If such stories have a fault, it is that they do not carry a sense of the wider world, the world of China, the world of Africa, in which the apparatus of suspension is even more savage and the yearnings of women even more radically thwarted. But I suppose that is America, ruler and ignorer of the earth!
Despite the admirable revolution of Washington and Jefferson, agonies remained. The pursuit of happiness was both guaranteed and elusive. In a self-absorbed city, the graduate fiction students got their stories published all over the place, and one of them became a legend by cracking the New Yorker. Another had her book accepted by Knopf. At the following class I provided two bottles of Moët, so much cheaper in New York than in the antipodes that I couldn’t work out why Manhattanites didn’t drink it all the time.
I would come home exhilarated from these workshop sessions, walking down University Place, past curfew-quiet Washington Square, by the University Gallery and the faculty eating house named the Violet, notorious for salmonella. There is a plaque on the wall somewhere along that stretch which honours the first Dutch teachers of New Amsterdam-New York. After a good session I might sometimes pause at it and – even as a novelist, a teacher-manqué – feel part of a long, decent tradition.
Next I usually swung past the complex of apartments named Washington Square Village. It had been home for Maureen and me when we first came to New York, and I visited it both for nostalgia’s sake and to congratulate myself on my escape from it. Good, if poorly plumbed, brownstone buildings had been torn down a quarter of a century past to make this poor imitation of Le Corbusier’s Île des Hommes, and its rent-free or rent-cheap apartments made it possible for NYU to attract faculty to the dangerous and expensive city.
I knew that retired staff stayed on in the building long after their teaching years ended. On our floor, for example, was a formerly dazzling cancer researcher who wandered the normally empty corridor asking whoever stepped out of the lift what time it was. He held a clock in his hand, with the intention of immediately correcting it once you answered him. The man’s still-blazing cerebrum knew that memory was largely a sense of time, and so he tried to get evidence of the day and the hour from all the tenants on that floor as a means of validating his own vanished memory.
Widows and widowers of staff also stayed on in that cold imitation of Le Corbusier’s work. One day, when I was rising to the eighth floor in the lift, the door slid back on the fifth floor and an elderly woman with a bottle of seltzer water, that highly effervescent New York speciality, presented herself. She passed the bottle in to me and said, Would you mind opening that for me? I obliged her, opened it without spraying the interior of the lift, and passed the bottle out again. She thanked me. And so the doors closed.
I wondered what sort of expert she or her husband or both of them had been. For the floors were full of experts from all over the world, as well as prime-of-life stars from Harvard and Yale, Cambridge or Trinity College Dublin, to whom NYU offered research fellowships and double professorships and attractive deals.
Once I hit Washington Square Village on my way home, I would swing eastwards, thereby evading the sad cancer professor who waited there on the eighth floor with his dock, palely maintaining his nexus with time. And so I would negotiate the two cold blocks to the Cotton Building.
Returning there after the first post-Wall Wednesday workshop, I found my wife sitting up, drinking a bottle of Australian chardonnay with Lucy. As ready as I was to settle to a quiet glass of wine with my wife, I was still stimulated enough to be pleased to see Lucy. Apart from the affection both of us felt for her as a forthright, sensible woman, she represented yet one more instance of that continuum of the young and talented for which New York is the holy city and of which my group of writers was a fair sample.
Accepting a seat and a glass, I asked her what she thought of her husband’s Wall renown? This was a silly question, as good as rhetorical. Something to say. When she didn’t answer, I saw her eyes were misted and her cheeks pink from tears. I remembered Dannie’s ferocious speech in the lift at the Kempinski. It was such an assertive slash at Lucy, the fabric of her marriage, that it might have woken Lucy from her sleep in New York. She might have been weeping for days and only now delivered herself tearful into my wife’s company.
