“My mother just tried to strip-search me. Merry fucking Christmas.”
“Sorry?” Peter says.
“Dad’s new girlfriend accused us of stealing her stash.”
Peter laughs. “Did she find anything?”
“Fuck you, Pete. It’s not funny.”
“It’s spectacularly funny. Though if that’s how you do things in your family, I may have to rethink coming over for New Year’s.”
“Don’t bother coming,” I say. “I’m getting on the next flight back to London. I’m done with these people.”
“That’s an awful idea. You’ll have to eat my mother’s cold salmon with dill mayonnaise that tastes like vomit. And attend midnight mass. And sleep in an icy room with stone walls and medieval windows. Alone. Because my mother does not approve.”
“I thought your mother liked me now.”
Peter’s parents are very posh. His father is an MP. When they aren’t at their country home in Somerset, they live in a large house in Chelsea overlooking the Thames. They hunt and have a Pimm’s Cup with lunch. They take brisk, tweedy walks across the moors. His mother is a classic battle-axe in pearls. After my fifth date with Peter, she insisted he bring me over to be inspected. We drank sherry in a large sitting room with polished hardwood floors—mahogany inlaid with fruitwood, she explained. A tasteful abstract painting hung over the marble fireplace. She’d recently taken an interest in “the Moderns.” I perched on a sage-green velvet sofa and thought about Becky Sharp as I crossed and uncrossed my legs. Peter’s mother could barely conceal her disdain when I confessed that I had never been on a horse. I redeemed myself somewhat when she learned I was getting a postgraduate degree in French literature at Queen Mary and planned to teach. “Though, of course, you would do much better to read German. Far more depth, less of that vulgar excess,” she said before refilling only her own glass.
“She does like you,” Peter says now. “Very much, for an American. That said, she has made it abundantly clear to me, abundantly,” he says with emphasis, “that she believes it inappropriate for me to be with a young woman I picked up on a street corner. You could be anyone.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Look, stay calm. I’ll be there in four days. We’ll work all this out. Incidentally . . .”—Peter laughs—“I’m very much looking forward to getting high with your father.”
“You aren’t going to meet my father,” I say. “Because I am never speaking to him or seeing him again.”
“I thought that was the entire point of this visit,” Peter says, “so I could ask him for your hand in marriage.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Stop turning everything into a joke. I’ll meet you outside baggage claim.” I hang up the phone, lie back on my bed, and stare at the ceiling. There are cracks in the plaster. Bits of peeling paint. Garlic and onions are cooking in an upstairs apartment. The interior courtyard smells thick with it. My single bed—the same bed I have slept in since I was five—is too short for me. On the bookshelf above my desk, next to the wooden turtle my father carved for me when I was little, is an entire set of useless Encyclopaedia Britannicas that my mother rescued from a Dumpster when I was ten, thrown away because it was out-of-date. “Knowledge is knowledge,” my mother said. I get up and pull volume 4, Botha to Carthage, off the shelf. Hidden deep inside it is a single sheet of paper, folded into a tiny square, entirely covered in words. One sentence, written over and over. Part punishment, part incantation: I should have saved him. I refold it, put the encyclopedia back on the shelf. Outside, the wind blows up gusts of dry snow from the cement ground. I head down the hall to find Anna. The door to her bedroom is partly closed. She’s at her desk, her back to me, rolling a joint.
22
1989. December, New York.
Peter’s flight arrives on time, but I’m hideously late. The Train to the Plane goes out of service at Rockaway, and we all have to wait outside on the platform for the next one to arrive. Sleet is turning to heavy snow and I can feel my eyelashes beginning to ice over. This is why I hate picking people up at the airport. It’s a gesture that almost always backfires. Peter will be pissed off and sulky that I’m not there, jumping up and down, when he comes out of the international tunnel after an eight-hour flight. And even though I’m trekking all the way out to fucking JFK and getting pierced in the face by thousands of freezing sleet needles, I now feel guilty and resentful. I should have told him to take a cab.