The Teleportation Accident (14 page)

‘I want that book. It’ll be gone by the morning.’

‘There’s a bottle of champagne under my desk. Real good stuff. Real expensive. I was saving it for when I finished my novel but you can drink it if you stay.’

Loeser found the champagne and popped the cork. No grey vapour spooled out. He took a swig and then crumpled his face. ‘That is infernal,’ he said when he could talk again. ‘It’s as if they’ve decided to incorporate the eventual hangover directly into the flavour as a sort of omen.’ He examined the label. ‘And they’ve spelled “champagne” wrong on here.’

‘You can’t leave now you’ve opened it,’ said Scramsfield in undisguised triumph. ‘That was my special bottle. You’ve opened it now and you can’t leave.’

Loeser sighed, sat down in the chair by the desk, and forced down another mouthful of champaggne. On the desk was nothing but a framed photo of Phoebe, a pair of underpants, an empty bottle of grenadine, and a lumpy knoll of cigarette ash that presumably still concealed a stolen hotel ashtray somewhere at its base, but between the desk and the wall were three stacked parcels, each containing two hundred copies of the first issue of
apogee
, minus the four he’d posted back to Boston and the two he’d folded into a flotilla of paper boats when he was bored last weekend. Loeser picked up one of the remaining five hundred and ninety-four and started to leaf through it.

‘Is this your literary magazine?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why are all these copies still in your apartment?’

‘A wop poet called Vaccaro says he’ll shoot me dead if I circulate it in Paris. He doesn’t realise I never really planned to in the first place, which is funny, I guess.’ Scramsfield explained that he had a homosexual school friend from Boston called Rex Phenscot whose highest ambition had been to publish a story in some influential avant-garde journal printed in Paris because that was how so many of his heroes had got their start in the 1920s. So Scramsfield had written Phenscot a letter suggesting he ask his lawyer father to invest some money in the first issue of
apogee
. The money duly arrived, and he’d used half to pay the ‘editorial board’ and the other half to print the magazine (he could have forged the printers’ receipt and kept the entire payment for himself, but he wasn’t some sort of con man). Phenscot’s story about an incident in a rural diner only took up a few pages, so Scramsfield had manufactured enough Dada poetry to fill up the rest of the magazine by copying out random sections of a boiler repair manual into irregular stanzas, knowing that this should be sufficiently confusing to satisfy his patron; but then Vaccaro had got hold of a galley proof and angrily accused Scramsfield of ripping off his best idea. So apart from the two copies he’d sent to the Phenscots and the two copies he’d sent to his parents,
apogee
had to cower in his apartment. All those popinjays like Vaccaro thought they were so brave and exciting. Well, Scramsfield knew a girl called Penny who’d gone to bed with a succession of prominent Dadaists and Surrealists the previous winter, and she’d now quit that gang to become the mistress of a psoriatic Lutheran mortgage accountant from Grindelwald; not for the money, she said, but because she wanted a more imaginative sex life.

‘So was this really the first magazine to publish T.S. Eliot?’ asked Loeser.

‘I never even read T.S. Eliot. You?’

‘No.’

‘You read Joyce?’

‘I look forward to starting
Ulysses
as soon as I finish
Berlin Alexanderplatz
. Did you really box with Hemingway?’

‘No. I only met him once. I didn’t even have time to tell him my name.’

‘Why is everyone here so obsessed with this Hemingway anyway? In Berlin nobody reads him.’

‘Who do they read?’

‘Of the Americans? I don’t know. I read Stent Mutton.’

‘I love Stent Mutton!’ said Scramsfield, delighted. Then his face fell: ‘Oh Christ, none of this would ever happen to Stent Mutton. Stent Mutton would never get beaten up by a designer of expensive hats for rich French ladies. Stent Mutton would never get beaten up by the fucking toothpaste man.’

‘No. I’ve always imagined him as a sort of grizzled ex-drifter. Still carries a rusty blade even when he goes into the Knopf offices to sign a contract for a radio adaptation. Just in case.’

