Rhode Island Blues

‘The north wind doth blow,

And we shall have snow.

And what will poor robin do then?

Poor thing.’

‘Things looked kind of permanent, at the Golden Bowl,’ I corrected myself. ‘And they seemed very responsible. They won’t just dump her.’

‘That’s what they want you to feel,’ said Joy. ‘But the marble is only veneer and that terrible white stone is so cheap they can hardly give it away. Why can’t she go somewhere more ordinary? Why does she have to be so special?’

‘The Ching was very positive about the Golden Bowl,’ said Felicity, when I came down with my bag, closing the book and rewrapping it in the piece of dark-red silk kept for the purpose. I felt such affectation to be annoying. ‘Though it seemed to see some kind of lawsuit in the future. Thus the kings of former times made firm the laws through the clearly defined penalties. What do you think that means?’

‘I have no idea,’ I said, briskly. ‘I do not see how throwing three coins in the air six times can affect anything.’

‘Darling,’ said Felicity, ‘it isn’t a question of affecting, but reflecting. It’s Jung’s theory of Synchronicity. But I know how you hate all this imaginative stuff.’

I said I’d rather not talk about it. My mother Angel had kept a copy of the I Ching on her kitchen shelf. She had no truck with silk wrappings or respect. The black-and-red book, with its white Chinese ideograms, was battered and marked by put-down coffee cups. ‘What’s the big deal,’ she would say, ‘it is only like consulting a favourite uncle, some wise old man who knows how the world works. You don’t have to take any notice of what he says.’ She would quote from Jung’s Foreword. ‘As to the thousands of questions, doubts, and criticisms that this singular book stirs up – I cannot answer these. The I Ching does not offer itself with proofs and results, it does not vaunt itself, nor is it easy to approach. Like a part of nature, it waits to be discovered.’

One day when Angel had brought home bacon and sardines from the shop, rather than the milk we needed, because she’d thrown the coins before leaving the house and come up with something disparaging about pigs and fishes, I’d lost my cool and protested. ‘Why do you have to throw those stupid coins, why can’t you make up your own mind, then at least I could have some cereal! You are a terrible mother!’ She’d slapped my face. I kicked her ankles. She seldom resorted to violence. When she did I forgave her: she’d get us confused: it was hard for her to tell the difference between her and me. To rebuke me was to rebuke herself. The sudden violence meant, all the same, that the downward slide into unreason was beginning again, and I knew it, and dreaded the weeks to come. My violence, in retaliation, was childish, but that was okay inasmuch as I was a child; I must have been about ten. Her white skin bruised easily. The blue marks were apparent for days. I felt terrible. I think that was at a time before my father left me alone with her: he simply didn’t understand mental illness. He felt she was wilful and difficult and was doing everything she could to upset and destroy him, while doting on me. I tried to tell him she was crazy but he didn’t believe me. I expect believing it meant he would have to take responsibility for me, and he wasn’t the kind of man to do that. He was an artist of the old school. Children were the mother’s business. Anyway he left, sending money for a time. I was alone with her for six months before Felicity turned up to look after us. I’d found her phone number in my mother’s address book and called her. We’d run out of money and there was no food in the cupboard and my mother wasn’t doing anything about it. My grandmother stayed until my mother was hospitalized, and I was in a boarding school, and then went back to her rich old husband in Savannah, the one who left her the Utrillo. She couldn’t stand any of it. Well, it was hard to stand. Visit my mother in her hospital ward, in a spirit of love, and find her white-faced with wild glazed eyes, tied down, shrieking hate at you. They didn’t have the drugs then they do now, and made no effort to keep the children away. I told them at school I was visiting my mother in hospital, but I didn’t tell them what kind of hospital. In those days to have an insane relative was a shame and a disgrace and a terrible secret thing in a family. No sooner had Felicity flown out than my mother simply died. I like to think she knew what she was doing, that it was the only way out for all of us. She managed to suffocate herself in a straitjacket. ‘Throw the coins and throw the pattern of the times,’ Angel would say cheerfully, in the good times, and she’d quote Jung’s Foreword, which she knew by heart, relieving me of the duty of believing what she believed.

