1985 - Stars and bars (8 page)

‘You’ll regret this!’ he shouted. He should have sworn as colourfully back at him, he realized seconds later, but he felt he had already made something of a fool of himself, a capital crime in the Englishman’s book. Reverting to type, he gathered what he could of his dignity around him and smiled pityingly at Bra, now back behind his lectern. Common little man, he said to himself. Serf. Nation of peasants, what do you expect? Diet of turnips and liverwurst. Vitamin deficiency, rickets, in-breeding. Subnormal, subhuman…He checked himself, feeling suddenly ashamed. He’d have him in the gas chambers next. The man was only doing his job—albeit un-courteously—there was no need for such poisonous hatred.

He walked up the street until he found a phone, inserted a dime and prodded out Irene’s number.

‘Hi there, this is Irene. I’m really sorry I’m not in right now—’

Answering machine. It was like trying to see the President.

‘—promise I’ll get back to you.
Beeee
.’

Henderson wanted to say he was sorry, explain everything, categorize his emotions.

‘Irene. This is Henderson…I’ll phone tomorrow.’ He hung up. His voice had sounded stilted, pompous. She’d never phone back someone who spoke like that…He stood alone on the street, balked, frustrated, all his good intentions stymied and snookered. What more could he do? There was nothing for it but to hire the car, collect Bryant and head south.

The South

H
enderson hired his car. He had asked for a medium-sized model, yet what he got was bigger than anything on the roads in Britain. The girl at the rental agency assured him that this was the standard size. They had larger cars if he wanted one. He said no.

In the car the bonnet seemed to stretch ahead like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. He slotted the gear into ‘drive’, touched the accelerator and the car pulled strongly away. He couldn’t hear the noise of the engine. The power steering, he discovered, allowed him to manoeuvre with two fingers. The thought of barrelling down the freeways in this behemoth suddenly sent a tremor of boyish excitement through his body, displacing his gloom and disappointment. God, this is
fun
, he thought as he surged up the ramp from the underground car park, it’s like some sort of massive toy.

By the time he had driven home, collected his suitcase, and then driven uptown to Melissa’s apartment, the steely blue car had lost the glass from a tail light, acquired a scratch running the length of one side and received a dent in the left hand front wing. Furthermore, on the course of his journey he had been described as a cunt, a fuckhead, a jiveass honky, a ‘sackashit’ and a ‘muthafuck-ah’ by the other snarling drivers he had fouled up or interfered with in some way or other. Pedestrians—meek, timid creatures in Britain—had kicked his tyres and thumped the bodywork with their fists. One particularly irate jaywalker went so far as to gob—greenily and with astonishing volume—on his windscreen. He managed to park not too far from Melissa’s door but sat still in his car for five minutes or so (windscreen wipers going) trying to regain his composure.

Melissa welcomed him at the door, Candice yapping in her armpit.

‘Hello, darling.’ Their cheeks touched, he felt her hair sharp on his face.

‘Candice, don’t shout at Henderson.’

They went through into the main room. Gervase joined in the shrill noise. He thought: if we ever get married again, those dogs are out—pronto.

‘She’s just packing her things. Won’t be a second.’ Melissa sat down beside him on the enormous sofa and took his hand.

‘Are you OK, baby? You look tired.’

Henderson told her of his troubled night—post-mugging—of the garbage men and their matutinal seminar group. Melissa looked genuinely sympathetic. She put her hand on the back of his neck and scratched his nape gently. It was an automatic gesture; Henderson recalled it from their early days; it brought him out in a warm rush of affectionate goose-pimples.

‘The sooner we get you installed here the better,’ she said.

He felt grateful and secure. Melissa had things under control. He was suddenly certain he would be happy with her. He put his hand on her shoulder: so thin, so neat. The silk of the
eau-de-nil
blouse was cool under his palm. He felt the thin strap of her bra. It would be silk too, he knew: crisp and clean on that day, with a discreet and pretty edging of lace.

‘I can’t wait,’ he said, with a slight tremble of sincerity in his voice, and touched her neck with his lips. This was a mistake, he realized at once, remembering how she sprayed her neck liberally with perfume. He sat up, his mouth full of a sour foreign taste. Bryant came in.

‘Could I have a drink of something?’ he asked, swallowing acrid saliva. ‘Coke? Seven-Up?’

