She said, “Sit down, my darling,” and appraised him through her winding smoke. On the ship he’d stared at her face for an hour a night, every night for seven. He wasn’t used to being looked at, or being called my darling. “I’ve got a home I can’t go back to myself. Can you pay weekly rent?”
“A little,” he said. He hadn’t been paid for his work on the boat—that would have happened on the return—but in his knapsack he had a stack of traveler’s checks, his entire savings, withdrawn the day he left.
“Remind me your name?”
“Lenny.”
“Oh no,” she said. She reached over to an ashtray on a side table to stab out her cigarette, the same gesture she used to punctuate all conversations, including the ones she had onstage with her several varieties of self. Her hair was a strange tweedy combination of dark and light. “We’ve already got a Lenny. What’s your last name?”
“Valert.”
“Jack,” she said. “Jack Valert. Suits you.”
So he was Jack.
He called his parents six nights later, two in the morning on Lottie’s phone, with the knowledge that it would be cheaper at that hour though possibly still astronomically expensive. He’d never made a long-distance phone call in his life. It was the day before he was due to return.
“How are you?” his mother said. “Shattered, I expect.”
“I’m in London.”
There was a pause. He wondered how much each second would cost. He would have to pay Lottie back.
“Why are you in London?” his mother said at last.
“I’m fine. I’ll come back in time for school.”
“Better had,” said his mother. He could hear his father in the background, and his mother said, her hand over the phone lightly, so he could hear, “It’s fine, it’s Lenny, it’s long-distance.”
He’d been Jack for less than a week but Lenny seemed lives ago. Of course his parents wouldn’t be alarmed. His youngest older sister had been twelve when they’d moved to New York, already boarding at Downe House in Berkshire. He had a faint memory of her as a womanish child or childish woman during school breaks. Fiona and Eloise, too, had gone to boarding school, come to the States for the summers and winter hols, and then graduated and gone on to English lives. Months went by when his parents didn’t see the girls. Only Lenny had been raised as an American, sent by his parents to public school—public in the American sense, less impressive, as everything was, in the American sense—as an experiment or a form of surrender. They regarded him as a sort of hanger-on with a pot-metal accent.
“Come when you’re able,” his mother said to him. “Do let us know your plans.”
Lottie gave him her guest room, a narrow space at the back of the flat, with a window at the foot of the bed and a large dresser with a mirror along one wall. “For practice,” she said. “That’s the only way to learn, practice in the mirror. I can’t teach you. I can give you this book, and you can read it, but you’ll have to put in the hours.”
“Am I really too old?”
“No,” she said. “You’re young yet. You might make it.”
“Were you young?”
“I was, yeah. Ten. My brother had an Archie Andrews figure he’d lost interest in. It’s like a language or an instrument. Easier when you yourself believe in all the mysteries of the universe. But not impossible afterward. Here.” From the top dresser drawer she got out a puppet shaped like a hen, brown with a yellow beak and a drooping red comb.
He put it on his hand. It was tight across the knuckles and abrasive around the wrist.
She turned him by the shoulders so they faced the mirror. Without puppet or pretense, she began to talk without moving her lips. “The hardest letter to say is B. Bottle of beer. The boy bought a ball. Barnum brought barnacles by Boston.” Then her mouth was mobile again. “The trick is you don’t really say it. You say D, but you think B.”
What he had loved about watching her on the boat: the hot cider of her voice against the dry toast of Willie Shavers’s, her measured exasperation with him. No: what he loved was big Willie Shavers himself, the glass eyes that looked from side to side, his levering eyebrows, the mystery of his mouth with its stiff lips and painted tongue. Squawkanna the parrot bored him; ditto the yellow tomcat, whose name was Captain Sims. This nameless hen, too. They were mere puppets, animals, sweet, but Willie Shavers unsettled Lenny—Jack, now, he agreed, it suited him—Willie Shavers upset Jack in a way that felt very much like love. He realized, in this small room, shirtless, looking at himself in the mirror, that it was Willie he had come for. Willie, who was a bully but yet could be bullied.
Lottie collected his rent and assigned him chores. She was astounded by what he didn’t know. “Rinse out the tub after a bath!” she said. Also, “Sit down while you eat.” Also, “It’s a small flat, nothing can be higgledy-piggledy.” Also, “Time to draw the curtains.” She believed in putting the physical world in order in a way he would have thought impossible. She was a genius at it. She paid him for lugging her equipment to performances, took the money back for rent and groceries. Her bathroom was long, with a navy-blue toilet and a navy-blue tub with no shower and an entire mirrored wall: maybe she practiced her Bs and Vs in every room. He hated standing up from a bath to catch sight of his dripping, naked body, the acne he’d
