The Anglophile (9 page)

“I'm sorry for how I behaved yesterday,” I say. “But…”

Tears flow as I burst out with everything: my search, my impending bankruptcy, my research and my sense of self. With the considerable emotion even the worst lip reader wouldn't miss—far away Ned looks delighted every time he looks over at us—Kit swiftly steers me to the corner by my elbow. I'm talking through my gasps of air. “I thought he lived in upstate New York,” I add, lest he should think I had the good sense to search in England.

“Oh, good God.” He wipes a tear with considerable grace and pity like a British reconnaissance soldier who has come across the sole bloodied survivor of an overrun platoon. “Would you like to meet him?”

It takes a long while to answer this time. “What, go to England?”

“Yes, that's what I'm saying. Maybe there is something good to come from this.”

He waits as my brain talks out this bizarre opportunity. Don't I owe it to myself to follow this to the end? Kevin and I were planning a little trip to the Smoky Mountains in a month, his treat. And regardless of that additional relationship betrayal (tack it on the list), how would I ever go on my diminished student stipend? “I'm not budgeted for that in my research, just this conference. I've been doing this academic thing too long. My funding is about to run out. I can hardly get to New Jersey on our miniscule budget.”

“You shall be my guest then.”

“This is crazy. Right now there is no one on earth I hate more than you.”

“Why not? I'm not on an academic schedule. I'll whirl you around London. Then we can drive up the moors to see—”

“Another time, Kit. I can't even afford a little of that. I don't know about you, but I can barely pay my rent. A plane ticket is definitely beyond my means.”

“I'll buy you the ticket. We'll go to a travel clerk immediately, shall we? Meeting Robert will give you closure. There's a little inn about ten kilometers out I stayed in.” He flips open his cell phone. “I can ring the inn from here—”

“Who
are
you? Enough with the International Man of Mystery already.”

He laughs loudly. “No one famous, don't worry. I just can do this for you if you want. Free. One hundred percent free. A gift.”

“Don't you mean a consolation prize?”

“Listen, I could take a page out of that awful Ned's book and offer the trip to Dave. It would get me in the right journals, but honestly he's not nearly as sexy.”

I sit.

He waits again. “I really like you.”

“You drive a hard bargain,” I say finally. “Free?”

“Free.”

“Free?” I check once more.

“Gratis. Every second of your stay.”

“You could stay in my apartment while you're in New York this week. It's not fancy but it would even things out a little. Make me feel like less of a harlot.”

“Do you think I'm buying you?”

“No, I think you really mean to soothe me—”

“Thank you,” Kit says firmly.

“My roommate is in Los Angeles until next week.”

“If that's a concern for you, fine. I'd love to stay with you.”

“Did you have any plans?”

“No, just a look around after the conference.”

After a moment I say, “Are you a Sir then?”

He glances at his watch, ignoring me. “Shall we?”

“Tea time?” I say with a sorrowful little laugh.

“How about vodka time?”

He smiles. Ned and Palindrome peek around the corner as he kisses me apologetically on the cheek.

 

Three Skyy vodka martinis later, I've temporarily expunged the unofficial end of my career out of my mind.

“And people in Europe don't think American vodka is any good,” Kit says, marveling at their mistake.

“I think Skyy is brewed around here. It's made out of something weird, I can't remember what it is—”

“I can't remember anything right now,” Kit admits just as woozily.

When the final tab comes, Kit's in the men's room. I mentally calculate my share. I reach in my pocketbook for two of the very few twenties I have left.

On Kit's return he waves away my money with great ceremony. “Let's go to the rest of the conference together,” he adds. “It's not you against me. Let everyone think we are a force to be reckoned with.”

I
f you've ever lived in New York you know the look of disappointment that first-time visitors have when they step into a taxi and drive a mile or so. Our two airports are in rather unflattering sections of my childhood-home borough of Queens. But I always resist telling guests to hold onto their hats because I know as soon as we are near the BQE—especially on a clear blue day like today—the magnificent Manhattan skyline will zoom into view across the East River from Brooklyn and Queens. Even without the two towers, it still takes my breath away.

