Swing Time

PART THREE: Intermission

Governments are useless, they can’t be trusted, Aimee explained to me, and charities have their own agendas, churches care more for souls than for bodies. And so if we want to see real change in this world, she continued, adjusting the incline on her running machine until I, who walked on a neighboring one, seemed to be watching her dash up the side of Kilimanjaro, well, then we ourselves have to be the ones to do it, yes, we have to be the change we want to see. By “we” she meant people like herself, of financial means and global reach, who happen to love freedom and equality, want justice, feel an obligation to do something good with their own good fortune. It was a moral category but also an economic one. And if you followed its logic all the way to the end of the revolving belt, then after a few miles you arrived at a new idea, that wealth and morality are in essence the same thing, for the more money a person had, then the more goodness — or potential for goodness — a person possessed. I mopped up my sweat with my vest and glanced at the screens in front of us: seven miles for Aimee, one and a half for me. At last she was finished, we stepped off our machines, I passed her a towel, we walked together to the editing room. She wanted to review an early cut of a promo we were making for prospective donors, which didn’t yet have its music or sound. We stood behind the director and editor and looked on as a version of Aimee, a silent version, broke soil on the school project, large spade in hand, and laid the foundation stone with the help of a village elder. We watched her dance with her six-year-old daughter, Kara, and a group of beautiful schoolgirls, in their green-and-gray uniforms, to music we could not hear, each stamp of her feet raising great clouds of red dust. I recalled seeing all these things happening months earlier, in reality, in the very moment that they happened, and thought how different they appeared now, in this format, as the editor moved things about with the ease his software allowed, inter-splicing Aimee in America with Aimee in Europe and Aimee in Africa, placing familiar events in a new order. And this is how you get things done, she announced, after fifteen minutes, satisfied, standing up, ruffling the young director’s hair and heading for the showers. I stayed and helped finish the edit. A time-lapse camera had been placed on the building site, back in February, and so now we could watch the whole school go up in a few minutes, as ant-like laborers, moving too fast to be distinguished from each other, swarmed over it, a surreal demonstration of what was possible when good people of means decided to get things done. The kind of people able to build a girls’ school, in a rural West African village, in a matter of months, simply because that is what they have decided to do.

It pleased my mother to call Aimee’s way of doing things “naïve.” But Aimee felt she had already tried my mother’s route, the political route. She’d gone to bat for presidential candidates, back in the eighties and nineties, hosting dinners, making campaign contributions, haranguing audiences from the stages of stadiums. By the time I came into the picture she was finished with all that, just as the generation she’d once encouraged to the ballot box, my generation, were finished. Now she was committed to “making change happen on the ground,” she wanted only to “work with communities at a community level,” and I honestly respected her commitment, and only occasionally — when some of her fellow good people of means came up to the Hudson Valley house, to lunch or to swim, and to discuss this or that venture — would it become very hard to avoid seeing the things my mother saw. At those times I really felt my mother at my shoulder, an invisible conscience, or an ironic commentary, pouring poison in my ear from thousands of miles away, as I tried to listen to all these various good people of means — famous for playing the guitar or singing or designing clothes or pretending to be other people — chatter over cocktails about their plans to end malaria in Senegal or bring clean wells to Sudan and so on. But I knew Aimee herself had no abstract interest in power. She was motivated by something else: impatience. To Aimee poverty was one of the world’s sloppy errors, one among many, which might be easily corrected if only people would bring to the problem the focus she brought to everything. She hated meetings and long discussions, disliked considering an issue from too many angles. Nothing bored her more than “on the one hand this” and “on the other hand that.” She put her faith instead in the power of her own decisions, and these she made with her “heart.” Often these decisions were sudden, and were never changed or rescinded once she’d made them, for she believed in her own good timing, in timing itself, as a mystical force, a form of fate, operating at the global and cosmic level as much as at the personal. In fact, in Aimee’s mind these three levels were connected. It was the good timing of fate, as she saw it, that burned down the British headquarters of YTV, on 20 June 1998, six days after she visited us, the wiring going wrong somehow, in the middle of the night, sending a fire ripping through the place, destroying those miles and miles of VHS which had been, up till then, preserved from the corrupting influence of the London Underground. We were told it would be nine months before the offices were habitable again. In the meantime everybody was moved to an ugly, featureless office block in King’s Cross. My commute was twenty minutes longer, I missed the canal, the market, Snowdon’s birds. But I spent only six days in King’s Cross. It was all over for me the moment Zoe brought a fax to my desk, addressed to me, with a phone number on it, which I was to ring, with no explanation. From the other end came the voice of Aimee’s manager, Judy Ryan. She told me Aimee herself had requested that the brown girl in green come to her offices in Chelsea and be interviewed for a possible position. I was stunned. I paced outside that building for half an hour before I entered it, shaking, all the way up in the lift and through the hall, but when I walked into that room I saw the decision already made, right there on her face. There was no anxiety for Aimee, and no doubt: none of this, in her view, was coincidence or luck or even happy accident. It was “Fate.” “The Great Fire”—as the employees christened it — was only part of a conscious effort, on behalf of the universe, to bring the two of us together, Aimee and me, a universe which at the same moment declined to intervene in so many other matters.

Aimee had an unusual attitude to time, but her approach was very pure and I came to admire it. She wasn’t like the rest of her tribe. She didn’t need surgeons, didn’t live in the past, fudge dates or use any of the usual forms of distraction or distortion. With her it really was a matter of will. Over ten years I saw how formidable that will could be, what it could make happen. And all the labor she put into it — all the physical exercise, all the deliberate blindness, the innocence cultivated, the spiritual epiphanies she was able somehow to experience spontaneously, the very many ways she fell in and out of love, like a teenager — all of this came to seem to me effectively a form of energy in itself, a force capable of creating a dilation in time, as if she really were moving at the speed of light, away from the rest of us — stranded on earth and aging faster than her — while she looked down on us and wondered why.

