Seven Lies (18 page)

And meanwhile there was the other side of the picture: those visions of pure, dripping gold. Furred models stepping from limos to shop for diamond ankle bracelets; tanning parlours where god-like bodies revolved under ultraviolet lamps . . . Even just the food stores: to behold for the first time those illuminated tiers of fruits and vegetables, the forests of flowers spilling out their scent and colour from the East Village bodegas; to walk on and be confronted, on the same block, by another, then yet another such
Wunderkammer
; to go inside and fill a basket with delicacies you had never bothered to
distinguish in your mind from the nectars and ambrosias of myth, so little had you ever expected to taste them; to watch your bill being created by nothing more than the passing of each item over the glass-topped counter's mysterious scarlet ray – all of this was an astonishment to me; one that merely increased as I discovered that these bodegas occupied not the highest but in fact the very lowest position on the city's hierarchy of stores, that above them were the more resplendent Korean groceries with their banked, year-round fires of grapefruit and peach and strawberry, that these in turn were as nothing to the crammed volumes of the Gristedes and D'Agostino chains, which were themselves eclipsed by the mighty cornucopias of Zabar's, Balducci's, Dean & DeLuca, where the entire planet seemed to have concentrated its riches for one's delectation; our own Baltic condensed into a hundred types of smoked fish, the Mediterranean gemmed and gleaming in jar after jar of olives; all of this of course entirely commonplace to other shoppers, but to us as startling as if a New Yorker should walk into a shop and find delicacies from Jupiter and Venus casually on display. And then the buildings themselves, the skyscrapers, my childhood fetishes, rising south and north over the humbler rooftops of the Village: the Empire State like a great syringe with some fiery elixir of the city vatted inside it, the Helmsley in its gold tiara, the Twin Towers reading each other's paragraphs of light . . .

How I loved this place! Having spent my teenage years dreaming of being reborn as an American, I should not have been surprised by this, but the reality of the country so exceeded my wildest imaginings that I would sometimes find myself in a state of almost painfully overfulfilled expectation. Even the shelter we supervised on the floor below us was a source of unexpected joy. I had imagined it was going to be
a place of pungent squalor and criminality; that to pass muster there I was going to have to find the resources of a prison guard somewhere inside me. But I was mistaken: the men who lived there, far from being the brutal or broken spirits my anxiety had conjured, seemed to me to embody, in a peculiarly pure form, precisely the qualities I had always most desired for myself: vitality, innocence, hope. Their stripped-bare lives, even the undeniable craziness of one or two of them, elevated them in my eyes, giving them an almost heroic air. I remember them vividly: David, young, lean, furiously energetic on his diet of protein powder and homegrown alfalfa sprouts, a fanatic reader of memoirs by billionaire executives, monopolising the pay phone with his own labyrinthine moneymaking schemes; Donald, bankrupted by medical bills, lumps all over his neck, forever poring over an enormous dictionary, convinced he needed only to master the rules of ‘orthography' in order to get his life back on track; Jean-Luc, a qualified doctor (so he claimed) who had come to America from Haiti in search of a job, had his suitcase stolen with all his medical certificates, and been marooned ever since, his kindly eyes signalling, as he told you this, that he didn't expect you to believe a word of it and forgave you in advance for your scepticism . . .

In the evenings, as they drifted in from the streets after we unlocked the door (our principal duty, along with keeping the store-cupboard stocked with laundry soap and toilet paper), I would sit with them in the communal room, spellbound. Their conversation revolved around two themes, each as intoxicatingly ‘American' to my hyperattentive ears as the opening notes of
Appalachian Spring
or some other purebred anthem: their eager willingness to take responsibility for their own predicament, and their unquenchable optimism for the
future. They were homeless, they believed, simply as a result of what they called their ‘bad choices'. But they also believed that the good life was attainable to anyone in this great country of theirs, themselves included, and that all it required was for them to make, instead of those bad choices, the ‘right' choices, which they would make as soon as they were ‘ready'. As simple as that! No talk of bad luck or the inherent injustices of the social order; nothing between themselves and their destiny: an apocalyptic nakedness! Every one of them, it seemed, was a millionaire-in-waiting: right now they were just going through their shelter phase, as the heroes of legend go through their obligatory spells in the desert or the pauper's hovel. Absurd as it may sound, I wanted to be as they were: emptied out of everything but faith and hope! Their glamour extended from themselves to the physical space they inhabited. Dingy as it was, with its soiled woollen curtains, calcium-bearded radiators, narrow beds and bits of old carpet remnant, the place had a rock-bottom sufficiency that I found strangely appealing. The hot water worked; the kitchen always had plenty of store-donated food in it; there was company if you wanted it, but no one imposed on you. I remember thinking that if we failed to make a go of things in this city, I, for one, would be content to end up in such quarters.

