Stray Love (6 page)

Pippa had cast her spell and I was in thrall. She was everything that Oliver was not. Not once did I feel that I was her mission or her busy work or her clay to be moulded. She never sat me down with a “topic” in mind. When she said
how are you,
she actually wanted an honest account of my feelings.

We had roomy conversations. She offered me words I craved without knowing it, words such as
aquatic
and
iridescent
that filled my mind with shimmering light. She spoke about things that were good for my “psyche.” She told me she disliked “dogma.” She played Tito Schipa and Cleo Laine, even though Oliver thought them bourgeois. She brought me end-of-the-run M&S shirts with right-out-of-the pack creases, but also picked up a checkered blue and yellow sweater at a secondhand store, teaching me that
style
was a product of your ability to combine the new and the old. She showed me all the secret spots in the neighbourhood. Walled gardens with disguised doors. A bench hidden beneath a screen of climbing vines.

Number 95 New King’s Road in Hammersmith and Fulham was the flat I shared with Oliver. Number 107 New King’s Road was where Pippa lived. For a while, she would always return to her own place after her visits, but one evening during a thunderstorm, the walk home suddenly seemed too long and she decided to spend the night. Then came the time of sleepovers, of waking and running into a warm bed on weekend mornings. Of lying between Pippa and Oliver while they divided the newspaper until the bed was covered in a quilt of pages. It was a time of Pippa reading aloud from her latest detective novel, and Oliver delivering sermons on the crisis in
the Middle East and other topics that consumed his attention: coups, the Geneva Convention, cholera. There were a lot of statistics in these discussions. Sometimes there were questions:
What do you think will happen with the secession of Katanga? Do you think Belgium will remain a presence in the Congo? Has the UN been too lenient?
Sometimes, when he went on like this, you could see that Pippa wasn’t listening any more. She looked out the window, at the night sky, lost in the daze that too much information brings on. Sometimes she had a drowning expression. Occasionally she yawned.

I was experienced enough to let Oliver’s flood of facts wash over me. While he droned on, I pictured myself as a swimmer threading the waves. Sometimes my mind wandered and I fantasized that I lived in the top branches of a tree. I wondered what it would be like to draw people from up high. If I drew them from the sky, they would look stocky and more tied to the earth—like anonymous peasants. If I drew them from the ground, they would look taller and more heroic—like famous Bolsheviks.

It wasn’t all lectures, of course. Pippa knew how to soften Oliver. She teased him and made him laugh. She seduced him away from the news. She took him to the pub, to the repertory cinema to watch old movies, to local churches for free music concerts, and to galleries to see modern art. There were times it seemed that he stopped gazing at her only when he was asleep or when someone or something came between them and obstructed his vision.

No more letters on pink hospital stationery arrived by post, or if they did, Oliver no longer kept them. Pippa walked around the flat as if she belonged with us. I couldn’t remember ever feeling so happy. But I noticed that Pippa never stored her personal
things at our place: no clothes, no cosmetics, no books. She might leave an umbrella or her scarf behind, but only out of forgetfulness. When Oliver cleared a drawer in his dresser for her, she didn’t use it. It became an issue. I tried to stay out of it, but it began to upset me that when she was out, there were virtually no traces of her.

One evening Pippa said she wanted to go back to her flat. Her sister was inviting several friends over. A group of artists. Not wanting to spend the evening apart, Oliver asked if we could tag along. He had nothing against art. After all, Pippa was artistic.

Pippa laughed at his enthusiasm, its obvious insincerity, but quickly agreed and told us to get dressed.

As we made our way out the door, she murmured into my ear, “Are you ready to have your head spun around?”

I tried not to laugh when we walked into Pippa’s flat. But it looked as if someone had tipped all of the guests out of their chairs onto the floor. There were artists sitting in clumps of three or four around the living room, stuffing themselves on what I soon discovered were Polish dumplings her sister, Stasha, had made. There was loud crashing piano playing on the stereo. A woman in a long orange dress put a bowl of food in my hand and led me to an empty spot on the cushiony rug. Beside me, a man and woman were having a conversation about something called “chance paintings.” The man poured himself some wine and drank it in one gulp. The woman talking was dressed in a striped satin bathrobe. “What I’ve done,” she explained, “is I’ve randomly stained bedsheets with ink and marbles—”

Just at that moment, the music stopped. I turned towards
the stereo and saw Oliver fumbling with a cord that had caught around his ankle. The man sitting cross-legged beside me closed his eyes and bobbed his head back and forth to the silence.

