Waiting for Kate Bush (15 page)

She was breathing! What was I thinking? But now I had to get downstairs and tell her mum. Oh, why me?

I got downstairs as quickly as I could. It wasn’t very quickly, of course. Mrs. Cavanaugh was drying the lunch dishes. I told her she had to come immediately upstairs to my room. The blood drained from her face. She was up the stairs in a third of the time it had taken me to get down them. She was on the phone when I finally reached her. “I don’t care if you’ve already got one coming,” she was shouting down the phone. “I want you to send another. What if the first one breaks down?”

The point was moot. The ambulance I’d phoned for had already arrived. She was down the stairs at the speed of light, and the paramedics up them. They listened to Cathy’s heart with a stethoscope. They pulled one of her eyelids back and shone a light into her eye. They took her pulse. “She’ll be all right,” the one with multiple studs in his ear lobe said. “We’ll just get her stomach pumped and she’ll be all right.” They lifted her onto their stretcher as effortlessly as they might have lifted a cat.

“Yes,” Mrs. Cavanaugh said. “She will be all right. You’ll see to it.”

“You can count on it, missus,” the other one, the one with no piercings, affirmed, and then they were gone.

* * *

No model remains in demand forever. Even if public taste doesn’t change, the creative directors of the big advertising agencies certainly do. They feather their own nests by convincing their clients that prospective customers and clients are fed up seeing the same old faces, however wonderfully symmetrical they may be, however dominated by fantastic cheekbones, and that, if they’re smart, the clients will rely on experts such as themselves to pick the next face the public will adore. One month absolutely everyone wants you. The next, everyone agrees you’re overexposed, and you’re lucky to be hired to model underpants with your back to the camera. But I never took money for sex, not even when the alternative was soul-destroying monkeywork.

For around nine months after my last Marcel Flynn campaign, mine was the face and body everybody thought would sell their product or service. Then Mark Pringle, nine years my junior, and very much more
chiselled-looking, and later Andrew Chen, 14 years my junior, with a better-defined six-pack, and half-Chinese at a moment when New York’s and London’s hottest creative directors all seemed to imagine in unison that consumers were feeling sinophilic, effectively put me out of work. My agent Rona, who’d discovered me when I was hitchhiking, asked if I’d consider escorting a woman from her temple to a big charity event for a tidy sum. I said sure, and away I went.

Phyllis Liebowitz had been the second (that is, trophy) wife of a guy, may he rest in peace, who’d made his fortune catering for location film shoots and then, God forbid, died of a massive stroke on the golf course at 71. On that first date, I heard about the poor devil and his untimely death until it was coming out of my ears, but apparently managed to look interested, because the next week she asked Rona if I could accompany her to a friend’s daughter’s wedding. When I reminded Rona that I was a model, and not a gigolo, Rona gently pointed out that I was a model for whom none of the creative directors were asking any more, and that Phyllis might be willing to pay me 20 per cent more than the first time. It wasn’t as though single Jewish men handsome enough to have modelled for Marcel Flynn were growing on trees.

Phyllis did indeed agree to the higher fee. I overheard her telling two women at the wedding that she was seeing me. When they asked if I were as good in the sack as I was easy on the eyes, Phyllis just winked at them in what they could hardly have been blamed for interpreting as the affirmative. Later, while she danced with a former business partner of her late husband, one of the two women asked if I might be available to escort her to a friend’s daughter’s
bat mitzvah
the following Friday evening. I got the feeling she was less interested in me than in the idea of upstaging Phyllis. In early adolescence, I’d never have dreamed that women – even those almost old enough, at least biologically, to be my mother – would fight over me. Now, in adulthood, I discovered myself embarrassed by their doing so.

In her big Lexus sedan on the way home, Phyllis made it clear that, for what she was now paying me, she thought she ought to be getting more than just my wit and charm and good looks. I had no girlfriend at the time – I was a few weeks shy of meeting the woman who’d become Babooshka’s mother – but was still mortified by the prospect, far less on moral grounds than on practical ones. Put simply, I was afraid I might not be able to get aroused, and would be humiliated. Which was what poor Phyllis wound up feeling, even though I told her – sincerely! –that she was by far the most attractive 49-year-old woman I’d ever
known. Through her angry tears she informed me that around the time she’d met her late husband, may God rest his soul, somebody like me would have been lucky to get 90 seconds of her attention. At 32, it was difficult for me to imagine that anyone aged 49 had ever been much younger than 47 or 48, and even harder to imagine that they’d ever been a universal object of desire. At 32, I was very stupid.

