My Other Life (34 page)

Lettfish's vocabulary was crammed with Burgess words. Who else said "proleptic" or "pelagic"? Lettfish also used the words "hali-totic" and "lexeme" correctly. He sometimes overdid it with something like "brachycephalic." I had the sense that Lettfish was a better man for knowing Burgess's work; and reading the books that Burgess reviewed, he was better read, better able to cope in London, funnier, more conversational. Burgess, a relentless pedagogue (so many of his fictional characters were English teachers), was Lettfish's teacher.

He implored me to arrange a dinner for him and Burgess. He had been asking me to do this for some time, but—as I told him—I hardly saw Burgess in London. Once he had left England I saw him only a few times. He came unannounced and was hard to pin down and furtive in a way I associated with most writers, and he always left in a hurry. I did not really want to have dinner with him. We could never be close friends. I wanted simply to know him and to go on being his reader.

It was about this time that I stopped reading my day's work to Alison in the evenings. With both children away at school during the week, our lives changed. We both worked later than usual—dinnertime could be flexible, there was only the two of us. The evening had once been long and eventful, beginning with the children's dinner, ending after our meal, as I sat reading the two pages or so I had written that day. Now it was different, emptier, Alison's workday was longer, we sometimes ate separately, and now and then I went to bed alone, or she did. Though she always read the finished typescript, I had stopped reading to her. I sensed that something important was ending between us but I could not say what it was.

Lonelier, more susceptible to offers of hospitality, I saw more of Lettfish, and he reminded me each time that he was eager to have dinner with Burgess. I was willing to arrange it—I owed it to Lettfish, I felt. But it was not possible because Burgess was unavailable; that is to say, in Italy, or else in Los Angeles.

And I reminded Lettfish—who paid no attention—that Burgess was not a close friend but an acquaintance, whom I had known ten years, having met him in 1969 in Singapore. It was now 1981. I had no friends in England, I had numerous acquaintances. I had no friends anywhere. For Burgess it was the same thing. Friendship in any intimate sense, implying sacrifice and love and an unquestioning willingness to confide, is almost impossible for a writer. My writer acquaintances—Ian Musprat, for example—did not have any friends either.

Still, Sam Lettfish, the collector, the lawyer, the version of Burgess, wanted to meet his favorite writer. I said I would try to fix it. Then one afternoon I was asked to appear with Burgess on a TV program to discuss Graham Greene's work—the occasion was a new novel of Greene's. Burgess flew in from Monaco. The taping was done at the BBC in White City in the afternoon, and while we sat in the fake library set of the studio waiting to begin, I said to him, "Are you and Liana free for dinner tonight?"

He said he was free, but that Liana was back in Monaco, laid up with a broken ankle—she had slipped on a hotel step in Monte Carlo. A horrible business, he said. He had sought compensation, the poor woman had not been able to work; but not only had he not received any money, Liana and he had been persecuted by the hotel's lawyer.

"Come to my house. You can forget all about it."

"That is very kind of you."

And after the taping I phoned Lettfish. "I apologize for the short notice, but can you come to dinner tonight?"

"Sorry," he said. "I have an important meeting with a client who has just flown in from Geneva on a tax matter."

"What a shame. Burgess is coming. I knew it was crazy, inviting you at such a late hour."

Was that a challenge? The earpiece of the receiver seemed to crackle and glow, as though charged with a jolt of electricity.

"I'll be there," Lettfish said.

As the host bringing together Burgess and Lettfish, the writer and his reader, I felt an apprehension that a marriage broker must know
intensely when making an introduction, because even when prospective marriage partners might seem equal, one does most of the speaking, the other the listening. It was the physical business of the meeting that puzzled me most, because I always imagined the writer and the reader as separate people, not two big men in the same room. Perhaps that was why I had done nothing to arrange it in the preceding years, and had been not lazy but afraid.

