A Stone Boat Read online

  Instead, we looked at neckties, and agreed that the yellow one that had been in my Christmas stocking the previous year looked terrific with my new shirt. Bernard wore the tie I had given him, with the pattern of knotted ropes, and a dark blue jacket, and a pair of slightly tweedy trousers. We looked so respectable, so eminently respectable. If we were not the couple I would have imagined for myself, the couple my mother would have imagined for me, we were, certainly, as bright and scrubbed and trim as Freddy and I might have been for dinner with the family.

  We proceeded down the grand staircase to the grand dining room, and were seated at a table by the fireplace, and ordered drinks. Bernard had supposed we would be objects of curiosity in the eyes of the golfing couples, but in fact, these couples were much too busy discussing golf and their children and their work and the weather and how hard it had been to get a line through to wherever they came from, and they could not have been less interested in Bernard and me. So we drank our drinks and looked at the large hunting scene over the fireplace and talked about the weather, and about our friends, and about how much we would miss each other when I went back to New York. I told him about the dog’s eye infection and the drops, and he said that his cousin Gordon’s dog had had a nasty sort of eye infection that had apparently been spreading among dogs in Britain, and that he had recently read a piece about this infection, and that one must be rather careful as it could cause complications. He pointed out that, since Molly was a terrier, she was very dependent on her eyes, not like a hound, who could manage pretty well with just his nose; and I agreed that one could see how much Molly used her eyes, and said I hoped it would all be all right. Molly was getting very old. And of course Nora, Bernard’s cat, was also getting old. So we talked about Molly and Nora and not about golf, and we looked at the menus, and we ordered some things that sounded rather appealing, and we felt that this was a safe and solid and secure sort of weekend to be having after all.

  But when we sat down to dinner, I felt slightly queasy. At first I blamed the long ride and the tension, but then I began to recognize the symptoms: I was coming down with a twenty-four-hour stomach virus. I am prone to twenty-four-hour viruses. Dutifully, I ordered the plainest and most boring items on the menu, and watched Bernard tuck into the dressed crab (dressed crab was a bit of a local speciality) and the rack of lamb. I drank ginger ale because it is settling to the stomach. I excused myself from the table at regular intervals to visit the stony loo and consider whether I was going to be sick or not. In the end I felt too ill to stay downstairs through dessert, and Bernard and I went back up to our room early. I lay down on my side of the bed, and Bernard said endless comforting things and remarked that twenty-four-hour viruses did at least go away by the end of twenty-four hours.

  • • •

  I was not really made for spa vacations. Moderation had always been difficult for me, and with Bernard I felt I was playing a perpetual game of charades in which my immoderation was too often the winner. I was made for adventure holidays, or for glamorous tours, or for complicated business trips, or even for journeys home, but I was not made for spa vacations. I would like to be able to say simply that spa vacations bore me, but in fact, they do not bore me. They absolutely fascinate me. The travel other people cannot carry off comes as readily to me as desire, but the vacations that other people find blissfully easy remain somehow inaccessible. I had thought in the beginning that Bernard might teach me how to live at a spa, but it didn’t work; I always seemed to be turning the spa into an adventure, or at least a drama, and this too often defeated its whole purpose.

  The next morning, I woke up feeling like half of myself, and not the better half. Bernard ate an impressive breakfast, the sight of which made me feel nauseated, and I sipped some weak tea. I then had a shower and got dressed and Bernard and I discussed what to do. It was raining out, and it was cold. We were not interested in golf anyway. So we got in the car and drove to a local town where Bernard had heard there were antiques, and we wandered through shops, half of which had broken furniture that was very old and not a bit attractive for extremely low prices, and half of which had beautiful antiques for the same out-of-the-question prices at which these items might have been purchased in London. We stopped for lunch at a restaurant furnished with the old broken furniture but priced for the people who came to shop in the out-of-the-question shops; Bernard had smoked salmon and I had some more tea. In the afternoon we went back to the hotel, and I slept and read while Bernard wandered through the garden identifying plants.

  When we got upstairs that night, after dinner, Bernard was all for love, but I was still too queasy, and felt stretched to the limits by the physical exertion of brushing my teeth. How nice it would have been to find Bernard irresistible. Bernard was very good-looking, but we both had too many similar and incompatible bones that seemed to clank on each other. Under ordinary circumstances, I didn’t mind about sex with Bernard; indeed, in some sense it was very pleasant, in much the same way that repeating familiar stories to each other was pleasant. But as for love in the afternoon, love in the morning, love in the evening—it was just as well that I was in the last throes of my twenty-four-hour virus, and could only drift toward sleep.