The effect was most striking when one of her Bendigo siblings visited, or when she was with Judy, whom she’d known since secondary school. What did these late-middle-aged people, with their fucked-up families and wrinkles and disappointments and difficult marriages and physical ailments — what did any of this have to do with Aimee? How could any of these people have grown up with her, or once slept with the same boys or been able to run in the same way at the same speed down the same street in the same year? It wasn’t only that Aimee looked very young — although of course she did — it was that an almost unbelievable youthfulness pulsed through her. It went right down to the bone, affecting the way she sat, moved, thought, spoke, everything. Some, like Marco, her bad-tempered Italian chef, were cynical and bitter about it, they claimed it was only money that did it, that it was all a side-effect of money and no work, never any real work. But in our travels with Aimee we met plenty of people with a lot of money who did nothing, far less than Aimee — who, in her own way, worked hard — and most of them seemed as old as Methuselah. And so it was reasonable to assume, and a lot of people did, that it was her young lovers that kept Aimee young, this was after all basically her own argument for years — that and the lack of children. But this theory could not survive the year she canceled the South American and European tours, and the arrival of her son, Jay, and, two years later, baby Kara, and the quick dispatching of one middle-aged father and boyfriend, and the obtaining and subsequent even swifter dispatching of the second father and husband, who was, true enough, not much more than a boy himself. Surely, people thought, surely this much experience, crammed into a few years, will leave its mark? But while the rest of the team came out of that whirlwind exhausted, completely wrung out, ready to lie down for a decade, Aimee herself proved largely unaffected, she was more or less as she had always been, full of a terrifying amount of energy. After Kara was born she went straight back into the studio, back to the gym, back on tour, more nannies were hired, tutors appeared, and she emerged from it all, a few months later, seeming like a mature twenty-six-year-old. She was almost forty-two. I was just about to turn thirty, it was one of those facts about me that Aimee had decided to obsessively retain, and for two weeks beforehand she kept insisting that we’d have a “ladies’ night,” just the two of us, phones off, total focus, mindfulness, cocktails, none of which I expected or had asked for, but she wouldn’t let it go, and then of course the day came and no mention at all was made of my birthday, instead we did press for Norway all day, after which she ate with her children, while I sat in my room alone and tried to read. She was still in the dance studio at ten when I was interrupted by Judy, sticking her head, with its unchanged feather-cut, remnant of her Bendigo youth, round the door, to tell me, without looking up from her phone, that I was to remind Aimee we were flying to Berlin the next morning. This was in New York. Aimee’s dance studio was big as a ballroom, a mirrored box with a barre of walnut that stretched all the way round. It had been dug out of the basement of her townhouse. When I walked in she was sitting in the horizontal splits, completely still, as if dead, her head thrown forward, a long fringe — red at the time — covering her face. Music was playing. I waited to see if she’d turn to me. Instead she sprang up and began running through a routine, all the time facing her own reflection in the mirrors. It had been some time since I’d seen her dance. I rarely sat in the crowd for the shows any more: that aspect of her life felt very distant, the artificial performance of someone I had come to know too well at a deeper, granular level. A person for whom I scheduled abortions, hired dog walkers, ordered flowers, wrote Mother’s Day cards, applied creams, administered injections, squeezed spots, wiped very occasional break-up tears, and so on. Most days I wouldn’t have known I worked for a performer. My work with and for Aimee happened in cars, mostly, or on sofas, in airplanes and offices, on many kinds of screens and in thousands of e-mails.

But here she was, dancing. To a song I didn’t recognize — I hardly ever went to the studio any more, either — but the steps themselves were familiar, they hadn’t changed much, over the years. The greater part of her routine has always consisted primarily of a form of strident walking: a powerful, pacing step that marks the boundaries of whatever space she’s in, like a big cat methodically prowling around her cage. What surprised me now was its undimmed erotic force. Usually when we compliment a dancer we say: she makes it look easy. This is not the case with Aimee. Part of her secret, I felt as I watched her, is the way she’s able to summon joy out of effort, for no move of hers flowed instinctively or naturally from the next, each “step” was clearly visible, choreographed, and yet as she sweated away at their execution, the hard work itself felt erotic, it was like witnessing a woman cross the line at the end of a marathon, or working toward her own orgasm. That same ecstatic revelation of a woman’s will.

“Let me finish!” she cried out, to her reflection.

I walked over to the far corner, slid down the glass wall, sat on the floor and reopened my book. I’d decided to establish a new rule for myself: read for half an hour an evening, no matter what. The book I had chosen was not long, but I hadn’t got very far in it. Reading was basically impossible when you worked for Aimee, it was seen, by the rest of the team, as deeply impractical and I think in some sense fundamentally disloyal. Even if we were flying a long stretch — even if we were heading back to Australia — people were either answering Aimee-related e-mails or flicking through a stack of magazines, which could always be disguised as work, for Aimee was either in the magazine you had in your hand or very soon would be. Aimee herself read books, sometimes decent books, recommended by me, more often self-help or diet nonsense that Judy or Granger put in front of her, but Aimee’s reading was something separate, she was Aimee after all and could do as she pleased. Sometimes she took ideas from the books I gave her — a time period or a character or a political idea — which would then end up, in a flattened and vulgar form, in one video or song or another. But this did not change Judy’s opinion on reading in general, for her it was a kind of vice because it took up valuable time we might otherwise spend working for Aimee. Still sometimes it was necessary, even for Judy, to read a book — because it was about to become a movie vehicle for Aimee, or was otherwise necessary for a project — and in these situations she would use our long-haul flights to read a third of whatever it was, with her feet up, and a lemon-sucking look on her face. She never read more than a third—“I get the basic idea”—and when she’d finished she would give one of four possible judgments. “Zippy”—which was good; “Important”—which was very good; “Controversial”—which could be either good or bad, you never knew; or “Lidderary,” which was pronounced with a sigh and an eye roll and was very bad. If I tried to make a case for whatever it was Judy would shrug and say: “What do I know? I’m just a little bogan girl from Bendigo,” and this, said within Aimee’s earshot, killed any project dead. Aimee never underestimated the importance of the heartland. Though she’d left Bendigo behind — did not sound like her people any more, had always sung with a faux-American accent and often spoke of her childhood as a form of living death — she still considered her hometown a potent symbol, almost a form of bellwether. Her theory was that a star has New York and LA in their pocket, a star can take Paris and London and Tokyo — but only a superstar takes Cleveland and Hyderabad and Bendigo. A superstar takes everybody everywhere.

