HAMISH HAMILTON
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in the United States of America by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2012
First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 2012
Copyright © Paul Theroux, 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-24-195775-2
PART I: Saying Goodbye
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
PART II: The Mzungu at Malabo
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
PART III: Downriver
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
PART IV: Snakes and Ladders
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
PART V: Ghost Dance
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Waldo
Fong and the Indians
Girls at Play
Murder in Mount Holly
Jungle Lovers
Sinning with Annie
Saint Jack
The Black House
The Family Arsenal
The Consul’s File
A Christmas Card
Picture Palace
London Snow
World’s End
The Mosquito Coast
The London Embassy
Half Moon Street
O-Zone
My Secret History
Chicago Loop
Millroy the Magician
My Other Life
Kowloon Tong
Hotel Honolulu
The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro
Blinding Light
The Elephanta Suite
A Dead Hand
The Lower River
V. S. Naipaul
The Great Railway Bazaar
The Old Patagonian Express
The Kingdom by the Sea
Sailing Through China
Sunrise with Seamonsters
The Imperial Way
Riding the Iron Rooster
To the Ends of the Earth
The Happy Isles of Oceania
The Pillars of Hercules
Sir Vidia’s Shadow
Fresh Air Fiend
Dark Star Safari
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
The Tao of Travel
I said to him: “I’ve come — but not for keeps.
But who are you, become so horrible?”
He answers: “Look. I am the one who weeps.”
Dante, The Inferno, Canto 8 (ll. 34–36)
ELLIS HOCK’S WIFE gave him a new phone for his birthday. A smart phone, she said. “And guess what?” She had a coy, ham-actress way of offering presents, often pausing with a needy wink to get his full attention. “It’s going to change your life.” Hock smiled because he was turning sixty-two, not an age of lifealtering shocks but only of subtle diminishments. “It’s got a whole bunch of functions,” Deena said. It looked frivolous to him, like a costly fragile toy. “And it’ll be useful at the store” — Hock’s Menswear in Medford Square. His own phone was fine, he said. It was an efficient little fist, with a flip-up lid and one function. “You’re going to thank me.” He thanked her, but weighed his old phone in his hand, as a contradiction, showing her that his life wasn’t changing.
To make her point (her gift-giving could be hostile at times, and this seemed like one of them), Deena kept the new phone but registered it in his name, using his personal email account. After she was signed up, she received his entire year’s mail up to that day, all the messages that Hock had received and sent, thousands of them, even the ones he had thought he’d deleted, many of them from women, many of those affectionate, so complete a revelation of his private life that he felt he’d been scalped — worse than scalped, subjected to the dark magic of the sort of mganga he had known long ago in Africa, a witch doctor–diviner turning him inside out, the slippery spilled mess of his entrails stinking on the floor. Now he was a man with no secrets, or rather, all his secrets exposed to a woman he’d been married to for thirty-three years, for whom his secrets were painful news.
“Who are you?” Deena asked him, a ready-made question she must have heard somewhere — which movie? But it was she who seemed like a stranger, with mad gelatinous eyes, and furious clutching hands holding the new phone like a weapon, her bulgy features fixed on him in a purplish putty-like face of rage. “I’m hurt!” And she did look wounded. Her recklessness roused his pity and made him afraid, as though she’d been drinking.
Hock hesitated, the angry woman demanded to know everything, but really she already knew everything, his most intimate thoughts were all on that phone. She didn’t know why, but neither did he. She screamed for details and explanations. “Who is Tina? Who is Janey?” How could he deny what was plainly shown on the screen of his new phone, covert messages, sent and received, that she’d known nothing about? “You snake! You signed them ‘love’!”
He saw, first with relief, almost hilarity, then horror, and finally sadness, that nothing in his life was certain now except that his marriage was ending.
He put it down to solitude. He did not want to say loneliness. He owned a men’s clothing store, and business had been — you said slow, not bad — for years. The store was failing. The history of the store was the history of his family in Medford, their insertion in the town, their wish to belong. Ellis’s grandfather, an Italian immigrant, had been apprenticed to a tailor on his arrival in New York. His first paying job was with the man’s cousin, also a tailor, in rural Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he arrived on the train, knowing no English. He helped to make suits for the wealthy college students there. Though he was no older than they were, he knelt beside them, unspooling the tape against their bodies, and shyly spoke their measurements in Italian. Three years of this and then a job as a cutter in a tailor shop in Boston’s North End. On his marriage, striking out on his own, he borrowed money from his widowed mother-in-law (who was to live with them until she died) and rented space in Medford Square, opening his own tailor shop.
The move to Medford involved another move, more tidying: he became a new man, changing his name from Francesco Falcone to Frank Hock. He had asked a tailor in the North End to translate falcone, and the man had said “hawk,” in the local way, and the scarcely literate man had written it in tailor’s chalk on a remnant of cloth, spelling it as he heard it. This was announced on a sign: Hock’s Tailors. Frank became known as a master tailor, with bolts of fine-quality woolen cloth, and linen, and silk, and Egyptian cotton, stacked on his shelves. He smoked cigars as he sewed and, still only in his thirties, employed two assistants as cutters and for basting. His wife, Angelina, bore him three sons, the eldest baptized Andrea, called Andrew, whom he designated as his apprentice. Business was good, and Frank Hock so frugal he saved enough to buy his shop and eventually the whole building. He had income from the tenants on the upper floors and from the other shops, including a Chinese laundry, Yee’s, next door. Joe Yee pressed the finished suits and gave him a red box of dried lychees every Christmas.