‘Yeah, me too. He probably couldn’t ever tell his criminal buddies he’d become a writer because they wouldn’t understand. I’m in the opposite fix.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve been writing
The Sorrowful Noble Ones
for six years. I’ve never got past the first paragraph. I don’t even know what it’s going to be about, apart from, I guess, some rich gadabout fellows who are noble but also – well, you know.’

‘Sorrowful.’

‘Yeah. I did write a book once, a real one, about facts, under a different name, but it was just for the money. It only took three days and I never even saw a copy. And I can’t tell anyone I don’t really have a novel. Any more than I could tell those ladies that I don’t know Hemingway or Joyce or Fitzgerald or Eliot or anyone.’

‘You’re as bad as Rackenham.’

‘Who?’

‘A writer I used to know in Berlin. He wrote a book about Lavicini and it was meant to give you the feeling that you were being taken around Venice and Paris and introduced to all these exciting luminaries. But the truth is, he can’t introduce you to anyone. He doesn’t know anyone either. It’s all nonsense.’ Loeser paused to peer down the neck of his bottle as if it were the barrel of a microscope. ‘This is starting to taste not so bad. And I can’t really smell you any more.’

‘So who’s this girl?’ said Scramsfield. ‘Is she young? Oh, why even ask? Of course she’s young. What else?’

‘I’ve been aspiring to fuck her for –
Gott im Himmel
, it’s been three years now. But I still feel the same way now as I always have – that if I did fuck her, just once, then, somehow, everything would be all right. Even everything in the past. Everything – everyone – I ever missed out on. Can you understand that?’

Scramsfield understood. ‘You fucked any French girls since you been here?’

‘No. I haven’t slept with anyone since I started chasing Adele. It’s not that I’m trying to be faithful to her, that would be cretinous, it’s just that – I don’t know. It hasn’t happened.’

‘You haven’t got laid in three years?’

‘No.’

‘Boo hoo,’ said Scramsfield. ‘That’s nothing. I haven’t got laid in five.’

‘Why not?’

‘I can’t get it up. I go to whores sometimes, to try, and I just end up sucking on their tits.’

‘Didn’t you say you had a fiancée? What are you going to do when she comes here and you get married?’

There was a time when Scramsfield could get drunk and it was like excusing himself from a party and he would go into the next room and his guests would have the politeness not to follow him and he would be alone in the quiet. Now when he went into the next room they all just crowded in there with him. ‘She isn’t coming,’ he said. ‘Phoebe isn’t coming to Paris.’ There was a long pause in which all they could hear was the distant grind and clatter of the horse-drawn pump wagon that came past every night like a coprophagic ogre to empty the district’s septic tanks. Then Scramsfield told Loeser about Phoebe.

They’d met in the summer of 1927, just after Scramsfield was expelled from Yale. He’d been accused of cheating in three different exams, and the Dean had made it clear that if he simply wrote a letter of apology he would be allowed to come back for his sophomore year, but despite all the urgings of his mother and father, who had evidently decided to take the Dean’s word over their own son’s, Scramsfield would not surrender to an accusation he still maintained to be false. One hot Saturday afternoon in August, when a frost of ill feeling still lay thick on the family’s tongues, his mother suggested a visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Scramsfield didn’t want to go, but he also didn’t want to look as if he were sulking, so he accompanied his parents.

In the Titian Room, with its raspberry wallpaper, they happened to see the Kuttles, another rich Back Bay family. Scramsfield had never before set eyes on the Kuttles’ blonde daughter, and standing with her in front of
The Rape of Europa
he felt so panicked by her beauty that after she made an enthusiastic comment about the painting he just stared at her, silently, like some sort of sweating inbred elevator attendant. Only later did he find out that she’d assumed he felt such scorn for her unsophisticated commentary on the Titian that he hadn’t even bothered to reply.

