A Stone Boat Read online

  Bernard picked me up at Heathrow when I got back from that first hospital sojourn. During the year that followed, he was to pick me up at Heathrow an inconceivable number of times, driving monotonously back and forth, listening in his appreciative but impassive way to tapes of grand opera in one direction and to the confessions of my heart in the other. He came to seem almost as routine as the customs officers, as inevitable a part of transit as the porters; but the fact that he was always happy to see me was addictive, and I came to be more reliant on his smile than on the engines of the planes in which I flew. When I was in New York, Bernard seemed remote and insignificant, but when I came to London, I relaxed into Bernard and became myself again. In New York, I felt as though I were being peeled, and when I returned to London and saw Bernard, my skin began to grow back.

  The first time, I was in New York for a month. I can remember kissing Bernard in the car park at Heathrow in the first minutes of getting back, driven not by passion or sexual longing so much as by the independence of the act. On the way into town, I asked him all about the recent events of his life, and found that the details which had seemed so tedious and so hollow on the phone in New York were strangely engrossing in London. I was delighted that Liz was getting married, and distressed by the continuing situation with Norman. I longed to see how the window boxes were doing, and was very pleased about the northern Italian restaurant near where that funny antique shop had been. I quite saw that it was inconvenient about Patrick’s leaving, but suggested that in some ways one might do better than Patrick in the long run, and that this might later on seem a very good thing. We talked also about the concert I was to give later in the week. In New York, this had masqueraded as the primary reason for my trip, and I had invoked it almost as an excuse, but I had given the cold reality of it little thought. Now it glared at me. Bernard told me, in the car, how many of our friends were going to come, and I wished that they weren’t.

  When we got to the flat, Bernard produced a magnificent cold supper, and a bottle of the Australian wine we had discovered in July. There were new candles in the candlesticks. There were late cornflowers in the vase I had given him two months earlier. I had been so busy fussing over my mother for more than a month; we had all been so busy making her favorite things that I had forgotten what my own favorite things were. I looked at that food and those flowers and the pretty glasses and when Bernard went to wash his hands, I found myself at the brink of tears. Helen used to say that all tears were memories; I seemed at that moment to be remembering myself, whole and entire. But I pulled myself up short before Bernard came back. And aside from a sad moment while Bernard was in the kitchen making toast, I stayed wreathed in smiles all evening.

  I had only ten days in London if I was to be back in New York in time for my mother’s birthday. There were a thousand things to do, people to see, phone calls to make, bills to pay. I had some details of my contract to settle with my agent and with the recording studio where I would be working—which was not far from Bernard’s flat—and we had to try to set up schedules of some kind, though I had apprised my agent of the situation with my mother and he was trying to make things as flexible as possible. “You should be performing more,” he said. “You should have a dense schedule this autumn.” But I insisted on a broken schedule with little clumps of engagements and larger clumps of free time.

  Bernard had taken several days off during my absence to meet the plumber at my house to try to deal with the problem about the washing machine, but it was not really settled in any very satisfactory way, and I knew that in the end I was going to have to spend an afternoon with the plumber and the electrician if anything was to function again. I also had to decide whether what the plumber had said to Bernard about the basement wall made sense, and I had to decide what to do about that wall, which was not looking terrific. I had to get my favorite umbrella repaired so I could take it back to New York, and to get my hair cut, and to buy my mother a birthday present. Between all these other things, I had to practice the music I was to play for the concert. I had spent too little time at the piano in New York, even less time than I had thought.

  After a month with nothing more sociable than the crush in my mother’s hospital room or a late-night drink with Helen, I suddenly had parties to go to. What was happening in New York remained inexplicable, but it also turned into anecdote, so that I could speak of it with the same fluidity I brought to the continuing situation with Norman and the question about Patrick. At dinner at Claire and Michael’s house, we discussed the nature of illness and the advantages and disadvantages of American hospitals and the National Health. At Frieda’s drinks party, she introduced me to a woman called Elaine who had had exactly what my mother had about ten years earlier and who was now divorcing her second husband since the illness. Jane seated me at her house next to a friend of hers whose mother had recently died; we made polite but rather uncomfortable conversation. Everyone took me aside to tell me how anxious Bernard was. “I’ve been talking to him every day,” Claire told me. “He’s keeping us all posted. And he’s so worried for you. Michael’s been absolutely worried about Bernard being so worried.” I smiled and observed that this was very like Michael, and generally said how lucky I felt I was. And in fact, though I had spent the month mostly feeling cursed, I did feel that week that I was lucky.

  • • •

  My mother and I spoke regularly on the phone. Usually I called her, but the day before my concert it was she who called me, in the afternoon. “How are you doing?” asked my mother.

  “I’m fine,” I said. I was trying to practice and I was frustrated by the interruption. “How are you?”

  “Well, I have a new collection of revolting symptoms, but perhaps I’ll wait and tell you about them some other time. Are you feeling ready for the concert tomorrow?”

  I said that I had been practicing constantly. “It’s not going to be a very difficult concert. It’s all music I’ve played before. And it should be an easy audience. Tolerant subscription people and Mozart lovers.”

  “You sound tired,” said my mother.

  I was not aware of sounding tired. I was, in fact, not aware of being tired until she mentioned it. “I had a strange dream last night,” I said. I had forgotten it until that moment. “I was playing the Schubert at a very big concert in some kind of great arena, a sort of amphitheater. I was playing it perfectly, better than I’d ever played it before, and then suddenly, in the middle of the Andante, I realized that I couldn’t remember which movement came next. And so I kept playing one phrase over and over again, hoping I would remember, so I could go on, but I couldn’t remember. I woke up in a cold sweat.”

  “So you’re not feeling at all anxious about the concert tomorrow,” my mother said in a tone of light irony.

  “No, I don’t think it was about that. I’m not playing the Schubert tomorrow anyway,” I said. “Funny, I’d forgotten it until this moment. I must have fallen asleep again a little while afterward.”

  “Do yourself a favor and go to bed early tonight,” said my mother. “Don’t keep getting out of bed to play little odds and ends over to make sure you have them right. Just go to sleep and stay asleep if you can.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said. “I don’t usually get up in the middle of the night here because the piano wakes Bernard up. But with jet lag and everything . . .”

  “If you decide to stay asleep, you’ll stay asleep,” my mother said. “I’m spending the day at the hospital tomorrow, preparing for my first chemotherapy, so I don’t know whether we’ll be able to speak. If we don’t, have a good concert. Call and let me know how it goes.”

  “You let me know how it goes at the hospital,” I said. “It can’t be as bad as you think it’s going to be.”

  • • •

  That night, I slept fitfully. Easy audience or not, Mozart or otherwise, I was nervous. It had been only six weeks since my last concert, but I felt a
s though I’d been on sabbatical forever. My fingers seemed tight and atrophied. I had included a divertimento that I didn’t like very much, because I had thought it would balance the other pieces, and I didn’t feel like playing it. Bernard said I should announce a change to the program, but that seemed theatrical to me. I kept working on the divertimento. I knew I was playing it too fast, but I couldn’t seem to get it back under control. By the end of the afternoon, I was in a foul mood, and when the phone rang, I was tempted not to answer it.

  “You’re still tired,” said my mother.

  “Jet lag,” I said.

  “Take a nap,” she said. “You still have time.”

  “I don’t have time,” I said, “and naps always leave me feeling bleary. You know that I never nap before a concert.” We were both silent for a moment while the line crackled. “Weren’t you supposed to be at the doctor’s all day?” I asked.

  “I’m between appointments. The man who checks my blood is finished with me, and I have half an hour until they do the scans. Your father has somehow managed to get me a private phone so I can call you while he runs out for sandwiches, which I have already told him I won’t eat. You’d think, since they keep telling me to eat more, that they’d have scheduled in enough time to go and get lunch.”