These days I live in Manhattan's East Village, a neighborhood of historical note where there thunders an imposing herd numbered in the thousands: the artists, musicians, writers and social activists, and savvy young executives down-dressing to pass as cool. The prime “grazing” ground for this easy-to-spot mass is the un
official heart of the neighborhood, Tompkins Square Park, a cube of three short city blocks between two longer avenues that was once a salt marsh belonging to peg-legged Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant. My small rent-controlled apartment over Tompkins Park Laundromat was “inherited” through my roommate's way-older brother who was an NYU student before the East Village real estate boom. It overlooks Tompkins Square's Hare Krishna Elm, the tree on the southern end of the square that is revered by Krishna converts as the site where their religion was introduced to the west in 1966. We have but two windows that face the southern end of Tompkins Square Park; it can get very noisy because just a few feet over on Avenue A there are nine bars with heavy traffic even for Manhattan.

My roommate Cathy Loeb, a Ph.D. candidate in Asian studies, has filled every inch of our groovy (i.e., cheap and small) apartment with her many bonsai and other Asian curios like her miniature jasper “Tang dynasty-style” horse, and a hilarious costume jewelry charm bracelet with Plasticine
tamago, ebi, maguro
and
ikura
that hangs on her doorknob.

“I can't believe I'm in the real East Village,” Kit says as he parks himself and his coffee cup on Cathy's mother's old couch slip-covered with a remnant blue poplin score we actually found on the street. He peers out the window. “So where are the famous beatniks?”

“Dead or in a nursing home.”

He takes his first sip from the take-out coffee we bought before we went upstairs to my place, almost undrinkable brew from
coffee.dot.com
a late-nineties cyber
boom relic two blocks down Avenue A. “No offense, but this is bloody atrocious.” In stating his horror he almost knocks over an inch-high Chinese mudman from the Guangdong Province that Cathy claims protects her favorite oak bonsai and gives her good feng shui. She is so worried about her plants that I was shocked that she was spending ten days away. I rush to the oak—the mudman teeters but lands on his feet.

“Yeah, coffee pretty much sucks in New York.”

“What is it?” Kit asks when I'm encased in thought. What's troubling me is that the soil in one of the bigger bonsai pots looks freshly wet. When did Cathy leave again? I was sure that she left the day after I left for Chicago almost a week ago. But I let it go and keep up my share of banter:

“Nothing. Just thinking to myself.” Where was I? “Oh, I read that Lavazza sent over their espresso expert from Italy but he threw his hands up in disgust.”

Kit laughs. “The BBC picked up that story. The press is always up for an American bash.”

“My roommate makes good coffee but I don't. I'm afraid you'll have to suffer.”

“So where is your roommate again?”

“At a giftware convention in L.A. She makes these Jewish origami ornaments.”

“Pardon?”

I laugh. “An ironic Jewish thing.”

“Oh, is she Jewish? We had a lot of Jewish Americans at Cambridge.”

The tone of that statement troubles me. “Do you know that I'm Jewish?”

“Really? Diamond? Is that a Jewish name? I didn't pick it. Do you avoid eating—”

“Pig?” I answer for him.

“Yes.” Is he too afraid of offending me to continue?

“I'm not Kosher, but I'm definitely Jewish.”

He says nothing.

I study his face. “Do you care?”

“No, of course not. It's just that—are you okay with me? I'm Church of England, you know.”

“Of course I'm okay with that.” Now is not the time to bring up Aunt Dot. Or for that matter, her back-up agent—my traveling roommate with her additional lecturing on Jewish self-loathing. Once, a month or so before I met Kevin, Cathy tried to get me hooked up with her humorless single cousin with a fat face and a twirly mustache who sold scaffolding brackets to construction companies. He may be a Cohen, a descendent of Moses's brother, but I sure as hell didn't want to help him continue his five-thousand-year-old line. Her reaction to my refusal to go on a date was so predictable: “Your birthright is a gift, not a curse. Why do you hate yourself so much?”

