One Thousand Chestnut Trees

‘Well, it’s settled then. I’m going. To Brazil … Why not Brazil?’

‘A bit melodramatic isn’t it? That’s where war criminals go. Besides, it’s so far away.’

Oliver looked far away already, quite alone with his misfortunes. Betrayed by his wife, business crashing, on the run from some past stain that made him jumpy and sour. But it wasn’t any good telling me these things, I was on the brink of telling him, I was just as derailed as he was.

‘The climate’s good in Brazil,’ he said, pathetically.

Sitting there overlooking Central Park amidst thick napery and gilt, it was hard to feel too sorry for Oliver. He looked so sturdy; a mature oak of a man, enjoying the deepest possible roots, but these he had severed long ago. Like most New Yorkers, he was a socio-geographic amputee, a handsome trunk, cut off at the knees.

I was saddened and mildly alarmed by this display of middle-aged vulnerability. But before I could offer any modest comfort, a wave of jadedness drowned the tender sprout of compassion. This is New York, pal, said the pre-emptive voice, Get a grip. Unnerved by his lost expression, I faltered, then remembered helpfully that people here came and went with every toilet flush. Oliver was a bubble on the effluvient foam of the East River; a wad of chewing gum on the city’s stiletto. You had to get used to people leaving New York. You reeled in the severed ties of friendship quickly. You learned to let go in advance.

Numbness set in as I realized that I was jobless. We parted in the freezing rain on the wide, optimistic steps of the Plaza. Oliver and his troubles were dwarfed standing there beneath the bright waving flags of Canada, America, France, and Guam. He forced a smile, and hunched his shoulders in farewell.

I would miss Oliver very much, despite his manifold obnoxiousnesses. In my heart’s psychiatric wing, he was almost like family. As with my uncle’s demise, there would be no Mayoral committee, no special envoy at the airport thanking him for his brave effort, nothing to soften his humiliation. Just a thirty-five dollar cab-ride.

It was odd thinking of my uncle and Oliver together. They met only once; not surprising given that Hong-do and I met only occasionally, but the two men were so different that they refused to share the same memory.

The one time Hong-do came to Cadogan Books was a tense occasion. Opening the door to Oliver’s apartment, I kissed my uncle’s cheek awkwardly, truly happy to see him. But a chilling moment followed, when I saw him through Oliver Flood’s eyes. After a perfunctory stab of courtesy, Oliver seemed only to notice my uncle’s awkward business-English, slightly inferior suit and rather dodgy shoes. These preliminary findings appeared to relieve him of further interest. It was also apparent from Hong-do’s sharp-eyed silence that he thought Oliver an arrogant, trivial man.

Seeing these two worlds standing side by side in the same room, yet failing to meet in any way, was painful. I was torn; insulted by Oliver’s flippant welcome to Hong-do, yet ashamed to be able to understand Oliver and his limitations better than I could follow my own uncle’s thoughts.

During those years in New York, Hong-do had remained in his own Korean enclave, and I stayed in my Western one. It was as if we had been moored in the same harbour on separate submarines. Although I invited him aboard my vessel, he never stayed long; he seemed to know about the leaks. I should have done better; made the necessary repairs to accommodate him.

I reflected on these failures walking down Fifth Avenue, past the unappetizing, superfluous luxuries behind shatterproof glass. I searched the faces streaming towards me with detached curiosity, with painter’s eye, but was soon numbed by the insistent drumming of impressions on the retinae. Infinitesimal variations on one eyes-nose-mouth theme, so many individual, snowflake faces in the blizzard of urban rush hour humanity. A face missing one quality was superseded by a face possessing that quality, and missing another. One race complemented another race. Perhaps the incomplete, jigsaw faces all added up to one consummate face, reflecting God’s obscured likeness.

It was getting dark. I ate a warm pretzel more for recreation than hunger, looked at my watch, and decided to go into St Thomas’ for evensong. Its choir was justly famous. Despite being Catholic, I preferred the intimacy of this church to the cavernous nave of St Patrick’s Cathedral across the street, with its dwarfing gothic stalagmites. I entered the dim church, and slid into a pew at the back, like a stray. A row of fur coats and blonde heads swivelled round in impious curiosity. Through the tracery of the altar screen and the rose window, the night glowed a rich cobalt blue.

