Jacko (27 page)

Where the air is clear as crystal, and the white stars fairly blaze

At midnight in the cold and frosty sky,

And where around The Overflow the reed beds sweep and sway.

To the breezes, and the rolling plains are wide,

The man from Snowy River is a household word today,

And the stockmen tell the story of his ride.

A steward interrupted me.

—Excuse me, sir. The fasten seatbelt sign is illuminated.

15

From the transcendence of Jacko on the wall, I returned to New York and my Wednesday night graduate writing class. Fourteen writers, nearly all of them capable of publishing fiction if they could stand the ignominy and disappointment of it all. They were two-thirds women, and they wrote about the intimate and the domestic: post-AIDS love in New York; the business of finding a good man in a poisoned city; the raising of children; marital ennui. Their heroes were Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, and someone had got hold of them at a young age and told them that they must all write like a
New Yorker
short story. Considering the difference in our taste, we got on well. I liked to tell them that if I had one virtue as a fiction teacher it was that I gave all genres equal credit. I urged them to do the same. You never knew when a genre would come ravening out of the bush and claim you for its own.

They didn't believe it though. Their range was very nearly the awful things mother and father had done, and then the perfidy of lovers. Of Dickens's trilogy of terrors, hunger and want had been largely taken care of, and love remained, unappeasable under any political regime.

In one of the students' stories, a woman betrayed by men of average fallibility meets a Persian-American in a Soho bar. He is a gentle soul, but he wants to suspend her in an apparatus designed for men who like to see women swinging powerless from the ceiling. He is embarrassed to ask, but would she consider it? More conventional males have adequately traduced her; she consents. In mid-suspension though, as she gyrates in her captive state, he's overwhelmed by the shame of his perversion and goes off and reads
American Track and Field
. Suspended between his desire and self-loathing, she swings in an empty room. It's a poisonously accurate image, a wonderful New York tale.

If such stories have a fault, it is that they do not carry a sense of the wider world, the world of China, the world of Africa, in which the apparatus of suspension is even more savage and the yearnings of women even more radically thwarted. But I suppose that is America, ruler and ignorer of the earth!

Despite the admirable revolution of Washington and Jefferson, agonies remained. The pursuit of happiness was both guaranteed and elusive. In a self-absorbed city, the graduate fiction students got their stories published all over the place, and one of them became a legend by cracking the
New Yorker
. Another had her book accepted by Knopf. At the following class I provided two bottles of Moët, so much cheaper in New York than in the antipodes that I couldn't work out why Manhattanites didn't drink it all the time.

I would come home exhilarated from these workshop sessions, walking down University Place, past curfew-quiet Washington Square, by the University Gallery and the faculty eating house named the Violet, notorious for salmonella. There is a plaque on the wall somewhere along that stretch which honours the first Dutch teachers of New Amsterdam-New York. After a good session I might sometimes pause at it and – even as a novelist, a teacher-manqué – feel part of a long, decent tradition.

Next I usually swung past the complex of apartments named Washington Square Village. It had been home for Maureen and me when we first came to New York, and I visited it both for nostalgia's sake and to congratulate myself on my escape from it. Good, if poorly plumbed, brownstone buildings had been torn down a quarter of a century past to make this poor imitation of Le Corbusier's
Île des Hommes
, and its rent-free or rent-cheap apartments made it possible for NYU to attract faculty to the dangerous and expensive city.

I knew that retired staff stayed on in the building long after their teaching years ended. On our floor, for example, was a formerly dazzling cancer researcher who wandered the normally empty corridor asking whoever stepped out of the lift what time it was. He held a clock in his hand, with the intention of immediately correcting it once you answered him. The man's still-blazing cerebrum knew that memory was largely a sense of time, and so he tried to get evidence of the day and the hour from all the tenants on that floor as a means of validating his own vanished memory.

