The English American (20 page)

A
LONE IN THE HOUSE
when Billie is in Georgia, I
almost
welcome Cole’s company. But not quite. He reminds me of a piece of transparent, uncooked white fish that’s ever so slightly off, you can almost see all the way through it. But not quite.

But Billie has appointed Cole the new president of Art Buddies, so I do my best to listen and learn from him. Cole seeks out my company, and in a low, monotonous voice, tells me about his terrible childhood. When he was five, he was made to eat his own shit by his babysitter. The fact that I am disturbed by his dark, sad stories seems to please him.

“When are you going to open up to me about your childhood?” Cole says, quietly. He’s convinced I’m hiding some terrible dark secret. I hate to disappoint him, but I just can’t think of anything. The time Dad shouted at me for drawing on my bedroom wall seems rather tame.

“Your mother told me you were sent to boarding school,” he begins.

Not for the first time I try to explain that sending your kids to boarding school is just part of the British culture. Something the British do because they genuinely believe it’s the best thing for their kids. It was just incidental that I hated it. “It wasn’t exactly
Oliver Twist,
” I say. “We didn’t have gruel or anything.”

“Yes, but how did you feel? I mean, you were abandoned by your birth mother. You must have felt abandoned again by your adoptive parents. That must have hurt.”

I look at him, astonished. This man, who I don’t really know, wants it to have hurt. I can see how he operates. He asks sensitive questions until he finds a woman’s most vulnerable area, convinces her that he’s got the panacea for that pain. Then he makes his move. He feeds off people’s misery. My initial mistrust of him has turned to intense dislike.

While Cole was being forced to eat shit by his babysitter, I was sitting on the roof of our Land Rover driving through the Tsavo game park, looking for elephants, hippos, giraffes, and getting back to our campsite to find that the monkeys had taken our red washing-up bowl high into the trees.

I take refuge in old childhood memories, while Cole talks on. I remember walking across the rope bridge in the jungle in Ghana, a hundred miles outside the nearest town, rocking back and forth above a huge ravine, safe in the knowledge that I was with Dad, so of course nothing bad could happen.

It all seems worlds away now. Sliding down the side of Green Gable in the Lake District on tea trays, past sunlit streams, emerald green moss, fences dotted with old man’s beard, and magnificent northern skies. Orchestra practice, proper tea parties, walks to historic castles and down country lanes, Mozart, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Flanders and Swann’s “The Gasman Cometh” blaring through our house. And, of course, the incessant Scottish dancing, which, right now, I miss terribly.

“They didn’t even raise you themselves,” Cole is saying quietly. “They sent you off to boarding school. That must have hurt. Talk to me, Pippa.”

I wonder for a half second how many British people have put on a kettle to extricate themselves from unwanted conversations. Millions, probably. “It’s four o’clock,” I say, sounding exactly like Mum. “How about a nice cup of tea?”

Cole’s expression is dark and sullen. He is glaring at me from the couch.

“Well, I’ll make one for myself then,” I say, smiling at him cheerfully as I leave the room and head for the kitchen.

So Mum and Dad sent me to boarding school. Because their parents were sent to boarding school, by parents who’d been sent to boarding school before them. It’s something the British do.

The problem with facing a long buried truth in one area of your life is that truths about other areas of your life, that you’ve been lying to yourself about for years, start popping out at you, making you jump.

I’ve suppressed my memories about boarding school for years. That rigid, enclosed world of bells and rules and corridors that smelled of beeswax. If you were more interested in climbing trees than talking about shades of nail polish, St. Margaret’s could be a cruel, lonely place.

The Billie I know would have defended me when the teachers sent me to detention for sitting by the stream at midnight because I wanted to see the baby owl. No. The Billie I know would never have sent me there in the first place. The Billie I know would have wanted me with her. I’m sure of it.

But, goddamn it, I’d rather have five years fending for myself in a girls’ boarding school than eighteen years of neglect from an alcoholic mother, who would have been so caught up in herself she wouldn’t have even noticed I was there.

I have to believe that, because to do otherwise would open the door to an unbearable sorrow.

Standing in Billie’s kitchen, looking out over the Adler Bridge, I think again of the Billie who used to live in my head. The sweet, understanding, empathetic, ethereal mother who loved me, focused only on me. One hundred and twenty per cent “there.”

And then the tears start crawling down my cheeks. Because I can no longer pretend that the mother I have found is anything other than who she is.

I think about calling Mum and Dad, but they’ll be asleep by now.

Disturbed, I look around Billie’s kitchen. My world—my England—has gone. I am alone. Powerless. Trapped in a dark house by a river, peopled by broken souls.

