This invitation had been Mrs. Everest’s idea. She wanted a portrait from me. She had even described it: Mrs. Everest posed in a sun-drenched window among symbolic flowers. All that remained was for it to be hung. And listening, just smiling, I had sent a message of disapproval, which was like a foul smell.
When the check for the meal came, the immensely wealthy Mrs. Everest frowned and turned away from it.
“I must run,” she said. “Don’t get up. Leonard is outside.”
Leonard, her driver, greeted her with a groveling smile and a little bow, and then he helped this old lady into the car.
And when they drove away, Izzy said, “She seemed in a funny mood.”
I saw Mrs. Everest one more time. This was at Sandy’s house on the bay. He had invited us, but said nothing about Mrs. Everest’s proposal that I should paint her portrait.
She was standing in her usual posture, as I would have painted her: old suede jacket, tousled hair, a glass in her hand, the elderly face of a wicked child.
She hadn’t expected me to say hello, and seemed startled by my small talk. I was enthusing about the plants I had bought, annuals for the summer, enumerating them, describing their colors — dahlias, delphiniums, Shasta daisies.
“Verbena,” I said. “Zinnias.”
“I hate verbena, I hate zinnias,” Mrs. Everest said, and frowned and coughed a little, like a cat choking on a mouthful of fur, and I translated that cough as I’m through with you.
After a short spell of being ashamed I had ever known her, I began to wonder why I’d endured her for so long. People say, “It’s all good,” and “I have no regrets,” and “It was a learning experience.” But I do have regrets. I want years back, I want days back, I want the hours back that I spent sitting over meals with Mrs. Everest. I regret knowing her. I didn’t hate her; I felt sorry for her having to drag her damaged soul through life. I hated myself for knowing her, for pitying her. I hated myself for my appetite.
Have some cheese! she said the first time we met. That was the beginning of many meals that ended in my refusing to do her portrait. And I had wanted to do her portrait!
I mentioned this when I complained about her to her friend Sandy, because I knew he’d tell her everything. He listened with his fanatical stare, then said, “Don’t take this the wrong way,” and sounding like Mrs. Everest, added, “The only free cheese is in a mousetrap.”
Another Necklace
“WE ARE QUITE fortunate to have with us today one of the most illustrious English writers of our time, and now a fellow resident of Boston,” Mrs. DeWicky was saying at the brightly lit podium. Backstage, in semidarkness, just at the edge of the heavy pleated curtain, waiting for her to finish, Raleigh Crindle smiled at the technician seated before the bank of lights and switches. He pointed to himself with a slender stabbing finger and, with a pop-eyed, self-mocking face, whispered the word “illustrious.” The technician made his own hand into a pistol and cocked it at Raleigh and mouthed the words “You the man.”
Then, noticing something, the technician came closer and squinted with concern and inclined his head — it was all mumming and dumb show here — as if to say, “Are you all right?”
Advancing in the heat, the man had loomed with a ripe animal smell and thick inquiring fingers, and Raleigh’s chest tightened. His breathing became arrhythmic, he missed a beat of air, then gagged and whinnied a little as though with fear or ecstasy. He placed his hand against the welt on his neck and managed a smile and a whispered sibilance, “My necklace.” The man opened his mouth and mimicked laughter, his big tongue working like a dog’s.
Raleigh was fastening his collar button when Mrs. DeWicky at the podium said, “Mr. Crindle’s perfectly marvelous fictions,” and he was annoyed with himself, even in this heat, for noticing that Americans used the words “quite” and “perfectly” around English people in the belief that it made them sound more English, and sometimes said primly, “We took tea,” in a way that English people seldom did. Raleigh wanted to be more gratefuclass="underline" coming here had saved him from obscurely vegetating in Slowland.
“For the past two decades, in novels and stories and travelogues, Raleigh Crindle has written powerfully of London, and of the English class distinctions he has called ‘Asiatic subtleties’ in his recent collection of essays, How to Be English.”
But he was thinking, Travelogues?
“Mr. Crindle has won many awards and prizes, and for his portrayal of the quite delicate social misunderstandings, he has been called…”
This part of the introduction Raleigh knew so well from his published and much-quoted biographical note that he smiled again at the technician. Just as he heard, “I’d like to present tonight’s guest,” his cell phone buzzed against his thigh. He slid it from his pocket and flipped it open with his thumb and read the text message: This is no damn joke. Im comin for u and u gon be damn sorry.
He heard a disapproving hiss. Raleigh lifted his pale face from his cell phone to the technician. In rapid scolding hand movements, the man indicated to Raleigh that he must turn off his phone. And then the curtain parted.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Raleigh Crindle…”
He was dazzled by the lights and the density of brightened faces. He approached the podium, thanked the woman, and in a practiced gesture he slipped a folded piece of paper from his inside pocket and, his damp fingers twitching with anxiety, smoothed it in front of him on the sloping surface under the microphone.
“After that wonderful introduction I can hardly wait to hear what I’m going to say,” Raleigh said, and after the ripple of laughter, he added, “If anyone wishes to accompany me to the Charles River at the end of this talk, they can watch me walk on water.”
That sacrilegious second remark fell flat, but when he recovered and said, “I am proud to call myself a Bostonian,” he was so surprised by the vigorous applause that he pursued it, saying, “As you know, many of my fellow countrymen — and countrywomen — have fled Britain for New York City. There are more bossy, high-profile English people in America now than there were before the Declaration of Independence!”
To yelps of laughter, he went on, “As the Londoner said of the GIs during the war, ‘I don’t mind the Americans. But it’s those white people they brought with them.’ I seriously wonder whether there are any English writers left in London! Perhaps it’s understandable, since a knighthood means more in America than it does in Britain, but an English accent is still a questionable asset. Hearing my accent, some Americans ask me, ‘Are you English or gay?’”
His accent was plummier in America, or sounded so to his ear, like an old voice on the wireless. And there were other words he had to avoid, like “schedule,” or else had to learn how to say them differently. He had become acutely aware of his manner of speech, his gulping and stammering. Sometimes in shops he attempted an American accent, and even then was not understood. “‘Cans,’ not ‘tins,’” he told himself.
“It is simply not true that when you ask an Englishman the time he tells what it is to the minute, and when you ask an American the time he explains how to make a clock.” That one didn’t work. He began again, affecting a confidential manner, lowering his voice. “But it is true that when you step on an Englishman’s toe he’s the one who says sorry.” He continued, in the same tone, over the laughter. “On my second day in New York City I was walking down the street and saw a stack of newspapers and the big black headline ‘Queens Mother Raped’”—he let this sink in, he repeated the headline in a shocked voice—“and I must admit it gave me a turn — you know how headlines have a way of seeming like boasts. But this was an outrage, until I realized of course that Queens is a borough. But to avoid any further misunderstanding I decided that I would not stay in New York a moment longer, and came to Boston, where I have been very happy ever since. Besides, my fellow Brits have claimed New York as their own and are shamelessly looking for celebrity there.”