Widows and widowers of staff also stayed on in that cold imitation of Le Corbusier's work. One day, when I was rising to the eighth floor in the lift, the door slid back on the fifth floor and an elderly woman with a bottle of seltzer water, that highly effervescent New York speciality, presented herself. She passed the bottle in to me and said, Would you mind opening that for me? I obliged her, opened it without spraying the interior of the lift, and passed the bottle out again. She thanked me. And so the doors closed.

I wondered what sort of expert she or her husband or both of them had been. For the floors were full of experts from all over the world, as well as prime-of-life stars from Harvard and Yale, Cambridge or Trinity College Dublin, to whom NYU offered research fellowships and double professorships and attractive deals.

Once I hit Washington Square Village on my way home, I would swing eastwards, thereby evading the sad cancer professor who waited there on the eighth floor with his dock, palely maintaining his nexus with time. And so I would negotiate the two cold blocks to the Cotton Building.

Returning there after the first post-Wall Wednesday workshop, I found my wife sitting up, drinking a bottle of Australian chardonnay with Lucy. As ready as I was to settle to a quiet glass of wine with my wife, I was still stimulated enough to be pleased to see Lucy. Apart from the affection both of us felt for her as a forthright, sensible woman, she represented yet one more instance of that continuum of the young and talented for which New York is the holy city and of which my group of writers was a fair sample.

Accepting a seat and a glass, I asked her what she thought of her husband's Wall renown? This was a silly question, as good as rhetorical. Something to say. When she didn't answer, I saw her eyes were misted and her cheeks pink from tears. I remembered Dannie's ferocious speech in the lift at the Kempinski. It was such an assertive slash at Lucy, the fabric of her marriage, that it might have woken Lucy from her sleep in New York. She might have been weeping for days and only now delivered herself tearful into my wife's company.

By silent accord we swung the subject to a Dmitris Sgouros concert she had been to at Carnegie Hall, all in the period when Jacko and Dannie and Fartfeatures and myself were returning from Berlin. After that she was ready to tell us new stories she'd heard from Jacko. She recounted what had happened to Al Bunker when he went south of Berlin to Bitterfeld in a limo stacked with cases of Calvados and tangerines to find the drunken Gunter's brother and force a reunion upon the two of them. They had needed to make their way past Vopo checkpoints and security police with uncertain orders by giving away bottles of the brandy. But there was still an ocean of it by the time they found Gunter's brother's slightly superior, middling-official residence in the south side of the town. Gunter's sister-in-law had answered the door, and the brother had refused to come out. Curtains were drawn, a siege was in progress and night was deepening on the only great fraternal reunion available to Vixen Six to film. At last the brother came out to prevent Bunker from knocking desperately on the windows, and the camera ran. Then Bunker rushed the tape back to Berlin with Gunter, who was not welcome to remain in that squalid town with his brother. The Vixen Six people in New York received it and edited it up so that the brother's anger looked almost like a grateful smile!

Cheered by her own re-telling of Jacko's version of this and with her mood nearly recovered, she rose to go home. I went down to Houston Street with her to help her find a cab.

—I'll be fine, she said. You know, I miss Oz. You and Maureen don't seem to.

—Maureen loves it here, despite her dead-beat bloody husband.

—Too much weird stuff here for me.

A cab found us and Lucy got in. I bent to its window to wave her goodbye, and saw her sadness resettle itself darkly, like a crow on either shoulder.

When I got back to the apartment, Maureen first told me simply that Lucy had got a more or less anonymous telephone call about Jacko and Dannie. I wasn't to mention it to Jacko, even though we were friends. On the other hand, had
I
seen any signs of a problem in Berlin?

Yes, I said. Between Maureen and me, and taking it no further, there
could
be some basis for the idea. I told her that Dannie was in aggressive pursuit, and Jacko … well, she knew Jacko. I began to say that Lucy had no concrete reason to think Dannie and Jacko were … But then I thought of the shared room, and so let the sentence trail away. And she wasn't to tell Lucy any of this, I added, even though she and Lucy were friends.

—And you and Lucy aren't? Maureen asked.

—Jacko talks to me, I argued, and Lucy to you. It's the best arrangement.