Phyllis turned out to have a vindictive side, and told Rona I’d made inappropriate advances. Rona was livid. It took me days to convince her of my innocence. By the time I finally did, it was too late to get her to ring the other one to say I was available for her friend’s daughter’s
bat mitzvah
after all. I earned less that week than the homeless guy who sat in front of the local supermarket with his multiple missing teeth and a Starbucks cup into which someone occasionally tossed a few cents and a wad of chewing gum from which all the flavour had gone.

Rona was only a couple of years my senior, but came from a different world. In hers, one stuck staunchly to one’s own kind. Gentiles dated and married gentiles. The coloured, as she called them, dated and married the coloured. Most importantly, Jews dated and married Jews. My family identified themselves as Jewish only sporadically. My mother enjoyed imagining that anti-Semitism was ongoing and nearly as widespread as in her youth, when she could remember her parents being turned down as tenants because of their ethnicity. She seemed to derive a strange sort of pleasure from imagining that certain restaurants wouldn’t serve us, though this seemed, in the end, to be based on purest whimsy. When out in public, she always spoke the word
Jewish
in a whisper, apparently for fear that gentiles might otherwise glare at us censoriously. In municipal elections, presented with a ballot listing endless candidates for offices he’d not even heard of, my dad made a practice of voting for those with Jewish surnames. No Friedman, Rosenberg, or Silverstein failed to get his vote. I studied to become
bar mitzvah
solely because my only friend at the time was going to do it, leaving me with no one to hang with. And I reckoned – mistakenly, it turned out – that I’d make some money on the deal, it being customary to give the little pipsqueak who’d just read some Hebrew in a thick California accent and pronounced himself a man a wad of cash for his trouble.

Decades later, my sister, who hadn’t spent 45 seconds of her life in Hebrew school, suddenly turned into Rona
redux
and specified in her advertisements on on-line matchmaking sites that she was interested in hearing only from other Jews, though I think she probably said
Jewish people. (Jew
sounds so brazen somehow, so militant,
Jewish person
so
gentle, so genteel. A Jew will swindle you at his delicatessen if you don’t watch him like a hawk. A Jewish person is someone you’d meet for cappuccino.)

Rona held her nose and got me dates with gentiles. When it came to me, there was no telling the two ethnicities apart. The gentile women wanted sex with me no less than poor Phyllis had, and were no less irate when I spurned them, always for the same reason. The nastier ones attributed our lack of relations to my being a fag, a cocksucker, or, in one memorable instance, a fudgepacker. The more vulnerable ones wept inconsolably, imagining my rejection of them to be the final brutal affirmation of their lack of allure. I came to hate the whole business, and got out of it for a while.

I got a job typing enrolment forms at the university. It couldn’t have been more boring. My co-typist was Whitney Houston’s double – that gorgeous – but no fun to chat to. I had to amuse myself by giving everyone (except those with extremely common names, for whom it was apt to cause problems) a different middle initial than the one he’d applied with.

The job might have been my downfall. Most of the other typists were women, nearly all of them overweight, nearly all of them with photos of multiracial toddlers on their desks, nearly all of them with boxes of chocolates close at hand, boxes whose contents they’d commonly decimate over the course of a shift. I think the idea was to try to compensate for the work being mind-numbingly boring with the intense sensual pleasure of chocolate.

I have reason to believe that Kate has had very much the same idea at several points in her career, while working too hard in the studio. Kate is wrongly thought to have come at one point to weigh 18 stone. I am rightly thought, if only by myself, and now you, to have gained three pounds in my month as a typist. Rona asked me pointedly if I’d gained weight. I hadn’t felt a big blubbery embarrassment since age 10. It promised to be a very long time before I ever felt anything else.