I called Alison's office from the studio where we were taping the Greene program. This was just minutes after Lettfish told me that he was coming. Alison made a sound that indicated exasperation, unwillingness, resentment, a sudden gust of impatience that the telephone wires made even harsher. It was just a sigh, a syllable, intelligible only to a spouse and only after years of marriage. A long-married couple have the perfect ear for such uncooperative murmurs.

"What's wrong?" I said, because I knew this sound was a serious objection.

"Does it have to be tonight?"

"Yes." There was so much to explain. All the months and years that had passed since I first met Lettfish had led to this moment. "Shall I tell you why?"

"Don't bother. If you want to have these people over, fine. But I can't help you. We've had one crisis after another all day here. I was hoping I could go home and put my feet up. Have an early night."

"I wasn't asking for your help."

She made another noise, just air, that was like the beginning of a howl.

"Please," I said, and I meant: Give me a break, yell at me tomorrow, swallow your anger, play along and don't embarrass me.

"It's a weeknight."

"I have to do this."

She said, "All right," and though there was a reluctance tucked into her intonation, saying yes under protest, she was relenting. She knew desperation when she heard it.

After I thanked her, she said, "Why are you doing this to me?" And before I could reply to that, she said, "It's your dinner," and hung up.

Those responses were part of that dispute. They were lines. In marriage many conversations are the same conversation. We had
been having this one more often lately, especially after I had stopped reading my daily pages to her. That part of the evening had been important when, as a writer, reading to her, I made her my reader.

Your dinner:
that was fine with me. I had started the event in motion and I had to see it through. And now I knew that at a certain point tonight, probably just after dinner, when I was taking orders for coffee, Alison would say, "Now I am going to be very rude and uncivilized. I have to get up early tomorrow. I'm not even going to ask you to forgive me. Good night."

Early on, I had the sense the dinner was going to be a failure. The conversation with Alison confirmed this fear.

We rarely entertained. I have already mentioned that I had no friends in London. My London door was always locked. No one ever dropped in. No strangers entered the house. I had not had any friends since I had gotten married. In my peculiar temperament, which the passing years intensified, I regarded other people as intrusions and placed a special value on being alone.

I was reflecting on this as I made the dinner. Because Burgess had mentioned curry with approval in his Malayan novels, I decided to cook a prawn curry with channa dal. I bought two pounds of prawns at the fishmonger's in Clapham Junction on my way home from the Greene program and walked back through the rain.

The Malayan touch was coconut milk. I found a large can of it at a Jamaican grocery on Northcote Road. Back home, I put on the rice, peeled the prawns, chopped the garlic and onions and green pepper, sauteed them, then made a flour and curry powder paste, added water and vegetable stock, and thickened it. This gave me a half gallon of curry sauce. Half of it I would use for the prawns, adding coconut milk to it; the rest was for the dal, to which I added red pepper and two chopped tomatoes and some crushed cardamom pods, along with three cans of chickpeas.

While the sauce simmered, I chopped a cucumber for the yogurt raita and made a plate of sambals, garnishes that Burgess would recognize from his days in Kota Bharu. It was almost seven. If we ate at eight-thirty or thereabouts, there would be enough time for the dal to simmer and reduce. It was simple cooking but its strong flavor made it seem ambitious. The thing to avoid was overcooking the prawns. I intended to put them into the sauce just before the meal, so they wouldn't curl and toughen and become flavorless.

Alison came into the kitchen just as I finished the last of the chopping. She poured herself a glass of wine and said, "What are you going to give them to drink?"

"There's wine and beer."

"What if they want whiskey?"

"They can have wine instead."

"Oh, God."

"All right, will you go out and buy some whiskey?"

"This isn't my dinner party!" Alison said, and the note of hysteria in her voice made me fearful.

I said, "You're right. I should have some whiskey. I'll go get some from the off-license."

"I'm so tired."

She spoke in a persecuted way. That was a definite signal that she would go to bed early, leaving me to handle the guests.