—What a load of rubbish, said Maureen.

—Jacko doesn't have my uncritical support.

—Yes, but you always obey his instructions. Because he's picturesque. By obeying him, you'll earn the privilege of writing about him in the end.

She had me, as the Brits say, to rights.

We went to bed, and when I woke at three o'clock in the morning I found that Maureen was awake too. I wandered off to the bathroom, still unsure whether I was by the Pacific in Sydney or located above Lower Broadway in populous Manhattan. I had the impression, as I left on the outward, dazed journey, that my wife was clear-eyed and insomniac. When I got back she had the bedside light on and was sitting upright. It was unlike her to put the light on this late unless she was reading.

She said, Lucy got a call. As I told you. I didn't tell you who called. It was from a particular woman … one who claims to be married to the Sondquist girl's kidnapper. She'd read about Lucy and Jacko in a television magazine. She told Lucy that she'd watched Jacko and his producer – what's that girl's name again? – filming somewhere in California. San Bernardino or Baker. She knew where her husband took the girl to work or to jog, so she took to ducking away from home and visiting those places on weekends … Sitting there for hours. An obsessive thing. And according to her she just happened to see Jacko's camera crew. And Dannie. She said she knew by looking at the two of them, by the way they behaved, by the way Jacko kissed Dannie, by all the body language … that they were having an affair. She said she knows the signs, because she'd watched her husband fall in love with the Sondquist girl. She could tell by the way Jacko conducted himself. And she hunted Lucy down through directory assistance – I've been warning Lucy to get a silent number – and called to tip her off. And to confide in her.

—Then she said she'd like to meet Lucy at some stage, so they could discuss what they had in common. She said this just like a normal, pleasant, wronged woman. She said she'd let her husband kidnap the Sondquist woman and now she knew he'd fallen in love with her! The ingratitude of men! That was the theme.

Having told me all this, my wife looked at me.

—The wife calls the girl prisoner Ess, exactly the same thing as that motel woman in Baker called her. Of course she, the wife, could have got that from the interview Jacko did with the motel woman. Anyhow, Lucy doesn't know what to do. She's wondering whether to tell the police about the phone call. And she's frightened that if she tells Jacko what the woman said, she'll look ridiculous and get the usual denials, or a quick apology. And then he'd be off like a terrier again, after Dannie, after Sunny. And she's scared, too, it might make a contribution of some kind to the euphoria Jacko and Dannie feel working together, and draw them closer still …

—Besides that, said Maureen, if Lucy and the woman had a meeting, Jacko and the others would want to use Lucy to film the encounter. Even if it's a hoax, they could use it to make another segment of the Sunny Sondquist quest.

The search for Sunny needed to be referred to and pursued at least twice a week on
Live Wire
.

The other option was that Lucy could ignore the call, but she worried that she could contribute thereby, perhaps, to the continuance of Sunny's enslavement.

My wife said, The woman's called her three times, long distance, and Lucy's in agony.

In the following week, on the basis that I did not betray any of this news to Jacko, I received further confidences from my wife, who was receiving them in turn from Lucy Emptor. The woman continued to call Lucy, but they were brief calls. The woman said, I don't want anyone to be able to put a fix on where I'm calling from.

In one call she confided that she had children. In another she told that she had given birth to a child in the same room in which Sunny Sondquist's, or Ess's place of detention was located.

Lucy told Maureen that each call was more circumstantial than the last. In one call, Lucy was told that the woman's husband was building
another pit
. The wife saw this as a frank declaration that the man intended to take yet another woman.

The pit-digger's wife would also express some sisterly feeling – Lucy noticed it wasn't straight-out jealousy of Ess which possessed her. She and Ess, said the wife, had suffered so much at his hands that they didn't want another girl to go through it.

What unnerved Lucy was that throughout her calls the woman spoke so averagely, so suburbanly, and seemed so convinced of her confidante's, Lucy's, ordinary sympathy. As if, out in the Sydney suburbs where Lucy was bred, husbands commonly signified marital discontent by digging dungeons.