I loved Stasha’s friends—their theatrical clothes and strange relationship to furniture—but it was clear to me that Oliver did not. He walked around clumsily, grimacing, as if there were tiny rocks in his shoes. After an hour, he retreated to a back wall. I looked for Pippa, who was gliding effortlessly from conversation to conversation, her eyes sparkling, her warm skin glistening. I watched the way she made a party seem like something good and fun. Then I turned towards Oliver, seated alone on a piano bench. Finally, with a sigh, I dragged myself over to join him.

I could barely admit it to myself but I was beginning to feel ashamed of him. He had chosen to wear a tie, a cardigan and an ugly tweed jacket. For the first time I wondered what Pippa could possibly see in him. I had noticed that her sister, Stasha, could hardly stand his presence. When we arrived, she had flicked her fur stole at him in a dismissive greeting, and then proceeded to give him the cold shoulder.

Why couldn’t Oliver be more with it? Why couldn’t I have been adopted by the man with the tight velvet pants, the one who called himself “Ben"?

I saw Pippa heading in our direction. She thumped down between us.

“You’re a bit mopey this evening, Oliver. Everyone has been asking about the ‘sad bookkeeper’ on the piano bench. What’s wrong? Crowd not to your liking?”

“No,” he said bitterly. “Frankly, Pippa, I think they’re full of shit.”

I don’t remember falling asleep at the party. They must have carried me home. But later I awoke to the sound of arguing. I placed my ear to the wall.

“How can you be so sure of everything?”

“I’m
not
sure.”

“But you act that way—as if anything that doesn’t settle into your view of what’s important is meaningless.”

“I’m sorry, Pippa. But those people were complete phonies.”

“Since when are you an expert on art?”

“I’m not saying I’m an expert.”

“That jacket, Oliver. Please take it off. It’s horrible.”

“I tried to be open-minded.”

“Then you can keep trying. Please, Oliver. We must agree to bend for each other. Promise me you’ll try a little harder.” She said this in a sweet and patient voice that made it clear she was feeling extra impatient.

There was a little silence before he said, “If I must. If you insist.”

And he did try. I found his tweed jacket folded in the rubbish bin the next morning. Over the next few days, he asked for Pippa’s opinion on Lamaism and Palmistry, the importance of good posture as an aid to digestion, and other topics he knew were of recent interest to her.

Occasionally, she would stop whatever it was she was saying or doing and stare off into a corner, as if she could see someone there, and he put up with this too.

W
E DO TRY FOR THOSE WE GROW TO LOVE
, don’t we. This morning, for example, I walked into the living room to find Iris playing dead.

“It’s not playing dead. It’s called
corpse pose.
It’s the most important posture in all of yoga. What I’m
doing,”
she says, pausing for dramatic effect, “is rehearsing my death.”

“Lovely,” I say, stepping over her. “Just let me know when you’re done.”

I sit at the kitchen table and watch her while I drink my coffee and wonder if this sophisticated New York act of hers is covering some hidden damage. I’ve seen it before: a child playing urbane companion to her single mother, young girls behaving like mini-women.

Another minute passes and she’s still lying there.

“Don’t do that, Iris,” I say finally with a shiver.

“What?” she says. Her eyes open.

“Don’t play dead.”

“Oh, come on, Marcel,” she says, making a space. “Just try it.”

I hesitate for a moment. I look up at the ceiling, where I notice the paint is cracked and peeling. Then I make my way onto the floor and lie down.

O
VER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS
, Pippa made every effort to include me, lavishing me with spontaneous hugs, asking for my opinion. She seemed eager to have me around. She took me to a shop called Mary Quant’s Bazaar and her favourite salon on the Edgware Road and asked my advice while she tried on clothes or had her hair done. But sometimes Oliver insisted that they go out alone for dinner or to the cinema, so he could have Pippa to himself. On such nights, Pippa called up her friend Martha to come keep watch.