By silent accord we swung the subject to a Dmitris Sgouros concert she had been to at Carnegie Hall, all in the period when Jacko and Dannie and Fartfeatures and myself were returning from Berlin. After that she was ready to tell us new stories she’d heard from Jacko. She recounted what had happened to Al Bunker when he went south of Berlin to Bitterfeld in a limo stacked with cases of Calvados and tangerines to find the drunken Gunter’s brother and force a reunion upon the two of them. They had needed to make their way past Vopo checkpoints and security police with uncertain orders by giving away bottles of the brandy. But there was still an ocean of it by the time they found Gunter’s brother’s slightly superior, middling-official residence in the south side of the town. Gunter’s sister-in-law had answered the door, and the brother had refused to come out. Curtains were drawn, a siege was in progress and night was deepening on the only great fraternal reunion available to Vixen Six to film. At last the brother came out to prevent Bunker from knocking desperately on the windows, and the camera ran. Then Bunker rushed the tape back to Berlin with Gunter, who was not welcome to remain in that squalid town with his brother. The Vixen Six people in New York received it and edited it up so that the brother’s anger looked almost like a grateful smile!
Cheered by her own re-telling of Jacko’s version of this and with her mood nearly recovered, she rose to go home. I went down to Houston Street with her to help her find a cab.
—I’ll be fine, she said. You know, I miss Oz. You and Maureen don’t seem to.
—Maureen loves it here, despite her dead-beat bloody husband.
—Too much weird stuff here for me.
A cab found us and Lucy got in. I bent to its window to wave her goodbye, and saw her sadness resettle itself darkly, like a crow on either shoulder.
When I got back to the apartment, Maureen first told me simply that Lucy had got a more or less anonymous telephone call about Jacko and Dannie. I wasn’t to mention it to Jacko, even though we were friends. On the other hand, had I seen any signs of a problem in Berlin?
Yes, I said. Between Maureen and me, and taking it no further, there could be some basis for the idea. I told her that Dannie was in aggressive pursuit, and Jacko … well, she knew Jacko. I began to say that Lucy had no concrete reason to think Dannie and Jacko were … But then I thought of the shared room, and so let the sentence trail away. And she wasn’t to tell Lucy any of this, I added, even though she and Lucy were friends.
—And you and Lucy aren’t? Maureen asked.
—Jacko talks to me, I argued, and Lucy to you. It’s the best arrangement.
—What a load of rubbish, said Maureen.
—Jacko doesn’t have my uncritical support.
—Yes, but you always obey his instructions. Because he’s picturesque. By obeying him, you’ll earn the privilege of writing about him in the end.
She had me, as the Brits say, to rights.
We went to bed, and when I woke at three o’clock in the morning I found that Maureen was awake too. I wandered off to the bathroom, still unsure whether I was by the Pacific in Sydney or located above Lower Broadway in populous Manhattan. I had the impression, as I left on the outward, dazed journey, that my wife was clear-eyed and insomniac. When I got back she had the bedside light on and was sitting upright. It was unlike her to put the light on this late unless she was reading.
She said, Lucy got a call. As I told you. I didn’t tell you who called. It was from a particular woman … one who claims to be married to the Sondquist girl’s kidnapper. She’d read about Lucy and Jacko in a television magazine. She told Lucy that she’d watched Jacko and his producer – what’s that girl’s name again? – filming somewhere in California. San Bernardino or Bake
r. She knew where her husband took the girl to work or to jog, so she took to ducking away from home and visiting those places on weekends … Sitting there for hours. An obsessive thing. And according to her she just happened to see Jacko’s camera crew. And Dannie. She said she knew by looking at the two of them, by the way they behaved, by the way Jacko kissed Dannie, by all the body language … that they were having an affair. She said she knows the signs, because she’d watched her husband fall in love with the Sondquist girl. She could tell by the way Jacko conducted himself. And she hunted Lucy down through directory assistance – I’ve been warning Lucy to get a silent number – and called to tip her off. And to confide in her.