The service had begun, and my eardrums were bathed in silky, sweet, golden music. The boys’ voices were arrows of piercing sound, bright as stars; still, chill, and distant. Aimed at the heavens, the notes were like austere fireworks, going so high and no further, bursting and falling gracefully, no less beautiful for their vain striving. I felt both pain and relief at the sound, as my selfish, jagged yearnings bled into insignificance. The voices sliced through my pretence at being happy, exposed my false footing. The discomfort was oddly strengthening. Often I sat there, coated with a light scum of petty dishonesties and rank thoughts, and by the end of the service would feel quite clean; spirits rinsed by the acid purity of the music, anxieties temporarily assuaged by the healing words of the prayers:

‘O God … give unto thy servant that peace which the world cannot give … Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ, Amen.’

Then I would slink out again into the lucre-grimed circus of Fifth Avenue, where the invisible particles of acquisition and struggle accumulated again within like a layer of plaque.

Now I sat still after the fur coats and cashmeres had filed out solemnly, and stayed behind to think. I had not taken communion, partly for tribal reasons. I would feel a fraud not being Anglican. Who were my ‘people’? Did one need a people? An artist was meant to be a pioneer, a pilgrim, yet a submerged need to belong surfaced at odd moments. The Catholic church was a spiritual family, but somehow the bond was obscure, impersonal, like St Patrick’s itself. One longed for a more acute, flesh-and-blood connection, smaller than God, and more enduring, more forgiving than a lover. A chill of doubt and wonder enveloped me in the church. Rueful thoughts came of my own small family, scattered by discord and continental drift. I had no siblings nor living relatives at all on my father’s side. I thought of my uncle Hong-do, and a tiny spark of warmth lightened the void. Clashes with my mother had prevented me from exploring the Korean side of my family. I wondered if it might be possible to try now, or if it was already too late. Had I the maturity to attempt such a radical reversal of the entrenched ostrich position that I’d assumed toward her culture?

Wriggling, I tried to calculate what it would cost to embrace the Orient. It could be restrictive. One might even lose one’s former identity. Besides, would one be acceptable to them, as a half-Westerner? A quasi-Oriental face would only go so far to reassure them. Inner qualities would be needed to bridge the gap. Did these qualities already exist in me, or could they be developed as one went along?

Strangely, Korea was the last destination I thought of travelling to. It was a world I accepted as being permanently and impossibly remote. In my warped thinking, I vaguely imagined it to be full of Korean mothers who would give me a hard time. Perhaps I wasn’t strong enough to face the sad endings of the fairy-tale past related to me as a child. Yet the prospect held out an undeniable sense of promise. Maybe it was the key to some locked door which needed opening. Although one shrank from becoming a race-bore, for the first time it seemed that there might be a middle way between exaggerating its importance, and denying it altogether. Perhaps it would be possible to go to Korea.

Full of nascent intentions, I took the express train downtown, somewhat sedated by evensong and the good wine from lunch. But after a few minutes under the cauterizing lights of the jolting carriage and the barbed stare of a drunk vagrant, my nerves were soon fraying again. Korea was pulled from my thoughts like an expensive scarf caught in the subway turnstile.

I slightly dreaded arriving at the Twenty-third Street exit. Wesley, the one-legged black Vietnam veteran on crutches might be there at the top of the stairs, bellowing ‘Marry me!’ to all the young women walking past. Much as I had a soft spot for Wesley, I couldn’t face him tonight, and to my relief, he was not there. Back out on the street, the air had grown colder and the wind had picked up. I checked the train entrance reflexively to make sure that I was not being followed by the drunk from the subway car, nodded a greeting to Jésus at the Ti Amo Cigar Stand on the corner, and let myself into the dark apartment building, the sleet cutting into my cheek, like a spray of crushed glass.

The apartment was empty. Laura was out at an uptown gallery opening with her married lover. Not hungry, I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. As I switched on the light the waterbugs startled me – and I them. Fat as dates, the bugs scrambled sluggishly out of the bathtub and filed into the large gaps in the tile-caulking that the landlord had promised to see to months ago.

