My Other Life (30 page)

"Have I ever shown you my Lears?" she said, glancing at an Edward Lear watercolor of the Nile and quickly sizing it up.

As she passed me on her way into the sitting room—she had not waited to be asked—I had a sense of other men on her, and I recalled how the bronze shell of the turtle door knocker at her house was stained and black with fingerprints, all the men who had entered. But this was more an odor than anything visible, and it enclosed her body in a layer like an atmosphere she carried with her, like the murk of dust and smoke that lay over London, so that London was never distinct except up close. From a plane, from a distance, the city was blurred, as she was.

"How very interesting," she was saying.

Her manner was a little chilly. Every encounter, every conversation I had had with Lady Max was like a job interview; but it was she who was turned down. Today was slightly different. She was responding to me in a defensive and remote way, treating me as a male—not a friend, or someone with a name, but a man. There had been so many other men. And men were so predictable. This was her weakness, her poor judgment, her bad timing, and the reason she would fail in the end; she believed all men were the same.

This made me dislike her and fear her even more, because a
woman with that belief would blame me for the harm another man had done her. Seeing her prowling in my house, looking two stories down at the garden below, gave me pause. Impulsive and greedy, loving to shock, capable of howling—these traits made her seem destructive.

"Don't worry. I'm not going to throw myself out the window."

It was precisely what I feared.

"But if I did, you'd be in a jolly awkward position explaining it."

"If you jumped out this window," I said, and looked down at the wet paving stones, "it seems to me that you'd be the one in the awkward position."

"Yes. Maybe I should push you instead."

"Why would you do a silly thing like that?"

I tried to appear calm, but what she said terrified me, and I was watching her, so that she couldn't lunge and catch me off balance.

"Because you've been avoiding me. I don't like that."

Was it so simple? That what made her passionate was that I was unwilling? But she was also stubborn. My refusal had made me different from the others, and it made her more insistent.

She had paused near a stack of magazines and papers on a side table. Each of them contained something I had written.

"I put those people on to you."

"But I did the writing."

She raised her face to me and pursed her lips, to jeer. "There are so many writers in London," she said. "Many of them are just as clever as you, but much more polite. They would have thanked me."

She lit a cigarette, and again I had the impression, when she exhaled, of someone blowing smoke into the room.

"I don't think you quite realize what I've done for you."

"Do I seem ungrateful?"

"Very," she said, and looked around. "Your little house. Your little life. Your little wife."

She peered across the back garden to the row of houses beyond, and the sun was casting its last redness over the roofs and through the black branches and the air was thickening with twilight.

"Places like this make my heart sick," she said.

"I can't do what you want me to do."

"I don't know why I came here," she said.

In that moment she looked abandoned—truly lost. Some women could seem so pathetic in their rejection, almost tragic, as though they were about to lose their lives. If they met the right man, they had a new life. Their fantasy was that a man could work miracles for them. But for most rejected men it was not tragedy, simply bad luck—the breaks, fooled again; move on, pal.

"I don't think I want you anymore," she said, turning away, looking sad. I had never seen her in this mood and it shocked me, her mute face, her small shoulders, her slightly hunched, defeated-looking posture.

Perhaps she wanted me to say,
Tell me what to do to please you, and I'll do it.
But I could not utter those words to her. It was not a fear of sex—on the contrary, I was attracted to her. But sex for her was not the meal—it was only the first course. She would not have been satisfied until she had all of me. She wanted more than passionate afternoons and the occasional party. I had the powerful fear that she wanted to suck my soul out of my body.

Without speaking again, she wandered out of the room and found the telephone in the hall. She picked up the receiver and dialed, and I felt sorry for her again. I said nothing, only watched her struggling, calling for help. I assumed she was calling a taxi.

"Julian!" she said.

What was this new voice? It was gleeful, it was false. There was something diabolical in the way this wholly different voice rang out of her body, as though she were a lump of ectoplasm that could be sorrowful one moment and coquettish the next. Like London itself, Dickensian in one street, dreary in another, renovated, crass, cozy, dangerous—not one city but many.

"It's me. What about our drink then?" she was saying. She stopped and listened, then said, "Perfect."

In this new voice she rattled on, mentioning a publisher, a magazine, an editor, a cafe, and she settled on a day and a time—tomorrow, in fact. The voice quacking like a duck at the other end of the line sounded surprised and grateful—a young man's eager voice, thankful for the sudden interruption on an otherwise empty afternoon. I knew that feeling.

She kept me waiting a while longer while she chattered with this man, and then she hung up and said over her shoulder, "Must be off. Thanks for the use of the phone."

I touched her arm, so that she would turn and listen to me.

"A prostitute did that to me once in a hotel," I said. "She had finished with me. She was calling her next customer."

"You are a shit," Lady Max said.

I opened the front door. In our passing from one room to the other, from the back of the house to the front, night had fallen. The word "shit" was still on her lips as she stepped onto the landing. I had always regarded her as lovely, even in her pestering and greed, but now I felt I knew her well, and she seemed ugly, bony, bloodless, witchlike.

"Don't be surprised if you find life in London rather different after this."

It was a threat, and she left believing that I was doomed, that I would be lost and forgotten. She went into the street and disappeared, swallowed by the London darkness. I was not afraid. At once my house seemed large and safe. I did not mind being left behind if it meant that I would never have to see this woman again.

The children came home from school a few minutes later. It was Friday, two free days ahead of them, and they purified the house with their laughter. From that day, the weather in London improved.

***

Spring came. Alison knew nothing except that for a period I was very happy and productive. My book was still unfinished. But a book was not a job or a project—it was part of my life, and I liked my life.