And that was how their courtship glided on for several months afterwards. Phoebe would say something about art or poetry or music or philosophy, and either Scramsfield wouldn’t listen because he was lost in the orchards of her face, or he would listen without understanding what she meant, but either way he would put on his stern thoughtful expression, and Phoebe would conclude that she still wasn’t quite clever or knowledgeable enough to impress him. Sometimes he liked to imply that he’d deliberately engineered his departure from Yale because he’d decided he had nothing left to learn from such a stuffy institution. Phoebe began to worship Scramsfield, just as Scramsfield began to worship Phoebe, but the difference was that he had to keep his worship a secret, a heresy inside their love, an impermissible inversion. She couldn’t know how far beneath her he felt. He was soon bored with all the exhibitions and readings and recitals and salons, but he would go anywhere with her. And it was inevitable, really, that they should soon start to talk about going together to Paris.

(‘Are we still in the prologue?’ asked Loeser. Scramsfield ignored him.)

All their heroes were in Paris. Art was there, and love, and truth. They could go there and get married and be poor and happy and free. Scramsfield could write a novel and Phoebe could paint and anything they did there would be so much better and more real than anything they could do in America, which was nothing now but a dry goods company pretending to be a nation. They were so certain.

He couldn’t remember when he’d first suggested that if they couldn’t go to Paris they ought to kill themselves. He must have been drunk. He might even have meant it as a joke. But then almost without debate it became a basic doctrinal premise between them: that it would be better to evaporate over the flame of their own love than to be trapped for ever in awful Boston with their awful families, doing awful jobs and having awful children.

When they’d sworn all that to each other, however, it had felt abstract, because they were still confident that they could get to Paris. No one else seemed to have any trouble. But as 1928 went by they worried more and more about the money. They knew that if they eloped their parents would cut them off straight away. Once they were out there, they were sure they would find the rent somehow – for a good bohemian, money was something that just came into your house at odd intervals like a one-eared tabby until you scared it off by fussing over it too much, so that in their elastic fantasy they were to go hungry sometimes, in a romantic and inspirational way, and they were also to employ a cook – but as it was they didn’t even have enough for two tickets on a steamship. Scramsfield thought of stealing some antiques from his parents’ house and selling them (to whom?), but Phoebe wouldn’t let him take the risk, because if he were caught and went to prison they’d be separated for years. If he were in Boston now and he needed two hundred and seventy dollars, Scramsfield often thought, he could be wearing blackface, leg irons, and a sandwich board that read do not under any circumstances give money to this man, and he could probably still find it a dozen ways. But back then he knew how money worked in the same way he knew how electric lighting worked.

Phoebe and Scramsfield had both agreed that they couldn’t tell anyone what they planned to do, not even their friends. But in the end, when they’d thrown away every other possibility, they decided that Scramsfield had better talk to his Uncle Roger. Scramsfield had heard rumours from his cousins that twenty years ago there had been some epochal scandal about Uncle Roger and a Cushing daughter and a week’s disappearance and a cheap hotel in New York. Uncle Roger was now a bachelor who spent about a hundred hours a week playing golf, but that story was still enough to suggest that he might, once, have had at least a smear of passion in his soul, and might understand why it was so important that Phoebe and Scramsfield should be able to run away together to the city where their future was impatiently waiting.

It was in Uncle Roger’s drawing room with an unaccustomed tumbler of bourbon in his hand that Scramsfield realised for the first time that he didn’t actually want to go to Paris very much. He hated foreigners, he loved American plumbing, and he was pretty certain that writing a novel didn’t pay, even if you had a good idea for one, which he didn’t. And out there he would presumably have to buy a lot of drinks for all these people he kept pretending to have heard of, and be grateful for the chance to buy drinks for them. He wanted to be with Phoebe for ever, sure, but he’d forgotten what was supposed to be so gruesome about being with her for ever in a nice big Boston townhouse full of servants. The great revelation took place at precisely the instant he opened his mouth to make his case, and he was never sure, later on, whether it had been this that had guaranteed his failure. While Uncle Roger sat frowning in his armchair, Scramsfield paced the room, mumbling about art and love and truth like a salesman who had never sampled his own product. Then he asked for a loan.