Upstate by James Wood

Author:James Wood [Wood, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

21

Alan sat alone in the hotel lobby. His drink was slowly rotting the paper napkin it sat on. Dixieland jazz again marched tastefully through the air. He was sunk in a fusty red velvet couch. He closed his eyes. Helen had gone to bed; it was far too late to phone Candace—he’d not spoken to her today. He felt uneasy, raw, vulnerable. At dinner—he and Helen ate together in the hotel, leaving Van and Josh for time together at home—he had revealed feelings about Josh that he had intended to keep to himself. Helen had come to the young man’s defense, she was stimulated by his juvenile cockiness. Too stimulated … He’d seen Helen and Josh today, the way they sang that little jingle, like lovers sharing a cigarette, he’d seen that gleam in Helen’s eyes. And as a father, he was put in the painful position of having to judge, from Josh’s possibly aroused perspective, the relative sexiness of his daughters: yes, from that point of view, Helen was the clear winner. She had a body and she knew what to do with it. Of course, he was reacting to nothing more than a breeze of flirtation between two adults. But it made him uneasy. Not for what it revealed about Helen—she was enjoying herself, she was a social tourist, she’d be gone in two days, she was probably unaware of it—but for what it revealed about Josh and his care—that was the necessary word—for and of Vanessa. He was tempted to warn Helen against too obviously favoring Josh, but realized that it was essential that he say nothing at all to either daughter about the matter. Van hadn’t witnessed most of the flirting—she’d gone to the kitchen to make coffee and have a smoke out back. And if he mentioned it to Helen, she might increase her attentiveness.

Josh was warm, charming, handsome. But where did the boy get that slightly tiresome confidence? At dinner, Helen said he was just young and enthusiastic. She said he was “a bit of a techno-nerd.” (Though also “quite cute.”) Van had said “Jewish-confrontational.” Maybe that was part of it. Alan sometimes liked to indulge the fantasy that the Old Testament had been written not about the Jews, but about the British. Just imagine it for a second: the whole Bible concerns the story of … the British! Imagine how bloody good we’d feel about ourselves, imagine the deep, invisible reserves of confidence that flow from the knowledge that your little national origin story is one of the founding religious myths of the world … Far better, even, than having Shakespeare, Newton, and Darwin on our side. Maybe that was it. Jewish-confrontational. Or perhaps American-confrontational? He’d learned a couple of things today. Americans really did pronounce “news” as “nooze.” And they apparently used the phrase “going forward,” as in, “So what, going forward, should Senator Obama say about race, to neutralize the issue on the campaign trail?” (Josh pronounced the word as “foward.”) Imagine the English using that phrase!… more like “going backward.

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