“What you reading?”

I held up the book. She drew her legs back together — from where they had landed, back in the splits — and scowled at the cover.

“Never heard of it.”

“Cabaret? It’s that, basically.”

“A book of the movie?”

“The book that came before the movie. I thought it might be useful, since we’re heading to Berlin. Judy sent me in here to crack the whip.”

Aimee made a face at herself in the mirror.

“Judy can kiss my bogan arse. She’s been giving me such a hard time recently. Think maybe she’s menopausal?”

“Think maybe you’re just annoying?”

“Ha ha.”

She lay down and lifted her right leg up in front of her, waiting. I went over and knelt before her, bending her knee into her chest. I was so much more heavily constructed — broader, taller, weightier — that whenever I stretched her like this I felt I had to be careful, that she was fragile and I could break her, though she had muscles I could not imagine having and I had seen her lift young male dancers almost as high as her head.

“The Norwegians were dull, weren’t they?” she muttered, and then an idea came to her, as if none of our conversations of the past three weeks had happened at all: “Why don’t we go out? Like, right now. Judy won’t know. We’ll go out the back way. Have a few cocktails? I’m in the mood. We don’t need a reason.”

I smiled at her. I thought about what it must be like to live in this world of shifting facts that move or disappear, depending on your mood.

“Something funny?”

“Nope. Let’s go.”

She took a shower and got dressed in her civilian outfit: black jeans, black vest and a black baseball cap pulled low, which made her ears stick out through her hair and gave her an unexpectedly goofy look. People don’t believe me when I say she liked to go out dancing, and it’s true we didn’t do it often, not in the later years, but it did happen and it never created much fuss, probably because we went late, and to gay places, and by the time the boys spotted her they were usually high and happy and full of an expansive sort of goodwill: they wanted to be protective of her. She’d been theirs years ago, before she was anybody’s, and looking after her now was a way of demonstrating that she still really belonged to them. Nobody asked for autographs, or made her pose for pictures, no one called the papers — we just danced. My only job was to demonstrate that I couldn’t keep up with her, and there was no need to fake this, I really couldn’t. At the point where my calves burned and I was as wet with sweat as if I’d stood under a hose, Aimee would still be dancing, and I would have to take my seat and wait for her. I was doing just that, in the roped-off area, when I felt a great thwack on my shoulder and something wet on my cheek. I looked up. Aimee stood over me, grinning and looking down, sweat dripping from her face on to mine.

“On your feet, soldier. We’re shipping out.”

It was one in the morning. Not so late, but I wanted to go home. Instead, as we approached the Village, she lowered the partition and told Errol to keep going right past the house, to head for Seventh and Grove, and when Errol tried to protest Aimee stuck out her tongue and raised the partition. We pulled up outside a tiny, scuzzy-looking piano bar. I could already hear a man with a grating Broadway vibrato singing a number from Chorus Line. Errol wound down the window and glared at the open doorway. He didn’t want to let her go. He looked at me pleadingly, in solidarity, as two people in the same boat — in Judy’s eyes we would both be held responsible tomorrow morning — but there was nothing I could do with Aimee once she’d set her will on something. She opened the door and pulled me out of the car. We were both drunk: Aimee overexcited, dangerously re-energized, me exhausted, maudlin. We sat in a dark corner — the whole place was dark corners — with two vodka martinis brought over by a barman of Aimee’s age so overwhelmed to be serving her it wasn’t clear how he was going to get through the practical matter of putting the drinks in front of us before he collapsed. I took the glasses out of his shaking hands and endured Aimee telling me the history of Stonewall, on and on, Stonewall this, Stonewall that, as if I’d never been to New York and didn’t know a thing about it. At the piano a group of white women at a bachelorette party sang something from The Lion King; they had horrible, shrill voices, and kept forgetting the words. I knew it was childish but I was in an absolute rage about my birthday, my rage was the only thing keeping me awake, I was feeding off it in that righteous way you can if you never mention out loud the wrong you are being done. I sank my martini and listened without comment as Aimee moved on from Stonewall to her own early days as a jobbing dancer, in Alphabet City, in the late seventies, when all her friends were “these crazy black boys, queers, divas; all dead now,” stories I had heard so many times I could almost repeat them myself, and I was despairing of finding any way of stopping her talking when she announced she was “going to the dunny,” in an accent she used only when very drunk. I knew her experience of public toilets to be limited but before I could get to my feet she was twenty yards ahead of me. As I tried to pass through the drunken bachelorettes the piano player looked up at me hopefully and grabbed my wrist: “Hey, sister. You sing?” At the same moment Aimee skipped down the basement steps and disappeared from view.

“How about this right here?” He nodded at his sheet music and passed a weary hand over the ebony sheen of his bald head. “Can’t listen to these girls no more. You know it? From Gypsy?”

His elegant fingers were to the keyboard, and I was singing the opening bars, the famous preamble, in which only the dead stay home, while people like Mama, oh, they’re different, they won’t just sit and take it, they’ve got the dreams and the guts, they won’t stay and rot, they’ll always fight to get up — and out!

I rested a hand on the piano, turned in toward it, closed my eyes, and I can remember thinking I was starting small, at least, that’s what I consciously intended to do — to start small and keep it small — singing under the notes so as not to be noticed, or not noticed too much, out of the old shyness. But also out of deference to Aimee, who was not a natural singer, even if this fact was unspeakable between us. Who was in fact no more a natural singer than the bachelorettes sitting in front of me sucking down mai tais on their bar stools. But I was a natural, wasn’t I? Surely I was, despite everything? And now I found I couldn’t stay small, my eyes stayed closed but my voice lifted, and kept lifting, I got louder and louder, I did not feel I had control of it, exactly, it was something I’d released that now rose up and away and escaped my reach. My hands were in the air, I was stamping my heels into the floor. I felt I had everyone in the room. I even had a sentimental vision of myself as one in a long line of gutsy brothers and sisters, music-makers, singers, musicians, dancers, for didn’t I, too, have the gift so often ascribed to my people? I could turn time into musical phrases, into beats and notes, slowing it down and speeding it up, controlling the time of my life, finally, at last, here on a stage, if nowhere else. I thought of Nina Simone dividing each note from the next, so viciously, with such precision, as Bach, her hero, had taught her to do, and I thought of her name for it—“Black Classical Music”—she hated the word jazz, considering it a white word for black people, she rejected it totally — and I thought of her voice, the way she could extend a note beyond the point of tolerability and force her audience to concede to it, to her timescale, to her vision of the song, how she was completely without pity for her audience, and so relentless in pursuit of her freedom! But too involved in these thoughts of Nina I didn’t see the end coming, I thought I had another verse, I sang over the concluding chord, when it came, and continued some way ahead before I realized, oh, yes, yes, stop now, it’s over. If there had been riotous clapping I couldn’t hear it any longer, it seemed to have stopped. I only felt the piano player patting me, two quick pats, on my back, which was sticky and cold with the dried sweat of the previous club. I opened my eyes. Yes, the uproar in the bar was over, or maybe it had never been, everything looked as it had before, the piano player was already talking to the next performer, the bachelorettes were happily drinking and talking as if nothing had happened at all. It was two thirty in the morning. Aimee was not in her seat. She was not in the bar. I stumbled around that cramped and crowded space twice, kicked open each stall in the awful toilets, my phone at my ear, ringing and ringing and getting her answerphone. I struggled back through the bar and up the stairs to the street. I was making yelping noises of panic. It was raining, and my hair which had been blow-dried straight now began to curl back up, with terrific speed, every raindrop that hit me spurred a curl, and I reached into it and felt lamb’s wool, the damp spring of it, thick and alive. A car horn went. I looked up and saw Errol parked where we had left him. The back window went down and Aimee leaned out of it, slow-clapping.

“Oh, bravo.”

I hurried to her, apologizing. She opened the door: “Just get in.”

I sat next to her, still apologizing. She shifted forward to speak to Errol.

“Drive to midtown and back.”

Errol took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“It’s almost three,” I said, but the partition went up and off we went. For ten blocks or so Aimee said nothing at all and neither did I. As we passed through Union Square she turned to me: “Are you happy?”

“What?”

“Answer the question.”

“I don’t understand why I’m being asked the question.”

She licked her thumb and wiped some mascara I had not realized was running down my face.

“We’ve been together, what? Five years?”

“Almost seven.”

“OK. So you should know by now that I don’t want the people who work for me,” she explained slowly, as if talking to an idiot, “to be unhappy working for me. I don’t see the point in that.”

“But I’m not unhappy!”

“Then what are you?”

“Happy!”

She took the cap off her head and pulled it over mine.

“In this life,” she said, falling back against the leather, “you’ve got to know what you want. You have to visualize it, and then you have to pull it down. But we’ve talked about this many times. Many times.”

I nodded and smiled, too drunk to manage much more. I had my face wedged between the walnut and the window and from here I had a fresh view of the city, from the top down. I’d see the roof garden of a penthouse before I saw the few, stray people still out at this hour, splashing through puddled sidewalks, and I kept finding in this perspective uncanny, paranoid alignments. An old Chinese lady, a can collector, in an old-fashioned conical hat, pulling her load — hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cans gathered together in a huge plastic sheet — under the windows of a building I knew to contain a Chinese billionaire, a friend of Aimee’s, with whom she had once discussed opening a chain of hotels.

“And in this city you really need to know what it is you want,” Aimee was saying, “but I don’t think you do know, yet. OK, so you’re smart, we get that. You think what I’m saying doesn’t apply to you, but it does. The brain is connected to the heart and the eye — it’s all visualization, all of it. Want it, see it, take it. No apologies. I don’t apologize ever for what I want! But I see you — and I see that you spend your life apologizing! It’s like you’ve got survivor’s guilt or something! But we’re not in Bendigo any more! You’ve left Bendigo — right? Like Baldwin left Harlem. Like Dylan left… wherever the fuck it was he was from. Sometimes you gotta get out — get the fuck out of Bendigo! Thanks be to Christ we both have. Long ago. Bendigo’s behind us. You get what I’m saying, right?”

I nodded many times over, though I had no idea what she was saying, really, apart from the strong sense I usually had with Aimee that she found her own story universally applicable, and never more so than when drunk, that in these moments we all of us came from Bendigo, and we all of us had fathers who had died when we were young, and we had all visualized our good fortune and pulled it down toward us. The border between Aimee and everybody else became obscure, hard to make out exactly.

I felt sick. I hung my head like a dog into the New York night.

“Look, you’re not going to be doing this for ever,” I heard her say, a little later, as we entered Times Square, driving beneath an eighty-foot Somali model with a two-foot Afro dancing for joy on the side of a building in her perfectly ordinary Gap khakis. “That’s just fucking obvious. So the question becomes: what are you going to do, after this? What are you going to do with your life?”

I knew the right answer to this was meant to be “run my own” this or that, or something amorphously creative like “write a book” or “open a yoga retreat,” for Aimee thought that in order to do these sorts of things a person only had to walk into, say, a publisher’s office and announce their intent. This had been her own experience. What could she know about the waves of time that simply come at a person, one after the other? What could she know about life as the temporary, always partial, survival of that process? I fixed my eyes on the dancing Somali model.

“I’m fine! I’m happy!”

“Well, I think you’re too much in your own head,” she said, tapping hers. “Maybe you need to get laid more… You know, you never do seem to get laid. I mean: is it my fault? I set you up, don’t I? All the time. You never tell me how it goes.”

Light flooded the car. It came from a huge digital ad for something or other but inside the car it felt delicate and natural, like the break of day. Aimee rubbed her eyes.

“Well, I’ve got projects for you,” she said, “if you want projects. We all know you’re capable of more than you’re doing. At the same time, if you want to jump ship, now would be a good time to do it. I’m serious about this African project — no, don’t roll your eyes at me; we need to iron out details, of course I know that, I’m not a fool — but it’s gonna happen. Judy’s been talking to your mum. I know you don’t want to hear that either, but she has, and your mother is not as full of shit as you seem to think she is. Judy feels that the zone… Well, I’m loaded right now and I can’t remember where it is right now, tiny country… in the west? But she thinks that might be a really interesting direction for us to go in, it’s got potential. Says Judy. And turns out your honorable member of a mother knows a lot about it. Says Judy. Point is, I’m going to need all hands on deck, and people who want to be here,” she said, indicating her own heart. “Not people who are still wondering why they’re here.”