I went to bed early, ascending the ladder to my carpeted shelf to read by the clip-on lamp. One could just about sit up without scraping one’s head. Without pleasure I drank the large glass of whisky I’d poured myself, feeling a sense of disgusted relief as the alcohol burned and seeped its way toxically around my bloodstream. In the semi-dark I drifted off – the marquee lights of the Coronet stayed on all night, bathing the curtainless apartment in ice-blue illumination. Since my small epiphany about Korea, I felt quite restless, unable to block out the usual nocturnal serenade. Traffic noise roared down Twenty-third Street. I was roused by the shout of a wino, the sound of a taxi honking. Around four am, someone’s newly discovered favourite song boomeranged around the building’s airshaft. The loud noise had a pointless, sad defiance to it, like a prisoner shaking the bars of his cell. It repeated three times more and abruptly stopped. Just before dawn, I slept.

CHAPTER THREE Five Martinis

At six o’clock the next morning I was awakened, as usual, by the hydraulic twangs of the industrial elevators delivering shipments to the storage basement below the funeral parlour. Feeling jetlagged from sleep-interruption, I dozed on until nearly nine. Standing in the narrow, gloomy kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil I remembered that Oliver had given me a month’s notice. Familiar financial fear started to spread through my lungs like camphor.

Obviously, rents and utilities had to be paid; food, drink, and art supplies had to be bankrolled, and a surreally large college loan needed repaying. I had difficulty swallowing my toast. I took a scorching swig of coffee and glanced around the apartment; Laura had not come home last night. The apartment looked dusty and neglected in daylight. It was dusty and neglected.

That afternoon Laura rang me at Cadogan Books and asked me to meet her for a drink at the Algonquin. Harry also called, back from his business trip to Philadelphia. He would join us there later. Laura and I met at six-thirty, and sat on a sofa trying to look nonchalant. I hadn’t seen her in a couple of days. She looked tired.

‘It’s my birthday,’ she said brushing a lock of wavy blond hair out of her martini glass. I had forgotten her birthday. So had Philip, the married lover.

‘About Philip,’ she said, ‘I think I’m in trouble.’

‘Not pregnant.’

‘No. In love,’ she said.

‘It’s not an affliction, you know.’

‘But it wasn’t supposed to happen. I was supposed to just like his company. Appreciate the square meals. Now I really mind; I mind that he’s married; I mind that I mind. And of course …’ she trailed off, ‘It’s tacky, I know …’

‘Maybe you could bail out now, before you get hurt any more.’

‘Easier said than done, old thing.’

‘Yeah, I know. But you’ve got to think about the big picture. Meals come and go.’

Laura looked upset.

‘Well, I’ve lost my job; Oliver’s going out of business.’

Laura raised an eyebrow. A balding waiter politely brought us our second round of martinis and another dish of greasy mixed nuts.

I had known Laura since university. Since before she had become an unknown actress. She hadn’t met anyone nice since her junior year, when she’d gone out with Charlie Downs. It was widely assumed that they would get married. Charlie surprised everyone by getting engaged to the eighteen-year-old daughter of the Senator for whom he’d worked in Washington.

Across the room I noticed a couple of preppy-looking boys, probably around our age. One of them was long and droopy, and the other had curly hair and wore a cream-coloured Irish fisherman’s sweater draped around his neck. Unexpectedly, the droopy one made his way over to our sofa.

‘Would you ladies condescend to have a drink with us?’

‘Suave,’ Laura said, smirking, ‘I guess I wouldn’t mind another.’

I shot her a questioning look. One worried almost equally about Laura’s man-judgement as about her drinking-judgement. She tended neither to eat enough to avoid instant drunkenness, nor to get enough decent male attention to repulse dodgy advances. However a diversion from the adultery question was welcome. Noting his friend’s success, the boy in the fisherman’s sweater rose from his corner, and sauntered over to our table.

‘Hi there. Wen Stanley. Tommy introduced himself? Tom Morgan. Morgan-Stanley, I know, I know … Mind if we sit down?’ he asked.

‘What kind of a name is “Wen”?’ said Laura.

‘Short for Wendell,’ said Wen, visibly warming to his subject. He and Tommy smiled conspiratorially. ‘Waiter! Another round please. Put these on my tab, will you?’ said Wen, untying his sweater sleeves.

I don’t remember a great deal of the ensuing conversation, nor was any of it surprising. Condensed version: them; Groton, Middlebury, Manufacturer’s Hanover training program, Fisher’s Island. Laura knew Tommy Morgan’s sister from St Pauls. Wen knew a few people from Brown, including my old boyfriend, Fred, and a slew of friends of my friends’ cousins. Wen lived on the upper East Side in his maiden aunt’s apartment. Would we like to go up there for a nightcap?

