This Must Be the Place (18 page)

‘Yeah?’ I get out.

‘Jeet?’ the person says, or seems to say.

‘Huh?’ I lift my head from the pillow. Across the room, in a chair beside the door, sits a woman. It is, I hardly need tell you, not my mother or, indeed, any other supernatural incarnation. This woman is possibly in her seventies. She is wearing a loose kaftan thing and her hair is pinned up in a kind of topknot; there are many coloured beads slung around her neck and her fingers glitter with rings. Do I, I am asking myself, recognise her? I must do. She seems to know me: she’s using, after all, my childhood diminutive. But is she an aunt, a cousin – what?

‘Danny,’ she says again, leaning forward in the chair, ‘jeet?’

We stare at each other for a moment, she and I, each of us struck by the unaccountability, the incomprehensibility of our situation.

‘Jeet?’ I repeat warily, and as I say it I know what it means. She is asking me, in pure Brooklyn, ‘Did you eat?’

I almost clap my hands together. Jeet. How could I have forgotten that? I am going to write it down, as soon as I can find a pen.

The woman pushes herself out of the chair and comes towards the bed. ‘You look like you could do with a little sustenance. You want me to make you up a plate?’

I stare at her from my prone position. The rings, the multiple necklaces, the long white hair. It comes back to me that I am at my father’s birthday party: the sounds of chatting and cutlery reach us from the door. I came in here to the bedroom with the idea of calling Claudette, of speaking to the kids, of taking ten minutes out for myself to consider what to do, where to go – home to my family or off to Sussex in search of Todd? – but instead I must have fallen asleep. Jet lag can do strange things to one’s body clock. There in my hand, in fact, is my cell phone: evidence of my better intentions.

So I have located myself in time and space but I still have no idea who this woman is. I search her face for traces of the Sullivan brow, the Hanrahan jaw, any clue at all, but there’s nothing. I cannot recall ever meeting her before. Could she be a friend of the family, one of my sisters’ mothers-in-law?

‘Er,’ I say, struggling to raise myself on my elbows, ‘no, thanks. I’m good.’

She puts her head on one side, looking down at me with an encouraging smile. ‘Tired?’

‘A little.’

She reaches out and straightens a book, a box of tissues on the nightstand. I see that it bothers her that I’m lying here like this, and an old, rebellious flame kindles itself somewhere inside me. Why, I want to say to her, shouldn’t I lie on my mother’s bed, if I want to? What’s it to you anyway?

I cross my feet, put my hands behind my head. Not going anywhere, lady, not any time soon.

‘You want me to help you up?’ she says, this tiny old lady who stands so proprietorially in my mother’s room.

I laugh. ‘That’s kind of you but a little ambitious, don’t you think?’ I gesture down myself. ‘I’m at least double your weight.’

She nods. ‘You’re probably right.’

She adjusts the box of tissues again and, as she does so, it comes to me who she is, what she’s doing in here, addressing me by my family name, why she might not like me lying like this with my shoes on the comforter. She is my father’s wife, the woman he met a few years ago at some social for elderly people – a church thing, was it, or a dominoes game? Something like that. I didn’t fly out for the wedding so have never met her, apart from a brief introduction when I came through the door.

I swing my legs off the bed and sit upright, my head swimming only slightly. Myrna – is that her name? I’m almost sure it is.

‘I guess I should get up,’ I say. ‘How’s the party?’

Myrna adjusts one of her necklaces, disentangling it from the others. ‘It’s going great,’ she says. ‘Your father sent me to look for you. Everyone was wondering where you’d got to.’

‘Oh, sorry about that. I just came in here to … um … make a phone call and … well … the thing is … I needed to … I need to decide whether or not I should …’ I look up at her, this woman who agreed to marry my father, the woman who sleeps in this bed every night now. What could have persuaded her? I wonder. How would anybody think that hitching themselves to a man like my father was the right choice to make in life?

I once put this very question to my mother, when I was aged about fifteen, and it didn’t go down too well. The memory sits uneasily within me, like a surgical pin in a broken bone. I came into this room (I say ‘came’ when, in fact, I must have crashed through the door, filled with ire at my father’s latest infringement to my liberty – as I saw it) to find her sitting on the side of the bed. She must, I see now, have come in here for a break from the
Sturm und Drang
going on in the apartment. Funny how you realise that only after you become a parent yourself. Here she was, a book open on her lap. And it was the book that seemed to me, in that moment, the essence of my frustration, its absolute cathexis.

You see, my mother’s idea of a good time was to spend the evening re-reading
The Divine Comedy
, whereas my father liked to have several beers and watch the game. That they were woefully mismatched seemed a given, a background presence in our lives; like others of their generation, they just got on with it, circling around each other, making the best of it. But my mother, I remember, often wore an expression of abstraction, of distance, as if her thoughts were elsewhere, exiled to a place none of us could reach.

What I wanted to know, in that moment, as I stood there in the bedroom in front of her, was how it had come about. What had led her to this terrible mistake, what had tripped her up, what had deceived her into thinking this marriage was a good decision for her?

‘Why the hell,’ I remember yelling at her, in the cruelty and myopia of youth, ‘did you marry that guy? What possessed you?’

She started to admonish me for cursing but couldn’t manage it. Instead she looked at me, right in the eye, and she said my name: ‘Danny.’ And she began a sentence she never finished. I would, to this day, give almost anything to have heard it in its entirety but, then, life is full of unanswered questions, as we all know. ‘Danny,’ she said, ‘the truth is that all this time I have …’

She didn’t get any further. You know why? Because she started to cry, with such overwhelming immediacy that she couldn’t speak. I had never seen my mother cry before. She was not an emoter, not a crier: she conducted herself always with an enigmatic calm. To see her racked with sobs, tears pouring down her face, was a shock of the most visceral, horrifying kind. I think I said, sorry, I think I said, Mom, I think I said, don’t. But perhaps I said nothing at all.

Either way, I never made the mistake of asking her again.

And now I am the one on the bed, looking up at my father’s second wife. In order, I think, to stop myself putting the same question to her as I put to my mother that day, and also to attempt to plaster over that awful memory, I blurt out the following: ‘I’m facing a dilemma, Myrna, and I don’t know what to do.’

‘Oh?’

I don’t really know where I am going with this but it seems preferable to be talking about dilemmas, rather than my father’s attractions as a husband. ‘Maybe you can help,’ I say wildly.

Myrna’s pencilled-on eyebrows shoot up but, to her credit, she attempts a smile. ‘I can try.’

‘I … Well, it’s kind of a long story but I – I just found out something about someone I knew a long time ago. And it has come as something of a surprise to me. Now, do I go and find an old friend who will be able to explain a lot more about what happened, who will be able to give me some answers? Or do I go home to my wife and forget the whole damn business?’

Myrna regards me, her fingers pressed to her lips. Maybe I have misjudged this situation. Maybe Myrna is not a person to whom you can put this kind of question. Maybe I should just shut the hell up, go back to the party, get a plate of food, talk to my relatives and wish my dad a happy birthday, then get myself out of here and go home.

‘This thing you found out,’ she says, after a moment, ‘is it to do with another woman?’

I point my finger at her. ‘Myrna,’ I say, ‘you are an astute thinker. How did you guess?’

She shrugs. ‘I’ve been married four times, Danny. There’s not much you can teach me about the way men are.’

‘I see that,’ I say. ‘Then I have to say that I’m intrigued as to what you make of my dad, the ins and outs of his mind, because no one has ever been able to—’

‘Your dad misses you a lot.’

‘Er, I really—’

‘He’s very proud of you.’

‘Myrna, come on, I—’

‘I would never presume to comment on your relationship with him – it’s not my place to interfere – but I know it’s a source of great sadness to him that he has so little contact with you and your family.’

‘With all due respect, I’m not sure you fully—’

‘When,’ she interrupts, ‘are you going to bring that wife of yours to meet us?’

The idea of me ever bringing Claudette here strikes me as improbable, hilarious. I laugh. She laughs in response. We laugh together. ‘I really can’t say!’ I exclaim, and we laugh some more.

I stand. I gather up my cell phone. I straighten out the bed.

‘Your wife,’ Myrna says behind me, ‘is she a good woman? Does she make you happy?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I say, sliding my phone into my pocket. ‘I managed to pick a good one this time.’