It’s the middle of the week, but with nowhere else to go, I head down to The Gold Room. The downstairs bar is quiet, so I head upstairs to open mike night. Instead of my prepared material, I perform an improvised song, to a made-up rock-and-roll melody I can’t seem to get out of my head. It’s midnight. My audience consists of Jack and a prostitute and her john, who get up when I am done, giving me my first standing ovation.

As usual, Jack walks me to my car.

I
’VE BEEN RUNNING AROUND
all day with no time to eat anything other than M&M’s. I’m at the YMCA putting up a poster for Billie’s workshop. I slip on the newly washed staircase and fall on my head. I know I’ve just fainted because when I come to the walls are moving. I hold on to the banister and pull myself up. I look around to see if there’s anyone who can help.

“I’m so sorry,” I say finally to the man with a mop, “but could I trouble you for a towel or something? My head seems to be bleeding.”

The man puts me in a taxi, which takes me to St. Vincent’s Hospital. There’s a long line of people waiting in the emergency room. I don’t have health insurance, and blood isn’t gushing out of me, so the woman at the counter says it could be hours before I’m seen.

The hospital is noisy and dirty. There are sick people lying in the corridors on metal trolleys. There’s no peace, just rushing and noise and fear. When I fell off my moped and cracked my head open one summer, I was seen immediately at Peaseminster General, glued back together, and given a teddy bear to take home as a present. I suppose, not for the first time, that it’s American health insurance companies who are behind the lie that a government-sponsored health-care system is always a mistake.

When I sit down, I pass out again. Then a man in a nurse’s uniform is putting a plastic thing round my arm and taking my blood pressure. I still feel dizzy.

“What is the name of the president of the United States?”

“George W. Bush. Unfortunately.”

Later, after he gives me a shot of some kind, a doctor appears with a chart, tells me I’ve got a concussion, and asks me where I live. When I tell him, he tells me I mustn’t drive for at least twenty-four hours and asks me if there’s someone I’d like to call.

The only phone number I can remember is Billie’s in Georgia.

“Thank God you called!” Billie says, as she’s picking up. “Malice has been into my house again. I can’t find my wallet anywhere, and before you say anything,
yes
I’ve checked the trash. I’m going to ask Johnny Taft to have a look around next time he’s working on her house. I’ll just bet he finds it stashed away somewhere with my missing passport.”

I hold the phone away from my throbbing head. My heart sinks. I bring the phone toward my ear again. Billie is still talking.

“I just wish that woman would let things go and learn to live in peace with the fact that I am not leaving! She can break into my house, put barbed wire between our properties, blacken my name around town, but she is not driving me off the mountain!”

“Of course not,” I say. But I don’t want to soothe Billie. I want her to soothe me.

My hand is shaking and my head aches. I get off the phone as quickly as I can. There is someone else I can call.

Jack arrives at the hospital within fifteen minutes and takes me back to his apartment in a taxi.

“I’ll take the couch,” he says. “You take the bed.”

I lie down under Jack’s comfy sheets and fall asleep. When I wake, I can see Jack’s face in stripes, lit as it is by the city light coming through the spaces in the dark green blinds. I can see fairy dust in the yellow light. Tonight his studio apartment reminds me of Badger’s house in the
Wind in the Willows
.

I’ve been given some pills by the doctor to help me sleep. The doctor told Jack to wake me every two hours, to make sure I don’t slip into a coma.

Now he’s gently shaking me.

“You okay, Pippa Dunn?” His brown eyes are filled with concern. I look at him for a moment and try and sit up. My head is throbbing.

“Ow.”

“Here.” Jack has some ice in a plastic bag. He holds it against the bruise on my head.

“That better?”

“Yes,” I say. The ice helps a lot. I lie back down again. When I come to, Jack is sitting on his couch, reading a book. He’s wearing a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. Sensing I’m awake, he looks over at me.

“You okay?” he says again. I look at the clock. Two more hours have passed. “Must have been a bad dream,” he says. “You kept shouting about someone called Walt.”

“Oh.”

We don’t say anything.

“What’s going on?” Jack says quietly.

“Nothing. Really.” I try to smile, but my face hurts.

“This Walt fella giving you trouble?” His expression is serious.

I smile at the thought of my powerful birth father being referred to as “this Walt fella.” Like he’s a hoodlum or something.

I don’t say anything. Jack’s voice comes in again.

“So who is this Walt?”

Jack is almost smiling. Patient. Waiting in the night for me to speak.

I can’t. The thought of formulating words about Walt and the rest of it hurts too much.

The pills the doctor gave me are making me very sleepy. I give in to the overwhelming need to rest, sensing Jack close to me as I go back under.

The next morning, while I’m still lying in bed, Jack feeds me some yogurt and a banana in a green ceramic bowl. Then I fall asleep again. I sleep on and off, in two-hour intervals, through the next day and night. When I’m awake, I’m aware of Jack, sitting on his couch, only feet away.