  • • •

  By the time we got back to London I was feeling somewhat better. Bernard helped me to pack, and promised to collect my umbrella, which I had forgotten, and said that he was going to discuss the basic facts with Norman, which I felt strongly that he ought to do. We agreed to go on talking to each other every day. He was sure my mother was going to like her birthday present. He made a whole toasted breakfast for me in the morning, which I more or less managed to eat, and then we put my suitcase back into his faded green car and headed out through the newly arrived sunshine toward Heathrow. I walked up to check-in feeling much better than I had felt ten days earlier, despite the mild aftereffects of my twenty-four-hour virus. And it was not until I had hugged Bernard goodbye—what a long time it had been since I had hugged him in that same terminal building, on the way back from France with Freddy—that the reality hit me, and that I thought about the long trip home.

  IV

  WINTER

  It is not the case that all happy families are the same. I often think that there are no new sad stories; the ways in which my life has been sad are so much like the ways in which the lives of those I know and love have been sad. Perhaps that is just as well: on the analyst’s couch or in the muted discourses of friendship, I learn that it is sadness that binds humanity, that the sadness I claim has been claimed, in some version or another, by everyone on earth. But my happiness, and the happiness of my family! There are thousands of happy families, but they are too private to earn the documentation tragedy claims as its due, and every one is so radically unlike every other, so frighteningly particular, that language itself shrinks from the task of describing them. Happiness is not too sentimental or too hackneyed to portray; it is too obscure, too personal, too strange to find a universal rhetoric. Sadness comes along well-worn paths and finds you, but since happiness is something you find yourself, it comes shaped in your own crazy image. The things that made my family happy were so much our own: no one else has ever touched them, nor will anyone touch them again. Our joy is forever ours, and its obscurity protects it; the unknowable is immune to decay. As for our sadness: it is only another version of the sadness that rings in everyone’s lives every day, and with the clockwork monotony of the run from birth to death, it unfolds along a course as predestined as the last notes of a scale.

  When I arrived in New York from England, the facts of our life were much as I had left them, but my relationship to those facts was changed. During my mother’s first hospital visit, I had learned how things were to be, and it had been like learning Chinese. Never in my life had I confronted anything so alien, so bewildering, so different in its very structure from all previous experience. By the time I came back from England, I was conversational in this
new language. The patterns of illness had become familiar, and though I did not like them and did not feel at ease in them, I was able to function in them. Absence does not so much make the heart grow fonder as give the heart time to integrate what it has not previously absorbed, time to make sense of what happens too quickly to have any meaning in the instant. This is always true. If it is in absence that people forget each other, it is also in the quiet pause of absence that, minds running in symmetry, people come to know each other; there is sometimes as much intimacy in the span of continents as in the shared hours before dawn. While I was in England, playing my concert and having my twenty-four-hour virus, I came to know anew both my mother and her illness, so that when I returned to town I greeted her ailments almost as comrades. In good faith, I started on the saddest period of my life. But we were a happy family, and so I also started, in some much more obscure way—obscure at that time even to me—to take possession of our happiness.

  • • •

  I came back to surprise my mother. I surprised my mother on her birthday over and over again, and every single time she was surprised, until at last I was as much amazed by her astonishment as she was surprised that I had come to surprise her. It never occurred to me not to go home for my mother’s birthday in the first year of her illness, since it was from her that I had learned my own sense of occasion. It was my mother who taught me that you could never put too much faith into birthdays or Christmas or graduations, she who built these into feast days such as no jousting knight had ever dreamed. My mother never tired of these holidays: she built them out of spun sugar on a foundation of thin air, and nothing delighted her more than to see how Freddy and I spiraled upward in her candied architecture.

  My father simply assumed that I would come back, but then my father assumed that the clocks would have stopped in the face of my mother’s disease had they known she wished it. My father’s life was my mother; he no more wanted independence from her than he wanted independence from his arms or legs. He could not understand how Freddy and I could feel otherwise. He never saw what I wanted from England; it did not strike him as a sacrifice for me to return after a short ten days with my life and my lover and my own piano, without having recorded a single note. So far as he was concerned, it would have been odd and sad to stay in London when my mother was having a birthday in New York—when there was an opportunity to make her happy. I needed independence, a happiness of my own, and I was almost violent in my protests against the relentlessly depressing life into which we were all sucked in New York, the life around the hospital. I tried to close out this life. I believed in my career, and knew that my tenuous position as a musician would blow apart if left alone for too long. I argued with my father then, because I did not want to admit to him that it would have seemed odd and sad to me, too, not to come home for my mother’s birthday. I refused to admit to him that I could not have played a concert that night if the moon and the planets and the stars had planned to be in the audience.

  Bernard put me on the plane to New York and Helen took me off. I felt like a shipment of glass. “You look about a thousand times better,” said Helen when I cleared customs, and her voice sounded almost jealous. “Good concert?”

  “I’ve been having a virus,” I said.

  “Couldn’t you let your mother corner the market on medical dramas for a few weeks?” she asked. “Watch your competitive streak, or it’s going to get you into trouble.” She gave me a big hug. “I think England suits you,” she told me. “Don’t stay in New York too long.”

