My Other Life (55 page)

"I want one of them," Weechie said, breathing hard, so eager.

A woman approached Bun-Bun and kissed her on the mouth.

Bun-Bun said, "This is the guy I was telling you about."

The woman shook my hand and said, "So you know River Phoenix?"

"I guess so."

"Janie read your book. Hey, Janie."

A young woman in an oversize sweater approached carrying a thick paperback. And she handed it over,
Presumed Innocent.

"So how about a signature?"

"I didn't write it."

"Aren't you Scott Turow?"

"No. I'm—"

"Forget it," she said sweetly. "I didn't really read it. I started it, but it kind of sucked."

"I am so pumped!" Weechie said, seeing the tattooist. She crouched and watched him work, drilling, wiping blood, drilling again.

"Get in line," he said. He looked at me and said, "You here for a tattoo?"

"I don't think so."

He smiled at me and drilled his needle gun against the woman's shoulder. He said, "You look like you just got shot out of a cannon."

It was a pleasant scene. There were women drinking and talking, passing plates of snacks, listening to music.

I said hello to a black girl.

"Do I know you?"

I shook my head no. "You from Medford?"

"West Medford," she said. "Jerome Street."

"One of my high school friends lived on Jerome Street. George Davis."

"I've heard of him," she said. "You getting a tattoo?"

"No. I'm just visiting. I came with Weechie and Bun-Bun."

"You're the guy who knows River Phoenix?"

"That's right. I used to deliver papers around here."

"What kind of papers?"

"Newspapers."

"Oh, yeah," she said. "Look, will you excuse me? I'm out of cigarettes. There's a store down the street where I can get some."

Watching her cross the room, I saw that the tattooist was kneeling before Weechie. He had finished the rose, and was prepping her. She lay limp and drooping like a pietà, her face glowing in ecstasy, Bun-Bun cradling her head while the tattooist shaved an area near the knob of her hipbone. He scraped away foam, readying her for the tattoo. Two girls watched, holding hands, and two more on the sofa were kissing. Several couples danced in the shadows at the far end of the room. Some others were grouped around the table of snacks as a girl in fur-trimmed shortie pajamas dealt
snapshots for them like playing cards. "Nipple rings," she was saying.

I hurried to the door, where the black girl was putting on her gloves.

"Mind if I go with you?"

"Up to you."

Then we were outside in the snow. I said, "My name's Paul."

"I'm Peaches."

"Listen, Peaches, this used to be a deli—a really good one, called Savage's," I said as we walked along Riverside Avenue. I bought her a pack of Marlboros and, on our way back, passing behind the city hall, I said, "See up there? That's where I used to go after school in the second grade."

"I'm too stoned to climb that thing," she said.

"Take my hand," I said, and I tugged her up the path. "Over there used to be Fountain Street, and that exit sign was the Washington School."

At the shoulder of the road we sat on a log, the vandalized trunk of an old fallen tree, the traffic passing above us.

"My Uncle Hal used to live where that off-ramp curls around. It was a really old house, full of treasures, with a chimney in the middle. The story was that Paul Revere stopped there on his midnight ride. He came right down Salem Street on his horse."

"Your uncle had a horse?"

"Paul Revere," I said.

The lights of Medford Square were dim in the scorching lamps of the interstate. The river, all ice, was flat and pale. When I was seven years old, in 1948, on this spot, or very near to it, I had kissed Linda Palmer and told her I loved her.

I wanted to kiss this black girl, Peaches. I imagined having her as a girlfriend—a Medford romance. I put my arm around her and my face near to hers. Then I sensed her whole body recoil and contract, as though getting smaller with fear, as though I were a slavering dog about to lick her face.

"No," she said.

"I just want to kiss you. Nothing serious."

"That's more serious than anything. I haven't like kissed a guy for maybe two years."

"Maybe you could get used to it."

She made a raspy little sniff of disgust and said, "Sometimes when I'm doing my girlfriend her husband watches, but we don't let him touch us. Anyway, he doesn't care."

