Chapter 3 ~ Leverage
March 11, 2010
They’re Brits.
He’s in management consultancy – uses the word leverage in what feels like every sentence – and she…
What does my mother do?
It’s not earning money, that’s for sure. She comes from money, lots of it. Born into expectations of elegance and achievement.
Different generation.
Different class.
At eighteen, she would have been at Swiss finishing school, comparing the bank balance that put her there with that of her school-friends, the trust fund in waiting, wondering which prince she might marry, planning her society debut, trying to decide whether it would be Cannes this summer or not.
I’m pretty sure that was the extent of decision my mother faced during her teenage years. Pretty sure.
She’s certainly never known what it is to work.
They relocated to New York in the mid-Eighties, a move that was more escape than escapade; problems went back a long time before we crossed the Atlantic.
I can’t really remember because I was young but it seems like I’ve always known there was an atmosphere, an undercurrent, like the smell of the city on a hot summer’s day. There, in the air you breathe. Stinking, with no chance of respite.
No escape, not anywhere, indoors or out.
So I learned to live with it.
When it came to my parents, all New York did was to focus the stench. Until it was too great to ignore.
* * *
It started with little things. Like my Father staying at the office late. Like having to put myself to bed, the only one in our empty apartment because she was out drinking and he wasn’t home from work.
It hadn’t always been that way. When we’d first arrived, there’d been a sitter to make sure I didn’t get up to any mischief.
That’s the way they would have thought of it, too: to stop me getting up to any mischief. Not to make sure I was safe. Not to act as an early warning system.
To keep me out of mischief.
In those early years, my Father used to work most weekends.
Then the Eighties really began to happen. And I mean really.
At that time, he was in advertising, ideally placed to feed off the movers and shakers, persuading them to part with money twice – once on pushing products and once again on the products themselves.
Leeches really made the money from those days. Not just the downtown top guns and shoulder-pad girls. In fact, leeches may even have made out better when the collapse came.
By then, though, he’d already made the move to consulting and was telling them how to pick up the pieces and make it big again.
My Father and his kind; parasites suckling on the lifeblood of boom and bust.
He had all the status symbols, of course. Porsche. Filofax. Aluminium briefcase. Brick cellphone.
He’d even fly back over to London just to see what the guys in the old hometown were buying. No other reason, I thought, just curiosity.
Didn’t occur to me until much later, when I was sleeping in alleyways off Eighth, that there might have been any number of other things he might have been doing on those trips. Women, gambling, a second family, anything.
Aside from Cocaine.
He didn’t need to fly to London to do that; never hid it, not around the house.
When I think of my early teenage years, as we settled into the city, I remember him with a white moustache of crystalline white dust.
Photo-flash recollections; memories of wasted time.
* * *
Later, when he’d climbed some rungs on the social ladder, we’d weekend on Fire Island, a thin strip of land to the south of Long Island, where it felt like everyone from the city went to relax. Everyone who was anyone, or who wanted to be. By this time, it was more important to be seen there than in the office over the weekend. Almost as if the ultimate status symbol in workaholic times was to be seen not to work.
How many of the summer people lay awake at night, secretly calculating the interest they were paying to lease a pathetic little wooden building on a wannabe island?
The conversations there were scary. People would wax lyrical about the fact that no vehicles were allowed on the island, about how it was just, like, so natural; how you could be yourself without any of the pressure of the city.
Well if it was so natural, why did they start eyeing each other up as soon as they walked through the door?
Shoes? Italian. OK.
Wayfarers by Rayban. Cool enough.
If there were no vehicles on the island, why did they start discussing cars the moment they got together?
There were few children on Fire Island, and I had no choice but to observe the adults, listen to their conversations.
To watch what they didn’t say.
The way they threw their heads back, laughing at a comment in passing, only to then glare at each others’ backs.
And at the centre of the milieu, my parents.
My Mother, grinding her teeth whenever he said something. I still don’t know if she noticed that he looked at women’s breasts when he was talking to them.
So wrapped up in their mutual, cold loathing, the pursuit of material aspiration; I could have drowned on those weekends and they wouldn’t have noticed.
And that’s not me being dramatic. It’s the truth.
It almost happened.
I got flipped by a wave while I was out swimming. They were with all the other sharks, playing on the beach; volleyball or something like that. Likely comparing tans. And me? I was flipping and flopping in the surf. Swallowing water each time I screamed. And I did scream. But none of them heard me. Because none of them were watching. No-one had listening.
Except for some guy who ran two hundred yards along the beach before diving into the surf to grab me.
Two hundred yards.
And none of them noticed until he was carrying me out of the water.
Two hundred yards.
I’d forgotten most of this until I was sixteen, until one of my Father’s colleagues, out of her brain on vodka and cocaine, told me about it.
* * *
We’re sitting on the bathroom floor, where she’s given me a little snort of her coke off the tiles; because I’m cute, she says.
She looks like Linda Kozlowski in Crocodile Dundee – I’m fighting back a hard-on, thinking of all those movies that had so recently fed my puberty-stricken mind: Risky Business, Weird Science, The Breakfast Club, Revenge of the Nerds and any French movie I managed to find on late night TV.
She keeps giggling and looking at me through her upper eye-lashes, bending her head forward and going cross-eyed in the process. Calling me cutie and here’s me thinking that all those films – Christ! How could I forget The Graduate? – are going to come true, that my very own Mrs Robinson is going to set me free right here and now.
Only she doesn’t, she just giggles and says what a bitch my Mother is.
