Their pizzas came, and while they ate Martin joined the conversation (a notably unstructured exchange about the dangers faced by somnambulists, especially those somnambulists who lived on aeroplanes, as Eliza planned one day to do). But it was not yet seven o’clock and he wasn’t hungry enough, so he made what progress he could with the house red before slipping outside for a smoke…
It had never bothered him, morally – what he thought of as the transactional phase or blip in his time with Phoebe. All the haggling and counterbidding was conducted in a febrile, giggly, not to say mildly hysterical spirit; it was comic relief from the gravity of a wrecked childhood, and somehow allowing them to move sideways – into their earthly paradise…Martin ground out his cigarette under his shoe and went back to watch the girls primly wallowing in their ice creams.
∗
‘I need to see the ruin,’ Elena said outside. The others had gone on a few yards ahead (Eliza shouldering her way through the wind). ‘I want to see what’s left.’
‘They say it stinks…There’s a couplet of Auden’s daubed all over the city. The unmentionable odour of death / Offends the September night. And it does smell of death, apparently. And of liquefied computers. Hitch says he took all his clothes straight to the cleaner’s.’
‘I want to feel the weight of what came down…’
He took her arm. ‘Are you going to write about it?’
‘Maybe.’ When Elena emphasised maybe on the first syllable, as here, she usually meant yes. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Walk me to the Zoo and back. Come on.’
At the gate to the front garden they peeled off from their daughters and made their way in shared silence to the northern rim of Regent’s Park. The taste of the air: it wasn’t local, he realised, or even hemispherical, or even terrestrial. Yes, the equinox, when day and night went halves on the twenty-four hours; it happened twice a year (the third week in March, the third week in September), as the sun crossed ‘the celestial equator’. So for an interlude you were subject not only to the home biosphere but also to the solar system and its larger arrangements. Did this explain the accompanying arrow shower of physical memories? You felt yourself as a multi-annual being; and instead of making you feel old, as you’d expect it to do, it made you feel young, precariously connecting you to earlier incarnations, to your forties, your thirties, your twenties, your teens and beyond, all the way from experience to innocence…The Child is Father of the man. True, O poet of the lakes; and twice a year, in March, in September, the man is father of the child.
…Standing at the railings near the Zoo’s entranceway, they listened hopefully, and lingered long enough to pick up the odd neigh, whinny, roar, and trumpet.
They started back and after a few paces Elena said, ‘For how long did she give you a hard time about Lily? Phoebe.’
He readjusted. Then he said, ‘She didn’t. She barely mentioned it. Maybe she was still nuts on Parfait Amour. Weird, because Phoebe wasn’t one to forgive and forget. But she seemed to let it go. I wonder why.’
Elena tightened her grip on his arm and brought him to a halt. She turned full face, full face, and pale in the light of the conscious moon.
‘Well now you know. That settles it, fool. She’d already got her own back – with your father.’ Elena shook her head. ‘You’re as blind as a kitten sometimes.’
The manhole
On October 7 the first American cruise missiles struck Afghanistan, and on October 11 Elena flew safely back to London; and on October 31 I myself crossed the Atlantic. To spend a few days in Manhattan and then take the shuttle to Boston. I had hoped of course to see Christopher, but he was in the city of Peshawar on the Pakistani–Afghan border, at the head of the Khyber Pass…
‘Some of them are really fired up about it – none more so than Norman.’ Them, in this sentence, meant New York novelists, and Norman was of course Norman Mailer. ‘He wanted to start writing a long novel about 9/11 on 9/12.’
The speaker was a young publisher friend, Jonas. We were drinking beer in an empty dive on 52nd Street.
I said, ‘The urge soon passed, I bet. Norman’s too wise about the ways of fiction. Have you read The Spooky Art? He’ll wait. Something like this takes years to sink in.’
‘I’m told that Bret’ – Bret Easton Ellis, the rather blithely unsqueamish author of American Psycho – ‘is struck dumb. For now.’ ‘Well. Everyone’s responding in their, at their own…’
Jonas said, ‘We have a lady in Publicity who does the press ads? She reads the book, she reads all the reviews, and she assembles and arranges the quotes. She’s the best there is at that, and she’s eighty-three. Totally on the ball. And you know something? She can’t take it in. She was here – she saw what happened. But she doesn’t get what happened. “I can’t take it in,” she says. “It’s too big.” ’
‘…It’s too big.’
Three times I went downtown to what they were now calling the Pile.
My wife, in her piece,*7 wrote that Ground Zero made her think of a steaming manhole. A fourteen-acre manhole. When she was there, in late September, the double high-rise of the WTC had become a medium-rise – a rusted steel and rubbish heap stretching to twenty storeys (down from 110). Now, in early November, the medium-rise had become a low-rise, chewed at its periphery by excavators and various other mechanical dredgers and burrowers…
‘The unmentionable odour of death’ had lifted and dispersed. Later in Auden’s poem we read:
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man…
Down at the Pile the air was no longer neutral (it was redolent of doused flames, scorched electrics, and the dusty undertaste of a lost battle); but the
