Swing Time Read online

  “I want to be there,” I said, looking at the spot, though under the influence of vodka her little breasts doubled themselves, then crossed, then merged.

  “I turn now?” asked Errol hopefully, through a microphone.

  Aimee sighed: “You turn now. Well,” she said, returning to me, “you’ve been acting screwy for months, since London. It’s a lot of bad energy. It’s the kind of bad energy that really needs to be grounded otherwise it just keeps passing round the circuit, affecting everybody.”

  She made a series of hand gestures here that suggested some previously unknown law of physics.

  “Something happen in London?”

  Three

  By the time I’d finished answering her we’d looped back and reached Union Square, where I looked up and saw the number on that huge ticking board speeding forward, billowing smoke out of the Dantean red hole at its center. It gave me a breathless feeling. A lot of things that happened in those months in London had made me breathless: I’d finally given up my flat, for lack of use, and stood at a crowded hustings waiting all night to watch a man in a blue tie ascend the stage and concede victory to my mother in a red dress. I’d seen a flyer for a nostalgic nineties-hip-hop night, at the Jazz Café, and wanted urgently to go, but could not think of a single friend I might take, I’d simply traveled too much the past few years, was not on any of the usual sites, did not keep up with personal e-mail, partly out of lack of time and partly because Aimee frowned on our “socializing” online, fearing loose talk and leaks. Without really noticing it, I’d let my friendships wither on the vine. So I went alone, got drunk and ended up sleeping with one of the doormen, a huge American, from Philadelphia, who claimed to have once played professional basketball. Like most people in his line of work—like Granger—he had been hired for his height and his color, for the threat considered implicit in their combination. Two minutes of smoking a cigarette with him revealed a gentle soul on good terms with the universe, ill-suited to his role. I had a little pouch of coke on me, given to me by Aimee’s chef, and when my doorman’s break came we went to the bathroom stalls and took a lot of it, off a shiny ledge behind the toilets that seemed specifically designed for the purpose. He told me that he hated his job, the aggression, dreaded laying hands on anyone. We left together after his shift, giggling in a taxi as he massaged my feet. When we got back to my flat, in which everything was packed up in boxes, ready for Aimee’s huge storage facility in Marylebone, he got hold of the aspirational pull-up bar that I’d put up above my bedroom door and never used, attempted a pull-up, and ripped the stupid thing from the wall, and part of the plaster, too. In bed, though, I could hardly feel him inside of me—shriveled up by the coke, maybe. He didn’t seem to mind. Cheerfully he fell asleep on top of me like a big bear and then, with equal cheeriness, at around five a.m., wished me well and let himself out. I woke up in the morning with a nosebleed and the very clear sense that my youth, or at least this version of it, was over. Six weeks later, on a Sunday morning, as Judy and Aimee frenetically texted me about the archiving, in Milan, of a portion of Aimee’s stage wardrobe, years 92‒98, I sat, unbeknownst to them both, in the walk-in clinic of the Royal Free Hospital, awaiting the results of an STD and AIDS test, listening to several people, far less lucky than I turned out to be, being taken into side rooms to weep. But I didn’t speak to Aimee of any of this. Instead I was speaking of Tracey. Tracey of all people. The whole history of us, the chronology sliding woozily back and forth in time and vodka, all resentments writ large, pleasures either diminished or destroyed, and the longer I spoke the clearer I saw and understood—as if the truth were a sunken thing rising up through a well of vodka to meet me—that only one thing had happened in London, really: I’d seen Tracey. After so many years of not seeing Tracey I had seen her. None of the rest mattered. It was as if nothing in the period between the last time I saw her and this had happened at all.

  “Wait, wait—” said Aimee, too drunk herself to disguise her impatience with another person’s monologue—“This is your oldest girlfriend, right? Yes, I know this. Did I meet her?”

  “Never.”

  “And she’s a dancer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Best type of people! Their bodies tell them what to do!”

