I laid out my purchases on the bed. The phone rang. It was Lorna. Savvy Van Ghent had asked us for the same evening as Geoff Millan.
I asked if there’d been more trouble. She said Dudley had learned from the operator that my pay phone was in Glasgow and when she’d phoned BEA she found they not only had me booked but knew my hotel. I asked if there’d been any trouble.
Why didn’t you come home? said Lorna. What did you tell Mr. Andsworth the Druid? I said. Tessa’s the one who knows him, said Lorna, not me. Well he talks as if he knows you, I said. Do you think Tessa spilled the beans? said Lorna, being funny. I wasn’t able to get hold of Tessa, I said. What did you want with her? said Lorna. Just as well I got Dudley, I said. Oh you’ll be glad to know, said Lorna, Jenny and Reid picked up your Xerox. Who told them to? I asked. I did, said Lorna, I was in a hurry to get into the West End and they said they would.
Who told you, I said, Will?
Lorna paused. No, come to think of it Jenny mentioned it to me as I was rushing around collecting my music and keys and checkbook — this was our last rehearsal before the concert — and I said would you be a dear and collect it whatever it is, and she asked me for a receipt but I didn’t have one, but I’m sure she and Reid didn’t have any trouble.
That was an error, I said.
Oh fuck you, said Lorna.
Give me the number of Jan Graf, she’s on the list on the table there.
Lorna gave it. She said, Lucky for you I’m at the downstairs phone.
Why didn’t you sleep at Tessa’s last night?
Why didn’t you come home today — because you were in New York?
I hung up.
I phoned down to the desk leaving a call for the morning and asking that I not be disturbed no matter where the call was from.
I was too hungry to go to bed. I was not myself, but it was incredible.
Look out at the walls of your hotel room with its print of the four-story Venetian palazzo that houses municipal offices in Glasgow’s George Square. Look out at the cheap Van Gogh flowers in the hotel off Boston Common or was it New Orleans or Baltimore, or Portland’s Congress. Look at the watercolor cliff scape in the motel in Cincinnati where you lie eyes closed, English shoes still on, listening on black-and-white TV to the news of Kennedy’s nomination campaign and thinking some English woman (in New York of course) told you American men go to conventions because they like a hotel room where they can masturbate in peace, and you woke up in the middle of the night to a bright ashy-blank screen and didn’t know where you were except that it was a motel you didn’t know how to get out of but as your father had said more than once in the fifties you hadn’t burnt your bridges behind you, you kept a foot in the door while enjoying the advantages of life in London. And what are they? I asked the two sedately linked hangers in my wardrobe. State schools in England are mostly better than American public schools: but face it, your own Will happens to be attending a private school, else he wouldn’t have had that group trip to Chartres whose 176 stained glass windows so exercised his engineering imagination. They stayed in the cathedral for four hours and saw the light change. They stayed in hotels down in the square where the traffic noise is dreadful. My grandfather whom I am like in looks died in a hotel.
In Stornoway tomorrow I did not look for a hotel and did not hop into a red rented Formula sports car but got my feet on the road at once and hitched almost to Callanish, then walked. In Callanish tomorrow I stayed in a crofter-widow’s house and had a large tea and a peat fire and asked questions that might open my way to the next fork.
