Sometimes I think that love is a case of mistaken identity.
It’s like Hiroko and me. She sees someone else when she looks at me-someone decent and good, someone she wants me to be. An English gentleman. David Niven. Alec Guinness. Hugh Grant. Someone I’m not and could never be.
Or it’s like Hamish and his partner. Hamish’s boyfriend probably likes to believe that Hamish really wants a serious, monogamous relationship. That he wants to go shopping in Habitat on Saturdays and give small, stylish dinner parties and sit around listening to Broadway musicals on CD and be faithful to only one partner. But that’s just another case of mistaken identity.
What Hamish wants is to go to public places and have sex with people whose names he will never know. That means more to him than anything. His partner just can’t see it. His partner doesn’t want to see it.
Does that still count? Is that still real? When you don’t know the other person at all?
For as long as I can remember, my nan has had a profound loathing of doctors. She always seemed to believe that she was locked in a never-ending battle for her freedom with the medical profession. My nan wanted to stay in her home. The doctors-“the quacks,” my nan called them, even the ones she liked-wanted to steal her away and lock her up in a hospital where she would be left to die.
But now she is actually in a hospital bed, my nan is showing signs of going over to the other side. She thinks her doctors deserve a raise, believes her nurses should be on television.
“They’re as pretty as weather girls,” says my nan. High praise indeed.
As my mother, Joyce Chang and I sit around her bed, my nan regales us with stories about the characters she has met in here. The nurse who “should be a model, she’s that lovely.” The old woman-younger than her-in the next bed who (this whispered) is “not right in the head, the poor old thing.” The Indian doctor who has told her that she will soon be “fit as a fiddle.” The orderly who is a flirt, the nurse who is a miserable cow, the elderly patient in the bed opposite who is her friend, who she has a right laugh with, who she will see for tea when they are finally set free. My nan doesn’t stop talking. She seems almost giddy with exuberance. Are they slipping something into her cream of tomato soup?
She seems happier than she has been for a long time, despite the squat, ugly machine on the floor by her bed that has a long thin tube rising out of it, slipping under the white gown that makes her look like an ancient angel, the tube piercing her side under that white gown, burrowing deep into her body, slowly draining the buildup of fluid from her clogged, breathless lungs.
One of her lungs showed up completely white on the X-ray, it was so full of fluids that should not have been there. The doctors gathered around, staring at it with awe. They were amazed she had kept breathing with all that stuff inside her.
But she seems happy, despite the humming of that ugly machine on the floor, despite the fluid being sucked out of her, despite the pain she must be in with that tube in her side. Night and day, the tube stays inside her. It will stay inside her until the fluid has all been drained. But my nan doesn’t stop smiling. How does she do it?
I know that my nan is a brave and tough old woman. But her sunny mood is more than courage, although she has plenty of that. Perhaps being in a hospital bed is not quite as bad as she thought it was going to be. Because she knows that, unlike her husband, my grandfather, she is not going to die in here. Not this time. Not yet.
She suddenly stops talking and we all turn to look at my dad standing awkwardly at the foot of the bed. He is carrying flowers and a box of Maltesers.
“Hello, Ma,” he says, coming forward to kiss her cheek.
“Mike,” she says. “My Mike.”
I am afraid that Joyce is going to start grilling my father about his sex life with Lena, but she remains stereotypically inscrutable, possibly for the first time in her life. She just takes my nan’s hand and tells her that she will soon be “as right as raindrops.”
My mother and my father seem more like brother and sister than husband and wife. They seem like two people who have a history together, but that’s all. There appears to be no hatred between them, and no overwhelming affection either. They are polite, businesslike, discussing doctors’ opinions and what my nan will need while she is in here. Only their avoidance of eye contact gives any clue that they both have a divorce lawyer.
And for the first time I feel sorry for my father. He hasn’t shaved today. His hair needs cutting. He has lost some weight, but not in any gym.
He has everything he wanted, but he doesn’t seem happy. Suddenly he seems to be getting old.
And he looks-what do you call it?
Only human.
Jackie Day’s first homework assignment was to write a critical appreciation of two poems: W. B. Yeats’s “When You Are Old and Grey and Full of Sleep” and Colonel Lovelace’s “To Lucasta, on Going to the Wars.”
I read her essay-neat, spidery handwriting-while she sits on the other side of the table, biting her painted fingernails.
Over by the window, the lump-does she have a name? have I already been told it?-is taking up most of the sofa and reading one of her disgusting magazines. The glossy cover features two sweaty, fat men rolling around on top of one another in spandex underpants. I wonder why her mother allows her to read this trash. I say nothing. Somewhere in the house, a cello is practicing scales. Outside the rain is falling.
“This is okay,” I say, placing the essay on the table.
Jackie looks disappointed.
“Only okay?”
“Well, you weren’t asked to review them. You’re not Frank Rich. You were asked to write a critical appreciation.”
“That’s what I did.”
“No, you didn’t. You stated a preference. You clearly liked the Yeats poem. And disliked the other one. The Lovelace.”
“I thought I had to put myself into my writing. That’s what you said. Put yourself into your writing.”
“Well, you do have to put yourself in there. But you weren’t asked to state a preference. Nobody cares which one you prefer. It’s not a beauty contest.”
“But the Yeats is so good. Isn’t it? It’s about growing old with someone. It’s about loving someone for a lifetime and still loving them even when they are old and worn out.”
“I know what it’s about.”
She closes her eyes. “ ‘How many loved your moments of glad grace, / And loved your beauty with love false or true: / But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, / And loved the sorrows of your changing face.’ ” She opens her eyes. They shine with excitement. “That’s so great. ‘One man loved the pilgrim soul in you.’ I love that.”
“You write very well about it. But you’re too dismissive of the Lovelace. In an exam, that will cost you marks.”
“This Lovelace bloke-what does he know about it? ‘To Lucasta, on Going to the Wars’ is all about putting things before love. Above love. Honor. Country. All that stuff.” She snorts contemptuously and puts on a ridiculous, high-pitched upper-class voice. ‘I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not Honour more.’ What a load of old guff. What a tosspot.”
“It’s one of the most famous love poems in the English language. I think you’d probably lose marks for calling Lovelace a tosspot.”
“Mum?”
It’s the lump.
The lump has spoken.
It lives.
“What is it, darling?”
“There’s a lady outside. Standing in the rain. She’s been there ever since we came in.”
Jackie and I go over to the window.
A young woman is standing under a lamppost on the other side of the street. The hood of her parka is pulled up and she is hiding under a Burberry umbrella that looks on the verge of collapse. Although I can’t see her face, I recognize the beige tartan of the umbrella, recognize the parka, recognize the waves of shiny black hair pouring out from the hood.