When Andrew Hock returned from the Second World War, Medford Square began to modernize. Old Frank turned the business over to Andrew, who had worked alongside his father. But Andrew had no interest in the fussy drudgery of tailoring. Plagued with arthritis in his hands, the old man retired. Andrew sold the building and bought a premises in a newly built row of stores on Riverside Avenue — the Mystic River ran just behind it — and started Hock’s Menswear, as an improvement on Frank’s tailor shop on Salem Street.
Ellis was born the year after Hock’s Menswear opened, and later he, too, worked in the store throughout high school most afternoons, tramping the foot pedal and bringing down the lid of the pressing machine in the basement tailor shop, with the tailor Jack Azanow, a Russian immigrant. Ellis also buffed shoes and folded shirts and rearranged the jackets after customers fingered them, milking the sleeves — his father’s expression. Now and then he made a sale. Christmases were busy, and festive with the frantic pleasure of people looking for presents, spending more money than usual, asking for the item to be gift-wrapped, another of Ellis’s jobs. The activity of the store at this season, and Easter, and Father’s Day — the vitality of it, the obvious profit — almost convinced him that he might make a career of the business. But the certainty of it alarmed him like a life sentence. He hated the notion of confinement in the store, but what was the alternative?
On graduation from Boston University, a biology major, facing the draft — Vietnam — he applied to join the Peace Corps and was accepted. He was sent to a country he’d never heard of, Nyasaland, soon to be the independent Republic of Malawi, and became a teacher at a bush school in a district known as the Lower River. There was something mystical in the name, as though it was an underworld tributary of the River Styx — distant and dark. But “lower” meant only south, and the river was obscured by two great swamps, one called the Elephant Marsh, the other one the Dinde.
He was happy in the Lower River, utterly disconnected from home, and even from the country’s capital, on this unknown and unregarded riverbank, where he lived in the village of Malabo on his own as a schoolteacher, the only foreigner; supremely happy.
After two years, he re-upped for another two years, and one afternoon toward the end of his fourth year, a message was delivered to him by a consular driver in a Land Rover, a telegram that had been received by the U.S. consulate: For Ellis Hock at Malabo. Dad very ill. Please call. There was no phone in the village, and the trunk line at the boma, the district’s headquarters, was not working. Hock rode back to Blantyre in the Land Rover, and there, on the consul’s own phone, he spoke to his tearful mother.
He had been so content he had never grappled with the detail of leaving the Lower River, and yet, two days after receiving the message he was on a plane to Rhodesia, and by separate laborious legs, to Nairobi, London, New York, and Boston. Finally back in Medford, he was seated at his father’s hospital bedside.
His father beamed with surprise when he saw him, as though Ellis’s return was a coincidence, nothing to do with his failing health. They kissed, they held hands, and less than two weeks later, struggling to breathe, Ellis hugging the old man’s limp body, his father died. It was three in the morning; his mother had gone home to sleep.
“Are you all right?” the night nurse asked, after she confirmed that his father had drawn his last breath.
“Yes,” Ellis said, and mocked himself for the lie. But he was too fearful of telling the truth, because he was himself dying from misery.
He went home, and when she woke at seven he told his mother, who wailed. He could not stop weeping. An old friend, Roy Junkins, hearing that he was home from Africa, called the next day. Ellis sobbed as he spoke to him, unable to control himself, but finding no more shame in his tears than if he had been bleeding. And something about that moment — the phone call, the tears — made a greater bond between the two men.
After the funeral, the reading of the will: Hock’s Menswear was his. His mother was apportioned a sum of money and the family house.
“Papa wanted you to have the store.”
He’d left Africa suddenly — so suddenly it was as if he’d abandoned an irretrievable part of himself there. He’d actually left a whole household: his cook and all his belongings, clothes, binoculars, shortwave radio, his pet snakes in baskets and cages. What he’d brought home was what had fitted in one suitcase.
He was now, aged twenty-six, the sole owner of Hock’s Menswear. He had employees — salesmen, the tailor Azanow, a woman who kept the books — and loyal customers. Within a few years he married Deena, and not much more than a year later Deena gave birth to a daughter, Claudia, whom they called Chicky.
The life sentence he had once feared, he was now serving: the family business, his wife, his child, his house in the Lawrence Estates, inherited from his mother after she died. Every day except Sunday he drove to the store at eight, parked behind it, facing the Mystic River, checked the inventory and deliveries with Les Armstrong and Mike Corbett, and opened at nine. At noon, a sandwich at Savage’s, the deli across Riverside Avenue; after lunch, the store. Sometimes Les or Mike reminisced about their years in the army, in dreamy voices, but they were always talking about war. Ellis knew how they felt, but didn’t mention Africa except to his friend Roy, who sometimes dropped in. At five-thirty, when Les and the others left, he locked the front door and went home to dinner.