  I had been sitting on the edge of my seat, but now I deflated and lay my head back on its cold corner pillow of blacked-out glass, walnut and leather.

  “Well, you can’t make old friends,” announced Aimee, in such a way that you might have assumed the phrase originated with her. “What would I do without my dear old Jude? Since we were fifteen! She fucked the dude I took to the school dance! But she calls me on my shit, yes she does. No one else does that . . .”

  I was used to Aimee turning all stories about me into stories about her, usually I simply deferred to it, but the drink had me bold enough to believe, at that moment, that both our lives were in fact of equal weight, equally worthy of discussion, equally worthy of time.

  “It was after I had that lunch with my mother,” I explained, slowly. “The night I went out with that Daniel guy? In London? The disaster date.”

  Aimee frowned: “Daniel Kramer? I set you up with him. The financial guy? See, you didn’t tell me anything about that!”

  “Well, it was a disaster—we went to see a show. And she was in that fucking show.”

  “You spoke to her.”

  “No! I haven’t spoken to her in eight years. I just told you that. Are you even listening to me?”

  Aimee put two fingers to her temples.

  “The timeline is confusing,” she murmured. “Plus my head hurts. Look . . . God, I don’t know . . . maybe you should call her! Sounds like you want to. Call her now—fuck it, I’ll talk to her.”

  “No!”

  She grabbed my phone out of my hand—laughing, scrolling through my contacts—and when I tried to reach for it she held it out of her window.

  “Give it to me!”

  “Oh, come on—she’ll love it.”

  I managed to climb over her, snatch the phone and press it between my thighs.

  “You don’t understand. She did a terrible thing to me. We were twenty-two. A terrible thing.”

  Aimee raised one of her famously geometric eyebrows and sent up the partition that Errol—wanting to know which entrance to the house we were heading for, front or back—had just sent down.

  “Well, now I’m genuinely interested . . .”

  We turned into Washington Square Park. The townhouses around the square stood red and noble, their façades warmly lit, but everything inside the park was dark and dripping, empty of people, aside from the half a dozen homeless black men in the far-right corner, sitting on the chess tables, their bodies wrapped in trash bags with holes for the arms and legs. I put my face to the window, closed my eyes, felt the flecks of rain and told the story as I remembered it, the fiction and the reality, in a jagged, painful rush, as if I were running across broken glass, but when I opened my eyes it was to the sound of Aimee laughing again.

  “It’s not fucking funny!”

  “Wait—are you being serious right now?”

  She tried pulling her top lip back into her mouth and biting down on it.

  “You don’t think it’s possible,” she asked, “that maybe you’re making a big deal out of not so much?”

  “What?”

  “Honestly the only person I feel sorry for in that scenario—if it’s true—is your dad. Poor guy! Super-lonely, trying to get his rocks—”

  “Stop it!”

  “It’s not like he’s Jeffrey Dahmer.”

  “It’s not normal! That’s not a normal thing to do!”

  “Normal? Don’t you understand that every man in this world with access to a computer, including the President, is right at this moment either looking at vaginas or has just stopped looking at vaginas—”


  “It’s not the same—”

  “It’s exactly the same. Except your dad didn’t even have a computer. You think if George W. Bush looks up ‘Teen Asian Pussy’—then what? He’s a fucking serial killer?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Good point—bad example.”

  I chuckled, despite myself.

  “I’m sorry. Maybe I’m being stupid. I don’t get it. Why are you angry, exactly? Because she told you? You just said you thought it was bullshit!”

  It was startling, after so many years of my own twisted logic, to hear the problem ironed out into Aimee’s preferred straight line. The clarity disturbed me.

  “She was always lying. She had this idea my father was perfect, and she wanted to ruin him for me, she wanted to make me hate my father like she hates hers. I couldn’t ever really look him in the eye after. And it was that way till he died.”

  Aimee sighed. “That’s the stupidest fucking thing I ever heard. You went and made yourself sad for no reason at all.”

