Authors: Barbara Trapido
‘You’re welcome,’ he said, taking a section of her haunch in his grasp. ‘Tell me, did a man ever fuck your ass?’
Ali was no longer unaccustomed to the eclectic adventurism of Noah’s sexual style, but occasionally the exploratory dynamism behind it was at odds with her own nature. For Noah – though he had strong traditional notions of filial loyalty – the art of life in other respects was change. It meant five years here and ten years there. It meant working through the Linguaphone course in French. It meant sabbaticals at Princeton, a constant seeking in consumer magazines after microwave ovens and home calculators. Life was the application of myriad problem-solving methodologies, where for Ali it was a primitive art of survival; a matter of clinging like a limpet to the known rocks until some battering wave prised one loose. Noah had that gift of personal sobriety, moreover, which made the innovative appear always consistent with the status quo – a gift which had proved useful in his professional life. Ali by contrast could often not purchase a toothbrush without making the act appear eccentric.
‘I thought it gave people piles,’ she said. ‘I have to warn you that I have always regarded it as a form of perversion.’
‘I guess if it doesn’t suit you, you pack it in,’ Noah said. He was nothing if not tolerant. ‘But are you trying to tell me that your decadent French nobleman never got up your ass?’
‘He was just like any other bourgeois Protestant in bed I suppose,’ Ali said. ‘Come to think of it, I’ve never actually been
in bed with a bourgeois Protestant. And I only mentioned the nobleman to shock you.’
‘You succeeded,’ Noah said. ‘He shocked me. Almost as much as this Bobrow shocks me. Almost as much as the crazy black in the garage shocks me.’ Ali laughed.
‘The Nigger in the Woodpile,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t black, Noah. I keep trying to tell you that.’
‘If we could move on,’ Noah said suddenly, as though he were ticking off matters on a committee’s agenda and, having exhausted the business of rectal defloration, was eager to push on to the next item without wasting time upon the subject of Thomas Adderley. ‘When we marry, how do you plan to occupy yourself, Mrs Glazer?’
‘Occupy
myself?’ Ali said. ‘You mean I have to be productive? I can’t just cook for you and keep the place nice? I wouldn’t open the door to anyone selling poisoned combs and red apples, Noah. Isn’t that enough?’
‘You’re artistic,’ Noah said. ‘I want for you to draw. You dissipate your time and energy. If I were to pick you a career, I’d say you’d do a whole lot better at drawing than at all this unpaid social work.’
‘Drawing?’ Ali said.
‘Sure,’ Noah said. ‘Drawing, painting. All that stuff.’
‘Camilla draws well,’ Ali said. ‘Have you noticed? I haven’t done much drawing since I left school.’
‘So go back to school,’ Noah said. ‘Marry me and go back to school.’ It struck Ali then that to marry Noah would be very much like going back to school, but she had always done so swimmingly well at school, so much better there than anywhere else, that it gave her a sanguine conviction about her imminent union. It also made her giggle. Ribbons of merit/Adorning the blazer/of the estimable/Mrs Glazer. It was not uncommon for Ali to behave childishly with him, since he was adult enough for both of them.
‘What’s so funny?’ Noah said.
In his hutch, planted squarely on the foregoing Saturday’s
Times,
the ageing lop-eared rabbit was lying dead. The sudden battery of cake tins, following hard upon Matt’s blow to his temple, had been too much for his heart.
It rankled a little with both of them that Mervyn beat her to it. With fortuitous timing he had submitted a divorce petition and soon afterwards married his girlfriend, who was pregnant and whose father materialised as a legal counsellor of some consequence. The basement bedsitter had been a misleading piece of undergrad slumming. The divorce was easy given the lapse of time, and Mervyn gave notice of his intention to reoccupy the house within six months when the baby would need a room of its own. He made a systematic inventory of the house contents and decided – upon the advice of a valuer – to keep the piano, the sanded bureau, Camilla’s wooden cradle, and the silver shell spoons. The rest he donated to Ali. Camilla was not part of the bargain beyond the usual visiting rights, which were seldom exercised. It was Eva’s opinion, where Camilla was concerned, that there was not much that even she or Mervyn could do and she had expressed herself in an audible aside on the subject during the one and only visit Ali had made to the basement in the course of these painful negotiations.
