Your Voice in My Head

I
WAS LOOKING FOR WEEKEND WORK
, and though it was a Saturday job at a hairdresser’s I was after, somewhere in my teenage mind I thought that Ophelia might need a handmaiden. So, every day after school, before my mum got home, I would cycle to the Tate Gallery to visit Millais’ muse.

I didn’t want a Saturday job at a hairdresser’s and bike riding was not my forte, but I was conscious that I was a thirteen-year-old and thirteen-year-olds ride bikes for fun and wash hair for tip money. Later I would understand that disconnect: “This is how and what I am supposed to want, and so I will try.”

Approaching the Tate, I knew what was coming. I could see Ophelia’s Titian hair, her white body floating down the river, the flowers around her. Sometimes, when I got there, she was dead. Other times she was still dying and could be saved by someone on the riverbank I’d never seen before. Someone Millais had sketched and then painted over, under
the pigment, taking shallow breaths so as not to be seen—a man who’d let her act it out, but who wouldn’t let her drown.

Though I’d never had sex, there were days when Ophelia seemed to be caught in a sexual act, her arms reached above her, her mouth open, beneath an invisible lover. A long time later—after I’d been in love—I knew that she could not let go of his postcoital scent, stronger than the smell of the flowers on the banks as she drifted by. The flowers beg her to stay in the moment. His scent keeps her locked in the past.

Those afternoons, the Tate was populated by a combination of the brightly patterned elderly and young, hip gallery patrons in black (the former keeping out of the rain, the latter longing for rain to get caught in). There was always at least one pickup going on. But mainly, on the leather banquette, in the center of the grand room, I’d sit in front of Millais’ painting, eating a secret bag of crisps, and cry. Salt and vinegar was my downfall. Before the year was up I’d be rushed to hospital after eating twenty-three packets in a row. Even today, salty food—salt and vinegar crisps, marmite—tastes of regret.

I knew the painting would make me cry and yet I kept going back. I doodled her name on my notebook at school: O
PHELIA
, in bubble print. I wanted to be with her constantly, and when I woke up on Saturdays, I’d go there again and cry some more. I could never gauge whether I was crying for her or crying for me. It is easy to say in hindsight: I believe that she infected me. I was afraid, at thirteen, that I saw in her my own destiny.

A MAN HOVERS OVER ME
as I write. Every table in the Los Angeles café is taken.

“Are you leaving?”

My notebook, coffee, and Dictaphone are spread out in front of me.

“No,” I answer.

“I’ll give you a thousand dollars to leave.”

“OK,” I say, as I pack up my things.

“What?”

“Sure. A thousand dollars. I’m leaving.”

He looks at me like I’m mad and beats a hasty retreat.

I meant it. He didn’t mean it. My radar, after all these years of sanity, is still off when it comes to what people do or don’t mean.

My mum calls my cell phone and I go outside to take it.

“How do you pronounce Tóibin?” my mother asks me, “as in Colm Tóibin, the novelist?” This is our daily call, me in America, her in England, every day since I moved here at
twenty-one. I’m thirty-two now, and she’s seventy-one, though she sounds like she’s seventeen.

“It’s pronounced toe-bean. Like ‘toe’ and then ‘bean.’ ”

“That’s what I feared,” she says. She lets this marinate a moment. Then, “No. Not acceptable.”

“But that’s his name! That’s how you say it.”

“I can’t be going around saying ‘toe-bean.’ It simply will not do.”

“Why don’t you just not say his name?”

“He’s a popular writer.”

“Read his books but don’t talk about them.”

“No,”—I can sense her shaking her head—“some situation will arise that requires me to say his name.”

I think my mother has the sense of doom, and guilt about the sense of doom, of Jews her age who weren’t directly touched by the Holocaust. When she was growing up in New York, the first bad thing that happened to her was that Irish children moved into the Jewish neighborhood and stole her kazoo
and
her sailor hat. She was a fat little girl, guarding the cakes she had hidden in her sock drawer. What was a fat child in 1940s New York without her kazoo?

The second bad thing was that her dad died and then, soon after, her mother, and she was only a teenager and she didn’t know how to make toast. So she got very thin—deliberately, not through lack of toast—and married a much older man. It didn’t last. The best thing that happened was she fell in love with my dad.

Once, when Mum and her first husband had long since lost touch and I was new to mania, I tracked down an address
for him, whom I had only heard about, and sent him a letter asking him whether or not he was dead yet. Not to be mean, just a manic need to know.

Mum gets anxious very easily. Something that is a source of calm (she watches her cat as he laps the water bowl: “Good boy, Jojo! What a good boy!”) can turn, like the weather (the cat keeps lapping; her smile fades: “Why are you drinking so much water, Jojo? What’s the matter, Jojo? Are you sick?”).

I talk to myself a lot because I’ve seen her talk to herself a lot, generally in the kitchen, where she’s been overheard saying, with real enthusiasm:

“I’m feeling tremendously optimistic about gluten-free bread!”

And:

“I fear George Clooney’s teeth may be his downfall.”

I see my mum everywhere. From certain angles, the Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen has her face, and from other angles so does the black comedienne Wanda Sykes. I think all white people have a black doppelgänger and vice versa. My dad’s black doppelgänger is the father in
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
. His Celtic doppelgänger is Sean Connery.

A lady came up to him at a hotel in Jamaica and said, “Last night we thought you were Sean Connery,” and Dad said, “Last night I
was
Sean Connery.”

My dad seems to know everything, so I never use Google. I only use Dad. I e-mail him a query and he figures it out, and then responds in the guise of the billionaire Google founders:

“London to Cardiff: is it expensive? How long is the trip?”

“2—3 hrs by train. Expensive if you don’t book in advance. xx Larry Page and Sergey Brin.”

When I was fourteen and wanting to get out of gym class, Dad wrote the teacher a letter in the shape of a perfect triangle:

He wrote it like that for nothing but his own delight, meticulous, making me late. When I handed it to her, Miss Jensen ripped it up, threw it on the floor, and said she considered it a personal insult from my family.

He once got a credit card saying “Sir Jeffrey Forrest” because American Express was dumb enough to send him an application form with the statement “Print your name as you would wish it to appear.”

The last forwarded flight details he sent me were: