‘Agreed,’ I said. ‘It’s not something you can print on a T-shirt or a bumper sticker.’
‘Yes. I mean, Saul, what’s Augie March “about”?’
And Saul said, ‘It’s about two hundred pages too long.’
At the time, and given the circumstances, I thought this was perfect: aslant, athwart, and inspiring a burst of relieved laughter…A decade later I learnt that Saul’s joke went all the way back to the time of Augie’s publication in 1953. The long-term memories of the victims of Dr Alois, as I would go on to see, are more readily available than whatever it was that happened five minutes ago.
And I would still say that after half a century Saul’s joke stood up pretty well. All the same, it was his only utterance of the afternoon.
Wrecking ball
He was becalmed in the doldrums of dementia – in windless stasis. That was one way of imagining it. What were the other ways? When he asked me about Nat and Gus, and went on asking me about Nat and Gus, I was stunned by the extent of the destruction already wrought; it was as if a host of Goths or Vandals had come and gone; everything that was beautiful or holy had been looted or wrecked. Yet here there was no human agency; the thing was insensible and indifferent…I eventually realised that Saul himself had come up with the most telling image, and he did it forty years ago, in Herzog.*14 From a famous paragraph:
At the corner he paused to watch the work of the wrecking crew. The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight browsing on kitchens and parlors. Everything it touched wavered and burst, spilled down. There rose a white tranquil cloud of plaster dust.
And Dr Alzheimer’s mission was not yet fully accomplished. The story wasn’t over, any more than the day was over for Moses Herzog: ‘The sun, now leaving for New Jersey and the west, was surrounded by a brilliant broth of atmospheric gases.’
James Bond and Captain Sparrow
‘He likes James Bond,’ said Rosamund on the phone.
‘He likes James Bond?’
‘Yes. If we could watch James Bond. With snacks. Little pastries and chocolates. I’ll get all that.’
The idea was to appease Saul’s frantic restlessness, at least for a couple of hours – to lull him with James Bond…
Rosamund said, ‘He likes James Bond. We like James Bond.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Come around two. I like James Bond.’
∗
In the pre-credit sequence James Bond – or Pierce Brosnan – is arriving in some Far Eastern fleshpot by sea, having crossed a great stretch of the South Pacific, not by sailing ship like Conrad on the Otago, but by surfboard…
The three of us were crouched round the screen, eating the little snacks.
On the beach or the harbour shore the great Brosnan unzips his wetsuit to reveal a tuxedo – an hommage to the much more commanding and graceful Sean Connery in (perhaps) From Russia with Love. And pretty soon Pierce is closeted in the penthouse bedroom with a champagne bucket and a scheming beauty…
‘Is this it?’ said Saul.
‘Apparently so,’ I said.
During that visit I had prolonged my stay at a hotel that followed the all-suite format, and my rooms were chintzily gemütlich, as were the pastries and chocolates in their twirly wrappings. The pay-per-view service was efficient, the tea hot and fresh. The only distraction, I found, was the reproachful daylight beyond the wispy curtains, making me feel that I must’ve shirked some vital duty. The heavens that afternoon were interestingly split-level, baby blue below, but glowered down on by black smears and coalescing thunderheads.
By now Brosnan was kaleidoscopically involved with high-performance automobiles, mountain roads, manmade avalanches, hovering Predator drones.
Saul had stopped eating and was stiffly thrashing about in his seat. Suddenly he said with a touch of raggedness and even despair,
‘Are we going to be here all night?’
—————
In the evening of my last full day in Boston he and I companionably watched a video of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. We exchanged words during the screening, words about the film, words about this and that. Rosie was of the audience, gazing up now and then from her other interests, toys, picture books; and Rosamund, who was making one of her expert dinners, passed through with appetisers and glasses of wine (for me).
‘Unsentimental,’ I said to Saul, after Captain Sparrow’s forensic visit to a whorehouse – a whorehouse that evidently spanned a whole island. The men were all drunkenly brawling and crashing around, and the women bore the vivid traces of maulings and batterings. ‘You couldn’t call it schmaltzy.’
‘I guess not.’
‘Christ, look at the size of the bruise on that blonde’s cleavage.’
But now Captain Sparrow was once again on the high seas. His quest? To locate and reclaim his old ship, the Black Pearl, stolen from him by his onetime messmate Hector Barbossa…
‘Pirates have been classified as terrorists,’ I said, not really expecting any response. ‘They were religious too, often – Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, though not Jewish, I don’t think. And they were often all-gay…We’re fond of pirates. We indulge them.’
‘Bluebeard,’ said Saul.
I had seen Pirates of the Caribbean before (sitting between Nat and Gus). Saul had also seen it before, last night, here at Crowninshield Road, and would be seeing it tomorrow, and the next day. We were actually seeing it again fifteen minutes later, because the tape mysteriously rewound and restarted. Now Captain Sparrow (Johnny Depp) was about to rescue Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley); he stood on the taffrail of the anchored galleon, and then he made the dive into the dark water.
In considered admiration Saul said, ‘He’s a brave boy.’
‘He certainly is,’ I said. ‘A very brave boy.’
Brave was what we were all going to have to be from now on. None more so than Rosamund…The strangely dogged interconnectedness of that
