, it's true. We met on my first day. We had rooms in college next door to each other. I was a country hick with hay in my ears in a moldy Crimplene miniskirt from a jumble sale in Truro and Grace showed me how to dress and what films to say I'd seen, even when I hadn't.”

“You shouldn't be ashamed of where you come from and who you are.”

“It wasn't shame, exactly.”

“But why would you listen to
her
?”

“Well, because I didn't know anything, nothing at all. I could easily have been one of those first-term suicides, there's always a few. People come up, they've worked so hard to get here, and then they arrive and they don't know anyone and they don't fit in and it's all far too much so they top themselves. Someone threw himself off the tower at Magdalen last year. But I don't think I'd have done it that way, I just would have got terribly depressed and swallowed a lot of aspirin. But anyway, there was Grace, and she took me in hand. She always said I had something, potential. And she had a plan.”

“What was that?”

“She was able to take me home in the vacs to stay. It wasn't a problem because I didn't have a home anymore, not anywhere to go back to, so the idea was that I would always be there.”

“Why?”

Stephen had only known loving, irritating, aggravating parents. He was the sun which came up every morning in their eastern horizon and rose higher and higher. He believed that he (and, in a lesser way, his sisters) were the sole purpose of his parents' existence.

“So I could stand between her and her father. I am the
obstacle,
you see.”

He considered this proposition. Only one idea attached itself to it, something he had read about but by no means understood.

“You mean he messed around with her?”

She thought for a moment.

“Yes. He did. He messed around with her head. I don't expect you to understand. No one does, really, and that is Grace's misfortune.”

“What exactly did he do?”

But she remained silent, and they lay there looking at the walls
of her bedroom, which she had covered with postcards of faces, portraits, of kings and queens, society beauties, statesmen and artists.

It was the summer the astronauts walked on the moon. There was nothing more glamorous than an astronaut, not even the film stars with their minks. Stephen wished he'd gone into astrophysics or any science that would investigate the stars. What was matter, anyway? Sometimes he saw people as swirling dense clouds of proteins walking along the street in colored formations and wished he could shrink them down to a size that could be examined through a microscope. He'd like to take Andrea to the lab and irradiate her with light, see her bones.

A month after the moon walk, Ivan got tickets for the Isle of Wight rock festival. The short ferry ride over was the first time Stephen had been on a boat since he had arrived in England. You could see the point of departure and the point of arrival, a journey of no more than a few minutes, and he thought of this toy-town life he was leading in his miniature house and the green alleys you drove down to reach somewhere else.

Next, as far as the eye could see, hippies. Chicks who took their tops off and walked around bare-breasted, guys in bell-bottoms, naked dirty children and an overpowering stench of shit, boiling brown rice, orange peel, joss sticks and patchouli oil.

Bob Dylan was a tiny figure in a white suit on the stage.

After several hours, Ivan reappeared from a mission to score some hash, his eyes like spinning tops, and without Grace. He waved his arm in the direction of the stage. “She's back there somewhere,” he said.

“How did that happen?” Stephen asked, jealously.

“I don't know, she said she ran into someone she knew who was with the crew. He was going to take her through.”

“How could she know anyone? Who does she know?” Stephen could not bear the idea of her chatting to Bob Dylan, the idea infuriated him, if anyone was going to meet Dylan it should have been him, they could have talked about so much stuff, such as the meanings of certain lyrics he had been thinking about for years, and hitchhiking across America, and being American. Dylan would have said, “Man, you should come see me sometime in New York. I'm living in the Village now. Drop by for coffee, when do you get back to the States?”

It was a long time before she turned up again, sitting outside the tent, rolling a joint with her long pale fingers. Everyone else was filthy, Grace was not.

“Did you meet Dylan?” Stephen asked.

“Yes, as a matter of fact I did.”

“And?” said Ivan.

“Well, he was okay, but I spent more time with Leonard Cohen.”

