Neurotica (11 page)

Charlie had got some idea from Anna that things weren't right
between her and Dan, but she had given him only the vaguest
outline of the situation. She decided against revealing any more
details because she felt it would be betraying Dan even further.
She resolved that if she were to have any moral guideline in this
whole exercise, it would be to protect Dan as best she could.

Charlie also seemed pretty reluctant to talk about his personal
life, although Anna had worked out from a few things he had said
that there were a couple of women—one in Sydney and another in
San Diego—that he was clearly screwing around with. Whether
or not he felt anything for them she had no idea.

Anna understood, and she suspected Charlie did too, that the
moment they became emotionally intimate, they were, in a sense,
done for. Their casual fling would turn into something far
heavier.

So they spent lunch being flippant and frivolous. Occasionally
curiosity would force one of them to hover dangerously around
the other's emotional boundaries, but neither dared do more than
hover.

Both of them felt too full after lunch to have sex, so they
decided to take a walk down to the Serpentine. They'd just turned
into Hyde Park when an early-summer shower materialized from nowhere.
Anna said she thought their best bet would be to take refuge in
the Culpepper Gallery if it was open. She knew it had been closed
for months while the building was being renovated. Deciding it was
worth taking a look, they left the winding footpath and started
running across the grass towards the white Palladian gallery.

The Culpepper was renowned for exhibiting the kind of
rhinoceros-placenta-in-formaldehyde art guaranteed to outrage
anyone who owned a car coat, while at the same time forcing those
who owned bleached cropped hair, black roots and Buddy Holly specs
to invent new superlatives to describe it. The gallery's last major
exhibit, entitled
Eliminate the Negative,
had involved a
surgeon performing real live plastic surgery inside an enormous
sterile Perspex cube. There had been a new operation to watch
every day. They included face-lifts, tummy tucks, liposuction and
breast implants. The day after a woman had collagen injected into
the outer lips of her vagina, there was a huge squabble in the House
of Commons about the misuse of public money. The
Guardian
headlined its report on the debate “Tax Spending Under Labia.”

Anna and Charlie stood beneath the gallery's decorative porch
wiping their faces with some Kleenex Anna found in her bag. Charlie
told her she looked particularly sweet and vulnerable with mascara
running down her face. Anna punched him playfully. He responded
by pushing her gently against one of the white Grecian columns and
kissing her.

“You know, I reckon, given another time and place,” he said
when they had finished, “the two of us could have got it
together.”

Anna was cross that Charlie was suddenly mounting an assault
on one of their mutually agreed no-go areas. She decided to try and
keep the conversation lighthearted.

“Cut it out, Charlie, or everything'll start going black
and white and we'll end up in
Brief Encounter.
What's
wrong with what we've got? We've had great sex. We can meet whenever
you're in London and you're free to carry on jetting off to all your
foreign floozies.”

“What foreign floozies?” Charlie gave her a look of mock
hurt, but she could sense that he was relieved she had let him off
the hook and wasn't about to make things awkward by sobbing and
begging him not to go.

Anna couldn't get over how cool and matter-of-fact she had
sounded. It flashed through her mind that her words had been
nothing more than an elaborate act and that really she had fallen
in love with Charlie. But she was pretty sure she hadn't. She didn't
feel overwhelmed by that clingy I-can't-live-without-you sensation
she always got when she was falling in love. She suddenly remembered
what she had said to Brenda about it being sex and not a full-blown
relationship that she needed. Nothing had changed. She still felt
the same. Although they'd only done it once, she'd had a taste of
great sex for the first time in years, and it was that she was going
to miss when Charlie went home.

“Come on,” she said, determined to sound cheerful. “Let's
see if this place is open.”

Charlie pushed the heavy paneled door and stepped inside. Anna
held back for a couple of seconds to get her makeup mirror out of
her bag. She was still concentrating on rubbing away at her
mascara streaks as she followed Charlie inside and almost tripped on
the tiny stone step into the gallery.

It was a long, thin, airy room with tall white walls and a
polished beechwood floor. It was also completely deserted. There
wasn't a uniformed attendant or even one other visitor to be seen.
The reason was clear. Everywhere they looked there was evidence that
the place was still in the throes of being redecorated. Around the
perimeter of the room there were, perhaps, ten or fifteen aluminum
stepladders as well as a couple of huge bits of scaffolding which
reached the ceiling. The central area was filled with what appeared
to be living-room furniture. Although everything was covered in dust
sheets, it was perfectly easy to make out armchairs, a dining-room
suite, a couple of sofas and a coffee table. Anna thought this was
a bit strange but Charlie said it had probably been removed from
the curator's office while that was being decorated.

