Читать книгу One Thousand Chestnut Trees - Mira Stout - Страница 7

After my uncle’s return to Seoul, life in Manhattan resumed its former shape as if he had not been there at all. Buses and taxis ploughed up and down Broadway, the phone rang, mail arrived. Pedestrians poured over crosswalks like columns of ants. The physical vacuum my uncle left was refilled instantly. The hard pavements sealed over my few, precious memories of him with the finality of quicksand.

When I tried to picture Hong-do’s life in Seoul, I could not. Its city smells, noises, and moods were inconceivable to me. Besides, it was too draining to imagine a world beyond New York. It was like living on the floor of an enclosed glass tank with unscalable walls. Only occasional, chastising glimpses of clear blue sky, in the gaps between buildings, reminded me of a remote natural order greater than Manhattan, quite beyond reach.

When I sat down to think of things to tell my uncle – in the letter that I never wrote him – I began to notice how marginal my life was. Days were measured out in so many tea-bags, bus-transfers, tuna sandwiches, cash-withdrawals, and hangovers.

I attempted to keep alive a connection to Hong-do through the occasional trip to Thirty-fourth Street for a Korean meal with friends, but this rather indirect approach failed, and without him the experience felt somewhat hollow. As predicted, my flimsy template of Korean awareness dissolved quickly, and attentions were soon fully reabsorbed in the lowly struggle for financial survival which had occupied my life before Hong-do’s departure. In my efforts to become a painter – and live in Manhattan – my life had become an undignified scramble for dry ground. I spent much of my time collecting cardboard boxes to move house with. Reasons for moving were various and unexciting: rent-hikes, lease-violations, buildings going co-op, and roommates like Ted, at West One Hundredth Street.

Ted was perhaps no better nor worse than you’d expect from a New York roommate. Ted had a honking Connecticut voice, and was a former Fly Club treasurer at Harvard, possessing the strange ability to bounce cheques selectively: rent and utilities cheques failing to clear, while extravagant entertainment and wardrobe bills found deep, instant funds. Ted stole your spaghetti sauce and lowered the tone of the bathroom with his depressing litres of bargain shampoo and generic deodorant. Pip, Alice and I were obliged to take numerous phone messages for Ted from The Hair Club for Men (where, at only twenty-four, he elected to go for weekly hair implants) and then struggle to pretend that we didn’t notice anything strange about the sudden presence of oddly-tinted brown hairs which appeared on his pate on alternate Thursdays. Unfortunately for us, this did not prevent him from attracting a girlfriend called Pierce; a law student with an aggressive laugh, who left items of clothing draped on the living-room furniture to signal her presence like a cat spraying its turf. But Ted’s most challenging habit was his nude sleepwalking. Fully clothed, Ted was irritating enough, but Ted entering my room late at night, buck naked, and climbing into my bed was pretty much the last straw. He would also make regular late-night sojourns into the kitchen when we were talking, and urinate into the refrigerator.

It was unfortunate that Ted’s name was on the lease. Although the unsolved murders of three young women on the rooftop of the building next-door cast an eerie menace over the block, and the peeling mustard-coloured paint, and tumbleweed dustballs in the corridor were slightly dispiriting, the apartment’s high ceilings, parquet floors, and wrought-iron balconies lent my existence a spurious graciousness that I appreciated very much at the time.

Sight unseen, I moved in to my next place on a searing August afternoon during a sanitation-workers’ strike, my belongings fitting into just two checker-cab trips. It was a sixth-floor walk-up on MacDougal Street, illegally sublet from a vacationing friend’s boyfriend. The strike was a bad omen: an almighty stench of food, cooked and rotting, hit me like a damp wall upon quitting the taxi; great banks of black plastic garbage bags were shored up generously on both sides of the street, shimmering in the heat. Up and down the block, an espresso bar, shish-kebab house, hot-dog-calzone-and-pizza stand, veggie-burger cart, sushi vendor and felafel emporium made MacDougal Street a sort of United Nations of fast food, whose dependence on the city’s sanitation workers was total.

I shared this apartment with Mona, a timid garment-district secretary from Belchertown, Massachusetts, her two neurotic long-haired cats, Mick and Mike, and a medical student, Ethan, who proudly told me on our first meeting that his father was the actor in the famous double-edged razor television commercials during the seventies.