Hate myself? I almost moved out that night, and later when she apologized for the cranky rant, and begged me to watch the third-to-last-ever episode of
Sex in the City
with her, she admitted that Kevin is her ideal of the perfect man. “Could I borrow him?” she asked.

“What, for sex?” I laughed nervously.

No, Cathy likes Kevin's comical “deep” radio voice he could summon at the drop of a hat so much that
she's had him narrate her two videos:
Folding Your Heritage
and
Folding Your Heritage Two
that have upon release been big hits with the
Heeb Magazine
and
Jew-cy
T-shirt crowd.

Kevin needed no coaxing—and just before the record button was pressed he admitted that he had five rabid townie fans when he hosted the
Ode to Grunge
hour during his undergraduate years at Michigan State.

“
Oy,
three more folds to get you a Chanukah
dreidel,
” he articulated into the mic with a boyish grin in the shoebox NYU recording studio we'd secured through another one of Cathy's NYU friends. Cathy was laughing hysterically when he told us during a coffee break about the time his henpecked father over-dramatically stormed to the bottom deli drawer in the refrigerator with a hole-punch “to fix things” after Kevin's mother Dee Dee scolded him for buying Munster cheese and not Swiss like she had written on the list.

Cathy later said I was incredibly lucky for finding myself “one of the nice ones,” and I have to say I nearly loved him that day, squeezed in so close to his vocal adorableness.

 

Kit's managed to finish his awful coffee. “So how much origami does she have to make to pay the rent? How much is tuition?”

“The cost, the whole degree will reach—actually I can't think about it, suffice it to say that current tuition is around thirty thousand a year.”

“That's a joke, right?'

“No, unfortunately that's the figure.”

“That's sickening! What kind of bloody country is this?”

“Usually you can get that covered in grad school, but I'm still recovering from my undergrad bills, and it's been ten years already. We're pretty lucky—our rent here is only thirteen hundred a month for this matchbox, and that's pretty damn good.”

“Thirteen hundred dollars is pretty damn good? That's over eight hundred quid if you do the converting—”

“That's a great deal for this neighborhood.”

“Matchbox. I never heard that word used for an apartment before.”

“Really? In New York it is the second most common word after rip-off.”

“Did you have Matchbox toy cars here?”

I look at him, confused, and then say, “Oh, you've changed topics. Yes, they sold them here.”

“My favorite was the fire engine and the combine harvester.”

“
Ah,
the combine harvester.”

He shoves me a little after the mild mocking. “I was trying to remember what happened to them.”

“My brother had a Matchbox collection, too.”

“You have a sibling, then?”

“Two. Both brothers.”

“Do they live in New York?”

“One's out in Queens, in Forest Hills, in a nice place.”

“So which queen was Queens named for?”

I smile. “I happen to know this.”

“I didn't doubt for a second that you would.”

“It was chartered in 1683 for Queen Catherine, although I don't know much about her.”

“She was the wife of Edward Charles the Second, I believe,” he says in academic tit-for-tat.

“So if I ever go on
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,
you're my number one lifeline.”

“You have that show, too? A child could answer those questions. ‘Jack and
who
went up the hill—'”

I do a little raspberry with my tongue. “That's the warm-up level for a hundred dollars. It gets harder.”

Kit shrugs with continued game-show contempt. “So where is the town of Queens anyway?”

“No, Queens is a borough. We passed through it when we landed at LaGuardia.”

“Oh was that it? It throws you off, doesn't it? Queens sounds so royal.”

“A definite no to that, but a few neighborhoods are upmarket, like Forest Hills.”

“Where your brother lives?”

“Yes.”

“Tennis area, right?”

