We Had It So Good Read online

  “Famous for what?”

  “We are the zeitgeist,” Grace replied haughtily.

  “The what?”

  “The spirit of the age,” Andrea said, and smiled slowly, revealing very crooked un-American teeth. She was the easier of the two to deal with. More relaxed. The other girl was so tightly strung she twanged and snapped.

  A shaft of sunlight passed across Grace’s face. Blue eyes blazed coldly. No one in Stephen’s family was blue-eyed. His own were the color of stirred mud. She was so beautiful he felt wiped out by it, her beauty wasn’t human. And she had the most stupendous breasts he had ever seen. He blinked several times to indelibly imprint them on his pupils. He wanted them packed away somewhere in his mind, for later. The other girl had large breasts too, but this one was the raving beauty.

  “What business do you have being American?” she asked.

  He looked at Andrea, hoping she would help him out, but she was silent, her green eyes taking him in, the bee-stung lips slightly parted over the bad teeth, and an expression he and many others had misunderstood as spiritual.

  “To state the obvious, I was born there.”

  “Yes, on stolen land.” Grace poured herself another cup of tea and picked up a finger of cucumber sandwich. “Yum. Just the right amount of salt. Are you hungry? There’s plenty.”

  “Stolen from who?”

  “The red Indians.”

  “Honey, we don’t call them red Indians. That’s just in Hollywood.”

  “It doesn’t matter what they’re called, you’re squatting on their land. That’s a fact. You really should have a sandwich, they’re excellent, and there’s a cake of some description in the kitchen, we’ll get it in a minute. Andrea, what kind of cake do we have?”

  “I think it’s ginger.”

  “Shop-bought, today, I’m afraid. Andrea makes a very good cake but no time this morning, we overslept. We like a nice piece of cake, don’t we?”

  “Well, you do, Grace, I can take it or leave it. I’m fat enough already.”

  “That’s her, selfless. Makes a cake she won’t even eat. I’m not selfless. Obviously.”

  “I like baking, I like things you do with your hands, though not dressmaking, that’s Grace’s talent, not mine. She makes all our clothes. But Grace, you should eat more cake. You’re so thin.”

  “Never mind cakes and dresses. He still hasn’t owned up to being what he is, a squatter on stolen land.”

  “Oh, do stop it, Grace,” said Ivan. “She’s only teasing. Have you read much Merleau-Ponty and his work on perception, Stephen?”

  “No, I never heard of him.”

  “What do they teach you in American universities, how to make money and then how to make more money?”

  “Don’t goad, Grace. It’s ill-mannered.”

  “What exactly have you got against America? Apart from the war, anything else?”

  “I hate it.”

  “Have you ever been there?”

  “Of course not. Why would I do that?”

  “To ground your opinion in objective reality.”

  “Sorry, we don’t do empiricism at Oxford.”

  He had fallen in with Humanities people and he found them just as he had suspected, full of bullshit. It was all about the war, he supposed, which he didn’t support, no one he knew did, apart from his parents, of course, who were right behind it, particularly his mother, but the war was not America. America, he thought, was his father stepping off a ramshackle ship onto the dry land of Ellis Island, a boy alone, and now with a son at Oxford University.

  “My old man came to America from Europe. Everyone he left behind was murdered. My mom is from Cuba. I look around Oxford and I don’t see too many black or brown faces, apart from the overseas students from India and Africa.”

  But instead of surrendering, Grace carried on enumerating America’s crimes.

  Man, he thought, she could wear a person down. Dope did not appear to mellow her. Yes, that was true about Oxford, she said, and why the whole place needed blowing up along with every other political institution of English life. She had run through the town trying to save guys from the flames.

  “What guys? You burn people here?”

  “I mean Guy Fawkes. We burn him in effigy on Bonfire Night because he tried to blow up Parliament.”

  “When was this?” Stephen did not pay much attention to the local news but he was certain he would have heard if someone had tried to take out the government.