The apartment’s subtly crippled appearance was owed to Delia’s vacationing boyfriend being something of an amateur carpenter. Interior walls were makeshift partitions he had enterprisingly nailed together late at night, apparently under the influence of hard drugs. The sturdiness of his carpentry was such that the cats could – and did – enter my bedroom by hurling themselves against the closed door at a gallop, whereupon they would lie down and moult on my pillow.

As it was summer, one didn’t mind that the frightening-looking gas stove was broken, but the bathroom arrangements were more testing. There was nothing as definite as a door to this bathroom; merely a friendly, cat-hairy, Indian bedspread thumbtacked to the doorframe, adding a certain anxiety to one’s activities therein. The superintendent had pledged to fix the plumbing, but in the meantime, toilet-flushing involved two trips to the kitchen tap with a bucket. Turning on the shower required the assistance of a pair of pliers. Once activated successfully, the exuberant shower-spray kept Mick and Mike’s kitty-litter tray in a continuous state of deliquescence.

When I think of MacDougal Street, I remember the inescapable melancholy of three ill-suited people sharing a small space, and the overwhelming smell of felafel. The airduct of the Middle Eastern restaurant downstairs expelled its kitchen fumes directly outside my bedroom window, which in August had to be permanently thrown open. I awoke in the mornings lightly coated in a dew of congealed felafel exhalation and cat-hair, provoking frequent bad-tempered battles with the shower-pliers.

That August it was too hot to paint in the studio, so sweltering free weekends were spent at friends’ summer places on Fisher’s Island and in Bridgehampton, or eating cherry Italian ices near the spray of the fountain in Washington Square Park, avoiding my flatmates. I spent many evenings at Laura’s, seated directly in the path of her electric fan, drinking cold beer and listening to the sound of other people’s stereos drifting in the stale night air.

I was grateful to my friend Delia for helping me out with a quick sublet, but having exhausted the charms of MacDougal Street, it was now time to move on. Laura, possessing a compassionate nature, agreed to split the rent with me, temporarily, on her studio apartment on Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue.

Our narrow, sooty tenement was positioned sensitively between a transvestite brothel and a funeral parlour. Laura had a bed in the living room, while I slept on a glorified shelf above a wardrobe, accessible by ladder. Being New York, it wasn’t even cheap. I also had to pay rent on a shared painting studio in the meat-packing district above the Hellfire Club, which I used on weekends and odd evenings. To keep up these two shelters, I held a full-time job uptown, with an antiquarian bookseller.

In the mornings at nine-fifteen I took the crowded subway uptown to Fifty-ninth and Lexington, stopped in at Frankie’s for my styrofoamed coffee and salt-bagel with cream cheese, and entered a modest doormanned building with my grease-spotted paper bag.

Through the bronze elevator doors awaited Oliver’s morocco-lined apartment, alias Cadogan Books, steaming with the force of three leather-preserving humidifiers. I let myself in with a key, and generally found Oliver, ruddy-faced, in a dark suit, tie, and half-lenses, sitting at the kitchen table sourly consuming a bowl of Frosted Flakes. He would be depressed about the uselessness of his life, occasioned by having spent another evening escorting a Mayflower matron to a dull gala at the Met.

Being a handsome, albeit impecunious Englishman of leisure, Oliver Flood was popular with various Pamelas, Aprils and Brookes. Although he felt himself well above being a walker, he was quite unable to refuse invitations, however repulsive he found them. Newly divorced, he was flattered by any reasonable attention, and admitted to being rather lonely.

After our usual morning banter, I would sit down at an elegant mahogany desk and attend first to the opening of Oliver’s mail, which he could not countenance without a human shock absorber. Sometimes plastic charge cards arrived snipped in two. Oliver confronted the arrival of credit card statements with the ritual of cowering in the kitchen doorway, half-lenses glinting, grunting softly, like an anxious primate. When the bill was very high, he hopped painfully from foot to foot, as if standing on hot coals.

