Live a Little, page 19
He stops and waits for her to return to now, to him, Shimi, the lesser brother.
She opens her eyes, as though on command, to the very disappointment Shimi has been anticipating for her. He is not, he thinks, the person she wants to open her eyes and see.
“Such powers of recall you have,” she says.
“You are welcome to them.”
“That’s a tactless thing to say to someone who can’t plug the holes in her memory fast enough. Don’t wish away the most precious thing you have.”
“What if it doesn’t feel precious to me?”
“Then you’re a fool.”
There is silence between them and then, as though to illustrate how hard she can find it to hold consecutive thoughts, she says, “What did Ephraim think of the way you dress?”
It’s as though she’s only just noticed herself.
“That’s an extraordinary question. There isn’t a way I dress.”
“You’re telling me you just fall out of bed that way, wearing your art critic’s bow tie and looking like Raskolnikov in that silly hat. What happened to the one you were wearing when I last saw you? The René Magritte hat?”
“The weather’s turned.”
“You have a hat for every season?”
“I have a hat for two.”
“You shouldn’t be wearing either in my presence. Did no one teach you to take your hat off when you’re in the company of a woman?”
“I wouldn’t be wearing it if we were inside. I did tip it. I have tipped it every time I’ve met you. And then I tip it again when we part. But it’s too cold to remove it out here.”
“I don’t believe you. I think you just like being in fancy dress. I fancy you have a band leader’s jacket at home.”
“Funnily enough I don’t.”
“Does your bow tie swivel?”
“Not if I can stop it.”
“You’re more of a dandy than Ephraim was. He was a dandy in his head; on the outside he was confident enough in himself not to dress like a band leader.”
“I’ll have to trust you on that. I can’t see him in clothes. I only see his face.”
“He had a lovely face. Like a fallen angel. But repentant. You are like him but then not. You aren’t as attractive.”
“You don’t have to tell me that. I know I’m not. I never was.”
“You could have been. You have the features. You should have got away.”
“Getting away would have fixed it, you think?”
“It would have made you less wary. You’d be handsome if you dared to relax your face.”
“It’s a little too late for that.”
“It’s never too late for anything. Let your face go. There’s nothing wrong with your bone structure.”
She hasn’t seen the nodules on his skull. She doesn’t know what he knows. She doesn’t know that bumps are fate.
“Well, you’re right about getting away,” he says. “I should have. The opportunity never presented itself.”
“You mean you never presented yourself to the opportunity. Ephraim said you were a frightened, burdened man.”
“And he of all people was in a position to know. I was burdened by him.”
“Because he was the person you couldn’t be?”
“You seem to want that to be the case, so let it be the case. But I was the older and felt responsible for him. Not when we were boys, but later.”
“Yet you didn’t see him for more than half a century. That was an odd way of showing responsibility.”
“You don’t have to see a person,” Shimi says, tapping his chest, “for him to be here.”
She leans forward, gripping the table. She seems to want to locate the part of Shimi’s chest where Ephraim is lodged.
But she can’t find him there.
“He’d defeated the Germans single-handedly,” she reminds him. “What did he need you for?”
“Nothing. I needed him. I needed to feel concern.”
“About what, though?”
“He told me things about his lifestyle that troubled me….”
He pauses, wondering if he’s said enough, then remembers the ground rules. “His drinking…His homosexuality…”
He sounds very old to himself.
“Has it ever occurred to you,” Beryl Dusinbery says, “that he was having you on?”
“There’s been time for everything to occur to me. Was he?”
The Princess draws herself up in her chair and regards him, in silence, inscrutably.
They pause for Nastya to fetch them more tea and ginger cake from the counter.
“Ignore the way she stares at you,” the Princess says when the girl withdraws. “It’s not an invitation. She looks at every man like that. I think she is smitten by your hat. It probably reminds her of her great-grandfather.”
“Unless I remind her of my brother.”