Anna found it even stranger that there were swatches of
Liberty-print curtain fabric lying on top of the coffee table.
Next to these was a half-empty gallon tin of paint labeled Eggshell
Magnolia and a roll of Laura Ashley wallpaper border covered in a
dark-blue seashell design. Anna thought about the incongruity of the
Liberty prints and the Laura Ashley in a place like the Culpepper,
but came to the conclusion it was probably OK,
de rigueur,
even, for the curator of a gallery like this to have an office
decorated like a suburban row house because it probably represented
some kind of tacky chic, antiminimalist rebellion.

The floor was littered with more pots of Eggshell Magnolia,
huge industrial paint rollers, ashtrays overflowing with cigarette
butts and mugs half filled with tea.

By the
Marie Celeste
feel of the place, the painters
had either done a bunk because the Culpepper was refusing to pay
them for some reason, or, more likely, they were still on their
lunch break.

Anna turned to Charlie and said as the gallery was closed why
didn't they either carry on with their walk or, if it was still
raining, go to the café down by the lake for a cuppa.

“Or perhaps we could go back to the hotel for an hour or
two.” She pulled gently on the lapels of Charlie's jacket, making
him lower his head to kiss her again. They kissed for a second or
two before Charlie pulled away, mischief on his face.

“Come over here,” he said, smiling. He took hold of Anna's
wrist and began pulling her into the middle of the room. Confused,
Anna tried to pull back, but Charlie yanked her even harder and she
lurched forward like a car in the wrong gear.

“Do you mind telling me what the bloody hell you're up to?”
she demanded.

The very next moment she had her answer.

“Christ all bleeding mighty. You cannot be serious. Charlie,
you're behaving like a total bloody lunatic. What the fuck happens
if we get caught?”

Charlie ignored her and continued to drag her over to a sofa
draped in an enormous paint-splattered dust sheet. By now Anna
was red in the face as she leaned back tug-of-war style, still
trying to pull herself away.

The next thing she knew he had got her onto the sofa and she
was lying under the dust sheet with Charlie half on top of her.

“Come on, relax,” he said, stroking her cheek. “With nobody
here to keep track of them, the decorators'll be in the pub for
hours.” Very slowly he began kissing her. As his hand slid down
under her tights and pants, Anna's anxiety melted into ecstasy and
she felt herself sinking into a sublime, almost transcendental,
sexual trance which she later described to Brenda as being very
sixties, very psychedelic. Brenda said she made it sound less like
brilliant sex and more like an elderly tie-dye.

Anna's state was made only fractionally less sublime and
transcendental by the almost deafening pounding of rain on the
skylight above them.

The noise of the rain, combined with an all-out concentration
on their fast-approaching orgasms, meant that Charlie and Anna
failed to hear the advance of a small group of art students. They had
come to the Culpepper to see the latest Frank Kennedy exhibit,
entitled
Anaglypta People,
which, according to the blurb
on the wall outside, was “a magnificent example of neofunctional
postsurrealism, transgressing traditional perceptions and capturing
the essence of the middle-class suburban obsession with design
concepts which are primarily conservative and safe.”

B
ut what I don't understand, Rebecca,” said
the South African, his pomposity and jingoism, unbelievably, having increased
still further with the passing courses, “is why on earth the
Vanguard on Sunday
would be concerned about such a story.
I just find it disgraceful how your gutter press latches on to
these trivial matters. In South Efrica nothing like that would be
considered a metter of the remotest interest to cultured
people.”

“Oh, François,” said Rebecca, “you are such a dry
old stick sometimes.” Anna kept silent. It was not so much that she
was enjoying seeing Rebecca have to defend her newspaper's
penchant for the occasional up-market tabloid-style scandal, such
as the one she had revealed to her guests was going to be in the
Vanguard on Sunday
the next morning; Anna's stomach was
churning more than she could ever remember. She considered pretending
to pass out as a diversion. Dan, unaware, of course, of the panic
consuming his wife, couldn't be bothered to get involved, having
decided the architect was too thick even to engage with.