Then began the grinding, circumlocutory task of updating the Cadogan Books mailing list and card catalogue. With a sense of hopelessness, I typed and retyped on index cards the names of cautious collectors, second-hand bookshop-owners, and changing department-heads of a number of universities and their often peevish and grand librarians (to whom I had already written) to try to sell off some rare volume, but Oliver’s books were usually too rare or too common to tempt the holders of these immensely fat-budgeted university funds. Meanwhile, Cadogan Books limped along, each day a little closer to bankruptcy.

Occasionally someone – Mrs Doris L. Vinehopper, for example, of 21 Mashpee Drive, Winnetka, Illinois 90987 – would mail-order two 1930’s editions of Omar Kháyyam’s Rubáiyát, and the fulfilment of Mrs Vinehopper’s desire would occupy the rest of the morning, dragged out with the aid of two further cups of coffee.

The ritual of preparing the books for their journey to 21 Mashpee Drive lent a sense of purpose to my otherwise aimless days at Cadogan Books, and kept the mind from wandering to the unpleasant reality that one was not doing any painting at all. The sheer beauty of the books made me lethargic; their gilded embossing, the satin feel of the calf book covers, and their pages’ mysterious, mushroomy smell.

But there was no slacking at Cadogan Books. Despite his considerable personal scattiness, Oliver was a stickler for book-wrapping formalities, hawkishly observing my erasure of extraneous pencil marks and smudges, the strategic insertion of a Cadogan Books compliments slip and invoice, cutting and snug taping of an underwear layer of sheet newsprint, followed by a vest of corrugated cardboard – Exact-O-knifed to precise cover dimensions – folded and taped to the tightest possible fit, and topped with a final overcoat of brown parcel paper, string reinforcement and sticky label: the book-wrapping equivalent of Jermyn Street winter tailoring.

Oliver himself went to the Post Office to mail the books; this being one of the more glamorous of the day’s activities, and a rare chance for people to know that he was wearing a suit. But oddly, if there was an auction to attend at Swann’s or Sotheby’s – dizzyingly social events for us – Oliver would insist that I do the bidding. At first it seemed that he was being generous, varying tasks to minimize staff boredom, but it became apparent, from arch comments he made about rival dealers Ephraim Pastov and John Speed, that he found the openly mercantile aspect of his profession a bit grubby.

While Oliver cut an enviable dash in the Post Office queue, selling books was one of his weaker points. His afternoons were generally spent attending art exhibitions, visiting the dry-cleaners’, lunching with potential clients, and sometimes listening to Puccini and Verdi, jotting down notes in an important hand for pedantic musical studies that he had been fine-tuning for years. Where such a desultory approach might be expected to yield limited results, Oliver was so annoyingly well-connected and clever that the books, however ordinary, and however long they might take to write, would be published by a decent house in England for quite a high fee, with no apparent negotiations undertaken.

One January morning after the arrival of a particularly emasculating credit card demand, Oliver took in the bad news with uncharacteristic silence. He eyed a priceless book of 18th century botanical illustrations with stupendous colour plates.

‘Susan Yankowitz-Miller,’ he said, melodramatically announcing his intended sales target.

‘Do you have to?’

He raised an eyebrow.

‘I suppose so,’ I said, glancing up from a new VISA statement. Perversely, Oliver appeared to hire his assistants for their flightiness and insubordination rather than their competence. My predecessor had been an London brewery heiress who dripped mayonnaise and nail polish onto the book covers, and conducted her intimidating social life on the phone in a particularly loud voice when introverted clients came to call.

Oliver went into the kitchen, and after the usual noise of cascading dirty crockery that accompanied most kitchen visits, emerged with a half-empty bottle of vodka, settled into a cracked brown leather armchair near the telephone, and crossed his legs.

‘What are you doing? It’s only ten-thirty.’ Ignoring this obvious remark, he struggled to remove the cap. ‘She’s terribly pretty, you know, half his age,’ he said, taking a tense swig from the bottle.

‘Who?’

‘Susan Yankowitz-Miller. Airline hostess emeritus; richest wife of the year. Said she might be interested in the book.’

‘Since when are you and Susan Miller having chats?’

‘Yankowitz-Miller. She insists. Saw her at Nonie Warburton’s ghastly bridge evening … If she does bite, that would be a ready eight thousand in the coffers. You’ve got to ring her up for me now.’