But tonight I dined in Glasgow, and Dudley’s phone call from New York was on my plate. A man of fact, he hadn’t hesitated to say that Lorna had not slept in his home last night. He was my friend not through Dagger-type laughs or warmth or in the usual way of shared concerns, but through my curiosity. But even in ’66 in bed before Tessa and me, he was still just a stolid American living off and on in London whose wife had made her mark in our household. When at Blum’s kosher restaurant she offered a toast to a vestige of Dudley, her father raised his glass with what was left of his Moselle and said, My son! and as Millan and Lorna and the Irish mathematician Christy Conn raised theirs, Lorna at last broke the day’s ice between her and me with a pursed smile across the table. Millan was saying an operation is such a violent thing and Tessa’s father vaguely demurred — oh no. Beyond Lorna in a line from me there was a couple at a table whom I knew but who did not seem to know me; Lorna opened up a real smile, then sensed that for an instant I was looking past her and she turned around only enough to see the pediatrician’s wife who had a tan as deep as paint. Tessa’s father was explaining why America would never have a Health Service like England’s, but Tessa broke in to say that service of any kind was a problem where there was such a high standard of living, and having said that, she turned to her right and removed her tongue from her cheek and stuck it out at Christy who put a finger on the mole on his upper lip and said they’d be altering the sex of computers soon because women made better surgeons than men. But Tessa’s father interrupted what promised to be a wild Irish aria to say to Tessa that that was what her mother had wanted to be before she’d married him. At which point we all sighed, even I think Christy Conn, who was the only one present who didn’t know what had happened to Tessa’s mother. Tessa’s father shook his head and said, She was the image of my daughter. I sighted past Loma’s ear lobe and received from the pediatrician a faint mouth-twitch of recognition, and again Lorna turned and this time saw them both and turned back slowly surveying the room, and said their name to me quietly and I nodded (hoping she and I were friends again) — and the pediatrician’s wife nodded back. Tessa’s father was just saying that life is surprisingly rewarding when you look back; Christy had made Lorna laugh telling how his sister who taught the Irish harp in Armagh toured Florence in a nun’s habit so as not to be hustled while she was trying to admire the sculptures. Tessa said directly to me in answer to her father who was on her left and my right at the end of the table, Rewarding when you look back if you’ve come through perhaps. I said I would be patient. Tessa’s father said to Tessa in answer to me, Patient! — look what happened to Job. Tessa said if you can’t have what you want, you have to want what you have. I caught Christy the mathematician’s eye: Formula for a rainy day, I said, and he frowned and grinned as if I were mad, and said to Lorna, Where was I? and Tessa said to me, But it wasn’t a rainy day, remember? but at once added, That wasn’t what Father was speaking of.
The gallery show had been of very young painters, and Millan had walked away at one point when his Irish friend wanted to introduce a blond giant in corduroy overalls who was one of the exhibitors. Lorna had barely spoken to me and had made the rounds of the pictures arm in arm with Tessa’s father. It was this — and the argument this afternoon that lay behind it about my sudden plan to fly to Pittsburgh to see a man about bringing Appalachian quilts into England — that had made me feel, among the white tablecloths and red cabbage and the plain munching stares we got from elder gentlemen in yarmulkas as we came into Blum’s and made our way to a table for six against the wall at the back, as if I were standing in line to cash a check at Chemical Bank in New York about to be observed (as if by a light angled in a corner where wall met ceiling) by one of four closed-circuit TV cameras that did not know (any more than the senior teller or the new black girl who when I get to the head of the line asks me to endorse my own check) that I don’t live in New York. (I heard Tessa say Of course I wasn’t lonely in New York, no one is lonely in New York, of course I had gentlemen callers!) Dudley did not describe those early scenes with Tessa’s father except to say that there was real passion despite its being also a formality; but Tessa had told Lorna that her father had shouted and wept and had let it be known through his confidante Mrs. Stone (who had lost two brothers and was living in Golders Green waiting for reparations) that Tessa was dead to him. Ned Noble’s father said anyone brought up in Brooklyn, except Brooklyn Heights, was Jewish and Ned repeated it to me as an instance of his family’s insanity. Tessa’s father did not want any coffee; he was telling Millan about Dudley’s achievements as a historian, speaking across me as if I weren’t present; and Millan was nodding dimly while trying to hold on to Christy Conn’s story of his sister’s butch girlfriend the xylophone player in an Armagh orchestra who got a message in the middle of a concert that her xylophone would explode during a solo and who had been thrown off ever since and might go into social work.