Gut Symmetries (12 page)

And then there were three.

His wife, his mistress, met.

PAGE OF CUPS

I met Stella at the Algonquin Hotel. The Algonquin Hotel; Dorothy Parker, James Thurber,
The New Yorker
, my father in 1957. He had stayed there because it seemed so English and when he brought me to New York for the first time as a child our reservations were at the Algonquin Hotel.

He had booked his old room and even packed a tie he used to wear in those days. Red silk with little white polka dots, he never would say who had given it to him.

'Never tell all thy love.'

Like my grandmother he kept secrets the way other people keep fish. They were a hobby, a fascination, his underwater collection of the rare and the strange. Occasionally something would float up to the surface, unexpected, unexplained.

Mother said: 'Why didn't you tell me?'

Father said: 'There was nothing to tell.'

I am my father's daughter.

She and I would be approaching the place from opposite ends of town. I imagined her, angry, confident, ready to match me and beat me at my own game. This was the big fight and Jove the prize. When I told him she had written to me he had decided to visit friends for the weekend.

I had her letter in my pocket. The careful handwriting. The instruction to obey. 'I will meet you on Wednesday the 12th at 6:30 p.m. in the bar at the Algonquin Hotel.'

Why had she chosen here?

Here it was.

Five minutes to spare. The cruelty of time.

I had dressed as a warrior: black from cleavage to insoles, hair down, fat hoops of gold in my ears, war-paint make-up. I had a twenty-year advantage over my opponent and I intended to use every month of it.

She would be greying, she would be lined, she would be overweight, she would be clothes-careless. She would be poetically besocked and sandalled, her eyes behind glass, like museum exhibits. I could see her, hair and flesh escaping, hope trapped inside. I would drain her to the sump.

No sign of her. The bar was a chessboard of couples manoeuvring Martinis, and waiters high-carrying chrome trays. I moved in black knight right angles across and cross the lines but apart from a few appreciative businessmen there was no one who seemed interested in me.

Of course she had not come. Of course she would not come. It had been a nerve war and I had won. I noticed I had a terrible pain in my neck. I ordered a drink and collapsed under a potted palm.

'May I sit here?'

'Please do. You must be English.'

'Why?'

'Too polite to be an American.'

'Aren't Americans polite?'

'Only if you pay them enough.'

'The British aren't polite no matter how much you pay them.'

'Then you and I must be refugees.'

'I suppose I am. My father used to come here. He loved New York. He said it was the only place in the world where a man could be himself while working his shirt off to become somebody else.'

'And did he?'

'What?'

'Become somebody else."

'Yes. Yes he did.'

We were quiet. She was looking towards the door. I looked at her. She was slim, wired, a greyhound body, half bent forward now, shape of her back muscles contouring her shirt, white, starched, expensive. Her left arm looked like the front window of Tiffany's. I was not sure how a woman could wear so much silver and sit without a lean.

Her hair was dark red, dogwood red, leather red with a suppleness to it that is part gift, part effort. I guessed that the look of hers was as artful as it was artless.

'Are you waiting for someone?' I said.

l was.' She looked at her watch. 'Are you staying here?'

'No. I live in New York. I work at the Institute for Advanced Studies. I came here to meet. . .'

To meet: to come face to face with. To become acquainted with. To be introduced. To find. To experience. To receive. To await the arrival of. To encounter. To encounter in conflict.

'I came here to meet. . .'

There was a wind in the room that tore the drink out of the drinkers, that scattered the bar bottles like bottle tops, that levitated the furniture and smashed it into the tranced wall. Waiters and waited on blew in rags out of the door. There was nothing left in the room but she and me, she and me hypnotised by each other, unable to speak because of the wind.

She gathered her things and together we left the destroyed room. I had to follow her as she twisted the pavements under her feet. I lost sense of where we were. The grid had buckled. The city was a bent alley and she was the better rat.

At last we arrived at a small diner in a beaten-up part of town. She swung inside and we sat at a menacingly nice checked-cloth table with two carnations and a few rods of grissini. A boy came out with a carafe of red wine and a bowl of olives. He handed us the menus as if this was just an ordinary dinner in an ordinary day. I had fallen into the hands of the Borgias and now they wanted me to eat.