It was the life that many people led, and luckier than most. Having a men’s store in Medford Square made his work also social, and selling expensive clothes meant he dressed well.
Over thirty years of this. He rarely took a vacation, though Deena rented a cottage at the Cape in the summer. He drove down on Saturday evenings to spend Sunday with her and Chicky. And after her parents moved to Florida, Deena spent weeks with them. Chicky grew up, graduated from Emerson College, got married, and bought a condo in Belmont.
Nothing would ever change, he felt. Yet changes came, first as whispers, then as facts. Business slackened, Medford Square changed, its texture fraying, a Vietnamese restaurant displacing Savage’s Deli, then the closing of Woolworth’s and Thom McAn. The shoe menders and the laundry and the TV repairers vanished, and the worst sign of all, some storefronts were empty, some windows broken. The old bakery that had sold fresh bread was now a donut shop, another chain. A new mall at Wellington Circle with large department stores and many smaller stores was now the place to shop. Hock’s Menswear was quieter, but still dignified, which made it seem sadder, like the relic the tailor shop had been — a men’s clothing store in a city center that was shrunken and obsolete.
But building — the real estate — was his equity. Ellis saw a time, not far off, when he would sell the premises and live in retirement on the proceeds. In the meantime, he kept to his hours, eight to five-thirty. He waited on customers himself, as he had always done, to set an example, simply to talk, to listen, to hear about other people’s lives, their experiences in the world beyond the front door of Hock’s. With only one other salesman these days he did this more often, and liked it, in fact looked forward to talking with customers, whose experiences became his.
He knew the business was doomed, but talk kept it alive, as conversation with a bedridden invalid offers the illusion of hope. The malls and the big chain stores, blessed with space and inventory, prospered because they employed few clerks, or sales associates as they were now called. Hock’s was the sort of store where clerk and customer discussed the color of a tie, the style of a suit, the drape of a coat, the fit of a sweater. “It’s meant to be a bit roomy” and “This topcoat isn’t as dressy as that one.” Nor did the newer stores offer Hock’s quality — Scottish tweeds, English shirts, argyle socks, Irish knitwear, Italian leather goods, even Italian fedoras, and shoes from the last great shoemakers in the United States. Hock’s still sold vests, cravats, and Tyrolean hats in velour, with a twist of feathers in the hatband. Quality was suggested in the very words for the merchandise — the apparel, rather: hosiery, slacks, knitwear; a vest was a weskit.
Every transaction was a conversation, sometimes lengthy, about the finish of the fabric, the weather, the state of the world. This human touch, the talk, relieved the gloom of the empty store and took the curse off it. The customer was usually an older man in search of a tie or a good shirt or a sport coat. But often a woman was looking for a present for her husband, or her father or brother. Ellis detained them with his talk, explaining the possible choices. “These socks wear like iron” and “This shirt is Sea Island cotton — the best” and “This camel’s hair will actually get more comfortable with age, softer with each dry cleaning.”
In the past eight or ten years he’d asked the likelier ones, women mostly, “Do we have your email address on file?” As a result he found himself in occasional touch, clarifying, offering suggestions for a new purchase, describing sale items, often adding a personal note, a line or two, mildly flirtatious. They had bought clothes for trips; he asked about those trips. This was his early-morning activity, on his office computer, when he was alone, feeling small in his solitude, to lift his spirits, so he could face the banality of the day. The harmless whispers soothed him, eased some hunger in his heart, not sex but an obscure yearning. Many women responded in the same spirit: a cheerful word was welcome to them.
Over the past few years these email messages had come to represent a constant in his life, a narrative of friendships, glowing in warmth, inspiring confidences, private allusions, requests for help or advice. But since he met the women only when they came into the store, which was rare, these were safe, no more than inconclusive whispers in the dark, though compared to the monotony of his storekeeper’s day, they were like the breath of rapture.
There were about twenty or thirty such women whom he’d befriended this way, various ages, near and far, and these included old friends, his high school sweetheart and senior prom date. Still living in the town where he’d been born, he was saturated with the place. He’d been away for only those four years in Africa, as a young teacher in the district of the Lower River.
When Deena showed him the full year of his email he was more shocked by its density than by the warmth of his confidences — though he was taken aback by glimpses of what he’d written. Writing was a way of forgetting, yet now it was all returned to him and he was reminded of everything he’d said. He did not know that a phone, even a high-tech computer-like device like that, could access so many messages, ones that he’d sent and received, twelve months of them, including ones that he’d deleted (which was most of them), that he’d believed, having dragged them to the trash-basket icon, were gone forever.
But they reappeared, arriving in a long unsorted list, a chronicle of his unerasable past, much of which he’d forgotten. And so the interrogation began, Deena saying, “I want to know everything” — another movie line? She held his entire memory in her hand, his secret history of the past year, and so, “Who is Rosie?” and “Tell me about Vickie.”
He was mute with embarrassment and anger. Ashamed, appalled, he could not account for the number of messages or explain his tone of flirtatious encouragement, his intimacies to strangers, all the irrelevant detail. He talked to them about his day, about their travel, about books, about his childhood; and they did the same, relating their own stories.
