What is it about this music? I like the upbeat stuff, songs like “Come Fly with Me” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” albums like A Swingin’ Affair! and Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! But what I like best are the songs about love breaking down. “In the Wee Small Hours,” “Angel Eyes,” “One for My Baby,” “Night and Day,” “My Funny Valentine” and all the rest.
Listening to Sinatra makes me feel as though I am not the only person in the universe who ever woke up to find themselves in some place that they never imagined. Listening to Sinatra makes me feel that I am not so alone. Listening to Sinatra makes me feel more human.
Frank recorded entire albums-Where Are You?, No One Cares, Only the Lonely-about missing some woman. The hippies think they invented concept albums in the sixties, but Frank Sinatra was doing it in the fifties. Sinatra will talk to you about it all night long, if you need him to. And I need him to.
I need this music the way normal men need food and football. Sinatra seems to point a way forward, to encourage me to get on with my life. When Sinatra sings of love dissolving, there is always the consolation of love to come. Love is like a bus in these songs. There’s always another one along in a minute.
But I know that’s not how it was in Sinatra’s heart. I have read all the classic texts, and I know that Sinatra never got over Ava Gardner. She was the woman who owned his heart. She was the one whose photograph he tore up, threw away and then stuck back together with Scotch tape. If Sinatra never got over Ava, then why should I get over Rose?
The music is an endless source of comfort, though. Sinatra makes missing someone sound noble, heroic, universal. He makes suffering sound as though it has some kind of point to it. And in the real world, it doesn’t. It just hurts like hell.
And there’s something else. As Sinatra mourns love, celebrates love, anticipates love, I can almost smell the manly cocktail of Old Holborn and Old Spice when my grandfather sat me on his lap, back when the world was young and everything was ahead and it felt as though everybody that I ever loved would live forever.
The way my mother deals with my father going away is to carry on as normal. She gets up in the morning, she goes to work in the kitchens of Nelson Mandela High, she comes home with an affectionate smile and stories of her kids. She even starts to take an interest in her garden-or at least she busies herself clearing up the mess she made when the old bastard walked out. This is how my mum reacts to a crisis.
It’s not that she ignores it. She just refuses to look it in the eye.
I go to work, wander the streets of Chinatown, listen to Sinatra in my room. And all the while I fantasize that one day my father will be there, bearing flowers and full of apologies, on his knees before my mother, begging for forgiveness. It doesn’t happen.
I don’t see how he can build a life with Lena on such flimsy foundations. I can’t imagine how they can form a lasting union when they don’t even own a kettle. I am convinced that one morning he will see her dancing in her chair as she eats her high-bran breakfast, and it will drive him nuts.
But I start to realize that even if their love nest does get repossessed, that doesn’t mean that my old man is ever coming back home.
There are phone calls between my parents. I make no attempt to listen because there are things that happen between your mother and father that you want to keep your distance from. The pattern is always the same. He calls her. There are long silences while he-I don’t know. Pleads for understanding? Asks when he can pick up his Stevie Wonder records? Asks if he can borrow a kettle? I don’t know what she tells him, but I can hear that she tries to keep the bitterness and hurt and anger out of her voice.
It’s impossible.
She likes to act as though nothing that my father does surprises her, that she knows him so well, that all this upheaval is only what she would expect from the man she has been married to for half a lifetime. It’s not true.
His new life in some other part of the city is beyond her imagination. She doesn’t understand how he got there, why this happened, when the world-sized hole in her life started to form.
When she comes off the phone she is smiling-a smile that is there for her protection, a smile as rigid as a bulletproof vest.
My mother and I have an early dinner at the Shanghai Dragon.
This is not a normal night out for us. Apart from the summer holidays of my childhood-bed-and-breakfasts in the seaside towns of southern England when I was small, the tourist canteens in the hotels of Greece and Spain when I was bit bigger-we have not spent a lot of time together in restaurants. Surprisingly for a woman who gets so much pleasure from feeding one thousand brats every day of the school year, my mother prefers “my own cooking, in my own house.”
But since my father went away, she is not eating very much and that frightens me. Always slim-where my dad’s life as a working journalist meant his waist size increased with every passing year, one extra pound per annum being the general rule-she is starting to look hollow-eyed and gaunt. I know that part of that is a lack of sleep because I hear her wandering around downstairs in the middle of the night as I toss and turn in my own bed, my own solitude. It is also because there are no more real family meals to prepare, because there is no more real family.
But my mum seems happy when she gets her first look at the Shanghai Dragon.
“Very nice, dear,” she says, admiring a grotesquely deformed root swimming in a jar like the outcome of some abominable scientific experiment. I now see that the dark nooks and crannies of the Shanghai Dragon are full of these roots. “Very nice indeed.”
Joyce emerges from the kitchen. She looks at my mother admiring the things in jars.
“You like?”
“Lovely!”
“You know?”
My mother squints at the jars. “It’s ginseng, isn’t it? The real thing. Not the capsules and pills that you buy in a drugstore.”
Joyce smiles, pleased with my mother. “Ginseng,” she says. “I can’t pull the sheep over your eyes. Yes, ginseng. Good for stress. When your body tired. When your body sad.”
“I could do with some of that,” my mum laughs, and I feel like hugging her.
“Please,” Joyce says, indicating the empty restaurant with an expansive gesture, asking us to choose a table.
The atmosphere in the Shanghai Dragon at six is very different from the mood at midnight. There are no drunks. Apart from my mother and me, there are not even any customers.
While we eat our Peking duck, my mum doing better with the chopsticks than I expected as we load our pancakes with spring onions, cucumber, plum sauce and duck, the Chang family are also eating their dinner at one of the tables in the takeout section. All the tables in the Shanghai Dragon have a white tablecloth apart from one. This is where the Changs eat their meals.
The entire family is there. George is spooning soup noodles from a huge bowl into six smaller bowls. He has his grandchildren next to him, the small boy on one side and the girl on the other side, both of them expertly wielding chopsticks that look far too big for them. The children’s dad, plump Harold, is noisily slurping noodles as though he has to do it within a certain time limit. His wife Doris is eating more slowly, but with her face so close to her bowl that her glasses are steaming up. Joyce barks instructions in Cantonese-at her husband, her son and his wife, and especially her two grandchildren-between checks to ensure that my mother and I are all right.
I realize how much I envy the Changs. I envy their closeness, their sense of belonging, the unbroken quality of their lives. Their completeness. Looking at them together makes me feel sad. But not really sad. It’s a kind of longing. Because I was once part of a family like that.