Still, when I wrote a review or took a trip, I remembered Lady Max's threat, which more and more sounded like a witch's curse. Defying it strengthened me—and I was even bolder when I realized that she could not destroy me. It meant that my writing mattered, and that she had not created me, nor was she involved in my achievement. Public relations were her game, and so it was with witches.

Once I saw her at a publisher's party. She seemed ugly, almost monstrous to me, with her huge white forehead and popping eyes and her greedy mouth and red claws. I intended to say hello, but I had ceased to exist for her. There was a London way of dealing with people you had written off. She froze me and then cut me—did
not see me, although she certainly noticed me. She radiated a poisonous awareness of me as she made a beeline for a young writer at the far side of the room, the same Julian she had called from my house that last day.

I went home happy and did not see her again. Lady Max had taken Julian as her lover. He was her project now. He was a northerner, new to London, and he lived in Hampstead and wrote of misery in provincial coal towns. Was Lady Max the reason he was all over the papers, being helpfully mentioned and reviewed and offered work and short-listed for the spring book prizes? Time would tell. In the meantime, Julian became known—as perhaps I had been—as one of Lady Max's young men.

"I think Julian is a fearful little tick," Musprat said.

We had resumed our snooker games, but not at the Lambourne. Musprat was avoiding the Lambourne because he owed so much money, both in club dues and bar bills. We played these days at the Regency Snooker Hall in Clapham Junction, two pounds an hour, tea and pork pies extra, and a Cockney lad with earrings and tattoos at the cash register saying, "Is that the lot then, guv?"

"But she's worse," Musprat said. "You know that."

I said I didn't. I wanted to encourage him, to hear his version.

"I think about her every time I do my taxes," he said. "She doesn't pay, she's not English."

"Of course she is. Her mother's a marchioness."

"But Lady Max is American. She took out citizenship—for tax reasons. Carries a U.S. passport. How else do you suppose she manages to go on living in London?"

I should have known. Yet I was grateful to Lady Max. She had shown me that I would never be a Londoner. That was a valuable lesson. And because I had not been her lover I could see her clearly, and London too.

W
HEN
The Mosquito Coast
was published, many people took a sudden interest in me; some offered me work. Then the movie came out and everyone was nice to me for a whole year. I seemed to be on good terms with the world. People sent me books, birthday cards, ideas, and invitations. Lonely people in far-off places wrote me long letters swearing that the main character in my book was exactly like their husband or father. In writing my book I had become part of their lives. Even complete strangers were eager to make my acquaintance. Once again I thought: A book is a miracle.

I did not need to explain myself. Certain people, of whom writers are one kind, acquire a peculiar celebrity, become famous but remain obscure. I had a sort of public biography—who I was, what I stood for, a character and persona. It was a collection of colorful fragments that, added up, was so untrue I still retained all my privacy. And because jacket photographs are misleading, no one knew my face. Only my name was accurate. That was convenient; it was all I wanted.

Friends whom I had not spoken to for years began to look me up. A popular book had that effect, of putting you in touch; the publishing house became like a post office for forwarding letters. The letters pleased me, because they gave me access to the past. If I were cut off from these old friends, I would wither like a plant with severed roots. So I prospered for all sorts of reasons.

One of these voices from the past was Rafe Sheppard. He had written to me before—once, briefly. He reminded me of this in Covent Garden—we had met at the Virago bookshop and walked to a café for lunch.

"I remember when this was a vegetable market," he said.

So did I—the baskets of Brussels sprouts, the oranges and apples, the stacks of torn-off cabbage leaves, the wagons, the porters, and the tramps foraging and sleeping rough, waiting for the arrival of the St. Mungo's van which brought hot tea and sandwiches to the homeless. Just over there on that patch of cobblestones I had sat and listened to a defiant tramp telling me how he hated the free hostels for the homeless men, because they smelled, they were dirty, they were full of what he called black beedes. He preferred pushing his battered pram containing everything he owned twenty-three miles through south London and into Surrey, where he slept rough in a copse on Mitcham Common.

I told Rafe Sheppard this. The way he smiled told me he was not listening. He said, "I wrote you a letter years ago, when we got to London."

"And I didn't reply?"

He shook his head.

That was odd. I nearly always replied, and I liked Rafe Sheppard. He was my first English friend, an anthropologist who had done fieldwork in Africa in the 1950s, and a good linguist and a skilled teacher of Bantu languages. He had taught me the structures of Swahili and Chinyanja. I had had trouble with the initial
m
in words such as
mkate
and
mwalimu.
He had said with a linguist's precision, "It's the same as the
m
in fascism." The language had stood me in good stead, and it was he who had shown me how to make language teaching an activity, getting students to chant "It's a dog ... It's a duck." He had increased my confidence. He had given me something valuable. So why hadn't I replied to his letter?

"I was married then," he said. "I was hoping that we could get together. My wife was very disappointed."

I felt rotten about it, and then I remembered the note of long ago. I had been suffering in London at that time.

"Wasn't your wife studying in London?"

"No," he said. "She was working on a book of poems."

When I heard about someone's wife working on a book of poems, I never thought of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The person who came to mind was someone batty and house-bound. Poetry, when it was mentioned like this, often seemed like the occupation of a handicapped person, in the same category as doing needlepoint or woodcarving.

"I mentioned that in the letter."

"It rings a bell." And then it all came back to me.

"She was very keen to meet you."

The letter had gone something like this:

...I've remarried. What does Doctor Johnson say about second marriages? "The triumph of hope over experience." But I took my time.
Haraka, haraka, haina baraka.
Maria is very talented. She's American—I met her at Syracuse in the summer of 1973. She's here on a Rafe Sheppard Sabbatical Fellowship, writing a dissertation on Frieda Lawrence, having already won a prize for the story of our honeymoon (100% autobiographical!) in the
Oakland Review.
She is also putting together a book of poems, and both she and I are hoping we can meet...