  “It was 1605,” said Andrea, helpfully.

  “For crying out loud, you still remember that? That was before the fucking Mayflower.”

  “Of course we should remember him. We should name a national holiday after him, our greatest revolutionary.”

  “Oh, do shut up, Grace, you do go on sometimes. Leave him alone.”

  Ivan put his hand to her lips and closed them. He has some nerve, Stephen thought. But she did nothing.

  The afternoon wore on, Andrea went into the kitchen and brought out the cake, which they ate very quickly because they were suddenly ravenous, apart from Grace, who cut a wafer-thin slice. They talked and then fell silent. Stephen understood almost nothing of the conversation. Andrea spoke of R. D. Laing and his theories of madness and sanity. Grace and Ivan studied politics, philosophy and economics, Andrea read politics, philosophy and psychology. They knew things he didn’t and the things he knew they did not have the training to understand.

  English afternoons drew to a close with a slight smattering of rain, he observed, as if the day had exhausted itself before it was even over. In California the light held up for as long as it was able then shut down, fast, at the horizon.

  Church bells, of which Oxford had many, chimed seven.

  “Let’s go and have something to eat,” Ivan said.

  They got into his van. “Where are we going?” asked Grace.

  “There’s a good pub in Wiltshire I’ve always wanted to try. And we could go and take a look at the white horse at Uffington afterward.”

  They drove west along what seemed to Stephen like narrow green alleys. Darkening flowers nodded in the hedgerows. The Downs rose up on either side of them like a bosom.

  They stopped at a village and ordered food from a menu chalked up on a blackboard at the bar. Stephen had no idea what to have, there were no steaks or hamburgers or macaroni and cheese.

  “Maybe you should order for me,” said Stephen to Ivan.

  When his food came, it was some kind of pie. Stephen dug in his fork and pulled out a piece of what seemed to be the breast of a very small chicken. Tiny breastbones lay half concealed by gravy.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s pigeon pie.”

  “Pigeons? Those birds?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t they live on the streets?”

  “Not these, they nest in the woods.”

  They started talking about revolution. Grace was of the party that wanted to blow everything up and start all over again, while Ivan favored an alternative society, which would coexist with capitalism, and replace it when capitalism had collapsed of its own internal contradictions. Andrea said that capitalism was more than an economic system, it was a means of manipulating desire.

  “Do you know about Wilhelm Reich and the orgone box?” said Ivan.

  “No idea.”

  “There is a primordial cosmic energy in the universe called orgone, which comes about through having an orgasm.”

  “No, there isn’t,” Stephen said.

  “Let me finish. You have people go inside this box and screw, and they produce this orgone with their orgasm. Then people who are mentally or even physically ill go into the box and the energy from the orgasm cures them. Now, orgone is blue and you can see it, because it’s the color of the sky, and it’s also responsible for gravity. Red corpuscles, plant chlorophyll, gonadal cells, protozoa, and cancer cells are all charged with orgone.”

  “Where’s the data?”

  �
��I don’t know, I’m just telling you the theory. If we all fuck enough, we’ll release enormous amounts of orgone, and capitalism will disappear of its own accord, because capitalism is simply a manifestation of sexual repression.”

  Stephen looked at Ivan. You have to be smart to get into Balliol, he thought, that’s a top school. “You’re just kidding around, aren’t you? Did you make this guy up?”

  “Of course I didn’t.”

  Ivan had mustard in his muttonchop whiskers. Grace leaned over to him, stuck out her tongue and licked it away.

  What is going down here, Stephen thought, where am I and who are these people? Outside the leaded windows of the pub, night had fallen. He was miles from Oxford and his solitary mattress and John Baines and the Dyson Perrins lab. The sky was full of intermittent stars and a large moon.

  They got back in the van.

  “Roll another joint, man,” said Ivan. “We need to be wasted to see this.”