I protested.

‘You can. I pay you …’ Oliver handed me the bottle with a bland expression. I took an experimental pull. He passed me the number.

‘Meelair residence,’ said a distant Hispanic voice.

‘Hello, this is Mr Flood’s secretary calling for Mrs Miller.’

‘Mrs Meelair ees not home.’

‘May I please speak with her secretary?’

‘Chust a moment.’

Oliver mouthed something. I waved him away.

‘Avedon Buckley speaking, Mrs Yankowitz-Miller’s personal assistant, may I help you?’ said a lockjawed, blaring female, as if guarding access to one of the more important Pentagon generals. A protracted and farcical exchange of rude evasions (secretary) and slimy begging (me) ensued, and at last the mighty Mrs Yankowitz-Miller consented to come to the phone, despite having no recollection of having been interested in buying a ‘book’ – a word she pronounced with genuine surprise. Oliver, primed by the Smirnoff, sat on the edge of his chair, knees pressed together in a supplicatory pose, and injected into his voice an oily bonhomie for which he later loathed himself, and which instantly secured him an afternoon’s audience.

After a bloody three-week telephone campaign fought between Cadogan Books and Mrs Yankowitz-Miller’s manicurist, masseuse, hairdresser, chiropodist, colonic irrigator, fitness-trainer, voice-coach, personal shopper, florist, caterers, flamenco teacher, and the Save Tibet Foundation, Mrs Yankowitz-Miller duly bought the priceless book, and instructed Rodrigo, her decorator, to cut out the plates to hang in the baby’s bathroom. She also bought twenty-five yards of tooled leather books of no interest whatever to plump out her husband’s library. Cadogan Books was temporarily reprieved.

We celebrated by going to the movies at noon the following day to see Aliens II, and Oliver took me out for a late lunch at the Plaza afterwards. His jutting chin, diplomat-grey hair and dapper suit found an approving audience among the waiters and divorcees, who craned their necks with interest as he entered the room. The attention agreed with him, and he even bothered to pull in his stomach self-consciously as he got up to make a telephone call. As he turned, the vents of his suit seemed to flap deliberately, revealing a scarlet silk lining that flashed like mating plumage.

Oliver ordered an expensive bottle of Mercurey to impress the impudent sommelier, who had sized us up as illicit lovers, and although he was fairly merry at first, by the time coffee had arrived he was in quite a fragile state.

‘I’m thinking of packing it in, you know … Do you think I should pack it in? I’ve already had to sell some furniture.’

I was a bit shocked. ‘I don’t know … Maybe we should both pack it in,’ I said half-joking, emboldened by the wine and false security of multiple waiters.

‘Of course I’m grateful you gave me the job, Oliver, but it’s a bit tricky getting my own stuff done working for you full-time.’

Oliver eyed me critically, annoyed at my candour; he disliked being reminded that I had aspirations beyond Cadogan Books.

‘Come on, Ol. Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. What about going back to England?’

‘Clapped-out place. Truth is, I can’t. Too many enemies. Customs & Excise, solicitors, creditors, cheated colleagues, ex-wife nonsense …’

‘Where would you go? Would you stay here? You can’t. You’d turn into an old soak who dines off old ladies,’ I slurred. He looked up sharply.

‘Well, it’s settled then. I’m going. To Brazil … Why not Brazil?’

‘A bit melodramatic isn’t it? That’s where war criminals go. Besides, it’s so far away.’

Oliver looked far away already, quite alone with his misfortunes. Betrayed by his wife, business crashing, on the run from some past stain that made him jumpy and sour. But it wasn’t any good telling me these things, I was on the brink of telling him, I was just as derailed as he was.

‘The climate’s good in Brazil,’ he said, pathetically.

Sitting there overlooking Central Park amidst thick napery and gilt, it was hard to feel too sorry for Oliver. He looked so sturdy; a mature oak of a man, enjoying the deepest possible roots, but these he had severed long ago. Like most New Yorkers, he was a socio-geographic amputee, a handsome trunk, cut off at the knees.

