Jim Crace - All That Follows

Indeed, the neighborhood is already culturally bipolar. From Maxie’s box room’s narrow balcony are views across a new “zen garden”—hard landscaping, a single cherry tree, and litter that stays beyond the reach of winds or brooms — toward a complex of new galleries and jewelry stores. There is an expensive coffee shop, an arty bar called Scofflaws, another bar called the Four T’s. Yet twenty steps across the street are the unadorned front gates of a poultry supply depot that employs only Mexicans and that, once locked at night, becomes a crack corner. Just a half mile downtown, and downmarket too, is an art-free strip of single-story tinnies: the Roadrunner Cocktails Bar, the Big Shot Grocery, a couple of thrift stores, the Reno Hotel (“Rooms by the Hour”), and, painted black and yellow in tiger stripes, behind its daily pall of smoke, Gruber’s Old Time BBQ, with — for almost downtown Austin — its ironic promises “Hunters Are Welcome” and “Best Motorcycle Food.”

Leonard ventures to the store on his first evening in Texas, driven from the loft by Nadia and Maxie arguing and then not arguing. He has pretended to be watching CNN for almost an hour while his hosts whisper loudly at each other in their room. He hardly dares to overhear, as he fears they might be arguing about him, that he is less welcome in their home than they have pretended, even that Maxie has discerned Leonard’s amorous objectives. Finally he taps on their door — four beats to the bar — with his fingertips. “Off out,” he says, disturbing them as little as he can. When their door swings open in response, Maxie has her in his arms, laughing into her hair, as unrepentant as a boy. Her face is flushed and childlike. For the moment she is no longer mad at him, it seems, though clearly she’s been crying.

“I’ll take a stroll,” Leonard says. “Just checking out the neighborhood.”

“Get some juice,” she says.

Maxie comes with him into the hallway and downstairs as far as the street door. “She’s tense,” he explains. “It ain’t you.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure because … Guess what? She’s gonna have a kid.”

“Nadia’s pregnant?”

“That’s the only way you get a kid in Texas.”

“Do I congratulate?”

“No, don’t say anythin’. Just get the juice. I’ll let you know what she decides when you get back.” Maxie reaches out and pulls at Leonard’s coat. “This is gonna be embarrassin’,” he says, pushing his fingers through his beard.

Leonard nods. He understands at once. “You’ll need the spare room now, I guess?”

“Whoa, take your time. That’s eight months down the road, if that’s a road she wants to take. You know? For me, I’m only sayin’ that the time’s not … at its very best. The kid’s no bigger than a cashew nut, she says. It’s no big deal. No”—he leans further in and whispers—“I’ll let you know if we … we’re gonna go ahead or if … well, if we’ll have to put a stop to it. Hey, man, what I have to say to you, now this is strictly private stuff—”

“I understand.” But Leonard still does not understand.

“I said you would. That’s what I said to her. Because what with your mother’s house an’ all and how the dollar is right now, not worth a bean, you’re better placed than us to be a little generous. I hate to even mention it, but if it comes to it, hard times and hard decisions, man, could you let me have a thousand dollars, say? Twelve hundred tops. Just to lend a hand. You know, like rent? Except not rent.”

“For an abortion?”

“Volume, Leon, please! She’s pregnant, dude. She isn’t deaf. Okay, get juice.”

Leonard’s indignation, and jet lag, send him two blocks down the street in the wrong direction, away from homes, away from the stores and traffic, into an industrial block of empty warehouses, abandoned tire-and-muffler-fitting stores, and railroad sidings with patches of sagebrush on their berms and — eerily — a pair of turkey vultures killing time on a power line. Ry Cooder country, he thinks, trying to recall the Paris, Texas sound track, which he has attempted to play once or twice. Despite the heavy, gluey air, he takes deep breaths. He balloons his diaphragm. He licks and purses his lips, practices his embouchures, blows vowels. All preparation for the saxophone — and his way of staying calm in any circumstances, even when, as now, his instruments are not at hand. A police car cruises by and turns, fixing Leonard in its headlights. It is only when the driver rolls down the window to stare at him and shake his head that Leonard stops miming notes, checks himself — and checks the neighborhood. It’s clear he’s lost, and vulnerable. He’s nervous, suddenly. This part of town is too shadowy and deserted for a newcomer — for this newcomer, at least.

