We Had It So Good (13 page)

The mink hat has to be kept in its box, because Max has already mistaken it for a potty and tried to pee in it, Stephen only just in time pulled him away by the arms.

They lie that night in the single bed in his old room.

“Tomorrow we'll take the kids to the beach,” says Stephen. “And then the next day I thought you'd like to see the studios.” The feeling of exultancy has not left him since they entered his old home and made the announcement that he was returning to America. He's on a better high than he ever got from the one time when he obtained some cocaine and experienced the icy rush of clarity and optimism followed by a come-down so intense he wanted to scratch off his
own skin. It's all come good, he thinks, you really can get what you want, as well as what you need.

But as for his wife lying next to him, he really has no idea what she is thinking. She goes away like this, she is always disappearing, but always coming back. Some people, he has come to understand, have shallow roots in the past. She had remade her family inside their own life together and he appreciates that it must be difficult to see for the first time, to
understand
that he had another life, one that had come before her, and still exists; she's bound to feel threatened and uncertain. And his parents, he consents in his mind, are not really what she's used to. They are not what anyone in England is used to, they are an idiosyncratic pair, that is for sure. But wonderful. The ache of love fulfilled and satisfied.
I have everything
.

“Are you okay?” he says, stroking her hair, and wanting to touch the place in the nape of her neck which is a privileged spot on her body, the zone of a strange, nonsexual pleasure that causes her face to relax and melt into formlessness.

But still, the silence.

“You don't like the mink hat, that's it.”

“It's not just the hat.”

So it is the hat. “It's just a hat. It's not like you're ever going to wear it.”

“But he thinks I'm the sort of person who would wear a mink hat.”

“He doesn't know you, he bought you a mink hat because he thinks that's what women like. My mother has one. My God, when he brought home that hat!”

“Well, she would have one.”

“What do you mean?”

“That's what she would wear.”

“Exactly. All moms wear mink hats if they can get one.”

“Not in my world.”

“
Your
world? You don't have a world, not as far as moms go.”

“That's a hateful thing to say.”

“Well, it's true.”

“You've never met my parents.”

“And why is that?”

“You know why.”

“That's my point.”

His Mickey Mouse alarm clock ticks on the nightstand and Andrea lies in the dark, illuminated only by the hands of the clock, loathing herself, loathing the hat and loathing his father for giving it to her.

The initial shock of the new family she has been bolted onto only partly subsided during the barbecue. Her in-laws had talked nonstop about their son, about his childhood, about his first chemistry set, about his graduation, about his time in the merchant marine, about how they had come all the way to New York to see him off on the SS
United States
when he set out for the old world, a Rhodes Scholar. She sees it is possible to grow up awash with family love, even from parents who are vulgar and uneducated. She has warmed up a little to Stephen's mother, who has tales to tell of her childhood in Havana, and most important of all, Marianne spent the whole meal sitting on Ximena's knee, as good as gold, waiting until the last mouthful of Jell-O salad wriggled down and ran free on the grass, a luxury, Stephen reminds her, that they do not have at home in Islington, where the garden was shared with all their neighbors, some of whom you would not want to leave alone with a small child.

She remembers how she had read R. D. Laing when she was a student. All madness is derived from the family, the mad are sane and the sane mad. But if this illogical warmth, this exuberance, this atavistic understanding of what you should cling to in life and what you should let go of is madness, then she is all for it. She does not understand Si and Ximena at all. The Newmans touch each other constantly, they are tactile people. Stephen's mother sits for a few
moments between courses, holding Andrea's hand for no reason Andrea can understand other than a natural affection she herself has had to teach herself how to feel. To live is simple and obvious, is the point that is being made.

Still, the nausea of revulsion. She persuades herself that her persistent knot of anxiety is probably due to the long flight across the Atlantic and the van trip, and worrying about the kids. Because she needs to snap out of this snobbishness right now. This is where they are going to live, it has all been decided. She has given her consent to becoming an American, even if it involves a mink hat. The one thing she is not giving up is her husband, for whom she has fought.
She,
not he, insisted that they were going to make a real, not fake, marriage.
She
gave birth to two children. Always she has been bedeviled by those crows and their many meanings in her life, but she won't put up with them spoiling this. She loves her husband and nothing will possess her to inflict a broken home on her children. Stephen is a fantastic father: he even irons their little clothes when he gets home from work; there is no way he will abandon them.

In the future, when she sees clients whose marriages are faltering, and are wondering whether they should leave or stay, she will remark (despite the rule of nondirectional counseling she must abide by): “Marriages last because the people in them want to be married.”

So what choice does she have?

“It'll seem different in the morning,” she says. “I'll be fine.”

“Good. I'm going to sleep. This is all nothing. It's just a damned hat.”

He closes his eyes and the road rears up in front of him.

All across America he had been noticing cripples. Boys his own age, with long hair, earrings, bandanas, jeans, in wheelchairs or on
crutches, missing an arm or a leg or two legs or two arms. He had seen for the first time a fleshy stump in shorts. He had noticed an eye permanently dragged open, with no eyelid, which must have been burned away. A missing nose. Scorch marks across the neck and chin. The maimed children of America. In Denver he saw a boy in a chair screaming at his parents in the street as they pushed him across an intersection, the poor mom and dad were in jail along with their kid. He thought of his parents like this, wheeling him around for the rest of his life, wheeling him to the bar where he would have sat and drank and wept. He'd known cripples, but they were poor bastards who were born that way and came up living in their own world on which he could gain no purchase, nor wanted to. Or they had had an accident (there was always some fool who really did jump off the roof for a dare). And in the neighborhood there were those who had come back from World War II no longer in one piece, people his parents' age whom you could never imagine young and they stayed at home in a permanent twilight on military pensions.