“I want to be there,” I said, looking at the spot, though under the influence of vodka her little breasts doubled themselves, then crossed, then merged.

“I turn now?” asked Errol hopefully, through a microphone.

Aimee sighed: “You turn now. Well,” she said, returning to me, “you’ve been acting screwy for months, since London. It’s a lot of bad energy. It’s the kind of bad energy that really needs to be grounded otherwise it just keeps passing round the circuit, affecting everybody.”

She made a series of hand gestures here that suggested some previously unknown law of physics.

“Something happen in London?”

By the time I’d finished answering her we’d looped back and reached Union Square, where I looked up and saw the number on that huge ticking board speeding forward, billowing smoke out of the Dantean red hole at its center. It gave me a breathless feeling. A lot of things that happened in those months in London had made me breathless: I’d finally given up my flat, for lack of use, and stood at a crowded hustings waiting all night to watch a man in a blue tie ascend the stage and concede victory to my mother in a red dress. I’d seen a flyer for a nostalgic nineties-hip-hop night, at the Jazz Café, and wanted urgently to go, but could not think of a single friend I might take, I’d simply traveled too much the past few years, was not on any of the usual sites, did not keep up with personal e-mail, partly out of lack of time and partly because Aimee frowned on our “socializing” online, fearing loose talk and leaks. Without really noticing it, I’d let my friendships wither on the vine. So I went alone, got drunk and ended up sleeping with one of the doormen, a huge American, from Philadelphia, who claimed to have once played professional basketball. Like most people in his line of work — like Granger — he had been hired for his height and his color, for the threat considered implicit in their combination. Two minutes of smoking a cigarette with him revealed a gentle soul on good terms with the universe, ill-suited to his role. I had a little pouch of coke on me, given to me by Aimee’s chef, and when my doorman’s break came we went to the bathroom stalls and took a lot of it, off a shiny ledge behind the toilets that seemed specifically designed for the purpose. He told me that he hated his job, the aggression, dreaded laying hands on anyone. We left together after his shift, giggling in a taxi as he massaged my feet. When we got back to my flat, in which everything was packed up in boxes, ready for Aimee’s huge storage facility in Marylebone, he got hold of the aspirational pull-up bar that I’d put up above my bedroom door and never used, attempted a pull-up, and ripped the stupid thing from the wall, and part of the plaster, too. In bed, though, I could hardly feel him inside of me — shriveled up by the coke, maybe. He didn’t seem to mind. Cheerfully he fell asleep on top of me like a big bear and then, with equal cheeriness, at around five a.m., wished me well and let himself out. I woke up in the morning with a nosebleed and the very clear sense that my youth, or at least this version of it, was over. Six weeks later, on a Sunday morning, as Judy and Aimee frenetically texted me about the archiving, in Milan, of a portion of Aimee’s stage wardrobe, years 92‒98, I sat, unbeknownst to them both, in the walk-in clinic of the Royal Free Hospital, awaiting the results of an STD and AIDS test, listening to several people, far less lucky than I turned out to be, being taken into side rooms to weep. But I didn’t speak to Aimee of any of this. Instead I was speaking of Tracey. Tracey of all people. The whole history of us, the chronology sliding woozily back and forth in time and vodka, all resentments writ large, pleasures either diminished or destroyed, and the longer I spoke the clearer I saw and understood — as if the truth were a sunken thing rising up through a well of vodka to meet me — that only one thing had happened in London, really: I’d seen Tracey. After so many years of not seeing Tracey I had seen her. None of the rest mattered. It was as if nothing in the period between the last time I saw her and this had happened at all.

“Wait, wait—” said Aimee, too drunk herself to disguise her impatience with another person’s monologue—“This is your oldest girlfriend, right? Yes, I know this. Did I meet her?”

“Never.”

“And she’s a dancer?”

“Yes.”

“Best type of people! Their bodies tell them what to do!”

I had been sitting on the edge of my seat, but now I deflated and lay my head back on its cold corner pillow of blacked-out glass, walnut and leather.

“Well, you can’t make old friends,” announced Aimee, in such a way that you might have assumed the phrase originated with her. “What would I do without my dear old Jude? Since we were fifteen! She fucked the dude I took to the school dance! But she calls me on my shit, yes she does. No one else does that…”

I was used to Aimee turning all stories about me into stories about her, usually I simply deferred to it, but the drink had me bold enough to believe, at that moment, that both our lives were in fact of equal weight, equally worthy of discussion, equally worthy of time.

“It was after I had that lunch with my mother,” I explained, slowly. “The night I went out with that Daniel guy? In London? The disaster date.”

Aimee frowned: “Daniel Kramer? I set you up with him. The financial guy? See, you didn’t tell me anything about that!”

“Well, it was a disaster — we went to see a show. And she was in that fucking show.”

“You spoke to her.”

“No! I haven’t spoken to her in eight years. I just told you that. Are you even listening to me?”

Aimee put two fingers to her temples.

“The timeline is confusing,” she murmured. “Plus my head hurts. Look… God, I don’t know… maybe you should call her! Sounds like you want to. Call her now — fuck it, I’ll talk to her.”

“No!”

She grabbed my phone out of my hand — laughing, scrolling through my contacts — and when I tried to reach for it she held it out of her window.

“Give it to me!”

“Oh, come on — she’ll love it.”

I managed to climb over her, snatch the phone and press it between my thighs.

“You don’t understand. She did a terrible thing to me. We were twenty-two. A terrible thing.”

Aimee raised one of her famously geometric eyebrows and sent up the partition that Errol — wanting to know which entrance to the house we were heading for, front or back — had just sent down.