But there was no reason to believe we would not make a go of things. We had a glamour of our own. We were young, exotically foreign; people wanted to know us; they wanted to help us. My father's old opposite number at the UN, Jim McGrievey, now an attorney in private practice, received me in his midtown office soon after we arrived. A spry, mirthful-eyed man, amused to be in the position of being called on by the son of his old ‘sparring partner', he fired a few innocuous questions at me about my life in Berlin. I told
him, in the vaguest terms, about my literary endeavours, predicting, correctly, that he would not press me for details. With the innocently satisfied look of a person matching two puzzle pieces together, he leaned over his desk and said to me: ‘Listen. I'm going to introduce you to a good friend of mine, Gloria Danilov. She's a wealthy lady – very politically connected but she also likes to have creative people around her. Play your cards right and she'll do something for you, I'm sure of it. Here, I'll have my secretary arrange a meeting right now . . .'

And a week later, by the gliding logic that seemed to govern our lives in those days, I was being shown by a butler into a flower-filled waiting room in a vast residence on Park Avenue. My audience with Gloria lasted no more than a few minutes – delegations of businessmen and politicians were no doubt waiting their turn in other parts of the building – but the brevity of our meeting in the alcove of her library, looking out on the late summer dusty greenness of the park, merely seemed to concentrate its impact on me. I remember the dreamlike strangeness of being addressed as if it were an established and incontrovertible fact that I was a distinguished Man of Letters and bona fide political dissident. There was no reason, of course, for Gloria to question my credentials: McGrievey would have recommended me in flattering terms, while her own burnishing propensities naturally raised my alleged accomplishments to yet more unrecognisable heights of brilliance. What did surprise me was that, while in the past such credulousness would have made me uneasy, here I found myself fully acquiescing in Gloria's version of myself. It was as if she had some magical power of suspending the true nature of whatever came into her orbit, and persuading it to conform with her preferred vision of things.

As we were talking she placed her large, warm hand on mine, as though we had been the dearest of friends for many years.

‘I want you to help me with my magazine,' she said. ‘I want you to help me choose the unsolicited pieces we sometimes run. I've been looking for someone with a more international perspective than our intern who does it at the moment. You're
just
the person I have in mind. Will you do it for me?'

I accepted without hesitation: her belief in me seemed to obliterate my own knowledge of what I was. The job, a virtual sinecure, gave me a pleasant office I could wander into whenever I had nothing better to do, a stipend of a thousand dollars a month, and – more precious to me than anything – the satisfaction of being a cog in the mighty, humming machinery of my new world.

Meanwhile, Inge too seemed to be in the process of establishing a new life for herself. Eric Lowenthal, true to his word, had chosen his new project with her in mind, and he began developing it soon after we arrived. He made a tremendous fuss over both of us, and seemed to want to convey that he considered Inge a great prize, going out of his way to include us in every part of the immense effort involved in getting the project off the ground. Every week there were lunches with producers and investors. There were late-night sessions watching audition tapes at his Tribeca apartment. There were rides out of the city to scout locations; script conferences where Eric would consult us on his latest revisions; meetings with lawyers, agents and distributors . . .