She lit a cigarette. She said she was cold.

"Now I remember what this used to be, before the road went through."

"Yeah?"

And I saw it, the slate stones, all of them chipped, some of them ancient, and incised with names and dates and simple skulls at the top. They were the first gravestones I had ever seen, on my way home from school right here on the bluff above the tracks—where the railway tracks used to be, and the tadpoles in the ditches, where exit 32. now led off the interstate. I was seven or eight, holding Linda Palmer by the hand, and for a long time after that had thought all gravestones were flat gray slabs carved with grinning skulls.

"A graveyard."

She screamed and said, "I know what you're trying to do to me—just quit it!"

She was hysterical. I could not calm her. She would not let me touch her. She hurried away, walking in the street, which was clear of snow, heading back to the tattoo party. I was afraid to follow her, afraid that this misunderstanding would mean they would confront me. They might be very angry. But this was Medford, my old home, and they did not know me. No one knew me.

Better just to leave, to slip away. I got into my car and drove down Riverside Avenue, then changed my mind and headed to the on-ramp of the interstate. It was so easy to leave Medford now. In seconds, it seemed, I was out of there. Within minutes I was in Boston, and Medford was darkness and a few blurred lights in the rearview mirror.

T
AKING THE SHORT CUT
through Boston that night was a mistake—I could not drive fast enough to escape my feeling of failure. Winter tramps and homeless veterans lurking in these narrow back streets looked like Arctic explorers in old engravings and blurred photographs—overdressed, shrouded in lumpy clothes, frostbitten and doomed. They walked stiff-legged like homemade monsters. It was face-freezing weather, and the plowed streets were lined with barriers of dumped snow. The sidewalks glittered with crystals of black frost. I was in a car, yet I was one of these men. Failure is a sort of funeral, and a person fleeing a collapsed marriage is both the corpse and the mourner.

A croaky-voiced yokel on my car radio said, "If you don't care where you are, you're not lost," and I laughed angrily.

Like the other wandering men I saw, I was anonymous—or rather, most of them looked like me, hunched over, kicking the dirty snow and wearing misshapen caps, their hands in their pockets. They were lost explorers waiting to be rescued. We were ignorant and illiterate and sick; we had a vague sense of needing another life. The only cure for my disorientation was to go far away and start again. There was no rescue for me here.

Arriving at midnight at my own house on the Cape, I was not consoled. It was chilly inside and the low temperature made the
damp air greasy. I switched on the lights and turned the thermostat up. Just then I heard the ping of my answering machine, indicating that it had taken a message. Two messages, so the window blinked to me in a yellow number. After almost three days away from here, only two messages, and the first one began,
You bastard, don't you dare
—at which point I hit the skip button, making the words quacky and meaningless.

The second message was strangely formal after the sudden abuse of the first one. It was like hearing a different language. I could tell from its hesitation and twittering and the howling wires that it was probably transadantic.

—This is a message for Paul Therouxfrom Mr. and Mrs. Laird Birdwood,
it began—female voice, submissive and secretarial.
They wonder whether you are free for dinner at their house in London on February twelfth. A few details. Black tie. Arrival at seven-thirty sharp—the timing is rather important, I'm afraid. We'll fax an invitation when you've confirmed that you can make
it.
We very much hope you can. Please ring back when you have a chance.

It was a complete statement—precise, confident, efficient, and clearly enunciated.

I listened to the message again, looking into the bedroom mirror. I was pale, unshaven, the tip of my nose was pink, a scab of snot clung to one nostril, my hair was twisted into spikes from my wearing a tight knitted wool cap. I had not changed my clothes for three days; I had slept in them.

Black tie. Arrival at seven-thirty sharp—

Another certainty in my condition was knowing what was possible and what was not. Dinner in London was out of the question. I could not think of a single reason for going. It would simply be a matter of working out the time difference between the Cape and London and then calling during office hours to convey my regrets.