  They were profoundly stoned. The moon acquired satellite planets and the lanes were full of goblins. Andrea began to speak of a book called Lord of the Rings, which everyone but Stephen had read. Apart from the essential works of high school, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Grapes of Wrath and some Jack London, Stephen had only read two novels, The Catcher in the Rye and Catch-22. “I’m waiting for another novel with the word catch in the title,” he said.

  Grace had put on a cloak, he had never seen a garment like it before, apart from movies about the olden days with Errol Flynn when people wrote with feathers. Andrea shivered in her green velvet dress; he wondered whether to put an arm around her.

  The van stopped. They got out on the edge of a steep escarpment.

  An outline in white lay below them, but Stephen could barely make it out in the darkness. Andrea came and stood next to him.

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know, I can’t see anything.”

  “You’re not really enjoying yourself, are you?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Look, Ivan and Grace are making orgone.”

  A few feet way he could see a moving shape on the ground.

  “Is that why we schlepped all the way out here? So they could fuck on a hill?”

  “Probably.”

  “Why are you and I here?”

  “Ivan likes company. He needs an audience.”

  “Your friend Grace is very ballsy, and I don’t mean that in a good way.”

  “She wouldn’t mind you saying that, she’d take it as a compliment.”

  “Are you cold?”

  “A bit.”

  He put his arm around her. She laid her head on his shoulder and he smelt her skin. Next he kissed her, because it seemed like the expected thing to do.

  Mister Button

  Undressed, her skin was ivory, with a tuft of coppery hair. His clothes were rags on the floor covering her green dress.

  “That was quick,” he said. “I’m really sorry. And now your sheets are all wet.” He rolled her away from the seeping patch. “For crying out loud! What’s this?”

  She looked down. “Oh, it’s true then. You do bleed a little.”

  He was stunned.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t have to say anything.”

  “I had no idea, how old are you?”

  “Twenty. It’s late, isn’t it?”

  “Why me? Why did you decide on me of all people?”

  “I suppose because you were so unimpressed with us. And didn’t want to know why I wear this and Grace wears that or who we are and where we come from and do we know Giles or Peter or Claire. You just tagged along. And you were very funny on that fence.”

  She had never met an American, she thought they must all be like him, with black hair and beaky noses, and an up-front way of talking. She supposed there must be endless depths of complication, hidden under a straightforward surface. It would be interesting to find out.

  “And why me?” she went on.

  “Well, I guess because you were there.”

  He realized it was a disappointing answer, her smile had faded. But having made love to her, or rather, abruptly combusted inside her, he began to like the idea of her. He liked her red hair and the bumps of her ivory body underneath her long velvet dress, though the dress itself he couldn’t stand. He knew it was polite, after you had made love to someone, to properly introduce yourself, to give a little bit of Stephen and to receive a little bit of Andrea back in return. Once these presents had been exchanged, you could decide how much more you wanted. Or if you should get out of bed fast, and run.

  So he told her all about Marilyn Monroe’s champagne mink and growing up in L.A., and she told him about the froggy day, the hotel, her parents’ disappearance, as she smoked her little roll-up cigarette. Stephen found the tale so bizarre she might as well have been describing Hottentots. Parents were there to love you. (You fall for what you do not know, he figured out eventually. But you do fall, the loss of balance is the point.)

  But he also wanted to know about the blonde, the dragon-lady, what was her story?

  “That’s a big question. You have to begin by understanding that Grace made me. I am her creation.”

  “How could she have made you? That’s crazy.” He recoiled from her in the bed, she felt his withdrawal and knew she had to get him back.

  “No, it’s true. We met on my first day. We had rooms in college next door to each other. I was a country hick with hay in my ears in a moldy Crimplene miniskirt from a jumble sale in Truro and Grace showed me how to dress and what films to say I’d seen, even when I hadn’t.”

  “You shouldn’t be ashamed of where you come from and who you are.”

