Waiting for Kate Bush (31 page)

I got a button undone, and then a second. She was wearing suspenders. The white area between the tops of her stockings and the bottoms of her black lace knickers was the visual equivalent of her smell and the sound of her gently mocking laughter.

At my signal, unleash hell!

If you’d have asked me an hour before she came to me, I’d have said that in trying to make love in the missionary position, I’d have been putting my lover in mortal danger. Suffice it to say that the widow Cavanaugh survived, and rather happily.

I
DIDN’T know quite how to act around her after that. We couldn’t exchange meaningful glances because our eyes never met, and not because mine didn’t want to. She’d always treated me fairly formally. If anything, she was even more formal with me now. Two hours before she let herself quietly into my room and offered herself to me, she would ask if I wanted more coffee as though we were Victorians first introduced 90 seconds before.

We didn’t do much talking. I wasn’t allowed to speak to her without first being spoken to, and she seemed, after having told me all about poor Roger that first night, not to have words to say. She asked when I’d first noticed that I was on my way to grotesque obesity. I told her instead about how the mere thought of my grandmother filled me with shame.

In my first year of university, when I lived in that corner of limbo reserved for university students who commute from their parents’ homes, I visited my grandmother often because her place was free of distractions, and a good place to study. I was already beginning to work up a reasonably accurate impersonation of a hippie, with my wispy moustache, bare feet, multiple bead necklaces, and long (albeit too coarse for flowing) hair, but at heart I remained a dutiful Jewish son, one who was mindful that my university education was costing my parents money for which my dad theoretically worked hard. I therefore trudged along dutifully to all my classes and did all the assigned reading, much of it in the bedroom of my grandmother’s apartment in which my uncle had topped himself a couple of years before.

My grandmother was always unnervingly delighted to see me, and honouring her with my presence made me feel rather less a cruel little bastard than in the rest of my life. I would sit in the bedroom in which my uncle had fed himself a lethal dose of sedatives and pore over my textbooks, highlighting especially salient passages with a fluorescent
puce highlighting pen, greatly diminishing the books’ resale value. On at least one occasion, I found what I was reading so boring that I spent the whole afternoon highlighting every word of the three assigned chapters, and giggled as I imagined what the book’s next owners would infer. I can see now, in retrospect, that highlighting everything was very much a precursor to the crowd-pleasing trick I devised the following year, when my girlfriend and I would occasionally have dinner at a nearby coffee shop offering paper place mats that children could colour while their parents dined. On request, your server would provide a little box of four crayons. I made my girlfriend laugh until she wept by colouring the entirety of my place mat red, from edge to edge. Our fellow diners probably thought we were on hallucinogens. They were right.

My grandmother’s family had come to America from Odessa around the turn of the century to escape the
pogroms
. Her father, according to who was telling the story, had been either a Talmudic scholar or a layabout with a very long beard, her mother the proprietress of a boarding house. I was never able to ascertain why they’d chosen to live in Minneapolis, which was either brutally hot or brutally cold, and populated mostly by xenophobic Swedes. My grandmother had married her second cousin at 19 and begun having his children the following year, starting with my mother. For the first dozen years of my mother’s life, the family lived in abject squalor, and commonly sneaked out of rented flats in the dead of night to foil their landlords. They regularly lacked hot water. At around eight, my mother was sent home from school for smelling, a humiliation that would inform the rest of her life.

My grandfather, a brute and tyrant who my mother says rarely had a kind or encouraging word for his children, had no trade either. He and my grandmother moved to Los Angeles, back when it smelled of oranges, and opened a small diner. While it was going bust, my mother, at 10, had to care for her younger brother and sister, an imposition that would inform the rest of her life. She had to take them to the movies, and then walk them back to the diner in what she would refer to forever after as The Pitch Dark. There was no moonlight in the world my mother inhabited as a child, and no street lights.