“Well, now I’m genuinely interested…”

We turned into Washington Square Park. The townhouses around the square stood red and noble, their façades warmly lit, but everything inside the park was dark and dripping, empty of people, aside from the half a dozen homeless black men in the far-right corner, sitting on the chess tables, their bodies wrapped in trash bags with holes for the arms and legs. I put my face to the window, closed my eyes, felt the flecks of rain and told the story as I remembered it, the fiction and the reality, in a jagged, painful rush, as if I were running across broken glass, but when I opened my eyes it was to the sound of Aimee laughing again.

“It’s not fucking funny!”

“Wait — are you being serious right now?”

She tried pulling her top lip back into her mouth and biting down on it.

“You don’t think it’s possible,” she asked, “that maybe you’re making a big deal out of not so much?”

“What?”

“Honestly the only person I feel sorry for in that scenario — if it’s true — is your dad. Poor guy! Super-lonely, trying to get his rocks—”

“Stop it!”

“It’s not like he’s Jeffrey Dahmer.”

“It’s not normal! That’s not a normal thing to do!”

“Normal? Don’t you understand that every man in this world with access to a computer, including the President, is right at this moment either looking at vaginas or has just stopped looking at vaginas—”

“It’s not the same—”

“It’s exactly the same. Except your dad didn’t even have a computer. You think if George W. Bush looks up ‘Teen Asian Pussy’—then what? He’s a fucking serial killer?”

“Well…”

“Good point — bad example.”

I chuckled, despite myself.

“I’m sorry. Maybe I’m being stupid. I don’t get it. Why are you angry, exactly? Because she told you? You just said you thought it was bullshit!”

It was startling, after so many years of my own twisted logic, to hear the problem ironed out into Aimee’s preferred straight line. The clarity disturbed me.

“She was always lying. She had this idea my father was perfect, and she wanted to ruin him for me, she wanted to make me hate my father like she hates hers. I couldn’t ever really look him in the eye after. And it was that way till he died.”

Aimee sighed. “That’s the stupidest fucking thing I ever heard. You went and made yourself sad for no reason at all.”

She reached out to touch my shoulder, but I turned my back on her and wiped a rogue tear from my eye.

“Pretty stupid.”

“No. We all have our shit. You should call your friend, though.”

She made a little pillow of her jacket and lay her head against her window, and by the time we’d crossed Sixth Avenue she was already asleep. She was the queen of power naps, had to be, to live as she did.

Earlier that year, in London — a few days before the local elections — I’d had lunch with my mother. It was a gray, humid day, people moved across the bridge joylessly, beaten down by the drizzling rain, and even the grandest monuments, even Parliament, looked grim to me, sad and underwhelming. It all made me wish we were already in New York. I wanted all that height and sun-struck glass, and then after New York, Miami, and then five stops in South America and finally the European tour, twenty cities, ending in London once again. In this way, a whole year could pass by. I liked it that way. Other people had seasons to get through, they had to drag themselves through each year. In Aimee’s world we didn’t live like that. We couldn’t even if we’d wanted to: we were never in one place long enough. If we didn’t like winter we flew toward summer. When we were tired of cities we went to the beach — and vice versa. I’m exaggerating a little, not by much. My late twenties had passed in a weird state of timelessness, and I think now that not everyone could have fallen into a life like that, that I must have been somehow primed for it. Later I wondered whether we were chosen primarily for this reason, exactly because we tended to be people with few external ties, without partners or children, with the very minimum of family. The way we lived certainly kept us that way. Out of Aimee’s four female assistants, only one of us ever had a child, and only then in her mid-forties, long after quitting. Climbing aboard that Learjet, you had to be untethered. It wouldn’t have worked otherwise. I had only one rope now — my mother — and she was, like Aimee, in her prime, although unlike Aimee my mother had very little need of me. She was flying high herself, a few days from becoming the Member of Parliament for Brent West, and as I turned left, heading toward the Oxo Tower, leaving Parliament behind me, I felt, as usual, my own smallness next to her, the scale of what she had achieved, the frivolousness of my own occupation in comparison, despite all she’d tried to direct me toward. She seemed more impressive to me than ever. I held tight to the barrier, all the way, until I was across.

It was too damp to sit out on the terrace. I searched the restaurant for several minutes, but then spotted my mother, outside after all, under an umbrella, sheltered from the drizzle, and with Miriam, though there had been no mention, in our phone call, of Miriam. I didn’t dislike Miriam. I didn’t have any feeling about her really, it was hard to have feelings about her: she was so small and quiet and serious. All her dull features were gathered in the middle of her little face, and her natural hair was wound into sista dreads, genteelly graying at their tips. She had a little pair of round, gold-rimmed glasses which she never removed and made her eyes look even tinier than they were. She wore sensible brown fleeces and plain black trousers, no matter the occasion. A human picture frame, her only purpose to set off my mother. All that my mother ever really said about Miriam was: “Miriam makes me very happy.” Miriam never spoke about herself — she only spoke about my mother. I had to google her to discover she was Afro-Cuban, by way of Lewisham, that once she’d worked in international aid but now taught at Queen Mary’s — in some very lowly adjunct position — and had been writing a book “about the diaspora” for longer than I’d known her, which was about four years. She was introduced to my mother’s constituents with a minimum of fuss at some event in a local school, photographed, tucked into the side of my mother, a timid dormouse standing by her lioness, and the journalist from the Willesden and Brent Times got exactly the same line I’d been given: “Miriam makes me very happy.” Nobody seemed especially interested, not even the old Jamaican men and the African evangelicals. I got the sense that her constituents did not really think of my mother and Miriam as lovers, they were simply those two nice Willesden ladies, who had saved the old cinema and fought to expand the leisure center and established Black History Month throughout the local libraries. Campaigning, they made an effective pair: if you found my mother overbearing, you could take comfort in Miriam’s unassuming passivity, while people who were bored by Miriam relished the excitement my mother created wherever she went. Looking at Miriam now, nodding quickly, receptively, as my mother speechified, I knew that I was also glad of Miriam: she was a useful buffer. I went over and put a hand on my mother’s shoulder. She did not look up or stop talking, but she registered my touch and raised a hand to lay over mine, accepting the kiss I pressed to her cheek. I drew out a chair and sat down.

“How are you, Mum?”

“Stressed!”