And I do a double take.
“A bitch,” she says again with spite.
I try to change the subject. “What do you do at Dad’s office?”
She bends her head forward, looks up at me again and I’m fighting not to let my eyes drop from hers, knowing that her top is gaping at the neck, that a real, honest-to-God opportunity to see real cleavage is right here in front of me and she’s looking me in the eyes.
“You almost drowned,” she says, “when we were out on Fire Island.”
“Huh?” Now my attention is anywhere but down her top.
“You…” she looks at my face, realises that she’s worrying me, “years ago. We were… You… He pulled you out of the sea and you were blue.”
She grabs my left hand, the one nearest to her, holds it up as if trying to see the light through it.
“Blue,” her voice filled with wonder.
“Really?” I ask and some part of me must remember this because it’s not really that great a shock after all. Maybe I just chose not to remember it.
“Yeah,” she nods repeatedly, cocaine agreeing with me, “and she didn’t even hold you when they brought you up to the house. I thought she’s such a bitch because all she said was… All she said when we got back to the house was…”
I nod, trying to get her to spit it out.
“She wanted to know whether the insurance would have covered it.”
Doesn’t surprise me at all, nothing would when it comes to my Mother.
She’s still holding my hand in the air.
Her hand is warm.
Her top yawning.
What the hell, I think, I might as well.
I try my best Tom Cruise.
I pout a little, flicker my eyelids like I’m fighting tears, grind my teeth so that the muscle above my jawbone will flex – I’d practised that one for hours in front of the mirror after I’d seen Top Gun.
“What?” she says, suddenly alarmed.
I pout a bit more, shaking a little to add to the effect.
And she puts her arm around me, pulling me close, going shhhhh over and over again.
When I reach to touch her tit though, she bursts out laughing.
“You dirty fuck!” she snorts through giggles, “you dirty little fuck!”
I must be blushing red as a stop sign by this point because she just looks at me again and starts laughing even harder.
“You dirty little…”
But she doesn’t get anything else out because her nose starts to bleed. The initial drips soon become a constant flow and she looks about herself, all panic and whites of the eyes.
She shoves toilet paper up her left nostril to stem the tide. Blood all down her.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
There are red spots all down the front of her top.
Which is probably expensive. Which is probably why she’s so angry.
She looks up at me. “Want to grab my fucking tit now, you little bastard?”
I shrug and it just seems to make her even more angry.
I decide to get out of there as quickly as I can.
But she’s between me and the door.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“To get some help,” I lie.
“Cute,” she says, all acid and bile, “very cute.”
“Huh?” I’m all innocence.
“Can’t wait to get out of here, can you?”
“Huh?”
“To tell them all what happened. Just like your fucking bitch of a mother!” She’s spitting the words out, kind of nasal thanks to the toilet paper.
“I should go and get you some help,” I say, trying anything I can to get past her and out the door.
By this time, I’m sure people in the apartment must have heard our raised voices.
“No wonder he wants to leave her,” she explodes and the paper flies from her nose, dragging a trail of red with it, spatters falling all over the floor and her top and my face.
This seems to take the life out of her.
“Shit,” she sighs and crumples to the floor.
“I should go and get you some help,” I repeat.
“Yeah, I think you should,” she nods, seeming to know the game is up, that there’s no way she can avoid the others knowing about this.
“Do you want me to get one of my mother’s tops for you?”
The look of gratitude in her eyes is breath-taking. She’s probably a power-dressing high priestess during the day and anything that changes that image either in her own or others’ eyes is to be avoided at all costs.
“You’d do that?”
For a moment, my mind reels; do I dare, do I really dare?
She’s looking at me.
I’m looking at her.
Her nose is dripping blood onto the tiles.
I nod as obviously as possible; staring at blood spreading between the fabric threads covering her chest.
She pulls the roll of toilet paper hard and it spins, a trail of it ruffling up into the air like a streamer. Rips some off and shoves it up her nose for the second time.
We stare at each other.
Blood on the floor has made little spider shapes on impact.
She shrugs.
“OK, but be quick.”
She closes her eyes while she lifts one side of her blouse, unhooking her bra to reveal her left breast.
I grab. Feel. Knead. Like it’s one of those stress toys my Dad brought home – always lying that it was a present for me as soon as he saw the disappointment in my eyes.
She shudders and I realise with a horrid sense of emptiness that she’s not enjoying this at all.
Not like the movies. Not at all. It’s just not right.
I let go.
“Something white?” I say.
She opens her eyes, mortified by what she’s come to, and nods.
“That’ll be fine,” and she walks past me without another word. Stands facing the wall, hands active beneath her top, regaining her bra while I leave the bathroom.
I grab one of my Mother’s tops from their dressing room, hoping – and at the same time knowing – that I won’t be spotted, confident that I exist under any radar that might be scanning for me. When I get to the bathroom, I knock on the door. She opens it a crack and I push the top through. She closes the door immediately without a word.
I return to the party.
* * *
Where I was ignored for the rest of the evening. Particularly by my bathroom confidante, who walked straight past me, pecked my Father on the cheek and left without another word.
My Father didn’t seem to notice, too busy discussing interior design and the latest Italian furniture trends or similar with another guy.
My mother was nowhere to be seen.
Nowhere.
So I got drunk on vodka and coke, puked my guts in the bathroom – which had been cleansed of all red spiders – and passed out in my bedroom.
Alone except for memories of the bathroom. None of which got me horny or made me smile.