The Princess counts time on her fingers. “She has not been with me long enough for that. But the other one tells me she has seen you before. At some Chinese restaurant, doing conjuring tricks. Is she delusional?”
“About the conjuring tricks, yes, but she might well have seen me working there.”
“Well I’m amazed she even got that right. What were you actually doing—washing up?”
“In a strictly amateur way—except that they feed me—I go from table to table telling fortunes.”
“With a wicked pack of cards like Madame Sosostris?”
“Who is she?”
“She reads the Tarot in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.”
“I am, as you would expect, more prosaic. I use an ordinary deck of cards. I practise what’s called cartomancy.”
“What’s called! I know what cartomancy is. It’s woman’s work. All divination is woman’s work. Didn’t they teach you about the sibyls at school either?”
“What’s the force of your ‘either’? If you mean Madame Sosostris, there you have me. But you can’t get to my age without encountering a sibyl.”
He thought of making a joke about a Widow he knew called Sibyl but thought better of it. Two, however, could play at impatience. “I wonder,” he said, “if another of our ground rules could be that you don’t castigate me for my lack of education.”
“It’s too late to add another ground rule. Be grateful I still have the patience to pass on to you what I know. Attend before it goes. The sibyls were priestesses. There were ten of them but the one that matters is the Cumaean sibyl who asked for eternal life but omitted to mention she also wanted eternal youth. You can see why she might interest me. She withered to next to nothing, and hung upside down in a bottle, pleading to die.”
“Why upside down?”
“What a curiously incurious question. Why don’t you ask why no one broke the bottle? Ephraim would have.”
“Ephraim, Ephraim…Wasn’t breaking people out of bottles his big thing?”
“So what’s yours—watching while they struggle?”
“No—averting my gaze.”
“But leaving them there?”
He doesn’t think he needs to answer that.
“Speaking of your brother,” the Princess says, after a pause, “wasn’t he something of a diviner in his time? Also cards, as I recall. Clearly it ran in the family. Was it from him you learnt it?”
Shimi reduces his slice of cake to a thousand crumbs. He is aware of the Princess watching him.
“It’s getting late,” he says, rising.
Suddenly, Shimi feels he has too much to do.
Wanda Wolfsheim is ringing him at all hours. Is he still up for the event.
Why can’t he say, “No, Wanda, I am not”?
But no: he must leave her swinging in her glass bottle.
Why?
He’s not sure he can explain it to himself but if he were to try, he has a feeling it would have something to do with Beryl Dusinbery. He has never been a decisive man. If he were to be decisive now, and deliver the Widow Wolfsheim an unequivocal “no,” could it not be interpreted, by himself, as an unequivocal “yes” to Beryl Dusinbery? There is no reason on earth that it should be. The moral dichotomy exists in his own head only. He could even locate the nodule for it on his cranium. A no to Wanda Wolfsheim equates to a yes to Beryl Dusinbery. As for what it would be a “yes” to exactly, he has no idea. Beryl Dusinbery hasn’t asked for anything other than his attention. What else could she ask for? What more could he give? But dismiss it as he might, he is in the grip of a crazy logic: by keeping the younger Widow guessing he continues to hold the older at arm’s length.
“Do you know who else has just written to say she’s coming?” the Widow Wolfsheim confides. Even over the telephone Shimi feels her breath hot in his ear. He could tell you the blend of coffee she’s been drinking. Wanda Wolfsheim is renowned for her telephone manner. I like people to feel I’m in the room with them, she says. Shimi feels she’s in the shower with him. But he accepts that without Wanda Wolfsheim’s social skills the world would be a worse place than it is. Over the years her telephone manner has persuaded wealthy people to cough up millions for her charities.
“Who?” Shimi dares to ask.
“Shirley Zetlin.”
“Do I know her?”
“Well she says she knows you. She is so keen to come I am not sure I should allow her to.”
He is, of course, only pretending he can’t remember Shirley Zetlin. He remembers everyone. But it’s a prerogative of old age to pretend your memory’s failing. Perhaps the only prerogative of old age.