‘Frankly,’ she had said to Mervyn, over Ali’s head – and she had risen to activate Virginia’s sagging Blutack for the fourth time that month, since the condensation in the basement was terrific – ‘the child has been so damaged by female inferiority feelings transmitted by her mother, that I’d rather we gave her up and started again with our own. That way we’ll be in
control
from the start.’
Ali’s relief upon hearing this was such that it left her surprisingly philosophical about the loss of her house and her things. She had already agreed to marry Noah who had no time for either. Both houses were too small for their needs as he perceived them, and the neighbours made unreasonable demands upon Ali
which he would not tolerate indefinitely. Moreover, from what Ali had let slip with regard to the electrical arrangements in Margaret’s adjoining interior, he had begun to fear for the entire block as a potential tinderbox.
Noah was in new york when Ali received her first letter from Mervyn’s solicitor informing her of the divorce petition. Having tried repeatedly to get in touch with Noah by telephone and having come up, each time, against the answering machine in Barbara’s apartment, she lunched instead with Arnie Weinberg who told her funny stories against himself, to divert her from the business. He had himself only recently returned from a trip to New York and Michigan. Both Noah and he were never without Pan Am tickets protruding from their breast pockets. Ali, who had made her one long journey to England on the last of a glorious line of Union Castle mail boats which had docked darkly one cold January morning in Southampton harbour, had never been on an aeroplane in all her life, and her reluctance to do so had by now become entrenched.
This frequent and apparently voluntary mobility in the men seemed to her a flagellating addiction. There was clearly no ‘lonely impulse of delight’ in this committing of oneself over and over to the departure lounge or to the airborne charabanc with its plastic food on trays. They grumbled about it stoically as a necessary evil – an evil upon which Noah at least spent very little of his own money, since his trips got funded by various research committees, but upon which Arnie appeared to spend almost all of his earnings. After paying his travel costs he was left with enough money to cover the cost of running his newly acquired
sports car, to paying the rent on various ever-changing bedsitting rooms in the Abingdon Road, and to funding a degree of sexually gratifying high-life in London at weekends. He had recently terminated a brief affair with the girlfriend of a Soho flick-knife king which had been rash, to say the least, and with its risky consequences he now lavishly entertained Ali. He never discussed these things with Noah but Ali invited intimacy. It was clear to Ali that Arnie’s encounter with the Oxford police was part of a pattern of minor hazards which, as a disaster-prone person herself, drew her into a feeling of kindred warmth with him. During his recent trip to the States, he said, he had borrowed a friend’s car and had driven from Michigan to New York City where he had been stopped in a police road block. The car had been extensively searched and, in the process, vandalised.
‘So I’m watching these cops rip up the carpeting and slash the seats, right?’ Arnie said, causing various restaurant crockeries to totter slightly as his narrative proceeded.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Ali said.
‘As true as God, Al,’ Arnie said. ‘They’re looking for stolen bank notes, see. Someone just robbed a bank and made a getaway in a Michigan car, just like what I’m driving. Finally they get word that the thief has been caught, so they wave me off with my friend’s car looking like it’s been worked over by Glaswegian football hooligans and one of the policemen says to me, all friendly and nice – wait for it Al – he says to me, “Welcome to the Big Apple”.’ Ali gargled accidentally on the house red, which promptly made a brief, reckless detour through her nasal passages and out again in agitated sputterings.
She asked him about his family who were the last word in periurban respectability he said and from whom he had been – for the two years after he left high school – completely estranged. Arnie had spent this time selling food stamps to the unemployed, he said. He had then, for a while, taken off on a Norwegian fishing trawler and had spent time being penniless in Paris, after which – for entirely instrumental reasons – he had affected a
reconciliation with his family. He had needed his father to pay his tuition fees and his living expenses through college and then through medical school. Just as he was toying with the idea of ditching medicine for a course in mime at a Parisian clown school, he had met Noah, whose work had commanded his attention.
‘You’ll like my parents’ address,’ Arnie said, with an engaging, un-English emphasis on ‘ad’. ‘My parents’ address is Country Club Road, Middletown, Connecticut.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Ali said again. ‘There’s no such place and even if there were, your family wouldn’t be living in it. Jews in Country Club Road? Since when?’
‘It’s the truth,’ Arnie said. ‘They got two lawns, Al. They got a “looking lawn” and a “walking lawn”.’