  “I wouldn’t think so. I wouldn’t think they’d think about it. Remember, I’ve been there and met them.” It was a bad connection with an echo. “You sound tired. I know you’re afraid,” I said, “but I think the process today is pretty routine.”

  My mother laughed. “Breaking rocks in the noonday sun is routine for chain gangs,” she said. “I didn’t sleep well last night. Partly because I knew I had to come here today. I hate this place.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “And then I had your dream,” my mother said.

  “You had what?” I asked.

  “I had your dream,” she said. “I had gone to one of your concerts, and I had seats in the middle of the hall. You were playing the Schubert, really beautifully. I love that piece. And then you began to get lost, in that low rumbly passage. And I knew what the notes were that you needed, and I kept trying to call up to you, but you couldn’t hear me, and you kept playing that passage over and over again. You had the most terrible look on your face, a sort of lost, frightened look, a little boy look. And I felt so sad, so overwhelmingly sad, and all I could do was watch you.”

  “I hope it doesn’t happen that way tonight,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” said my mother. “It’ll be fine.”

  “I’m not in good form,” I said.

  “No,” said my mother. “You sound grumpy. Think of it this way, Harry. At eleven o’clock tonight, one way or the other, it’ll be over. It’s not going to be a complete disaster with that music and that audience. If it’s not the best concert you’ve ever played, then it’s not the best concert you’ve ever played, and after eleven o’clock you don’t ever have to think about it again. You don’t really want to be thought of as a Mozartian anyway.”

  • • •

  That night, Bernard drove me to the concert hall, and then he came backstage and sat with me while I ran over some scales and tried to get the tempo for the divertimento. He retied my tie—he always retied my bow ties—and then we waited together until we heard the crowd being let in.

  It was not the best concert I had ever played, but it was perfectly all right, and the audience dutifully asked for an encore. I had planned to do more Mozart, but I suddenly remembered, as I sat down, what my mother had said the week before about the Moonlight Sonata sounding like the dishwasher jammed on the rinse cycle, and it made me laugh again, and I played a light early Beethoven sonata instead. All the time I was playing I thought about the dishwasher, that dishwasher we had had in the country, and the way the yellow china had looked against the dishwasher racks. I remembered when I had once jammed the dishwasher; my mother had been furious. Hot water and bubbles everywhere. “If I had wanted to go wading,” my mother had said, “we would have bought a house on the beach.”

  That night, as we drove home, Bernard said to me, “You’re right about the Mozart. It was fine, but nothing more. But you were great on that Beethoven you did as an encore. It was just lovely. Maybe you should even think about trying to record it.”

  I smiled and kissed him on the cheek. “Maybe I should,” I said. I felt very tired, and I looked out of the window. I tried to imagine having one of his dreams, or his having one of mine.

  • • •

  The next day was Friday, and I had promised Bernard that I would meet him at lunchtime so that we could pick out a birthday present for his godson. We had looked briefly in a small toy store near the flat, but, not finding anything suitable, had decided to venture to central London. I was feeling relaxed. The concert was over; the weekend was at hand; the sun was out. Bernard was taking the afternoon off from work, and as I was fond of his godson I was pleased to be included in the choosing of a gift. It was a good kind of shopping day, which is no doubt why the store was busy when we got there—not so crowded that it was difficult to make purchases, but distinctly bustling.

  We wandered around on the ground floor, looking at laminated furniture with Your Child’s Name in balloon letters, and large plastic toys that could be fitted together into larger plastic toys, and an anatomically correct model of a racing car that was marked at some inconceivable price. There was a man in a clown suit blowing bubbles out of what appeared to be a chrome-plated saxophone, standing next to a pyramid of smaller saxophones. There were rows of plastic dolls in glittering sport clothes staring vacantly from a glass display case, and there were computerized video games of every description at which mobs of eleven-year-old boys stood transfixed. “The things we want are upstairs, I think,” said Bernard.