‘To one person the spirit of the I Ching appears as clear as day, to another, shadowy as twilight, to a third, dark as night. He who is not pleased by it does not have to use it, and he who is against it does not have to find it true.’

As if that settled everything. I try to keep my mind on the good times, but you can see why I like to live in films rather than in reality, if it can possibly be done. I wondered what Krassner’s hang-up was. I thought I probably didn’t want to know, it was an impertinence to inquire. Art is art, forget what motivates it. What business of anyone else’s is why?

Felicity walked with me to the limo, her step still light, her head held high: age sat on her uncomfortably: it didn’t belong to her: I wanted to cry.

‘Thank you for coming all this way,’ she said. ‘I do appreciate it.

It’s made things easier. That place is okay, isn’t it? Of course I’d rather live with family, but one doesn’t want to be a burden.’

‘That place is a hoot,’ I said. ‘I’d give it a go. If you don’t like it I’ll come over and we’ll try again.’

I sank into the squashy real-leather seat.

‘Of course you’re not my only family,’ said Felicity. ‘There was Alison. Though I daresay they changed her name.’

Charlie was looking at his watch. But I was truly startled. I kept the limo door open. We couldn’t leave until I shut it.

‘Alison?’

‘I had Alison before I had your mother,’ said my grandmother. ‘On my fifteenth birthday. That was in London, back in the thirties. I wasn’t married. That made me a bad girl. They made me keep the baby for six weeks, and breastfeed, then they took her away, put her out for adoption.’

‘How could they be so cruel?’ I stood there with the car door open, in the middle of Connecticut, and the past came up and slammed me. And it wasn’t even mine, it was hers.

‘In the name of goodness,’ she said. ‘Most cruelties are. It was in case we changed our mind, but how could we, we unmarried mothers? We had nowhere to live, nowhere to go.’

‘Who took the baby?’

‘I don’t know. They didn’t tell you. It wasn’t allowed. They said so you could put the past behind you and the baby could live without the stigma of its birth. They said it was for everyone’s good but really it was for our punishment. It was a long time ago. Don’t worry about it. She’d be in her late sixties now, if she made it to that.’

‘An aunt,’ I said, jubilant.

‘Always thinking about yourself,’ said Felicity, wryly, and there was nothing for it. I had to go. Other people took more than three hours to drive to New York, but Charlie the mountain man got to Kennedy in two and a half.

8

Alison! A long lost aunt! So long as she could be traced: so long as she had survived. But sixty something years was not so long a time in a Western society; the probability was that she would be still in this world. Chances were that she would have married, had children, grandchildren; that she could provide me with a host of cousins and little relatives, all only a half step away. As ready a family as one of the cake mixes in my grandmother’s refrigerator: just add water and stir: pop in the oven and there you are, evidence of the continuity of family affection. Go for the pleasure, the ready-made, not the pain and boredom of finding the bowl, the wooden spoon, beating the sugar into the butter until the wrist tired. Just hang around, and lo, a family turns up.

Leaning against Concorde’s flimsy hull on the way back to London (I had a window seat but there was nothing to see outside but navy-blue), sipping orange juice, I wondered from whence these domestic images came. When I was small, in the patches when she was sane, which grew fewer and fewer as the years went by, my mother Angel would bake cakes and I would help. Then I was truly happy: we both were. I would scrape the bowl of the creamy mixture: lick the wooden spoon. The taste of damp wood would come through with the vanilla essence.

So much of the time, at least when I was working, I rejoiced in my lack of family. I was not burdened as others were, by the guilt and obligations that seemed to go along with having parents, of whom one should be seeing more, or doing more for, desire and duty forever conflicting: the problems of children, ditto.

‘Just a grandmother in Connecticut’ seemed more than enough to me: far enough away, and of her own volition, to be out of the dreaded Christmas equation which afflicts so many these days: who goes where: which step-child to which step-house, which natural child to which parent, who is to take in the reproachful aged. ‘Oh, now she’s moved to Rhode Island,’ sounded as if she were not an invention, and static, but a living, moving in-touch person. And only a fraction nearer.