And because Grace did not usually lie, they had to believe her, though she refused to say another word about the encounter. It had either gone very well or very badly, Ivan pointed out. You could drive yourself mad wondering which it was so it was best to just take her at her word. There was no alternative.

“Do you know what her father did to her?” Stephen asked him.

“Yes, of course.”

“And was it really bad?”

Ivan was uncharacteristically silent. Eventually, he said, “Reich may not have fully understood the negative effects of orgone.”

“Reich? Do you really believe in that?”

“Look, man, the sixties are a carnival of ideas, we throw a lot of stuff in the air and some of it flies. Most of the rest falls back to earth, burns out. The decade that's coming is the one when we catch hold of all the air-bound concepts, we take them by the tail and see where they carry us. Reich I haven't entirely made my mind up about yet, but Andrea is right in one respect, capitalism is about
stimulating desire, and we have to subvert it by creating a desire counterculture, the potheads need to beat the bread-heads.”

“What has this got to do with Grace?”

“I'm thinking that if you put orgone into the hands of the wrong people, like Grace's dad, you might have a problem. We have to take all the orgone in the universe away from the Man.”

“How are we going to do that?”

“I don't see why it should be a problem. They'll all be dead soon, and then we'll take over.”

Andrea returned from the periphery bearing bowls of unidentifiable food that they ate with relish because they were perpetually hungry.

Andrea moved into Stephen's room, bringing with her a trunk of the weird clothes made by Grace and her glass vials of patchouli oil, which he surreptitiously poured down the sink.

She insisted he begin a dream diary. Every morning he had to write down as many dreams as he could remember. They were mainly a rehash of the mundane events of the previous day. “Perhaps I don't have a subconscious,” he suggested, but Andrea said that if he did not, then it would be by far the most interesting thing about him. Besides, a boy who tried on a mink stole could hardly be said not to possess repressed desires.

In Oxford people floated and drifted and spoke slowly. The word for this was
languid,
Andrea said. No one was languid in L.A., it was a city too vast not to be permanently paying attention. In his teens he had watched the surfers and hadn't got what they were after, in and out of the shore, always returning to land, their backs to the horizon. He had shipped out, he had reached somewhere, and these tiny repetitive voyages on the margins of the beach bored him. Now he revolved in a gyre.

Arriving at Oxford in jeans, sneakers, T-shirt and a World
War II–era army surplus khaki jacket he'd bought in Manhattan in 1966, and which was still going strong by the time the war in Iraq started in 2003 (if slightly threadbare), because it had been made to repel Nazi bullets, Stephen experimented under Andrea's guidance, first with a paisley scarf knotted round his neck, and then moved on to an embroidered Afghan waistcoat that stank of goats. If he went back in time to his Oxford days, he sometimes thought, he would not be able to stand the smell. No one washed enough, there were no showers, only huge cast-iron bathtubs with leaking tarnished chrome taps and a rubber hose attachment if you wanted to wash your hair.

Ivan obtained some acid. The girls said no, they wouldn't do it. Grace was entering a Marxist phase, which Ivan had already worked through at boarding school, and she sat in the garden, her back against the fence, reading Trotsky. She was not interested in altered consciousness; Andrea was, but had powerful instincts of self-preservation, having seen her father's calamitous mental collapse at the time of his bankruptcy. She knew there was no safety net, no home to go to or private sanatorium if things turned weird. She would be in the public asylum, forgotten by everyone.

Sitting on the back step with Ivan, waiting to peak, Stephen grew increasingly astounded by a dandelion.
This,
he realized, should have been his field of study all along. It was a massive proclamation of the sun, its vast gaseous starry being, and all the laws of geometry! Everything you needed to know about the physical world was right here in one common flower which grew between the cracks of Oxford pavements, ignored, and then transmuted itself overnight into a ball of cloudy white tendrils. The study of the dandelion was the path to the Nobel, so obvious yet he was, as far as he knew, the first person to study it. Unless, he thought, in a queasy pang of paranoia, John Baines was secretly racing toward Stockholm.