‘Bryant, honey, can you get Henderson a Coke?’

‘Why can’t he get it himself?’

‘
Bryant?

‘It’s all right,’ Henderson said. ‘No problem. I’ll go.’

He drank some water in the brilliant kitchen. When he came back, Melissa had gone somewhere, and Bryant was standing alone in the room.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Yes, whew…well.’

Bryant looked at him as if he were slightly mad. She was wearing blue striped trousers that stopped at mid-calf, a very old faded grey T·shirt and an expensive looking leather jacket, all pockets, flaps and buckles. Her hair was tousled and uncombed.

Spoilt brat, he thought. Those dogs wouldn’t be the only inhabitants of the Wax household to get a rude awakening when he moved in. He put his hands in his pockets and looked around the room as if he were seeing it for the first time. This is absurd, he thought. She is a fourteen-year-old girl and I am a thirty-nine-year-old man. So why do I feel nervous? He stopped himself just in time from whistling ‘Nymphs and Shepherds’. Bryant looked at him, apparently quite relaxed. It’s true, he reflected, she
is
very cool and mature for a teenager. He thought of himself at her age; his awkward, boiling adolescence. His freezing fearful schooldays, the chasms of timidity, the deserts of anguish he had daily to traverse. No points of comparison there. What had been wrong with his education, his environment, his family? Think what torments he would have avoided if he had been like Bryant.

‘Where’s Irving?’ he said, with a gasp of relief, finally thinking of something to say.

‘Don’t know.’

‘Ah.’ Henderson nodded vigorously, spun round on his heel, slapped his pockets as if searching for a missing wallet. This was some travelling companion Melissa had foisted on him: he’d have more fun with a Trappist monk. He resolved to drive south with the greatest possible urgency.

Melissa came in with the two dogs and they prepared to leave. Bryant crouched down and embraced the animals.

‘Bye, Candice. Bye, Gervase. Be good, I’ll see you soon,’ she said in a fake-sad voice. For an instant Henderson saw the young girl in her.

‘Phone me,’ Melissa said, hugging her daughter. ‘Lots. And you too,’ she whispered in Henderson’s ear as she kissed his cheek. She glanced down. ‘Gervase,
stop it!
’

Henderson had imagined that the pressure on his lower leg had been caused by contact with the sofa edge, but looking down saw Gervase trying to fuck his ankle with slant-eyed, panting ferocity.

‘Agh! Get off!’ He sprang to one side stamping the animal free from his leg. For the second time that day he wished he had his sabre. Fleche attack: Pekingese kebab.

‘I’ll be back next week,’ Henderson said, turning back to Melissa. ‘I’ll see you the
-Jesus Christ!
’ The mutt had somehow gained the arm of the sofa and was trying to bury its head in Henderson’s groin.

‘What’s wrong with that dog?’ he demanded. ‘Shouldn’t you have it seen to? Spayed or whatever?’

‘Come on, Gervase. Don’t be a naughty boy.’

Bloody dogs! he swore to himself, picking up Bryant’s case and backing out of the door.

‘Bye, Gervase! Bye, Candice! Bye, Mom!’

‘Say goodbye, Gervase, Candice. Say goodbye to Bryant and Henderson.’

The most sensible women could be reduced to idiots when it came to animals, Henderson thought, contenting himself with a brief wave. There was not the slightest possibility of him actually vocalizing a farewell to those dogs, he vowed. He’d never be able to meet his eyes in the mirror again.

They hummed down in the lift, the faint barking soon lost to earshot, and with little fuss installed themselves in the car.

‘Well,’ Henderson said, hands on the wheel. ‘Here we are. Go South, young lady.’ He looked round to see if she had caught the allusion, but Bryant was too preoccupied searching her multitude of pockets for something. She found it, and turned to face him, blowing hair out of her eyes.

‘Smoke?’ she said, offering him a squashed pack of cigarettes.

The Holland Tunnel plunged them beneath the Hudson River. They emerged on the far bank to drive through Union City to the mighty overlapping clover leafs of junction seventeen of the New Jersey Turnpike. Bryant was on to her third cigarette and Henderson saw the road ahead through a thin grey mist. His eyes smarted and his nose itched with incipient sneezes. Bryant sat with her legs folded beneath her, her head propped on a fist, looking emptily at the shabby cityscape passing by.

