DO ALL SANE—OR EVEN SEMI-SANE—children know they need to run away from home? I think so. Hardly bothering to wave good-bye, indifferent to our parents’ feelings, unable to imagine that they might miss us, thinking only of our own desires—and self-preservation—we flee, and sometimes forget to come back. And then if we’re lucky, and haven’t made a total mess of our own children, they do the same thing to us. Many years ago Anna Haycraft explained to me how the world works. She said it was really quite simple: Men love women, women love children, and children love hamsters. That’s just the way it is, and there is absolutely nothing to be done about it. Not being a mother at the time, and crazily in love—as usual—with some man or another, I couldn’t begin to understand what she was talking about. But now I know precisely what she meant. Men love women—that’s obvious, and quite right too—then the women have babies, and become totally besotted with them—that’s natural, but not so much fun for the fathers—and then the children fall for a furry animal, and the next time you turn around they’re off. Peter and I just upped and left, never stopping to think that my mother, Freddie, and both his parents would all grow old and die in London while we were gone.
At first I was mystified by my happiness. Was it just the thrill of starting a new life with a new husband in a new city, or the scent of the wisteria blossoms that floated up to our bedroom from the terrace outside, or being in New York, where I couldn’t ride in a cab without hanging my head out the window like some mad panting dog so I could see every single building all the way to the top? No, something else was going on: I had escaped, I was independent, I had my own house, my own telephone number (really grown-up, that bit), and my mother wasn’t stomping around upstairs.
I arrived at Bank Street eight o’clock sharp, in the very last of the light. Overhead the sky still scintillated, but there was a film of green up there among the pinks and blues, an avocado tinge of beautifying city sickness.… Bank Street looked like a chunk of sentimental London, black railings and pale blossoms girding the bashful brownstones, even a cautious whiff of twig and leaf in the night-scented air.
Not my words but Martin Amis’s description in Money of the street where we lived. The house had been thrown in with the BBC job, and Martin was right, it was “a chunk of sentimental London,” which must have been why I felt so at home there. The stairs were crooked, the windows didn’t fit, the roof occasionally leaked, the bathrooms and kitchen had been put in before the war, but what did any of that matter as you drifted off to sleep to the sound of owls hooting from the trees in the garden below? In the hot jungly New York summer nights there were even mosquitoes—and if that isn’t the ultimate urban luxury, then I don’t know what is.
Before we had children the house on Bank Street operated as a hotel for our friends. Some stayed for a night or two, others for a few weeks, and one—Christopher Hitchens—lived with us for six months when he first arrived in New York. The previous December, Peter and I had fled Christmas in London—when the entire place packs up, forcing you back into the familial bosom for perhaps longer than you might wish—and had borrowed a creaky old apartment in Greenwich Village, where we happily ignored the whole wretched business. Christopher must have had the same clever idea, because soon after we arrived we ran into him with Anna Wintour in Mortimer’s, a restaurant on the Upper East Side owned by a poisonous, snobby old queen who placed his favored customers up front where they could be seen but allowed riffraff like us to lurk at the back. Carried away by the glamour (could that be Jacqueline Onassis walking by on her way to the ladies’ room?) and the energy (you could actually get a cab on Christmas Day!) of the city, the three of us (Anna was already living in New York) decided this was clearly the place to be. And so the “pact of Mortimer’s” was sealed. Peter got the BBC to deliver, and Christopher persuaded Victor Navasky, the kindly editor of The Nation, that his publication would sparkle even more brightly with the addition of the Hitch.
Christopher was the ideal guest: hardly ever there, didn’t eat, bought his own whiskey and cigarettes, spent no time in the bathroom, and—this was easily the best part—he made us laugh. The room he occupied was called Smike’s parlor, in honor of the pathetic stunted Smike, who is rescued from Dotheboys Hall by Nicholas Nickleby, and whose sad end allows Dickens to wallow in yet another of his long-winded, mawkish deathbed scenes. The longer Christopher stayed, the more Smike-like his parlor became, with cigarette butts floating in old mugs of tea, clothes draped over the radiators, the desk piled high with papers, until the cleaning lady decided it might be simpler for everyone if she bypassed the room entirely.
In those days before cell phones, part of my role as hostess was to act as an answering service, and nobody got more calls than Christopher. Usually his friends were perfectly polite, but there was one especially pushy lady, a real ratbag who looked like a snake and masqueraded as a writer (her first novel had been snapped up by a publishing house owned by her hapless husband) and never stopped calling. I suppose she must have had designs on Smike’s undernourished body. Whatever her motives, the old—she was well past forty—hellhag rang one morning and was not best pleased to be told that the object of her desire was in the shower.
“Okay. Just say it’s Patsy. I’ll hold on until you get him out.”
I made a gargoyle face into the receiver and said I’d be sure to trot along and fetch him immediately. The bathroom door was ajar, so I pushed it open and there, protruding from the shower curtain, was Smike’s paw holding a cigarette, with a neat little pile of ash on the tiled floor below. Oh Smike, must you?
