Russell Hoban: Her Name Was Lola

‘Planning one?’

‘I don’t know. My fatherhood is a total confusion to me. Sometimes I dream that I have another son.’ Max doesn’t speak the name of his dream son. Both he and Klein fall silent, lost in thought and Pedigree. Max gets a fourth pint for each of them.

After a while Klein lifts his right hand with the index finger in the admonitory position. ‘Remember,’ he says, ‘Mack in Barch ’97, the first time we had drunks here at The 14 Bus, I told you that the best thing … What was I saying?’

‘The best thing mack in Barch ’97.’

‘Right. You could do for both of your women was to get out of their lives.’

‘I remember.’

‘I think the same about your child or childs. Children. As the case may be. If you can’t be in the same place with them. Can’t be a full-time father. Better off without you. Vanity of vanities. One generation pisseth itself away and another generation likewise. That’s all she wrote.’ Klein falls asleep. Max wakes him up. They visit the Gents and leave The 14 Bus. Or The Pickled Pelican. Whichever.

March 1999. Max has been doing his best to achieve Page One with whatever he can. Moe Levy has left him and no one has replaced him. Charlotte Prickles is doing what she can to help with river memories but there’s been no progress. Max has had times like this before and he’s always got through them so maybe he’ll get through this one.

This day is not like other days. It’s the vernal equinox. It was just two years ago that he and Lola picnicked on Mai Dun. Max is all keyed up, ready for messages from anywhere. Sitting at his desk with a bottle of red, he falls asleep and dreams that he’s on a boat. He’s on Noah’s Ark. He looks at his hands and sees the hands of a boy. Max is the boy Noah, his own dream son. In his hands is the raven. The boy Noah goes to the window. He launches the raven. The raven is Max. He sees the rainbow. He loops the loop, flies to Mai Dun and lands there by the ribbon that Lola tied to a grass stem two years ago.

Max wakes up feeling calm and clear. He doesn’t know why or how, but this dream has changed him. He doesn’t know if he has a son by Lola. He doesn’t know where she is or whom she’s with. Doesn’t know if he’ll ever see her again. But he knows now that there can be no other woman for him.

March 1999. On the second anniversary of the Mai Dun vernal equinox Lola does nothing to mark the day. With Noah on her lap she thinks about what has brought her to this day. She had come to Diamond Heart full of rage. Full of hurt. She had taken up the sarod with the aim of composing a raga that would, if she could call up the demon of Forgetfulness, erase her from Max Lesser’s memory. But the deeper she gets into Indian music the more difficult it is for her to know exactly how she feels. Certainly the self Max had presented to her had been a lie. But how much of a lie? The first time he saw her he said she was his destiny woman. Outrageous. He said it so loudly that everybody in the shop turned to look at him. Lola was embarrassed. But in her heart she’d been hoping for her fate to declare itself in just such a sudden and startling manner. In that moment she felt as if she’d let go of the trapeze of her ordinary life and was flying through the air to Max’s outstretched hands. There was of course a safety net called Basil. But the thrill of letting go and flying like that! What Max had said that day was not a lie, she knew that. And her response was not a lie. Through the air she flew to him, and that was real. That was a true thing.

Where did the lie start? With Lula Mae? Not really. The lie started with Max’s constant craving for a bit of strange while he pretended to be true to her, Lola. Could she have changed him? What if he hadn’t got Lula Mae pregnant? At some point Lola would have told him, ‘It’s either her or me. Choose.’ That day at Mai Dun, did his announcement of Lula Mae’s pregnancy mean that he’d chosen the homecoming queen? She hadn’t given him a chance to say what he intended to do. He’d wanted to talk and she’d crashed the E-type instead of listening.

Lola takes up Polaris and Noah, watching her, goes to his nakkara. Indira has given Lola the written-out music for ‘Smriti’ which is definitely not a piece for beginners. Lola follows the still unfamiliar notation slowly and carefully, but her very hesitancy becomes an embellishment of the shadowy ascents and descents of ‘Memory’. She cannot bring to this music any rage or hurt. She can only be the vessel for what her fingers call up from the sarod. Love remembered. Longing and regret. Noah, listening attentively, draws closer to his mother, his drumbeats helping her to find the music.

June 1999. ‘Dear Max,’ writes Lula Mae. ‘Victor is a year and a half old now. As you can see from the photo, he’s looking handsomer all the time. He said his first word today. “Dada.” Daddy. He said it to Jim Bob Baker. Jim Bob has asked me to marry him and I’ve said yes. I know I promised you that he’d never call anybody Daddy but you, but the reality is that you and he have never seen each other and probably never will. So reality has made me break that promise. I hope you’ll forgive me and I think you will. Jim Bob has his own software company and he works mostly from home. He’s a good man, he loves Victor and Victor loves him. Don’t send any more money. Wish us luck. Love X, Lula Mae.’

September 1999. ‘Talk to me about the river,’ says Charlie Prickles to Max. ‘Tell me whatever comes to mind.’

‘Well,’ says Max, ‘it’s pretty much what I’ve told you. We paddled. We swam. We had canoe fights. I think we went through a lock. We cooked over a fire, we slept under the stars. When we got to the end of the canoe trip a truck took us back to camp.’

‘That’s the canoe trip,’ says Charlie. ‘But what I asked you about was the river.’

‘The river we took the trip on?’ says Max. ‘I don’t even remember if it was the Allegheny or the Susquehanna or what.’

‘I just mean river,’ says Charlie. ‘The river in your mind.’

‘Oh,’ says Max. ‘That river.’

‘Yes,’ says Charlie. ‘That one.’

‘It flows to the sea,’ says Max. ‘They all do.’

‘Think about that,’ says Charlie.

‘I always do,’ says Max. ‘And then the Ark comes in. It’s in my dreams with the raven and the Noah child but there’s no story in that.’

‘You can’t get a story out of everything,’ says Charlie. ‘Some things are just for thinking about.’

December 1999. By now Lola finds saris more comfortable than jeans for sitting on the floor to play the sarod. She has a quasi-Persian rug (the best she could do locally) and several cushions. Sitting crosslegged on the floor makes for a kind of thinking that’s different from standing-up or sitting-on-a-chair thinking. The sky is higher, the sea wider. Time stretches out in all directions.

Noah’s sitting near her. He’s wearing a woollen waistcoat crocheted by his mother in broad bumblebee bands of yellow and black. Both he and Mum like the effect and sometimes they have little buzzing conversations. Noah’s first word was ‘deh’. As close as he could get to ‘destiny’, which Lola has evidently murmured more often than she’s been aware of. He’s making good progress on the nakkara, and under Hariprasad’s tutelage is able to keep the beat with a skill beyond his years. He particularly enjoys the slow tempos and repetitions of the Dhrupad style. He accompanies Lola as she plays and sings, in English, her own compositions. ‘Yesterday, yesterday, gone away, here to stay,’ she chants. Noah chants along while beating out the time, tunka tu, tunka tu. He likes to play with words. ‘Dessa nay, yessa nay, onna way, heena say.’ When they come to a pause he says, ‘Dad?’