“What is your problem, Ellis!”
He didn’t know. He bowed his head, more to protect himself from her hitting him than in atonement. From the moment he got home from work, for a month or more, he and Deena argued. Her last words to him in bed at night were hisses of recrimination. And when he woke, yawning, slipping from a precarious farcical dream, but before he could recall the email crisis, she began again, clanging at him, her tongue like the clapper of a bell, her finger in his face, shrieking that she’d been betrayed. Some mornings, after a night of furious arguing, the back-and-forth of pleading and abuse, he woke half demented, his head hurting as though with an acute alcoholic hangover, and couldn’t work.
Deena demanded detail, but the few scraps he offered only angered her more; and she was unforgiving, so what was the point? It all seemed useless, a howl of pain. She was a yelling policeman who’d caught him red-handed in a crime, not yelling for the truth — she knew it all — but because she was in the right, wishing only to hurt and humiliate him, to see him squirm, to make him suffer.
He did suffer, and he saw that she was suffering too, in greater pain than he was, because she was the injured party. But he knew what was at the end of it. It really was like theater; she needed to inhabit every aspect of her role, to weary herself and him with the sorting of this trash heap of teasing confidences, and when he was sufficiently punished, the ending was inevitable.
They began sessions with a marriage counselor, who called himself Doctor Bob, a pleasant middle-aged man with a psychology degree, a professorial manner, and conventional college clothes — tweed jacket, button-down shirt, khaki pants, and loafers, probably bought at one of the mall outlets, Ellis thought. What bothered Ellis and Deena as much as the actual sessions were the chance encounters with one or another of Doctor Bob’s clients, someone troubled — drugs? alcohol? — leaving the office as they arrived, or someone similarly anguished, head bowed, on the couch in the waiting room as they left.
Doctor Bob listened carefully in the first session and said that such a discovery of compromising emails was not unusual. “I’m seeing three other couples in your position. In each case, the man is the collector.” He didn’t assign blame, he was sympathetic to both Ellis and Deena, and at one point near the end of the first hour, as Deena sat tearful with her hands on her lap and Ellis wondered why he had sent so many emails, Doctor Bob could be heard puzzling, saying softly, “How does it go? That old song, ‘strumming my pain with his fingers’ — something about being flushed with fever, something-something by the crowd,” then raising his voice, but still in a confiding, lounge-singer croon, “ ‘I felt he found my letters, and read each one out loud … ’ ”
“Please,” Deena said, “this isn’t funny.”
“I’m trying to put your situation into context,” Doctor Bob said. “There are other precedents. After his wife poked into his private letters, Tolstoy ran away from home. And died in a railway station. He was eighty-two.”
In the next session Doctor Bob asked blunt questions and acted, it seemed to Ellis, like a referee. He did not sing again. They returned for more sessions.
But instead of repairing the marriage or calming Deena, the counseling made matters worse by offering an occasion to air old grievances, conflicts that, before starting the sessions, Ellis had decided to live with. But why not mention them, the disappointments, the lapses, the rough patches that had remained unresolved? Long-buried resentments were disinterred and argued over. With a referee, a witness, they could be blunt.
Doctor Bob nodded and smiled gently, like the friendly old-fashioned priest at Saint Ray’s, Father Furty — reformed drinker, always sympathetic. He let Deena talk, then Ellis, both of them pleading with him to see their point of view, the validity of their claim, as though deciding “whose ball?” in a significant fumble.
He said, “What I’m hearing is …”
Letdowns they’d never mentioned were now mentioned, and the sessions became acrimonious: Deena’s friends, her absences; Ellis’s coldness, his absences.
“You’ve been leading separate lives …”
Ellis thought, Yes, maybe that’s why my life has been bearable. It was not a pleasure but a relief to go to work in the morning. Monotony was a harmless friend. He dreaded Sundays at home; most of all he hated vacations. Ellis had never met anyone who hated vacations, so he kept this feeling to himself.
Though Deena had that one issue on her mind — the business about the numerous and overfond emails — this dispute stirred Ellis into defending himself with memories of other disputes.
“I want to know why you were emailing those women,” Deena said.
Doctor Bob smiled at Ellis, who said, “I’d like to know that myself.”
“My name is nowhere in those emails. You never mention you’re married. I don’t exist. Why?”
Ellis said in a wondering tone that he didn’t know.
Pleading with Doctor Bob, Deena said, “He tells them what he’s reading! He tells them what he has for lunch!”
By then, about a month into counseling (and the store suffered by his absences), all contact with the women in the emails had been broken off. Deena still had possession of the phone, monitoring it every day. She clutched it in disgust, as though it was Ellis himself she was holding, her hatred apparent; and Ellis hated the sight of the thing too.
Ellis, at Deena’s insistence, got a new email address, and used it only for business. Without his contact with those women, he was numb, mute, friendless, but still could not explain the emails he’d sent, his befriending the many women, the strange amorous inquiring tone. To one he had said, “You are the sort of woman I’d take into the African bush,” and squirmed at the memory.
