‘Fine, Dad, a little crazed, to be honest. We have a dinner tonight.’
‘Anyone important?’
‘Yes, but I can’t — I mean, I shouldn’t really say.’
‘Am I untrustworthy?’
‘No, of course not, it’s just, phone lines these days, you never know. Maybe I’m being paranoid. But how are you?’
‘Okay. Something — it’s. . nothing really. I just wanted to hear your voice.’
‘Come tonight if you like. I could use another person. And it would be good to see you.’
I could not tell whether it was a genuine invitation or if my daughter was simply throwing pity on me, but I made a brief show of protest before accepting. The thought of spending the night alone in that apartment in the Village, or even taking myself out to eat and then going off to see some deeply earnest Iranian or Turkish or even French film at the Angelika or walking an hour up to Central Park just to feel the sensation of moving among other people, to imagine I was not alone in the world, failed and a failure because I had to throw myself into the company of strangers to create the illusion of connection, was more than I could stomach. Such perambulations, all the attempts at distracting myself from my loneliness, only made the sense of isolation worse.
When I accepted the job at NYU I did not give much thought to how this change, my return to a city I still thought of as home despite more than a decade’s absence, would affect my social life, which in Oxford was stuffed with colleagues. Many of them, it has to be said, were foreigners like me, banding together in our shared sense of alienation from the English, or from Englishness, which I gradually came to understand was distinct from Scottishness or Welshness (though the latter is a word one does not commonly hear) and was often conflated in the minds of the English with Britishness. I once heard an anchor on Sky News describe the tennis player Andy Murray as ‘England’s great hope, and he’s a Scot,’ as if the whole country were truly England, only one part of a federal country, and not the United Kingdom. Despite the alienations of Englishness, which is really about the exclusionary quality apparent in some quarters of Englishness, its unwillingness to assimilate its immigrants, I was not, not ever, not even in the first months of my life in Oxford, ever truly lonely. There were endless garden parties and High Table dinners and gaudies and drinks receptions, and it remains a small enough place that the like-minded seem instinctively to seek each other out, making time despite the onerousness of the workload to keep conviviality at the heart of their experience of that ancient city. The socializing, I came to understand, was as much a part of the educational and intellectual atmosphere as the libraries and lecture theaters.
So in the late afternoons or evenings, feeling a sudden void of loneliness in New York — the city I love, a love that sustained me when I was in Oxford, a city I also came to love for its own peculiar charms — I find myself too often phoning my daughter, especially on weekends, and perhaps too suggestively asking if she and Peter have any plans. Three out of five times Meredith invites me to their apartment for dinner or to meet at a restaurant, or I discover that she has an event in the Village or Meatpacking District — a gallery opening or party — and she swings by to see me before heading home. I have learned that my daughter, who until recently I still thought of as a child even though she is married and by all measures successful in her own right, with a gallery bearing her name and a rising reputation, has, like her father, a taste for single malts, and especially for those earthy and almost medicinally peaty ones from Islay. Together we will sit in my living room with Miles Davis or Ornette Coleman on the record player, because I have taken to buying ink-black vinyl LPs in what my daughter calls, with not a little contempt, one of my ‘aging hipster affectations.’ All that remains missing is a Cuban cigar between us, though that sounds unduly Freudian now that I think about it, or might suggest that what I really wanted — what I want, what I most desire now — is a son. Meredith is the greatest joy of my life, and will always be, I remain certain, no matter whoever else may yet — I hope — become a part of my family.
~ ~ ~
On that Saturday in November when the meeting with my student Rachel did not materialize, I took the subway up to Columbus Circle and stopped in a grocery store in the basement of a building that wasn’t there when I last lived in the city; in fact Columbus Circle has changed so much over the years that it is scarcely recognizable to me every time I return. If I emerge from the subway without thinking where I am, the disorientation is so acute I have to look at a map or ask directions just to find my way onto Central Park South.
Perhaps it’s related to the divorce, or to the fact that I packed up and moved away when my daughter was only thirteen, leaving her in the care of her mother, or even the humbling way in which she and Peter have transformed my own life by granting me access to luxuries I never thought would be within my reach (travel is always First Class, zipping through fast lanes and pre-approval lines at airports, resting in executive lounges before departures and helping myself to free food and drink), but I find it impossible now to arrive empty-handed at her door. How much I owe her, how much I feel I have to compensate for the years of my absence. That night I brought a bottle of Laphroaig because she likes it, though it is neither expensive nor rare, and an autumnal bouquet from that overpriced basement grocery store.
Meredith answered the door and my God, the effect! For a father it was nothing short of breathtaking to see her like that, in an exquisite black dress, a string of pearls, her dark hair swept behind her shoulders, her whole presence perfectly composed in every imaginable way except in the eyes, and there, in her gaze, I could recognize total panic and guessed she had invited me not as a favor, but because she needed help getting through the kind of gathering that would once have been extraordinary to her and to me, but is now meant to be no more significant than any other business dinner. Why she had not invited me in the first place I can only guess; perhaps she thought I would find it boring, or Peter vetoed it, or, after my long absence from their lives, it had not occurred to them, although we have seen each other frequently over the past few months, which suggested to me that a conscious decision had been made at some point — or at some level, I thought, because it has always been clear that Peter regards himself as the ‘decider’ in the marriage — that on this occasion I should not be present.
As I handed Meredith the flowers and scotch she leaned over to kiss me on both cheeks. How sophisticated we’ve become in the space of two generations. My parents would never have imagined greeting anyone with such European flair. But before I could get any further two security men in suits appeared.
‘Sorry, Dad, you understand, no one gets inside tonight without the onceover. You know how it goes.’
The men passed a metal detecting wand around me and patted me down and once I had been given the all-clear, assured that I was unarmed and therefore not a risk to whoever was in the next room, I followed my daughter into the kitchen, which was thronged with cater waiters and a chef. Since my return to New York, and in fact since Meredith and Peter married two years ago, I had never seen my daughter so much as boil water for tea. Usually the housekeeper does the cooking, but for an event like that night’s dinner they needed a larger staff and it was only later that I understood how important the evening was, and what a risk, in a sense, Meredith had taken by inviting me at the last minute (I later discovered there had been a late cancellation, one of Peter’s colleagues whose child fell ill with food poisoning, and I presented myself, as if by fate, to make up the numbers). I don’t know in retrospect whether there was an element of calculation on Meredith’s part but I like to think there was not, that there was and is enough affection between us that she was moved as much by her own need of my support as by a desire to support me, to lift me out of my all too obvious loneliness.