I had noticed, mind you, that if I were out of the editing suite for more than a couple of days I would begin to feel a little uneasy, a little unbolstered up, as it were, by my comparative aloneness in the world. Others had parents and aunts and children: their Easters and Passovers were well peopled: their Christmas lists were full of duty items, and duty, I had come to observe, can feel less onerous than freedom: the need to enjoy oneself can become oppressive. As my due to Christmas festivities I would visit my mother’s headstone at Golders Green crematorium, and consider the meaning of life and death for half an hour or so, until cold seeped through the soles of my boots. Not, I came to the conclusion fairly early on, that there were any conclusions to come to. There was the pleasure one got in getting things right, and a disappointment that one day one could no longer do so, it would be too late. I hoped nobody noticed this lack of affect in me. I put on a brave face. And if someone were needed to work on Christmas Day, I would always volunteer.

Between jobs, the cracks showed. They were beginning to yawn wide enough to fall into. Colleagues were all very well: they adored you until the show ended, and then failed to recognize you in the street the following week; there were drinks and jokes in the pub with proper friends, and dancing and sexual overtures in the club, and films to go to, and plays, and theatre, and books. Girlfriends were fine until they got married or solidly partnered and drifted off into their folies à deux or, with-children, à trois or quatre, when you, little by little, turned into the baby-sitter, and a haze of domestic triviality drooped like a dull cloud over the old association, and the friendship faded away to Christmas card level: and others you thought were permanent in your life you quarrelled with or they quarrelled with you, over ridiculous things, over borrowed clothes or hurt pride or imagined insults, and that was always upsetting, and there was no sex by which to re-register and consolidate former affections. As if female friendship wasn’t made to endure, was a false conceit: as if sexual relationships plus children was all that really kept people together, and God knew even that didn’t seem to be enough. Some tried lesbian togetherness but I never really fancied it: it was either too possessive or too bent on variance for comfort, and you’d still find yourself jumping when the phone rang. Is it him, is it her, what’s the difference? Oddly, the young gay men now around town in such numbers seemed to make more reliable and lasting friends than anyone else: true, their partners changed more frequently and the splits were accompanied by the most dreadful tantrums, but their laughs and their lamentations mixed agreeably: they created more of a noisy family feel than the females managed.

My usual answer to the unease about whither and whence, alone, was simply to begin another job. Directors waited for my services. I was as busy as I needed to be. Get back to the cutting room and the dissection of fantasy, and the possibility of an award, an Oscar even, if not this year, then next, and the comfort of one’s prestige in the film business, the working end of it at any rate, if not the Oscar Versace summit, and I’d be just fine again. But I could see I could do with an aunt. One sprung ready-made into my life, without the complications of a shared past. Alison!

If there was an aunt maybe there would be an uncle to go with her? But maybe not. The men in my family tended to fade out of sight in the bright glare of the female personalities with which they were confronted. Mind you, there was fresh blood in there somewhere: this Alison would have had a father. Who fathered an illegitimate baby back in the nineteen-thirties and then scarpered? Not anyone nice. But I assumed Felicity wanted me to go in search of her long-lost daughter, otherwise she wouldn’t have mentioned her. Would she?

The elderly woman in the Hermeés scarf and sensible shoes in the seat next to me called the steward. He arrived, obsequious, resentful and rubbing damp palms together. It is as difficult for Concorde to provide a more luxurious service than First Class on a regular flight as it is for First Class Regular to do much better than Club Class subsonic. There must be an end to the distinction between one grade of smoked salmon and the rest, the taste and texture of one rare globule of caviar and the next. The battle to justify the extra thousands spent by customers cannot be left to speed and convenience alone. There must be luxury enough to shame the opposition. Catering feels it too must do its best, but imagination fails. The staff just has to learn to bow yet lower, and it hurts, and it shows.

‘Last time I was on this blasted machine,’ said my neighbour, ‘there were shreds of real orange in the juice. I’ll swear this is condensed.’

The steward went forward and came back with the cardboard container to reassure her. ‘Nothing but the best of freshly squeezed real oranges,’ claimed the box. She refused to be reassured.

