The Death of Eli Gold

‘Yes. Good to have you here, Harvey. Eli will be so pleased to see you. Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’ He clicks the OK button on his phone, and forces it back into his jeans. Roth? Philip Roth? Harvey loves Philip Roth more than he has ever been able to admit to his watchful-for-literary-slights father. He feels intense desire to meet the dark bard of American sex and clear the decks of his depression, making him wonder, angrily, if he shouldn’t just turn up unannounced at this great literary lunch-time: he is, after all, Eli Gold’s son, the only one of the three adult children who has been prepared to make the journey. Then self-awareness settles like soft snow back upon him, and he realizes how far such an action is beyond him, he who has always hated confrontation anyway, and these days need only to be confronted with the smallest of obstacles for his depleted energy reserves to drain away to nothing.

Harvey moves into the Baggage Reclaim Hall, with its always palpable dynamic of tension and relief, as exhausted passengers wait nervously for their cherished belongings to be spat onto the oval belts. His conveyor, No. 4, is sparsely populated now, the phone call having slowed down his movement here. He can see his suitcase, some Samsonite-alike with pull-out handle – again, due to the particular nature of this particular journey, he didn’t know which of the numerous bags piled up under the stairs to pack – forlornly beginning what looks like its twentieth or thirtieth rotation. A woman he had noticed on the plane, sitting four or five rows in front of him on the opposite side, is there, beginning to look anxious. She is in her early twenties, dirt-blonde long hair parted like that of a Woodstock girl dancing towards the crackly camera, sea-blue eyes, and, even under the whip-lash Baggage Reclaim lights, skin so smooth that if Harvey were to reach out and touch it – as every cell in his hands is urging him to do – his fingers would slip.

Her bag, pink like bubble-gum, tumbles out of the conveyor hatch, the relief registering on her features, softening them even further, and making Harvey remember something one of his many more sexually opportune friends had told him once, about how, while waiting at airports for luggage, he would try and steal a furtive glance at the labels on the suitcases of any waiting attractive women, and then offer to share a taxi in that direction. As she picks up the bag, Harvey, impelled by the thought, does flick his eyes downwards and, catching sight of the zip code, thinks it might be an address near his hotel, but never has any intention of going through with all that stilted ‘Hey, I see you’re going my way’ shite. It just tears another little track through him, the idea that it could be done, that someone else could do it.

An older woman joins her, and helps her heave her bag onto a trolley. She moves away: she hasn’t registered Harvey’s presence, even cursorily. He looks at his watch. He now has time, far too much time. He looks again at his iPhone and ponders the text from Stella. I should call her back, he thinks, let her know I’ve landed. But then the other thing grabs his heart with its cold hands, and, instead, he sits down on the edge of Conveyor Belt No. 5, to watch his suitcase travel round Conveyor Belt No. 4, round and round and round, like a lone ship on the greyest, most mundane of seas.

* * *

Eli Gold’s first wife, Violet, is in her room just finishing lunch when she sees the item on the television news. It has been a day on which she has already veered from her normal routine. She usually watches the one o’clock news in the lounge, even though some of the other residents would always be fast asleep in there by then, and Joe Hillier’s snoring, in particular, was more than loud enough to drown out the words of the newsreader. The more able residents at Redcliffe House are allowed to make their own lunch and eat it in their rooms, and Violet takes this option as often as she can, preparing it – baked beans on toast, a cheese sandwich, a tin of ravioli – in the tiny kitchenette off to the side of the room and eating at the table by the window. Lunch always reminds her of Valerie, who is forever hinting that Violet should move to somewhere more structured, which means, Violet knows, one of the fascist old-age homes, a place where her independence would be taken away, her privacy disregarded, and the other inmates comatose, just because Valerie couldn’t bear the idea of her sister eating on her own from time to time. After lunch, she would normally get the lift down from the fourth floor, and, if it was not wet, walk the path around Redcliffe Square Gardens, which, even with a stick, would not take her more than fifteen minutes, and she was always back at Redcliffe House by five to one, ready to watch the news. She could take the lift back up to her room and watch it there, but even though Violet was a woman who liked to keep herself to herself much of the time, she felt there was no point in living in a place where so many other people lived if she never mingled with them at all: and so she always went into the lounge following her walk, and, with her cream winter coat on her knees, watched the one o’clock news.