* * *

I’d have got a taxi to the hospital, but I wasn’t sure which one Cathy had been taken to. I’d only just finished lunch, but was very, very hungry. I went downstairs to wait for Duncan and Gilmour to get home from work. I felt I owed it to them to relate what had happened. And then I felt I didn’t, as I certainly hadn’t encouraged their sister to look through my things and take my Cypramil. And then I felt once again that I did. If it hadn’t been for my bloody fat man’s self-loathing
and depression, there’d have been no Cypramil for Cathy to find, at least in my room.

Duncan and Gilmour came home moaning about the heat. “It’s the nutter,” Gilmour observed with a snort when he noticed me. His more gracious elder brother asked if I was all right. I told him I wasn’t, and burst into tears. I related how I’d found Cathy on my bed, and how their mum had gone with her in the ambulance.

The next thing I knew, Gilmour had his hands round my neck and I couldn’t breathe as he screamed, “I’ll kill the nutter! I’ll fucking kill him with my bare hands.” I’d have expected Duncan to be very much stronger than his younger brother, but it took him – and me! – what seemed hours to get Gilmour’s hands off my throat, more than long enough for my whole painful life to pass before my eyes, not a pleasant spectacle.

“At the moment Mum needs us most,” Duncan shouted, “you decide to go mental on me? Wally! Prat! Come on, let’s get over there.”

I asked if he thought I might be able somehow to squeeze into the back of their van, and here came Gilmour again, even more intent than before on strangling me. “We could get 10 of you in the bloody van, you fucking loon!” And here, before my eyes, came my whole life again, that woeful cavalcade of shame.

“Maybe it’s better if you keep the home fires burning,” Duncan, still kind in spite of his exertions, in spite of his emotional upset, suggested, and I agreed.

It’s funny how the mind works. You try to think about something –anything! – other than that which is causing almost unendurable stress, and what comes up? Russell Crowe in
The Gladiator
, the famous opening scene, in which he advises the Roman legions he commands, “At my command, unleash Hell.” At the time my daughter took me (with the utmost reluctance) to see the film, the line struck me as especially cool, on a par with, “Are you feeling lucky today, punk?” But the more I thought about it, the more ludicrous it seemed. Did it not go without saying that, with hundreds of bloodthirsty Goths, or whatever they were, across the ravine, waiting to do everything in their power to repel them, the Romans would hit them with their best shot? Is it conceivable that Maximus, Crowe’s character, might have said, “At my signal, unleash considerable unpleasantness, but let’s not go overboard, shall we?”

I hated myself for my self-amusement at a time like this, and then for wondering if Nicola had wondered why I hadn’t phoned.

I don’t know how she did it, but Mrs. Cavanaugh actually made dinner, and then came to each boarder’s room in turn to apologise for it being so late. I didn’t even acknowledge the apology, but just put my arms around her. She cried, just for a moment, very softly, a woman of incomparable restraint. She blew her nose softly into a facial tissue and sat on the edge of my bed, the bed atop which I’d found poor Cathy. The hospital had determined that Cathy hadn’t taken my Cyp at all, but had lost consciousness owing to her extremely low blood sugar level. They were feeding her intravenously, and had every expectation of her surviving, though there was no question about her needing to take in nourishment. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “I want you to know I don’t hold you responsible.”

“But if it weren’t for my stupid self-loathing and depressiveness,” I said, “there wouldn’t have been any pills in here for her to pretend to take.”

That sounded odd coming out. Mrs. Cavanaugh and I looked at each other, and she burst out laughing. And once she’d started, there was no stopping her. She absolutely howled. Gasping, she slid off the bed onto the floor, which made her laugh all the harder. I couldn’t help but respond in kind. If you’d walked past my room, you’d have thought it had been occupied by the Lunatic Liberation Army. And then, of course, when she had no more laughter left, Mrs. Cavanaugh found more tears, and was absolutely wracked with sobs.

At last she was exhausted. She dabbed at the corners of her eyes with her facial tissue, said what any woman in the English-speaking world would have said at that moment (“I must look a mess”), and sighed back to her girlhood. We could hear Mr. Halibut listening to
The Dreaming
for a change in the room below mine. Kate got nearly all of ‘Sat On Your Lap’ sung before Mrs. Cavanaugh finally spoke. “In a way, you’re kindred spirits, you and Catherine, both of you unable to see yourselves as you are.” I couldn’t be sure what she meant, but this wasn’t the time to ask, I didn’t think.