After the diner failed, my grandfather took to drinking and brawling. My mother remembers him being brought home soaked in his own blood, spitting out his own incisors. But then, just as Prohibition was repealed, he suddenly made a fortune as a liquor wholesaler, and the family moved to the poshest part of the Twin Cities area that would
take Jews. His new prosperity apparently didn’t improve my grandfather’s disposition. He took personal offence at the fact that, in early adolescence, my mother became a bedwetter. (I come naturally by my predisposition for rapacious self-loathing.) But even while she was wetting her bed, she was also becoming so beautiful and stylish that she actually inspired my grandfather to compliment her. A year after telling her – not proudly, apparently, or affectionately, or encouragingly, but in the same tone in which he might have acknowledged her being right-handed – that she was beautiful, he was dead at 42 from a heart attack. For the rest of her life, my grandmother plugged in a special memorial lamp every year on the anniversary of his death.

My mother hated my grandmother for not having defended her from my grandfather. Her hatred didn’t keep her, dutiful Jewish daughter that she was, from visiting my grandmother regularly during my childhood. They would sit across from one another in the uncomfortable Queen Anne chairs my grandmother had bought to furnish the big house in the poshest section of the Twin Cities that would take Jews, and bicker for hours while I drew pictures or, later, after some public education and my very high IQ had kicked in, tried to find something interesting in
Reader’s Digest
. My grandmother subscribed.

I never knew my aunt Doris, my mother’s younger sister, not to be bedridden. She had been even more beautiful than my mother at one point, but had, I found out decades later, got herself pregnant. My grandmother blamed her bedriddenness on her abortionist. She seemed to love me, which even when I was five years old felt not quite right. She shared my uncle’s hatred of my mother, who, however excruciatingly neurotic she might have been, was in very much better nick than either of her siblings.

My aunt would die in mysterious circumstances when I was about 10. I think she may have been on some sort of life support by that time, and that my mother and grandmother had got my dad to pull her plugs. It was the sort of thing my dad, always trying to please, always failing, would have done without protest.

My mother addressed my grandmother as Mother and spoke to her in a voice pitched about a third higher than that with which she spoke to my dad. It was a good key for hectoring. What they talked about mostly were the character flaws of every one they knew. They used a lot of Yiddish. I hated every minute of it.

My uncle, my grandmother’s youngest child, my mother’s little brother, lived with my grandmother. Everything that was wrong with my mother – the awful shyness, the misanthropy, the self-loathing –
was worse with my uncle. He came to be treated by a psychiatrist who prescribed a pre-first generation antidepressant that made my uncle unfit to drive a car. He drove anyway, and was in an accident in which his face was very slightly disfigured. He grew a Van Dyke to conceal that he’d lost a bit of his chin. He looked fine, but regarded himself as too ugly for anyone outside of family to see him. To humour him, my grandmother moved to the desert north-east of Los Angeles, where my uncle would never have to see anyone except my family when we drove up there every month or so.

He’d decided to become a writer. I’d shown precocity as a writer in my own right. He’d read a biography of his idol, Thomas Wolfe, in which it was revealed that the great man used to make his students agonise over every syllable of what they wrote for him. I was a self-loathing adolescent who wanted only praise, and our little sessions were torture. He also trounced me at chess, for which I seemed to have no aptitude whatever, while my dad stood in the back yard and smoked contentedly while my mother and grandmother discussed the woeful character deficiencies of their every common acquaintance.

I couldn’t wait to be old enough not to have to come to the desert with my family anymore, but was too neurotic to stay on my own even at 15. I felt certain that someone had broken into the house and would leap out of the shadows and slash my throat if I abandoned one room for another. In every phase of life, I felt damned if I did, but no less if I didn’t.

I helped kill my uncle. With my mother’s tacit encouragement, I wrote him a letter vilifying him for having ruined my grandmother’s life. I have every reason to believe it hurt him. Lazy, self-loathing, self-righteous adolescent twerp that I was, I was still as near as he had to a friend. I have much to answer for. Several months later, inconsolable in the face of being unable to get any of his short stories published, he typed a neat, bitter goodbye-and-fuck-off letter with his left hand (his right having been rendered useless in the car crash in which his face was disfigured), took a whole bottleful of his pills, decided he had a few more poison thunderbolts to hurl, and wrote, ever less legibly, with a ballpoint pen until he lost consciousness.