Unless it was wet, as on the day she hears the news about Eli, a day on which she hadn’t even bothered going downstairs to check the pavements: the rain had been hitting her window all morning, a downpour blown diagonal across the pane by the wind. Over time, an errant branch from the neighbouring hostel’s enormous oak tree had grown along the walls of the house to lie pressed against her sill, and today she could count the drops on its leaves. She had just finished eating a few slices of ham and some crackers, and had already risen to take the plate into the kitchenette, when the item began.

She is shocked by seeing his face on the screen – at first some footage of him, recently giving a lecture, with the beard and the big shock of grey hair that she vaguely knew he had now, followed by an old black and white photo from round about the time they were married. For a split second, Violet thinks they might even show a photograph of her: him wearing his GI uniform, her on his arm in the white floral dress that she used to wear on their first dates.

They don’t – how could they, she chided herself, when the only photos that have survived of us together are all in that shoebox under the bed? I don’t suppose he kept any. The news moves on to a shot of a tall building in New York, which Violet gathers is a hospital. A doctor, an Indian, is standing in front of a crowd reading some sort of statement. Without her hearing aid she cannot hear what he is saying, but his name – Ghund … khali? – is subtitled below. She puts the plate down and turns away from the kitchenette, feeling her knees crack beneath her. She goes over to the television, a Hitachi ex-rental model made in 1973 which she brought with her when she left her flat in Cricklewood. Even turning the volume up full, she has to stand right beside it, bending her face to the screen to hear what is being said.

‘… is said to be …’ the reporter was now saying ‘… conscious rarely, if at all. His family are by his side. But it seems unlikely at this stage that this man, considered by many to be the world’s greatest living writer, will come home from hospital again. This is Rahim Khan, for BBC News, in New York.’

The screen cuts back to the main studio. The newsreader looks reverent for a second, before going on to a story about an earthquake in Sri Lanka. Violet watches for a minute, then turns it off. She sits back down by the window. The rain is easing, but even if the sun were to come out and dry the pavements, she would not go out for her walk now. Age has made Violet a creature of routine: the big surprise for her – the failing of her body – is easier to manage if she limits all other surprises. Last week, while moving the dial between her touchstones, Radios 3 and 4, she heard a plaintive voice on the wireless singing the words no alarms and no surprises, please, and it made her pause, thinking how true to her own desire that imprecation was now: since some irretrievable day in the past, all news – everything from finding one day that the gate to Redcliffe Square Gardens was unaccountably locked, to feeling the arrival on waking of some new bad ache in her bones, to hearing that another of the residents has died – all news seemed to have become bad news, and so she’d rather it all just stopped, that the news was all in. The only way she could make her life approach this condition was through habit.

But news would still intrude, breaking through the fragile circle of routine. Here it was: Eli in hospital; Eli, who she had not seen or heard from in over fifty years; her first and only husband; the only man to have touched the tender sections of her body except for the surgeon who must have at least held her breast for a few seconds before applying the scalpel to remove it in 1987. The world’s greatest living writer: did that include the letters yellowing in that shoe-box? If she took them out and read them now, which she has not done for many years, would the parchment-like paper mirror her skin, of which the words so sweetly sing? Violet Gold feels suddenly nauseous and stands up, heading as quickly as she can towards the bathroom, more aware than ever of the bandiness of her legs, the ridiculousness of her movement. By the time she gets there the wave has passed, and she feels relieved not to have to bend or, worse, kneel in front of the white china and the tiny puddle – not so much because of the horror of having to vomit, but because of the possibility that she might not be able to get up again. She lowers the plastic seat, and sits, in reach of the red panic button on her left.