“I guess I was interested in their lives,” he said. “I was curious. There was a story line to the way they lived, an unfolding narrative. I’ve always liked hearing people’s stories.”
With a pocket-stuffing gesture, Doctor Bob asked, “But were you keeping them in your back pocket for later, something to act on?”
Ellis said no, but he was not sure. The solitude of the store, the uncertainty of the business, had set him dreaming. He did not know how to say that to his wife — no longer grief-stricken but enraged — and the nodding counselor. Doctor Bob would have said, “Dreaming of what?” And Ellis had no answer.
“Is there something you want to tell your wife?” Doctor Bob said.
Ellis fixed his eyes on Deena’s furious face. He said, “You’re overplaying your hand.”
Shushing her — Deena had begun to object — Doctor Bob spoke to Ellis. “I see you as untethered,” and he explained what he meant.
Ellis nodded. The word was perfect for how he felt, unattached, not belonging, drifting in a job he’d taken as a dying wish of his father’s, maintaining the family business. But his heart wasn’t in it — had never been in it.
When, Doctor Bob asked, had he been happy?
Ellis said, “I used to live in Africa.”
“Oh, God,” Deena said.
“I meant in your marriage,” Doctor Bob said.
Hands together under his chin, prayer-like, Ellis became thoughtful, and tried to recall a distinct time, an event, something joyous, a little glowing tableau of pride and pleasure. But nothing came. It was thirty-three years of ups and downs, too much time to summarize. They were married: years to share, to endure, to negotiate, to overcome. Yes, plenty of happiness — he just could not think of anything specific. Marriage was a journey without an arrival.
Seeing Deena slumped in her chair, waiting out his silence, Ellis grew sad again. Just the way they were sitting apart, burdened by a kind of grief, with the doctor between them, made him miserable. It was as though they were in the presence of a terminal patient, their marriage dying, and it seemed that these last few weeks had been like that, either a deathwatch — this gloom — or a danse macabre, the hysteria at the prospect of the thing ending.
Nor could they hold any kind of coherent conversation without Doctor Bob being present. Ellis saw himself at sixty-two, Deena at sixty, as two old people who’d now, with the death of their marriage, be going their separate ways, pitiable figures bent against a headwind, or worse, with ghastly jollity, talking about “new challenges” and starting again, joining support groups, taking up yoga, gardening, volunteering, charity work, or worse, golf.
The counseling sessions continued, more rancorous, provoking new grievances, driving them further apart. But along with that melancholy vision of separation Ellis saw relief, too, the peacefulness of being alone. He guessed that Deena was feeling the same, because one day after a session, driving home, she seemed to come awake and said, “I want the house. I’m not giving up that house. My kitchen, my closets.”
“I could get a condo,” Ellis said. “But the business is mine.”
“I’ll need some money,” Deena said, and noticing that Ellis did not react, she added, “A lot of it.”
And like that, snatching, each staked a claim. At the suggestion of Doctor Bob they saw a lawyer and divided their assets.
Hearing of this, Chicky said, “What about me?”
“You’ll be all right,” Ellis said.
“But what if you guys remarry?”
Deena looked at Ellis and laughed, and he responded, laughing too, the first time in months they had shared such a moment of mirth. They stopped, not because they were saddened by the out-burst but because the love in their laughter shamed them, reminding them that in their marriage they had known many happy moments like this.
Chicky, bewildered, and made stern by her bewilderment, said, “Dougie’s probably going to get laid off. We could use the money. I want my cut now.”
“ ‘Cut,’ ” Ellis said, echoing her word, “of what?”
“Your will,” Chicky said.
“I am alive,” Ellis said, wide-eyed in indignation.
“But what about when you pass? If you remarry, your new family will get it and I won’t get diddly. If I don’t get it now, I’ll never see it. And look at Ma. She got hers.”
Had this conversation not taken place in a sushi bar in Medford Square — another example of the changes in the town — Ellis would have screamed at his daughter and hammered the table with his fist. Later, he was glad that he had remained calm and had only shaken his head at the sullen young woman chewing disgustedly at him. He replayed the conversation that night, at first bitterly, then in a mood of resignation. Let it all end, he thought; let a great whirlwind drive it all away. Then he offered Chicky a lump sum. She asked for more, as he guessed she would, and he gave her the amount he had already decided upon.
Chicky’s husband was with her when he handed over the check. Dougie was merely a spectator to the family negotiation — Chicky had always been annoyed that Ellis, refusing to hire him at the store, had said, “What is he good at?”
“I doubt that I’ll be seeing much of you from now on,” Ellis said, with the solemn resignation of his new role. “I don’t think I want to.”
“Okay by me,” Chicky said.
With her share of the will in her hand, and her back turned, he felt that he was already dead. He was sorry to think that she did not see the pity in this.
Although he moved into a condo on Forest Street — the old high school — he and Deena still saw each other. Formally, sometimes shyly, they went on dates. They were not quite ready to see other people, and even the sessions with Doctor Bob had not affected their fundamental liking for each other. The dates ended with a chaste and usually fumbled kiss, and Ellis was always sad afterward, lonely in his car. He knew that he had caused Deena pain, destroyed her love for him, made her untrusting — perhaps untrusting of all other men. In the secrecy and confidences of his messages, he had betrayed her. He could be kind to her now, but there was no way to amend the past. On some of their dates she sat numb and silent, suffering like a wounded, bewildered animal. He could not think of himself, because he knew the hurt he’d inflicted on her would never heal.