Shirley Zetlin…Christ!
* * *
—
AND THEN THERE was Bernie Dauber, who had decided some time ago to check out Shimi’s prostate the old-fashioned way and, while he had Shimi at his mercy, seize the chance to discuss Dickens’s characters with him. “Why do you Brits, who can’t make a decent cup of coffee either, find those names so amusing? Sweedlepipe, for crying out loud. Wackford Squeers! What kind of goddam name is Wackford Squeers?”
Shimi wasn’t going to get into a critical discussion of Dickens’s merits while lying on his side on an extra-large sheet of kitchen paper with Dauber’s gloved hand up his anus. He tossed in a few of his own to speed things along—M’Choakumchild and Sergeant Buzfuz—and said it beat him why anyone found anything amusing.
But now Dauber feels he has to greet him with a Pumblechook or a Fezziwig every time they meet. And frankly Shimi has more important things to talk about. How is it that he is urinating less, or at least with less urgency? Can whatever it was that was wrong have reversed itself without medical intervention?
He drops in for a quick consultation. To hell with the money.
Dauber wants to know if Shimi’s circumstances have changed significantly.
“My brother’s died.”
“Were you close?”
How many times is he going to be asked that?
“Yes and no. But could closeness have a bearing on my bladder?”
Dauber scratches his head. “If you were very close I’d expect you to be returning to the john more. Deep distress can do that. Not close should make no difference. I’d just be thankful if I were you.”
“I’m thankful, but there is one other thing. I have struck up an acquaintance—I don’t know what else to call it—with a woman who appears to have known my brother well. She’s older than me….”
Rather tactlessly, Dauber allows his jaw to drop. Older than Shimi Carmelli? Older than Shimi Carmelli and the object of romantic, even if not erectile, interest?
Shimi notes the doctor’s surprise. “To the old,” he says, “the old do not look old.”
Dauber makes the face of a man innocent of offensive imputation. “That’s a grand thought,” he says. “Do you mind if I write it down?”
“I am not saying I’m going anywhere with this. And I’d expect her to say the same. To be frank, I’m not even sure we like each other much. But it’s a way for both of us to stay in touch with Ephraim.”
“Your brother?”
“Yes.”
“And to her he was what?”
“I’ve no idea. I’m trying to find out. But what I’m wondering—what I’m asking you—is if this could have anything to do with it.”
“ ‘It’ being going to the john a lot.”
“ ‘It’ being not going to the john a lot.”
“Well again I’d expect it to have been the other way round. Agitation and excitement would normally make you go more.”
“Then by your reasoning it must follow that I’m neither agitated nor excited.”
“Unless you’re lying.”
“Why would I lie to you?”
“Not to me. To yourself.”
Shimi rolls his eyes.
Dauber looks at his watch. “Don’t be guided by me on this,” he says. “I’m not a shrink. You must know what you feel.”
“I guess so,” Shimi says. But no, he doesn’t know what he feels.
“Nathaniel Winkle,” Dauber adds as Shimi is on the way out.
* * *
—
THE RESTAURANT, TOO, is a problem waiting to be solved. Hasn’t he now entered the twilight of his career as a cartomancer at the Fing Ho, no matter that it was in the twilight of his career that he began there? It’s partly the Widow Wolfsheim’s importuning that is the cause of this dissatisfaction. Life would be easier if he put his cards away altogether. “I’ve retired,” he could tell her. But there’s something else. Beryl Dusinbery. That’s to say Beryl Dusinbery’s carer. He isn’t gratified that she’s reported seeing him doing his stuff at the Fing Ho. What if she comes again? What if she persuades the old lady to accompany her? That the prospect of this should alarm him is something he can’t adequately explain. Would he rather Beryl Dusinbery were uncontaminated by knowledge of what he does? If so, wherein lies the contamination? Does he see her as a higher being, too rarefied to know what he gets up to on the Finchley Road at a time civilised men his age are tucked up in bed reading The Waste Land? Does he fear her seeing him demeaned?