“Don’t you have to go to work?” I say at one point.

“I called in. Told them you’d had a fall. They told me not to even think about coming back until I was sure you were okay.”

Then I’m under again.

It’s nine o’clock on a Thursday morning before I can get out of bed without my head hurting. I’ve been at Jack’s house since Monday afternoon.

If I disappeared from my English life for three days, the police would have been called by now. But here no one knows what’s happened. Billie is in Georgia. Carol has left the company. I’m avoiding Cole anyway, Marvin’s on sabbatical, and Ralph’s down in Georgia, training with his mother.

I told Billie Ralph seemed very interested in cartoons. “Really?” she said. “I had no idea!” She promptly set up an animation department at Art Buddies for Ralph to run. He now spends his days giving advice to would-be cartoonists, and Billie is giving him more attention than she has in years. I’m sure Billie isn’t exaggerating when she says he’s doing brilliantly.

Hungry, I sit on a wooden chair at a green wooden table in Jack’s tiny green kitchen. Jack’s wearing a sleeveless white vest, a light blue apron, and a torn pair of jeans. He’s staring into his tiny refrigerator, underneath his tiny kitchen sink.

“Now that you’re awake,” he says, “we can have a full English breakfast.”

He takes some eggs, bacon, and a grapefruit out of his tiny refrigerator.

“Ah. I have got tomatoes,” Jack says, in an English accent. “I’ll fry them up for you the English way.”

“Have you been to England?”

“Never been anywhere outside the U.S.,” Jack says, lighting his tiny stove with a long wooden match. “My mom’s parents were from Scotland, though. She came over to New Jersey from Glasgow when she was six years old.

The picture of a six-year-old packing her bags and moving from Scotland to America on her own makes me giggle. And then laugh. “Not on her own,” he says, laughing with me. “With my grandparents, of course.”

The bacon smells delicious. Jack puts it on some paper towel to get rid of the grease and puts it on a plate in front of me.

I savor every mouthful, while Jack tells me about his family.

It feels almost unreal, to be eating an ordinary breakfast, with an ordinary man, who has nothing whatsoever to do with Billie. I eat all the bacon, three eggs, two pieces of toast, and a hot cinnamon pretzel, which Jack has bought fresh from the bakery on Seventh Avenue. When I am done, Jack washes the dishes, then, still in his apron, he sits opposite me and hands me my third cup of steaming-hot coffee in a dark green mug.

“How you feeling now?” he says.

“Oh, much better. Thank you so much, Jack.”

“No problem.”

There’s no chaos here. Only calm.

“My friend Elfrida’s looking for a roommate,” Jack says.

“Really?” I wonder if it might one day be possible to return to a normal life with a roommate in it.

“I could tell her you were interested if you want.”

If only.

“That’s so kind of you, Jack. But I don’t think I can leave where I am.”

“Why not?” he says. His eyes are steady.

I can’t tell him I have no money to pay rent. If I do I’ll have to explain that I’m still working for Billie for room and board only. I just want to be normal, just for these few moments. Like I used to be before I made the phone call that changed my life. I was Pippa in those days. Just Pippa. I want to be just Pippa right now.

“It’s a long story,” I say to Jack, finally.

“Well, I’d like to hear it,” he says. His body is tense. I’m feeling tired again.

“Do you mind if I lie down for a few more minutes before I leave?” Without waiting for a reply, I move over to Jack’s wonderfully comfy couch and fall asleep again.

When I wake up, I can hear Jack taking a shower. I put my clothes on. He comes out of the bathroom naked, apart from a dark green towel wrapped around his lower half. Then Jack tells me he’ll drive me home.

“No, really…”

“I’m driving you home.”

We walk over to Thirty-second and Twelfth, and get into my car.

On the ride back to Billie’s house, Jack and I don’t speak. It’s a comfortable silence. The kind you have with someone you’ve known for years.

Saying good-bye to Jack as he heads off toward the train that will carry him back to New York, I feel a tug that takes me by surprise. And I realize that I love this man. Not in the romantic sense, of course. Not in the way I love Nick. But I do love him.

An American would probably tell him this, but in this matter I am as English as Mum. Besides, it would only make him feel obligated to say it back, opening us up to ghastly embarrassment the next time we see each other.

So instead I just say, “Thank you again!”

Feeling woozy, I try to pretend I am somewhere other than this dank, neglected house, with its dirty carpet and the smell of cat food. I lie down on Billie’s bed and fall asleep.

I’m woken by a phone call from Nick, calling me from somewhere at three o’clock in the morning, his time. My idea for a Middle Eastern series has had him painting all night, despite the fact that he has an early meeting tomorrow. I tell him I can’t wait to see the new paintings. He hangs up, before I’ve had a chance to tell him about my fall.