“The Culpepper Gallery story will be a complete hoot to
British people,” Rebecca continued indignantly. Anna now put her
hands involuntarily over her face, only to remove them smartish.
“Once they'd taken the picture the
VoS
is using, the
students even approached the couple to double-check they weren't
part of the exhibit, but they refused to come out until everybody
had left the building. They escaped ten minutes later with jackets
over their heads and made a dash to Kensington Road, where they
hailed separate cabs. Nobody got a look at them, so we'll never
know who they were. It's a marvelous story.”

Everybody agreed that it was, indeed, a hoot of Olympian
proportions, and a perfectly valid story for the
Vanguard on
Sunday
to carry.

Everybody, that is, apart from François, who snorted
and shook his head; and Anna, who continued to stare grim-faced into
the beady eye of the grilled red mullet lying on her plate, and wish
like François that the
Vanguard on Sunday
could
only be a bit more serious these days.

C H A P T E R     T E N

I
T TOOK FIVE OR SIX WORDS IN ENGLISH to describe Gerald
Brownstein. In Yiddish it took one. Gerald Brownstein was a schmo.
It wasn't that he was stupid—his IQ probably hovered round
the hundred mark—it was just that he looked stupid and
sounded stupid. He also insisted on ending every meal with soup.

Gerald came from a long line of schmos. When his grandparents
arrived in Britain they decided that in order to become assimilated
they needed to anglicize their surname. While most people would
have opted for Brown or possibly Steen, the Braunsteins went for
Brownstein. They could never get over how people always guessed
they were Jewish.

Despite his high-pitched voice, permanently open mouth and
indifferent intelligence, Gerald Brownstein had managed to notch
up some impressive achievements in his sixty-odd years. The most
remarkable of these was his marriage, in 1960, to the beautiful,
public-school-educated Kitty Wax. They had met at a synagogue
dance. Gerald fell for her long legs and sharp mind. As he so
rightly said, “What schmo wouldn't?” She saw in him a chap
without a brash or arrogant bone in his body who would worship her
and be kind to her.

A couple of years later Shelley was born. She was beautiful
like her mother and by the age of five could belt out word-perfect,
albeit tone-deaf, renditions of Dusty Springfield's entire oeuvre.
Gerald took this as a sign of great intelligence.

In 1970 Kitty's father died. With the money he left them, Kitty
and Gerald moved to Stanmore and bought an old newsagent's shop
which they turned into a kosher delicatessen. Within five years,
the combination of Kitty's business sense, her ferocious drive
and dogged determination to own a detached mock-Georgian house
with fiberglass pillars had made it the best deli in northwest
London.

When Kitty's arteries finally gave out a couple of years ago,
as a result of her constant bingeing on fried potato latkes, nobody
was surprised. She would bring them home from the deli for supper,
along with piles of other fattening leftovers. Gerald had always
warned her that potato latkes killed more Jews than Hitler, but
she never listened.

At the funeral people remarked on how well Gerald was bearing
up. Throughout the seven days of mourning, when he had a constant
stream of visitors bearing food and company, he managed to appear
almost cheerful. It was only when everybody stopped coming and
empty day began to follow empty day that he began to appreciate
the extent of his misery. He had no heart to run the deli without
Kitty. Without her there to scream orders at him all day long, the
business meant nothing. Three months after Kitty died he sold the
shop. Shortly afterwards the obsessions began.

At first he kept getting worried and anxious about running
out of food. Every few minutes he would put down the newspaper and
go into the kitchen to check the contents of the kitchen cupboards
and the fridge. As the months went by he began doing mammoth shops
in Sainsbury's. Every few days he would stock up on enough food
to keep a family of five going for a month. By the time Shelley,
who was living in sin in Temple Fortune with an estate agent called
Elton Goldberg, discovered what he was doing, the huge chest freezer
was packed with hundreds of packets of fish fingers and potato
pieces shaped like letters of the alphabet and the fridge was
bursting with chicken legs so out of date they could have walked
to the dustbin.

Gerald's most frequent purchase was Bloom's salami. He spent
much of his time driving round northwest London from one deli
to another, chatting to his former rivals about the iniquities of the
Inland Revenue—and buying up all their salami, the kind
without garlic. He never asked for it to be sliced. He preferred to
buy the whole thing. Because he had run out of fridge space, he
decided to keep his salami collection in the bath, which he kept
refilling with cold water so that the meat wouldn't go off. When
Shelley walked into the bathroom one day to go for a pee, she
discovered dozens of thick foot-long salamis in their bright-red
Bloom's skins bobbing about in the water like little kosher
torpedoes.

