I don’t know of a city that can best New York as a metropolis. Paris has collapsed into its past. Not only has it become a parody of itself, but it is consciously, positively cultivated, marketed even by the French, or rather (with no different result) the Parisians, as a parody of itself. Rome is a mess, and having had a whiff of Bangkok as I traveled between its main airport and a rundown town 70 miles to the north I felt no desire to explore its eastern mysteries.
New York I covet as the epitome of America’s greatness, a greatness, I hasten to add, existing in a seemingly inexhaustible continuum of achievement and opportunity that, however, never, in any given period, at any given time, has been attributable to its people, or its cast of rulers, or has coalesced in its culture, its morality or even its institutions, or has otherwise broken down in anything beyond the individual and the incidental to elicit praise and admiration.
But London is the imperturbable and reassuring center of the world. And so, to my daughter and me, is my son.
*
I lost my husband in a divorce. Then I lost my job, and then my prospects. My son is in college. He is 21. He rents a single room apartment in the town, our capital, where his university is. It is less than 40 minutes by public transportation from the village where we live. He touches home plate, so to say, most weekends. He often brings his girlfriend, a smart and pretty girl from a liberal Jewish family, and they would spend the night here. He will always bring his laundry.
Once, when I expected his call and the phone started ringing, I called out to my daughter: “I take it! It’ll be laundry calling!” Even as I said it, I realized that this was the kind of joke that might be scripted in a sitcom (having arrived at a critical juncture in my life, I had all but OD’d on them). It was funny, really, in a way, but it was a joke that was alien and hostile, forsaking, to the relationship with my son, which is very affectionate both ways. Besides, I love doing his laundry. It was a poor sucker of a joke. After I had disconnected, I told my daughter that it was her brother who had called.
“Why did you say laundry?”
“What? Oh! No! No! What I said was ‘That’ll be London Calling’.”
“But wouldn’t we be London then?”
“No, London is wherever he is.”
My son has begun to suspect that I’m in some degree of trouble. I have been home for quite some time now, months, in fact. I still have my income, but that is going to change within the next two or three months. That change being from a huge income to nothing, laying bare a submerged debt of monstrous proportions with a cash buffer of another three months or so to ward off immediate consequence. Everything we have grown accustomed to as a family – the big house, the cars, the designer bikes, the heedless day-to-day expending (brand clothing, lunching and dining out, transatlantic business class air travel, laptops and tablets and smartphones, regularly updated, luxury food, two household accounts that I fund, one for my daughter and me and one for my son in addition to my paying his college fees, rent and health insurance) – is bound to topple. I had told my daughter I was having some kind of sabbatical (I hadn’t said “a sabbatical”, which would have been an outright lie). To my son, I hadn’t even told that I wasn’t working during the week (which wasn’t lying either, but holding back information). That isn’t something you can keep a secret though, not even to someone who isn’t with you during the week, not if that someone is your 21-year old son; and my daughter, if she isn’t aware of anything out of the ordinary and would not have brought it up to him as a topic, may have said things to him which have alerted him to something catastrophic looming over our lives.
And so, of late, when he calls me or gets home, he asks me how things are going “around the place”. It’s not conversational. I’m extremely sensitive to sottinteso. Already in that question, I think I can sense his suspicion of there being an answer he will have to come to terms with. It’s a question he never asked before anyway. It’s just not the kind of question that would ever have seemed apropos in the situation we have always found ourselves in for as long as he would be able to remember.
And I answer “Oh, as usual”, or “Oh, no special report due”. And I immediately follow up with questions about his study, his girlfriend (whom I’m much endeared to) if she’s not with him, the housing situation (they each rent an apartment which is much too small for them to live together in, even if they do that, in hers) and so on. And my son doesn’t press me, not yet, but briefs me, committed to detail and comprehensiveness and attentive to my interest in what he says, on his attempts to enroll into a certain research traineeship without compromising his chance of entering the minor of his choice (or the other way round), the advanced dance class he and his girlfriend have signed up to and the bleak prospects for couples on the student housing market and the workarounds they have considered, but only in the abstract so far.
A call comes in on my landline. That would be my therapist, who, this time, is going to fling her no-show tariff in my face and announce the early-termination of the therapy for which my doctor had referred me to her. But the handset’s display suggests it’s my son. I undock. “London calling!”, he says.
Oh, that daughter of mine! Oh, my son! Damn! Five to six months. Make that four, conservatively. Let’s settle on three. That’s a hell of a lot of time for a woman in good health, of indomitable spirit and whose private banker told her not so long ago he’d stake the bank on her earning capacity (I didn’t have the heart to press for details).
And I decide to open the books on this beleaguered territory.
___
Hard Nosed Women 