As a guest Martin was no more trouble than Christopher and just as much fun. If the two of them happened to be in New York at the same time, they liked to meet for a late hangover-haunted lunch at some Italian place in the Village, and then they would while away the afternoon at the Show World Center in Times Square where—boys will be boys—the entertainment consisted of watching naked girls dancing. Naively I envisaged a stage with prancing showgirls in sequined G-strings and stilettos, silk tassels glued to their nipples; but it wasn’t like that at all. Apparently the management thoughtfully provided each member of the audience with his own cozy little cubicle, furnished quite simply with a chair (upholstered in plastic), a box of Kleenex, and a window whose shutter was somehow connected to a ravenous machine that had to be fed a constant diet of tokens if you wanted to experience Sheri in all her glory.
Whoever came to stay with us was always included in our social life, as we were in theirs. Sometimes we had dinner with old friends like Anna—Hitch had accompanied her to our wedding and used to call her the “foal” on account of her ludicrously long, slim legs and the thick chestnut bangs that almost, but not quite, covered her eyes—sometimes we went to an awful pinball parlor on University Place where Martin could indulge his addiction to video games, played on clanging, fridge-size precursors to Xbox, and sometimes we went to parties. One memorable evening Martin’s date decided she had something better to do with her time than see him, so instead of a solitary return visit to the pinball parlor, he decided to come out with us.
The apartment occupied the top floor of a building somewhere in Chelsea. Its hallway, illuminated by a fizzing fluorescent light, was painted a dispiriting pea green, and, just to add to its charms, the architect had forgotten to put in an elevator. Martin manfully took the lead and started the trudge up, stopping for a reviving wheeze on each landing, until we finally heard the distant beckoning sound of too many people crammed into too small a space, trying to have too good a time. Standing by the open door was our hostess, dressed in an off-the-shoulder ruffled chiffon number, a necklace of shells, beads, and seedpods draped across her freckly décolletage, and a bloodred hibiscus flower tucked optimistically behind one ear.
“Hello, I’m Martin Amis.”
Not necessarily the words she wanted to hear. Not the ideal greeting from the man you had slept with just a few days before.
Still, you could see how the poor fellow might have become confused: “The thing is she had her hair up, and it was rather dark at the top of those stairs.”
SOON AFTER we settled into our apartment on Bank Street with the bumblebees and owls and mosquitoes, I received a truly alarming letter from my mother. At first I didn’t quite understand what it was about, so I read it again slowly. It seemed that she had finally had enough. She was done with snobby old England, she was done with that old fart Freddie, she had sold our nice old house, she was getting divorced, and she and Hylan were about to board an ocean liner to start a new life in the New World. My job was to find them a sublet where they could live while they looked for a permanent home.
I settled on the Chelsea Hotel, an Edwardian pile on West Twenty-third Street, ten blocks from Bank Street. It was just their kind of place, and I knew they would be happy there. Diego Rivera had lived at the Chelsea in the thirties while he was painting his mural Man at the Crossroads for Rockefeller Center, which featured Lenin’s heroic visage and had caused such a furor that it was soon taken down; Sid Vicious died there; Dylan Thomas had had his very own “Smike’s parlor” there—but had chosen to die at the White Horse Tavern instead; Andy Warhol made his movie Chelsea Girls there, and Charles James, the great American couturier—this would surely appeal to Hylan—had also been a longtime resident. The ceilings were high, the rooms dark (perfect for my mother), it was cheap, and best of all, El Quijote, a lugubrious establishment on the ground floor, served lobsters for only six dollars a pound. My mother adored lobster.
Still, the question remained: What had possessed these two middle-aged people to abandon their lives—and children—in London and set out on this insane—at least in retrospect—enterprise? My mother had always been an adventuress, so maybe she felt she needed to reinvent herself one last time before it was too late; then again it may have been some nostalgic impulse that made her want to come home to the country she had left when she’d bought that one-way ticket to Paris in 1947. Many years later I talked to Hylan about it. “It was crazy, almost incomprehensible. We had conjured up this ‘other America’—it was pure fantasy. An escape from our slightly false, slightly ill-fitting Englishness that was so attractive, but was not really us.”
Whatever their motives and whatever I felt about my mother’s becoming my neighbor once again doesn’t really matter, because there were two other people—Nick and Alex—whose lives were turned upside down and inside out by their parents’ decision. Sixteen and seventeen, respectively, they had both been left behind in London. Nick told me later that he has no memory of talking to our mother about the move, and that he just arrived home one day to find that the house had been sold, although he does admit that it’s entirely possible that she had told him, and that he had subconsciously blocked out this unwelcome news. Either way it was a bit of a shock for a teenager whose difficulties with both school and drugs continued, and who now found himself homeless. Freddie had gone off to live with Vanessa in Fulham, and since his son had not been invited to join the lovebirds in their new nest, Nick went to stay with a series of friends. Some had managed to hang on to their parents and were still begrudgingly at home; others had had quite enough of the old codgers, and had taken over an abandoned building, where they lived as squatters. Alex’s situation wasn’t a whole lot better. At least she had Hylan’s flat—her own mother, being something of a free spirit, was living in a caravan in Holland at the time—and at least she had a nice boyfriend, Ronnie (now her husband), who moved in, helped with the bills, and gave her life some kind of stability.
