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Excerpt

Chapter 10

BUSINESS SUCCESS I have never found that difficult. The deal I set up with our new traders on
Wall Street enabled us to move to more prestigious office space nearer central London, which -- if it hardly caused
a smile -- I was pleased about. Apart from actual negotiations I slumped into the awful routines of tourism, which
brought me to my hotel bar at five every evening, where I drank too many gins, and tottered to the elevator -- then up to my room -- long after hors-d'oeuvres had been served in the dining room. Here in the insulated hush, with only a swish of air conditioning, I threw myself into the hollow of my bed and leafed dejectedly through the hotel information pack. Propped in my pillows, I phoned Marisa several times, without ever finding her home, then early one evening (Eastern Time), after my second shave, she at last picked up one of her newly installed extensions. There was a party in the background -- music in a whirl from that inherited hi-fi -- and the audio pyrotechnics of voices hooting at the stars.

'You sound very distant,' she said.

'I am very distant. Sounds like you're having a get-together.'

'It's wilder than that, Bruce. Why not come over?'

'I would. Problem is, at this moment I'm looking out from my hotel room at the evening
silhouettes over Central Park.'

'Ah -- that explains the weird delay.'

The first faint signs of the illness that laid me low for a fortnight showed themselves a few
days before I was due to fly back home. They'd turned into a full-blown something -- 'flu, or one of my famous
viruses -- on the morning I sat in the limousine, waiting to be driven out to JFK. I recall, through the haze of
pharmaceutical potions I'd dosed these last of my New York days with, how in the blooms of a very sore nose I tested a long dreary succession of Kleenexes, discarding an empty box number one well before baggage check-in. Gesundheit is what the smiling baggage handler said.

I took my seat above the wing and anaesthetised myself for practically the whole duration of
the flight, choosing an endless ingestion of Scotch with ice. Not unnaturally I'd turned a dispirited shade of cabbage when finally the plane touched down, after cumulative loops through the ether (the runway when we
skimmed to ground was wet with rain). Then, infuriatingly, I emerged as the very last man on earth to find his
luggage, the occasion crowned by the forensic deliberation with which I had scrutinised every vagary and nuance
of the carousel, going on and on on its ceaseless circuit.

Happily Bruce Senior never quite gave up on me. I found him skimming through a furrier's
magazine, looking bored and forlorn, and not entirely comfortable on the bright plastic bench he'd found for
himself. Not unwisely this he had chosen for its close proximity to one of those many TV screens, all pulsating
every so often with new and newly confirmed departures and arrivals. I saw him glance up at it, a puzzled frown remoulding itself to a crooked smile once he'd caught sight of me. I explained what had held me up.

'Oh. Bad luck. You look terrible.'

'Feel terrible.'

'Come on. Let's get you home.'

I clambered into a very cold bed, and after five or ten minutes clambered out again, forced to
answer persistent rings at the door, where under the storm porch, grinning very cautiously, my mother's daily help
bore gifts and tidings in the form of a thermometer and a very hot water bottle. I took myself back upstairs, where under the whips of fire and icy perspiration an indissoluble grey kaleidoscope engaged its teeth and cogs through a multiplicity of changing images, all in a kind of Futurist delirium, which I tried hard to shake off. The shifting scenes it inflicted almost always had at their centre a persona I knew to be Marisa, yet whose looks were antithetic to the wonder of her being, and cloaked in an enigmatic aura telling me to accept this vague new principle of life. She came to me open-armed in the stodge of middle-age, and suffering badly with gingivitis. Then as a disreputable teenager she planted one sugary kiss on my cheek, before collapsing into a fit of coquettish giggles. At worst she was badly overweight, with a weakness for gooey chocolate, one of those luxuries I knew she eschewed.

Our trysts and assignations occurred invariably under extreme conditions, and always in a
bizarre locality. There was I remember a motor workshop, its whole capacity temporarily reprised to a gigantic, yet
flaccid exhaust pipe, its needs critical, dire, remedial. Recurring too often for what sanity I then possessed was a Thames-side building site (some new skyscraper shooting up in seconds, in a whirr of worker-ant activity). Worse followed out at sea (worse always follows out at sea), where under a frozen spray of Shetland foam we tried
desperately to talk above the din of an oilrig (what, pray, was our business there?).

She must have heard I was ill, because she phoned. 'How are you?' she said.

'Let's put it like this -- if it now gets worse rather than better, the next stage is rigor mortis.'

'Would you like me to come over?'

'I'd love you to come over.'

'Shall I bring a priest?'

'Very funny.'

I relapsed immediately into that whirligig of deluded images, my diseased thoughts floating this time into the distant territories of extra-terrestrial life, where a race of people, much more ancient than our own, had burnt off their own precious eco-systems several million years ago. Some certain foresight had accompanied that destruction, and they had built not spaceships, but whole planets -- with seas and hills and mountains and arable lands, and an atmosphere. These vast worldly structures came with built-in self-propulsion technologies, the plan being to voyage out in all known directions, so increasing what chances the race as a whole might have of surviving genetically. This madness I'd cooked up did have its certain underlying logic, when in a
half-awake dream state I engaged with all the differing destinies these separated travellers -- all of a common stock -- were likely to evolve through, depending on what problems or opportunities they encountered. But the whole mental edifice tottered under so many offshoots and replications that eventually -- my quilt cover damp with the fever I exuded -- it all came tumbling down. What remained was a kind of global empathy I had for these very
resourceful people -- the cosmic gipsies we might have to become -- cut off forever from their birthright, and
condemned to wander eternally through the lethal emissions dusting the universe we share. Then suddenly I too
was a cosmic gipsy, a man homeless, and never quite sure where to go -- then of course the doorbell rang, and the
nightmare tucked itself away, and there was my mother's help bearing a mug of stew.

I cannot be certain of what is now just as improbable a recollection -- and one that still persists -- of the moment I think Marisa called. I wring out the mental contortions of all those febrile days, but what I still don't remember -- it's a blank absolutely -- is all the practical mundaneness of hearing the bell, of putting on my robe, of letting her in. She poured me a glass of water, and emptied grapes she'd brought -- the first of her gifts, for which she must have found my little Chinese bowl, which she rinsed in the sink. She told me her life had changed in oh so many ways. Then she put me to bed and prinked my pillows. Here I beheld her, perched at the edge of my mattress, smiling in that mystical way she sometimes had. Then she pulled down the quilt, and likewise the shorts I wore in bed, then having petted my manhood to the fullness of its pride she adjusted her own undergarments and
raised the hem of her dress. This first of our liaisons must have demanded allowances as to the fragility of her
patient, for I closed my eyes and mustered no personal effort at all -- how could I, I was almost dead -- yet learned to float and fall in that capacious heaven in every expert stroke, a testament of slow and perfected circles. When I woke she wasn't there, and I doubted that she had been -- yet there was the glass of water, there the grapes, and I didn't think the dampness of my bed was solely the fever.