‘I have no proof the juice came out of that particular box,’ she said. The steward offered to provide witnesses. She declined the offer. The cast, as she called them, would only stick together and lie. ‘Why didn’t you just squeeze fresh oranges?’ she demanded. He said there was a space problem on Concorde. She said oranges, properly packed, wouldn’t necessarily take up more room than boxes. He said they would: oranges were round and boxes were square. So they wrangled on. The human race, even on Concorde, is in search of an occupation. The Mach meter showed 2.2. More than twice the speed of sound. The metal against which my arm rested became uncomfortably hot. I thought maybe the whole machine would melt. I expressed my worry to the steward. He felt the wall of the plane, and studying his once handsome face, grown soft from the habit of an unfelt politeness, and petulant from the obligation to justify, justify, justify, I thought I saw alarm writ there. As one does.

‘Oh it does that sometimes,’ he said. ‘If we overheat the pilot will cut back.’ Even as we spoke the Mach meter fell rapidly to 1.5 and the metal cooled almost instantaneously.

‘There you see,’ he said, triumphantly. The woman beside me snorted and fell asleep. I slept too and dreamed of Aunt Alison, who looked like one of the motherly types you see on packets of cake mixes. She folded me in her arms and said, ‘There, there.’ That was all but when I woke up there were tears on my cheeks.

9

The film had been unlocked, that was what had happened, why I had been sent for. A rare event. Young Olivia’s female live-in lover Georgia, slighted by Olivia’s claim that she was no lesbian but the mere victim of child-abuse at the hands of a female teacher, had made an unsuccessful bid to end her life, first e-mailing the news desks with her suicide note: she had been stomach-pumped in time. Georgia’s parents had not helped, joining in the media fray, accusing Olivia, our film’s gentle heroine, of seduction of their daughter, who had been all set to marry a parson. The PR panic was sufficient to infect the studio back in Hollywood. They flew over to sort things out, which only happened in real emergencies. Had they been able, they would have cut off my head and had my brain pickled and turned into some sort of memory bank unit, always accessible, but they couldn’t do that, so they had to pay the price of a Concorde ticket and have my body as well as my brain in the editing suite. They breathed down my neck and shuddered when Harry smoked, which he did more than usual for their benefit. ‘The Studio’ consisted of a sharp young man and a sharper young woman with big hair and a narrow tiny face. She had LA hips, which are wider than those you see skittering about in New York. Californians are built bigger, spreading into available space. Texas is not so far away, in perceptual reality.

The decision finally reached was that I was to recut the love scenes between Leo and Olivia to show an absence of passion rather than a surfeit, as both young people struggled to define their gender identity. This was no great problem for me, since it reflected the actuality of what went on between them on camera. The end was to be changed, which fortunately there was sufficient random footage around to do: a conventional happy ending became one rather less conventional but more convincing. Olivia went off into the sunset with her best friend: Leo with his. The suggestion that the same-sex friends were shortly to be lovers I was able gently and delicately to imply. The film could now be described as brave and edgy, pushing back the frontiers of contemporary experience, it no longer had to be a heart-warming story of young love. It would not please the overseas Islamic markets, but would do fine in the non-Catholic West. ‘The Studio’ were thrilled by their own decision, seeing it as, I quote, ‘seminal to a new generation of gender cinema’. We went into a London pub (their idea) to celebrate and they drank gassy water and managed to score some coke – the supply side in LA had recently run into some trouble, apparently – and got the last flight home.

Nearly everyone was happy about this new turn of events, except by all accounts Krassner, who bit my neck as I did what I was paid to do, and handsomely paid at that. Krassner’s artistic integrity was acknowledged to be under threat, though I had the feeling he would be laughing like the rest of us if he didn’t have a reputation to preserve. The writer was not particularly happy, either, but then writers never are, and Clive our producer, whose film was now going to come in way over budget, was white and exhausted, and in a state of shock, but this is what producers are paid to be.