  “It wasn’t shame, exactly.”

  “But why would you listen to her?”

  “Well, because I didn’t know anything, nothing at all. I could easily have been one of those first-term suicides, there’s always a few. People come up, they’ve worked so hard to get here, and then they arrive and they don’t know anyone and they don’t fit in and it’s all far too much so they top themselves. Someone threw himself off the tower at Magdalen last year. But I don’t think I’d have done it that way, I just would have got terribly depressed and swallowed a lot of aspirin. But anyway, there was Grace, and she took me in hand. She always said I had something, potential. And she had a plan.”

  “What was that?”

  “She was able to take me home in the vacs to stay. It wasn’t a problem because I didn’t have a home anymore, not anywhere to go back to, so the idea was that I would always be there.”

  “Why?”

  Stephen had only known loving, irritating, aggravating parents. He was the sun which came up every morning in their eastern horizon and rose higher and higher. He believed that he (and, in a lesser way, his sisters) were the sole purpose of his parents’ existence.

  “So I could stand between her and her father. I am the obstacle, you see.”

  He considered this proposition. Only one idea attached itself to it, something he had read about but by no means understood.

  “You mean he messed around with her?”

  She thought for a moment.

  “Yes. He did. He messed around with her head. I don’t expect you to understand. No one does, really, and that is Grace’s misfortune.”

  “What exactly did he do?”

  But she remained silent, and they lay there looking at the walls of her bedroom, which she had covered with postcards of faces, portraits, of kings and queens, society beauties, statesmen and artists.

  It was the summer the astronauts walked on the moon. There was nothing more glamorous than an astronaut, not even the film stars with their minks. Stephen wished he’d gone into astrophysics or any science that would investigate the stars. What was matter, anyway? Sometimes he saw people as swirling dense clouds of proteins walking along the street in colored formations and wished he could shrink them down to a size that could be
examined through a microscope. He’d like to take Andrea to the lab and irradiate her with light, see her bones.

  A month after the moon walk, Ivan got tickets for the Isle of Wight rock festival. The short ferry ride over was the first time Stephen had been on a boat since he had arrived in England. You could see the point of departure and the point of arrival, a journey of no more than a few minutes, and he thought of this toy-town life he was leading in his miniature house and the green alleys you drove down to reach somewhere else.

  Next, as far as the eye could see, hippies. Chicks who took their tops off and walked around bare-breasted, guys in bell-bottoms, naked dirty children and an overpowering stench of shit, boiling brown rice, orange peel, joss sticks and patchouli oil.

  Bob Dylan was a tiny figure in a white suit on the stage.

  After several hours, Ivan reappeared from a mission to score some hash, his eyes like spinning tops, and without Grace. He waved his arm in the direction of the stage. “She’s back there somewhere,” he said.

  “How did that happen?” Stephen asked, jealously.

  “I don’t know, she said she ran into someone she knew who was with the crew. He was going to take her through.”

  “How could she know anyone? Who does she know?” Stephen could not bear the idea of her chatting to Bob Dylan, the idea infuriated him, if anyone was going to meet Dylan it should have been him, they could have talked about so much stuff, such as the meanings of certain lyrics he had been thinking about for years, and hitchhiking across America, and being American. Dylan would have said, “Man, you should come see me sometime in New York. I’m living in the Village now. Drop by for coffee, when do you get back to the States?”

  It was a long time before she turned up again, sitting outside the tent, rolling a joint with her long pale fingers. Everyone else was filthy, Grace was not.

  “Did you meet Dylan?” Stephen asked.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I did.”

  “And?” said Ivan.

  “Well, he was okay, but I spent more time with Leonard Cohen.”

  And because Grace did not usually lie, they had to believe her, though she refused to say another word about the encounter. It had either gone very well or very badly, Ivan pointed out. You could drive yourself mad wondering which it was so it was best to just take her at her word. There was no alternative.