Russell Hoban - Her Name Was Lola

‘Will you feed me apples and lumps of sugar?’ says Lola.

‘All the time,’ says Max, smiling because Lola is looking very coltish in a short plaid skirt, purple tights, and fur-trimmed boots. A donkey jacket, purple muffler, and little black beret complete her outfit. Her fair hair is in a long thick plait that hangs down her back, ‘if I don’t eat you up first,’ he says. They kiss among the Dover paperbacks. The ice-skating elephants and crocodiles whirl in their pages, long scarves streaming out behind them. The lights are lit in St Martin’s Lane, the sky is dark and thick, rosy with the loom of London. Snow begins to fall. ‘When it stops we can turn St Martin’s Lane upside-down and make it snow again,’ says Lola. ‘This is what it is to be happy,’ thinks Max within the memory he’s typing. Lola’s cheeks are like cold apples as he kisses them. He falls out of the memory with a sudden drop. No more Lola. ‘Ahhh,’ sighs Max.

‘What a girl!’ says Moe Levy. ‘I love my Lulu.’

‘Your Lulu!’ says Max.

‘It says right here,’ says Moe: ‘“‘All the time,’ says Moe, smiling because Lulu is looking very coltish …” Hello? Are you there?’

‘Where?’ says Max.

‘In Chapter Four,’ says Moe, ‘APPLES, LUMPS OF SUGAR.’

‘Right,’ says Max. ‘I’m with you.’

‘I feel as if I’m going to blow a gasket,’ says Max’s mind. ‘Do we have to keep doing these memories?’

‘What else have we got?’ says Max.

‘No more Lula Mae?’ says his mind.

‘Where’ve you been?’ says Max. ‘That’s all over, she’s going back to the States. She’ll send photos, I’ll send money.’

‘And have you become wise?’ says his mind.

‘Not yet,’ says Max.

April 1997. Goodbye drinks at The White Horse. Tomorrow Lula Mae and the unborn Victor/Victoria are flying back to Texas. ‘Homecoming Queen,’ says Max. ‘Have you ever actually been one?’

‘High school and college both,’ says Lula Mae with a modest smile. ‘It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it.’

‘Have you told your parents you’re coming?’ says Max.

‘Oh yes, they’ll be meeting me at the airport.’

‘Told them about their grandchild-to-be?’

‘Not yet.’

‘How do you think they’ll take the news?’

‘They’ll open a few bottles of champagne and they’ll be impatient to start spoiling him or her. I chose my parents carefully and they’re my kind of people.’

‘Probably a lot of jocks and ex-jocks hoping to see you again?’ says Max.

‘The jocks are a while back,’ says Lula. ‘Before you it was mostly executives.’

‘I wonder who’ll be next,’ says Max.

Lula Mae shakes her head and takes Max’s hand. ‘I’m not the same as I was before I met you.’

‘Definitely not,’ says Max, patting her in the area of major change. He finds that he has to wipe his eyes.

‘Whatever happens,’ says Lula Mae, ‘Victor or Victoria won’t ever …’ She also needs to wipe her eyes.

‘Won’t ever …?’ says Max.

‘Call anybody but you Daddy,’ says Lula Mae.

Long kiss, long embrace. ‘Time for our last double scotches,’ says Max.

May 1997. Max’s pages are accumulating. He doesn’t know how Moe Levy’s story will end but he trusts that this will be revealed to him in the fullness of time. Moe has no complaints at the moment. He’s not a writer, he’s a painter, and he’s already done a portrait and many sketches of Lulu.

Max’s mind is kept busy riffling through its files as Max’s memories become Moe’s life. Today he’s recalling a visit to the V & A with Lola. This will be the Moe and Lulu activity in Chapter Nine. No title for it yet. Max’s mind gives him Lola and himself back in early February. Up the museum steps they go, through the revolving doors and into warmth and brightness, long spaces and echoes, years overlapped like fish scales. Bowls and goblets, wine of shadows. Women, men, gods and demons in stone, clay, bronze, ivory. Some with open eyes, some with closed. Fabrics and jewels embracing absent friends.

‘Let’s go to the Nehru Gallery,’ says Lola. They hear music as they approach. On a dais musicians with sitar, tabla, flute and harmonium are playing a classical raga, far-away warm and bright in the dark London winter. The music is not loud but it is very wide. Max and Lola are standing in front of a display case in which they see Shiva Nataraja dancing in bronze, his hair streaming symmetrically to right and left. Dancing in a bronze ring of fire, Shiva Nataraja with his four arms, his hands with drum, with flame, with ‘Fear not’, with pointing to his uplifted left foot. Under his right foot is a dwarf all blackish green with patina. It has a long body, short arms and legs. Under Shiva’s foot it is like an animal, something that goes on all fours. Its baby-face, is it reposeful? Max thinks it is. ‘That’s Apasmara Purusha,’ says Lola. ‘The dwarf demon called Forgetfulness.’

‘Among other things,’ says Max. ‘Is he someone you visit often?’

‘Our lives are made of memories,’ says Lola. ‘Everything up to the present moment, even the word now leaving my mouth, is a memory. I come here every now and then to make sure Apasmara’s still under Shiva’s foot.’

‘He’s a dangerous guy,’ says Max, ‘but even if he got loose he couldn’t make me forget you. Fear not.’

On the page Max is typing, that’s what Moe says to Lulu. ‘I’d just as soon you hadn’t put those words in my mouth,’ says Moe to Max. ‘They seem unlucky to me.’

‘Be brave,’ says Max. ‘We’ve all got to take our chances.’ He goes back to the beginning of the chapter and types in the title: FEAR NOT.

June 1997. Max is chugging along comfortably with Moe and Lulu. Moe and Lulu visit the National Gallery, look at the Claudes, and encounter Linda Lou Powers from Austin. Moe and Linda Lou chat briefly, she says where she works, Moe admires her going-away view and so on. Moe has no need for a research visit to Holborn so Max sends him to Blacks for a new rucksack.

‘This is where you drop by Himalaya Technology and go out for lunch with Linda Lou,’ says Max to Moe.

‘What for?’ says Moe.

‘Hey,’ says Max, ‘don’t come the innocent with me, I’m the guy who’s writing you.’

‘Oh, really?’ says Moe. ‘How often have I heard you say that your characters develop a life of their own and you go with the action that comes out of that.’

‘That’s all very well,’ says Max, ‘but if you can pass up Linda Lou you must be dead from the waist down.’

‘No need to be coarse,’ says Moe. ‘Linda Lou is certainly attractive but Lulu is all the woman I need and all the woman I want. I’ve got no interest left over for anyone else.’

‘My God,’ says Max. ‘I’ve created a monster. So what are you going to do now?’

‘I’m going to go home and stretch a canvas,’ says Moe. ‘Tonight I’m starting a nude of Lulu.’

‘Wonderful,’ says Max. ‘Do you think you’re better than I am?’

‘Let’s just say that I think of you as a demiurge,’ says Moe, ‘a brute creator that gets things started but doesn’t really know what to do with them, OK?’

‘That a character of mine should talk to me like that!’ says Max. ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth.’

‘I didn’t ask to be written,’ says Moe.

June 1997. Max is utterly gobsmacked by Moe’s put-down. As a writer of fiction he draws on himself, with whatever changes are required for the people he invents. They are taller or shorter than he is, braver or less brave, more honest or less, more aggressive or less. Better at sports perhaps, or talented in ways he isn’t. But never before has one of them assumed the moral high ground and lectured him from there. ‘What do I do now?’ he asks his mind.