‘Please do not bite my neck,’ I said to Krassner. But I had come to almost like the slightly sweaty, anxious, obsessive smell of his breath as he craned alongside me towards the screen, and it mingled with mine. Stray strands of black hair interwove with my red tendrils, which by sheer bulk and energy won any encounter. If I tossed my hair out of my eyes, as I did from time to time, a few strands of his would leave his scalp and end up in mine. There seemed an intimacy between us, the greater because we had failed to spend the night together. Matters were still all promise, no disappointment. My bed had held a companionable waft of Krassner as I snatched a couple of hours’ sleep before getting to the cutting room, and to my surprise I hadn’t minded one bit. He’d left a note saying he had wormed the cat: a homey touch, though he had not shaken out the duvet. But then, neither had I before he got under it.

‘I’m not biting,’ he said, now. ‘I’m neurotically gnawing.’ It was true, his teeth – all his, and perfectly capped or veneered or implanted or whatever they did with the teeth of the older man nowadays – slipped gently over the surface of my skin, his full lips following. You don’t get anywhere in film by claiming sexual harassment: that’s for people about to get out of the business anyway. You can get a handsome award but you never work again. For some it’s worth it. Not me. And I liked him gnawing me.

We were three hours into editing when Krassner got a personal phone call from LA. His turn to disentangle his hair from mine, leaving a few more of his strands behind. He took the call. ‘Why hello, darling,’ he said. ‘Yuh, the rumours are correct, we’re up shit creek again. I’m stuck here. Why don’t you fly over to me instead of me going over to you?’

I stopped listening: how stupid I had nearly been: I cut off all reaction. Any shoulder in a storm, that was all my shoulder was to Krassner. Someone nudged me and said that’s Holly Fern on the line – I’d heard of her, who hadn’t: she being the new talent on the block, singing and dancing, according to her people, just like a reborn Ginger Rogers – I thought that was pretty stupid because whoever these days had heard of Ginger Rogers – and with a degree in philosophy which publicity also foolishly did to death. It was from a crap college. ‘Against stupidity,’ my mother Angel once said to me, ‘the Gods themselves strive in vain.’

Nobody had hair as good as mine, but hair isn’t everything, and just because I got up ordinarily with mine in the morning, didn’t mean others couldn’t get the same effect out of a hair salon, if they were prepared to spend half a day achieving it. I wiped Krassner out of my mind, moved my shoulder out of his line. Back at the console he dug me in the ribs and said, ‘Whatzamatter with you?’ but I didn’t deign to reply. It doesn’t do to aim too high, the fall’s too hurtful.

10

That night I called Felicity. I tried to get her to tell me more about Aunt Alison but she wouldn’t.

‘I shouldn’t have brought it up,’ she said. ‘What’s the point?’ She quoted from Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters.

‘We have had enough of action, and of motion, we, Roll’d to starboard, Roll’d to larboard, when the surge was seething free,

Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.’

No, she hadn’t heard yet from the Golden Bowl but if they wouldn’t have her she would sell up anyway and go round the corner to the nearest residential house. Joy’s brother-in-law Jack had turned up and made an offer on the house and she had had to disappoint Vanessa.

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘$750,000,’ she said.

‘But that’s lower!’ I was shocked.

‘It’s all he can afford, I won’t have to pay agent fees and I don’t want to disappoint Joy.’

‘How do you know he can’t afford it?’ I asked. ‘Because Joy said so?’ ‘I don’t know what you’ve got against Joy. She’s a better friend than you ever were a granddaughter. Just because she’s a bad driver doesn’t mean she’s a bad person.’

‘No,’ I said bitterly, ‘she just prefers animals to people. Big deal. Is Joy’s sister moving in too?’

‘She died a year ago: Joy hated her, loved him.’ I asked if this meant there was romance in the air and Felicity told me not to be absurd. Joy hated sex but liked to have a man about the place to shout at.

Felicity was not moved by my anxiety that the house was sold, and the Golden Bowl had not yet confirmed her apartment. She said one room was much like another when you got older: one steak as hard on your teeth as the next. The I Ching had given her Biting Through, Chen Chi. She must bite resolutely through obstacles: then she would be rewarded with supreme success. I could tell these were mere delaying tactics: she would talk about anything at all except my lost aunt. I cut her short and asked her directly who the father of her first baby was. I pointed out that these days there is no family decision which can be made without consultation: if you gave away a family member you were giving away relatives for future generations, too, and you had to be answerable to them.