Rain in London had a sooty quality that soaked the city in its own smoky odor. I walked quickly through the drizzle. The corner shop—the Paki store, as it was known, though the owners were Indians, Hindus from Gujarat—was open all hours, and sold groceries and tobacco and newspapers and overpriced liquor, as well as renting TV sets. They were young, with a fat, squally infant and a slavering guard dog: England's new nation of shopkeepers. I bought a bottle of Scotch and, passing the Fishmonger's Arms, I glanced in and wished that I could be sitting there irresponsibly reading the evening paper over a pint of draft Guinness.

At the house I saw Lettfish at the front door, his hands in motion.

"There's no answer," he said to me.

"My wife probably didn't hear the bell"—
It's your dinner!—
"but at least you found the place."

Lettfish said, "I've never been to this part of London before," and it seemed to carry with it a hint of rebuke.

Leading him in, I remembered that tomorrow was rubbish pickup day. I put out the barrels.

"What's the word they use for those things?"

"Dustbins."

"I love it."

"Dustmen are coming tomorrow," I said, "with their dustcart."

I had rain on my face, curry stains on my shirt, my hair was wet, and I was breathless, gasping as I let him into the house.

Lettfish looked around, made a beeline for my bookshelves, gave them his lightning scrutiny, and then he snatched at volumes, opening them to the copyright page, smoothing the dust wrappers, assessing their value.

"Whiskey?" I asked. The fresh bottle was under my arm.

"How about a gin and tonic?"

"I don't have any."

"Wine, then. A red—cabernet."

"You got it."

I poured him a Beaujolais and smiled, defying him to object.

He was restless, asking where Burgess was. Alison was upstairs, so I could not get on with setting the table or any other preparations. He required me to be with him.

The etiquette for a guest lay in reading what the host had to do and then either helping or else getting out of the way. All guests were supposed to know that. But Lettfish was so used to being a host that he was a bad guest, knew nothing about the responsibilities, how demanding it was to strike the right balance between being helpful and being intrusive. Being a guest involved a large measure of generosity and tact, cooperation and intuition. He was inept, and I began to see that his always assuming the role of host had made him selfish.

When Alison appeared, I said, "This is Sam Lettfish," and I excused myself and went back into the kitchen. I tossed the prawns into the skillet of bubbling curry sauce that was creamy with coconut milk and stirred them until they turned pink. They had such delicate flesh and were so easily toughened, spoiled by overcooking, I took them off the stove and ladled them into a double boiler.

"Bonnet, wing, wing mirror, boot, petrol tank," Lettfish was saying as I returned. One of his favorite topics: English nomenclature. I guessed it was my mention of dustbins that had set him off. He found the words uproariously funny. Alison's eyes were glazed. In a moment she would say that she was hungry.

"Sam's a book collector," I said, as a way of getting him to change the subject.

"Paul's worse than I am," Lettfish said. "Pretty exciting, Anthony Burgess coming over, eh?"

"I must confess that I am not a fan," Alison said.

"All those big words," Lettfish said.

"I know the meaning of the words. I don't regard them as very big," she said. "No, it's those Burgess women. They are so frightful."

"I guess I'm a sucker for crazy broads."

"If they were truly crazy I would pity them, as one does. But they are simply objectionable."

"It takes all kinds."

"It doesn't take castraters."

"Maybe I'm just stupid for liking his books," Lettfish said.

"You don't understand," Alison said, and smiled, as though to placate a simpleton. "Like him by all means, but please don't try to make me like him."

"I can relate to his output."

"Whatever that means," she said.

"'Relate' means understand."

"'Output' was the word I was questioning."

"Hey, you remind me of my wife."

Alison smiled again, not mirth, but a look of pure disgust.

"You're as bad as she is!"

Staring at him, her smile fixed, not trusting herself to reply to this, Alison said, "Paul tells me you're a lawyer."

She was wondering how anyone this silly and casual could hold down a serious job. I knew that Lettfish's nervousness was making him chatter in an infantile way.

"What you'd call a solicitor, though I don't do much soliciting." He paused for a reaction. There was none. "Mostly tax matters, corporate mergers, estate planning, licensing agreements. We don't live in separate countries anymore. We're part of a global tax and banking structure."