In the Light of What We Know: A Novel Read online

  Zafar’s sarcasm took me by surprise.

  Only someone who doesn’t have it could ask that, he added.

  No, I meant the sensibility to the homeless.

  Listen. I’m talking about why I noticed the homeless guy. You can’t understand it because you don’t know what it’s like.

  Why are you having a go at me? All I’m saying is that when you see a homeless guy and give him food, that’s a commendable act of charity.

  You said it yourself. I always noticed them. I noticed them because I couldn’t help it. Only from the inside can you know what it’s like from the inside. Understanding isn’t just knowing or learning what it is but knowing what it’s like.

  Do you think you might be confused a little?

  I think I might be confused a lot.

  You say love is about actions, and all I’m saying is that your actions were quite loving.

  What? Giving some sod on the street the leftovers that would have gone in the bin?

  Yes.

  Think about Emily’s brother, James, said Zafar. The Hampton-Wyverns had their Christmas shindig during the day but, on Christmas Eve, James—or so Emily told me—helped out at a soup kitchen at a homeless shelter in West London. He must have served more meals in one evening than I’ve handed over doggy bags of scraps in all my time in Manhattan. That’s the kind of relationship I want with poverty—something that doesn’t bite me every time I see affluence or misery.

  Zafar’s account of the beginning of his relationship with Emily revealed aspects of him that I had never properly appreciated. I listened to him and steadily I formed an impression that was so starkly at odds with the understanding I had had of him that I began to call into question my own judgment. I cannot help but wonder now, as I consider this point, whether Zafar might have intended this, or at least have been conscious that his narrative might have that effect. I had sensed a background of adversity, but the man I’d met at Oxford seemed to be so comfortable in his skin, so much above me, so terribly clever to begin and end with, so sure in his dealings with others, that no one could reasonably have contemplated the vicious tempest that churned below the surface. In Zafar’s notebooks, there is a line from Somerset Maugham, whom I admire, as I say, a line I have already used as an epigraph to an earlier chapter, but that bears repetition. Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.

  You asked her to marry you. You never told me.

  It was autumn 1997, said Zafar. Autumn in England, even in the metropolis, even in Brixton, he said, can surprise you with its melancholy beauty, every time. Outside the restaurant we stopped in the square to collect ourselves and take our bearings for the walk to my flat. The evening’s failing light picked out the edges of leaves on the tops of the trees. The blustery wind scattered debris along the street, and I was in love with the world. I took Emily’s hand.

  We neared a road, stopping for the cars streaming past. I looked right and made out an oncoming gap. When I looked left, I saw Emily’s face, a picture which in that instant elicited unfathomable tenderness, and in an act of folly, in a moment that seemed to have no root in conscious planning, as the bulk of my weight listed from the back foot onto the front, as I held her eyes so that I would have no doubt that she heard the conviction in my voice, I asked Emily Hampton-Wyvern a question I would never ask her again.

  She let out a little laugh, a perfectly formed ladylike laugh. Just enough. And I said nothing more.

  Afterward, I told myself that this laugh was the reason why I could never ask her again. But the truth is that this so-called reason was a cover I gave myself, a refuge from inclement facts—but while not wholly ineffective, it could not forever hold off the reality. Reality seeps through the cracks. She would never marry me. It wasn’t going to happen. Even after the engagement, I still believed this. In fact, even if we’d got married, I knew I would still believe that she wouldn’t marry me and I don’t think I would have been wrong. I don’t think I would ever have occupied the space set aside in the romantic vision of the girl whose formation was in another country, a land that shared not even one border with mine, no border of race or nationality of course, but still less any border of class. I’ve said it before: Race, or as everyone now likes to say, ethnicity, was never so much a source of anxiety as class. In point of fact, racial difference was part of the attraction for both of us, I am sure, an aspect of the fierce sexual love binding us, central to it.

  This was 1997. Five years later, when she in turn asked me, all my own laughter had left me.

  She asked you? I asked.

  She did, though really she asked under duress.

  How do you force someone to ask you to marry her?

  The duress didn’t come from me, said Zafar. We were going to break up. That much was pretty certain. Asking me was her last-ditch attempt to rescue things, even when, I think, she had no wish to rescue the future but only the present, as it was.

  I’m sorry, Zafar, but I’m not sure I understand what happened. Of course I want to ask you what went wrong, but I can’t help thinking that something about it must also have been right. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have stayed in it. I know a lot of it was long-distance and you don’t need to explain to me how things can just keep ticking over if you’re apart for big stretches. But there must have been something you liked about her?

  Can you fall in love with someone you don’t like?

  Who? Me?

  Can a person fall in love with someone he doesn’t like?

  I suppose some kind of attachment is possible, but I don’t know if I’d call it love.

  Because, asked Zafar, you fall in love with the person, the person you don’t know?

  Because like is an aspect of love.

  * * *

  In the following summer, not so long after the proposal and laughter but long enough for memory to find an accommodation, we went to Tuscany. Villa Fontana, which belonged to Emily’s grandmother, whom I had yet to meet, sat on a hillside not far from Lucca. A steep tarmac road, under a bright blue sky, curled around the hill overlooking olive groves. To my unaccustomed eyes, the bark of those trees looked as dry as kindling. In our hired car, we inched toward a huddle of cyclists, each one dressed the part: cycling shorts and streamlining sunglasses.