Myrna reaches up and straightens my collar and tie, a gesture that seems oddly intimate for someone I’ve just met. ‘You know,’ she says, brushing at the lapels of my jacket, ‘your father always says you got all of the brains and none of the sense.’

‘He does?’ This interests me a great deal. ‘Well, he may have a point there.’

Myrna smiles at me as we stand in the room where my mother died. ‘I would go home, Danny, if I were you,’ she says, and she puts her arm through mine, as if we’re about to take part in a country dance, and propels me towards the door. ‘Leave whatever this is alone. What can be gained from turning over old coals? Go home to your wife. But first come and eat. OK?’

The Kind of Place You’d Have Trouble Getting Out Of

Lenny, Los Angeles, 1994

‘I
… hate … LA,’ his boss gasps, between breaths. ‘I don’t know … how much longer … I can take it.’

Lenny feels his head nod, like one of those toy dogs people have in the backs of their cars.

‘The air,’ his boss continues, as he runs beside him, limbs moving seamlessly, mechanically, ‘the traffic, the people who can’t get their asses out of their cars, the rivalry, the naked ambition of everyone, everywhere. I hate all of it.’

Lenny, wobbling slightly on the bicycle, nods again. He isn’t required to do much else and he’s heard this speech – or versions of it – several times.

‘Have you ever been in a more self-obsessed culture, a more venal city than this?’

Lenny swings his head back and forth, then has to straighten the handlebars of the bike and steer round a rollerblader, oblivious and sleek, as she slalems past them. Timou lets out a
tchau
of annoyance at her, as if he – in his biodegradable, organic cotton T-shirt, sourced from Scandinavian forests and dyed with the feathers of chickens fed on locally sourced grain or whatever the fuck it is he’s wearing today – and only he has the right to run in Venice Beach at nine in the morning, accompanied by his reluctant PA, who is meant to be taking notes, meant to be recording his every passing thought, but is currently concentrating only on not falling off the bicycle and wondering when they might be able to stop for breakfast.

Bicycles are not within Lenny’s comfort zone; boardwalks are not places he has ever enjoyed; exercise is not something with which he is at ease, especially in public, and in particular when that public consists of nerve-frayingly attractive women in Lycra and running shoes or surfer dudes with rippling abs and low-slung shorts. Neither is he entirely happy with the idea of holding a Dictaphone while riding a bicycle, while dodging street-sellers and buskers and dozing down-and-outs, while trying to filter what is important from what is irrelevant in what Timou is saying.

All in all, Lenny wishes he were back in New York. He would give anything right now to be waking up on the Upper West Side, three blocks away from where he grew up, six blocks away from where he went to kindergarten, with the noise of sirens threading up to his window, able to step out and buy a lox bagel from the corner deli before walking to Timou’s office, where he has a desk next to a window: there, he can take calls, put his feet up on the trashcan, hide those black and white milk cookies in a drawer to keep him going during the long hours of Timou’s conference calls.

Instead Timou has decided to relocate to LA for a while. He told Lenny this last month as he passed through his nook, wearing – it pains Lenny to recall – a wetsuit, unzipped to the waist. As if it was no big deal for Lenny to uproot his life in New York, to sublet his apartment, to sift through his clothes to find something suited to the climate of California, to attempt (unsuccessfully, Lenny fears) to put on ice the girl he’s been tentatively dating, to trade in his Subway tokens for this: a bicycle, bafflingly referred to by Timou as ‘the hybrid’.

When Lenny had asked why they needed to go to LA, Timou had snapped a pair of goggles down over his eyes. ‘Economic and creative practicality, my friend,’ he said. ‘Claudette is shooting that ghost movie there and the next script isn’t going to write itself. So, right now, where she goes, I go. And where I go, you go. Unless you want to start finding your replacement.’ He had grinned and yanked up the zip on his wetsuit. ‘I’m going to swim the East River. I will be back in one hour.’

Timou has, over the last while, developed a thing for Ironman triathlons. Lenny had explained this to his almost-girlfriend that night over dinner. The obsession started after Claudette won an Oscar and began to get roles on big-budget studio projects. It seemed, Lenny had said to the girl, to be Timou’s way of coping with this unexpected development in their lives. Claudette only took those roles, he hastened to add, if they fitted between her projects with Timou. That was, of course, where her heart really lay.