  We went back to Helen’s apartment, where I was to spend the night, so that I could surprise my mother the following day. Helen lived in an old building with brown corridors that smelled like decaying cats, but her apartment was the more impressive for that. It had been painted in brilliant white, a white so sharp that it hurt your eyes. There were no rugs or carpets on the highly polished floors. There were funny old pieces of furniture that she had bought from the Salvation Army, which had been rubbed to an almost jewel-like luster. There were several very large plants, and there were a few framed posters, and there was divine and terrifying order everywhere. On the dressing table, Helen’s earrings were arranged in even rows. In the kitchen, the plates stood in perfect stacks, and the boxes of detergent were graduated by size. Helen would have arranged her shoes in alphabetical order if she’d known how.

  We ate Chinese food for dinner in a little takeout/eat-in joint around the corner. Helen did the ordering; the food was lukewarm, but it was not bad. I told her briefly about the concert, and she asked about my mother. But I was, for once, too tired to talk about myself; I sat with my head still full of the plane and listened to Helen plot the regulatory policies with which she hoped to make the world less of an unfair place. By the time we got back to the apartment I was worn out. Helen had set up a futon on the far side of her room, and had made it up with crisp white sheets and a large green quilt. I sank down to floor level and thought I would go at once to sleep. In fact, Helen slept first. I lay in the corner and listened to her breathing, and saw the way her arm dropped off the side of her bed, like Chatterton’s. Helen had no curtains in her apartment, and the light of the city and the light of the moon came through her large window and lit her, and she looked like peace on earth. I got up and walked across the room to look at her more closely; I almost touched her hair, which had become luminous, but she turned slightly and alarmed me, and I lay down again. Then I, too, fell at last into a deep, exhausted sleep.

  The next morning jet lag woke me early. I showered in Helen’s glitteringly white bathroom, turning the large, old, satisfying knobs that she had polished to a silver glow, and reveling in the bliss of American water pressure. Helen had to get to work, and when I shuffled into the kitchen, she was eating a croissant with some orange juice and a large cup of milky coffee. “The jam’s for you,” she said, pushing a jar of apricot preserve in my direction. “And there’s another croissant, and there’s toast if you want it, and I got some yogurt.” So I had the croissant with a great deal of apricot jam—which I didn’t particularly want—and I drank some orange juice, and I ate the yogurt, and I made myself some tea. Bernard always said it was less painful to make breakfast for me than to watch me bump into things in my morning miasma; Helen seemed to think it was easier to let me fend for myself. I was in an expansive mood, but Helen was pressed for time. “Lock the top lock, but don’t try to lock the bottom lock, because it gets stuck. Turn off the lights when you go, and please make sure you wash your dishes because there are bugs in this building.” Helen stopped for a second in front of the old gilded mirror in the hall and tightened one of her earrings, as though the mirror had shown it to be loose. “I’ve got to run,” she said, and then she gave me a great hug. “Sweetie, I hope it’s a raving success tonight. Give your mother all my love,” she said. “And call me.” And then she was out the door and gone.

  I went back into the bedroom and turned on the TV to a channel that Helen’s set couldn’t receive—she didn’t have cable—so that a variable fuzzy noise filled the room. I dialed my parents’ line, and made a point of pausing between sentences to reproduce the effect of a bad transatlantic connection. I sang “Happy Birthday” as I had done on my mother’s birthday morning every year. My mother told me that she was going to go out that evening for the first time since her hair had gone. “Your father’s made a reservation,” she said, and named a favorite restaurant as though it were the café at the gates of hell.

  I remember that, when I was little, my father once came home without a cake for my mother’s birthday. She sat through her birthday dinner with a set expression, and my father couldn’t work out what was wrong; unsure whether there was really anything wrong at all, he preserved his sunny manner through two courses. At the end of the roast beef, he stood up to help clear the table. “And what’s for dessert?” he asked brightly.

  “I didn’t get anything for dessert,” said my mother, “beca
use I didn’t think it would be necessary this evening.” I can still hear the injury in her voice. Of course, my mother never ate cake, but she expected icing sugar and candles and she expected to be surprised. My father never failed again; cakes and champagne marked the passage of each of my mother’s years. Now, it was my mother who, for my father, was going to have a festive evening, to open presents and seem glad. “It’s the first evening out for the wig,” she said, as though it were anyone’s treat but her own.

  • • •

  I got to the restaurant half an hour early that evening, sat at our usual table, had a drink, and watched the other diners. I was calm in expectation of my mother’s arrival; I knew the facial expressions with which she always registered her surprise, and I looked forward to them placidly. I had worked out in advance all the nice things I would say about the wig, which my optimistic father had said looked so like her own hair that only she could tell the difference. I felt certain that I would make the day as rich for her as any of her birthdays had ever been.