I looked at the menu. FOOD TASTES BETTER IN ITALIAN.

'This is where I met him,' she said. 'In 1947 on the day that I was born . . .'

The little boy had been asleep and through his dreams came a sleigh piled with furs and followed on foot by a band of wild dark men, huddled hurrying, talking in a language he did not understand. He heard barking and crying and from below the protesting water being drawn along the frozen pipes and into the geyser. He woke up and ran downstairs. The chairs and tables had been pushed back against the walls and the double doors onto the street were open. Through the blue curtain of cold, into the orange lights, six wolves drew a sledge. The leading pair pulled up two inches from his chest and level with it. One of the wolves licked his face with its brown-pink parma ham tongue. Now he would be eaten.

'Mama! Mama! Mama! Il lupo mi mangier
á
!'

'Eccola, Romulo,'
said Signora Rossetti, and the little boy was hoisted over the grinning dogs and told how Romulus and Remus, the abandoned twins, had been suckled by a she-wolf and thus saved to found the great city of Rome.

Not wishing to be outdone, the Elders all began to tell stories at once of Hebrew heroes and animal help: Abraham's ram, Balaam's ass, Jacob's lion, Samson's bees. Job's entire menagerie, including the horse that danced and crieth among the trumpets 'Aha!'

'And our Saviour himself,' said Signora Rossetti, whose contribution was met with a generally icy stare colder than the air outside.

But this was no night to pick quarrels and over polenta and kirsch it was agreed that Jesus could be included because he was Jewish and because he had been assisted at birth by donkeys, sheep and dogs.

The little boy had never seen a baby pink as a wolf's tongue.

As she told the story she forgot about me. I had begun as an adversary, become an audience, and now seemed only a footlight. The stage was hers and if she was performing for anyone it was herself.

A very good performer she was; breaking into Yiddish, into Italian, into German, accenting and gesturing, turning now into a claque of elderly Jews, now into a frightened small boy. I had to let go of my detachment, my resentment. When she imitated the horse that crieth among the trumpets 'Aha!', I was back with Grandmother again, back with the weekly visits and the preposterous slippers, the huge full-length apron, its pocket stuffed with Polo mints and a battered Bible.

Perhaps it was the seriousness of our business that pushed us both into laughter, extremes of emotion so easily tumbling into their opposites. Yet there was relief for us to find a human face behind the monster mask; the monster wife, the monster mistress, and what about the monster man?

'He was a flirt even then,' said Stella. 'He flirted with Mama who had a weakness for dark hair and dark eyes, even in a seven-year-old boy.'

'But Jove is younger than you.'

'Did he tell you that?'

'You were born in 1940. He was born in 1947.'

'The other way round.'

And she told me how she and her mother had visited the diner once a week, on a Saturday, for the next eleven years. It had to be Saturday. The Jewish Shabbat. Papa's ecstasy. Mama's defiance. Her daughter was not Jewish. Jewishness is continued through the female line. Mama would not have her daughter given up to Papa's passion.

Mother and daughter, secular, apart. Papa beckoning the child in unwatched moments, taking her into his secret room, showing her symbols and precious stones. She had navigated her parents' hostile waters with a child's discretion, learning to keep from one the confessions of the other. Learning to hide love.

When she was eleven, Papa died. Within three months Mother in a little black suit, child in a black warm coat, took ship to Hamburg and re-settled in Berlin. The books and the bookshop had been sold and the secret room was empty.

While she was talking I wondered why Jove wanted me. I had come out dressed to kill and I was the one being murdered. My self-esteem is a jigsaw I cannot complete. I get one part of the picture and the rest lies in pieces. I suspect that there is no picture, only fragments. Other people seem to glue it together somehow and not to worry that they have been using pieces from several different boxes. So what is the answer? Is identity a deceit, a make-shift, and should we hurry to make any pattern we can? Or is there a coherence, perhaps a beauty, if it were possible to find it? I would like to convince myself about myself but I cannot. The best there is are days when the jigsaw assumes its own meaning and I no longer care what picture is emerging. By that I mean I am unfrightened by the unexpected. If there is beauty it will surprise me. Of all things it cannot be calculated. I said I suspect that there is no picture. I should have said that whatever the picture is, it will not be the one on the box.