“Your mother’s very stressed,” confirmed Miriam, and began quietly to list all the many causes of my mother’s stress: the envelopes that had to be stuffed and the flyers yet to be posted, the closeness of the latest polling, the underhand tactics of the opposition, and the supposed double-dealing of the only other black woman in Parliament, an MP of twenty years’ standing, whom my mother considered, for no sensible reason, her bitter rival. I nodded in the right places and looked through the menu and managed to order some wine from a passing waiter, all without breaking the flow of Miriam’s talk, her numbers and percentages, the careful regurgitations of the various “brilliant” things my mother had said to so-and-so at this or that vital moment and how so-and-so had responded, poorly, to whatever brilliant thing it was my mother had said.

“But you’re going to win,” I said, with an intonation I realized, too late, was posed awkwardly between statement and question.

My mother looked stern, unfolded her napkin and lay it on her lap, like a queen who has been asked, impertinently, if her people still love her.

“If there’s any justice,” she said.

Our food arrived, my mother had ordered for me. Miriam set about squirreling hers away — she reminded me of a small mammal who expects to hibernate soon — but my mother let her knife and fork rest where they were and instead reached down to the empty chair beside her to bring up a copy of the Evening Standard, already open to a large picture of Aimee, on stage, juxtaposed with a stock photo of some destitute African children, from where exactly I couldn’t tell. I hadn’t seen the piece and it was held too far from me to read the text but I guessed the source: a recent press release, announcing Aimee’s commitment to “global poverty reduction.” My mother tapped a finger on Aimee’s abdomen.

“Is she serious about it?”

I considered the question. “She’s very passionate about it.”

My mother frowned and picked up her cutlery.

“‘Poverty reduction.’ Well, fine, but what’s the policy, specifically?”

“She’s not a politician, Mum. She doesn’t have policies. She has a foundation.”

“Well, what is it she wants to do?”

I poured some wine for my mother and made her pause for a moment and clink a glass with me.

“I think it’s really a school she wants to build. A girls’ school.”

“Because if she’s serious,” said my mother, over my reply, “you should advise her that she needs to talk to us, to be in partnership with government in one way or another… Obviously she has the financial means and the public’s attention — that’s all good — but without understanding the mechanics, it’s just a lot of good intention that goes nowhere. She needs to meet with the relevant authorities.”

I smiled to hear my mother referring to herself, already, as “government.”

The next thing I said so irritated her she turned and gave her answer to Miriam instead.

“Oh, please—I really wish you wouldn’t behave as if I’m asking for some great favor. I’ve no interest AT ALL in meeting that woman, none at all. Never have had. I was offering some advice. I thought it would be welcome.”

“And it’s welcome, Mum, thank you. I just—”

“I mean, really, you’d think this woman would want to talk to us! We gave her a British passport, after all. Well, never mind. It just seemed, from this”—she held up the paper again—“that she had serious intentions, but maybe that’s not right, maybe she just wants to embarrass herself, I wouldn’t know. ‘White woman saves Africa.’ Is that the idea? Very old idea. Well, it’s your world, not mine, thank God. But she should really speak with Miriam, at least, the fact is Miriam has a lot of useful contacts, rural contacts, educational contacts — she’s too modest to tell you. She was at Oxfam for a decade, for God’s sake. Poverty is not just a headline, my love, it’s a lived reality, on the ground — and education is at the heart of it.”

“I know what poverty is, Mum.”

My mother smiled sadly, and bit down on a forkful of food.

“No, dear, you don’t.”

My phone, which I had been trying, with all the will available to me, not to look at, buzzed again — it had buzzed a dozen times since I’d sat down — and now I took it out and tried to move quickly through the backlog, eating with my phone in one hand. Miriam brought up a dull administrative matter with my mother, often her way when she found herself caught up in some argument of ours, but in the middle of dealing with it my mother became visibly bored.

“You’re addicted to that phone. You do know that?”

I didn’t stop typing but made my face as calm as I could manage.

“It’s work, Mum. This is how people work now.”

“You mean: like slaves?”

She ripped a piece of bread in half and offered the smaller section to Miriam, something I’d seen her do before, it was her version of a diet.

“No, not like slaves. Mum, I have a nice life!”

She thought about this with her mouth full. She shook her head.

“No, that’s not right — you don’t have a life. She has a life. She has her men and her children and her career—she has the life. We read about it in the papers. You service her life. She’s a giant sucking thing, sucking your youth, taking up all your—”

To stop her talking I pushed my chair back and went to the bathroom, lingering at the mirrors for longer than I needed, sending more e-mails, but when I got back, the conversation continued uninterrupted, as if no time at all had passed. My mother was still complaining, but to Miriam: “—all your time. She distorts everything. She’s the reason I won’t be having any grandchildren.”

“Mum, my reproductive situation’s really got nothing—”

“You’re too close, you can’t see it. She’s made you suspicious of everybody.”

I denied it, but the arrow hit the target. Wasn’t I suspicious — always on guard? Primed for any sign of what Aimee and I called, between ourselves, “customers”? A customer: someone we judged to be using me in the hope of getting close to her. Sometimes, in the early years, if a relationship of mine did manage — despite all the obstacles of time and geography — to putter along for a few months, I would build up a bit of confidence and courage, and would introduce whoever it was to Aimee, and this was usually a bad idea. The moment he went to the bathroom or out for a cigarette, I’d ask Aimee the question: customer? And the answer would come: Oh, honey, I’m sorry, definitely a customer.

“Look at the way you treat old friends. Tracey. You two were practically sisters, grew up together — now you don’t even speak to her!”

“Mum, you always hated Tracey.”

“That’s not the point. People come from somewhere, they have roots — you’ve let this woman pull yours right out of the ground. You don’t live anywhere, you don’t have anything, you’re constantly on a plane. How long can you live like that? I don’t think she even wants you to be happy. Because then you might leave her. And then where would she be?”

I laughed, but the sound I made was ugly, even to me.

“She’d be fine! She’s Aimee! I’m only assistant number one, you know — there’re three others!”

“I see. So she can have any amount of people in her life but you can only have her.”

“No, you don’t see.” I looked up from my phone. “I’m actually going out with someone tonight? Who Aimee set me up with, so.”