  There was a sense, even when we had climbed only a hundred yards, that the view higher up would be spectacular. I remember the sound of the car, its agonies as the incline fought us, a shrill plea for mercy. I glanced at the gear lever.

  It’s at times like these, I said, you wish you had another gear between neutral and first.

  Yes, she replied.

  A second passed before she shifted the gears down to first and overtook the cyclists.

  When we pulled up outside Villa Fontana, I was surprised to see that it was no more than forty yards from the side of the road. I had been expecting—I don’t know why—something set deep within much larger grounds. My first instinct was to look for the fountains, but there were none, which fact I interpreted as a sign of the age of the place.

  At that time, everything basked in a favorable light. A colonnade of conifers lined a path to a two-story house with tall windows, their shutters open flat against the exterior walls. The house had an unkempt outer appearance. I remembered a story I’d heard about the Englischer Garten in Munich. My guide, an American friend I was visiting, who had taken up a year-long fellowship at the Max Planck Institute, explained to me that the English Garden, a large park in the center of Munich, was so-called because it was organized along principles that in parts of mainland Europe were known as the English style, disorganized, unkempt, and overgrown, rather like areas of Hampstead Heath, I suppose. Standing in front of the villa in Tuscany, I remembered the corollary my friend had added: Apparently, this kind of natural disorder requires a lot of work—more than any other kind of garden.

  We spent a week there, eating, reading, making love, a
nd floating on wide inflatables in the pool. Emily never liked walking very much. If she visited a tourist spot, a thing to see, she might have been compelled by a sense of obligation, but walking for its own sake never held anything for her. So I went on walks by myself whenever she chose to read or take a nap or simply lounge by the pool. We did walk together once, up the road we came on, up around the house and to the top of the hill, and when we came over the crest, the view opened onto a wide vista of a deep valley carved from the earth leading west to a dwindling sun. I read somewhere of a particular view that is found in paintings across cultures and across time. It is apparently a universal aesthetic, and it consists of a valley, of hills directing the eye to the center, of trees and shrubbery of varying colors of green, and a path, either explicit or implicit in the contours of the land, that winds through the valley to an expanse of water in the near distance, a lake. Evolutionary biologists have speculated that a view with such elements is ubiquitous in our art because it was engrained in the psyche during man’s formative evolutionary period, for it is the view of a land that is hospitable to human habitation, a welcome sight to early humans in search of new beginnings. Nature maketh man to lie down in green pastures and leadeth him beside the still waters. And it was the very view from the hill that Emily and I stood on. Behind us was a church, its walls crumbling, its paintwork mottled by moss and rain, because in the end the earth takes back everything and all God’s work. Beside it, under the evening sky, and on an incline that made the act unfamiliar and new, Emily and I made love, and it was every bit as romantic and tender and urgent as any two human bodies have ever willed.

  The sex was extraordinary. For me, I mean. Generally speaking. At other times, I mean. By that I don’t mean it was full of gymnastics or contorted geometries. Sure, there was spontaneous sex in unlikely places. There was enough of the drama, but what I mean is that it was powerful. It was almost always fucking, animal-like, but fucking in the head for me. It was not so much that she was good at sex but rather that the idea of Emily never failed to arouse me. I felt moved to greater and greater efforts and attentions. I learned more and more about the workings of her body, the pathways of stimulus and response. Sex was the realm in which I could take control of her being, the only place where I could approach understanding, so that sometimes—quite often, in fact—her body became an extension of mine. The scents of my own body came to remind me of her. You know, I hesitate to use the word control. I don’t recall any explicit evidence of a desire to control her, to control her actions or her thoughts. But in the end, control is the right word, because I wanted to control the Emily in my head, which was the Emily that was more and more in control of me, of my mental composure, of my waking thoughts, more and more the source of anxiety. A wise man once said to me—a psychiatrist, but to say more would be to get ahead of myself—that I had placed too much faith in trying to understand her. I was trying to understand her because … well, because understanding is what we set so much store in, understanding others, ourselves, understanding the world; because of that, but also because understanding is a mode of control, it subdues the unruliness of people in one’s head, it brings order and confers control where it is most sought, in that theater in the mind in which the avatars of people we know stand as actors resisting direction.

  * * *

  Tomaso visited on day six. Something happened that morning, before he arrived. I was perusing the villa’s bookshelves again, hoping against hope that another search would give up something overlooked, in the same way a man might open the fridge several times in an hour, half hoping the contents have miraculously changed. Only, that’s never what we really hope for, is it? What we won’t admit to ourselves is that we’re hoping our preferences might change, that the cheese and the tomatoes might suddenly appeal, or that the book we passed over before might somehow now catch our interest.

  Emily came up beside me.

  Found anything?

  Not yet, I replied.

  Look here, she said, pulling out a book. Have you read this?

  She was holding Erewhon by Samuel Butler.