  And indeed they were. Upstairs, we found good, solid, wooden blocks in wonderful colors and shapes. We found big stuffed animals and little stuffed animals, most of them dressed better than the shoppers, all made by traditional British craftsmen in remote counties. We found building sets manufactured in Scandinavia, in which little dowels and motors and slatelike supports could be fitted together to form anything from a car to a fully functional model of Tower Bridge. “This is rather good, don’t you think?” Bernard said, as he lingered over a workbench with a dozen perfect miniature tools and a box of blunt-ended nails.

  I agreed that it was good, that it was indeed a perfect gift for his godson, and waited while he went off to find a salesman. Standing by the workbench, I saw parents and children in every direction, contented-looking couples in their mid-thirties and early forties, mothers bending over eager little girls, fathers smiling as their sons held forth on the virtues of one set of model trains over another. Just before I had left New York, I had dropped Bernard’s name in a conversation with my mother. She had put her hand on my arm for a minute. “Harry,” she had said, “I love your father. I love him more, maybe, than you can imagine. But what would I do now without you and Freddy?”

  “You’d be fine,” I had replied.

  “Don’t get annoyed,” she had said to me, her voice taking on a saintly edge. “Please don’t. I wouldn’t be fine. I didn’t know when I was young and single how much it meant, or what a sense of purpose children bring. Maybe it’s unfair that men can’t have children with men, but it’s the way of the world. I wish I could explain it to you somehow. What you do have with Bernard—I know you think you’re being honest or true to yourself or something, but what you have with Bernard can’t be greater than that combination of love and children that you could have with Helen or someone, no matter how wonderful he is. It’s not just that I’m conventional—” She had looked at me then, and I had glowered at her. “I know this only because I do love you so much, Harry, you and Freddy.” Her voice had sunk almost to a whisper. “If you don’t have children of your own, you’ll nev
er know.”

  I had scoffed. “I am who I am.”

  “I think you could do anything, Harry, anything in the world if you wanted to,” my mother had said. “I’ve always thought that about you.”

  Now, standing in the toy store, I felt a sadness that was not just about children. If I was too idiosyncratic for convention, I was also too conventional to be blithely marginal, and among all these toys I felt as peripheral as though I had given up the rights even to my own childhood. I looked at the other adults in the toy store, and they seemed to me to be drifting already toward the relative contentment of middle age that I had seen in my parents. I knew that I did not really want to spend my life with Bernard; nor did I want to find myself older, a bit pinched and a bit faded, still looking for young pleasures. Male domesticity seemed suddenly fraudulent to me. I imagined what it would have felt like to come to this store with Helen, to be included, as Bernard and I clearly were not, in the approving smiles the other couples seemed to bestow on one another. I stood a little apart from Bernard, and hoped that we looked like old friends or like brothers; if I had come with Helen, I might have draped an arm loosely around her shoulders, and felt like part of how the world perpetuates itself. I believed that to do so would have been both a lie and a relief.

  If I had said any of this to Bernard, he would have been outraged. “You’ll never be happy,” Bernard would have said angrily, “if that’s what you think.” He would not have forgiven me. And perhaps he would have been right. Bernard did not have such doubts and, not having them, was able to be happy in our life just as it was. I envied him that; I envied all the men who were unflinchingly happy with men (I knew any number of them) as much as I envied those familial groups in the toy store. The happiness of such men seemed infinitely remote to me, more remote even than the complacence of these parents looking at stuffed animals. Helen had told me I had to make sure I knew who I was, and then learn contentment. “You just learn it,” she’d said. “Like you learned to play the piano.” In subtle contrast, I heard my mother’s voice saying, lightly, “You’re a big boy now, Harry. You make your own happiness or unhappiness.”