—Then she said she’d like to meet Lucy at some stage, so they could discuss what they had in common. She said this just like a normal, pleasant, wronged woman. She said she’d let her husband kidnap the Sondquist woman and now she knew he’d fallen in love with her! The ingratitude of men! That was the theme.
Having told me all this, my wife looked at me.
—The wife calls the girl prisoner Ess, exactly the same thing as that motel woman in Baker called her. Of course she, the wife, could have got that from the interview Jacko did with the motel woman. Anyhow, Lucy doesn’t know what to do. She’s wondering whether to tell the police about the phone call. And she’s frightened that if she tells Jacko what the woman said, she’ll look ridiculous and get the usual denials, or a quick apology. And then he’d be off like a terrier again, after Dannie, after Sunny. And she’s scared, too, it might make a contribution of some kind to the euphoria Jacko and Dannie feel working together, and draw them closer still …
—Besides that, said Maureen, if Lucy and the woman had a meeting, Jacko and the others would want to use Lucy to film the encounter. Even if it’s a hoax, they could use it to make another segment of the Sunny Sondquist quest.
The search for Sunny needed to be referred to and pursued at least twice a week on Live Wire.
The other option was that Lucy could ignore the call, but she worried that she could contribute thereby, perhaps, to the continuance of Sunny’s enslavement.
My wife said, The woman’s called her three times, long distance, and Lucy’s in agony.
In the following week, on the basis that I did not betray any of this news to Jacko, I received further confidences from my wife, who was receiving them in turn from Lucy Emptor. The woman continued to call Lucy, but they were brief calls. The woman said, I don’t want anyone to be able to put a fix on where I’m calling from.
In one call she confided that she had children. In another she told that she had given birth to a child in the same room in which Sunny Sondquist’s, or Ess’s place of detention was located.
Lucy told Maureen that each call was more circumstantial than the last. In one call, Lucy was told that the woman’s husband was building another pit. The wife saw this as a frank declaration that the man intended to take yet another woman.
The pit-digger’s wife would also express some sisterly feeling – Lucy noticed it wasn’t straight-out jealousy of Ess which possessed her. She and Ess, said the wife, had suffered so much at his hands that they didn’t want another girl to go through it.
What unnerved Lucy was that throughout her calls the woman spoke so averagely, so suburbanly, and seemed so convinced of her confidante’s, Lucy’s, ordinary sympathy. As if, out in the Sydney suburbs where Lucy was bred, husbands commonly signified marital discontent by digging dungeons.
—She must tell Jacko, I said. And then the police.
—Give her a little time, said Maureen. She will. She doesn’t have to act on calls that might have hoax written all over them, like Frank Emptor’s stunt.
Just the same, during that week I felt my own and my wife’s dread, guilt and bemusement grow as a shadow of Lucy Emptor’s. Even New York had not prepared us for the idea of these frightful confidences.
Jacko got back on Monday at dawn from a weekend of Los Angeles interviews, and Lucy at last broke down and gave him the information about the dungeon master’s wife. Lucy had struck on a median course for saving her own dignity and delivering Sunny Sondquist.
—Now, she said, we can tell the police.
Jacko argued against it. What had the police done so far? They’d found nothing, pursued nothing. Meet the woman, Jacko told Lucy, and we’ll film it. And then the police.
She told him that she would not meet this woman, real or hoax as she might be. Since Dannie wished to be Mrs Emptor, here was her big chance. Let her have breakfast or lunch in some dismal corner of Southern California with the wife of the pit-digger, and trade mutual fears of betrayal with her.
At that time I suffered my own minor confusions regarding loyalty. Jacko asked me to another afternoon’s drinking session with him at the Odeon. At last New Year’s Eve celebrations, Lucy had worn her party-piece black miniskirt with tassels. She looked magnificent in it, and, for what I hope were avuncular teasing purposes, I called it her ‘waistband’. At our table, Jacko had had us all inhale helium and sing the Australian national anthem. The Odeon always carried that redolence for me – Lucy with her long lipped, vivid smile singing in the voice of Minnie Mouse:
—In history’s page, let every stage
Advance Australia Fair.