By the time Leonard has retraced his steps, gone beyond the lofts, and caught his breath, he is less incensed by Maxie’s casualness and his damned cheek for dunning money for a termination from a man he’s only met this afternoon, a stranger who has just arrived. He’ll not part with a dollar, though, he decides. Except for rent. He will pay rent. That’s not unreasonable. And he will contribute toward the groceries. But as for funding an abortion — not a cent, not a cent unless it’s Nadia who begs for it and possibly not even then. She needs to hear what might go wrong, long-term: his sister’s suicide, his broken mother’s subsequent deliberate decline and early death, at hardly fifty-eight years old, the nephew never born. “No, not a single cent,” he says out loud, but it is only to himself and to the sidewalk. He’s practicing. He’ll stand his ground. He lets himself imagine it, the line of reasoning: mother, sister, nephew, all of it. He rehearses each phrase, imagines Maxie storming off, imagines Nadia’s relief. Then he lets himself drift home to England, where Nadia is with him, rescued from the Lone Star State and in her final weeks, in great wide skirts. Her hands are resting on her unborn child. Whose child is it? His child — it’s simply done. He only has to say it to himself, envision it. Then Maxie never was. Dragged out of bed, kicked out of town. His building’s down. He’s murdered, possibly. And it is Leonard who will help her to take deep breaths and push. Meanwhile, he takes deep breaths of air himself and parps the saxophone again for her — a skipping variation, “Mack the Knife.” For half a minute he is admirable and brave, a husband and a father to be proud of, until he’s summoned back to Austin first by the wolf call of a train and then by vehicles and voices that to his tuned ear sound dangerous.

Leonard has never been at ease abroad. It always seems that anything he does outside of England is a sham, even in America, where at least the language is familiar, if not the same: Here I am, being local , is his running commentary. Here I am, blending in; here I am, not acting the outsider. But fooling nobody . He is still nervous too, despite the distance he has almost run from the warehouse block — nervous of the dark and light, nervous of the street but uneasy about leaving it and pushing open doors, even the partly open doors to the brightly lit Big Shot Grocery with its wall-mounted amplifiers blasting hip-hop at the sidewalk and its come-hither kitchen smells.

Leonard is not unduly paranoid. Strangers truly pick on him. He’s twice been beaten up in pub car parks, one a robbery (his instrument case, with his first beloved saxophone inside), the other without any cause or not any cause expressed except in punches. And he’s been threatened countless times by men (and women too) who haven’t liked his voice or his opinions or what they take to be his “attitude.” His attitude, he knows, might come across — because he’s tall and scholarly and has reed-player’s lips — as supercilious. He admits that he can also sound intemperate, extravagantly unbending in his politics, though he prefers to characterize, mythologize himself as a plain and simple man of solid principle. He’s even invented a working-class background, useful in both jazz and politics, as it validates his stridency. At antiwar and antiglobalization meetings, at the more sedate China Solidarity vigils and Carbon Conscience pickets, and on the Asylum Support and Open Borders committees (his current campaigns), Leonard is the one who does his best to strike the fiercest notes, who calls for action every time, as Mr. Perkiss would, who says they should not surrender an inch to anyone but “be a limpet, cling to principle.” As far as possible, and certainly in his private life, such as it is, he matches what he says with what he does. No private health care for Leonard Lessing. He takes public transport when he can. What remains of his inheritance has been ethically invested. He carries an Amnesty credit card (“Buy One, Set One Free”). He plays for no fee at benefit concerts and charity gigs but does not accept corporate engagements. He has never crossed a picket line or stepped away from a trade boycott or defied an embargo. He does not patronize multinationals like Tesco, CaliCo, and Walmart. He will not wear clothes that have been sourced from sweatshops. He always checks the labels on his life.