Ellis dreaded the day when Deena would say to him, “I’m seeing someone.” He told her how bad business was, and she tried to console him, urging him to sell the building, that the real estate was worth something, that it was an ideal location.
On one of these dates, she gave him the phone — the instrument of their undoing, which now seemed to him like something diabolical. Or had it been a great purifying instrument? Anyway, it had uncovered his entire private life, shown him as sentimental, flirtatious, dreamy, romantic, unfulfilled, yearning. But for what? What did all those emails mean? What in all this emotion was the thing he wanted?
He did not know. He might never know. He was too old to hope for anything more. No momentous thing would ever happen to him. No passion, no great love, no new landscape, no more children, no risk, no drama. The rest of his life would be a withdrawal, a growing smaller, until finally he would be forgotten. The name on his store would be replaced by another. His marriage was over, his daughter was gone. He could not remember much of the marriage, and yet he missed the eventlessness of it, his old routines, the monotony that had seemed like a friend. There was a certainty in routine; the torpor it induced in him was a comfort.
The day after Hock got the phone back he went to the store, keeping the thing in his pocket the whole day. After he locked up for the night (he observed himself doing this, as if in a ritual), he walked to the edge of the parking lot, where beyond a fence the Mystic River brimmed, and flung the phone and watched it plop and sink and drown in the water that was moody under the dark sky.
TO RELIEVE HIS EYES, to clear his head, Hock was standing in the open doorway at the back of his store, facing the Mystic River flowing past the parking lot, the water dark under the drizzly clouds, lumpy with debris from upstream. A week of heavy rain had filled the lakes and sent a torrent down — the river swelled at its banks, rippling like the muscles of a hungry snake. The river that had always consoled him with its movement was a special comfort now that he was in greater need of consolation; the water and that debris swept past the back of the store and poured into the harbor, into the ocean, into the world, reminding him that his phone was gone, the corpse of it, sluiced into the sea.
Today he saw Jerry Frezza sidling between parked cars, wiping droplets from his face. Jerry had a tight smile and a jaunty upright stride; even in the rain Hock could tell that his friend had something on his mind.
Jerry saw him and said, “I’ve been trying to call you on your cell. What’s with your phone?”
“I don’t have one anymore.”
“How do you keep in touch?”
“I don’t,” Hock said. “You can call the store number, though.” He was going to tell him that in another month the store would be closing, but he resisted. He didn’t want to discuss it, he didn’t want sympathy, he hated the thought of the obvious question, What will you do now? So he smiled and said, “What’s up?”
Jerry said, “You know snakes, right? From when you were in Africa?”
On the Lower River, at Malabo, Hock had been the mzungu from America; in the Medford store, he was the man who’d lived in Africa. The sunny word “Africa,” spoken on a wet November day in Medford Square, seemed almost blasphemous and made him rueful again.
The Lower River in his time had been a nest of snakes. He was known for not fearing them; he was feared for daring to catch them. One of Hock’s long-ago names in the village was Mwamuna wa Njoka, Snake Man. So he said, “What’s the problem?”
“This crazy mama I know, Teya, over in Somerville, has a humongous snake she keeps as a pet, python or something. Get this, she actually sleeps with it.”
Hock considered the stupidity of this, and then said, “They like the warmth. How big?”
“Yay big,” Jerry said, flinging out his arms. “Almost as big as she is. What do you think?”
“I think, don’t be cute. Put it into a cage. But it should really be in an equatorial forest. Ask her if it makes any noise — like a blowing sound.”
Not long after that, nearer Thanksgiving, Jerry stopped in again and said to Hock, “You were right. It sucks in air and goofs it out.”
“If it’s vocalizing, it’s a python. Other snakes don’t make any sounds.”
“Whatever. I told her what you said, but she feels sorry for the snake. The thing’s not eating. She gave it food, but it won’t touch it.”
“Probably it would eat if it was left alone. But they can go months without eating.” Hock was folding sweaters that a man had decided not to buy. “She still sleeping with the snake?”
Jerry nodded. “Whack job, right?”
But standing at the store counter on this November day of denuded trees under a brown sky, Hock thought of Malabo, of the snakes he’d collected: green mambas, black mambas, spitting cobras, the swimming sun snake, the egg-eating wolf snake, the boomslang mbobo, the puff adder, and the nsato, the rock python, which could have been the woman’s pet snake. The villagers feared them and would kill a snake on sight. If a traveler encountered a snake at the start of a journey, he would return home. Because of these fears Hock developed an interest and made a study, to set himself apart, so he would be known as something more than a mzungu. One of the derivations of mzungu was “spirit,” but the word meant “white man.” He kept some snakes in baskets, and fed them lizards and grasshoppers and mice, and he released them in places where they’d be safe to breed.