Realizing that her father wasn't so much going to Sainsbury's
as going insane-sbury's, she sat him down and insisted he go to
the doctor and get some psychological help. To his credit Gerald
recognized this was what he needed and when the GP suggested he
join a support group where people with similar obsessions met to
talk over their problems, Gerald needed no persuading.

If nothing else, he reasoned, it would be a way of getting out
of the house and meeting new people.

There were ten or twelve regulars who came to the group. Most
of them were women, which for a widower, thought Gerald, couldn't be
a bad thing. At his first session he had to stand up and announce,
“My name is Gerald Brownstein and I am obsessed with buying
food.” Then everybody clapped and in unison yelled, “Welcome,
Gerald.”

Each week, members of the group confessed how many times
they had washed their hands, checked the gas was switched off or
cleaned the kitchen floor. At the end of every session they were
given homework by the group therapist. The obsessive cleaners were
usually asked to do something like empty the contents of an ashtray
onto the carpet and see how long they could walk past the mess
without cleaning it up. They then had to report back.

One of the compulsive cleaners was a woman who had been going
to the group for years and had still to make the slightest
progress. She didn't own an ashtray, refused to buy one and had never
got further with the homework than neatly arranging a couple of
previously rinsed and ironed Quality Street toffee wrappers in a
Waterford crystal sweet dish and leaving the dish and its contents
on the floor for two minutes before feeling compelled to clear it
up. One week, her face beaming, she announced her best time yet.
She had managed to leave the sweet dish for three minutes nineteen
seconds, after which, she explained to the group, she had been
overtaken by feelings of extreme anxiety and had to rush back into
the room, pick up the sweet dish and sponge the area it had occupied
on the carpet with 1001.

The woman's name was Gloria Shapiro. She was slim and
expensively dressed, with beautifully coiffed blond hair and long
red nails. Gerald knew she was married, but he was smitten.

In fact he was more than smitten. As the months went by she
became his second obsession. Every evening about six he would
pour himself a sweet sherry, put on one of his Joe Loss records
and imagine what it would be like to go out with the glorious
Gloria. In no time his mind was full of romantic trysts, gentle
fox-trots and lingering goodnight kisses.

It didn't take long before Gerald wanted to turn his fantasy
into reality. When she happened to mention to the group that her
husband was in Israel for six weeks supervising the redecoration
of their flat in Eilat, he saw the perfect opportunity to ask her
out. But knowing full well she would turn him down, and suspecting
he wasn't strong enough to cope with the rejection, he formulated
an alternative plan. He decided it would be sufficient to just
catch a glimpse of her every day. Overnight Gerald Brownstein
became a stalker.

G
loria kissed Martin Solomons good-bye. Even though he was her
dentist and had just finished the last of her root canal work,
she didn't feel she was overstepping patient–practitioner
boundaries by giving her best friend's son, whom she had known since
the day he was circumcised nearly forty years ago, a quick peck on the
cheek. Besides, she adored Martin. Not only was he, in Gloria's
opinion, the best dentist in northwest London, but he was also one of
the gentlest, kindest men she knew. She put this down to him being
gay.

Gloria still had her doubts about whether God had meant to
put homosexuals on the earth. If he had, wouldn't he have created
Adam and Steve? Still, she had to admit that like a lot of women she
felt very much at ease in the company of gay men and she looked
forward to her appointments with Martin because he chatted away over
the amalgam about his boyfriend troubles and always asked for her
advice, which she gave willingly, albeit in fits and starts, every
time he allowed her a break for a mouth rinse.

Today's session had lasted nearly an hour. Afterwards Gloria
wrote out the check at reception and then ran back briefly to remind
Martin in front of his new patient and within earshot of a
waiting room full of people, several of whom were bound to have
been raving homophobes, that in her opinion, lack of communication
was the reason most relationships broke down and had he and Rob
considered counseling?

It was then that she planted the good-bye kiss on his
cheek—and it crossed her mind how embarrassing it would be
if Martin knew that she always referred to him at home as the
Tooth Fairy.