Martha Harling (whom we called “Mata Hari”) had a small
place on nearby Clonmel Road in Parsons Green. She lived with her mother, Mrs. Harling, a vigorous white-haired widow in her early eighties. Mrs. Harling had been a successful stage actress in her birth country, Austria, and still wore thick pancake makeup and spoke in a quavering theatre voice. Once a week, she baked delicious loaves of raisin bread for her favourite neighbours, who lionized her for her efforts, thus fulfilling what Pippa called Mrs. Harling’s “fame needs.” Otherwise, Mrs. Harling sat in her doily-festooned parlour watching
Candid Camera
on the telly.

Her daughter, Martha, had quit hairdressing and was now officially “in between jobs.” We called her Mata Hari because of her preference for bangles and wispy scarves and her dyed jet black hair. I liked to imagine that she was an exotic dancer or a spy.

Sometimes she would spend the whole evening in our flat without removing her coat, claiming she was losing heat, and I could almost visualize it being siphoned off her. Sometimes she brought her white cat with her. It was a long-haired Persian and she would carry it as if she were holding a Salvador Dali clock to her chest. Often she carried books. Some of them had strange titles, such as
Magical Mandalas
and
Virility & Vitality,
and were crammed with clippings and notes on torn paper.

Mata Hari was just one of the many rootless people who entered and exited and re-entered the flats on New King’s Road. There were a lot of visitors in those days, a lot of artist types in black ponchos, cast-off tuxedos, and moulting fur hats. Oliver complained that Pippa had a weakness for “the poor, the transient and the unstable.”

Some of her visitors spoke English with strange accents and apologized for their poor pronunciation. Most of them had little
experience with children and treated me as if I were a small grown-up. One man sat at Pippa’s coffee table and rewired a clock so that the hour, minute and second hands would tick backwards: anti-clockwise. Another artist was creating an all-white chess board with all-white pieces. (She told me that she wanted to see how long opponents could conduct a match with uncertain sides. How does one advance when the adversary is identical to oneself?) Oliver thought it was all idiocy. Pippa offered her misfit friends the respect normally bestowed upon prophets and great statesmen, and Oliver hated that. He hated the idea that people were living by rules of their own invention.

Pippa’s lack of convention was growing more alarming by the day. She seemed incapable of staying indoors for very long. Trading her favourite high-heels for flat-soled loafers, she would set off from her flat and walk for hours. Sometimes she walked so far that at nightfall she would have to borrow a telephone and call Stasha to pick her up.

I was travelling on the bus with Oliver. It was Sunday afternoon and it had rained recently and the streets had a damp metal sheen. The bus had just turned the corner onto Bayswater Road, past the cash and carry when Oliver slapped the window and said, “Christ. That’s Pippa.”

He leapt up, called to the driver to stop, and pulled me off the bus. I wanted to yell out to her, but Oliver held my arm and said, “Shh.”

She was walking towards the entrance to Kensington Gardens. He nodded in her direction and said, “Look, Marcel, we’re going to play spy for bit.”

I thought it was a fun game at first. We tailed after her at a distance to avoid being seen, listening for the gentle clopping of
her shoes on the paved path as she slowed down. She was lost in her own thoughts and didn’t appear to notice us. I saw, as we got closer, that her hair was wet.

After a short while, I started to feel nervous. What were we really doing? I looked over at Oliver, my hands waving, gesturing,
Why are we hiding?
He raised a finger to his lips.

There was a tree up ahead along the path, with dark, glossy leaves and sooty branches that intertwined to form a canopy. She stopped under it. Oliver stepped back between two shrubs and pulled me with him. We waited to see what she would do.

The ground was littered with faded petals and swollen buds that had fallen off the branches. Pippa bent over to inspect these. I watched as she tried to pry several buds open, manually bloom them, kneading, coaxing, slowly peeling, in one case revealing a frill of perfect satiny pink, which seemed to glow in the grey air. More buds fell from the tree, as if shaken.

Two women strolling by noticed the shedding tree and hurried past, holding their hands over their faces to protect their powdered noses from any scattering of moisture.