Jerry called the store the next day. He did not offer a preamble because their only subject lately had been the woman with the pet snake. He said, “She wants to know why the snake is acting weird. It still isn’t eating. It lies beside her, flattening itself.”
“Did you say flattening itself?” Hock said. “Listen, get her on the phone. Tell her to put the snake in a cage immediately.”
“Why are you shouting?”
Only then had Hock realized that his voice had risen almost to a scream. In this same shrill pitch he said, “The snake is measuring her. It’s getting ready to eat her!”
He knew snakes. Jerry’s story of the woman made him miss Africa — not the continent, which was vast and unfinished and unfathomable, but his hut in Malabo, on the Lower River in Malawi.
After he hung up, he called Jerry back and said, “Where is she? That woman’s in trouble.”
The house was a wood-frame three-decker on a side street in Somerville, from the outside like every other house on the block, from the inside a tangle of drapes and silken gold-fringed banners, highly colored, smelling of a sickly fragrance, perhaps incense, or from the candles flickering like vigil lights, their fumes the pulpy flavor of fruit, the plush bite of spices. The place was shadowy, as though furnished for some sort of ritual, a séance or spiritual exercise. A small cluttered bulb-lit shrine was fixed to one wall — a dark idol, a dish of grapes and plums before it. The rooms were warm with the aroma of sweet cake crumbs on this raw day.
A white-faced woman opened the door, holding it ajar just a few inches, looking afraid, until she recognized Jerry, and then she smiled and let them in. Her dark hair was uncombed and looked clawed and nagged at.
“Where is it?” Hock asked.
“Is this your friend?” the woman said, peering with her flat smile.
“Teya — this is Ellis,” Jerry said.
She spelled her name and said, “American Indian. I wish I would have known you were coming.”
Hock said, “The snake — did you secure it?”
“Mind taking your shoes off?” the woman said.
She herself was wearing sandals, with silver rings on her toes, and over her shoulders a robe that Hock knew to be polyester and not silk. She was older and slightly plumper than he expected. “Spaced out” and “hippie” had made him imagine someone girlish, but the woman was perhaps fifty. Her left wrist (upright, she was clutching a hank of her hair) was tattooed with a pattern of small dots.
When Hock put his mesh box down, she said, “Like I need another pet.” But she was pleased and smiled at the small sniffing guinea pig.
Stepping inside, barefoot, his foot-sole cushioned by carpets, he could not see much in the candlelit room. Yet through the furry fruitiness of incense and hot wax he could smell the snake — a distinct tang of flaking scales, the sourness of urine and smashed eggshells, a rank odor of earth and warmth.
“I’ve been doing a ton of washing,” the woman said. “Just back from Vermont.”
“The snake’s in a cage, right?”
“Witch Camp,” the woman said. She bent down and put her face against the mesh of the box and clucked loudly at the guinea pig.
“Witch Camp. What did I tell you?” Jerry said, pleased with himself.
“Am I wasting my time?” Hock said. “Where is this bad boy?”
“I was just going to say, the Mud Ritual,” the woman said. “It was insane.”
She had turned and was shuffling in her sandals across the room, to an adjoining room, where parasols hung upside down from the ceiling, the walls draped with scarves and gilt-edged banners and more votive lights.
“In here,” she said.
He saw a glass-sided fish tank against a wall, some sawdust and wood shavings heaped against one end, and a snake inside that he immediately recognized as a rock python. A heavy board served as the lid of the tank. And because this room was not as warm as the first one, the snake lay coiled like a rope on the deck of a ship, its head tucked under its thickest coil.
“Nsato — Python sebae,” Hock said.
Jerry said to the woman, “What did I tell you?”
“Jerry told me about him being dangerous. I put him in here just before I went to Vermont.”
“You didn’t leave him any food?”
“He wasn’t interested.” She had taken possession of the mesh box, and now she lifted it and smiled at the guinea pig. “But this little guy looks hungry.”
Hock unhooked the small door of the box and reached in. He held the squirming guinea pig, which was kicking its short legs. In one motion he lifted the lid of the fish tank and dropped in the guinea pig. The small creature scampered to a corner, darting against the glass, skidding in the thickness of wood shavings, awkwardly tugging its body as though too fat and top-heavy for its short legs.
The snake did not move — that is, it remained coiled. But then its pear-shaped head tilted, its yellow eyes flickered and widened, and it seemed almost imperceptibly to swell, like an inner tube inflated by a hand pump, fattening, tightening, filling its scaly thickness, as though it was visibly thinking.
“I had him drinking milk,” the woman said, looking closer at the panicky guinea pig, the enlarging snake.
“They like their food a little more animated than that,” Hock said.
She was peering in, blinking, her nose almost touching the glass. “Maybe they’ll be friends.”
“How long have you had him?”
“Couple of months.”
“They can go months without eating.”
“After the milk, he wasn’t interested. He let me hold him. He’s bigger than he looks.”
“They can grow to twenty-four feet.”
“He just — like Jerry told you — flattened himself next to me.”
“Because he was planning to eat you,” Hock said. “Seeing if you’d fit.”
“Me?” The woman laughed, moving her body heavily, as if to show her plumpness, to emphasize the absurdity of what Hock had just said.