I found out about my uncle’s death one afternoon when I arrived home from school. My sister, around seven at the time, opened the front door with the words, “Marty died.” That, apparently, was all she’d been told. I, every inch the tough guy, demanded, “So?” But a few months later, when I read his last letter, the tough guy, feeling as though his heart were being ripped from his chest, sobbed so hard he
thought he’d split open. He accused me of betraying him, as indeed I had. My age wasn’t an excuse. I betray everybody in the end. My grandmother moved back from the desert and I started university and came over to her place to pretend to study.

When I finished university and started my modelling career, I continued to visit, less frequently. I found it difficult to converse with her. I got her to tell me what she could about her early life. She couldn’t tell me much. I’d talk to her about current events. She held Jane Fonda in very low regard because of comments about Zionist thugs. When I pointed out that it had in fact been Vanessa Redgrave who’d decried Zionist thugs, my grandmother said, “Well, I don’t think the other one is any great friend of the Jewish people either.” I had no idea what she was basing this on. She knew virtually nothing of Judaism, but seemed to feel, as my mother would too, that her ethnicity entitled her to a certain amount of paranoia.

My grandmother knew little about actual Judaism, but much about Jewish cuisine. She made delicious
gefilte
fish, delicious potato
knishes
, delicious cheese
blintzes
. When I came to visit, she would always give me a dozen
knishes
or
blintzes
wrapped first in tin foil and then in a plastic bag. I could taste the love in them.

She began to fade away, to become hopelessly confused. When she ceased to be able to keep track of the medications she was meant to be taking, my mother got her admitted to a convalescent hospital. I visited her there even though I knew I’d be getting no
blintzes
to take home, no
knishes
, and even though conversation with her was more difficult than ever. She wore her empty handbag on her arm whenever she left her room, rather like the Queen. She thought she’d been incarcerated, and asked, “What did I do wrong to get put in here?” If I’d had a heart, it would have been broken. You got old, I thought, and confused.

I moved far away. My mother transferred my grandmother to a different convalescent hospital, one offering greater care in very much less pleasant surroundings. It was the hospital in which I would later allow my father to die. My grandmother lived on and on and on. Her 90th birthday came and went. She ceased to recognise my mother, who told me she’d started to smell.

I saw her one last time, when I came to visit my dad, for whom it must have been deeply heartening to have become a patient in the same halfway house in which his mother-in-law was rotting away. I saw her wandering the halls, looking utterly befuddled. Afraid that she’d smell, and confident she wouldn’t recognise me anyway, I
didn’t interrupt her, didn’t say hello, didn’t thank her for the
knishes
and
blintzes
.

* * *

Mrs. Cavanaugh confessed to being an avid reader. She’d read the memoirs the month before of an Irish university lecturer who’d been kidnapped in Beirut and then held hostage by Islamic Jihad for nearly four years. It had made her grateful to be able to visit the loo whenever she needed, to be able to eat whatever she pleased off clean plates, to open a window and look out on the street when she liked. “It’s a good thing to savour small mercies,” she said. “And I don’t think you do, Les.” It was the only time she ever called me Les.

Neither of us smoked, so instead of ritually lighting cigarettes after lovemaking, we’d put one of Kate’s CDs in my boombox. (We’d tried having it off to her accompaniment, but found that we kept getting caught up in the music and losing our places.) Mrs. Cavanaugh couldn’t get enough of
The Ninth Wave
, the song cycle about drowning that had originally been Side 2 of
The Hounds Of Love
. She said she herself often felt as though drowning – in frustration, in boredom. It hadn’t been her ambition to run a boarding house, but she’d been unable to get the sort of work she wanted. She didn’t like to talk about it. I wondered if she was mindful of her own small mercies.