thought, you’re going back to Peter Jones tomorrow to buy me a real chair. He pictured a huge leather recliner on sale; Elizabeth would be horrified, but he couldn’t stop the thought. She’d never know anyway. Maybe Francine would like to take the chair home in August when he left. She deserved some booty if she was going to be unemployed.
As he stood up to shake the wet off his trouser legs, the telephone rang. He ignored it. It went on ringing and he patted his hips and his chest, where his jacket pockets might have been, thinking about his cell phone. Anybody who seriously wanted to reach him called him on his cell phone. He looked at his jacket hanging over the computer screen and thought, I left the phone downstairs in my bag. Still, he picked the jacket up, felt the weight of it, shook it a little, batted at the pockets. Then suddenly he reached for the phone on the floor, thinking, Maybe it’s Elizabeth. They must have arrived.
His voice was just a flat bark. ‘Yup?’
‘Is that David?’ It was a man.
Nailed by the office; guess I’m a sucker. ‘Yup, it’s David. What is it?’
‘Do you mean who is it?’
‘Oh, Christ.’ But David’s blood was already rising; he was always ready to spar. He knew the voice, a big, deep American voice. Teasing, basically friendly. Who the hell was it?
‘David! It’s Leon!’
‘Jesus! Leon? How’d you find me here?’
‘It’s just your house, isn’t it? This number?’
‘Yeah—barely! I’m about to sell the house and move home!’
‘Home?’
‘Well—Virginia.’
‘Virginia?’
‘Jesus, Leon, where the hell are you? Are you in London?’
‘Of course I’m in London. I live here. I’ve lived here for nearly a year!’
‘You’re joking! What are you doing?’
‘Calling you.’
‘Asshole! Come over and have a beer with me. I’m all alone in Belgravia. Ditched by Elizabeth and the kids till the end of the summer. A quivering wreck!’
‘I’m there. I’m staring at your address. Give me twenty minutes.’
How could Leon spend a whole year in London and not call until tonight? It was unbelievable.
In college, David had seen Leon every day, twice a day, all day long and half the night. And afterwards, those strident, crazy years starting out in New York. Twenty-five-hour days at the office, it had seemed like. The towering, gut-boiling canyons of steel and glass. The sweaty shock of competing full-out with everyone in the whole world all the time; bosses and colleagues who didn’t necessarily want you to win and who didn’t necessarily even look upon you as a team-mate; results that made the real newspapers. We went into that life full-bore, David thought, busting for action action action. Everything so fast-forward that pretty soon nothing else would do. Speed-addicting days, with the occasional split second of wrung-out leisure in that airless walk-up on East 12th Street, drifts of dirty clothes on the floor, tin-foil-and-white-paper packaging from the Chinese carry-out erupting from the kitchen trash can. David could just about smell sesame noodles, pizza, stale beer. He thought of their slapstick antics trying to clean the place up and make it seem like a real apartment when one of them wanted to bring a girl back.
Time was nothing. Gone.
Are we that old already? That duty-ridden? What are we doing with our lives, that we move further and further forward without holding on to anything from the past? How did I lose touch with Leon of all people? My best friend, among a lot of good friends.
He pictured Leon’s huge, bounding limbs that could look so ungainly at first, his scraggly blondish hair, long, thin, never really combed. His colossal, uncontrollable grin that peeled his lips back like an apple, or something bigger, a melon, being sliced open. Leon seemed like an enormous dog, a yellow Lab, but he was so much more collected than that. In sport, his timing was perfect, incredible. And when David pictured Leon, he saw the dirty-blond hair lift slightly over the ears, as if Leon were in motion.
Climbing the stairs to his bedroom, David saw Leon, as he’d seen him for years in his mind’s eye, skating fast, his ice hockey helmet clamped onto his head like a flying ace’s, hair blowing out through the ear pieces, and the pads which made their team-mates into blimps and clowns hanging loose on his giant’s physique, his stick swinging like a pendulum backwards and forwards over the bladescored ice, the puck cradled, babied, protected, then slapped silly into the goal.
His timing was perfect, tonight, too, David realized. When did I ever need Leon’s company more?
He opened his closet door half-expecting his clothes to be gone. But there hung the sober row of dark, handmade suits on heavy wooden hangers, neatly spaced, the elbows ever so slightly bent so that the jackets seemed to be politely offering him their arms. He tugged a pair of khakis off the last hanger and felt around on the shelf above for a pullover. The bedroom, David thought, looked relatively undisturbed by the movers. Some things were missing—the mirror above his chest of drawers, for instance, and his bedside table. Had she left every telephone like that on the floor?
He bent down and pressed the intercom then stood up to buckle his belt.
‘Hey, Francine.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘I’m expecting a friend. Bring up a couple more of those beers when he gets here.’
‘Yes, sir.’
When he had changed his clothes and splashed water on his face and hands, David went back down to the drawing-room and turned on the lights. It was an absurd choice, the blue silk sofa or the pink and green flowered chair in his study. None of it suits Leon any better than it suits me, he thought. It might as well be made of matchsticks.
He went out onto the balcony in the tawny semi-darkness of the lamp-lit street. His mind was streaming with images from the past, easily, unexpectedly. He felt amazed at all the time that had gone by. He had reached a watershed without meaning to; he might have missed it altogether.
I’m always about the next thing that’s going to happen, David thought to himself. I’ve been poised on the balls of my feet, on the edge of my chair, convinced that there will be nothing more and that I’ll be bored out of my mind.
What if I were not so afraid of being bored? Would life pass more slowly? Could I choose what to do on purpose, shape my destiny a little? Instead of lying like a feeding fish on the current, putting myself in the way of an endless stream of events and just reacting?
He began to wonder whether what had happened so far in his life might be all he should expect. And he thought: A lot of it’s lost, dammit. But if I could go backwards to those lost events, have them all again, it might be enough to carry me for a long time. For ever? Maybe. Nothing was connected up; it had just gone on endlessly happening, with no time for reflection. His experiences seemed disparate, tumultuous, unrelated. Some things, he thought, he might have paid too little attention to, so that he wouldn’t be able to recover them now if he wanted to. But the human mind is deep, he thought to himself. It’s all in there somewhere.
A motorcycle roared at the end of the square, then rocketed around it, blasting the sedate doorways and windows one by one. It stopped practically at David’s feet, on the single yellow line beneath the streetlamp.
Once the engine died and the noise stopped, David paid no attention, but then as the black leather rider made for his own front door, David suddenly called out brazenly on the velvet air.
‘I thought you were a fucking courier! When did you start riding a motorbike?’
Leon took off his helmet and tilted back his head, smiling broadly. Then he put a finger to his lips and whispered loudly and hoarsely, ‘You’ll wake the neighbors!’
David