My Other Life by Paul Theroux

Author:Paul Theroux [Theroux, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780547525860
Google: xe_bPioJJusC
Amazon: B005HKUVSO
Goodreads: 130519
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 1996-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

Man Alone

RUPERT MOODY told me the story of Arturo Tripodi, and so I knew there must be something missing in it.

We were in London. He had come over to my house on his bicycle, a rare visitor. He said, "My wife's down in the country. I'd be there myself but I'm fronting a TV program for Julian. Stop looking at me as though I'm a media slut!"

It was late summer, a season I was so unused to in London (I normally spent the summer on Cape Cod) that it seemed like a different city, and another of its lives was revealed. When London dried out in the summer heat and became parched, its surfaces cracked—the brick walls, the stucco façades, the pavements. It was a shabbier city, with a look of exhaustion, the split masonry, the trees heavy with dusty leaves, the grass a blackish green, clumpy and uneven, thick hedges and untrimmed rose bushes leggy and out of hand, needing to be dead-headed. The magnificent flowers of spring and early summer had vanished and gone to seed. There were no blossoms in August, and the days were either clammy and humid or else sunk in harsh, headachey heat with dense, gassy air. In summer the city was overwhelmed by its weather, and with its windows open, noisier. The English seemed self-conscious in the street, looking vulnerable and underdressed, their flesh exposed, either very pale or burned pink.

"My wife and I were supposed to be in Tibet, but this TV program came up," Rupert said. "We'll head for India in October. It's a better month anyway and there's that fantastic puja there at that time, the Kumbh Mela, which is absolutely not to be missed. What are you doing?"

Irritable in the city heat, I was writing a novella, I told him. I had sent Alison and the children to Cape Cod; I was in London alone.

"And what does your little family think of that?"

"I'm not very popular these days."

"I was in Amsterdam last month. People were raving about you. You're big in Holland, you know."

"Someone interviewed Alison recently. She was quoted as saying, 'Even Genius has to do the dishes.'"

"Oh, yes, the death of the artist is the pram in the hall."

"I don't have that problem. It's just that writing seems to be a very antisocial activity. Wouldn't you hate to be married to a writer?"

"My wife writes all the time. She's always scribbling her head off."

But I was thinking about my house, my marriage, and wondering whether I had overstayed my welcome.

"What is this novella you mentioned?"

"I started it in May. The trouble is, it's not portable. I can't leave until I finish it. I like it too much to leave it behind. So I'm here alone until it's done."

It was, I said, about a young American woman, Lauren Slaughter, leading a double life, as a political science researcher by day and a social escort, a glorified call girl, by night. It seemed to me to be the best way of revealing the layers of life in London.

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