They motored south among a surge of large, surprisingly dusty and battered cars and truly enormous lorries, all changing lanes and shifting about the road- as fidgety and illogical as a school of fish. As Henderson became used to the eccentric driving conditions (so different from the impeccable lane-adherence on British motorways) his initial tension was slowly replaced by irritation. Why hadn’t he simply refused to take Bryant? Said it was impossible? It was typical, he saw, of his own particular weakness. He was too easily manipulated and put upon; too decent and obliging for his own good. He did everything Melissa asked of him and here was his reward: a rude, taciturn, chain-smoking ingrate as his travelling companion for the next two days. He was tempted to drive through the night to Richmond (home of the Wax grandparents) just to get rid of her. He felt a tear crawl from his left eye and squinted round to see Bryant lighting her fourth cigarette from the dashboard lighter. She lit the cigarette with the unreflecting professional ease of the habitual smoker, applying the little glowing hotplate to the end with barely a glance, inhaling and puffing smoke from the corner of her mouth until the tobacco caught.

‘You can get lung cancer from cigarettes, you know,’ he said.

‘Sure. And emphysema and cardiac arrest and they kill cowboys. I know all that.’ She sat back and smiled for the first time. ‘It’s a calculated risk. Don’t you ever take risks, Henderson?’

‘Not if I can help it,’ he said.

She looked at him. ‘No, I guess not.’

They drove on through New Jersey. Sometimes the turnpike was raised high on stilts over a baleful marshy landscape, studded with small brown lakes and acres of tall reeds. Here and there a huge concrete and glass power station would rear up like an island, its cooling towers disgorging steam, humming wires looping out from its hot dynamos to feed the sprawling suburbs and distant cities—Edison, Metuchen, Plainfield, Sayreville. Power-lines, he saw, were everywhere. Electric cables had a prominence and visibility in America that was wholly unlike the neater, tidier Europe. Now he thought of the power stations as vast mills, churning out their miles of cable to enmesh the entire country with its warp and weft; cables that festooned every townscape and street-view, a great tangled net of fallen rigging over the land, holding it together. The effect was, he thought, to make everything appear messier and half-finished, ramshackle and rundown. American streets and roads looked, to his eyes, unnecessarily fussy, with wire and cable stretched all over the place.

There was generally, he saw, as he looked at the scene on either side of the turnpike, more ironwork of all kinds in evidence: from the gawky, teetering TV aerials to the criss-cross cantilevers of the road signs, most of which looked in need of a paint. In Britain, he thought, we maintain our street furniture to an extraordinarily high degree; everything looks new and neat on the roads. Gangs of men roamed the country furiously repainting the white dashes of the lane dividers. He thought of some of London’s streets with their multitude of lines and zig-zags: double yellow or single, the various flashes on the kerbs, the grids and arrows. You needed a dictionary to park your car these days.

But here everything looked well-used. The verges were dusty and ragged; where road ended and verge began was a matter of real ambiguity. In England edges were distinct. Kerbstone production had never seen such boom years. Verges were sharp, and well-defined: finished off, beaded, seamed. Sometimes in America you saw the same rectitude, but usually edges were frayed and worn. There was no manic energy expended in maintaining them.

So what? he thought later, suddenly bitter. Here energies were directed to making the important things work—like telephones, food production, heating and cooling—not dissipated in buffing up roadsigns or polishing cats’ eyes. By their verges and street furniture shall ye know them…

His sombre mood continued to darken as they bypassed Philadelphia. He was getting thoroughly disenchanted with the belching smokestack in the front seat beside him. For the most part he drove in tight-lipped silence. He could be as sulky and withdrawn as any spoilt teenager, he told himself with quiet satisfaction: no trouble in descending to that level at all. He contented himself with looking at the scenery and pondering on its strangeness: all the houses made of wood; the astonishing number of playgrounds, tennis courts and baseball diamonds scattered generously about.

Unfortunately his ill-humour seemed to make Bryant relax, as if it had been the very self-consciousness of the adult-child relationship that irked her. Now he was being selfish too, she seemed to unwind. She switched on the radio for a while and sang quietly along to some of the pop-songs. She proffered the odd remark: ‘Hey, look at that neat car!’ or, ‘I spent a weekend in Philadelphia one night.’