Today when I arrived at the Odeon, Jacko’s big Burren Waters backside spilled defeatedly over either side of a bar stool. Seeing me, he spoke with a throaty mournfulness. That morning – as I knew from my viewing – he had taken the Harvard Glee Club to a house uptown and had them perform in some Bulgarian refugee’s kitchen.
—Lovely, lovely boys with so sweet voice, the Bulgarian woman had cooed.
All the electronic enthusiasm of that encounter had, however, vanished from Jacko now.
So I had to hear again, as if for the first time, how a woman who claimed to be the enslaver’s wife was talking to Lucy on the telephone, and that Lucy was pretty pissed off with him at the moment. She had made it clear she was passing on this news only for the vanished girl’s sake. Jacko too – even as one who had seen everything, who had met racketeers’ children with aftershave collections, who had watched men with freshly lopped digits sipping Veuve Clicquot in Paterson, New Jersey – expressed amazement. He too was astounded by a woman who called another woman and, in the most normal tones, sought compassion and understanding on the grounds that her man was digging further holes of detention, as men will, not being monogamous that way!
Lucy, he told me, refused to meet with the woman and be filmed from a distance by a Live Wire crew. She said that she was not part of the circus. Dannie was part of the circus. Dannie would not look silly if the woman turned out to be a hoax. If Dannie were worried about looking silly, Lucy had told Jacko with rare acerbity, she wouldn’t work for Vixen Six.
Lucy wanted to call the police, but did seem to accept the idea they would mess things up. Maybe better to have the woman filmed, and then get in the police!
Jacko complained to me that the woman’s tale about Dannie and himself hung on the question of whether the woman herself was authentic or not. Jacko felt cheated somehow that Lucy was willing to consider the idea that the woman was a hoax, yet not willing to believe the tale of Dannie and himself could also be false. This, he kept telling me, was the usual irrational stuff he’d got used to from the astral Logan sisters.
Then, said Jacko, Lucy reversed her principles, the stylish, casual attitudes which had marked her till now, and struck a deal that if she travelled to California and did the meeting with the woman, then she wanted thereafter to travel with Jacko all the time!
—You’ll have nothing to do though, protested Jacko (according to his own account).
She said she’d knit or read. Or write a book, as I had suggested to her.
—You should let her do it, I advised Jacko. Let her travel with you everywhere.
—I’d feel too crowded, he pleaded. It’s the truth. I’m not designed for closeness.
—Then you ought t
o stay away from Dannie. She intends to strangle you pretty comprehensively.
—The two things have nothing to do with each other, Jacko complained. Dannie and whether Lucy comes with me on bloody weekends. Nothing in common.
I’d got weary of Jacko’s wrongheadedness, his wilfulness in marriage. On the other hand, Lucy’s presence might leave Jacko fewer occasions with Dannie in the short term, but might encourage them in the long.
—I just don’t want to see her demean herself like that, he told me sombrely. Keeping an eye on me. Being a watchdog. It isn’t her nature and it’ll turn her sour.
As we drank, it was hard to tell which of Lucy’s two present aspects most grieved him: that she now had an idea of Dannie’s plans; or that she would not consent to play the Live Wire game. I felt an obligation to bring him back to the essentials.
—Can’t you reassure her, Jacko? I asked him. Can’t you offer anything? She’s genuinely distressed.
—How do you know? Did she say anything to you?
—Not her. Dannie said something though. She warned me off. In the lift in Berlin.
—Oh Jesus, I feel like a bloody football field, and both teams are tearing me up. I suppose you’re barracking for Lucy eh.
—Listen, melodrama doesn’t become you, Jacko. What’s wrong with Dannie doing the meeting? You implied before we flew to Berlin that she likes dressing up and acting parts …
I could see that he was stung. He took two sips of his drink to still the anger.