With that thought ringing in her ears, along with Martin's
reminder not to chew on her left side for the next couple of hours,
she closed the surgery door behind her and walked down the steps
and onto the pavement.

As both sides of the main road were painted with double yellow
lines, Gloria had left the car round the corner in Sainsbury's
parking lot. She decided she would pop into the supermarket and get
a few bits and pieces for Anna. She'd had a surreptitious
stock-take of her daughter's cupboards a few days ago and was
horrified to discover that Anna was down to her last half-dozen
tins of red salmon.

Gloria was a firm believer in tinned fish. She frequently
made the point to Anna that if anybody popped round unexpectedly, it
was the most versatile standby. Gloria herself was never to be found
without cupboards groaning with food. Although she only had to
cook for herself and Harry these days, and despite a full-time job,
she retained a profound maternal need, not uncommon in Jewish
women, to provide food in abundance.

This afternoon Gloria's assistant, Sylvia, was minding
Maison Gloria, which meant she could take the rest of the
day off. She would spend an hour or so wandering round Sainsbury's,
piling up her cart with treats for Amy and Josh, and then pop
over to see Anna and dispense goodies to the children. Anna had
said she would be home by four because she had to pick the
children up from school. Denise, the baby-sitter, had sprained
her ankle line dancing and had taken the day off.

Thanks for Gloria's food-buying efforts would be bestowed
in two ways. The children's would come in the form of exuberant
hugs, kisses and whoops of “Wow, Gran, thanks. You're the best
gran in the world. Mum never lets us have Mars Bar ice creams.”
For a second or two, Gloria would bask in the nourishing warmth
of conditional love. Then Anna would spoil the moment with her
usual speech about how undermined as a mother she felt every time
Gloria went against her express wishes by feeding the children
the kind of crap she and Dan had banned except for
Saturday-mornings treats.

Gloria was incapable of mending her ways. She walked towards
one of the snakes of supermarket carts outside the main doors.
As she struggled to remove the first cart, something caught her
eye. She focused on the inside of a midnight blue Jaguar parked
ten or fifteen yards away.

A trilby hat appeared to be bobbing up and down behind the
steering wheel. For a second or two, Gloria thought it was simply
somebody with their head down, searching through the glove
compartment. Then a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles came level
with the dashboard, bringing with them an oversized nose and a
thick gray mustache.

“Oh, Gawd,” Gloria heard herself mutter. “It's that
bloody schmo from the group.”

All the obsessive compulsives agreed that even by their
standards, Gerald Brownstein was a bit odd. Gloria, however,
was having particular problems with him. At the end of each
meeting he would make a beeline for her. Just as she was getting
her coat, she would look up to find him standing beside her.
The first couple of times this happened he said nothing. He
simply stood there breathing through his half-open mouth, making
soft snoring sounds. She smiled politely, said good-bye and
disappeared. Lately he seemed to have plucked up the courage
to speak to her. The last couple of times he had made conversation,
it had lasted over half an hour. In his silly high-pitched
voice he had gone on and on about how much the group was helping
him tackle his food-shopping compulsion, how lonely he was since
his wife died and how he could really do with some female company.
This final sentence was always followed by a long, heavy silence,
during which Gerald's eyes widened and his tongue protruded
slightly from his open mouth.

A few weeks ago, Gloria had spoken in private to Julian,
the group's therapist. She suggested it might be better for
everyone if Gerald left the obsessive compulsives and joined the
neurotics downstairs, but Julian had said that in his opinion
Gerald was making excellent progress and should stay where he was.
He went on to suggest, much to Gloria's irritation, that he didn't
like members of the group being turned into scapegoats and that
maybe it was Gloria who had the problem, not Gerald.

In an effort to give Gerald the impression that she hadn't
noticed him, Gloria opened her handbag and began rifling through
it as if she had lost something. Every so often she would
glance surreptitiously towards the blue Jag. One minute Gerald's
face was above the dashboard, the next it had disappeared and
all she could see was the trilby. Then Gerald became bolder.
The next time he looked up, he took off his glasses and leaned
forward. Then he pressed his face against the windshield the
way children do on buses. She took one look at the straining
myopic eyes, the squashed outsize nose and flattened clownlike
grin, and felt sick. There was no doubt in Gloria's mind that
she was being watched. Julian had got it all wrong. Gerald
Brownstein had developed a new obsession. Her.