AT THIS POINT you may be wondering what had happened to my brilliant career. Or at least what the hell I did all day long while Peter was running the BBC’s American empire from his office in Rockefeller Center. The truth is that I had only one interest in life: to have a baby. Ever since little Nick had been placed in my arms when I was twelve, ever since I had held an unending stream of leaky Haystack babies on my lap, ever since I had fallen in love with Peter, actually ever since I had picked up my first doll, I had wanted to be a mother. The pills were flushed down the toilet in a sea green marble bathroom in Barbados on our honeymoon—but nothing happened.
Doctors were consulted, tests were conducted, sex was scheduled for a few purposeful nights each month, purple dye was injected into my tubes, poor Peter was dragged up to Columbia-Presbyterian on One Hundred Sixty-eighth Street, where he was locked in a Show World Center–type cubicle—with a copy of Playboy, rather than a gyrating Sheri in split-crotch fun panties, for company—and still nothing happened. If Peter was too busy for the three-hour hospital trek, I would make a mercy dash up to the hospital with a glass jar nestled in my armpit (to keep the temperamental creatures warm) where they would be spun around in some contraption and then let loose inside me to swim about. This depressing routine went on for more than three years, driving me and my patient loving husband to the point of madness, until one day in the bathroom of the Cadogan Hotel in London, my pee turned a pregnancy-test strip the most beautiful shade of Tiepolo blue I have ever seen. (Twenty-six years later it remains my favorite color, and the room where I am typing these words now is painted that same magical blue.)
Barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen—I had finally been allowed into heaven. All I did was waddle around with no shoes on, cook strange new dishes that I would never have attempted before, lie on the sofa reading Proust, trying to remember what Theodore Zeldin had taught me, and make regular sorties uptown to visit the saintly Dr. Scher. As the months passed, my experiments in the kitchen took off in ever-more-fanciful directions—“Darling, that pig’s ear was delicious, but I just can’t eat any more” (a dimly recalled crunchy snack in a bar in Barcelona had been my inspiration)—the duchesse de Guermantes remained as elegantly elusive as ever, and even Dr. Scher, indulgent though he was, wondered, out loud and frequently, just how much more weight I could possibly pack on. One hundred and ten pounds on day one, I had without any difficulty at all gotten myself up to 165 by the time Peter carted me off, nine months later, shrieking—poor driver—in a cab to Mount Sinai.
When I woke up, Dr. Scher gently explained the situation. Nothing serious, he said holding my hand, but I had an infection, he had prescribed antibiotics, and just as a precaution, the pediatrician was going to put our daughter in an incubator. They were being extra cautious, the cleaners had been on strike for several weeks, the hospital had become a gigantic, bubbling petri dish of bacteria, and several babies had become sick. There was no question of feeding her my milk, on account of the infection, so I needed to pump every few hours to stop my breasts from exploding and get them used to their strange new role in life. There was absolutely nothing to worry about, your daughter is healthy, perfect in every way, and you need to rest. For the next week I shared a room with three other ladies who fed their snuffling babies while Rebecca lay, resplendent in her transparent incubator—like a gigantic doll in a plastic gift box from FAO Schwarz—up in some distant wing of the hospital, and I watched my milk trickle down the drain. Not precisely what I’d had in mind, and sometimes I slid into a self-pitying wallow, but mostly I hung on tight to Dr. Scher’s words and reminded myself that it was only a few more days before we would be back home together, sitting under the wisteria with those lazy, drunken, corpulent bumblebees buzzing around us.
“Hey, we’re here to spring you out of jail. Quick, grab the kid and let’s make a run for it!” My mother was standing at the foot of the bed, smiling; Rebecca was all wrapped up; the papers were signed; my bag was packed, and we could get a cab on Fifth Avenue and be way downtown before they even noticed we’d gone. The taxi skidded and bumped along the potholes, its driver clearly had no notion of the exquisite treasure he had in his backseat—oh, please slow down, we’ll triple the tip!—until we got to Bank Street, where my mother, true to my promise, gave him three crisp twenty-dollar bills.
She helped me up the steps and then went around to the deli to get us BLTs, lightly toasted white bread, lots of mayo, an extra pickle for me, please, and two Cokes. We sat down together on the terrace and ate our sandwiches, and as she took the plates into the kitchen, she asked if I needed anything else? Not a single thing, thank you. I had everything I had ever wished for. Except for The New York Times, which she brought up to me in bed. “I’ll call tomorrow to make sure you and the critter are okay.” Peter was coming back from Boston that evening, but for the next few hours Rebecca and I were all alone together for the first time in both our lives.