But then what about Ephraim who’d been to prison, taken to drink, and rolled in the gutter with God-knows-whom—how had she reconciled herself to that?
Glamour is the difference, he decides. Ephraim had been disreputable—Shimi is merely humdrum. And there is another consideration. The Fing Ho isn’t what it was. The world isn’t what it was. Though he continues to astonish the elderly and the widowed by what he seems to know just from looking at a deck of cards, he accepts that in the era of the spectacular media illusionist and soothsayer—traversing time and space through the miracle of video and television, deploying microchip technology to do in half a second what a hundred old-style performers like Shimi couldn’t do in half a century—his brand of close-up prognostication is old hat. People can now look deeper into their futures on their mobile phones than he can with a thousand packs of playing cards. More and more, these days, diners at the Fing Ho Banquet Restaurant politely look away when he approaches their tables. Once upon a time high-flying banqueters waved twenty-pound notes in the air to get him to come to them and deal the cards or read their destiny among the contents of their duck pancakes; now, harder to impress and more concerned with hygiene, they will pay that much to get him to stay away.
The consequence of this is that he’s standing around more, not knowing what to do with himself. Another of the cultural changes to which the Fing Ho has succumbed is the public commemoration of birthdays. For ten seconds at least five times a night the restaurant comes to a stop, the lights dim, a cake is brought out, and the waiting staff gather round the celebrant’s table to sing “Happy Birthday.” There is, Shimi believes, a silent pressure building on him to join in. Not least as he is the only one who knows the words. But for him, of course, joining in is quite impossible.
He is lucky that the proprietor of the Fing Ho has a soft spot for him and remembers to invite him to join the staff for a leftover dinner at the end of an evening, no matter how little satisfaction he has given or how many waitresses he has impeded. “My father employed you, I employ you,” Raymond Ho tells him.
“I can’t go on taking your charity, Ray,” Shimi says.
“It’s not charity, it’s tradition.”
Shimi knows what tradition means. It means he is the elder statesman of the establishment now that Raymond’s father, who started the place and was also called Raymond, but later sat with his back to the kitchen, staring sightlessly out into the street, has departed it in body. Shimi is just as useless, revered only because he has stayed alive. The Chinese have a deep respect for old age. As well as for people who live above their restaurants and don’t complain about the smells.
He should have stopped long ago but he hasn’t. The staff whose laughter he still can’t fathom and whose conversation he still doesn’t understand have been like family to him. Li Ling, who used to finger his jacket and tell him he was smart, has long gone. But there’s another Li Ling now, the original’s daughter, who also finds him amusing and fingers his jackets in the same sisterly way.
So he is ashamed of himself for being ashamed of working there.
* * *
—
AND NOW, AS though that’s not enough to keep him awake at night, the reappearance of Shirley Zetlin.
“Will you walk with me,” he recalls Si Zetlin saying to him in a gravelly whisper. Shimi can still smell the schnitzel on Si Zetlin’s breath. They’d been eating lunch at adjoining tables in the Bukovel Cafe, just a short walk from Swiss Cottage Underground Station. Shimi loved it at the Bukovel, less for the food than for the languages that were spoken there. Not the language of psychiatry which so many of the Bukovel’s regulars spoke with fluency—this was lost on Shimi, who didn’t believe in psychological explanations of anything—but Russian, Hungarian, German with a Viennese accent, Czech, and the despondent Carpathian crooning with which his mother had failed to soothe his anxieties. If the Bukovel was still the sanctuary for exiles it had been since first opening its doors in the 1930s, giving solace to the dispossessed of Europe, for Shimi—a man dispossessed in London—it worked the other way around, making him feel at home in the dark woods and barren mountains the speakers evoked. It didn’t matter whether he talked to anybody. It was enough just to listen. In fact it was better. Talking to a person always led to misunderstanding.