I had a bath. I shaved. I drank green tea. I got into bed and read some pages of Malinowski's
Coral Gardens and Their Magic.
Sleety rain had started to patter like sand grains against the window. I fantasized about disappearing in New Guinea—no lumpy clothes, no gloves, no frostbite. I warmed myself with my tea and my reading and, warmer, I was soon asleep.

In the morning I called Birdwood's number in London to say I
could not make it. I got his secretary, the polite woman who had left the message.

— I am so sorry,
she said.
I know Mr. and Mrs. Birdwood will be disappointed. They were very keen for you to come. Whatever is that noise?

— The wind,
I said. It was last night's storm, still blowing, tearing at the shingles.
It's just that it's quite a trip from here to London for dinner. And it's rather soon.

— Quite. But it's going to be a special occasion.

— Oh, I'm sure. But—

— I think that you ought to know that the guest of honor is Her Majesty the Queen.

— Yes,
I said. I could not look at my face in the mirror and still make sense of these words. The Queen?

— And Prince Philip, of course. They've never visited Mr. Birdwood's home before. Everyone's very excited, as you might imagine.

— The Queen,
I said. I was smiling, standing naked in my room, yesterday's clothes in a pile, looking like the carcass of a large animal. The word "Queen" called up her portrait on the postage stamps, her slender neck, her dainty chin, her perky nose, her crown prettily tipped on the back of her head.

— For security reasons we have to have our final guest list fairly soon.

— I'll be coming alone,
I said.

Flying into London on my low-season fare using frequent-flyer miles, my only luggage my tux in a bag, I reflected that what I needed was the solace of anonymity in a place where no one knew me. In the meantime, feeling like someone on the graveyard shift on his way to work, Mr. Half-Life carrying his shabby uniform, I was setting off to meet Her Majesty Elizabeth II, the Queen, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of her other realms and territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.

I was in coach. Carl Lewis was in first. A bossy, buttocky flight attendant—male, wet-eyed, twitching to be noticed—blocked my way, allowing the Olympic runner off the plane. From my humble place in the steerage line I noticed that Lewis had the smallest ears I had ever seen on a human being.

In the Underground I realized that, having left two years before, and with no good news to report, there was no one I wished to see
in London. I did not want to be asked how I was doing or what I was working on. I had no answers. I craved the company of strangers. The teenagers in Medford had not worked. I liked the idea of naked illiterate islanders grinning in my direction and seeing me (so Malinowski had said) as someone who did not belong to the human race.

The Birdwoods were almost strangers to me. Charmian was English, "the Queen's cousin," people said, as they said about many people, from one of those families—but perhaps this royal visit was the proof. Laird was a wealthy American, a breeder of horses who needed to be near Newmarket. He prided himself on his stables (he had twice won the Grand National) and on his library of first editions—look under T and you would find editions of my books that even I did not own. Years before, during Ascot Week, he had invited me to dinner with Princess Anne, and he had sat me next to her.
Daddy had a go at the
Daily Express, the Princess Royal had said. After dinner, her husband—
the Captain,
as she called him—had complained about her trips to Africa to visit hungry villagers.
What I say is, charity begins at home.
He had broken his leg in a riding accident. It had not stopped him from attempting a foolish little jig as he wearily kicked his plaster cast while the Princess Royal sighed and suffered. They were separated now.

The seating arrangement had worked. I was American, a writer, the soul of gratitude and politeness; and I was harmless. Being socially unclassifiable helped solve the problem of a royal seating arrangement. A presentable American created no class conflict. It was much better that I was obscure, that we were all strangers to each other, even the hosts. And it was easier returning to London this way, a visit as parody, the guest dressed as a waiter.

In eighteen years of living in London, I had never stayed in a London hotel. Only the out-of-towners truly understand a city's hotels. It did not matter—I had lost my money and so I no longer had any choices. I got off the Underground at Earl's Court and found a Vacancy sign in the window of the Sandringham House Hotel. It was as cold and dirty and poorly lighted as the house I had just left.