  She reached out to touch my shoulder, but I turned my back on her and wiped a rogue tear from my eye.

  “Pretty stupid.”

  “No. We all have our shit. You should call your friend, though.”

  She made a little pillow of her jacket and lay her head against her window, and by the time we’d crossed Sixth Avenue she was already asleep. She was the queen of power naps, had to be, to live as she did.

  Four

  Earlier that year, in London—a few days before the local elections—I’d had lunch with my mother. It was a gray, humid day, people moved across the bridge joylessly, beaten down by the drizzling rain, and even the grandest monuments, even Parliament, looked grim to me, sad and underwhelming. It all made me wish we were already in New York. I wanted all that height and sun-struck glass, and then after New York, Miami, and then five stops in South America and finally the European tour, twenty cities, ending in London once again. In this way, a whole year could pass by. I liked it that way. Other people had seasons to get through, they had to drag themselves through each year. In Aimee’s world we didn’t live like that. We couldn’t even if we’d wanted to: we were never in one place long enough. If we didn’t like winter we flew toward summer. When we were tired of cities we went to the beach—and vice versa. I’m exaggerating a little, not by much. My late twenties had passed in a weird state of timelessness, and I think now that not everyone could have fallen into a life like that, that I must have been somehow primed for it. Later I wondered whether we were chosen primarily for this reason, exactly because we tended to be people with few external ties, without partners or children, with the very minimum of family. The way we lived certainly kept us that way. Out of Aimee’s four female assistants, only one of us ever had a child, and only then in her mid-forties, long after quitting. Climbing aboard that Learjet, you had to be untethered. It wouldn’t have worked otherwise. I had only one rope now—my mother—and she was, like Aimee, in her prime, although unlike Aimee my mother had very little need of me. She was flying high herself, a few days from becoming the Member of Parliament for Brent West, and as I turned left, heading toward the Oxo Tower, leaving Parliament behind me, I felt, as usual, my own smallness next to her, the scale of what she had achieved, the frivolousness of my own occupation in comparison, despite all she’d tried to direct me toward. She seemed more impressive to me than ever. I held tight to the barrier, all the way, until I was across.

  It was too damp to sit out on the terrace. I searched the restaurant for several minutes, but then spotted my mother, outside after all, under an umbrella, sheltered from the drizzle, and with Miriam, though there had been no mention, in our phone call, of Miriam. I didn’t dislike Miriam. I didn’t have any feeling about her really, it was hard to have feelings about her: she was so small and quiet and serious. All her dull features were gathered in the middle of her little face, and her natural hair was wound into sista dreads, genteelly graying at their tips. She had a little pair of round, gold-rimmed glasses which she never removed and made her eyes look even tinier than they were. She wore sensible brown fleeces and plain black trousers, no matter the occasion. A human picture frame, her only purpose to set off my mother. All that my mother ever really said about Miriam was: “Miriam makes me very happy.” Miriam never spoke about herself—she only spoke about my mother. I had to google her to discover she was Afro-Cuban, by way of Lewisham, that once she’d worked in international aid but now taught at Queen Mary’s—in some very lowly adjunct position—and had been writing a book “about the diaspora” for longer than I’d known her, which was about four years. She was introduced to my mother’s constituents with a minimum of fuss at some event in a local school, photographed, tucked into the side of my mother, a timid dormouse standing by her lioness, and the journalist from the Willesden and Brent Times got exactly the same line I’d been given: “Miriam makes me very happy.” Nobody seemed especially interested, not even the old Jamaican men and the African evangelicals. I got the sense that her constituents did not really think of my mother and Miriam as lovers, they were simply those two nice Willesden ladies, who had saved the old cinema and fought to expand the leisure center and established Black History Month throughout the local libraries. Campaigning, they made an effective pair: if you found my mother overbearing, you could take comfort in Miriam’s unassuming passivity, while people who were bored by Miriam relished the excitement my mother created wherever she went. Looking at Miriam now, nodding quickly, receptively, as my mother speechified, I knew that I was also glad of Miriam: she was a useful buffer. I went over and put a hand on my mother’s shoulder. She did not look up or stop talking, but she registered my touch and raised a hand to lay over mine, accepting the kiss I pressed to her cheek. I drew out a chair and sat down.

