The next morning we had breakfast in a local diner, and after that we spent a few hours at the Met. Since Chantal had another week left in New York, we agreed to meet again, and again – and, inevitably, again. We spent one entire twenty-four hour period together locked in her hotel room, during which time, among other things, I took French lessons. I think she was amazed at how much of the language I managed to learn, and how quickly, because by the time of our last encounter, in a Moroccan restaurant in Tribeca, we were speaking almost exclusively in French.
Chantal told me that she loved me and was prepared to give up everything in order to come and live with me in Manhattan. She’d give up her flat in Bastille, her job with a foreign aid agency, her whole Parisian life. I really enjoyed being with Chantal, and hated the thought of her leaving, but I had to talk her out of this. Never having had it so easy in a relationship, I didn’t want to push my luck. But I also didn’t see how our relationship could plausibly be sustained in the wider context of my burgeoning MDT habit. In any case, the way we’d met had been fairly unreal – an unreality which had been further compounded by the personal details I’d given her about myself. I’d told her that I was an investment analyst devising a new market forecasting strategy based on complexity theory. I’d also told her that the reason I hadn’t taken her to see my apartment on Riverside Drive was because I was married – unhappily, of course. The parting scene was difficult, but it was nevertheless nice to be told – through tears, and in French – that I would live for ever in her heart.
There were a couple of other encounters, too. One morning I went to my friend Dean’s place on Sullivan Street to pick up a book, and as I was leaving the building I got talking to a young woman who lived on the second floor. According to the bullet-point profile of his neighbours Dean had once reeled off, she was a single-white-female computer-programmer, twenty-six, non-smoker, interested in nineteenth-century American art. We’d passed each other on the stairs a few times before, but in the way of things in New York City apartment buildings, what with alienation and paranoia, not to mention endemic rudeness, we’d completely ignored each other. This time I smiled at her and said, ‘Hi. Great day.’ She looked startled, studied me for a nanosecond or two, and then replied, ‘If you’re Bill Gates. Or Naomi Campbell.’
‘Well, maybe,’ I said, pausing to lean back against the wall, casually, ‘but hey, if things are that bad, can I buy you a drink?’
She looked at her watch and said, ‘A drink? It’s ten-thirty in the morning – what are you, the crown prince of Toyland?’
I laughed. ‘I might be.’
She was holding an A & P shopping bag in her left hand and under her right arm she had a large hardcover volume, lodged tightly so it wouldn’t slip. I nodded at the book.
‘What are you reading?’
She released a long sigh, as if to say, Fellah, I’m busy, OK… maybe some other time. The sigh then tapered off and she said, wearily, ‘Thomas Cole. The works of Thomas Cole.’
‘View from Mount Holyoke,’ I said automatically. ‘Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm – The Oxbow.’ It was as much as I could do to resist continuing with, ‘Eighteen thirty-six. Oil on Canvas, fifty-one-and-a-half inches by seventy-six inches.’
She furrowed her eyebrows and looked at me for a moment. Then she lowered the shopping bag and put it down at her feet. She eased the large book out from under her arm, held it awkwardly and started flicking through it.
‘Yeah,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘The Oxbow – that’s the one. I’m doing this…’ She continued flicking distractedly through the book. ‘I’m doing this paper for a course I’m taking on Cole and… yeah,’ she looked up at me, ‘The Oxbow.’
She found the page and half held it out, but for us both to look at the painting properly we had to move a little closer together. She was quite short, had dark silky hair and was wearing a green headscarf inset with little amber beads.
‘Remember,’ I said, ‘the oxbow is a yoke – a symbol of control over raw nature. Cole didn’t believe in progress, not if progress meant clearing forests and building railroads. Every hill and valley, he once wrote – and in a fairly ill-advised foray into poetry I might add – every hill and valley is become an altar unto Mammon.’
‘Hhm.’ She paused to consider this. Then she seemed to be considering something else. ‘You know about this stuff?’
I’d been to the Met with Chantal a week earlier and had absorbed a good deal of information from catalogues and wall-mounted copy-blocks and I’d also recently read American Visions by Robert Hughes, as well as heaps of Thoreau and Emerson, so I felt comfortable enough saying, ‘Yeah, sure. I wouldn’t be an expert or anything, but yeah.’ I leant forward slightly, and around, and studied her face, her eyes. She met my gaze. I said, ‘Do you want me to help you with this… paper?’
‘Would you?’ she said in small voice. ‘Can you… I mean, if you’re not busy?’
‘I’m the crown prince of Toyland, remember, so it’s not like I have a job to go to.’
She smiled for the first time.
We went into her apartment and in about two hours did a rough draft of the paper. About four hours after that again I finally staggered out of the building.
Another time I was in the offices of Kerr & Dexter, dropping off some copy, when I bumped into Clare Dormer. Although I’d only met Clare once or twice before, I greeted her very warmly. She’d just been in with Mark Sutton discussing some contractual matter, so I decided to tell her my idea about confining her book to boys, starting with Leave it to Beaver and taking it as far as The Simpsons and then calling it Raising Sons: From Beaver to Bart. She laughed generously at this and slapped the back of her hand against my jacket lapel.
Then she paused, as though something she hadn’t realized before was suddenly dawning on her.
Twenty minutes later we were down in a quiet stairwell together on the twelfth floor, sharing a cigarette.
I kept reminding myself in these situations that I was playing a role, that the whole thing was an act, but just as often it would occur to me that maybe I wasn’t playing a role at all, and that maybe it wasn’t an act. When I was in the throes of an MDT-induced episode, it was as if my new self could barely make out my old self, could just about see it through a haze, through a smoky window of thick glass. It was like trying to speak a language you once knew but have now largely forgotten, and much as I might have wanted to, I couldn’t simply revert or switch back – at least not without an enormous concentration of will. Often, in fact, it was more comfortable not even to bother – why would I bother? – but one result of this was that I had a slightly less easy time of it with people I knew well, or rather with people who knew me well. Meeting and impressing a total stranger, assuming a new identity, even a new name, was exciting and uncomplicated, but when I met up with someone like Dean, for instance, I always got these looks – these quizzical, probing looks. I could see, too, that he was struggling with it, wanted to challenge me, call me a poseur, a clown, an arrogant fuck, while simultaneously wanting to prolong our time together and spin it out for all it was worth.
I also spoke to my father a couple of times during this period, and that was worse. He was retired and lived on Long Island. He phoned occasionally to see how I was, and we’d chat for a few minutes, but now all of a sudden I was getting caught up in the kind of conversations with him that he’d always craved to have with his son – and the kind that his son had always ungraciously denied him – idle banter about business and the markets. We talked about the tech stocks bubble and when it was going to burst. We talked about the Waldrop CLX merger that had been in all the papers that morning. How would the merger affect share prices? Who would the new CEO be? At first, I could detect a note of suspicion in the old man’s voice, as though he thought I was making fun of him, but gradually he settled into it, seeming to accept that this, finally – after all the arid years of bleeding-heart, tree-hugging crap from his boy – was the way things were meant to be. And if it wasn’t quite that, it wasn’t a million miles off it either. I did get involved, and perhaps for the first time ever I spoke to him just as I would speak to any other man. But I was careful at the same time not to go overboard, because it wasn’t like messing with Dean’s head. This was my father on the other end of the line, my father – getting animated, working things out, permitting long dormant hopes to sprout in his mind, and almost audibly… pop! – would Eddie get a proper job now? – pop! – make some real money? – pop! – produce a grandchild?