I was saddened and mildly alarmed by this display of middle-aged vulnerability. But before I could offer any modest comfort, a wave of jadedness drowned the tender sprout of compassion. This is New York, pal, said the pre-emptive voice, Get a grip. Unnerved by his lost expression, I faltered, then remembered helpfully that people here came and went with every toilet flush. Oliver was a bubble on the effluvient foam of the East River; a wad of chewing gum on the city’s stiletto. You had to get used to people leaving New York. You reeled in the severed ties of friendship quickly. You learned to let go in advance.

Numbness set in as I realized that I was jobless. We parted in the freezing rain on the wide, optimistic steps of the Plaza. Oliver and his troubles were dwarfed standing there beneath the bright waving flags of Canada, America, France, and Guam. He forced a smile, and hunched his shoulders in farewell.

I would miss Oliver very much, despite his manifold obnoxiousnesses. In my heart’s psychiatric wing, he was almost like family. As with my uncle’s demise, there would be no Mayoral committee, no special envoy at the airport thanking him for his brave effort, nothing to soften his humiliation. Just a thirty-five dollar cab-ride.

It was odd thinking of my uncle and Oliver together. They met only once; not surprising given that Hong-do and I met only occasionally, but the two men were so different that they refused to share the same memory.

The one time Hong-do came to Cadogan Books was a tense occasion. Opening the door to Oliver’s apartment, I kissed my uncle’s cheek awkwardly, truly happy to see him. But a chilling moment followed, when I saw him through Oliver Flood’s eyes. After a perfunctory stab of courtesy, Oliver seemed only to notice my uncle’s awkward business-English, slightly inferior suit and rather dodgy shoes. These preliminary findings appeared to relieve him of further interest. It was also apparent from Hong-do’s sharp-eyed silence that he thought Oliver an arrogant, trivial man.

Seeing these two worlds standing side by side in the same room, yet failing to meet in any way, was painful. I was torn; insulted by Oliver’s flippant welcome to Hong-do, yet ashamed to be able to understand Oliver and his limitations better than I could follow my own uncle’s thoughts.

During those years in New York, Hong-do had remained in his own Korean enclave, and I stayed in my Western one. It was as if we had been moored in the same harbour on separate submarines. Although I invited him aboard my vessel, he never stayed long; he seemed to know about the leaks. I should have done better; made the necessary repairs to accommodate him.

I reflected on these failures walking down Fifth Avenue, past the unappetizing, superfluous luxuries behind shatterproof glass. I searched the faces streaming towards me with detached curiosity, with painter’s eye, but was soon numbed by the insistent drumming of impressions on the retinae. Infinitesimal variations on one eyes-nose-mouth theme, so many individual, snowflake faces in the blizzard of urban rush hour humanity. A face missing one quality was superseded by a face possessing that quality, and missing another. One race complemented another race. Perhaps the incomplete, jigsaw faces all added up to one consummate face, reflecting God’s obscured likeness.

It was getting dark. I ate a warm pretzel more for recreation than hunger, looked at my watch, and decided to go into St Thomas’ for evensong. Its choir was justly famous. Despite being Catholic, I preferred the intimacy of this church to the cavernous nave of St Patrick’s Cathedral across the street, with its dwarfing gothic stalagmites. I entered the dim church, and slid into a pew at the back, like a stray. A row of fur coats and blonde heads swivelled round in impious curiosity. Through the tracery of the altar screen and the rose window, the night glowed a rich cobalt blue.

The service had begun, and my eardrums were bathed in silky, sweet, golden music. The boys’ voices were arrows of piercing sound, bright as stars; still, chill, and distant. Aimed at the heavens, the notes were like austere fireworks, going so high and no further, bursting and falling gracefully, no less beautiful for their vain striving. I felt both pain and relief at the sound, as my selfish, jagged yearnings bled into insignificance. The voices sliced through my pretence at being happy, exposed my false footing. The discomfort was oddly strengthening. Often I sat there, coated with a light scum of petty dishonesties and rank thoughts, and by the end of the service would feel quite clean; spirits rinsed by the acid purity of the music, anxieties temporarily assuaged by the healing words of the prayers:

‘O God … give unto thy servant that peace which the world cannot give … Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ, Amen.’