Why this? she thinks. Why this physical reaction to the news about Eli? It is not unexpected: the surprise is that he’s lasted so long, what with so many wives – how many since her? Three? Four? – and his generally cavalier approach to all things healthy – although that was a long time ago, and he might have changed. And when they were young everything was different, anyway. He smoked, but so did she: so did everyone. She was smoking when they first met, she remembers; it threw off Eli’s chat-up line. ‘Oh, damn,’ he had said, the first words she heard him speak. He had been leaning against a post in the Rainbow Corner, watching the men and women dance: it was 1944, a Friday night, and the Bill Ambrose Band were playing. Violet was with her friend Gwendoline, who was a hostess, a word Violet was never sure about – the Rainbow Corner was simply the drinking and dancing section of the Red Cross Club in Shaftesbury Avenue, where many American soldiers congregated during the war, and there were always jobs to be had for girls who wanted them, but Violet was never entirely clear what being a hostess involved. Mainly, it seemed, never saying ‘no’ on being asked to dance, and Gwendoline had certainly fulfilled her obligation that night: Violet had spent most of the evening on her own watching her friend’s flower-patterned skirt twirling around five identical pairs of olive-brown trousers. She had just decided she was going to leave after finishing this last cigarette when Eli spoke.

‘Damn …’ he repeated.

‘What?’ she replied eventually, realizing he was expecting some sort of reply from her.

‘You’re smoking,’ he said. His voice was low, a throaty rumble. Violet had met enough GIs by now to recognize it as defining him as from New York or its environs. She glanced at her own cigarette, twisting her hand to her face a little self-consciously.

‘Yes …?’

‘Well, that’s scuppered my plan.’ Violet’s face remained a mask of confusion; she wondered if she’d misheard him over the music. ‘To offer you a cigarette …’ he added helpfully, taking a sky-blue packet of Newport cigarettes out of his breast pocket. His hands, she noticed, were large. Finally she understood; her features relaxed into gentle mockery, the face she reserved for suitors.

‘You could always ask me to dance.’

He shook his head, pausing to light his cigarette. Violet remembers this pause clearly, almost more than anything else about their first meeting. He stopped his head, mid-shake, cocked his lighter, lit his cigarette, took in a deep draught of Newport smoke, and then continued the shake of his head before speaking again.

‘I don’t dance,’ he said, fixing her in his gaze. His face was impassive, challenging: not a hint of apology.

‘You don’t?’

‘I’m a man of words.’

‘I see.’

‘This lighter, for example … do you know what it is?’

Violet glanced down at the squat metal case. She had seen many of them, cupped in the crinkles of American soldiers’ palms.

‘What?’

‘It’s a Zippo. The lighter of choice for the American military. Since last year, Zippo have been producing and distributing them free to servicemen. We’ve all got them. But the shape …’ he weighed the lighter in his palm, the back of his hand moving gently up and down on the lever of his wrist, ‘… is actually modelled on an Austrian lighter. Can’t you tell? The heft of it, the dumb solidity. It’s so Teutonic. So Germanic. And yet …’ he patted his breast pocket ‘… we the Nazi-fighters keep them next to our very hearts.’

Violet felt at a loss to know how to react to this speech. She had never really heard anyone else talk like this – certainly not a soldier, certainly not a man trying to chat her up – and it seemed to leave her with nowhere to go. She understood his point, but could think of nothing to say in addition.

‘They give off a good strong flame though, don’t they?’ was what she said in the end, and instantly felt the banality of it. In answer, he flipped the lid of the lighter again, stroking the wheel twice before the blue flame rose once more from the wick. He moved it closer to her face: she could feel the warmth and smell the butane, its chemical scent dizzying her a little. Through the blue she could see his eyes, what seemed sadness in them now overridden by curiosity. There was an expression Gwen used about men – she used it a lot, in order to make their attention known – saying they were undressing her with their eyes; Violet felt something of this now – not that he was undressing her, because his eyes did not move from her face – but that sense of feeling a man’s eyes on your body, as if his sight were touch. It made her cheeks prickle. She felt, obscurely and for the first time, that when men are examining a woman’s face, their method of weighing her beauty is to search for flaws.

‘What’s your name?’ she said, because she wanted to know, but also because she wanted to be released from his gaze. He smiled, a wider grin than she expected, bringing his nose down over his mouth: he looked suddenly medieval, cartoonish.