Again that purposefulness, so utterly novel to me; the sense that one's inner desires and dreams could actually be transformed into material realities in this miraculous new universe.
At first, Inge seemed to thrive in its bracing atmosphere as much as I did. A rehearsal period had been set for the following spring, with shooting to start early that summer. The film – a sort of philosophical parable, I gathered – was about a poor émigré from Poland who cleans houses in New York and finds herself inexplicably beset by wealthy American admirers. ‘You've read
Being and Time
, of course?' Lowenthal had said to me in an attempt to explain it. I had nodded (though I hadn't read a word). ‘Well, think of Inge's role as the “Remembering of Being”, and the men wooing her as supplicants trying to recover that memory.' Which meant nothing at all to me, though Inge appeared to approve, which was all that mattered. Already by winter she was beginning to submerge herself in her role, and as the rehearsal date approached, she seemed to burn again with the same subdued glow of gathering energies (I think of the flames, barely visible in daylight, on jet-fuel refineries in airports), as she had when I first saw her in that Prenzlauer Berg theatre. For a time I even had the sense that she was shifting, with Eric's encouragement, into that other self of hers: the actress/beauty who offers up her mysterious vitalities in exchange for the world's regard.

This was our grace period, in retrospect; our honeymoon. There were tensions, of course; little erratic shock waves from the past; shadows cast backwards from the future. The words ‘
glasnost
' and ‘
perestroika
' had begun appearing in newspapers and on people's lips, and they disturbed me, dimly, like obscure portents in a dream. There were problems, right from the start, in Inge's adjustment to the American way of life. The jetsam of squalor washed up every morning by the tides of a free, unsanitised press created special difficulties for her peculiar, somewhat morbidly compassionate temperament.
With no capacity for detachment, no ability to unsnag her heart from the things that caught hold of it, she could be reduced to despair by the contents of the Metro Section of the
New York Times
. Every one of those grim stories – old people frozen to death in trash-filled apartments; children starved, beaten, hit by stray bullets – seemed to lodge itself inside her and take root there, requiring her to enter into every corner and cranny of its pain, even as each day brought in new ones just as bad. For a while she got it into her head that nothing short of actual, practical intervention would do, and in her quietly fanatical way she would try to help: writing letters to editors, government departments, welfare agencies; badgering our own Lutheran benefactors to get involved; signing up for volunteer programmes; going off on subway rides to far-flung housing projects – this white-blond and no doubt utterly baffling foreigner, offering her assistance to complete strangers in her imperfect English . . . Then, as the ineffectuality of her efforts, the massive indifference they met, became impossible to ignore, she shifted her energies towards this more passive act of empathy –
snip-snip, snip-snip
(I can hear her now) – as though instead of trying to relieve the world's suffering, she had settled for the role of its recording angel.

But although the forces aligned against us may have already been stirring, our own springtime surge was stronger than they were. I remember looking out through the window of our apartment one January morning and taking stock of our lives – the shelter, my job at Gloria's magazine, Inge's budding new career, this uncluttered home of ours, the busy street below with its tumult of cars, trucks, skateboarders, shoppers, idlers, deliverymen; all of these things linked together in my imagination and speeding forward in full sail through the
brilliant blue Manhattan air – and feeling in some way I never had before that at whatever cost, and on however dubious a basis, I was alive.

S
nip-snip, snip-snip
. . . My anchoress upstairs at her devotions.

Oh, these scrapbooks of hers!

Snip-snip, snip-snip
. . . Some element of survivor's guilt in her fixation on these dismal stories: punishing herself for getting out . . . ?

Snip-snip, snip-snip . . .

Not that it isn't also squarely the act of repudiation it appears to be.

More so than ever, in fact: a distinct sharpening of focus seems to have occurred since the current administration took office. The latest volume was lying open on her desk the other day when I went up to check our insurance policy. The old ‘human interest' stories had given way to more explicitly political pieces. There was a report on the rolling back of the Clean Water Act; another on the destruction of coral reefs, with a Bloomingdale's ad for a new line in coral jewellery set pointedly beside it. On the opposite page were articles on the attacks of two years ago: an administration official saying, ‘We should flatten a country or two'; a piece recommending torture be legalised for terrorist interrogations; a professor fired for suggesting America ‘had it coming'; vigilantes in some suburb attacking homeowners who didn't have flags in their yards . . .