Then I would slink out again into the lucre-grimed circus of Fifth Avenue, where the invisible particles of acquisition and struggle accumulated again within like a layer of plaque.

Now I sat still after the fur coats and cashmeres had filed out solemnly, and stayed behind to think. I had not taken communion, partly for tribal reasons. I would feel a fraud not being Anglican. Who were my ‘people’? Did one need a people? An artist was meant to be a pioneer, a pilgrim, yet a submerged need to belong surfaced at odd moments. The Catholic church was a spiritual family, but somehow the bond was obscure, impersonal, like St Patrick’s itself. One longed for a more acute, flesh-and-blood connection, smaller than God, and more enduring, more forgiving than a lover. A chill of doubt and wonder enveloped me in the church. Rueful thoughts came of my own small family, scattered by discord and continental drift. I had no siblings nor living relatives at all on my father’s side. I thought of my uncle Hong-do, and a tiny spark of warmth lightened the void. Clashes with my mother had prevented me from exploring the Korean side of my family. I wondered if it might be possible to try now, or if it was already too late. Had I the maturity to attempt such a radical reversal of the entrenched ostrich position that I’d assumed toward her culture?

Wriggling, I tried to calculate what it would cost to embrace the Orient. It could be restrictive. One might even lose one’s former identity. Besides, would one be acceptable to them, as a half-Westerner? A quasi-Oriental face would only go so far to reassure them. Inner qualities would be needed to bridge the gap. Did these qualities already exist in me, or could they be developed as one went along?

Strangely, Korea was the last destination I thought of travelling to. It was a world I accepted as being permanently and impossibly remote. In my warped thinking, I vaguely imagined it to be full of Korean mothers who would give me a hard time. Perhaps I wasn’t strong enough to face the sad endings of the fairy-tale past related to me as a child. Yet the prospect held out an undeniable sense of promise. Maybe it was the key to some locked door which needed opening. Although one shrank from becoming a race-bore, for the first time it seemed that there might be a middle way between exaggerating its importance, and denying it altogether. Perhaps it would be possible to go to Korea.

Full of nascent intentions, I took the express train downtown, somewhat sedated by evensong and the good wine from lunch. But after a few minutes under the cauterizing lights of the jolting carriage and the barbed stare of a drunk vagrant, my nerves were soon fraying again. Korea was pulled from my thoughts like an expensive scarf caught in the subway turnstile.

I slightly dreaded arriving at the Twenty-third Street exit. Wesley, the one-legged black Vietnam veteran on crutches might be there at the top of the stairs, bellowing ‘Marry me!’ to all the young women walking past. Much as I had a soft spot for Wesley, I couldn’t face him tonight, and to my relief, he was not there. Back out on the street, the air had grown colder and the wind had picked up. I checked the train entrance reflexively to make sure that I was not being followed by the drunk from the subway car, nodded a greeting to Jésus at the Ti Amo Cigar Stand on the corner, and let myself into the dark apartment building, the sleet cutting into my cheek, like a spray of crushed glass.

The apartment was empty. Laura was out at an uptown gallery opening with her married lover. Not hungry, I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. As I switched on the light the waterbugs startled me – and I them. Fat as dates, the bugs scrambled sluggishly out of the bathtub and filed into the large gaps in the tile-caulking that the landlord had promised to see to months ago.

I went to bed early, ascending the ladder to my carpeted shelf to read by the clip-on lamp. One could just about sit up without scraping one’s head. Without pleasure I drank the large glass of whisky I’d poured myself, feeling a sense of disgusted relief as the alcohol burned and seeped its way toxically around my bloodstream. In the semi-dark I drifted off – the marquee lights of the Coronet stayed on all night, bathing the curtainless apartment in ice-blue illumination. Since my small epiphany about Korea, I felt quite restless, unable to block out the usual nocturnal serenade. Traffic noise roared down Twenty-third Street. I was roused by the shout of a wino, the sound of a taxi honking. Around four am, someone’s newly discovered favourite song boomeranged around the building’s airshaft. The loud noise had a pointless, sad defiance to it, like a prisoner shaking the bars of his cell. It repeated three times more and abruptly stopped. Just before dawn, I slept.