‘I shall answer that in what I believe is the customary manner.’ He spoke in an exaggerated cut-glass English accent, waving his left hand in a florid eighteenth-century style. Before Violet had time to react, he stood on tiptoe, lifting the still aflame lighter above his head. It was only then that she realized he was quite a tall man: he had been slouching against the post, and bending down in order to have the conversation with her. He seemed to Violet almost to uncoil.

Her eyes went upwards, to the low ceiling of this section of the Rainbow Corner. Lifting the Zippo to the ceiling created a circle of light, revealing a messy sprawl of signatures, doodles and numbers burnt into the plaster, written by GIs keen to preserve something of themselves in this foreign country, before war or peace took them away. Dodds, 98205D she read, before the flame in the man’s hand began to move, forming a blackening line that slowly became the upright pillar of an ‘E’. Despite the general smokiness of the room, she could detect in her nostrils the acrid smell of burning plaster. A couple of other American soldiers, noticing this familiar custom being performed, clapped and cheered. The man – El someone, it seemed: was he Spanish? – seemed to be absorbed in his task. Most of the names on the ceiling were just scrawls, bearing the marks of having been written on tiptoe, in public and by drunken hands; he had the appearance, however, of deep concentration, as if he were Michelangelo on his back at the Sistine Chapel. The words were bold and clear, and he spent long enough on each letter to burn it thickly into the wood: it looked, by the end, more like an imprint, more like the International Shipbrokers company stamp that her fist had to plonk down over and over again on the envelopes at work, than letters inscribed by hand – by flame. When he had finished, he spent a little while looking up at his name, admiring his handiwork. Violet noticed that he didn’t have a very protruding Adam’s apple – there was no triangular skin stretch in the gullet pressing against his extended neck – which made her glad, as her previous boyfriend had done, and the feel of it pressing against her throat when they were kissing had always put her off.

‘Eli Gold …’ she said, intoning the words, brushing her blonde hair out of her eyes as she tilted her head back to read.

‘E-li,’ he said. He pronounced it ‘lie’. She had said ‘Ely’, like the town.

‘That’s a funny name.’

‘Is it? Eli, Eli, lema sabachtani.’

‘Beg pardon?’

‘It means God. Literally …’ And here he raised the lighter to the ceiling again, although this time unlit, ‘… Elia, the Highest.’

‘In what language?’

Eli’s face creased, his smile revealing his face to be lined for his age.

Somehow, it did not make him look old.

‘Hebrew, of course. Elia’s own language.’

‘Hebrew?’

‘I’m Jewish. On my father’s side.’

‘Oh,’ said Violet, who – having occasionally made the journey from her parents’ house in Walthamstow to Spitalfields for meat and vegetables – had seen some Jews, but only the ones in the big black hats with the curly sideburns. ‘I thought you were an American.’

Eli looked at her, his composure for the first time dented. The lines around his eyes all went upwards, as he stared at Violet’s pretty, open, easy face, a face standing firmly behind the straightforwardness, the frank neutrality, of her statement. Then he laughed, loud, long peals that seemed to drown out even the brass section of the Bill Ambrose band. Violet felt frightened, but unfathomably drawn to the fear. She looked up at his name, still smoking on the ceiling. A swell hit her soul and, as can happen in moments of epiphany, she thought she saw this moment as it would be described years from now, saying to friends, perhaps to children, that it was as if he had been burning the words Eli Gold into her heart. And she did say that, to friends if not to children, and soon came to believe that such was indeed the true quality of her experience. It was only later she realized that Eli had just been writing.

* * *

He is not certain he should be wearing black, in summer. It is not the heat – that is not bothering him, though he is used to the white chill of Utah – but thinks that it might, somehow, give him away. When, earlier, he had ventured into the hospital reception area, an orderly had looked at him suspiciously. This is paradoxical, as he is wearing it to fit in. Where he comes from, no one wears black: not even any of the younger, trendier Mormons, in their younger, trendier sects, the Bullaites, or Zions Order Inc., or The Restoration Church. But he is wearing it, because his third wife, Dovetta, told him that that was the first thing she noticed when she went to New York on her mission trip, On Fire for Christ: everyone wears black.