“You’d be surprised at what a snake like that can fit into its mouth.”
The woman was smiling anxiously at the twitching guinea pig, the staring snake. She said, “You actually think they’re going to get along together in that cage?”
Hock frowned and said, “Let’s leave them to make friends. Okay?”
“Want some herbal tea?”
“Tell us about Witch Camp,” Jerry said.
She led them through the room with the incense and the drapes and the shrine to a small kitchen, and they sat at a table while she heated a kettle of water and made tea, crumbling some tiny black twigs into the pot.
“This is very cleansing. It sort of scours the toxins out of your system and heals your linings.”
And as she went on describing the purifying powers of the tea, Hock reflected on the untidiness of the room, the pots and dishes in the sink, the crumbs on the table, the dull gleam of the sticky toaster imprinted with a film of grease. And the woman herself, dark hair, pale skin, her heavily made-up eyes — blue eye shadow — squinting from her puffy face. She smiled wearily and shook her head.
“The Mud Ritual, like I was saying — insane. People were copulating. I got mud in my hair and my clothes were filthy. I’ve been doing laundry for two days.”
“Copulating?” Jerry was beaming at her.
“In the mud,” she said. “Big turn-on. But not for me. Some of these people just take advantage. The things they put in their bodies! One of them tosses a beer can onto the ground and I goes, ‘This is the earth. It’s your mother!’ ”
“Maybe a little chilly up in Vermont for getting tagged in the mud?” Jerry said, and he nodded at Hock.
“We’d just done a sweat,” she said. “Sweat lodge?”
“That’s some crazy stuff.”
“A few got wacky-vaced.”
Jerry said, “Excuse me?”
“Like medevaced. But they were toasted, I think on mushrooms.”
Hock was thinking of the snake, the poor thing captive in her apartment, just another artifact, part of the scene. Yet it was a great coiled cable of muscle, glittering, black and yellowish on its dorsum, with a glossy iridescent bluey sheen all over its upper scales, the pupil of its eye vertically elliptical. It simply did not belong here in a suburb of Boston.
The woman was telling Jerry about the Mud Ritual — Jerry giggling. Hock said, “I want to have another look.”
“At Naga?”
“That what you call him?”
“It’s Hindu. Naga the snake.”
“Naga’s the cobra,” Hock said. “This is nsato. That’s what he’s called in the Lower River.”
“Your friend’s kind of interesting,” the woman was saying, as Hock left the kitchen and walked through the shrine room to the back room where the snake lay coiled in the fish tank. Now the python was only partly coiled. Its sculpted head was upraised, its neck looped in a tight and thickened S.
In a whisper behind him, the woman said, “How’s my baby?”
Hock lifted his hand to quiet her. He knew that the snake’s posture, the drawn-back S, meant it was preparing to strike. The small guinea pig had flattened itself into a corner, where it was twitching miserably.
“Are you sure you want to see this?” Hock said in a low voice.
Before the woman could reply, the snake flung its head forward, jaws agape, and crushed the guinea pig against the glass wall of the tank. The jaws closed, but only slightly, and a pale froth brimmed at the edges of its mouth.
The woman was whimpering, Jerry behind her, softly cursing in awe.
“Can you get him out?”
“It’s caught, like a fish on a hook — the teeth are recurved, slanted back. The more the thing struggles, the more he’s pinned. Shall we give them a little privacy?”
“I didn’t need to see that,” the woman said.
“That was awesome,” Jerry said. “Snake was hungry.”
“Do you mind if I come back sometime?” Hock asked.
“Give me your cell-phone number. I might be doing my puja. Like praying.”
“No cell phone,” Jerry said.
The woman said, “That’s nice. That’s righteous.”
Back at the store, Hock thought only of the snake, especially its uncoiling and lengthening across the fish tank to strike at the guinea pig — the woman’s gasp, Jerry’s curses.
He called her a few days later. When he visited again he brought a mouse in a small box, which he kept in his pocket. The rooms were tidier, even neat in places, more candles had been lit. Teya — he remembered the name — was dressed in a dark smocklike dress, her hair drawn back, fixed with an ornate comb, gold hoops on her ears, bangles on her wrists.
Hock wanted to see the snake, but she insisted on serving him tea first. She was more relaxed, kinder-seeming, and yet was watching him closely.
“Hock — like the store?”
“You know the place?”
“I used to get the bus from there,” she said. “My father wore clothes like that. Overcoats with velvet collars.”
“Chesterfield.”
“Yeah. And always a hat. He’d wear a cravat sometimes. I mean, lace-curtain Irish, but he knew how to dress. He was a comptroller over at Raytheon, terrific with figures. He’s retired but he still does consulting. Maybe you could use him.”
Hock said, “I’m selling the business.”
“Bummer.”
“It’s served its purpose. It’s over now. It’s dated, like chesterfields and cravats.” When the woman said nothing, he went on, “Things change, things end, things die. Even love.”
“What are you going to do with all that money?”
“Ask my ex-wife.”
“Money is trouble,” she said. “Are you dating?”
The word had always made him smile. “My ex-wife and I go out now and then.”
“You should consider massages, maybe detoxing.”