  “How are you, Mum?”

  “Stressed!”

  “Your mother’s very stressed,” confirmed Miriam, and began quietly to list all the many causes of my mother’s stress: the envelopes that had to be stuffed and the flyers yet to be posted, the closeness of the latest polling, the underhand tactics of the opposition, and the supposed double-dealing of the only other black woman in Parliament, an MP of twenty years’ standing, whom my mother considered, for no sensible reason, her bitter rival. I nodded in the right places and looked through the menu and managed to order some wine from a passing waiter, all without breaking the flow of Miriam’s talk, her numbers and percentages, the careful regurgitations of the various “brilliant” things my mother had said to so-and-so at this or that vital moment and how so-and-so had responded, poorly, to whatever brilliant thing it was my mother had said.

  “But you’re going to win,” I said, with an intonation I realized, too late, was posed awkwardly between statement and question.

  My mother looked stern, unfolded her napkin and lay it on her lap, like a queen who has been asked, impertinently, if her people still love her.

  “If there’s any justice,” she said.

  • • •

  Our food arrived, my mother had ordered for me. Miriam set about squirreling hers away—she reminded me of a small mammal who expects to hibernate soon—but my mother let her knife and fork rest where they were and instead reached down to the empty chair beside her to bring up a copy of the Evening Standard, already open to a large picture of Aimee, on stage, juxtaposed with a stock photo of some destitute African children, from where exactly I couldn’t tell. I hadn’t seen the piece and it was held too far from me to read the text but I guessed the source: a recent press release, announcing Aimee’s commitment to “global poverty reduction.” My mother tapped a finger on Aimee’s abdomen.

  “Is she serious about it?”

  I considered the question. “She’s very passionate about it.”

  My mother frowned and picked up her cutlery.

  “‘Poverty reduction.’ Well, fine, but what’s the policy, specifically?”


  “She’s not a politician, Mum. She doesn’t have policies. She has a foundation.”

  “Well, what is it she wants to do?”

  I poured some wine for my mother and made her pause for a moment and clink a glass with me.

  “I think it’s really a school she wants to build. A girls’ school.”

  “Because if she’s serious,” said my mother, over my reply, “you should advise her that she needs to talk to us, to be in partnership with government in one way or another . . . Obviously she has the financial means and the public’s attention—that’s all good—but without understanding the mechanics, it’s just a lot of good intention that goes nowhere. She needs to meet with the relevant authorities.”

  I smiled to hear my mother referring to herself, already, as “government.”

  The next thing I said so irritated her she turned and gave her answer to Miriam instead.

  “Oh, please—I really wish you wouldn’t behave as if I’m asking for some great favor. I’ve no interest AT ALL in meeting that woman, none at all. Never have had. I was offering some advice. I thought it would be welcome.”

  “And it’s welcome, Mum, thank you. I just—”

  “I mean, really, you’d think this woman would want to talk to us! We gave her a British passport, after all. Well, never mind. It just seemed, from this”—she held up the paper again—“that she had serious intentions, but maybe that’s not right, maybe she just wants to embarrass herself, I wouldn’t know. ‘White woman saves Africa.’ Is that the idea? Very old idea. Well, it’s your world, not mine, thank God. But she should really speak with Miriam, at least, the fact is Miriam has a lot of useful contacts, rural contacts, educational contacts—she’s too modest to tell you. She was at Oxfam for a decade, for God’s sake. Poverty is not just a headline, my love, it’s a lived reality, on the ground—and education is at the heart of it.”

  “I know what poverty is, Mum.”

  My mother smiled sadly, and bit down on a forkful of food.