Shocked and frightened to see what has happened to his own generation, that his decision to stay on in England to avoid the draft was well-founded, he lies thinking of those crippled men. For while he has often imagined his own death in combat, he had never given any thought to the war's damaging him for life. That could have been me, been me, been me. He has no idea who he would be if he had no legs. Where, for example, would he have found a woman, unless she was some poor creature who would take a partial man because she could never get a whole one?

For several days Stephen is behind the wheel again, as the family takes in the sights of Los Angeles and eats at the Brown Derby restaurant, a diner in the shape of a hat, where they spot Farrah Fawcett with her hair in a flick, a sight so charming and innocent,
Stephen thinks, so absolutely American, a buttered corncob kind of girl. But alone, he drives the van to the campus to see his old professor who had guided him through the process of applying for his Rhodes Scholarship. They had always liked each other and he had written to Professor Whaley to confess that he had been sent down, and what exactly for, a difficult letter to compose. The response had been cool but without any tone of moral outrage, and at the outset of this journey across America, he had hoped that this misdemeanor would be long forgotten.

“A research job?” Professor Whaley laughed. “With only a bachelor's degree we could just about offer you a position as a lab technician.”

“What?”

“I'm so sorry, but what did you think? You've been out of your field for nearly a decade, you really don't have any qualifications, for getting back into science. You were doing your research back in the solution phase, we've been automating peptide synthesis. Of course, if you want to come back and start your doctorate again, I'll take you on as a student, but someone who graduated this summer is more up-to-date than you are.”

“That's not true. I read up.”

“No, Mr. Newman, it's not the same thing at all. Here's what has been happening just here in our department.”

And Stephen is totally fazed. He has no idea what Professor Whaley is talking about, he can only just keep up.

“But what am I to do?” he cries.

“Well, we always need science journalists. Have you thought about trying
Popular Science
? Though of course you'd need to relocate to New York.”

Is this how Professor Whaley thinks of him? A guy who writes dumbed-down articles for
Popular Science,
which marvel over new inventions such as Velcro? He understands that his old professor is punishing him, he feels personally let down that his kid, his
protégé, has turned out to be one of those hippies whose eyes have never been on the prize.

“Are you sure there's no other opening, no avenue I could go down? What about the commercial sector?”

“Yes, you could try something like General Foods.”

Develop new breakfast cereals and potato chips? He would rather die.

“So you said in your letter that you got married,” says Professor Whaley, changing the subject.

“Yes, I have. And two kids.”

“Is your wife a scientist?”

“No. She's a shrink.”

“Ah, the voodoo science.”

This is it. Professor Whaley has made it clear what he thinks of him, the defector, the second-rate phony. The verdict is agonizing because Stephen's self-image is so bound up with his being the blue-eyed boy, the Rhodes Scholar with everything ahead of him, and now he is caught, trapped in a tight corner from which he can see no obvious escape.

He walks out to the van under blue skies and past palm trees, the Pacific only a mile or two away lapping the shores of the continent. I'm a nobody, he thinks.

Behind the wheel of the van he finds himself not heading home, but striking south toward San Diego. This wasn't his intention, but he needs half an hour to clear his head, to take in what he has just heard. Half an hour is not enough, though, for the cataclysm which has occurred. With his eyes ahead of him, it seems entirely possible to keep on driving south until you run out of road but that's a long long way in the future, you can reach near the end of the world before the road dies. Crossing America he was intent on a destination, going home, but now he is just a hand on the wheel and a foot on the gas.

When things like this happen to him, when he got sent down from Oxford because they found his acid-making factory, he experiences a heavy numbness. Andrea is always asking how he feels and the answer is, he feels nothing. He is encased in a thick membrane of indifference. That's what envelops him now as he drives on. Fog.

The signs to San Diego remind him of his uncle Enrique, and of the merchant seaman's document he has carried always in his wallet, proud of its possession, that once he was a sailor and still is, with the papers to prove it. The key to life is in the oceans. He could do it, he could just take himself to the hiring hall and leave the van at the dockside and Andrea, Marianne and Max at his parents' place to console themselves any way they can and find their own way home. He could be clear across the Pacific, sailing down past the coastline of Patagonia. Anything is possible.

Brooding on these thoughts, at Carlsbad, he picks up a lone hitchhiker who is working her way down the coast to Mexico. Standing at the roadside with her rucksack, her long hair swinging round her face, her tight jeans and cut-off top, she awakes in Stephen memories of long ago, of his forgotten college girlfriends who all looked much like she does. There is a type, this Californian kind of girl who dresses simply and is fresh and natural and does not have too many complicated European ideas in her head. She looks about twenty, more than a decade younger than him, and on an impulse he does not want to think too hard about, he pulls over and picks her up.

Susie is not Californian, she's a girl from the real north country, way up in Canada, up and over the high line, Alberta, a place where you look out and you see endless nothing and the longer you stare the more you start hallucinating. But it's not even where she is originally from, she was born in a cold, cold town in Ontario where nothing worthwhile has ever happened or will, and her dad moved the family out West to find work in the oil fields. So here she is, running away to find the Aztecs and eat peyote buttons and learn to fly like the guy in the Carlos Castaneda book.

“You know that's not possible?” Stephen says. Back in college, a few of his customers had read the same book,
The Teachings of Don Juan,
and figured that if a Yaqui shaman could fly under the influence of mescaline, it ought to be possible to take off from the window of their college. All this had produced was broken legs and broken necks but adherents of the guru claimed that this was to do with the lack of a higher consciousness in Oxford undergraduates, the purity of whose minds were corroded by Western precepts like the Enlightenment.