Laura said she’d like to, and excused herself to go to the Ladies’ Room. I sat there between the boys, smashed. We had eaten some nuts and pretzels. I counted having drunk five martinis. (A first.)

Just then Harry entered the hotel and looked around inquisitively. He spotted me sandwiched between two strange men, and his face hardened a fraction. I had forgotten that Harry was coming.

‘How was Philadelphia?’

‘Fine,’ he said, scrutinizing me. ‘Harry Palmer. Pleased to meet you,’ he said, shaking hands insincerely with Morgan-Stanley. He fired me another look and settled heavily into Laura’s seat. The boys exchanged men-of-the-world glances.

‘Not Palmer, of Palmer’s Peanut Butter, I trust?’ said Tommy, in an inspired gambit.

‘’Fraid so,’ said Harry, looking about distractedly.

‘Weh-hey! Palmer’s Peanut Butter! The King of Peanut Butters. That makes you … what, King Peanut?’ said Wen.

Harry flinched. ‘My father’s the boss.’

‘So what do you do, crack the shells?’ Tommy drained his martini glass languidly.

Harry ignored him.

‘So you must be an incredibly rich guy. Plus all the peanut butter you could ever desire.’

‘I’m flattered at your interest in the family business. Why, what does your father do?’

‘Here are the drinks. Cheers, Mr Peanut!’ Wen raised his glass. Harry’s jaw tightened again, and he looked at me with distaste.

‘I’d better go see what’s happened to Laura,’ I excused myself. As I walked to the Ladies’ Room the force of the martinis asserted itself in a blaze of dizziness and acidic hunger. Legs, which felt like they belonged to someone else, carried me to the little wood-panelled bar with the grouchy bartender. Ignoring his eyeballing intimidation tactics, I crammed a handful of mini-pretzels from the napkinned bowl into my mouth and walked away, crunching, pleased to be able to negotiate the crowded reception area without mishap. I found Laura behind a locked cubicle in the Ladies’ Room.

‘Are you all right, Laur?’ I got down on all fours onto the spotless black-and-white checkerboard floor and looked under the door.

‘Absolutely not,’ came a weak voice above her familiar feet, ‘I’ve been sick.’

Worried that I might get sick as well, I started to do some light jumping-jacks and toe-touching calisthenics, hoping that violent blood circulation might speed the alcohol-processing and chatted with some difficulty to Laura as I performed them.

The sound of Laura retching ripped through the echoey sanctum. It was so hushed in the Algonquin that one could imagine being ejected for making audible bodily function noises. A middle-aged woman in a fur coat entered and looked horrified, catching me mid-jumping-jack, and experiencing Laura’s vomiting noises as they peaked acoustically. She left in an outraged huff, trailing the scent of ancient Blue Grass.

‘I don’t want to rush you, but are you OK yet?’ I asked under the door.

‘Getting there.’

‘You can’t really want to go uptown with these clowns. I mean, it’s not as if we know them or anything. And Harry certainly won’t want to go.’

‘What is there to know, for Christ’s sake. Where’s your spirit of adventure? It’s my birthday after all … Won’t you at least go along with me on my birthday?’ she wheedled from under the door.

‘Excuse me for pointing this out, but look where “spirit of adventure” has gotten you so far, Laur – the tiles.’

‘Oh come on. Forget Harry. You don’t like him anyway.’

‘Thanks Laur. I’ll see you back out there. And hurry up will you? Do you need anything?’

‘Nah. Be out in a minute.’

Twenty minutes later, the five of us were in a taxi headed uptown. Tommy tried to charge the bill to his father’s reciprocal Harvard Club account, but the waiter refused. Harry, looking blacker and blacker, ended up paying the tab. The air was somewhat tense.

Although Morgan-Stanley were a bit of a joke, Harry’s martyred patience and plodding reliability were not especially endearing that evening. There in the taxi I was chilled by the thought that I didn’t actually care much what he thought or felt. Though we had only been seeing each other for a month, he was becoming quite proprietorial. Our watery liaison boiled down to a flirty evening shouting over the Palladium’s sound system, a couple of unrelaxed beers at Fanelli’s, a harrowing weekend at his parents’, and an intensely interrogatory dinner at Mortimer’s.

