Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

‘I think you’ll find America has changed since you’ve been away,’ Caroline said, leaning to one side as a waiter took her plate. ‘When the Republicans no longer had the Cold War to let them do what they liked, they had to invent a new one, that badly named War on Terror. What they could not have imagined is that the War on Terror, by turning its eye everywhere, even within the borders of this country, laid the groundwork for a new Civil War. That’s what the Tea Party and its ilk want, although they’d call it Revolution probably, but the reality isn’t revolution at all. It’s one part of the population determined to live and govern in a way that’s anathema to most of us. I don’t know, I’m just a painter, and maybe what I’m describing is the very definition of Revolution, but it’s not one with universal support, however much they might want to present it as such.’

As the evening progressed I realized the Mayor’s mother was more intelligent than at first she seemed. She looked and sounded like Lauren Bacall, whom I had once seen stepping into a car on Park Avenue; Caroline had the same elegance and grace and the kind of deep voice that suggested either an unusual physiognomy or else long years of marinating her vocal cords in whisky and cigarette smoke. She must have been in her eighties, so could easily have been my mother, and she spoke in the often irritating way of the aged and coherent, who insist on their wisdom and on imparting their knowledge to those who will listen. I was willing to listen politely for the sake of my daughter and her husband, not that Peter has done much to encourage my affection, I find him a rather stiff son-of-a-bitch, not unlike the Hooray Henrys of Oxford’s Bullingdon Club, the American equivalent of those self-satisfied toffs with no interest in ordinary people and no real understanding of how the poor suffer. The difference with Peter, however, is that his politics and heart are ostensibly in the right place, which is to say, from my perspective, the left, although with the super rich, and I think it’s fair to put Peter in this category, for those people who have been rich from birth, who have, as his mother jokes, been paying taxes since they were in utero, they can never entirely understand the realities faced by most Americans, never mind the realities of the profoundly impoverished people elsewhere in the world, to whom America’s poor would look comparatively well off.

I met the new Mayor and his wife that evening, we spoke briefly over coffee, all of us stepping out onto the terrace despite the cold to look at the lights in Central Park and the glow of buildings over on the Upper East Side. This , I thought, this is why I came back to New York, because I have been nowhere else that affords such urban views. London is a city of great pre-war beauty and much post-war ugliness, Paris for all its splendor can be monotonous and museum-like, Rome is chaotic, Berlin a hodgepodge, but New York has, despite the recent proliferation of new skyscrapers, cracked a kind of urban code that makes it one of the most dynamic cities in the world. Admittedly I have not been to Asia, and colleagues tell me that to see the urban future I have to go to Shanghai and Tokyo and a dozen other cities that will tell me a quite different story. Perhaps one day, although the promise of that kind of travel now grows more and more dim as the days pass and I sit in this room, scribbling these pages and wondering just what kind of future may yet be mine, what the purpose of my account here will be, who will read it, whether it will be little more than an eccentric legacy left to my heirs, or one day soon entered into evidence, a matter to be classified rather than kept public. You who read it, whoever you are, in whatever number, are undoubtedly already drawing conclusions about me, reading between the lines and making assumptions despite my protestations of innocence.

Fogel was charming but I sensed his judgment that I was a person of no great importance. The only reason to chat to me over coffee was because I was the father of his hostess and because he relied on the goodwill of media titans like Peter and his colleagues to convince the city that what he wanted to do, the plan he had to make it a fairer, more egalitarian place, would not undo the economic growth attributed to the policies of his predecessor. We spoke only briefly and he showed no real interest in me. I cannot blame him. What am I but an academic historian, a professor who may teach another fifteen or twenty years, perhaps influence a generation or two of other scholars, although now that future — all aspects of my future — seem genuinely in doubt. Each word I put on paper I imagine may be the last I write in freedom.

When everyone had gone home that night and I was left alone with Peter and Meredith while the staff washed the dishes, the three of us sat down in the den. I thought Meredith might open the Laphroaig and was surprised when she did not, although we had all been drinking throughout the evening, three different white wines, one for each course, of a quality I had come to expect from Peter.

‘Why don’t you stay the night, Dad?’

‘No, I should get home.’

‘Don’t be silly. It’s after one. We have nothing to do tomorrow, so stay. We’ll have a late breakfast.’

‘You’re sure it’s no trouble?’

‘You’re very welcome, Jeremy.’

‘As a matter of fact, I wanted to talk with you about something, although maybe I should leave it until tomorrow.’

‘Go ahead, Dad, I’m feeling wide awake.’

Peter, though, looked exhausted. ‘If you want to go to bed, it’s fine. I don’t have to talk about it now. It’s really no big deal.’

‘No, please, Jeremy, you’ve piqued our interest.’

‘Something slightly strange happened today. I was supposed to meet a student and I confirmed it by email earlier in the week. I saw her after a lecture I gave yesterday and we spoke again about the meeting. So I went to the café at the appointed time and she didn’t show. I walked home and was going to email her to ask why she hadn’t shown up, only to discover that I appear to have written to her earlier today to ask if I could reschedule and she responded saying that was fine. Now the problem is, I have no memory of writing that email asking to reschedule, nor do I remember reading her reply, and yet both messages are there.’

Meredith shifted on the couch, drawing her feet up under her legs and covering herself with a gray wool blanket I remembered having sent them after a trip I made to Stockholm for a conference last year. It was gratifying to see it was in use and had not been stowed in a cupboard, forgotten, or re-gifted to some less affluent friend. ‘I guess that is kind of strange. Have there been, you know, any other incidents like this?’

‘No, sweetheart, not that I’m aware of, which is why I wanted to talk to you about it. Have you noticed anything? Am I losing it?’

‘No, absolutely not. I haven’t noticed anything like that. Have you, Peter?’

Peter shook his head. ‘Honestly, I swear, Jeremy, your memory is better than mine. I haven’t detected anything strange. I mean, you drive me crazy a lot of the time, but that’s not the same.’ He smiled because it was a teasing, generous thing to say, rather than an expression of real irritation. It was the kind of banter that made me like the kid a little more each time I saw him, and I felt he was gradually relaxing around me, accepting me as part of the family, though I had met his parents only a couple of times and had the sense that Meredith was becoming integrated into Peter’s family more completely than he had become a part of ours, perhaps because there was no ‘ours’; there was now my family, which was Meredith and my mother, and Meredith’s mother, who was really on her own, she has no siblings, her parents are dead, so less scope for Peter to become a part of us in the way that Meredith could become a part of them . I felt this as a loss, it is true, because I knew that to a large degree the dissolution of our family was my fault and not Susan’s, although the decline of any relationship is almost always multilateral, and my ex-wife was not without fault.