  See. The title spells nowhere backward, she said.

  I looked again at the title.

  No, it doesn’t, I said. Though I’m no man of letters, I added.

  Yes, it does, she replied.

  I looked again.

  Prove it, I said.

  She took a closer look.

  You’re right, she said.

  I tell you what is cute though, I said. Nowhere can also be read as Now-here, which means exactly the opposite.

  She wasn’t listening. She looked crestfallen, perhaps even defeated, but I tell you I did not have it in mind to defeat her. Hers seemed to me an easy enough mistake to make, and I think now of our human tendency—her tendency, my tendency—to see only what we wish to be true.

  She gave me a look that was not easy to read, as if I was being held responsible for something.

  It’s certainly an anagram of nowhere, I said.

  I’m going to sit by the pool, she said.

  Tomaso was a friend of hers, from the same college at Oxford, an Italian with a crop of tousled brown hair and shoulders permanently pulled back after the fashion of proud men who are seldom the tallest in their company. He was educated at Lancing, Emily explained—Evelyn Waugh’s public school, I thought—but when I met him, I saw that his accent was nevertheless very Italian. She told me that he was a business journalist with Reuters, stationed in Turkey, though I later learned—don’t ask me how—that he had also established a fledgling gambling business online, in which Emily had been an investor. These gambling dot-coms, as you know, ran into difficulties with American regulators a few years ago.

  Emily explained that he’d returned to Italy that week with his girlfriend, to his mother’s home, somewhere not far away. He and his girlfriend, a slim English girl with perfectly unblemished skin and dark eyes—whose name I can’t for the life of me remember—came to Villa Fontana for lunch.

  From the beginning, Tomaso seemed to be sizing me up, and I speculated about whether he and Emily had once been an item, whether, at any rate, some embers of his love their fire retained—to quote that black Russian Pushkin. Did you know Pushkin was black, African black, had African blood?

  I did not, I replied.

  You can see it in photographs. He was very proud of it. Anyway, continued Zafar, she hadn’t mentioned anything about a past romance, and after Tomaso arrived there wasn’t a moment when I could ask. But then, I would never have done so anyway.

  You were at Oxford? Tomaso asked me.

  The four of us were in the kitchen preparing lunch. I was making up a salad, standing at the kitchen table. He was standing on the other side of the table, holding a glass of red wine, while Emily was fetching things from the fridge.

  Yes, I was, I replied, thinking that perhaps he thought this was something we all had in common.

  I was at Magdalen, he said.

  Were you happy there? I asked.

  Yes. I suppose I was. Did you meet Emily at Oxford?

  This marked out a boundary in his relationship with Emily. Clearly, she had not said much about me to him. Moreover, he could not have known her so well at Oxford that he could assume, therefore, that if she had known me there, she would have mentioned me to him. Yet the moment this thought passed through my mind, I realized its error: Emily was, as you put it, so secretive. Who knows what she would have told anyone?

  We met in New York, I replied.

  New York?

  New York.

  You were in New York?

  I was working there.

  I was in business school there, at Columbia. What were you doing?

  I was a banker.

  What kind of banking?

  I traded derivatives, I replied.

  So you were a trader and not a banker?

  It struck me as a little pedantic and even a touch too assertive to make a point of the distinction.

&nbs
p; I’ve never seen a coin with the image of a tail on it, but that doesn’t stop people from saying Heads or tails? when they toss a coin.

  He looked puzzled by my remark.

  I’m not sure what it means myself, I said.

  Emily was now standing behind Tomaso, outside his field of vision, at a counter laying out antipasti on a platter. She turned to glance at me. Her face bore no expression.

  A trader, then?

  True, I replied. I rather hoped he would leave the point there.

  Why New York?

  I was already in the U.S. before I got the job.

  Doing what?

  Law school.

  Where?

  Harvard.

  He seemed puzzled by this.

  But how do you go from law to trading derivatives? Isn’t it very technical?

  Law?

  No. Derivatives.

  You think the law isn’t technical?

  No, I mean derivatives. They’re very mathematical, aren’t they?

  I studied mathematics before law school.

  Oh, he said. He seemed to consider this.

  A few moments later, he left the kitchen to return with a bottle in hand.

  I brought this for you, he said, presenting it to Emily.

  He had not said we brought this. His girlfriend looked down.

  Emily took the bottle and, as she turned it in her hands, I noticed the label.

  Hey, I said, that’s the olive oil they sell in that shop we went to. Marchmain’s, wasn’t it? Near Harrods, on Beauchamp Place.

  I put some effort into pronouncing Beauchamp, trying to capture the French accent fluttering over the word.

  Tomaso’s family produce it, she explained. It’s pronounced Beecham, she added.

  She did not look at me.

  Of course it is, I replied.

  One way or another, I thought, the English will get you, even if it’s with their French. I had been put in my place: That’ll teach me not to question the ordering of letters.

  Thank you, Tomaso, she said. We’ll use it in the dressing.

  Tell me, Zafar. Are you Indian? he asked, as if making a prediction, the brow leaning forward, the eyebrows raised expectantly, the tone of voice willing ratification.