“Yes. The U.S. Open used to be held there.”

“You know, my brother lives next door to my mum.”

“Do they live in an apartment in London?”

He pauses a second as if he is measuring how much he should reveal. “No, they're in the country alongside a stream.”

“That sounds pretty amazing.”

“It is. Nigel lives in a gristmill that was abandoned in the next lot. It still has an original sawmill and granary—
it was a real fixer-upper across from some unkempt medieval watercress beds.”

“You're just saying all that to turn me on, right?”

“Pardon?”

“Gristmill? Medieval watercress beds? Do you have any idea how exotic that sounds?”

“It's lovely, I must confess.”

“What does your brother do for a living?”

Kit smirks. “Do?”

“What? Doesn't anyone in your family work?”

“Ah, not really, since I don't make much money from what I've written for the journals. Nigel collects things though. He's a bit of an oddball.”

“Not as odd as my family.”

“Try me.”

I really don't want to go into too much detail with a man whose mother lives across from medieval watercress beds. The most sophisticated possession in my extended barely middle-class family is the photo my uncle made us all copies of since he joined a World War II veterans social group. It's a photo he took in 1945 of horses pulling a wagon loaded with a massive cask of wine down the cobbles of a small French town. After that we're talking mom's and Aunt Dot's historical romance novels and Gene's vast library of World Wrestling Federation DVDs.

And what about Dot's skunks? My brothers and I have pooled our memory, talked over plausible explanations, and have continually come to the conclusion that there simply is no sane explanation. And there's much more insanity to Dot than her skunks. There's Eric, her six-
foot-three life partner who Dot met seven years ago online at Skunk Chat, the skunk lovers' Web site.

“C'mon, I'm waiting,” Kit says, arms crossed.

I offer Kit the more palatable insanity of my mother's significantly older sister, Fay.

“My aunt Fay's the World's Greatest Talker who constantly carps on about her neighbor Delores who wouldn't shut up.”

“That's all? Weak. I need better than that.”

I'm not ready to broach Dot yet. It may make a good story, but I want this man in my life.

I tell him about Fay's enormous soap frog collection, and that she makes everyone collect bagfuls of orange peels she reincarnates as vile orange-peel chocolate bark that she neatly repacks in cookie tins hand-painted by her, cookie tin beach scenes of waves, angelfish and albatross. “Oh and Fay has bought up America's supply of watermelon tea candles that no one has the heart to tell her really smell like nail polish remover.”

Kit sneers. “Sorry, your auntie Fay doesn't have a patch on my brother—hoof trimmers.”

“What?”

“That's what Nigel collects. Vintage hoof trimmers.”

“Okay that's pretty damn odd,” I concede with a laugh. “What's the prize in his collection?”

“I don't know. I think he has some eighteenth-century duke's hoof trimmers. He buys them on—on eBay, like you.”

“Another sucker 'cross the pond.”

“What does your brother do?” Kit asks.

“The older one has something to do with a bank. But
I'm throwing my other brother in the ring here, he lives in a commune on Staten Island that supports itself making environmentally-sound sandals that involve no animal slaughter or pollutants.”

Now why am I telling him that?

Kit is unfazed. “Pretty good, but I'm sure I can ante you. Did I tell you about Uncle Frederic with his gong collection?”

I laugh so hard my coffee jiggles in its take-out cup.

“That's it? No more after that sentence?”

“End of story. Frederic goes to church and at night he collects gongs via mail correspondence with gong collectors across the globe. Good lord did he get ‘a boot out of' the gong exhibit last year at Christie's. Made his year.”

In the past ten minutes Kit's speech has quickened to that of a nutty Queens passenger telling the weary bus driver in the front seat all about his winning pick at Belmont. Is it the pace of Manhattan that has him going, or the foul caffeine?

I nudge him. “Hey listen, chatty, since you're obviously not jet-lagged, do you want to take a little walk around the Big Apple now?”