‘All right,’ Ali said. ‘I believe you.’
‘So that’s maybe why I’m living in England, see,’ Arnie said. ‘Suffering in the Abingdon Road. Al, can you tell me how it is the draughts get to blow through the walls in those houses?’ Ali laughed.
‘It’ll be down draught from windows,’ she said. ‘Or from the flue. You want to plug the flue with newspaper. Or it could be cracks in the floorboards of course. Underlay the carpeting with newspaper. It’s useful stuff, newspaper.’
‘I’m telling you, it comes through the walls,’ Arnie said. Ali lent him a hot-water bottle – which leaked and woke him in the small hours. ‘Did you ever wake up to find yourself in bed with a dead alligator?’ Arnie said, with feeling.
‘No,’ Ali said. The analogy made her comfortably aware that, once the issue of legal separation was over, she would wake up to find herself in bed not with cold crocodiles, but with Noah, whose square, heavy body gave off heat like an electric generator.
Arnie appeared around breakfast on the wedding day bearing, as gifts, two careful studies in tastelessness. The first – calculated to quash Ali’s dormant homesickness – was the ugliest household
object he had been able to find in all of the West End: a monstrous copper wallclock shaped like a map of Africa and dotted about with raised cut-outs of African wildlife in beaten brass. The second, for Noah, he had bought in a Soho novelty shop. It came in a black plastic bag labelled
La Chaîne Haute Fidélité
and comprised a length of sturdy-looking plastic chain with handcuffs at either end.
‘Thanks, Arnie,’ Noah said. ‘It’s just what I always wanted.’
‘What is it?’ Camilla said.
‘Joke,’ Ali said. ‘It’s a handy accessory to bondage. Have you had breakfast, Arnie? Noah is making breakfast.’
The wedding ceremony in the local registery office – cheek by jowl with the Friends’ Meeting House – was followed by a small party in Noah’s house where old Margaret, on her fourth glass of bubbly, and in a hat resembling a crushed meringue in collision with a brace of woodpigeon, was observed by Ali to be heatedly interrogating a Muslim Egyptian cardiac man on the subject of vaginal stitching customs. The cardiac man made repeated small bows to her and nibbled apprehensively upon Twiglets. He attempted now and again, without success, to introduce his wife who was talking to Camilla. Camilla looked more lovely than ever in her pastel blue, bell-like dress and pale matching tights.
‘Oh boy!’ Arnie said, coming up to Ali. ‘To watch that kid of yours walk. It’s like poetry. Mobile poetry.’
‘Poetry?’
Ali said. ‘Arnie, are you drunk?’
‘Noah!’ Arnie said, raising his voice quite deliberately in the hope that Camilla would hear him and make those unwittingly provoking, sideways eyes at him. ‘Hey, Noah?’ he said. ‘Would you check that kid of Al’s? The way she moves – it’s dynamite! The whole damn kid is dynamite! You’re gonna have to lock her up.’ Noah was working hard, filling his guests’ glasses.
‘Against whom?’ he said. Arnie laughed. He was wearing his hair newly cut and had put on a neat, dark suit for the second time in five days for he had finally appeared in court, where he had been found guilty, fined thirty pounds and bound over to
keep the peace. It gave him immeasurable satisfaction thus to have acquired a criminal record.
Noah had already sold his house and had bought another, jointly with Ali. The house was more rural than either of them had expected or intended, while being only three miles from the city centre, and had been quite irresistible. It had belonged to an ageing farmer who had sold both house and land to a company which, having no use for the farmhouse, had soon offered it for sale along with a half-acre of garden. To have a house set among fields which were tended by the labour of others was the best of all possible worlds. The undergraduates who had inhabited the house in the interim between owners had already departed for Christmas, leaving behind them a shed full of empty lager bottles. Camilla’s piggy-bank soon weighed heavy from the deposits on reclaimed empties. Noah was indefatigable in the matter of telephoning plumbers. In particular, the sewage disposal arrangements did not meet with his approval and neither were his reservations quelled by a helpful notice tacked by the undergraduates to the door of the upstairs loo. ‘WARNING,’ it said. ‘DODDERY BOG. FLUSH ONLY FOR SHITTING AND BURN ALL USED PAPER IN THE GRATE.’
Some of the grates went too, in the wake of an oil-fired central heating system.