ME: I am sorry.

SHE: This isn't the first time.

ME: I know that.

SHE: They always do.

ME: I thought I might be the one.

SHE: They always do.

ME: You could leave him.

SHE: To you?

ME: To himself.

SHE: Simple in books.

ME: Not in your books.

SHE: Words, words, he says.

ME: Safety in numbers.

SHE: Even the hairs of your head are numbered . . .

ME: What number am I?

SHE: Five.

ME: That’s lucky.

SHE: Said to ward off the Evil Eye.

ME: I thought that was you.

SHE: Little round glasses?

ME: Socks and sandals.

SHE: Fat, beery.

ME: Out of touch.

SHE: Give me your hand.

ME: What?

SHE: I'll read it for you.

ME: What do you see?

SHE: Beauty and fear.

ME: You aren't looking.

SHE: I used to say that to Papa.

ME: What did he say?

SHE: What you see is not what you think you see.

ME: Sound science.

SHE: Doesn't that depend on the scientist?

ME: I wouldn't depend on the scientist. . .

SHE: If I were you?

ME: It isn't a warning.

SHE: A threat?

ME: Do I look like a threat?

SHE: You look exactly like the previous four threats.

ME: What are you going to do?

SHE: What would you like me to do?

It was what Jove had said a few months ago when he had been holding my wrist, too tightly, across a restaurant table. She was still holding my hand and what I did was outside of anything I had imagined I would do.

I leaned across the narrow table and kissed her.

SHE: Women as well?

ME: No.

Cowardice bedshares with arrogance. I was afraid and I wanted to bluff my way out. The kiss was a smoke bomb to cause confusion and distract attention. I thought she might slap me. I thought she would rush away. In fact she did nothing. Asked her question and did nothing. I started to re-eat my cold pasta. I would have been glad to climb into the plate and cover myself in clam sauce.

ME: I'm working on antiquarks.

SHE:

ME: They are the antiparticles corresponding to the quarks.

SHE:

ME: They haven't been discovered yet.

SHE:

ME: That makes them quite difficult to work on.

SHE:

(Say something please say something.)

ME: Did you know I was born on a tug-boat in the River Mersey?

SHE:

ME: My father wanted to call me Mersey but my mother wouldn't let him. My real name is Alluvia. I shortened it to Alice.

SHE: Alluvia?

ME: That which is deposited by the river.

SHE: Shall I call you Moses?

ME: If I grow a beard.

SHE: Jove calls you Rivelleto.

ME: Little River?

SHE: I call him a mamzer.

ME: Mamzer?

SHE: Yiddish. Look it up under Bastard.

ME: I know.

SHE: Come on.

Walk with me. Walk the broken past, named and not. Walk the splintered plank, chaos on both sides, walk the discovered and what cannot be discovered. Walk the uneasy peace we share.

Walk with me, through the night, the night air, the breathing particles of other lives. Breathe in, breathe out, steady now, not too fast on gassed lungs. I did not mean my words to poison you. Walk with me, walk it off, the excess fat of misery and fear. Too much to carry around the heart. Walk free.

She had a long stride though I was taller. Soon we were at the Battery.

Valet de Coupe. A youth stares anxiously into an elaborate cup whose contents are concealed. There may be no contents. Nevertheless he holds onto the cup. Carrying it with him as he walks.

Page of Cups. Young hopeful of the Tarot deck. My identity card.

When Stella kissed me I remember thinking, 'This is not allowed.' I was glad of the fog and the dark because I knew that if anyone saw us, the totality of our lives; history, complexity, nationality, intelligence, age, achievement, status, would be shrunk up to the assumptions of our kiss. Whoever saw us would say, 'There's a couple of. . .', and this kiss, tentative, ambivalent, would become a lock and key.