Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

Leaning against the podium he spoke into the silence. “Little do they know the pleasures of your city, which is not a city really, but a small town surrounded by smaller towns.”

He knew from a muffled pause, a withholding, a silence and suspense, the very quality of the air in the hall like a drop in pressure, that he had just said the wrong thing. It was so easy here to blunder, and you were so quick to know it.

“Of course all cities are built up of townships, and Boston has bags and bags of character,” he said, backing away; and explaining, praising, he recaptured the attention of the audience, who, as he always felt, were sitting in judgment upon him.

But he was glad for a chance to speak, grateful to have been asked. He needed this audience to take him on trust. He had come here to stay and found Boston to his taste. He could live in a house here, he could own a car; it was only twenty minutes to the woods in one direction, or to the ocean in the other. He could know the whole city, and no one knew him. The line about the fellow Brits — and the middle-aged ones he knew well — claiming New York as theirs might have sounded jokey, but they had rebuffed him in the stately city.

The English had come, they closely guarded what they had found, they didn’t share, there were as cliquey in New York as they’d been in London — cliquier, really, and slyly competitive in being part of the scene, not so much class-conscious as wicked one-uppers. Some behaved like expats in a savage colony, praising the place in public but denigrating it in private, mocking the locals in exaggerated have-a-nice-day accents. Yet they had possessed it, crowding him out, and he found it hard not to resent them. The first English person seems unique, and then you see the second one and realize it’s a whole identical tribe. There were just too many of them now. They were telly faces and wireless voices, they had strong opinions about everything, explaining America to Americans, who listened to them, and they were cock-a-hoop because the UK had stopped listening.

Raleigh had visited the States before — book tours, the lecture circuit — but that was a different routine: hotels, handshakes, expensive meals, free laundry service, key to the minibar. This, the monotony of a resident, seemed to occur in another country, of bills and frowns and strangers and inconveniences. And it was odd how a Pakistani or a Jamaican, or the Haitian taxi driver who lived in the house next door, also considered themselves resident in the same way, hanging on, never intending to return to their homeland. It disconcerted him to think, They’re just like me.

This litany of grievances played in his head as he smiled and spoke, a silent counterpoint to everything he said aloud. His subject tonight had been billed as “Anglo-Boston”: English writers who’d visited and written about Boston — notably Dickens, Trollope, and Kipling; and Bostonians who’d visited and written about England — Hawthorne, Henry Adams, and James.

The names were like chloroform: hearing them, the audience smiled and drowsed, but remained upright in listening postures. The writers he mentioned had felt at home, had made friends, had written their experiences, and were quotable. He meant to flatter the listeners, but also tactfully to educate them by reminding them of these traveler-writers, and he implied that these men had shown him the way, that he was one of them, for he wished to make a place for himself in Boston.

“They had secret lives,” Raleigh said in a pleading tone, hoping to rouse. “Dickens was in an adulterous love affair with an actress, Henry Adams was a ferocious anti-Semite, Hawthorne had an incestuous relationship with his sister, Kipling was at war with his American brother-in-law, Henry James was desperately lonely. But Trollope was a happy man.”

Had they heard? He said, “And I am happy too.” But it sounded insincere, like a protest. He added, “Almost without trying I have found a routine, and a routine is like a one-word definition of a life.”

He glanced at his watch and saw that thirty-five minutes had passed, his allotted time was almost up, his cue for his prepared closing, about there being a Boston in Lincolnshire, but that it was little more than a market town with a cathedral tower so odd they called it the Stump. “Your Boston is the real thing, and I am grateful that you’ve welcomed me here.”

He reached into his pocket for his handkerchief, and his fingers snagged on his phone, which was tangled in it, and he removed them both. His face and neck were damp in the hot bright June evening, and he knew his cheeks were pink, his face flushed. He wiped his face with one hand and with the other undid the top buttons of his shirt and opened the collar.

Mrs. DeWicky, who had introduced him, now appeared at his side and shook his hand in thanks, and when she looked more closely, with concern, he touched his throat and drew his collar together.

“Questions,” she said into the microphone. “We have ten minutes before I turn you into the furnace of Arlington Street.”

He glanced down at the phone and read, U cant git away, I find u and buss u face. U be real sorry, and shut it off with such force that the flesh under his thumbnail throbbed.

“Yes?” he said to a woman in the front row with her hand raised.

“My husband and I go to Britain almost every year,” she began, and he was sure it would be a question related to travel. But he smiled and listened, and when the woman was done, he repeated the gist of what she’d asked — destinations in Scotland — and he offered several suggestions.

After that, more hands, more comments. One thanking him for writing Lifers, his book about English prisons (“But I felt at home there because I’d been at an English boarding school,” Raleigh said), another asking whether he knew any of the English writers who had relocated to New York (“Many of them are my Oxford chums,” Raleigh said. “We’re all enfants terribles in our sixties now. We can misbehave here to our heart’s content”), and the inevitable English pedant ticking him off about his reference to Boston in Lincolnshire and elaborating on Saint Botolph. When he tried to signal an end, a man stood up at the back and spoke loudly.

“Do you think you’ll be writing something about Boston?” he asked. “Or, um, what sort of work will you do here?”

“I have found a welcome here.” His hand was in his pocket on U cant git away.

“Maybe some kind of book?” the same man said, persisting.

“I can only quote Henry James,” Raleigh said, and sensed the same slackening of attention when he spoke the name. Why was that? Because they hadn’t read him, or had read him and found him dull? To try again to rouse them from their torpor, he spoke with whispered urgency: “We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

When they applauded — and he suspected they were applauding his theatrical delivery rather than the message — he thanked them for being there and said he looked forward to seeing them again.

As he left with Mrs. DeWicky, several tried to detain him, just to chat, and he listened and smiled and edged toward the door, seeking to be free of them, and at the same time feeling that, apart from that one comment about Lifers, there had been nothing else about his books, no mention of his novels, no indication that anyone had read his journalism. But that was all right. He was holding his cell phone in his damp hand.

The taxi was waiting for them. At the foot of the stairs, glancing back, Raleigh said, “This is a first for me. Speaking in a church.”