There had been a curious lack of urgency about our attraction. Harry’s advances, like his opinions, were politic, and had remained delayed on the ground for a disarmingly long time, like the take-off of a well-maintenanced jumbo aircraft. Although he was kind and well-meaning, I had been attracted to a friend’s racy description of what he had been like during college. As time went on, I wondered if perhaps the friend had been thinking of someone else.

Squashed up against Harry as the taxi gunned up Park Avenue, mildly sickened, I wondered about romantic Love. The rare, invisible currency running through people’s lives, whose presence tripled your blood count in the night. People pretended it didn’t matter if you had it or not, but it did. Maverick and precious, it was a wild thread stitching together unlikely people, strengthening them, suturing their wounds, weaving surprising designs in the chaos. Whatever it was, Harry and I had not been selected for its grace.

I recalled that weekend, being brought home speculatively, and prematurely, to his family’s grey-shingled mansion in Sands Point, to see how I went with the decor, and the weft and weave of other family members. Harry’s other blond brothers Mark, Randy, and Junior were all lined up at the enormous mirror-polished dining-table with their blonde-highlighted, nautilized wives. It was like being cast in an East Coast setting of a Tennessee Williams play. Mr Walter Palmer, rheumy-eyed, ruddy-faced manufacturing magnate and patriarch, sat at the head of the table sallying and interrogating his slightly cowed sons with brittle humour. Mrs Betty Palmer, with spun-sugar hairdo and kind, suffering expression, made conversation with Junior’s new wife Donna about the upcoming Cancer Benefit at The Pierre.

Harry smiled a little too encouragingly at me over his cut-crystal wine goblet. That I was an apprentice artist had been bad enough, but when Mr Palmer asked what my father did for a living, he took the news that my father was an artist too as if it were a personal insult. He couldn’t quite place me socially, which irritated him; artist-father – could be some Communism there – the slightly Oriental eyes, the prep-school and ivy-league background, it didn’t tally squarely on the balance sheet. Mrs Palmer was just asking where my mother was from, when Mr Palmer launched into a well-rehearsed anecdote about how Mr Palmer senior had worked his way up and across from air-conditioning units to the dizzying heights of the peanut butter world. We laughed tactfully, and filed into the equestrian-print-lined, chintzy study for coffee and Mrs Palmer’s special-recipe peanut brownies à la mode, as prepared by Dolores, the Filipina cook. I smiled inanely, and sat down on a needlepoint cushion that read, Nouveau Riche is Better Than No Riche At All.

Why had I gone? What was I now doing in a taxi with him and these other strangers? I didn’t really know. Muddling along, trying anything once. Lost. That most people I knew appeared to be equally lost blurred this fact, and removed the stigma.

During the cab ride Wen accidentally dropped his fisherman’s sweater out of the open window. The taxi driver refused to stop for it. Back out on the pavement Laura, now sober, paid for the cab as the rest of us were having considerable trouble finding correct change. Harry’s pale blue eyes looked more puzzled and washed out than usual, and he said that he was going to walk home. I told him I would be keeping an eye on Laura. As I said this, it occurred to me that I might not be seeing Harry again. I felt a needling regret as I remembered that Harry was quite nice really. I wished him well, and selfishly, disliked losing an admirer. Harry walked away, head down and hands jammed in his coat pockets, and disappeared into a gap of dark pavement between the streetlights.

Wen, Tommy, Laura and I crushed into the carved wooden elevator under the disapproving stare of the doorman, and entered Wen’s aunt’s apartment with a respectful silence as we took in the regulation upper East Side brocades, severe Chippendale and grandiose blackamoor figures flanking the doorway to the dining room.

Tommy, the polite one, decanted generous glasses of Aunt Stanley’s vintage Armagnac. A lock of Laura’s hair caught fire as he lit her cigarette. It wasn’t serious, but she was a bit shaken. We ate some Baskin Robbins Rocky Road ice-cream and leftover microwaved macaroni, in that order. After a couple of Armagnacs and some frugal lines of cocaine from a little waxed envelope in his wallet, Wen emerged from a bedroom without any trousers on, and sat down wittily on the ottoman at Laura’s feet in his socks and protruding boxer shorts.

This seemed like a good moment to leave. Wen, still trouserless, and Tommy escorted us downstairs in the elevator, and Laura – nursing her singed lock of hair – and I got into a cab and went home. We never saw them again.