“Well, that’s nice,” said Miriam. Her favorite thing in life was to see a conflict resolved, any conflict, and so my mother was a great resource for her: everywhere she went she made conflict, which Miriam then had to resolve.

My mother perked up: “Who is he?”

“You wouldn’t know him. He’s from New York.”

“Can’t I know his name? Is it a state secret?”

“Daniel Kramer. His name is Daniel Kramer.”

“Ah,” said my mother, smiling inscrutably at Miriam. An infuriating look of complicity passed between them. “Another nice Jewish boy.”

As the waiter came to clear our plates the sun appeared in the gunmetal sky. Rainbows passed through the wine glasses on to the wet silverware, through the backs of the Perspex chairs, spreading from Miriam’s commitment ring to a linen napkin that sat between the three of us. I refused dessert, said I had to get going, but as I moved to take my raincoat off the back of the chair my mother nodded at Miriam and Miriam passed me a folder, official-looking, ring-bound, with chapters and photographs, lists of contacts, architectural suggestions, a brief history of education in the region, an analysis of the likely “media impact,” plans for government partnership, and so on: a “viability study.” The sun crept through the gray, a mental fog cleared, I saw that the whole lunch had been for this purpose, really, and I was just a channel through which information was meant to pass, to Aimee. My mother, too, was a customer.

I thanked her for the folder and sat looking at its cover, closed in my lap.

“And how are you feeling,” asked Miriam, blinking anxiously behind her glasses, “about your father? The anniversary’s Tuesday, isn’t it?”

It was so unusual to be asked a personal question during a lunch with my mother — never mind having a date significant to me remembered — that at first I wasn’t sure it was addressed to me. My mother, too, looked alarmed. It was painful for us both to be reminded that the last time we’d seen each other had in fact been at the funeral, a full year earlier. Bizarre afternoon: the coffin met the flames, I sat next to my father’s children — now adults in their late thirties and forties — and experienced a replay of the only other time I’d met them: the daughter wept, the son sat back in his chair with his arms folded across his chest, skeptical of death itself. And I, who couldn’t cry, once again found them both to be far more convincing children of my father than I had ever been. And yet, in our family, we had never wanted to admit this unlikelihood, we always batted away what we considered to be the banal and prurient curiosity of strangers—“But won’t she grow up confused?” “How will she choose between your cultures?”—to the point that sometimes I felt the whole purpose of my childhood was to demonstrate to the less enlightened that I was not confused and had no trouble choosing. “Life is confusing!”—my mother’s imperious rebuff. But isn’t there also a deep expectation of sameness between parent and child? I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end — we are not our parents and they are not us — my father’s children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years, were perhaps only learning it fully at this very moment, as the flames ate the pinewood, whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face. But this was all my private drama: afterward, at the reception, I realized something larger than my loss had been going on the whole time, yes, wherever I walked in that crematorium I heard it, an ambient buzz, Aimee, Aimee, Aimee, louder than my father’s name and more frequent, as people tried to figure out if she was really in attendance, and then, later — when they decided she must have already come and gone — you could hear it again, in mournful echo, Aimee, Aimee, Aimee… I even heard my sister ask my brother if he’d seen her. She was there throughout, hiding in plain sight. A discreet, surprisingly short woman, make-up free, so pale as to be almost translucent, in a prim-tweed suit with blue veins running up her legs, wearing her own natural, straight, brown hair.

“I think I’m going to lay flowers,” I said, pointing vaguely across the river, toward North London. “Thanks for asking.”

“One day off work!” said my mother, turning back, joining the train of the conversation at an earlier stop. “The day of his funeral. One day!”

“Mum, one day was all I asked for.”

My mother affected a face of maternal woundedness.

“You used to be so close to your father. I know that I always encouraged you to be. I really don’t know what happened.”

For a moment I wanted to tell her. Instead I watched a pleasure boat churn up the Thames. A few people sat dotted among the rows of empty seats, looking out at the gray water. I went back to my e-mail.

“Those poor boys,” I heard my mother say, and when I raised my head from my phone I found her nodding at Hungerford Bridge as the boat passed under it. At once the same image that I knew was in her mind floated up in my own: two young men, thrown over the railing, into the water. The one who lived and the one who died. I shivered and pulled my cardigan more tightly across my chest.

“And there was a girl, too,” added my mother, tipping a fourth sugar into a frothy cappuccino. “I don’t think she was even sixteen. Practically children, all of them. Such a tragedy. They must still be in prison.”

“Of course they’re still in prison — they killed a man.” I drew a breadstick from a thin china vase and broke it into quarters. “He’s also still dead. Also a tragedy.”

“I understand that,” snapped my mother. “I was in the public gallery almost every day for that case, if you remember.”

I remembered. I was not long out of the flat and it had been my mother’s habit to call me each evening when she got home from the High Court, to tell me the stories — though I didn’t ask to hear them — each with its own grotesque sadness, but all somehow the same: children abandoned by mothers or fathers or both, raised by grandparents, or not raised at all, whole childhoods spent caring for sick relatives, in crumbling prison-like estates, all south of the river, teenagers kicked out of school, or home, or both, drug abuse, sexual abuse, on the rob, sleeping rough — the thousand and one ways a life can be sunk in misery almost before it’s begun. I remember one of them was a college drop-out. Another had a five-year-old daughter, killed in a car accident the day before. They were all already petty criminals. And my mother was fascinated by them, she had a vague idea to write something about the case, for what was, by that point, her Ph.D. She never did.

“Have I annoyed you?” she asked, placing a hand over mine.

“Two innocent boys walking across a fucking bridge!”

As I spoke I rapped my free fist on the table, without meaning to — an old habit of my mother’s. She looked concernedly at me and righted the toppled salt-cellar.

“But darling, who’s arguing with that?”

“We can’t all be innocent.” Out of a corner of my eye I saw a waiter, who’d just come out to check on the bill, tactfully withdraw. “Somebody has to be guilty!”

“Agreed,” murmured Miriam, twisting a napkin fretfully in her hands. “I don’t think anybody’s disagreeing, are they?”

“They didn’t have a chance,” said my mother quietly, but firmly, and only later, walking back across the bridge, when my bad temper had passed, did I see that it was a sentence moving in two directions.